by Legs McNeil
Chuck’s primary goal was to bring me and Hugh Hefner together sexually. He saw this as the beginning of a great palship. Chuck had this picture of Hefner and himself as arm in arm buddies, dividing up Playmates and Bunnies equally. Of course that never came down.
Hefner was into frolicking around, going from one girl to another. He carried a huge bottle of Johnson & Johnson’s baby oil with him, and he was rubbing everyone down with the oil. There were about twelve people in the Jacuzzi, and before long they were all coated with oil.
CHUCK TRAYNOR: Was Hefner into bestiality? No, I don’t think any more than anything else. I think it was just a fascination. Hefner put up with Linda, but I think he wanted to see her screw the dog. The idea was to at least see it once. He was more of a collector and a researcher about it. Hefner was like an expert in “Porno Trivial Pursuit.”
I liked Hefner, but I liked Sammy Davis Jr. more. Sammy was a knockdown guy. We partied, we orgied, we drank, smoked, and fucked from one end of the country to the other. Sammy was a real hell-raiser.
LINDA LOVELACE: Chuck wouldn’t take part in an orgy himself, not as a rule. He had sexual problems he didn’t want revealed. He was naked in the water, but if a girl came up to him and tried to get something started, there’d be no reaction.
But then this girl—who loved being the center of attention—and I got together, and the rest of the orgy goers stopped and formed a circle around us so that they could get a closer look at what was happening. It was like an old Fred Astaire movie where all the dancers suddenly stop and form a circle around Fred and Ginger.
CHUCK TRAYNOR: Were Hefner and Linda sexually involved? At parties probably, yeah. But not romantically sexually involved. I know Hefner separates sex and emotion like I do. Sure they balled, but as far as any more involvement than that, I doubt it. It was just an ego trip for Hef to have Linda Lovelace around.
LINDA LOVELACE: Then Chuck decided to demonstrate a new trick he had been practicing—putting his entire fist into me. One of the other men held my body out of the water, and then the girl took over for Chuck, doing the same thing with her fist. At this point everyone applauded, again, just like in an old Fred Astaire movie.
CHUCK TRAYNOR: As Linda became more of a commodity, I became more possessive of her. I can’t really say I was overly possessive because around Hefner’s house she did what she wanted to do—pretty much.
LINDA LOVELACE: The next time I went into the Jacuzzi, Hef was there. He was soft, gentle, and shy. But he was basically honest and happy. I decided I wanted to fuck him and give him some good head.
I was standing there in the Jacuzzi next to a girl, and Hef said, “Why don’t you two start?” The chick was great looking, so I didn’t have much of a problem getting into it. It was a good time. I went down on the chick, circling my tongue around her clit. The king began getting excited, just watching. The next thing I knew, I felt a tongue flicking away at my clit.
CHUCK TRAYNOR: Is Hef great in bed? I wouldn’t want to have to live up to the standards that are set, not by him, but for him. I think he’s probably like anybody else. Probably a little more introverted than anyone would believe. But his whole organization is totally opposite, so Hefner has to stand for his organization. He makes a big to-do about it. He always has a good-looking girl hanging on his arm—or two or three of them. But I think he’d just as soon be upstairs in the bedroom, watching television or something, than balling those three girls.
LINDA LOVELACE: Man, Hef really knew what he was doing. Just when I was beginning to go wild, I felt a hot cock forcing its way into my ass. My ass just happened to be up toward him, and I hope he dug it because I was having a delicious time. He gave me the best ass-fuck I’ve ever had. A good, steady humping that kept getting more and more frantic.
I could have sworn he giggled when he turned me over. Then he began to fuck me. A nice, deep, slow fuck, which had me gasping after fifteen minutes. The average guy gives you about twenty-five thrusts with his cock before he comes. But Hef was a master. We both came together, and it was tremendous.
But that was the only time we ever made it together.
