Cobra Killer (42 page)

The judge in the Cuadra and Kerekes cases, Peter Paul Olszewski, Jr., stood for a ten-year retention vote in November 2009. In a rare outcome, voters turned Olszewski out of office. Although never implicated in scandals that swept two other Luzerne County judges from the bench under federal indictment, Olszewski’s opponents nonetheless circulated a damaging photo of the judge unknowingly posing next to a convicted drug dealer. The result was catastrophic, with 33,800 county voters answering “no” to the question of whether to retain the judge; 22,471 voted “yes.” Olszewski’s loss was the first in decades for a sitting Luzerne County judge.

Harlow Cuadra appeals, and loses

While outspoken Wilkes-Barre attorney Demetrius Fannick did not succeed in representing Cuadra or Kerekes during their initial criminal proceedings, he did gain Cuadra as a client upon his conviction appeal. Fannick based most of the appeal, filed in August 2009, upon rulings he believed were in error; for example, allowing the Crab Catcher and Black’s Beach transcripts into evidence, as well as items seized during searches of Cuadra’s Virginia Beach home. Fannick also sought to have blocked from evidence on a retrial a video of Cuadra working out at the Big House Gym and autopsy photos of the victim.

The appeal allowed Fannick to continue arguing that he should never have been disallowed to represent Cuadra and concluded that the commonwealth’s “evidence was insufficient to convict the defendant.” Several of Fannick’s appeal points were already addressed by Judge Olszewski prior to trial, including change of venue and use of victim photographs.
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In October 2010, the Superior Court of Pennsylvania upheld Cuadra’s conviction and sentence in a five-page ruling. In it, the state’s high court said Judge Olszewski’s rulings in both pre-trial and trial proceedings were “well-detailed and well-reasoned.” The judges added, “We can find no error in (the court’s) factual findings and corollary legal conclusions.”
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Seemingly undeterred, Fannick filed a new appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court in late November 2010, perhaps the last long shot effort Cuadra could make to win release. It too failed. Defeated via the state’s highest courts, it seemed unlikely Cuadra had any remaining hope of being released via this means.
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Harlow’s life behind bars

Cuadra has talked little about his life behind bars to anyone but his immediate family and friends, but he revealed some of his experiences via a rather circuitous manner. In late 2009 and early 2010, on a web blog and YouTube videos posted by a young woman in England going by the name of “Natasha,” published and later read and displayed on YouTube letters she had received from Cuadra.

Natasha told her followers that she had been writing to Cuadra and promised to show them one at a time. In her first letter from Cuadra, he details having received Natasha’s first missive just as the paperwork arrived for Cuadra so he could proceed with his appeal. “That was an emotional moment,” Cuadra writes. “In one hand could be the key to open the heavy door back into society, and in the other a letter from a stranger that had the guts to reach out to someone on the inside.”
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In his reply, he told Natasha he read her letter first, putting off reading the appeal documents because “there was a lot of legal jargon and it took me a few days to read through it (it was thick as a phone book). Natasha, my head has been all over the place for days now and so please excuse how all over the place this letter is. Not until yesterday have I had any breathing room.” He confessed that prison life “has been really tough. Not in a physical way, but pure mental. Most times I take my glasses off to avoid the stares and to blur out my surroundings.”
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Cuadra was optimistic in his first letter, telling Natasha that he expected that in six to nine months, a judge could decide whether he could go home or would stay in prison for the rest of his life. He told her that “according to the legally inclined, the odds (on winning the appeal) are in our favor.”
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A second undated letter was shared by Natasha online a few weeks after the first. In it, Cuadra updates her about the appeal process including his conclusion that a thirty-day extension granted in the proceeding was a good sign for his chances.

In this letter he also took up what he believed were contributing factors to his conviction, such as long-brewing Luzerne County judicial scandals and corruption investigations of county officials not involved with his case. “Not only did they (county officials) need to convict me in order to secure a bigger budget for the following year, but the Judge himself was up for re-election (he lost and is out of there),” Cuadra wrote. “Maybe they thought that my conviction would bury all of their bad deeds.”
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He told Natasha to keep the faith, as time would prove him right. He also responded to her about their shared love of the band Green Day, and her comments about John Roecker’s documentary about the “true life” of gay porn stars, a video he has never seen since it was released after he was incarcerated.

