The Other Hollywood (23 page)

If they hadn’t prosecuted Harry Reems, I don’t think it would have
been an important case—and it certainly wouldn’t have drawn all that heat from the directors and the actors and producers in Hollywood.

NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE,
MARCH 6, 1977: PORNOGRAPHY ON TRIAL
:
“On December 8, Harry Reems and Alan Dershowitz were addressing the prestigious Harvard Law Forum, a law-school-sponsored series of lectures. They would be followed a week later by William Colby of the C.I.A. and had been preceded, some years back, by Fidel Castro. This was the kind of company that Harry Reems now kept.”

FRED LINCOLN
:
Harry Reems started to believe his own press. He was better than this, better than that. He was drinking, he was doing coke—I mean, he was drinking
a lot
.

C. J. LAING
:
Harry got another big film and was given a lot money by some producer to do promos and was staying in big hotels and going to Cannes. This was when I hooked up with him. You know, he’s in New York, staying at the Pierre.

Then Harry got an invitation to the Playboy mansion. When we went there, it was right after Dorothy Stratten was murdered. But Harry’s a little savvier now, so he’s working the angles of the distributors, and he’s hanging with Hef—and that I didn’t like. I didn’t like hanging at the Playboy mansion.

It was very intimidating for me. I felt sort of thrown to the wolves. I didn’t feel very protected as his girl. I felt like prey. And not very attractive prey, with all these blond androids around—all these rubbery, fantastic women. I just felt awkward.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Harry was living at that Malibu house, hanging out with Steve McQueen. I never went over there. I wouldn’t hang out with a guy, but if it was Ali MacGraw, I’d go for sure. But I wasn’t hanging out with guys; I never have. I mean, Butchie was an exception, but even Butchie and I didn’t hang out that much.

C. J. LAING
:
In Malibu, Harry was drinking vodka, and one day he put a gun to my head. We were on the deck of his house, and he said to me, “Suck my cock. Where’s the cunt? Suck my cock.
Where’s the cunt?
”

See, I always had a bottle of his sperm with me at all times, you know, so that I could reproduce our children at a moment’s notice. I wish I still had these little things. The Christmas gift he gave me—sperm.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Harry wasn’t a good actor. If he was, they would’ve given him a piece of the pornos. But he couldn’t carry them.

Harry wasn’t a great actor—but he was a great fucker.

MIAMI/CAYMAN ISLANDS
1976–1977

WAYNE CLARK (METRO-DADE COUNTY POLICE DETECTIVE)
:
We were investigating pornography in Florida for years at the Dade County Organized Crime Bureau, but we were only getting the guys that worked in the bookstores. We were arresting clerks and seizing some merchandise, but it was a lot of wasted time because we weren’t getting any of the distributors.

See, we wanted to prove that organized crime controlled the production and the distribution of pornography in the United States, and particularly in Dade County.

So we applied for a federal grant, and we were given federal monies to do an undercover operation. So that’s how we started this “MIPORN” thing. But it wasn’t called MIPORN yet; we called ours “Operation Amore.”

BILL KELLY
:
Wayne Clark and Al Bonanni made a lot of inroads. They were telling me how successful they had been, but they said, “This thing is just too big for Metro-Dade. We don’t have the money; we don’t have the man power. This is a federal case that should be worked nationally. Will you take it over?”

I said, “I’d love to, but I gotta get permission from headquarters.”

PHIL SMITH (FBI SPECIAL AGENT)
:
Nobody was doing anything in pornography, except Bill Kelly, who was always running around trying to make obscenity cases. He’s good-hearted, but he did only local stuff.

One day I get a call from a sergeant at the Metro-Dade Police Department—Wayne Clark, who said, “I got this source, and he’s too big for me—you know, he’s talking about nationwide distribution and everything.”

So I brought Wayne Clark over to the office with his source. I talked to the informant, and he told me all the things he could do in Detroit, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, and Los Angeles. He was willing to cooperate because he had a problem; he was hung up. We had something good on him—some felonies.

I said, “Okay, let’s see what we can do.”

EDDIE FITZGERALD (MIAMI PORNOGRAPHER/INFORMANT; NAME CHANGED)
:
Bonnani and Clark said what they wanted to do—go undercover and use my partner, Joey [name changed], and me to vouch for them, but I says to ’em, “Well, that’s great, but count me out.”

But to Joey, it was excitement—all expenses paid, you know? Joey had a bookstore. He was just a good-hearted slob, never made any money. And when I opened up the warehouse, he came to work for me.

So I said, “Joey, do whatever you want, all right? But count me out.”

And the cops said to me, “Look, the only thing we want from you is to keep your mouth shut.”

I said, “I’ll just say, ‘If you’re with Joey, you gotta be okay.’”