MARILYN CHAMBERS: I’d gone to the Playboy mansion only once, and that’s when Linda Lovelace was around Hefner. She was putting on a revue for Las Vegas. She was going to be onstage at Caesar’s Palace—and that’s what I wanted! I was like, “Oh, why couldn’t that be me?!”
But I never did meet Linda. Never face-to-face.
Automated Vending
CLEVELAND
1973
BILL KELLY: Reuben Sturman was by far the most important pornographer in the history of the world. He started out in Cleveland, his hometown, selling comic books—a real nickel-and-dime operation. Then he found out girlie magazines were a hot item, so he went from them to soft-core porn, then to hard-core porn—movies and then videotapes.
In the early 1970s, Sturman was the richest and most famous, most powerful man in the entire world in porno.
Everybody kowtowed to Reuben Sturman.
LARRY FLYNT: I’ve known Reuben Sturman for over twenty-five years. I consider him one of my few friends. He was a gentleman, a very bright guy. You know, in the 1960s, Reuben had twelve hundred adult bookstores nationwide.
Yeah, he was on par with many of your typical franchise operations. Just like McDonald’s.
ROGER YOUNG (FBI SPECIAL AGENT): Reuben Sturman developed the idea of the peep show booths. And he developed another idea: say you and I are running a store—we’re independent. Well, he sells us his product, okay? And then he goes, “Every time you show that, every time you sell that, I get a piece. In the peep show booths or over the counter.”
So he starts making money that way—let’s say you have to put in enough quarters to pay five dollars to see the whole show, well, he wants a buck or two. Even if we bought them; even if we think we own them.
STEVE RUDNICK: When I was sixteen or seventeen, in 1973, I needed a job. The construction industry was in a deep recession. There were daytime bowling leagues springing up all over town, filled with electricians and carpenters. So my friend Stewart Liebowitz’s mother was a bookkeeper for a company, Automated Vending, that had an opening.
But you had to be eighteen. But I don’t think they were too big on checking my bonafides, so I got the job.
ROGER YOUNG: Reuben would sell the actual peep show booth through Automated Vending, but he still maintained a percentage of showing the film in the booth. He had another company, called Diversified, that did the distribution of the videotapes for the people who bought the booths.
And the collection of the quarters was done by another company.
STEVE RUDNICK: I asked Stewart what they needed help doing there, and he said, “Uh, we make peep show booths.”
I looked at him and asked, “You make what?”
He said, “You know, you put a token into the slot, and you watch a porn movie. We build them, load up trucks, and drive ’em all over the country and up to Canada, too.”
BILL KELLY: Reuben Sturman had at least six lieutenants whose principal jobs were to go around to his bookstores and make sure the money count was okay and to empty out the peep show machines.
I’ve seen these guys go into these dirty bookstores, which a lot of folks call “adult bookstores”—I call them porno garbage dumps—and they’d fill up two five-gallon buckets full of quarters on a regular basis.
Now I guarantee you, I can’t pick up a five-gallon bucket of quarters, and neither can you or anybody—short of somebody from the Miami Dolphins. And these guys would pick up two of them and walk out of the place after giving half the proceeds to the owner or manager of the store.
Big money.
STEVE RUDNICK: You’d put a token in a coin box, push a button, and then the circuit board would tell one of two or four projectors which one to turn on. They were eight-millimeter or Super Eight film projectors. They would get them by the carload from someplace in Taiwan or Japan. Very cheap, crappy projecto
rs.
My job was to take the brand new projectors, open up the case, take out a capacitor, and put in a resistor, then take out one dry chain and put in another. It was very, very mundane.
REUBEN STURMAN: With the peep booths, that’s when my thing took off. Money was coming in so fast I didn’t know what to do with it. Guys come in with bags of $50,000, $100,000. They would throw it on the desk. I say, “Thanks, Bill.” Away they go.