Again he offered a glimpse into prison life, referring to his new cellmate Paul (whom he called a “roommate”) as “a nice guy” but that “we keep to ourselves around here. You must in order to make it day to day. Many of the guys in here are pretty much living people with dead souls. I think that is why most of the stuff I write is about the yaw and pitch of moral struggle.”
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His third letter to Natasha (and the last one she published online) talked about the hot-humid Pennsylvania weather and Cuadra’s happiness about weaning himself off the last twenty-five milligrams of imipramine. The drug, an anti-depressant normally sold under the name Tofranil, is prescribed mostly to treat depression and anxiety in adults, and to curb bed-wetting in small children, according to the drug’s manufacturer. He mentioned to Natasha that he had received Prozac as a child, along with Ritalin and other drugs, all of which he said he stopped taking once he entered the Navy.

As he had in his earlier letters, he confessed, “I suffer every second of every interminable day. And it does not get easier; you just get sort of used to it.”
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He contrasted his prison experience with that of “those who have sold drugs or killed people, maybe for them this has gotten easier because they are responsible for the world that they have created and now find themselves in. It’s life on autopilot, almost like a groundhog day where the same day is repeated over and over.” Always somewhat poetic, Cuadra noted that “the more time passes, the more you have missed, the more you have missed out on. If you pay enough attention, you can actually see people (in prison) carrying their tears around like sacks of stones.”
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He repeated earlier themes about having to keep himself separate from “the undesirables” who were all around him. “You see people change around here, and it’s never for the better. It makes it harder, but that’s what I must do.”
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Remain in prison is indeed what Cuadra has to do unless Pennsylvania’s highest court reverses all previous proceedings and orders him a new trial. He remains housed on a life sentence at the State Correctional Institute in Coal Township, Pennsylvania. The medium-security facility is located about seventy miles southwest of Kocis’ former home in Dallas, Pennsylvania. The facility housing Cuadra is about 100 miles away northeast of where Joseph Kerekes will spend the rest of his life.

The great porn machine grinds on

The murder of Bryan Kocis and the subsequent jailing of Harlow Cuadra and Joseph Kerekes did nothing to impact the ever-grinding machinery that produces literally thousands upon thousands of porno images everyday. The porn business, estimated to be worth at least $12 billion annually to its producers, is estimated to have as many followers as the National Basketball Association (NBA) and the National Football League (NFL) combined. Some have even touted porn as one of the few American economic sectors that is fully recession proof.
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Still a product that polite people don’t talk about openly, porn is more likely hidden away on discreet files on a home personal computer. There are glimpses of mainstream acceptability. In 2007 then-San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom (now California’s lieutenant governor) issued a proclamation for “Colt Day” in that city to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Colt Studios, an established gay porn producer. Porn critics abound, some even fueled still by the ancient findings of the Meese Commission Report of 1986 in which the Reagan Administration once and for all declared porn was a big, bad business.

