by Legs McNeil
BILL KELLY: This is a very large courtroom in a new Federal District Court in Memphis, and it sits right smack on the Mississippi River, okay?
So over on the side of the courtroom closest to the river are twelve defendants—all the Peraino gang and a couple of other guys and Harry Reems and eight lawyers. And one of these defendants was Joe the Whale, who weighed at least 350, if not 400, pounds. He took up two chairs.
On the other side of the courtroom was Larry Parrish and an FBI agent named James Donland, the case agent in Memphis, who did the best job I’ve ever seen done by a new FBI agent. There must have been four tons of meat on the defendants’ side—and 350 pounds on the government’s side. The courtroom was so weighted that I could almost see it starting to tilt and flip over, right into the river.
LARRY PARRISH: Even Harry Reems, who was subpoenaed, did not want to sit with those people. There would be the gang around the defendants’ table, and over there in the corner would be Harry Reems sitting on a bench. And the judge would say, “Mr. Streicher, you gotta get over here with the defendants! You can’t sit over there!”
TONY BILL: I did answer a lot of factual questions: “What does a producer do? What does a director do?” Then, at a certain point in the trial, Larry Parrish asked, “Who paid for you to be here today?”
I said, “I’m not being paid to be here today.”
He said, “Well, who paid your travel expenses?”
I said, “I did,” which he was kind of flummoxed by.
It was a curveball for him to discover that an expert witness he’d intended to portray as a mercenary had in fact not taken a dime. It was the first chink in his armor.
BILL KELLY: I talked to Harry Reems at that trial. He was as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof. He didn’t want to be associated with these people of mid-Mediterranean origin, him not being one of them, see?
I think he was looking at me to sort of shelter him from these people—and here I am trying to help put him in jail along with the rest of them.
TONY BILL: The next tack Larry Parrish took was a line of questioning about pornography—“What did I consider pornographic?”
I allowed as how I didn’t think there was probably any subject that couldn’t be treated with taste, with artistic expression, and that there was probably no subject that was off base when it came to artistic expression, in a movie or a painting or a poem or a novel or whatever. I couldn’t think of anything that was inherently pornographic.
BRUCE KRAMER (DEFENSE ATTORNEY): At the beginning of the trial the jury was fairly friendly to us. They would look at Harry, make eye contact with us—until the day we all got on the bus and went to a Memphis midtown theater to see a screening of Deep Throat.
After that, their demeanor changed. I mean, it’s one thing talking in the abstract about explicit motion pictures and another thing for these people to actually see it.
TONY BILL: Larry Parrish continued that line of questioning by asking, “What about bestiality?”
I said, “Well, one of the most famous images in the history of art is ‘The Rape of Leda by the Swan,’” and that stopped him.
To my great pleasure, when it was all finished, and I got down from the stand, the head of the ACLU turned to me and said, “You’ve turned the tide of this trial. That was brilliant. He should never have asked you that question.”
LARRY PARRISH: After the jury saw Harry Reems in all his glory on a huge screen—everybody just stared at him once they got back in the court room.
Harry Reems was an embarrassed bird. He was humiliated by that experience, you could tell. He never told me, “I was humiliated,” but he had this air of guilt about him, as if he knew he had done something wrong.
BRUCE KRAMER: Joa Fernandez, the cameraman on Deep Throat, took the stand, and Larry Parrish was very animated, very intense, as he led him through his direct examination.
Joa Fernandez was a very hip character. A dude, ha, ha, ha. So when Larry asked Mr. Fernandez to describe a group sex scene in the movie, Fernandez said, “Hey, man, there ain’t no group sex in Deep Throat.”
Larry was taken aback, and asked, “Mr. Fernandez, weren’t you the cameraman on this film?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you filmed all of the scenes?”
“Yes, sir.”
Then Larry starts describing the scenes in detail—almost frame by frame—and asking Joa if he remembers them. “Do you recall the scene where Mr. Reems is engaged in cunnilingus with so and so and at the same time so and so is engaged in fellatio with Mr. Reems?”