STEVE RUDNICK: I was working there after school until eight o’clock at night, and I’d say there were fifteen laborers. There were other people during the day that I didn’t know about. They had a couple people that went out on the road, setting up the stores, which were all prefab. They built the booths from scratch. They’d bring in truckloads of plywood and cheap wood-grain paneling, staple them together with a pneumatic stapler, and then cut them down. One would be a wall, and another one would be a door or something like that. Incredibly sloppy. It always killed me: In order to “dress it up,” they would buy mile after mile of cheap wooden corner molding, and I’d have to sit there and stain each piece.
They could take a clean shelf and make a store in three or four days, tops—forty-eight hours, if they worked around the clock.
ROGER YOUNG: Jimmy “The Weasel” Frattiano told me flat out that Reuben Sturman was owned by the Gambino family. That Robert DiBernardo, a Gambino associate, was the one controlling him. And Sturman became the wealthiest man in the world in pornography. I mean, the skim just from his peep show booths was probably two million a day.
LARRY FLYNT: Even if you go back to the 1960s, when Reuben Sturman and Mike Thevis and Robert “DiBe” DiBernardo and those guys pretty much carved up the country, it still was not a Mafia organization. Now, they have always attempted, at every opportunity that the government or the prosecutor gets, to insinuate that most pornography is produced by organized crime. I know all of the major players in this industry and absolutely none of them is connected to the Mafia.
ROGER YOUNG: In 1971, there was a meeting in Las Vegas of the Big Three. At that time it was Milton Luros, DiBe—Robert DiBernardo from Star Distributors in New York—and Mike Thevis from Peachtree in Atlanta. Those were the big pornographers in the United States—bigger than anybody else.
They met with their attorneys and divided up the United States—organized their distribution rights and who would sell what to who where, and what attorneys would defend what sections of the United States. Mike Thevis had the South/Southeast, DiBernardo had the Northeast, and Milton Luros had west of the Mississippi.
BILL KELLY: I got this from the case agent on Mike Thevis. He had an informant, and the informant and his wife had to be put into a secret location because Thevis was gonna murder him.
The case agent said that the informant told him, “Thevis personally murdered various people in the porn business and one innocent bystander. His associate, Roger Dean Underhill, and a nonassociated real estate agent, a salesman named Golanti, who was a friend of Underhill’s, were murdered by Thevis in the 1970s in Atlanta.”
Thevis got life for those murders on a federal civil rights violation. He was convicted in 1978.
The informant also said, “Thevis murdered a guy from Miami, one of our informants: Kenneth “Jap” Hanna, who was a porn dealer in Atlanta. Thevis shot him in the lungs and right between the eyes while Hanna was sitting across the desk from Thevis in his office.”
I remember that one—he took him out to the Atlanta airport and left him in the trunk of his car.
Thevis had been one of the top three pornographers in the United States until he went away. And then along came Reuben Sturman.
ROGER YOUNG: Robert DiBernardo had to take Sturman for a sit-down in front of Ettore Zappi, who was the national coordinator for the Gambino family for pornography nationwide. So, at one point, Sturman didn’t pay a bill; a guy complained to the Gambinos—a soldier—and Zappi says, “Bring Sturman in here.”
So DiBe brought him down to Fort Lauderdale. Sturman, I think, realized what was going on. And a day or two before the sit-down, Sturman pays the debt off—sends a check or makes a phone call.
And Zappi thanked him for paying off this debt—thanked him very much for helping him to pay that off. And that’s what it boiled down to: Sturman paying the debt.
But Ettore Zappi never really got out of porn. He was an old guy then, in his eighties. He died.
STEVE RUDNICK: In the work area, there were a couple of overhead garage doors, always locked, and the door to the rest of the building was also locked. Everybody came in through the outside overhead door, and before they would raise it you had to ring the buzzer three times—in a special way because they were afraid of getting raided. I don’t know if it was the cops or the FBI they were worried about.
ROGER YOUNG: Teddy Rothstein was there at Star Distributors. Teddy wasn’t making money until they brought DiBe into the Gambino family and Star Distributors. That’s my understanding.
