Cobra Killer (6 page)

Austin’s Beach Buddies,
starring one of Kocis’ most popular discoveries, “original Cobraboy” Austin Sterling, broke the mold of earlier Cobra productions and was filmed away from Kocis’ Midland Drive home, partially on the Delaware shore, presumably during the summer of 2000 or 2001. The video features single-named “Cobraboyz” Justin and Kaipo who appeared in several other Cobra productions and again featured bareback, or condomless, anal sex that would become a trademark of Cobra videos. The Radvideo.com reviewer of
Austin’s Beach Buddies
gushed when he dubbed it “without a doubt one of the best twink videos you will ever purchase.”
⁽⁷⁾

In 2002, the year Kocis served his criminal probation for his earlier arrest, it appears video production at Cobra continued, but at a slower pace. That year Kocis released just two titles, including one that summed up his ever-growing controversial place in the gay porn world,
Bareback Twink Orgy.

By this time Kocis had also found a new filming location, a local beauty salon loaned to him by the owner that he used after the salon closed for the day.

Bareback Twink Orgy
was originally released as
Bareback Beach Boyz
and appears to also have been taped at a shoreline cottage or resort, and includes external beach shots with the actors enjoying the sun and surf. It was edited at a later time to remove one scene that included a light, sadomasochistic bondage three-way scene featuring actor “Aaron Phelps” ball-gagged and chained to two posts on a patio. The bondage scene was inexplicably pulled from a new version of the tape renamed
Bareback Twink Orgy.

In his video notes Kocis posted online at Pornteam.com about
Bareback Twink Orgy,
he reported that one of the actors, credited as Armon, “just turned eighteen the week before this trip and we promised to throw a birthday party for him, though he didn’t quite realize the type of party it would turn into.” Kocis notes the orgy scene that follows took more than two hours to film and features two camera angles (though it is unclear if Kocis ever employed anyone other than Robert Wagner to assist in taping scenes).
⁽⁸⁾

Kocis’ disclosure that Armon had just turned eighteen, if accurate, indicates he would have recruited the teen to participate in the video prior to the teen becoming legal. However, given the genre Kocis had tapped into, the dangerously-close-to-illegal-age references in some of the video descriptions could have been just salesmanship or marketing to attract a devoted audience of gay porn video buyers.

In similar fashion, an online posting boasted that actor Ethan Armstrong was “a newly-turned-eighteen guy” and was “the first real poster boy for Cobra Video” starring in
Ethan’s College Buddies.
⁽⁹⁾

Another early film,
Outdoor Boyz
released in 2001, wandered briefly into kink by featuring one actor using a corn husk as a dildo (a variation not repeated in later Cobra releases).
⁽¹⁰⁾

In his notes on the production of
Outdoor Boyz,
Kocis revealed some of the control he would later be accused of exercising over his actors with a heavy hand. He noted that “I will admit I was a bit ticked off about (actor) Ashton getting his skinhead haircut right before this scene.” Contracts signed later between Kocis and Sean Lockhart would reveal Cobra requirements that the actors not dramatically alter their appearance before or during taping.
⁽¹¹⁾

Bryan’s friend Robert Wagner

Robert Wagner met Bryan Kocis in the fall of 2000 when he was still a computer science major studying at prestigious Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, although Wagner is originally from northeastern Pennsylvania, not far from Kocis’ home.

Wagner said he first met Kocis at the Steamtown Mall in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a location Kocis preferred and continued to use because “it was a nice, neutral location where he would determine if (young men) were cut out” for making porno videos, Wagner said.
⁽¹²⁾

“Initially it started out that I was a model and then it grew into a friendship,” Wagner said. “I made a few videos early in college, then we just became friends.”
⁽¹³⁾

Even after moving to New York City after 2004, Wagner remained in close, daily contact with Kocis via e-mail, phone, texting, and frequent visits to his Midland Drive home. For Cobra Video, Wagner said he did a lot of “second camera work” and helped Kocis in organizing model applications and reviewing applicants for the porn videos.

