The Other Hollywood (55 page)

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
They wanted my magazines. I was gettin’ sent in, like, twenty porn magazines a month. But then they stopped at Christmastime. The government had, what’s-his-name—Jesse Helmes—put somethin’ on a rider that said, “No magazines with sexual things can be sent to federal prison.” So no
Playboy
, no
Penthouse
, no nothin’. As a matter of fact, not even any pictures of your girlfriends, like, in bathing suits.

JOHN WATERS
:
They were married for quite some time, and they did break up, but they don’t hate each other. I still see Traci. She came to the premiere of the new version of
Pink Flamingos
with me—and she said a really funny thing in the
Los Angeles Times
afterward. She said, “I didn’t do anything
that
bad.”

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
Yeah, I got out of jail, but I had a very bad personal life. My oldest son got murdered in a drug thing. He was twenty-seven. He was meeting with a guy that owed him money—seven thousand—and the guy set him up with a robbery, and the robbery turned into murder. Some Israeli Mafia guys, I found out later.

He had over a million dollars in cash. They probably tortured him to find his money. I couldn’t find a nickel. I have no money from him. And
they took all his money, hit him on the head with a board, and he died. They found him in the trunk of a car after nineteen days. That was a terrible thing. And since I’m a pornographer, and he was drug dealer, the cops wasn’t lookin’ for no murderer.

BOBBY ELKINS
:
You know, it’s really a horrible thing. Ruby’s kid was really nice. I kind of liked him, even if his father was a jack-off.

After, the son started to sell dope and make some money. Some people say Ruby grabbed the money from his kid for a deal he was doing.

I don’t know what happened, but they found his kid in a trunk of a car.

STEVE ORENSTEIN
:
I like Ruby. He’s definitely a character, but I didn’t realize he was crazy. I don’t know if he’s crazy, he’s just…Ruby Gottesman had a reputation for how he dealt with people—vendors, let’s say. Well, when we became partners, I started being treated like another vendor, so it didn’t go too well.

The books were fine. It was just that payments weren’t being made on time or at all. I’m sure I wasn’t too happy about it. We were partners for about two years, and then we split up.

That’s when I started Wicked Pictures.

LOS ANGELES
1990–1991

TIM CONNELLY
:
When Teddy Snyder got murdered, nobody was surprised. The story going around—you know, the porn story, the inside story—was that he owed people money. He was in way over his head.

PHIL VANNATTER
:
I just looked at Sharon Snyder, and I knew she was a strung-out coke addict. She looked like hell. I know for a fact that she burned her nose out when she was with Teddy. And what we found out was, Teddy had been meeting Victor Diaz over on Blackhawk Avenue under the pretext of picking up some cocaine from him.

TOM BYRON
:
Marc Wallice had told me on a couple of occasions that Teddy had gotten a little out of hand and stuck a gun in his face.

Teddy liked to film his wife with other guys, having sex. I guess they were all coked out, and he would lose his mind, pull out a gun, and threaten them both.

PHIL VANNATTER
:
Bobby Genova told us about a diamond ring Teddy had, with “TED” spelled out in diamonds—and we were able to run that down to a jewelry store down in Dallas where Sharon had sold it after the murder. Sharon had reported it to us as stolen at the time of the murder. She had flown down to Dallas and sold this ring. She needed money, apparently, for coke.

TIM CONNELLY
:
Teddy Snyder was one of the worst cocaine addicts I’ve ever known. And I never saw him snort it, but I knew people who did—and these were guys that wouldn’t come out of their offices all day, you know? They would go to work, and then stay in their office and snort coke. And I heard stories from them about Teddy buying ounces of coke every week.

PHIL VANNATER
:
I was looking into Sharon’s background real strong, and one day I answered the telephone at the station and it was Dennis Fitzgerald calling from Fort Wanimi. We didn’t know each other—I just happened to answer the phone. He says, “I have a guy up here talking about this big-time pornographer who was killed down in Los Angeles.”

And I says, “You gotta be kidding? I got a big-time pornographer that was killed.” We started talking, and this guy had been picked up for receiving stolen property. It was interesting because it fit in with what I was thinking already.

And this snitch Fitzgerald had was talking about another guy in Simi Valley, who was on federal probation for violation of the firearms act. He had manufactured some fully automatic weapons.

TOM BYRON
:
Paul Thomas told me about Teddy before I read it in the news. “Hey, did you hear about Ted Snyder? He got whacked.”