Reuben really wasn’t brought in. Reuben grew up on his own and then was just taken over or, rather, “approached” by DiBe, who said, “I’m your man, and you will work with me.”
STEVE RUDNICK: There was one guy that worked in a hidden room. You could see a doorway going into a room that was hidden behind a huge wall with boxes, which I think were all empty. But if you got into that room, there was a hidden door, and then you’d go into another room—where he would edit the films.
And this guy would come out of there, like, once an hour for a cup of coffee, with red, puffy eyes and say, “I can’t look at another movie. They’re drivin’ me crazy!”
BILL KELLY: Reuben Sturman’s estimated income was over a million dollars a day. Whether that’s what he actually grossed or not, I don’t know. But he had over seven hundred stores around the country. I ran him outta Miami in the early 1970s. He had some operations down here, and I got them all indicted, and I guess they thought they better get outta here. So they left Miami, but his product was still widely available.
LARRY FLYNT: Reuben Sturman beat about forty pornography raps in a row. He was literally giving the government fits because they couldn’t get a conviction.
ROGER YOUNG: Reuben Sturman really never let his district managers, at his two hundred plus companies throughout the United States, know how close he was involved with the mob. I mean, they were all in fear that if they screwed up, the mob would come get them—because of Sturman’s contacts. But they didn’t really know how involved he really was. He never talked about that in front of anybody.
In fact, even when the whole state of Nevada was controlled for Reuben by Ralph Levine, every time something came up about organized crime, Ralph said to me, “Reuben would not let me get on the phone. He would not let me write letters. He would not let me do any of the paperwork that involved those people. Reuben said he’d take care of it. Reuben just said, ‘That’s none of your business, Ralph, I’ll handle this.’ With the Perainos, or the Gambinos, or the Columbos, or anybody.”
STEVE RUDNICK: The films weren’t on a continuous loop, which is what everyone thought. There was this electrical device; it would know when to stop and rewind and when to advance again.
So I’d have to test every projector. It was very, very easy to do—just had to make sure that the motor was running, that the thing advanced, that it ran, and that the lamp went on. Then they were ready to go. And they’d ship extra projectors in case one got broken in transit.
ROGER YOUNG: You see, Milton Luros and Reuben Sturman are relatives, and they became very, very good friends. Milton Luros was in the Los Angeles area and branching out—he was the first one that had divisions and branches in his pornography businesses.
Milton would have one business with a totally different name for the distribution, another business with a totally different name for publication, and another business with a totally separate name on the licenses and the paperwork. All of them were separate corporations. Reuben Sturman learned from him.
STEVE
RUDNICK: My parents knew who Reuben Sturman was. “Oh, he’s in the comic book business.” You know, “Nice Jewish boys don’t go into the porn business,” you know?
Unless of course they wanna make a zillion dollars. Then, of course, they jump into it.
Reuben’s reputation was that he was the largest porn magnate that wasn’t affiliated with the mob. That was his big selling point: “I’m not connected. This is my own thing.”
ROGER YOUNG: That’s one thing Reuben Sturman learned from DiBe and from the mob—to be the nicest guy in the world. DiBe was always giving Reuben’s secretary flowers. That’s where Sturman learned a lot of his tactics because he was probably the most diabolically evil person I think I’ve ever investigated. Up front, he’s one way, but behind the scenes, he was absolutely ruthless.
STEVE RUDNICK: I heard that a couple of film producers would show up from time to time with a limousine full of voluptuous young women—the stars of their recent productions—and they would service the foreman or the boss. But I never saw that; I just heard about it.
For the rest of us, I can’t remember if it was Tuesday night or Thursday, but nobody could work overtime because everybody had to go home and watch Kung Fu on television. Everything stopped for Kwi Chang Caine. Lights went off. “Everybody outta here, Kung Fu is on!”
It was so weird because here’s this little Zen light in the middle of all these hillbillies and bikers—the last people you’d think would be interested in that. They’d say, “Oh, I just like it when he beats these guys up,” you know?