The Other Hollywood (60 page)

Garth Cohen—the guy who was originally going to go but then backed out—picked us up at LAX. We dropped Joe Martinez off at his house and then went to a supermarket about a block away, and that’s when I called my friend Kevin Beechum.

KEVIN BEECHUM
:
I’m fuckin’ sittin’ in my office in Northridge, and I’m sweatin’ fuckin’ bullets, and the phone rings and it’s Jay. He’s at Hughes market over here in Chatsworth. I’m like, “What the fuck are you doing?”

He said he was on fire; the bomb blew up in the car. I’m like, “Oh, fuck!”

Jay said, “I think Donny’s dead.”

I’m like, “Oh, shit.” So I go pick him up and take him to my house in Chatsworth. And I call Mickey and tell him. He’s like, “Oh, fuck.”

I said, “Mickey, you said you’d get the lawyers; you’d pay the bail; you’d take care of the guys.”

He said, “Don’t worry. I’ll see what I can do.”

I ran to see my lawyer, Jim Henderson, and told him the story. Jimmy says, “Go sit tight until we hear something.”

So me and Jay go back to my house, and as we’re walking in we get a phone call from Little Joe saying that the FBI and the ATF are raiding his house. We’re like, “Oh, fuck!” So we take off—but then we’re like, where are we gonna go?

NAOMI DELGADO
:
I knew Russ Hampshire for about eight years or so. He’s a friend of Reuben’s. He’s in the adult video business. Russ would come over to our house every Tuesday night for a card game.

RUSS HAMPSHIRE (OWNER OF VCA STUDIOS)
:
Mickey Feinberg came to my office, asked me to close the door, and said that he was in trouble. He said he’d been asked to break up some stores in Chicago, and that an individual was killed with a bomb, and that it got back to him through Kevin Beechum.

Mickey said that Reuben Sturman had paid him fifty or sixty thousand dollars to do the job in Chicago. And they had him on a wire—but that he wasn’t going to roll.

Mickey asked me to go see Sturman and tell him what happened and tell Sturman that he wasn’t going to roll and that all he wanted was his legal bills and his family taken care of.

KEVIN BEECHUM
:
We hid out the whole weekend, and we’re calling Mickey Feinberg. “Mickey, you’ve got to come up with the money—you’ve got to do something.”

First he told me, “Go put your house up for the bail.” I’m like, “Wait a minute! I’m not even supposed to be in this picture! This picture is between you guys; you gave them your word that you would fucking get the money.”

Mickey finally tells us, “Fuck you, you’re on your own.”

I’m like, “Well, you’re fucked.”

He’s like, “Fuck you!”

So now I’m pissed. I call Jimmy Henderson, and he says bring Jay here. So I do, and Jimmy says, “You guys are gonna go down if you don’t cooperate. So fuck Mickey. If he’s gonna screw us, we’re gonna screw him back.”

So Jay went there and cooperated with the FBI, and I did, too.

NAOMI DELGADO
:
In April 1992, Russ Hampshire came to see Reuben at our house. He asked to speak to Reuben, and they went outside to talk.

RUSS HAMPSHIRE
:
I asked him to step outside, and related the information that Mickey Feinberg had told me—that he just wanted to let Reuben know that he was not going to roll on him and that all he wanted was his legal bills paid for and his family taken care of. I told Reuben that they had Mickey Feinberg on a wire discussing whatever with Kevin Beechum.

Reuben said, “Oh, shit.” He said to relate to Mickey that “I will definitely take care of his family and legal bills.”

NAOMI DELGADO
:
I talked to Reuben afterward, and he said that Mickey had hired two guys, and one of the men was assembling a bomb, and it went off and killed him. Reuben said that he didn’t know who these guys were—and these were people that Mickey had hired—and no one could point anything at Reuben. And he said that Mickey would go to jail for Reuben, if he would pay for Mickey’s defense.

