The Coyote's Bicycle (32 page)

Under the nome d'arte Godfrey Daniels, Segall followed his first effort with the sequel
Harvey Swings
. And using the aliases P. C. O'Kake,
Ms. Ricki Krelmn, and Arthur Byrd, among others, Segall made fourteen full-length sex films over the decade, sometimes two and three a year. They had names like
Spirit of Seventy Sex
(“a costume piece with wardrobe mostly from the Garden of Eden,” reads the description on
IMDb
) and
Teeny Buns
(“three girlfriends discover that they can make money the old-fashioned way”). Segall directed some of the biggest names in the business, and garnered awards. And in a nod to his ambitions outside pornography, he produced and directed 1977's
Drive-In Massacre
, in which a serial killer slaughters patrons of a rural California drive-in with a sword.

That same summer, the US Department of Justice released a report on the intertwined relationship between organized crime and the pornography business. It fingered Stu Segall Associates, with offices in New York and Hollywood, as a business affiliate of Bonanno crime family capo Michael “Mickey” Zaffarano. Not only was Zaffarano president of Stu Segall Asscociates, together Zaffarano and Segall served as directors of a nationwide adult theater chain, Pussycat Theaters. Organized crime had moved into the pornography business very early on. The industry operated in a legal gray area and was conducted mainly in cash, which made it prime territory for money laundering and racketeering. According to the
FBI
, each of New York's infamous five families sent emissaries to Los Angeles—some with instructions to corner the market. Intimidation was brought to bear, and at least one theater was firebombed.

Zaffarano was a big guy with a broad face who had once been a bodyguard for family boss Joseph Bonanno. His father was said to have worked for Al Capone in Brooklyn. In the book
Donnie Brasco
, Joseph D. Pistone, the
FBI
agent who famously infiltrated the mafia to the extent that he was on the verge of becoming a made man, bragged about having met Mickey Zaffarano through one of that captain's subordinates. The meeting was a new height in Pistone's long climb up the chain of command. When Pistone dropped his
undercover identity, which resulted in over two hundred indictments of crime family members, those formerly associated with the undercover agent were assassinated.

But this would not be the fate of Stu Segall Associates president Michael Zaffarano. By 1977, mafia members had also expanded into the piracy of mainstream movies. The Justice Department claimed this trend had cost the mainstream industry $700 million in lost revenue. And the Motion Picture Association helped finance a nationwide
FBI
sting called Miporn, for Miami Pornography, where the investigation into a clandestine web of porn distribution, racketeering, and piracy began. Some of the mainstream movies pirated included
Bambi
,
The Exorcist
,
Saturday Night Fever
, and
Jaws
. In February of 1980, on Valentine's Day, four hundred
FBI
agents fanned across the country to make arrests on the strength of the Miporn investigation. Agents searched the offices of Louis Peraino, financier of
Deep Throat
, and his brother Joseph C. Peraino—both of whom, according to
The New York Times
, were associated with New York's Colombo crime family. At the Peraino offices agents discovered film reproducing equipment and a number of original film reels—including, get this, a copy of
The Godfather
.

Agents also raided an office located at 1600 Broadway, Manhattan, which a report by Attorney General Edwin Meese claimed to be the New York office of Stu Segall Associates. According to Zaffarano's former underling, Joseph Pistone, aka Donnie Brasco, the Bonanno family captain fled the
FBI
on foot. But the fifty-six-year-old didn't get far, because he soon collapsed, the victim of a heart attack. Agents found his crumbled figure clutching a reel of porn that Zaffarano had apparently hoped to conceal from authorities.
The New York Times
reported that Zaffarano died an hour after agents attempted to serve him their warrant.

The loss of his business partner, and the upending of the industry, didn't seem to slow down Segall. And despite the fact that agents
observed wanted mafia associates as guests at Segall's home in Los Angeles, he avoided entanglement in the Miporn operation. The year Zaffarano died, Segall released
Insatiable
, featuring Marilyn Chambers and John Holmes, the most successful film of Segall's career and a modern porn classic. He followed this with a sequel, more movies, and by 1984, in a nod to his founding career as an investigator, Segall joined Stephen J. Cannell Productions to produce the hit TV series
Hunter
—a police drama centered on cagey, rule-breaking detective Rick Hunter.

