The Other Hollywood

by Legs McNeil

  It used to be that the 976 numbers were the weather, the horoscope, dial-a-joke—you know, that kind of thing. And they had no method for distributing these numbers. They just picked names out of a hat.

  And, as luck would have it, we came away with one of them—they picked our publisher’s name. Drake or Crescent. I don’t know which name they were using in those days.

  SHARON MITCHELL: All I had to do was hide a little briefcase of coke in my apartment and let some guy come pick it up in two weeks, and somebody would give me an ounce of coke. I didn’t have to fuck them. They just told me not to get into it.

  They were heavy-duty Colombian guys, you know? And I just felt completely complete whenever I did that stuff.

  And then I lost that connection, probably because I did something inappropriate. I really don’t remember—but I’m sure it was something inappropriate.

  GLORIA LEONARD: Phone sex was a huge success. There was one cartoon done by Rigby in the New York Post after it turned out that the Pentagon had made seven thousand dollars’ worth of calls in one day.

  And so they started putting blocks, you know, on outgoing calls. ABC was one company that ran up a huge bill.

  FRED LINCOLN: Tiffany bought, like, three grams once. She cooked it up. She was lucky she got two hits outta that. I said, “What the hell is that?”

  Nobody knew what the hell they were getting. No, it just swept—not only New York—but also the whole country. California had a lot. Jesus, directors, producers, everybody.

  GLORIA LEONARD: After phone sex became so successful, there were attempts to stop it by lots of religious right and political right-wing groups that said this was inappropriate. I mean, I was on every talk show you could think of. Oprah, Maury, Larry, and Geraldo. There’s hardly a talk show I haven’t done. I was basically saying that this is a matter of choice, if you want to call the number or not.

  “Well, what if kids listen to it?” So, what are they going to hear? A girl moaning and groaning and enjoying herself? I mean, better they should hear that than some of the other horrors that are going on. I was just trying to shoot holes in the stupid hypocrisy of it all.

  SHARON MITCHELL: Then I was doing other forms of coke—but I couldn’t deal it because I was doing too much of it.

  GLORIA LEONARD: We fought for a lot of years. Laurence Tribe was High Society’s counsel of record. He’s a professor of law at Harvard with Alan Dershowitz. He made the case for us in the Supreme Court—and won!

  FRED LINCOLN: After we left Plato’s, Tiffany stopped doing coke. Tiffany and I never had a freebase problem until then. Never had a cocaine problem before that. I used to buy a gram of cocaine, and it would last us two weeks. I could leave it on the table, and she would never even touch it.

  SHARON MITCHELL: I had a lot of bad episodes. I mean with guys with guns. I used to get high with this lonely guy, an eccentric crazy guy named Joey. He dealt Uzis. He was Greek.

  FRED LINCOLN: So Tiffany stopped freebasing. Six months went by; she was dancing, she was doing movies, and I thought, “Well, if she stopped, I guess she didn’t really have a problem.”

  I made a mistake and bought her some coke one night. It was the beginning of the end because we had stopped. So I blame myself for that.

  GLORIA LEONARD: High Society is the pioneer of phone sex. It was my idea. And I never realized a single dime off it.

  SHARON MITCHELL: Joey used to build these incredible pipes and smoke from them. We’d sit around and smoke and talk. Every once in a while he’d just take out an Uzi and shoot holes in the walls—probably shot some of the neighbors.

  He was crazy. I used to, like, take another shot of coke and pretend it didn’t happen, you know?

  FRED LINCOLN: I had said to Tiffany, “We can’t do this. I can’t do this shit. You’re ruining my life. We don’t eat. We don’t go out. The only people we hang out with are people who do this shit.”

  I said, “I want nothing more to do with this coke thing.”

  SHARON MITCHELL: I moved to Thirteenth Street, and I was hanging out with some well-known rock and roll people. They were getting really high downstairs in this town house, and I was upstairs. So I said, “I want some of that.”

  The dealer was like, “No. No, no.”

  So I went downstairs, whining, “Give me some, man!” And they said no because they liked me. Everybody liked me. They thought they would protect me as long as possible. And they didn’t want to give me any of their dope, you know. So they gave me this cotton shot.