PHIL SMITH
:
So I proposed to set up an undercover operation using Wayne Clark’s sources because these guys had entrée all over the country. I wrote it up and sent it to the bureau and they approved it because that was a big deal then—everybody was looking for undercover cases.

EDDIE FITZGERALD
:
Teddy Gaswirth was a big pornographer for the Zappis in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, Teddy was cheatin’ on his wife, and during the relationship he had stolen some money and tried to put the blame on me. According to Teddy, I purchased this stuff from him and never paid him.

Willy Bittner contacted me and said, “Eddie, we know you didn’t do it. We know who did. But we need you out there to confront this individual because he is saying you did it.”

So I had to go to Vegas for a sit-down.

PHIL SMITH
:
Now, since I put the operation together, I gotta find someone to be our undercover guy. I had a guy on my squad by the name of Pat Livingston who had done a little undercover stuff in Detroit—and he was a pretty good bullshitter. Plus, he was the only guy I had with any experience. Like I said, I had limited resources. So I said, “Okay, we’ll use him.”

But I wasn’t sold on Pat Livingston.

EDDIE FITZGERALD
:
I jumped on a plane and went out to Vegas. Willy Bittner, Teddy, Nat “the Arab” Gamma, and a guy from Rhode Island,
Kenny Guarino, were there—and those are just the guys I recognized. Ten people were there, having a meeting at a hotel.

Then, they call Teddy Gaswirth up. Well, when Teddy walks into the room and sees I’m there, his whole facial expression just changed, and he started crying.

Teddy finally admitted he was involved in gambling and involved with a woman, and he was just squandering the money. You know, living high off the hog.

I guess everybody figured they were gonna put a hit on him or something like that, but all they wanted was their money back. I guess Teddy was a good earner for them.

PAT LIVINGSTON (FBI UNDERCOVER AGENT)
:
I first met Bruce Ellavsky when I was working undercover in Detroit. I just felt comfortable with Bruce from the get-go. We just really connected. We were both real staunch supporters of J. Edgar Hoover. Bruce was more conservative than I was, but he was an excellent agent, very good at what he did, and a great guy. So when I went to Miami and started working on MIPORN, I knew I wanted Bruce to come down and be the other agent. I knew him, and I’d worked with him; I could trust him. When you’re out there undercover, you got to protect each other. You have to know exactly what the other guy is thinking. I was comfortable that Bruce could do that.

So I called him and talked to him. He was having trouble with his wife, Pam, at the time. He was anxious to leave New York and come down to Miami—but he didn’t know if Pam was coming or not.

BILL KELLY
:
Pat Livingston and Bruce Ellavsky came here in August 1977, and my job was to train them both to be pornographers.

Well, I’d never done that before. I knew how to be a pornographer, but I’d never trained anybody. And these guys knew nothing about obscenity when they came down here. So, initially, I thought these guys couldn’t break into the porn industry. I just didn’t think they had enough experience.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
Bill Kelly brought out a double-dong dildo. I mean, I didn’t know what a double-dong dildo was. Do
you
know what a double-dong dildo is?

It’s about two feet long, and two girls use the same dildo at the same time. And Kelly’s explaining this to us, and I mean, you know, I didn’t know up from down.

BILL KELLY
:
I’d been fooling with these porno guys for fifteen years before MIPORN started, and I didn’t know an awful lot about the inner work
ings of the day-to-day business operations. I had never gone out and made a large-scale buy. I could never go undercover because everybody takes me for a c-o-p as soon as I stick my nose in the door—especially if I got a cigar, which I always do.

BRUCE ELLAVSKY (FBI UNDERCOVER AGENT/PAT LIVINGSTON’S MIPORN PARTNER)
:
We were not like Bill Kelly. We were learning as we were going. And I think early on Kelly didn’t think we would be successful.

BILL KELLY
:
I had Pat and Bruce for, probably, two weeks. I gave them a minimum amount of training. I told them who their targets should be and what mistakes not to make. I said, “Don’t ask for kiddie porn because they’ll know you’re a cop. And don’t pay sixty dollars for a tape you can get wholesale for forty.”

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
Bill Kelly was just a hard-nosed agent. Straight by the book and as strict and gritty as you can be. He’s a tough guy. And he took pornography pretty seriously.

BILL KELLY
:
After a couple of weeks with me, Pat and Bruce went out and set themselves up in a warehouse near the airport as blue jeans salesmen. We bought a lot of blue jeans and stocked that place with them, but that was just the cover for them being pornographers.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
We’d make a splash by walking into an organized crime hangout—a bar or restaurant—and rather than giving the waitress a hundred-dollar tip, we’d give her a pair of Jordache jeans. They’d go into the ladies’ room, try them on, and come back out in the jeans. It was fun, but it also it made the waitresses remember us because designer blue jeans were a real commodity then.

