by Legs McNeil
PAT LIVINGSTON: Bill Kelly brought out a double-dong dildo. I mean, I didn’t know what a double-dong dildo was. Do you know what a double-dong dildo is?
It’s about two feet long, and two girls use the same dildo at the same time. And Kelly’s explaining this to us, and I mean, you know, I didn’t know up from down.
BILL KELLY: I’d been fooling with these porno guys for fifteen years before MIPORN started, and I didn’t know an awful lot about the inner workings of the day-to-day business operations. I had never gone out and made a large-scale buy. I could never go undercover because everybody takes me for a c-o-p as soon as I stick my nose in the door—especially if I got a cigar, which I always do.
BRUCE ELLAVSKY (FBI UNDERCOVER AGENT/PAT LIVINGSTON’S MIPORN PARTNER): We were not like Bill Kelly. We were learning as we were going. And I think early on Kelly didn’t think we would be successful.
BILL KELLY: I had Pat and Bruce for, probably, two weeks. I gave them a minimum amount of training. I told them who their targets should be and what mistakes not to make. I said, “Don’t ask for kiddie porn because they’ll know you’re a cop. And don’t pay sixty dollars for a tape you can get wholesale for forty.”
PAT LIVINGSTON: Bill Kelly was just a hard-nosed agent. Straight by the book and as strict and gritty as you can be. He’s a tough guy. And he took pornography pretty seriously.
BILL KELLY: After a couple of weeks with me, Pat and Bruce went out and set themselves up in a warehouse near the airport as blue jeans salesmen. We bought a lot of blue jeans and stocked that place with them, but that was just the cover for them being pornographers.
PAT LIVINGSTON: We’d make a splash by walking into an organized crime hangout—a bar or restaurant—and rather than giving the waitress a hundred-dollar tip, we’d give her a pair of Jordache jeans. They’d go into the ladies’ room, try them on, and come back out in the jeans. It was fun, but it also it made the waitresses remember us because designer blue jeans were a real commodity then.
BRUCE ELLAVSKY: I became Bruce Wakerly and Pat became Pat Salamone. We wanted to call our company “Gold Coast Specialities,” but that was already taken. So we put an “e” on gold and an “e” on coast and became “Golde Coaste Specialties.” And every once in a while we even had to sell some blue jeans to people—at discount—so we lost a little money on that.
PAT LIVINGSTON: We tried to look like minor mob guys. You know, silk shirts with an open collar. Silk suits. Sharkskin shoes. I even had a sharkskin suit.
BRUCE ELLAVSKY: We also had an undercover apartment where Pat and I supposedly lived together—to save money, you know? We had it furnished, and we had clothes in there, and we tried to make it look lived-in.
PAT LIVINGSTON: Oh God, we had our first undercover car—I never had a new car in my life, much less a Cadillac, you know? We had a pink Cadillac for our undercover car—“the pimpmobile.”
BRUCE ELLAVSKY: After we set up the warehouse and the undercover apartment, we realized we had a problem: The porn people we were buying X-rated films from were eventually going to start wondering, “Who are these guys selling this merchandise to?”
BILL BROWN (ATTORNEY/FRIEND OF PAT LIVINGSTON AND BRUCE ELLAVSKY): When Pat called me during the summer of 1977, I hadn’t seen him for two-and-a-half or three years. His career in the FBI was skyrocketing as my career as a lawyer was plummeting.
I’d built a successful Miami law practice for six years, made a lot of money, had a Mercedes, had a house in Coral Gables, and everything was going well—until everything fell apart.
I went through a very difficult divorce—and ended up living on a houseboat in the Dinner Key Marina. I didn’t have a piece of clothing that wasn’t mildewed. I’m paying a mortgage on the house, rent on the boat—so my life was in real turmoil.
PAT LIVINGSTON: We couldn’t resell the porn we were buying to other people, so we decided to set up a business operation for laundering our product—a mail-order business in the Cayman Islands.
I’d tell them, “That way the Feds can’t get me. I’m outta the country. See, I take all my orders through the Cayman Islands—then I fill them stateside.”
BILL BROWN: I was hired to set up the corporation. So Pat, Bruce, and I fly down to the Cayman Islands, hail a cab—and on the way to the hotel Pat says to the driver, “Where are the girls? Take us to the girls!”
Pat gets the cabdriver’s name, gives him forty or fifty dollars, and says, “You’re our man while we’re here. Drop all your other work—you work for us now; we’ll pay you. And where are the girls?”
So the driver says, “All right, I’ll take you to the Cayman House, a grand old house, for the finest dinner.”
I was just dumbfounded. Because I’d have trouble saying to a cabdriver, “Where are the girls?” I mean, I have trouble giving a maître d’ twenty bucks to get a nice table.
But Pat knew how to do it.
I mean, maybe Pat would be remembered as an asshole, but he would be remembered—and that’s what it was all about.
BRUCE ELLAVSKY: Pat was the best at undercover. That was his forte. He was fantastic.
BILL BROWN: Our first night there, Pat and Bruce struck up a conversation with a fellow at the bar who smuggled stamps out of Sweden. Immediately, Pat and Bruce were passing themselves off as smugglers. Pat and Bruce talked to this Swedish guy at the bar, and then they set up a meeting the next morning to develop a new smuggling operation.
And I was dumbfounded, just dumbfounded, that people would fall for this. Pat and Bruce were selling themselves. I saw them do it in front of my eyes. Pat much more so than Bruce, but together they made a pretty good team.
BRUCE ELLAVSKY: Pat and I were able to communicate mentally and play off each other. He knew what I was thinking, and I knew what he was thinking.
BILL BROWN: I mean, we met girls at the hotel. The women were just dates; they weren’t hookers or anything. One of them worked at one of the hotels, giving snorkels to the tourists. Another worked at the airport restaurant. Just ordinary girls—nineteen-, twenty-, twenty-one-year-olds—gorgeous, chocolate-skinned beauties.
At two or three in the morning everybody went their separate ways. I ended up sleeping with mine; they ended up sleeping with theirs.
BETTY JO (AN EX-GIRLFRIEND OF PAT LIVINGSTON, NAME CHANGED): I wanted to get intimate with Pat sexually because he intrigued me so much. He seemed to have a certain amount of class. It wasn’t, “Hey, baby, let’s get high.” We just liked each other. I was used to European men, to a lot of flash and fun and men with money, and Pat had a taste for nice things. He seemed to be the kind of guy I could relate to.
BILL BROWN: That’s why Pat was able to pull off the operation. Nobody else I know in these undercover operations ever came as close as Pat. Frankly, Bruce would never have come as close because Bruce is just not that type.
BETTY JO: Bruce was as different from Pat as night and day. Bruce is a very realistic, down-to-earth person.
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.
Nobody Does It Better
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!