Wagner said he managed and organized the 2257 forms for Cobra Video, assisted in checking IDs at model shoots, and picking up actors from the airport and delivering them to video shoots.
⁽¹⁴⁾

Wagner, in fact, spent the last weekend of Kocis’ life at the Midland Drive home visiting his friend and helping organize IDs and 2257 forms for several hours. Wagner said he was scanning hard copies of the 2257 forms into a back-up computer and making sure all records were in order.

Kocis wanted to digitize and backup the records, Wagner said, because he had heard a rumor that federal authorities were opening new investigations into porn companies. “Investigators were coming, making sure all the reports were in order, so I wanted to make sure that everything was in perfect shape,” Wagner said.
⁽¹⁵⁾

Enter Sean Lockhart as “Brent Corrigan”

Bryan Kocis’ ambitious efforts to build Cobra Video continued and a string of new videos followed, with the 2002 release
Charmed
nominated for “Best Specialty Video” at the Gay Adult Video News Awards. The 2003 release
A Boy’s Raw Urges
stripped away all pretense about whether safe sex practices were in use—the video ventured freely into raw porn territory with bareback sex, including the highly risky practice of reinserting a penis into the anus with ejaculate still present.
⁽¹⁶⁾

Cobra’s most popular titles were still to come, however, and coincided with the arrival of Sean Lockhart in 2004, always cast as “Brent Corrigan” in Cobra productions. Lockhart wrote about his earliest days working for Cobra Video in a four-part “guest column” titled “A Siren’s Tale” posted after Kocis’ death on the popular gay blog, www.jasoncurious.com. In it, a poetic Lockhart declared that “at the heart of every shipwreck is a siren.”
⁽¹⁷⁾
Describing himself as “young, supremely naïve and misguided by those who were once close to me,” he says that at age sixteen during the summer of 2003 he began an Internet chat with Bryan Kocis with the “help” of his then-twenty-one-year-old boyfriend.
⁽¹⁸⁾

Lockhart said the summer before the start of his junior year in high school was one of newfound freedom. His boyfriend represented “the first relationship ever in which a person outside my family held precedent in my life.”
⁽¹⁹⁾
Lockhart said a live webcam was used to send pictures of Lockhart in the nude to Kocis, which served to entice him to approach Lockhart for a video shoot. Kocis was instantly interested, Lockhart said, and began an extended online chat and other contact with the then-sixteen-year-old boy. “Bryan’s pursuit was on as he began to recruit me with subtlety,” Lockhart said. “He gained my trust and sparked my curiosity by showering me with compliments, giving me the kind of undivided attention of which the likes I had never seen before.”
⁽²⁰⁾

Kocis learned Lockhart’s “hopes and dreams” and “presented the ways in which I could achieve these things by joining him at Cobra Video,” Lockhart said.
⁽²¹⁾
Lockhart admitted he participated in an initial effort to mislead Kocis about his real age, allowing Kocis to believe that he would turn eighteen in October 2003 (rather than his actual seventeenth birthday). Lockhart attributes pressure from both his boyfriend and Kocis for deciding to go ahead with the deception.

Believing a lie about his actual age was “no big deal” and that “nobody would get in trouble and that it was common that boys worked underage in the industry,” Lockhart went forward with sending tapes and participating in private webcam shows in order for Kocis to “audition him” via the Internet.
⁽²²⁾
“Bryan was intent on remaining in contact with me,” Lockhart said. “This became an almost daily event from the first time we were introduced, until the day I gave him official notification of my true age (in the autumn of 2005).”
⁽²³⁾

The underage issue surfaces

At the same time Lockhart was creating a new cross-country connection with Kocis, forty-year-old Grant Roy had begun plans for how Lockhart could cash in on his good looks and strong sex appeal to gay men. Roy’s plan was for Lockhart to not only star in gay adult videos but to produce and own them. “That way, when you’re old and gray, if we do it right, this thing’s still gonna be paying,’” Roy recalls telling Lockhart.
⁽²⁴⁾

While Roy’s plans for Lockhart’s career were in their infancy, Bryan Kocis was moving full steam ahead. In February 2004, Lockhart says Kocis paid to fly him to Fort Lauderdale, Florida to tape scenes for a new video,
Every Poolboy’s Dream.