BRUCE ELLAVSKY
:
I became Bruce Wakerly and Pat became Pat Salamone. We wanted to call our company “Gold Coast Specialities,” but that was already taken. So we put an “e” on gold and an “e” on coast and became “Golde Coaste Specialties.” And every once in a while we even had to sell some blue jeans to people—at discount—so we lost a little money on that.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
We tried to look like minor mob guys. You know, silk shirts with an open collar. Silk suits. Sharkskin shoes. I even had a sharkskin suit.

BRUCE ELLAVSKY
:
We also had an undercover apartment where Pat and I supposedly lived together—to save money, you know? We had it furnished, and we had clothes in there, and we tried to make it look lived-in.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
Oh God, we had our first undercover car—I never had a new car in my life, much less a Cadillac, you know? We had a pink Cadillac for our undercover car—“the pimpmobile.”

BRUCE ELLAVSKY
:
After we set up the warehouse and the undercover apartment, we realized we had a problem: The porn people we were buying X-rated films from were eventually going to start wondering, “Who are these guys selling this merchandise to?”

BILL BROWN (ATTORNEY/FRIEND OF PAT LIVINGSTON AND BRUCE ELLAVSKY)
:
When Pat called me during the summer of 1977, I hadn’t seen him for two-and-a-half or three years. His career in the FBI was skyrocketing as my career as a lawyer was plummeting.

I’d built a successful Miami law practice for six years, made a lot of money, had a Mercedes, had a house in Coral Gables, and everything was going well—until everything fell apart.

I went through a very difficult divorce—and ended up living on a houseboat in the Dinner Key Marina. I didn’t have a piece of clothing that wasn’t mildewed. I’m paying a mortgage on the house, rent on the boat—so my life was in real turmoil.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
We couldn’t resell the porn we were buying to other people, so we decided to set up a business operation for laundering our product—a mail-order business in the Cayman Islands.

I’d tell them, “That way the Feds can’t get me. I’m outta the country. See, I take all my orders through the Cayman Islands—then I fill them stateside.”

BILL BROWN
:
I was hired to set up the corporation. So Pat, Bruce, and I fly down to the Cayman Islands, hail a cab—and on the way to the hotel Pat says to the driver, “Where are the girls? Take us to the girls!”

Pat gets the cabdriver’s name, gives him forty or fifty dollars, and says, “You’re our man while we’re here. Drop all your other work—you work for us now; we’ll pay you. And where are the girls?”

So the driver says, “All right, I’ll take you to the Cayman House, a grand old house, for the finest dinner.”

I was just dumbfounded. Because I’d have trouble saying to a cabdriver, “Where are the girls?” I mean, I have trouble giving a maître d’ twenty bucks to get a nice table.

But Pat knew how to do it.

I mean, maybe Pat would be remembered as an asshole, but he would be
remembered
—and that’s what it was all about.

BRUCE ELLAVSKY
:
Pat was the best at undercover. That was his forte. He was fantastic.

BILL BROWN
:
Our first night there, Pat and Bruce struck up a conversation with a fellow at the bar who smuggled stamps out of Sweden. Immediately, Pat and Bruce were passing themselves off as smugglers. Pat and Bruce talked to this Swedish guy at the bar, and then they set up a meeting the next morning to develop a new smuggling operation.

And I was dumbfounded, just dumbfounded, that people would fall for this. Pat and Bruce were selling themselves. I saw them do it in front of my eyes. Pat much more so than Bruce, but together they made a pretty good team.

BRUCE ELLAVSKY
:
Pat and I were able to communicate mentally and play off each other. He knew what I was thinking, and I knew what he was thinking.

BILL BROWN
:
I mean, we met girls at the hotel. The women were just dates; they weren’t hookers or anything. One of them worked at one of the hotels, giving snorkels to the tourists. Another worked at the airport restaurant. Just ordinary girls—nineteen-, twenty-, twenty-one-year-olds—gorgeous, chocolate-skinned beauties.

At two or three in the morning everybody went their separate ways. I ended up sleeping with mine; they ended up sleeping with theirs.

BETTY JO (AN EX-GIRLFRIEND OF PAT LIVINGSTON, NAME CHANGED)
:
I wanted to get intimate with Pat sexually because he intrigued me so much. He seemed to have a certain amount of class. It wasn’t, “Hey, baby, let’s get high.” We just liked each other. I was used to European men, to a lot of flash and fun and men with money, and Pat had a taste for nice things. He seemed to be the kind of guy I could relate to.

BILL BROWN
:
That’s why Pat was able to pull off the operation. Nobody else I know in these undercover operations ever came as close as Pat. Frankly, Bruce would never have come as close because Bruce is just not that type.

BETTY JO
:
Bruce was as different from Pat as night and day. Bruce is a very realistic, down-to-earth person.