The Other Hollywood (24 page)

BRUCE ELLAVSKY
:
Pat used to aggravate me because he beat me in almost everything. You know, I always thought I was in pretty good shape, and I’d go running with him, but Pat always ran a little faster. When we’d play tennis, he was always a little bit better.

So in the beginning, I think I was a little apprehensive about going undercover—but, yeah, I was excited. It seemed like something you read about somebody else doing.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
Just don’t ask me whether I was a better dancer than Bruce. Most people say he’s a better dancer, but unquestionably I was.

BETTY JO
:
Pat was very confident, very proud of himself. He was sort of a loud person, cocky, swaggery. Pat always seemed in control. And Pat’s much better looking in person because his personality comes out. He’s charming, and he can seduce you into doing anything he wants….

BILL BROWN
:
For me, the trip to the Cayman Islands was a watershed. It changed my life. Because while watching Pat and Bruce, I understood salesmanship for the first time—and the implications of this to me were just tremendous.

I was in a flux in my life, trying to decide what to do. I always believed that ability was everything and that the show—the clothes one wore, the office one had, the car one drove—really didn’t make much difference.

Then I realized that being a lawyer—winning in court, winning trials, winning clients—
is
salesmanship. My wardrobe changed, my office—parquet floors, oriental rugs. It was the beginning of me building a really good, successful law practice.

Pat taught me that I can change the hand I was dealt—that it isn’t written in stone that I have to be the way I am. He showed me how to choose.

BETTY JO
:
I felt like Pat was in control of the act, totally in control. But I never felt it was the real person. Even in bed he seemed to be odd. I even remarked to my friends, “I don’t know this man.”

BRUCE ELLAVSKY
:
You have to have a certain personality to be able to do undercover, but you really should be acting, rather than
becoming
. And during the operation Pat started to
become
his undercover persona.

Actually,
becoming
is much easier because if you become that person, you won’t screw up.

MIAMI/LOS ANGELES
1977

GORDON MCNEIL (FBI SPECIAL AGENT)
:
The real emphasis of MIPORN was getting to organized crime—pornography was just the vehicle we used to do it. So we had a seminar in Quantico, Virginia, at the FBI Academy in 1977 where I selected the national targets in the MIPORN investigation.

BRUCE ELLAVSKY
:
We had the benefit of the briefing in Virginia, so we knew pretty much who the major players in the industry were. Then we set out to see if there was a logical way to deal with them. I mean, you don’t just roll into town without somebody introducing you. So our plan was to do it step by step, to play off one to get to another.

GORDON MCNEIL
:
We knew that MIPORN wouldn’t be considered a success unless we ended up indicting Mickey Zaffarano and Robert DiBernardo. If we didn’t get them, the operation would be a failure.

BRUCE ELLAVSKY
:
We had intelligence that Robert DiBernardo was a made member of the Gambino family, and Mickey Zaffarano was a made member of the Bonanno family.

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
CPLC was a big distributor in California—I was buyin’ stuff there—and their guy comes over to me and says, “Hey, we got some guys from Florida; they wanna buy some sixteens.”

I was the guy for sixteens. So I says, “Who are these guys?” He says, “Ah, they’ve been in Florida. I know them. I dealt with ’em….” Because you always had to be careful.

Pat Salamone and Bruce Wakerly—sure enough, those are the guys.

DICK PHINNEY (LOS ANGELES FBI AGENT/WEST COAST OBSCENITY EXPERT)
:
I had information from an informant in Los Angeles that there’s two guys in Los Angeles from Miami, and they’re involved in porno—supposedly big guys, yet I don’t know who they are. It turns out to be Pat Salamone and Bruce Wakerly.

So I made some calls back to Bill Kelly and asked, “Who are these guys from Golde Coaste Specialties?”

Well, Kelly knew, of course. But he couldn’t tell me because he wasn’t authorized to.

BILL KELLY
:
I had to lie to Phinney. I said, “I don’t know anything about them.”

Phinney said, “Gee, you oughta know about these guys. They’re right outta Miami—your town.”

I said, “All right, all right. I know, but I never heard of them….”

DICK PHINNEY
:
I can understand the secrecy; they had to keep as few people knowing about it as possible. I was brought into it later—because it was obvious I was going to know anyway.

In fact, so much of the work was going to take place in Los Angeles, they needed my help for guidance and background.