  And I was like, “Oh, wow!”

  FRED LINCOLN: There was this guy from New York who owned some escort services, and he was really after Tiffany. He used to give her all the shit she wanted. He used to make Tiffany’s mouth water—for smoke.

  He got all the girls that worked for him strung out. He had this girl Harley, who used to go and get girls for him. I’ve got to admit, he was a pretty shrewd businessman. He even sent his girlfriend after me!

  SHARON MITCHELL: I went, “Oh! Oh, man!” That was just, like, such peace. It was just peace and solace. And I had control. I had control. I felt like I’d been waiting my whole fucking life for this shot.

  FRED LINCOLN: Why didn’t I have the guy who was giving Tiffany shit whacked? ’Cause I’m not like that. I’m a nice man. Bad karma.

  I figured it was my fault. I thought about it for days, and I figured out I’d have to get every drug dealer—anybody who ever gave the stuff to her—and that would include me.

  SHARON MITCHELL: I probably instantly got a habit. I did good stuff—I had a lot of money. I didn’t even know I had a habit, not really. I always had stuff. I made sure I was always in the right place to be around people that had stuff. I had huge tracks. I would go to work, and everybody in the business knew I had a habit.

  But I performed really well. I did what I needed to do. I believe heroin made me function. Heroin and coke together made me function really well for decades. I was able to get things done. I was able to come—make myself come on camera—so it helped me.

  FRED LINCOLN: Tiffany knew I was in town; she called me. I knew the people she got stuff from. It was pretty sad. She was goin’ out to cop as soon as I gave her the money.

  She didn’t wanna go to a detox. She liked her life. She was runnin’ from the cops. She had broken parole. The federal marshals were coming for her.

  SHARON MITCHELL: Did I shoot up on the set? Yeah. Oh, sure. Everybody knew. I didn’t hide it. If you hired me, I had to know where the nearest methadone clinic was ahead of time, so I could transfer my dose.

  I never hid the fact that I was a drug user. And nobody seemed to mind. They were like, “Okay, that’s Mitch, and that’s what comes along with her.”

  FRED LINCOLN: I realized it was my fault—bringing people to the house, buyin’ the stuff and doin’ it. It wasn’t even Tiffany’s. If I had never said that one day, “Let’s do this,” I don’t even know if it would’ve happened because she would never go and do anything without me.

  Stayin’ Alive

  MIAMI

  1978

  BILL BROWN: It was June 21, 1978. I’d just come back to my office, and there’s a message, “Call Bruce. Emergency.”

  I called Bruce, and he said, “Pat’s been arrested.”

  PAT LIVINGSTON: I meet Andre D’Apice at the Pancake House in North Miami Beach. I pick him up in the pink Cadillac—the pimpmobile—and we’re gonna do one of our porn deals.

  So Andre’s got a box of, maybe, twenty-four movies he brought down as samples, and he throws the box into the trunk of my car, and we jump in and start driving down One Hundred Sixty-third Street. That’s when we get pulled over by the police.

  Fine. No problem. I get outta the car and, you know, give them my license. Fine. But then the cop says, “Come on back here. You have to open the trunk of your car.”

  I said, “I don’t think I’m gonna do that.”

  AL BONNANI (METRO-DADE POLICE DETECTIVE): Our surveillance unit in the O
CB [Organized Crime Bureau] was following Frank Cochiaro—Big Frank from the DeCavalcante crime family in New Jersey—and Livingston showed up with Andre D’Apice. They sat down, talking deal, and then they went to the trunk of the car. Our surveillance men made a determination—and they moved in.

  BRUCE ELLAVSKY [FBI WIRETAP]: “Did you hear what happened to Pat? He got busted for possession of pornography. Yeah, it was a screwed up thing, man. They were following somebody—Frank Cochiaro—who was with Andre….”

  PAT LIVINGSTON: Little did I know that Andre was being followed by the Metro-Dade Police. It turned out that, besides doing our porn deal, Andre was in Fort Lauderdale to do an alleged drug deal with Frank Cochiaro—prior to meeting with me. That’s why the Metro-Dade cops were following him.

