The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz (21 page)

I was in San Diego, shooting a film called
Star 88
. It had been less than a month since my last arrest, and I’d been extra-secretive about my production plans. I stopped using the phone, all of the actors had been cast in person, and nobody was told about the location until the last possible moment. I even found a set that was a hundred miles south of Los Angeles. I had taken precautions. I was careful. This shouldn’t be happening.

“You must be kidding,” I said as Como and Navarro strolled inside. “This isn’t your jurisdiction. You can’t be here. You have no authority.”

“Oh, we’re not here to arrest you,” Como said.

“Then what’s going on? You just here to watch?”

Como motioned toward the door. “We’re with him.”

A San Diego vice cop named Detective Hardman shoved past me, waving his badge like he thought he might emit tear gas. “Everybody get on the ground,” he bellowed.

I glared at Como. “We’re just advising,” he said. “Don’t mind us.”

A small army of police officers marched inside and began putting cuffs on some of my actors. Detective Hardman waited until the entire cast and crew was out of sight before turning to me.

“Hey, Jeremy,” he said, as he slapped a pair of handcuffs on my wrists, “loved you on
Geraldo
.”

So he had seen it. I was afraid of that. It was all starting to make sense.

A few months earlier, long before my first arrest in Los Angeles, I had taped an episode of Geraldo Rivera’s talk show. It was for a segment called “Porn Stars and Their Families.” Along with actors like Hyapatia Lee and Nina Hartley, we discussed what our families thought about our chosen profession. I thought it went pretty well. My sister Susie agreed to be interviewed on air, though only in silhouette and under the fake name “Lynn.” She had the best one-liner of the entire show. When Geraldo asked her if she still thought of me as her little brother, she said, “No, I couldn’t say it
exactly
that way, now could I?”

After Como and Navarro came bursting down my door in Laurel Canyon, I vowed to my lawyer not to do any more national television. It would’ve been stupid. As my lawyer reminded me, “If you’re too much of a public figure, it’s just going to provoke the cops. They’ll go out of their way to embarrass you. It’s like you’re throwing down the gauntlet.”

But the episode of
Geraldo
, which I had completely forgotten about, had been broadcast that very morning. Como and Navarro must have seen it, and Detective Hardman obviously had. It must’ve seemed as if I was flaunting my porn career in their faces, and they were going to make damn sure I knew that they didn’t appreciate it.

“You sure gave Geraldo a run for his money,” Hardman sneered. “It was damn fine TV. You’re a funny guy, Jeremy. And you looked good.” He patted my stomach. “Not as heavy as you are in real life.”

I tried not to make direct eye contact with him. “Can we just get this over with, please?”

Hardman circled me like a vulture honing in on its prey. “Don’t expect any favors from me. I’m not gonna be nice to you like they are in L.A. The L.A. cops might like you, but I
don’t
.”

Hardman was just a few inches from my face, so close that I could feel his hot spit splattering on my cheek. I saw Como standing behind him, whistling nonchalantly. He may not have expected Hardman to get so rough with me, but he was powerless to do anything to stop him.

Hardman grilled me for information. Who was I working for? Who was paying for the shoot? Did the name Mark Carriere mean anything to me? Mark was, of course, my boss, and just as Hardman had guessed, the movie was being funded by Leisure Time Entertainment. But I wasn’t about to tell him that.

“Oh, come on, Jeremy,” Hardman growled. “We know that you’re sending your tapes to Indiana. We stopped the FedEx truck, for Pete’s sake. We know that Mark Carriere lives there. We don’t want you; we want
him
. Just admit that he’s paying your bills, and this will all go away.”

“Mark has nothing to do with this,” I said. “I always give him first look at my films and allow him the chance to distribute them, but this is
my
movie.”

“Goddamnit, Jeremy, why are you protecting this guy? He’s a fucking scumbag.”

Hardman’s accusations got only more preposterous. He started asking if I had connections to organized crime. “What’s the mob paying you to direct these movies?” he demanded.