“Yeah, yeah. I remember that.”
Larry asks, “Well?”
And Joa Fernandez says, “Hey, man, that’s only three—that ain’t no group.”
LARRY PARRISH: I am probably an overly modest person, personally. But if you’re going to prosecute this stuff you have just got to steel yourself to it and just do it. And probably, sometimes, in trying to overcome that part of me, I would overdo it.
So now we’re at the end of the trial, and we have just seen the film, ha, ha, ha, and it’s time for me to make my final argument.
I said, “Now, I’m really not trying to personally offend you, and I’m not trying to offend myself, but let’s just take a five-minute segment of this film, and let me describe it to you, as you saw it from the screen….”
BRUCE KRAMER: When Larry Parrish was describing that scene, he was, in my opinion, absorbed in a morbid, pathological, salacious, lascivious, lustful description—because he got to the point where he was describing cum dripping off the woman’s lip.
I thought that was unnecessary.
LARRY PARRISH: I went through it—“Did you see him take his penis out and ejaculate all over Miss Lovelace? And did you see the semen run down out of her eyes into her mouth, and she licked it with her lips?”
After about three minutes of that, the jurors were filled with hatred, thinking, “You pervert, shut up.”
And then I just stopped and said, “Did you feel all those feelings running through your veins? Did you feel the feelings you were having toward me? That’s called prurient interest—what you were reacting to is that you were hearing me describe what any normal human being would say is an appeal to prurient interest. Now when the judge asks you to find whether or not this film appealed to prurient interest, think of how you felt when I just described that scene.
“There’s no way—there’s no way on earth that any of this material can be found nonobscene.”
BILL KELLY: Larry Parrish took every one of those twelve defendants to trial, with their eight high-powered lawyers, and he just beat them down and whacked them good—and every one of them got convicted.
LARRY PARRISH: The Perainos convicted themselves on the organized crime front just by their demeanor, their attitude, the way they talked to each other, and the way their lawyers spoke.
They were just obnoxious.
They were Yankees—bad Yankees. They were everything you see on TV. They’d get up and strut and preen and try to be smart alecks and irritate the judge and jury. I just gave them some rope and watched them hang themselves.
BILL KELLY: They didn’t get much in the way of sentences, though. The head of the operation, Anthony Peraino Sr., got convicted, but he decided he wasn’t going to jail—so he took off for Italy and stayed gone for about five years.
NEW YORK TIMES, MAY 1, 1977: EIGHT MEN SENTENCED IN DEEP THROAT CASE: “Fed. Dist. Judge Harry W. Wellford has sentenced eight men convicted in the Deep Throat obscenity trial to prison terms ranging from three months to one year and has imposed fines of up to $10,000. Harry Reems had his conviction overturned. Those sentenced are Michael Cherubino, Anthony Novello, Joseph and Louis Peraino, Carl Carter and Mario DeSalvo. Plymouth Distributors is fined $10,000.”
BILL KELLY: Bobby DeSalvo was the international distributor for Deep Throat. He thought he was getting shortchanged because all this money was coming in. But the Mafia is not a good place to go to collect mo
ney.
Bobby DeSalvo’s body was never found because he went to Italy to try to collect additional money from the Peraino family. We traced him as far as London and haven’t seen him since.
I imagine he’s fish food.
RUBY GOTTESMAN: It was my job to pick up Bobby DeSalvo when he came to Los Angeles and drive him around in the Mercedes. He came out every week from Florida. Nice guy. He gave me two-hundred-dollar tips and took me to lunch and dinner.
Then a week or two goes by, and there’s no Bobby.
So I go to Butchie, “Where’s Bobby?”
He says, “Forget about it.”
I says, “What do you mean, forget about it?”
He says, “He ain’t comin’ no more.”
I says, “Oh, yeah? What happened to him?”
He says, “I ain’t tellin’ ya. None of your business.”
I find out Bobby’s with the fish.
FRED LINCOLN: Butchie Peraino did nothing but make movies; that’s all he ever fucking wanted to do. He didn’t extort from people, he didn’t hit people, he didn’t hurt people—he made movies. That’s what he did, that’s what he always wanted to do, and that was his love.