  AL BONANNI: I knew Pat Livingston was undercover as Pat Salomone and so did my bosses, but that was it. Only three or four people knew that we flipped the informant and had given him to Livingston—and no one knew we had turned our investigation over to Livingston and the FBI. So, of course, no one in OCB surveillance knew.

  BRUCE ELLAVSKY [FBI WIRETAP]: “So the cop starts asking Pat all kinds of questions, you know, let me see your registration; this and that. But Pat hadn’t done anything wrong—nothing. Then another cop shows up and says, “This car might be stolen.” Pat says, ‘It’s not a stolen car; it’s a leased car. Here’s the lease papers—call the guy.’

  “So the cops go back to their car for a while; then they go back over to Pat and say, ‘Get your hands on the roof.’”

  “They put the cuffs on him. And the other cop goes into Pat’s car, takes the keys out of the ignition, and opens the trunk. There’s a box in there, all sealed up. The cop cuts it open and grabs the stuff. But it was soft-core stuff—you know, bondage, eight-millimeter films.

  “Still, they threw Pat and Andre in jail for about six hours.”

  BILL BROWN: This was really a disaster. Pat and Bruce had put a year into establishing their credibility—and now it’s all going down the tubes because Pat’s been arrested on a traffic violation.

  AL BONANNI: Our guys thought it was a coke deal going down, but then the trunk was opened and they saw obscenity. So they took them to Station Six and called me. I went down, and there was Livingston with his little goatee. I told the cops, “You’ve got a problem here. You just arrested somebody you shouldn’t have.”

  BILL BROWN: When Bruce called to tell me Pat had been arrested, he was jumpy and nervous—and if you know Bruce, he doesn’t get jumpy and nervous. Then he told me Andre had been arrested with Pat.

  Andre D’Apice is bad news—New York, Star Distributors, Robert DiBernardo. Andre is the number three man in this organization.

  Andre D’Apice made my blood run cold. I was afraid of him.

  So I said, “Okay, I’ll get them out. What’s the bond?”

  Bruce said, “A thousand dollars.”

  Andre and Pat were being held in the North Miami Substation, so I called the bondman—and we drove up there to bail them out.

  PAT LIVINGSTON: When they took us to jail, they started asking us questions, you know, “What’s your occupation?”

  I said, “Well, I’m self-employed….”

  I was talking bullshit, but I carried a little notebook in my back pocket—and in it was a list of names and numbers of organized crime guys, names of porn contacts, names of informants. So they got that and thought they really had something.

  BILL BROWN: Pat and Andre were arrested around noon. I got the call at three and drove up there at about three-thirty to bail them out.

  Pat came out, snapping fingers—you know, real cool, “Hey, what’s happening?” Pat’s just rolling with it. He’s feeling good.

  I’m nervous.

  Then Andre walks out. Andre is a mean motherfucker.

  So we start talking, and Andre’s real grim because—I found this out later—he’d been told not to deal with Pat and Bruce because they were on the watch list. They were suspected of being FBI.

  So Andre thinks that this is the bust—and that Pat and Bruce have set him up.

  BILL KELLY: Andre was the muscle; he was the scare guy. If Robert DiBernardo ever wanted to intimidate anybody, he’d send Andre. And, of course, DiBernardo had Don Carlo Gambino and Paul Castellano behind him. So Andre was dangerous.

  PAT LIVINGSTON: Andre thought I might be an informant. It was like, “Why did we get stopped? Why were they following us?”

  Andre knew it wasn’t Frank Cochiaro. So if it wasn’t him, he had to think, “Maybe it’s this other guy, Pat Salamone.”

  So, oh God, yeah—I had to go through a dance to convince Andre that I wasn’t an informant. I was saying, “What the hell is goin’ on here? Why’d they arrest us? They’re not lookin’ at me! Are they lookin’ at you? Have you done any drug deals? I haven’t done any drug deals!”

  We both didn’t know until afterward. We had no clue.

  BILL BROWN: Andre kept saying to me, “All the stuff we had in the car was soft-core—none of it was hard-core….”