“The mob?” I said incredulously. “Who said I was working for the mob?”

“Are you a part of the Peraino Family?”

“Hell no!”

Hardman looked like he wanted to drag me into a back room and work me over. “How about the Gambinos?” he asked. “Or the House of Milan?”

“Nope, sorry,” I said. “I’ve never dealt with them.”

“I’m in no mood for this. You’re going to give me some answers, or we’re going to make your life very, very difficult.”

I shot him a deadpan expression. “This,” I said, in my best Hyman Roth impression, “is the business we have chosen.”

I
t was true, of course. I wasn’t working for the mafia. I knew that they were at least tangentially involved with porn films, and I heard rumors that some of our investors had shady pasts. But I never met them, never associated with them in any way. I wasn’t involved in that end of it. I made the films, shipped them out to Mark, and somehow they got into video stores or theaters. If there were men in fedoras and pinstripe suits having basement meetings, plotting the best way to transport porn across state lines, I never witnessed it.

Not that I was totally unfamiliar with the mob. But it wasn’t because of porn. Believe it or not, two generations ago, my family had a mafia connection. My great-uncle worked with both Frank Costello and Bugsy Siegel. He changed his name from Ben Greengrass
*
to Ben Caruso and got involved with the mafia during the 1930s. My dad has told me some pretty interesting stories. When he was just a kid, Ben would take him up to the Catskills for the weekend, where he met with other gangsters to discuss, well, whatever it is that gangsters talk about when they’re alone. A black limousine would show up at my dad’s house and whisk him and possibly some other cousins away to the countryside. It looked less conspicuous if they had young children and families with them. They wanted to appear like just another family enjoying a harmless picnic in the Catskills.
**

My great-uncle Ben was known as a rumrunner or bootlegger for Frank Costello, and they used my grandmother’s basement to store rum. My dad claims that they may have dealt in drugs as well, but my grandmother denied it.

“Just rum,” she’d say firmly when I asked. “Never drugs.”

“That’s not what I heard,” my father would say with a laugh.

My grandmother would shush him. “Arnold,” she’d snap, “you shouldn’t be saying these things.”

“Oh Mom, he’s long dead. It doesn’t matter anymore. Those connections are long gone.”

Another time, my father, sister, and I were watching
The Godfather Part II
on TV. When we got to the scene where Al Pacino’s character attends a meeting of mafia leaders in Cuba (they were plotting to open gambling resorts in Havana), my dad went into a back room and brought out some Caracas flags, which Uncle Ben had brought back for him from Cuba. As it turns out, Ben had been at the very same meetings portrayed in the film!

Not all of the stories about him involved bootlegging and gangsters. He was also a Jew, and fiercely proud of his heritage. He owned a restaurant in New York called McCarthy’s Steak House, and one night he heard an Irish sergeant making anti-Semitic remarks. Ben had just lost his nephew Elliot, who died a hero at the Battle of the Bulge during World War II. He loved Elliot, as everybody in the family did, and it killed him to hear this sergeant insulting Jews, claiming that they weren’t worthy of being called soldiers. Ben got so upset that he dragged the guy outside and beat the snot out of him. And as he did it, he said, “This is for my nephew.”

So no, I didn’t have any
direct
mob connections, at least not when it came to porn. But if Detective Hardman had asked me if I had any
family
involved in the mafia, I could have told him stories for days.

D
etective Don Smith led me out to the back porch for a private talk. He had somehow convinced Hardman to take off the handcuffs, which was a nice gesture. Smith was a very sweet guy, and, unlike Hardman, he almost treated me like a buddy.

Smith took a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and offered one to me.

“No thanks,” I said. “I don’t smoke.”

Smith nodded. “That’s right,” he said. “I knew that.”