BILL KELLY: On the second trial the government decided, “Well, we got our shots in,” and they dropped the charges against Harry Reems. That was Larry Parrish’s decision, originally, I think. But the government deliberately drew a lot of attention to that trial because they prosecuted an actor.
If they hadn’t prosecuted Harry Reems, I don’t think it would have been an important case—and it certainly wouldn’t have drawn all that heat from the directors and the actors and producers in Hollywood.
NEW YORK TIMES SUNDAY MAGAZINE, MARCH 6, 1977: PORNOGRAPHY ON TRIAL: “On December 8, Harry Reems and Alan Dershowitz were addressing the prestigious Harvard Law Forum, a law-school-sponsored series of lectures. They would be followed a week later by William Colby of the C.I.A. and had been preceded, some years back, by Fidel Castro. This was the kind of company that Harry Reems now kept.”
FRED LINCOLN: Harry Reems started to believe his own press. He was better than this, better than that. He was drinking, he was doing coke—I mean, he was drinking a lot.
C. J. LAING: Harry got another big film and was given a lot money by some producer to do promos and was staying in big hotels and going to Cannes. This was when I hooked up with him. You know, he’s in New York, staying at the Pierre.
Then Harry got an invitation to the Playboy mansion. When we went there, it was right after Dorothy Stratten was murdered. But Harry’s a little savvier now, so he’s working the angles of the distributors, and he’s hanging with Hef—and that I didn’t like. I didn’t like hanging at the Playboy mansion.
It was very intimidating for me. I felt sort of thrown to the wolves. I didn’t feel very protected as his girl. I felt like prey. And not very attractive prey, with all these blond androids around—all these rubbery, fantastic women. I just felt awkward.
FRED LINCOLN: Harry was living at that Malibu house, hanging out with Steve McQueen. I never went over there. I wouldn’t hang out with a guy, but if it was Ali MacGraw, I’d go for sure. But I wasn’t hanging out with guys; I never have. I mean, Butchie was an exception, but even Butchie and I didn’t hang out that much.
C. J. LAING: In Malibu, Harry was drinking vodka, and one day he put a gun to my head. We were on the deck of his house, and he said to me, “Suck my cock. Where’s the cunt? Suck my cock. Where’s the cunt?”
See, I always had a bottle of his sperm with me at all times, you know, so that I could reproduce our children at a moment’s notice. I wish I still had these little things. The Christmas gift he gave me—sperm.
FRED LINCOLN: Harry wasn’t a good actor. If he was, they would’ve given him a piece of the pornos. But he couldn’t carry them.
Harry wasn’t a great actor—but he was a great fucker.
Deep Cover
MIAMI/CAYMAN ISLANDS
1976–1977
WAYNE CLARK (METRO-DADE COUNTY POLICE DETECTIVE): We were investigating pornography in Florida for years at the Dade County Organized Crime Bureau, but we were only getting the guys that worked in the bookstores. We were arresting clerks and seizing some merchandise, but it was a lot of wasted time because we weren’t getting any of the distributors.
See, we wanted to prove that organized crime controlled the production and the distribution of pornography in the United States, and particularly in Dade County.
So we applied for a federal grant, and we were given federal monies to do an undercover operation. So that’s how we started this “MIPORN” thing. But it wasn’t called MIPORN yet; we called ours “Operation Amore.”
BILL KELLY: Wayne Clark and Al Bonanni made a lot of inroads. They were telling me how successful they had been, but they said, “This thing is just too big for Metro-Dade. We don’t have the money; we don’t have the man power. This is a federal case that should be worked nationally. Will you take it over?”
I said, “I’d love to, but I gotta get permission from headquarters.”
PHIL SMITH (FBI SPECIAL AGENT): Nobody was doing anything in pornography, except Bill Kelly, who was always running around trying to make obscenity cases. He’s good-hearted, but he did only local stuff.