BILL KELLY
:
Phinney was really upset with me. He was my best friend in the bureau at that time; we worked very closely together for fifteen, twenty years. So he was mad as hell.

But I told him, “Look, I didn’t have a choice. I was told not to tell ya until it became absolutely necessary.”

RHONDA JO PETTY (PORN STAR)
:
When
Little Orphan Dusty
came out, my dad called me. See, it was a very big hit. I didn’t expect that. I walked out the door after the shoot, and they said, “What name do you want to use?”

I said, “Just use my real name.” I didn’t think it was going to go anywhere.

Then my dad called me and goes, “I’m going to break your legs and arms!” Because I used our family name. That same day I’m driving down the freeway in my little VW, and this Jewish guy—who was kind of balding—pulls up alongside me in a Mercedes. He’s going, “Pull over! Pull over!”

BRUCE ELLAVSKY
:
Let me put it this way: You don’t walk into the porn industry off the street, okay? We needed somebody to vouch for us. Fortunately, we had a guy in Los Angeles—Ruby Gottesman—that we’d dealt with early on. If anybody got us an entrée into the porn industry, it was him.

RHONDA JO PETTY
:
We got off the freeway, and this guy says, “Come on,” and he’s got all this coke, and I’m going, “Oh, I don’t know about this….”

We go to my apartment and he’s got all this cocaine and we snort cocaine and we’re talking and his name was Ruby Gottesman. And he says, “Oh my God! You’re Rhonda Jo Petty. I sell your films!”

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
Ruby Gottesman was a funny guy. I liked him. You had two kinds of people in the pornography business: businessmen who just happened to be pornographers and used it as a vehicle to make money, and the ones who enjoyed it—sleazy idiots who relished using the women.

Ruby used women like the others did, but he was above the average street-level porn guy. He was like a go-between between the distributors and the mob people who would finance the movies.

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
Pat was like five-foot-five, a little, skinny guy. He looked like a gay guy. I never thought he was FBI.

DICK PHINNEY
:
I got feedback from my informants that Pat and Bruce were probably gay. Typically, people in the porn industry would be provided with a woman—if they wanted—and Pat and Bruce went out of their way to not have women. So that made them suspicious.

RHONDA JO PETTY
:
I’m still freaking out because of my dad, so I go, “Well, I don’t know what I’m going to do. My dad’s gonna kill me. I need to go hide.”

Ruby went and got me a place in Manhattan Beach. He became my sugar daddy and hid me out there for almost two years.

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
I never dreamed they were FBI, you know? They were wastin’ money and travellin’ too much. So after a while I sold them a lot of X-rated tapes.

RHONDA JO PETTY
:
Ruby was one of the top ten video pirates. I’d be flying all over the United States—to Hawaii—with him and all these films. Finally, I realized what he was doing—was illegal.

I didn’t know anything in the beginning, but as time went on, I started realizing that he was black-marketeering. But I was too fucked-up on coke. I didn’t really care—the coke was just flowing, and I was away from everything.

And Ruby was making so much money it was fucking ridiculous.

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
Rhonda Jo Petty was the Farrah Fawcett look-alike porn star. She looked a little bit like Farrah Fawcett—if you were drunk. She was busty, and she had that Farrah Fawcett hair.

One time I picked up Rhonda and took her over to where Pat and Bruce stayed, this hotel by the airport, the Marriott in Marina Del Rey. I took Rhonda there and says to her, “I never asked you a favor
before. Do me a favor—I have an idea that these guys are cops. See if you can find out?”

RHONDA JO PETTY
:
Ruby was paranoid—I figured he was on too much cocaine. So I went up to a hotel room to meet these two men. Ruby wanted me to do something to make sure they were who they said they were.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
We spent a lot of time with Ruby, hanging out, learning about the porn industry, how it worked, who some of the players were, getting the right names.

Ruby was just a real likable character—you know, kinda balding, cowboy boots. He was married, but he had his women on the side, and he was very proud of that.

You know how some people are funny, and you just like to hang out with them? Ruby was like that—and he introduced us to a lot of people. He even had one of the stars from one of his movies come to see us.

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
When we got to their hotel, Rhonda took each one of them into the room—separately. Bruce stayed maybe five minutes and Pat maybe three minutes.