MARK PROSPERI (U.S. ATTORNEY)
:
After Mickey Feinberg learns about the bombing, he goes to Russ Hampshire and says, “I want you to go talk to Reuben and tell him what happened,” and that’s exactly what he did. And then Hampshire becomes an intermediary between Feinberg and Sturman. And this time Reuben goes in there, and he checks for a wire and tells Naomi, “I don’t want you to pay Feinberg any more than twenty-five thousand dollars.”

NAOMI DELGADO
:
Later Mickey called, and he gave me directions to Russ Hampshire’s office—he had set up a time—and we met. After I met with Russ, I met with Mickey Feinberg, in a screening room that was adjacent to Russ’ office. Mickey said that one man who helped do the bombing had become a government witness, and he was going to finger Mickey. Mickey was going to need money for his defense.

KEVIN BEECHUM
:
Meanwhile, Mickey gets the money from Russ Hampshire from VCA. Mickey even collected some of the money from Reuben—and Mickey never gave us a fucking nickel. He came to my lawyer and gave him five hundred dollars, or five thousand, and I ended up having to pay Jim Henderson $140,000 to keep me out of it.

Mickey said, “I’m not going to cooperate. I never did nothing.”

Then when he found out we were fucking him, he wants to cooperate. So he goes back to their men and says he’s going to cooperate. But now it’s too late; now he’s facing fifteen to thirty years. Now he’s
fucked.
He shoulda took the ten years. He would’ve been out by now.

NAOMI DELGADO
:
When Mickey said he would need money for his defense, I told him I would have to talk to Reuben about it. Then he said, “You’re a very pretty woman, and you have a lovely child, and I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you or your child.”

I was frightened. I mean, I took it as a threat. So I told Reuben, and he told me that I would have to help Mickey if he needed it. I told him that Mickey was asking for twenty-five thousand dollars. Maybe he asked for more—I don’t remember—but it ended up that I sent twenty-five thousand to his attorney.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE
, SEPTEMBER 10, 1993: REPUTED PORN KINGPIN CONVICTED IN PLOT AGAINST ADULT BOOKSTORES
:
“Reuben Sturman, whom prosecutors described as the nation’s largest distributor of hard-core pornography, was convicted Thursday of conspiring to send thugs to Chicago to damage several adult bookstores in an attempt to extort payoffs from their owner.

“A federal jury, though, acquitted Sturman of seven other counts related to the attempted bombings of the Chicago bookstores in April 1992. The jury convicted Sturman of conspiring to extort the Chicago owner through the use of force and violence. The jury, though, acquitted Sturman of involvement in the attempted bombings, apparently believing the hired men decided to escalate the violence without Sturman’s knowledge.”

RICHARD ROSFELDER
:
I think Reuben intended to scare some people, but I just didn’t see him as the type of guy that would be intending to kill anybody. Because what happened in Chicago and Arizona was the result of one of those goofy bombers blowing himself up.

CLEVELAND PLAIN DEALER
, SEPTEMBER 10, 1993: PORN KING CLEARED IN BOMBING CASE; MORE JAIL TIME DUE
:
“Pornography king Reuben Sturman was cleared of federal bombing charges yesterday but was convicted of other charges that could leave him in prison for the rest of his life.

“If Sturman had been convicted of the bombing charges, he would have faced a mandatory 30 years in prison because a man sent to Chicago last year to vandalize adult bookstores was killed when a bomb accidentally exploded in his lap.

“Sturman’s sentence will now be determined by federal sentencing guidelines. He was convicted of conspiring to commit extortion and of separate charges that said he used threats of violence, but not bombs, to extort money from Roy May, who was buying several Chicago adult bookstores from Sturman.”

RICHARD ROSFELDER
:
It appeared to me that he hired people to break up the bookstore and scare people and probably hired people to go up and plant bombs outside of bookstores and scare ’em there. I didn’t really see it as anything more than that.

I didn’t think Reuben was a killer.

1990 and on….