One day I get a call from a sergeant at the Metro-Dade Police Department—Wayne Clark, who said, “I got this source, and he’s too big for me—you know, he’s talking about nationwide distribution and everything.”
So I brought Wayne Clark over to the office with his source. I talked to the informant, and he told me all the things he could do in Detroit, Cleveland, Dallas, New York, and Los Angeles. He was willing to cooperate because he had a problem; he was hung up. We had something good on him—some felonies.
I said, “Okay, let’s see what we can do.”
EDDIE FITZGERALD (MIAMI PORNOGRAPHER/INFORMANT; NAME CHANGED): Bonnani and Clark said what they wanted to do—go undercover and use my partner, Joey [name changed], and me to vouch for them, but I says to ’em, “Well, that’s great, but count me out.”
But to Joey, it was excitement—all expenses paid, you know? Joey had a bookstore. He was just a good-hearted slob, never made any money. And when I opened up the warehouse, he came to work for me.
So I said, “Joey, do whatever you want, all right? But count me out.”
And the cops said to me, “Look, the only thing we want from you is to keep your mouth shut.”
I said, “I’ll just say, ‘If you’re with Joey, you gotta be okay.’”
PHIL SMITH: So I proposed to set up an undercover operation using Wayne Clark’s sources because these guys had entrée all over the country. I wrote it up and sent it to the bureau and they approved it because that was a big deal then—everybody was looking for undercover cases.
EDDIE FITZGERALD: Teddy Gaswirth was a big pornographer for the Zappis in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, Teddy was cheatin’ on his wife, and during the relationship he had stolen some money and tried to put the blame on me. According to Teddy, I purchased this stuff from him and never paid him.
Willy Bittner contacted me and said, “Eddie, we know you didn’t do it. We know who did. But we need you out there to confront this individual because he is saying you did it.”
So I had to go to Vegas for a sit-down.
PHIL SMITH: Now, since I put the operation together, I gotta find someone to be our undercover guy. I had a guy on my squad by the name of Pat Livingston who had done a little undercover stuff in Detroit—and he was a pretty good bullshitter. Plus, he was the only guy I had with any experience. Like I said, I had limited resources. So I said, “Okay, we’ll use him.”
But I wasn’t sold on Pat Livingston.
EDDIE FITZGERALD: I jumped on a plane and went out to Vegas. Willy Bittner, Teddy, Nat “the Arab” Gamma, and a guy from Rhode Island, Kenny Guarino, were there—and those are just the guys I recognized. Ten people were there, having a meeting at a hotel.
Then, they call Teddy Gaswirth up. Well, when Teddy walks into the room and sees I’m there, his whole facial expression just changed, and he started crying.
Teddy finally admitted he was involved in gambling and involved with a woman, and he was just squandering the money. You know, living high off the hog.
I guess everybody figured they were gonna put a hit on him or something like that, but all they wanted was their money back. I guess Teddy was a good earner for them.
PAT LIVINGSTON (FBI UNDERCOVER AGENT): I first met Bruce Ellavsky when I was working undercover in Detroit. I just felt comfortable with Bruce from the get-go. We just really connected. We were both real staunch supporters of J. Edgar Hoover. Bruce was more conservative than I was, but he was an excellent agent, very good at what he did, and a great guy. So when I went to Miami and started working on MIPORN, I knew I wanted Bruce to come down and be the other agent. I knew him, and I’d worked with him; I could trust him. When you’re out there undercover, you got to protect each other. You have to know exactly what the other guy is thinking. I was comfortable that Bruce could do that.
So I called him and talked to him. He was having trouble with his wife, Pam, at the time. He was anxious to leave New York and come down to Miami—but he didn’t know if Pam was coming or not.
BILL KELLY: Pat Livingston and Bruce Ellavsky came here in August 1977, and my job was to train them both to be pornographers.
Well, I’d never done that before. I knew how to be a pornographer, but I’d never trained anybody. And these guys knew nothing about obscenity when they came down here. So, initially, I thought these guys couldn’t break into the porn industry. I just didn’t think they had enough experience.