She told me she blew them both. She said they came fast. I don’t know; I wasn’t in the room, but I know she was great on head. She gave great blow jobs, and she looked nice.

RHONDA JO PETTY
:
I just kinda asked them questions. Ruby wanted me to do something to make sure they were who they said they were. It had nothing to do with me having sex with them.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
Rhonda Jo Petty was hot. Oh yeah, it was, just,
nice
….

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
Rhonda came back with nuthin’. She said she don’t know if they were cops or not. She couldn’t find out anything.

So I says, “Did you see any guns?”

She says, “No.”

RHONDA JO PETTY
:
As far as I could tell, they were who they said they were. I don’t even know what they looked like. You know the only reason I remember it at all? Because I didn’t have to fuck ’em, ha, ha, ha!

RUBY GOTTESMAN
:
Rhonda was flighty. She didn’t give a shit. She was always chasing young boys. I’d come home, and she’d be doing a sixteen-year-old.

I says, “You do that again, and you’re out of here. I don’t want no sixteen-year-olds here—get me in trouble. They gotta be eighteen!”

RHONDA JO PETTY
:
My relationship with Ruby was—I kind of lived my own life, you know? I was totally hidden, and we had very little sex because he had a little dick and couldn’t get it up. Sorry, but he did!

And when you’re doing that much cocaine, you can’t have sex! He was too fucking coked out all the time. But it really wasn’t about sex. I think it was about having somebody to do his cocaine with because his wife drove him nuts. She was a real bitch—very demanding. She wanted this, and this, and that, and that—and he was killing himself to give it to her.

I think I was his getaway. He’d come by, do his coke, and relax.

BRUCE ELLAVSKY
:
Ruby took a liking to us, and the next thing we knew he was vouching for us in New York and other places—and arranging for us to go to these clandestine porn conventions.

They were secret meetings where the major players in the porn industry would meet in a particular hotel in a particular city once or twice a year.

Everyone in one place.

NEW ORLEANS/NEW YORK CITY
1977

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
Ruby Gottesman really helped us get to the next level. The New Orleans porn convention was the first big one Bruce and I went to, and we got in there through Ruby.

The porn people would follow on the heels of a legitimate publishing convention—they would come in for three or four days at the tail end. Of course, the hotel people never knew.

BILL KELLY
:
I would follow Pat and Bruce to the porno conventions and harass them, to give them additional credibility with the underworld. If I had the opportunity in a hallway or on a stairway—with other pornographers watching—I would deliberately bump ’em with a shoulder and try to knock them down.

I’d say, “You guys are from my hometown. I don’t like pornographers from Miami.”

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
We had talked to the bureau about needing girls for cover because we knew we would be offered some at the New Orleans convention if we didn’t have women with us.

The bureau just ignored it. Their suggestion was, “Well, why don’t you be homosexuals?”

So I posed the question, “What happens when they send a guy up to the room?”

Dead silence on the other end of the phone.

BRUCE ELLAVSKY
:
Pat and I were in the lobby when Ruby told us he wanted to introduce us to someone in the restaurant around the corner. That’s when we met Teddy Rothstein.

Teddy told us that he could supply Golde Coaste Specialties with hard-core eight-millimeter films, magazines, and videotape cassettes—and that he would like to introduce us to Andre D’Apice, a producer of eight-millimeter films.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
It was the first real inroad the bureau had ever made into organized crime control of the porn industry—our first real confirmation that organized crime players carved up the country for their porno business.

So immediately after the convention we flew to New York, where we had set up a meeting at Star Distributors on Lafayette Street. The elevator opened up into a huge area—a maze of offices and people milling around. It looked like a shipping warehouse. A lot of boxes and film.

Ruby Gottesman gave us a guided tour. He knew everybody, so we floated around with him, making conversation. Then we sat down with Teddy Rothstein, and he introduced us to Robert DiBernardo—DiBe—who looked more like a Wall Street broker than a mobster.

He wore dapper Italian designer suits and a Rolex watch. He looked dashing and debonair and had the air of being in charge.

BRUCE MOUW (FBI AGENT/GOTTI STRIKE FORCE)
:
Robert DiBernardo was a soldier in the Gambino family who was very active in labor racketeering and the construction trades—and a prolific moneymaker. Everybody knew he had Star Distributors—which was a multimillion-dollar porn company—and a big house on Long Island. He was one of the first wiseguys to drive a little Mercedes Benz convertible.