Segall's past almost certainly informed
Hunter
, and the fictional detective reciprocated by boosting Segall into the mainstream.

In 1991, Godfrey Daniels had graduated from a two-decade career in adult entertainment and escaped Los Angeles by establishing a studio for low-budget cable productions in quiet San Diego. The new venture found success with serial programs such as
Silk Stalkings
,
Renegade
, and
Pensacola: Wings of Gold
. But ten years later, in the wake of 9/11, the studio's business began to weaken for a combination of reasons.

In a twist of fate, the Drug Enforcement Administration's San Diego headquarters just happened to relocate to an office complex within shouting distance of the back lot. One day—the story goes—
DEA
agents heard automatic gunfire in the neighborhood and soon descended on the studio with guns drawn. Once there, they came face to face with “movie magic”—blank-firing weapons and actors shocked to see the real deal. In a peaceable turnabout, the
DEA
agents proposed that the studio mock up a training program for them. Trials in what was called the “shoot room” were successful. And with the growing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Segall saw his opportunity. He turned a portion of the lot into a Middle Eastern village replete with foam “insurgents,” minarets, and a dingy, moth-worn look of disorder. Segall's people consulted their military contacts from dramas such as
Pensacola
to evaluate the potential for realistic training. The
villages, whether intended to replicate Kurd, Persian, or Arab settlements, developed a common nickname, Baby Baghdad, and through government contracts these Baghdads were built at the most important bases in the United States. As set dressing, the studio shipped the swamp bikes around the nation. Soon, Native Americans role-playing as Afghan villagers at a Baby Baghdad in Nevada pedaled the bikes around a set weathered to look like Helmand Province. Christian Iraqi immigrants to the United States found work as Islamic extremists pretending to destabilize their former homelands. Simulation bullets flew. Pyrotechnics blasted. And the line between Hollywood make-believe and real war continually blurred.

Even in make-believe, problems arose. In 2004, eighteen-year-old marine private Jesse Klingler volunteered to play an interrogation victim on a set at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego. According to a Marine Corps investigation, Klingler was blindfolded, bound, and gagged during the exercise. A Lebanese role player employed by Strategic Operations conducted the mock interrogation. He questioned, punched, and kicked Klingler, who was lying prone. The role player also held an AK-47. It was loaded with blanks. Guidelines required guns to be kept some distance from their targets. But maybe things felt too real. At some point, in an apparent act of intimidation, the actor placed the rifle against Klingler's body parts. Finally, he put the rifle against the soldier's right thigh and fired. Hot gases shot from the riffle barrel and ripped a hole in Private Klingler's leg. He rolled onto his side, attempting to evade further harm. The simulation turned nightmarish when the actor, apparently unaware that the gagged soldier was wounded, fired another round into the other leg. The actor then aimed at the soldier's neck, at which point marine observers intervened. Klingler's injuries ended his marine career.

According to an employee who managed a portion of the company's budget, Segall Productions was up to its ears in debt. And,
highlighting the downside of military largesse, attempts to hoover up grant money from the Department of Homeland Security just got weird. Senator Tom Coburn made an example of Stu Segall Productions in his report on the “misguided and wasteful spending” of
DHS
's Urban Areas Security Initiative grants. The report cited Segall Productions' staging of a “zombie apocalypse” tactical demonstration at a posh counterterrorism summit in 2012. The exercise cast forty actors as the gray-faced undead who were hell-bent on capturing an anonymous
VIP
while authorities fought them off. The demonstration was meant to simulate a “real-life terrorism event” for which
DHS
paid $1,000 per summit attendee. Brad Barker, president of the security firm the
HALO
Corporation and the organizer of the summit, told an Associated Press reporter, “This is a very real exercise, this is not some type of big costume party.”

There were plenty of reasons for Segall not to talk to a stranger poking around his swamp bikes, but given the variety of criticism pointed his way, I'm not sure he could pinpoint any particular one.