It was scary how much these vice cops knew about me. And not just things that were relevant to the porn business. They knew little details.
Irrelevant
details. They knew what I spent my money on, and the friends with whom I hung out. It’s amazing how often they spoke to the CRI (confidential reliable informant). We later learned that John Holmes was a paid police CRI. No wonder his shoots were never busted.

“Things are going to get much worse before they get better,” Smith said. “Why don’t you just cooperate, and we can all go home?”

“I haven’t done anything wrong,” I told him. “What exactly are you expecting me to confess to? Do you really think I’m mixed up in the mob?”

“No,” he said softly. “I don’t think you are.”

“That fucking guy in there—Detective Hardman, or whoever the hell he is—he’s an idiot. You are aware of that, aren’t you? He’s wasting everybody’s time.”

Smith sighed. He stared at his feet, pondering his words carefully. “Ron,” he said, “why are you bothering with this crazy business anyway?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ve done a few TV shows and mainstream movies. I saw you in
52 Pick-Up
. Why do you keep doing porn? Just retire and be done with it. You always wanted to do real films. I can’t think of a better excuse to make the leap. And besides, you’ve got plenty of money.”

I almost did a double take with that last remark. “How do you know that?” I asked him ominously. “You’ve checked my tax returns?”

His smile was all the answer I needed. He patted my back. “It’s a good thing you’re a straight shooter,” he said. “The last thing you need on your record is tax evasion.”

When the L.A. “advisers” left, Detective Hardman threw my ass in jail. I didn’t tell them anything. They could rattle off my tax records until they were blue in the face, but I wasn’t a rat, and I never would be. Besides, how bad could jail be? You had four walls, a free meal, and your own bed. It was like getting a hotel room for the night, all expenses paid. My lawyer would take care of this. And as soon as Mark heard that I’d thrown myself on a bomb for him, he’d wire my bail money without blinking an eye.

“They set your bail at seventy thousand dollars,” Mark told me on the phone.

“What? That’s got to be some kind of mistake.”

“No. I talked to the D.A. myself. He isn’t budging. It’s your second offense. You were already out on bail for the L.A. job. Can you just ride it out for a bit while I try to get a bail reduction?”

“I’d rather not,” I told him. They’d put me in the sex offender’s cell. I’d spent the last hour surrounded by rapists and child molesters. There was one guy who was doing yoga on the toilet seat while jerking off. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, one of them had recognized me.

“Aren’t you Ron Jeremy?” he’d asked.

“You mean the fat guy with the mustache?” I’d said, disguising my voice. “Nope, not me. It’s funny, though. I’ve been told that I look like him.”

They’d been glaring at me with distrust ever since. When the warden finally came to give me my one phone call, the other inmates were starting to figure out that I was probably lying. The masturbating yoga guy was reciting lines of dialogue from my own movies back at me. If I went back in there, I might be surrounded by a pound of beef and a bucket of balls. (As it was, I was afraid to pee in front of them, so I held it in for hours.)

“Okay, okay, settle down,” Mark said. “I’ll make some calls and see what I can do.”

With Ralph “Papa” Thorson.

Luckily, the warden had come to the conclusion on his own that I didn’t belong with the sex offenders and transferred me to a different cell. When I was introduced to my new cell mates—nothing more threatening than drunks and petty thieves—I almost wanted to kiss them.

“Hey, aren’t you Ron Jeremy?” a friendly looking boozehound asked.

“Yes, I am!” I declared.

I signed autographs and told stories for most of the night. I was so happy to be around people who weren’t jerking off in front of me, I would’ve given them my home phone number had they asked.

The next morning, Mark and I devised a way to get me released without the $70,000 collateral. I called in a favor with Ralph “Papa” Thorson, an old friend and world-famous bounty hunter. He was legendary in Los Angeles. Steve McQueen had played him in a 1980 movie called
The Hunter
. His word was enough to get me a free pass. Papa talked to the two bondsmen assigned to me, Dan Majors and Mark Herman, and assured them that I wouldn’t be a problem.