  And I’m talking like a lawyer, “Well, Andre, the basis for obscenity is community standards, so you never know what might be considered obscene and against the law.”

  But Andre keeps saying, “But it was all soft.…”

  And I was uncomfortable because I’m representing Pat, and I don’t like being in a quasi-legal capacity for Andre.

  Then Andre’s lawyer from New York calls me, an attorney by the name of Joel Steinberg, and now I’ve got to lie to him—give him a line of bullshit, which I didn’t like at all.

  JOEL STEINBERG (CONVICTED OF MANSLAUGHTER IN DEATH OF HIS SIX-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, LISA; EX-HUSBAND OF BATTERED WIFE HEDDA NUSSBAUM): Bill Brown didn’t disclose that he was FBI. But Brown became friendly with me, and when I went down to Florida I hung out with him. He was appreciative of my legal knowledge because, you know, I was the “New York lawyer.”

  BILL BROWN: I knew if Andre D’Apice got convicted, I could envision Joel Steinberg standing up before a bar association trial for malpractice—saying, “This lawyer, Bill Brown, was telling me things about the case that were simply not true, and I represented my client based on those misrepresentations. Andre was convicted and went to jail based on those lies.”

  PAT LIVINGSTON: Joel Steinberg was just your typical sleazy lawyer. And he’s telling Bill Brown, “Lemme get up and say something. I gotta look good for Mr. D’Apice here. Lemme get up there….” He didn’t do anything.

  JOEL STEINBERG: Basically, I came into the case immediately after Andre D’Apice was arrested. What happened was that they drove up in their pink Cadillac convertible to the airport, took delivery of this brown paper-wrapped package—which I think had four canisters of video in it—thinking it was drugs.

  But they reviewed the film—and you can’t do that. It’s a first amendment violation, search and seizure. A first amendment claim, all of which was over Bill Brown’s head because I realized in a minute he wasn’t a criminal lawyer.

  BILL BROWN: Joel Steinberg suffered the problems of any lawyer coming from out of town—or coming in on a case late. He’s lost control; he’s got to justify his existence, so he’s saying, “Let’s ask for a jury trial….”

  But my game plan was to get the prosecutor to drop the case. Because once they swore in witnesses it was all over for Pat because he had already received orders from high up in the FBI: “Do not lie under oath.”

  They said, “If you have to take the oath, that’s the end of it—we’re throwing in the towel—because the first question is: ‘State your name.’”

  PAT LIVINGSTON: After the arrest I went to the Bridge Restaurant to meet Andre. The Bridge Restaurant was one of three or four places that were hangouts for wiseguys. So whenever we went to those places, we made a big splash as Salamone and Wakerly.

  We threw a lot of money around at the Bridge in particular and got to know the owner and the chef well. When we’d come in for dinner, the owner would take us
back in the kitchen, you know, “Hey, what’s the special tonight?”

  So that night I go to meet Andre—I was there by myself—I go into the kitchen, and there’s two guys with guns waiting to take me off into a car. I didn’t know them, okay?

  We drive out on Western to Fort Lauderdale, then further west out onto a sandy road. Then we get out of the car. They open the trunk, hand me a shovel, and say, “Start digging.”

  BILL BROWN: Fortunately, the arrest didn’t make any sense. They got Pat on an expired tag. Pat didn’t own the car. So it was a bad arrest.

  PAT LIVINGSTON: I started digging a hole. The two guys are saying, “Look, we know you’re a snitch. We know that you know that there’s a problem here. So you might as well tell us right now….” They were claiming I was an informant.

  BILL BROWN: So my argument was that the officer had made an illegal arrest, and I could prove it. And once the initial arrest is improper, then anything that flows from that is fruit from the poisoned tree. In this case it was those two cartons of porn films in the trunk of the car. If you can’t introduce the films at trial, you have no evidence—you might as well drop the case.

  PAT LIVINGSTON: They were saying, “Who are you working with? The FBI? Broward County? Dade County?”

  I’m getting down to about my ankles, and I can’t say, “I’m a cop.” I’d be dead then. My only chance was to say, “Look, you can kill me, but you’re going to die because you’ve made a big mistake here.”