“It's embarrassing, really,” said set designer Kim Zirpolo.

Along with designer Bill Anderson, Zirpolo was responsible for the look and feel of the training facilities of various nicknames—from Margoz in Fort Polk, Louisiana, to Little Kabul. By default, she also had her hands deep into procurement, buying everything from window curtains to copies of the Koran. During his stint at Stu Segall Productions, Tarek Ahmad Albaba had become close to Zirpolo. So it was not without reservations that Albaba put me in touch with her concerning the movements of what some at the studio suspected to be hot bicycles. When we first spoke on the phone, I explained my interest in her work and that Kiser had already granted me a tour of the set. As suspicious as she might have been about my motives, she expressed dismay at the thought that my first exposure to her design was the facility on Ruffin Road.

“I wanted to take Baby Baghdad, or Kabul—whatever you call it—to the next level. But Stu . . .”

She didn't need to explain. By the time I'd reached Zirpolo I'd heard plenty about the thrifty operation at Segall Productions. The odd aspect of this particular frugality, however, was that the set I'd been shown by Kiser was used as the showcase for a majority of their contracts, an example of sets that were priced in the millions—and now, a major source of studio income.

According to Zirpolo, the Baby Baghdad I'd seen was a shabby pastiche of her finished product. For example, she said, the marines at Camp Pendleton, California, had wanted a field of opium poppies to replicate such a crop in the Afghan hinterland. Zirpolo sourced container loads of plastic poppy flowers, bulbs, and hip-high stems. Then she and her crew painstakingly erected the fakes into a wind-ruffled expanse of agrarian green. Soldiers used the site to train in opium interdiction and eradication, among other uses. From Zirpolo's description it wasn't hard to imagine the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, the Cowardly Lion, and Dorothy encountering the spell-cast sea of poppies at the shore of the Emerald City—this time with soldiers stalking through the growth.

Then, Zirpolo described an $11 million installation at Fort Irwin, California—a drab town of meat stands, groceries, bakeries, and cafés. Command specifically asked Zirpolo to build an Iraqi bike shop. The theaters of war Zirpolo was asked to replicate were almost exclusively impoverished. As early as the 1890s, the bicycle was called “the poor man's nag.” Even today, African politicians promise bicycles to indigent voters. Soldiers who had been deployed suggested that bicycles would lend the fictive villages a sense of commerce, movement, and vitality. The result of Zirpolo's labor was a mud-colored, two-story facade ornamented with a green-and-white striped awning. A yellow-and-white sign in Arabic ran across the shop's front. Outside the darkened doorway, perhaps three dozen
bikes—mostly mountain bikes—stood in rows, their bright purples, blues, and reds contrasting with the desert village palette like gummy bears dropped in dirt. The bike shop was the only corner of the installation that truly sparkled.

For a while, a photo of the Fort Irwin bike shop dominated the Strategic Operations website. I found myself drawn into it—I counted bike frames, tires, the hoops of wheels hanging from the shop awning. Compared to the Tijuana bike stores, it was a wonder. Yet it was obvious that the models displayed were not of Middle Eastern origin. Their source was obvious, but I had to know for sure.

“Those were all Terry's bikes,” Zirpolo admitted.

Even so, during our first phone conversation I could sense that Zirpolo was hesitant to reveal the details. When I asked how many bikes she'd purchased from Tynan, I received a vague and middling approximation. When I asked where, exactly, the bikes had ended up, Zirpolo said she couldn't be sure. Considering the rise in business brought on by the troop surge and the fact that Tynan's stockpile had been all but cleaned out, both responses confounded me. I continued to phone Zirpolo, however. We chatted. It helped that I wrote for a surf magazine, as San Diego is a surf-stoked city and a good portion of her studio colleagues, as well as Zirpolo herself, were devotees. I described my passion for the bicycles. I knew people she knew. Moreover, I got the impression that she'd reasoned herself out of worrying over a surfer obsessed with shitty bicycles. I wasn't a threat anymore; I was pitiable. Eventually, Zirpolo agreed to meet me at a beachside taco joint near her home in San Diego's north county.