I said, “Really? Well, that, you know, kind of makes sense, given the circles that he reputedly ran with.”

Paul said, “Yeah, you know, they think it might have been his wife.”

I said, “Really. Well, that sort of makes sense, too.”

“Yeah, the guy, you know, he’s kind of an asshole sometimes, you know, I mean he, you know, he threatened me with a gun a couple of times.”

I said, “Oh, I heard that, too.”

FRED LINCOLN
:
When Teddy was doing coke he wasn’t logical no more—making Sharon fuck guys he brought over and he would videotape it. She was gorgeous! But Teddy never said for me to fuck her—I mean, I’d have kept her, you know? Everybody knew that about me in those days.

TOM BYRON
:
That was happening a lot in the early 1980s, you know? A lot of people turning up dead or missing. I mean, certain people ran this business back then—people that probably had a rap sheet or two; it wasn’t the corporate, legitimate machine that it is now.

LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS
, JANUARY 28, 1990: RAID LED BACK TO SLAIN MAN’S WIFE, UNRELATED CASE SPURRED THE ARREST OF SPOUSE, FRIEND IN PORN MAKER’S KILLING
:
“When Theodore Snyder was shot and killed on a Northridge street last August, police said it looked like a mob killing out of the ‘Untouchables’—he was hit nine times in a barrage from a machine gun.”

PHIL VANNATTER
:
That snitch was a hanger-on with the Hell’s Angels. He had long hair, was all buffed up from being in jail, and was wired on speed all the time. The sheriffs up there knew him well. They actually had a barricade situation with him, where they had to go in and get him out of this house with the SWAT team. You know, that kind of guy.

This firearm that Teddy was killed with—that snitch made the gun.

TIM CONNELLY
:
I only met Sharon Snyder once. She was probably good-looking in her heyday, which was probably in the mid to late seventies. And she was pretty strong; I think she really ran a lot of what was going on in Teddy’s life, more than most people knew.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Sharon had been with Teddy for ten or fifteen years. Then she finally married him, and after like nine or ten months she got a divorce—because she wanted to get half the money.

Well, she goes to court and the judge notifies her that they’d be willing to give her, like, three years, so she’s not entitled to anything. Oh God, she was devastated!

This girl was fucking
pissed!

LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS
, JANUARY 28, 1990: RAID LED BACK TO SLAIN MAN’S WIFE
:
“In the end, the five-month probe led detectives right back to where they started—to Snyder’s Woodland Hills home and his wife, Sharon.

“Last week, Sharon Snyder, 39, and an acquaintance, 47-year-old Victor Diaz of Reseda, were charged with the killing of Theodore Snyder in a plot to take over Snyder’s estate.”

PHIL VANNATTER
:
The snitch had told us that he had given Victor Diaz the gun, and had fired some shots into the floor of his house with it. So, with his permission, we went out to the house, recovered the ballistics evidence, and had it compared with the ballistics evidence from the murder. It was the same gun.

Apparently Diaz and this snitch were dealing dope together. That’s how the guy met Sharon. In fact, he ended up with her mink coat as a trade for the gun. There wasn’t one good person in this whole thing, including the victim. They all were a bunch of dirtbags.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Sharon gave Teddy’s killer, Victor Diaz, a ten-thousand-dollar bill.

PHIL VANNATTER
:
That’s where I started to put the whole thing together, when the snitch told me he had supplied the gun to Victor Diaz and that Diaz had told him that Sharon paid him with a ten-thousand-dollar bill.

So I asked Bobby Genova, “Did Teddy have a ten-thousand-dollar bill?”

He said, “Yeah, he had it framed and hanging on his den wall.”

Sharon was not a rocket scientist.

LOS ANGELES DAILY NEWS
, JANUARY 28, 1990: RAID LED BACK TO SLAIN MAN’S WIFE
:
“Sharon Snyder promised Diaz $20,000 to kill her husband, and later gave Diaz a $10,000 bill from her husband’s rare money collection as a down payment…. Diaz tried unsuccessfully to exchange the rare bill
for smaller bills at a Ventura County bank, and it came to the attention of authorities, police said.

“The complaint also charges that Diaz bought a .38 caliber Mac II machine gun…on or about August 1, the day Theodore Snyder was killed. Police believe Diaz used the gun to kill Snyder.

“Snyder and Diaz are charged with murder, conspiracy to commit murder and special circumstances allegations that could mean the death penalty if they are convicted.”