LOS ANGELES/OGDEN, UTAH
1991–1993

TIM CONNELLY
:
I met Marc Carriere in 1985 at the CES show in Vegas. Marc and I met through Tina Marie, Marc’s then-girlfriend—a big-breasted Samoan. Tina had one of the early 1980s tit jobs; fake tits were rare at that time.

Tina’s big movie was
Star 84
, which Marc produced; she was also the star of
Firestorm
. Marc and Tina’s relationship helped gain Marc entrée into the porno industry—being with Tina Marie made him okay.

RAY PISTOL
:
When Marc Carriere was starring Tina Marie, he had just brought out
Star 84
, and he was in town from Indiana. Tina was making an appearance in my store, signing autographs. Marc brought her over and hung around, and we just chatted about store business.

At that time I believe he had about five stores—a very nice guy, with a very good-looking wife. They were an engaging couple.

MARC CARRIERE
:
I found Tina Marie for the film
Star 84
. Tracked her down through Jim South, I believe. Jim and I had a parting of the ways soon after that. They got a little greedy. They wanted royalties—after they had already made the deal. My thing was, “You already made the deal. Let’s talk about the next film.”

That was the first big film that Bruce Seven, John Stagliano, and I worked on, and there was one thing that we all pretty much agreed upon: that the films should be mainly sex and be down and dirty.

JOHN STAGLIANO
:
Bruce Seven and I did Video Exclusive’s first movie—which was Marc Carriere’s first video production—which we’re still owed five thousand dollars on. So you might want to mention that.

Video Exclusives still owes Bruce and me five thousand dollars. We think that Video Exclusives should pay up!

TIM CONNELLY
:
Marc came from the Midwest and was endlessly fascinated by the mail-order in all the magazines—you know, the X-Ray Specs advertisements, and things like that. So he went to a lot of the porn premieres, made a connection to
Hustler
and some of the other big magazines, and came up with some mail-order campaigns.

He used P.O. boxes for addresses—so his ads were all the same ads, though you would never know it. There were girl/girl ads, magazines, dildos, rubbers—whatever he could sell from Chicago to Michigan City and all points in between.

MARC CARRIERE
:
I didn’t major in anything specific in college, just the usual courses. But what attracted me was this mail-order stuff. I thought, “What the hell could sell really well?” And then I thought, “Sex really sells.”

ROSCOE JEFFERSON (PORN PRODUCER)
:
Marc ran his mail-order business out of Indiana, with people he grew up with. Marc’s brother, Brad, ran the company back there. Then Marc moved out to California and became a big porn producer. Marc and Brad talked constantly on the phone, from L.A. to Indiana. But Brad was getting a little disenchanted by the business. It was fun for him at first—but it was a lot of work. Brad didn’t really have a taste for the business.

TIM CONNELLY
:
Marc quickly got a corner of the market. When he finally moved out to California, that’s when we hooked up. He wanted to come up with a national campaign: “Porn for a Penny,” a take-off on the record club concept. It was all about just getting somebody to give you their name; once you have their name, you can sell them whatever you want—and you can sell their name.

We learned that federal law said a mail-order company had thirty days to fulfill an order, or the company had to send a letter saying that they’re back-ordered. If you’re back-ordered, then you have another thirty days to either give them a cash credit or some other sort of fulfillment. So Marc immediately saw that as a ninety-day window. Within thirty days he would send out a postcard saying, “Your order is being processed. Due to the overwhelming response, we’ll get to it as quickly as we can.” Based on the responses he got for various offers, he figured out how to bulk-edit his mail-order requests. Then, in sixty days, they’d give you the choice of having a credit with their catalog or something else.

ROSCOE JEFFERSON
:
Rumor has it that there was money being kept in Marc’s safes back in Indiana because a lot of people were sending cash in,
and they weren’t fulfilling those orders, they just kept them. But I don’t know if that’s true. If somebody decides he wants to buy the thousand porn scenes for $79.95, and he sends in a postal money order or cash, there’s no real record of it. You can basically decide not to fulfill the order, as long as they send the payment by regular mail. They can go after you, but they can’t prove it.