Lockhart describes the weekend as a flurry of activity with sex scenes filmed at a local gay resort, followed by external still photo shoots on the beach with the cast of the video for the DVD box covers.

“At the end of the weekend and upon completion of all production, Bryan gathered up all the models to present their IDs and have everyone sign contracts and model releases,” Lockhart said, noting this reflected Kocis’ standard practice of “shoot now, ask questions later.”
⁽²⁵⁾

Lockhart said while Kocis personally inspected the IDs of each of the other actors used in the films, he assured Lockhart to “not worry about it” and that he had already reviewed his documents via an e-mail attachment. That e-mail attachment, a PDF, contained false information added to a Washington state driver’s license and an altered Idaho birth certificate using Adobe Photoshop.
⁽²⁶⁾

Veteran gay porn director Kevin Clarke notes, “No reputable person would ever shoot anyone on the basis of an e-mailed picture of an ID. Ever. Those of us that shot in the eighteen to twenty-three year old age group were especially careful. We always went the extra mile.”
⁽²⁷⁾

Lockhart said, “After the shoot, all I really wanted to do was to quietly fade away; something Bryan did not necessarily agree with.”
⁽²⁸⁾

The artist known as “Brent Corrigan”

Disagreement still exists over how Lockhart’s stage name “Brent Corrigan” was created. It would be a disagreement that would grow to epic proportions. Lockhart claimed in interviews and in court documents that he selected the name “Corrigan” from a phone book because of it sounded Irish.
⁽²⁹⁾
Kocis claimed the “Brent Corrigan” name was created by him early in 2004 “to be used in the creation of a series of premier adult content DVDs/videos for Cobra” and that he “is the owner of this trade name, has invested time and money in the promotion and creation of this trade name for a character to be premiered in its adult gay films and serials.”
⁽³⁰⁾

The fight over the name “Brent Corrigan” would come later, but for now,
Every Poolboy’s Dream
was an instant hit for Cobra. For Lockhart, he said “it only complicated matters. Bryan’s promise of anonymity from the industry started to crumble as person after person in the gay community began recognizing me from my debut film.”
⁽³¹⁾

Lockhart claims it was at this point when Kocis first began to learn of his underage status at the time of the Fort Lauderdale shoot for
Every Poolboy’s Dream,
a major and potentially criminal violation of federal law. Lockhart believes, however, that Kocis was intent on scaring him into compliance and silence with the risk of a federal charge hanging over his head and by exposing his involvement in gay porn to Lockhart’s mother and family. Amidst his ever growing behind-the-scenes pressure on Lockhart
and
growing DVD sales, Kocis kept
Every Poolboy’s Dream
on store shelves and for sale online.

“Though I was worried, confused, and felt utterly alone and conflicted, Bryan remained a constant entity in my life,” Lockhart said. “With all the questions and uncertainty surrounding my age, he made it a priority to maintain tabs on me.”
⁽³²⁾

Kocis also acted quickly to get Lockhart back in front of the camera based on the sales success of his debut video for Cobra. Another video was proposed,
Schoolboy Crush.
This video, shot in April and May 2004 in La Jolla, California, would cast Lockhart’s “Brent Corrigan” character opposite another rising gay porn star, Brent Everett. In fact, the Corrigan character’s fascination with Everett would form the basis of the “plot” of the film.

The highlight of
Schoolboy Crush
would be a rare double-penetration scene with Corrigan bottoming without condoms for two men at the same time. Just like
Poolboy,
the
Schoolboy
video was an instant hit and won a 2005 nomination for “Best Overall Gay Video” via Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network’s first-annual “Video on Demand Awards.” At the time of the awards and brisk sales of the video, no one knew one of the stars of the film had appeared in it while underage and still completing high school.

Signs of strain surface

During the weekend of the shoot for
Schoolboy,
Lockhart said Kocis introduced him to alcohol and “made a move on me”—a sexual encounter Lockhart would later claim embarrassed him and one that he did not disclose to anyone.
⁽³³⁾