In 2012, the Los Angeles City Council gave preliminary approval to a plan to require porn producers to provide and require the use of condoms on a set in order to obtain permits to film,
Business Week
reported. The move by city officials to act amidst ever-growing reports of HIV transmission via “bareback” sex mirrored efforts by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation that sought a statewide California ballot initiative to require condom use in all adult films—gay or otherwise. New struggles face today’s porn industry, beyond challenges related to HIV and AIDS transmission or even local obscenity measures. New online sources, such as www.xtube.com, present the same challenge to porn producers that www.napster.com and others presented to music producers. Customers can get an amazing amount of content online, for free. Add into that the merger of television and the Internet, seemingly embraced by producers of all kinds has meant that the “Google generation” of today may find it rather odd that anyone wants them to actually
pay
for their porn. Some estimates indicate that as much as 15 percent of the 100-most visited gay porn sites online offer free porn viewing. Getting it for free may be neat for the consumer, but the industry is reeling over how to react and survive.
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Some of the “reaction” or “will to survive” of the industry has taken on the form of producing more and more hard-core and kink content. Certainly the financial struggle has not slowed the desire for “bareback” or condomless content that Kocis produced. “As a small company, I am forced by distributors to shoot bareback content,” gay porn producer Tyler Reed of USA Jock Studio told
The Advocate
. “Unless you have extremely high-quality models, sets, and so forth, distributors won’t even touch the safe content anymore.” Reed estimates that “bareback sells two-to-one, guaranteed. And if you put the word ‘bareback’ in the title, you’re looking at three-to-one.”
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Does it matter? Consider that four years ago, industry insiders said a porn website could expect 5 million “hits” or “visits” a day, and online porn site memberships have risen from 4 to 7 million subscribers throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century.

In May 2009,
The Advocate
reported in its review of the panic overtaking the porn community that DVD sales were down between twenty-five and forty-five percent overall—and that’s for a DVD technology that most agree is bound for the graveyard.
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Whether he knew it or not, murder victim Bryan Kocis represented another new challenge to mainline porn producers. His home-based business was at the start of a huge wave of producers to come online. “Self-proclaimed producers from all walks flocked to adult entertainment, operating under the correct assumption that sex sells and the sort-of-correct assumption that there’s an endless supply of customers,”
The Advocate
reported.
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As blogger Jason Sechrest said, “Everyone with a camcorder picked it up and said, ‘Hey! I’m going to do that!’”
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Some mainline producers have tapped into what Kocis found early on by producing their own alleged “amateur” content, much of it focused on the “twinks” Kocis favored, or straight-guys-having-gay-sex genres. Successful examples include www.seancody.com, www.randyblue.com, and www.corbinfisher.com. “These companies are now some of the most lucrative in the business and offer top dollar for the right model,” according to a report in
The Advocate
.
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Most predict the days of renting or buying one’s own DVD from the local shop or online store is a thing of the past. Most customers will likely download the porn they want onto laptop computers or even more on mobile, hand-held computer devices. And while recessions come and go and porn producers will undoubtedly find ways to recapture their customers (and many new ones), gay activists lament the days when mainline gay porn studios were major contributors to HIV and AIDS prevention efforts and other political causes of importance to the gay-lesbian-bisexual and transgender communities. “(Gay porn) is a huge part of our culture,” said online industry journalist J.C. Adams. “For many of us, porn was our first exposure to male intimacy and porn stars were the only openly gay or bi men that we saw or heard of.”
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In the End

After all is said and done, the murder of Bryan Kocis was not dramatically different than the thousands of murders that occur across the nation each year. It had unusual aspects, given its ties to gay porn, and the small-town sense of security that it threatened in the hearts and minds of locals. But then, just as easily, locals and others can conscribe this case to the anomaly category. Observers of the events in Luzerne County can easily say they aren’t involved in porn, they have engaged in no cross-country rivalries with others who seek to do them harm, they lead more everyday lives, and that something like this could never happen to them. But the people at the center of this case, Bryan Kocis, Sean Lockhart, Joseph Kerekes, and Harlow Cuadra are all products of those normal, everyday American lives and homes as well, though in differing forms. For their part, Kocis and Kerekes had very traditional, solid childhoods based on parents expecting them to do well at school, with extra curricular activities, including Scouts or church youth groups. And Lockhart and Cuadra represent the polar opposite, both coming from homes in transition without strong parental support at the top that caused traditional childhood boundaries to be blurred. The only “player” in this saga with any remaining hope or potential, it seems, is Lockhart who continues to construct an identity for himself both in and out of the porn world. His biggest advantage: he’s alive and free to pursue what life holds next. For Cuadra and Kerekes, their lives essentially died at the moment of Kocis’ death, all deaths borne in the margins of the gay porn subculture that placed the pursuit of pleasure above all else.