LOS ANGELES TIMES MAGAZINE
, FEBRUARY 17, 1991: DEMAND IS STRONG, BUT POLICE CRACKDOWNS AND A SATURATED MARKET SPELL TROUBLE FOR ONE OF L.A.’S BIGGEST BUSINESSES
:
“Some of the wind has been taken out of Marc Carriere’s bluster. His mail-order company was raided in October by federal agents, who took away four safes containing $548,409.15. He later was arrested on charges of tax evasion. The government said his income from 1986 to 1988 was ‘substantially in excess’ of the $2.96 million he claimed. He is awaiting trial.”

ROSCOE JEFFERSON
:
Soon after that, Brad Carriere turned up dead.

On June 13, 1991, he committed suicide in the garage of his new home—which he was just about to move into, after marrying his childhood sweetheart. He sat in his car with the engine running and died of carbon-monoxide poisoning.

I saw Brad two weeks before his death; he was a happy guy. He was not threatened at all by the investigation. Figured that if they did have some trouble, that maybe somebody would have to go in.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
Apparently there was some family issue there, something about how Brad wasn’t getting along with his wife. That whole Carriere thing was crazy, though. Those guys were pretty odd.

ROSCOE JEFFERSON
:
Did Marc talk about Brad’s suicide? A little bit. He was very distant and cold. At the time, I was more concerned about Marc. I thought, “Marc would never do that. It’s his
brother.
” I never saw anything but an easygoing friendship between them.

But it was difficult because Marc’s not the easiest guy in the world to talk to—very shut down. He leaves a lot of things unsaid—sentences trail off all the time. A lot of it’s inference and innuendo.

RON JEREMY
:
Marc is a nice guy, but he hires tough guys as front people. Two editors tried to blackmail him, and so rumor has it that he sent a couple of black guys into the labs to threaten them. They didn’t hit them, but they pushed them around and scared them. Marc’s got the money and the power to do things like that—but he’s only done it once that I’ve heard of.

SHARON MITCHELL
:
They were the beginning of this town’s slide into oversatu
ration of the porn industry. And Ron Jeremy was right there with them—he’d jump on their fucking two-hundred-dollar-a-scene bandwagon.

That was the beginning of the end of any quality in the business. You can’t compete with that much stuff that quick.

LOS ANGELES TIMES MAGAZINE
, FEBRUARY 17, 1991: DEMAND IS STRONG, BUT POLICE CRACKDOWNS AND A SATURATED MARKET SPELL TROUBLE FOR ONE OF L.A.’S BIGGEST BUSINESSES.
“Others dispute the idea that it was Carriere who caused the price of an X-rated cassette to plunge from $100 a few years ago to as low as $5 today. Critics say he is just the industry’s most swashbuckling price-buster, delivering an inferior product. Carriere doesn’t spend much time worrying about what his competitors think of him. He is too busy planning his next move to out-flank his opponents in the flash wars.”

MARC CARRIERE
:
Perry Ross offered to come and work for me and brought along the idea of doing to girls what he had done to Angela Baron. Which was: Find a girl, and do the whole plastic surgery trip. Make her a goddess.

Make our own goddesses. That sounded good to me.

TIM CONNELLY
:
Marc Carriere’s movies were horrible. I told him that right away, and he knew it, so he opened up an office and started getting girls to be part of his “Killer and Filler” program.

MARC CARRIERE
:
I told Ron Jeremy that I wanted to make a one-day feature with six sex scenes and that we’d have to have one killer girl and the rest be filler. I think the first one was
California Blonds
then
Ebony Humpers
. Nobody was really doing those one-day-wonders back then.

RON JEREMY
:
I was the king of “Killer and Filler”—the technique of hiring that one girl who’s on the box cover and shooting her in two or three scenes and then making two or three movies using her. Then the next day Marc would have me shoot the filler—the less expensive girls—and then we would have three movies. It was moviemaking conveyor-belt style.