PHIL VANNATTER
:
Victor Diaz went to a preliminary hearing; then, when he went to superior court, he just pled guilty. And they worked out a deal for him to testify against Sharon.

I always felt Diaz was a real dirtbag—but I also felt that he’d been manipulated by Sharon. So I always thought she was more culpable in the murder. Because Victor Diaz would have never killed Teddy Snyder if it hadn’t been for Sharon. The thought wouldn’t have even crossed his mind.

FRED LINCOLN
:
Sharon Snyder got beat up real bad in jail by the other inmates. Why? I dunno, maybe they came on to her, and she said no. Was it payback for Teddy? Could’ve been. I mean, there’s no question Teddy was connected.

The funny part is, Diaz got a letter in jail, supposedly from Sharon, telling him how sorry she was—she just felt so bad and if there was some way she could take it back, she would. Diaz wrote to his lawyer about it. But Sharon was a very tough woman—she might have had somebody else write the letter and put her name on it. But his lawyer brought the letter to court, like, “Ha! We got her!”

PHIL VANNATTER
:
Victor Diaz was horribly in love with Sharon. She had seduced him and told him that once Teddy was gone, they would be together all the time. Diaz was flattered because he’s a big, fat, ugly Hispanic man, and when Sharon was cleaned up, she was halfway attractive. But otherwise, she was horrible looking, you know?

LOS ANGELES TIMES
, AUGUST 17, 1991: INCRIMINATING LETTER IS NOT DEFEN DANT’S, WITNESS SAYS
:
“A handwriting expert testified Friday that a Woodland Hills woman on trial for murder did not write a letter in which she purportedly admitted her role in the machine gun slaying of her pornographer husband.

“The letter was studied by Los Angeles police handwriting expert Phora Graigh, who testified that she compared samples of both Snyder and Victor Diaz, the confessed triggerman, and determined that neither of them wrote the letter.

‘The letter was contrived by Diaz,’ Alex R. Kessel, Snyder’s attorney said. ‘The bottom line is that he had someone do it. He had it prepared.’

FRED LINCOLN
:
They didn’t get her.

LOS ANGELES TIMES
, AUGUST 31, 1991: JURY ACQUITS WIFE IN 1989 SLAYING OF SEX-VIDEO MAKER
:
“The witness, Victor Diaz, 47, who admitted killing flamboyant sex-video producer Theodore J. Snyder, testified that he did it at Sharon Snyder’s behest because he was in love with her, and she had promised to share the inheritance with him.

“In return for his testimony, Diaz, an admitted cocaine dealer, was allowed to plead no contest to second degree murder and has been promised a maximum sentence of seventeen years to life.

“Had she been convicted, Sharon Snyder could have been sentenced to life in prison without parole.

“After the verdict was read, Sharon Snyder smiled broadly for several minutes, then quickly left with bailiffs.

“Jurors said that Diaz’s credibility plummeted when he said that Snyder had sent him a letter from jail implicating herself in the Aug. 1, 1989 slaying and pleading with him to ‘take the whole rap for me.’”

PHIL VANNATTER
:
When Diaz got on the stand, he said, “Yes, I killed him because Sharon wanted me to. Yes, Sharon gave me a ten-thousand-dollar bill.” But he wasn’t real convincing with it. He actually said, “I still love her. I loved her then, and I love her now.”

FRED LINCOLN
:
That’s why it was thrown out.

PHIL VANNATTER
:
I asked the jury foreman, “How in the world could you not find this woman guilty with the evidence we put forward?”

And his only response was, “We hated Victor Diaz so much we didn’t want to believe him. Yes, she’s done some horrible things, but if we can’t believe Victor Diaz, then we can’t convict her.” That was their whole feeling.

Sharon was going for sympathy. She was up-front: “Victor Diaz did this. I didn’t have any hand in it.” Even though we were able to show the connection with the payoff, the jury didn’t buy it. I still don’t know why.

I hated losing that case more than I did the O. J. Simpson case.

Sharon Snyder’s attorney told me afterward, laughing, “You know, Sharon wants me to sue you.”

And I said, “Well, let’s get it on. I want to get all the evidence out again.”

And he said, “Oh, no! I told her, let’s let sleeping dogs lie.”

Sharon wanted to sue me for false arrest because I arrested her, and she was found not guilty.

Everyone in this case was a space cadet.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
Sharon Snyder may have gotten out of jail, but she didn’t get off. She lost half her face in state prison.