But the mob old-timers, for whatever reasons—out of their own sense of perverted morality—found pornography to be distasteful. They had no use for pornography or prostitution.

ROBERT DIBERNARDO (FBI WIRETAP)
:
Castellano uses me. He makes me look bad. He says, “Look at DiBe; he makes his money in pornography!”

Mr. Fucking Clean. Does it stop him from taking his cut? “Sorry, Paul, you don’t wanna touch those dollars—there’s pussy on them.” Ha! He’ll take ’em anyway.

He wants it both ways. Get paid; act clean. My ass.

BRUCE ELLAVSKY
:
DiBernardo was definitely the boss. When he was telling stories about his childhood you could hear a pin drop. Nobody was gonna cut him off—regardless of how they felt about the story—because everybody respected him or feared him.

Then DiBernardo asked me and Pat, “What type of pornography business do you have there?”

Pat and I told him it was a mail-order operation—basically eight-
millimeter films—but that we were thinking about getting into the videotape market.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
I was talking big numbers—said we’d buy ten thousand magazines that we could turn over in a day. Plus, I told him we operated out of the Cayman Islands, which enhanced our mail-order business. It showed how we could be moving such large quantities, that we weren’t just selling to a lot of little people in Miami—which also gave us credibility.

BRUCE ELLAVSKY
:
DiBernardo and Teddy Rothstein went into an office and had a closed-door meeting. Then Ruby Gottesman went into the office and had a meeting.

While I was waiting for DiBe, Andre D’Apice came up to me and told me that during the New Orleans convention, there was a lot of apprehension about our porn operation. He told me that Teddy Rothstein had done some checking into the background of Golde Coaste.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
We were told Teddy Rothstein flew from New Orleans to Tampa to talk to Paul Howard about us. And Paul Howard verified our story to Rothstein. I guess he did it to help me out because I was a good customer of his when we started MIPORN.

OPERATION AMORE REPORT
:
“PAUL HOWARD, aka Dilbert Eugene Craver. Subject worked for TED ROTHSTEIN and STAR DISTRIBUTORS for twenty years in New York City and Cleveland. Subject became ill in 1974 and was semiretired by ROBERT DIBERNARDO. DIBERNARDO and ROTHSTEIN ship subject pornographic films so Howard can earn an income in Florida by distributing to retail stores.”

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
I was concerned when I heard Teddy Rothstein checked us out with Paul Howard. All this was coming back to me through Ruby Gottesman, who was now my confidant. He had a lot of information about people being killed—bombings in Chicago, etc. Gottesman told us about a guy who got hit in the head because he hadn’t played ball with Mickey Zaffarano on some movies.

So we had all this hanging over our heads—if we said the wrong thing, if our cover was blown. We were in for some real problems. And we didn’t have any cover from the FBI, we didn’t have weapons; the only protection was being the pornographers we said we were.

So I was thankful that I had gone the long way in setting the undercover operation up, step-by-step-by-step.

BRUCE ELLAVSKY
:
I wasn’t in fear. I wasn’t paranoid. But sometimes, because of the people we were dealing with, I’d think, “Jeez, how the hell
did we pull this off?” When we went to a city, we couldn’t have the local FBI office surveilling us because they might blow our cover. If you’re worried about the danger on this kind of operation, then you really shouldn’t be doing it. I mean, we were pretty much out there on our own—but it’s a voluntary thing. Nobody was forcing us to do it. So you assume the risk and don’t really dwell on it.

PAT LIVINGSTON
:
Finally, DiBernardo says to me, “Rothstein and Andre D’Apice speak for me.”

So we were given the okay to deal with Star Distributors. Then, Andre D’Apice comes in, and we talk price. We talk about doing a large deal with large numbers, and Andre agrees to bring the product and the film over to our hotel later that afternoon.

On the way back to the hotel, Ruby says, “Look, you’ve got to be careful dealing with Rothstein and D’Apice. DiBernardo will have you hit in the head if you don’t deal with them right.”

So we meet with Andre D’Apice at the New York Hilton and put our deal together. And Andre says the same thing, “The deal’s good—you’re dealing with good people—but if you fuck us, there are people who’ll kill for DiBe.” That put everything in perspective.

Then he says, “So, are we going to Plato’s Retreat tonight? I can get us three whores….”