MARC CARRIERE
:
Then Perry Ross was over at Jim South’s office, and he bumps into this guy Rex Cabo. Perry said I had to meet Rex because he could bring a ton of girls down. So I met with him; he sounded like a fast talker, but he produced. He started bringing down girls by the busload.

TIM CONNELLY
:
Perry Ross ran Marc’s place with an iron fist—while Rex Cabo brought in the girls. Being around either Rex Cabo or Perry Ross would send a chill up the spine of a normal person.

Today, Perry Ross is dead. He died from a mysterious drug overdose in
Holland.

MARC CARRIERE
:
Every day these girls were coming in—ten a day—it was just incredible. Rex Cabo brought Savannah to us, Rikki Lee, Vivianna, et cetera. We would bring the girls up and assess them. We would decide if we were going to have work done on them, handpick them, and then do, like, twenty picture deals with them.

TIM CONNELLY
:
Marc was known for sending these girls off to Idaho—to Dr. Pearl. He’d call the doctor up and have him add more cc’s of silicone or saline, so that the girls came out with monstrous breasts. Marc would pay the girls—ten thousand dollars, let’s say. Then they’d come in and shoot five box covers in maybe two days, and then he’d get five scenes out of them or ten—two scenes for each video.

But he’d always shoot them for the box before they fucked because their tits would always come down a couple dings, visually, after a week in the Carriere Fuck Factory.

TREASURE BROWN (EXOTIC DANCER)
:
Would Marc tell the surgeon to make the girls’ tits bigger when they were already under? Yeah, that’s completely true. And then Marc would tell them, “Don’t worry! The saline’s going to go down!”

It happened to one stripper, who had to have her boobs reduced. It was Dr. Pearl in Idaho.
Idaho!
This little hick town, and it’s the epitome of boob jobs for porn stars!

They would fly these Pepperidge Farm country girls out from Indiana to Idaho, slap new tits on ’em, and then fly ’em off to Hollywood.

RAY PISTOL
:
It is funny to see somebody like Bunny Bleu go from bee stings to basketballs, you know?

TREASURE BROWN
:
Dr. Pearl did silicone when silicone was illegal—and it’s far better. If you were questioning whether silicone was good or bad, he’d be like, “Look, this is a water balloon. This doesn’t feel like a tit!”

I was like, “Oh, my God!”

Dr. Pearl was a little scary.

RAY PISTOL
:
Treasure told me she was sitting with a girl in Dr. Pearl’s office, and she asked him, “Well, what if they break?”

Dr. Pearl’s like, “They won’t break!!”

Thump! Threw one of them up against the wall!

He said, “See?!”

JEANNA FINE
:
I was really scared when Dr. Pearl walked into the office
because he looked like he had created himself. He kind of looks like the guy from
Poltergeist
with the black hat.

He came in and dropped his glasses; he was kind of stumbly. He was, like, seventy-something at that point. I was a little uncertain at that moment. And all his nurses were five feet tall and eighty years old. I thought, “Oh no, I’m not sure about this.”

But he did fantastic work.

TIM CONNELLY
:
Marc was one of the first to make his product the “Big Mac of pornography.” Vivid knew pretty early on that a good box cover could sell a movie, but Carriere took it to the extreme. He said, “Why don’t we make it all about the box, and fuck everything else? Because all they really want is to see the girl on the box fuck.”

So he’d get that girl, have a
Penthouse
photographer shoot her, and spend a lot of money on airbrushing. Then they’d pay the girl a flat rate and give her whatever she needed—a car, an abortion, the rent, whatever.

There was some heat in the industry about it. But the bottom line was that the girls didn’t complain, you know? Because he really knew how to deal with them on a commercial level—and a lot of producers didn’t.

MARC CARRIERE
:
I don’t think you should get too involved with the girls. We have girls to this day who call at midnight looking for help. Even if we’re not working with them anymore, we’ll still help them out.

One girl came in and said she needed eight hundred dollars right away. For her rent or something. They were going to throw her out on the street. She said she would do a scene for us.