The Other Hollywood

by Legs McNeil

  A couple of hours later, we get a call from Big Tom, who says they have John in protective custody. Big Tom said they have John in a position where he’s going to give them some information, but that he won’t do it until he sees us first.

  SHARON HOLMES: Big Tom wanted to know if Dawn and I would meet John somewhere—that he was trying to cut a deal. That’s when we ended up at the Bonaventure Hotel.

  DAWN SCHILLER: There were cops all over the place at the hotel—they had them at checkpoints. When we arrived, there was someone talking into a walkie-talkie; they’d radio ahead, “They’re here.”

  Then we had an extra escort at the door—and then we went up in the elevator. There were two rooms with an adjoining door; they took us in one room and searched us.

  I’d smuggled a favorite bud of pot in to John—that he had saved in Sharon’s bathroom. They patted us down, then brought us into the other room. John was there, and he just gave us this big hug—each of us—and was so glad to have us there.

  TOM LANGE: At first, it was decided to stroke John Holmes. Well, it’s a little late for that—now it’s time to clamp down. Holmes is not thinking straight. He’s probably terrified; he may’ve been involved in the murders.

  You don’t stroke somebody like that—you hard-ass ’em. You don’t put them up in the VIP suite of the Bonaventure and Biltmore hotels and have Sharon and Dawn up there with him—ordering Johnny Walker Red and filet mignon day after day, giving him everything he wants.

  What are you gonna get outta somebody like that? Nothing. And not only that, but Lieutenant Ron Lewis told us we couldn’t interrogate Holmes. He was obviously getting it from somewhere, and we were livid—absolutely livid.

  DAWN SCHILLER: That first night we didn’t really talk about what was going on. We ordered food. John said, “You can order whatever you want.” So we ate and watched TV and relaxed. It felt safe, like being at home. It was a real comforting feeling after all that stress. It was healing.

  Then we all just went to bed and slept. There was only one California king-size bed. John lay in the middle and Sharon and I laid on either side, which was the first time that we ever did that. I knew he had his arm around me, and I’m pretty sure with Sharon as well. It was something that we all needed.

  Then the next morning he told us he needed to talk to us both. He went into the bathroom with Sharon first. They were in there for a while.

  SHARON HOLMES: I told John, “Even if this works out, I won’t go with you. I’ve lived with enough upheaval, and there’ll never be a life for us—because you can’t change.”

  He cried and begged and pleaded, but for him to be able to stand there and watch these people be slaughtered—I couldn’t live with that.

  I didn’t want to put up with screaming and nightmares—I didn’t want to have to relive that kind of experience. It was just the complete opposite to what my life was about.

  My life was about life—not about death and drugs and porno.

  DAWN SCHILLER: John told me he had information that the police wanted, but he said, “I’m not going to do it unless you and Sharon go with me into protective custody.”

  John said that Sharon had agreed to go into protective custody with him. He said, “This means we’re going to have to change our names; we’re not going to be able to contact our families. It’ll just be you and me and Sharon—and we’ll have the dogs, and there won’t be any drugs, and things will be like they were.”

  I said, “Yeah, I’ll do it.”

  There were tears. He was crying, and I was crying because this was definitely serious.

  This was a big life change.

  SHARON HOLMES: We were at the Bonaventure Hotel Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and then they moved us to the Biltmore. We were only at the Bilt more for twenty-four hours because they weren’t going to give John what he wanted in exchange for rolling over on Eddie Nash—witness protection. I guess they didn’t believe he had information.

  DAWN SCHILLER: John was going to give them this whole criminal organization, not just the murders—but he wasn’t going to go into it with me. John didn’t want me to know that kind of stuff. Even though he was abusive—at a fucking drug-crazed, dysfunctional level—I was also his precious little girl he had to protect, you know? Twisted, but that was our relationship.

  SHARON HOLMES: John was going to lay out the whole Mafia connection to the pornography industry for them. The money laundering in New York, Miami, and Chicago—he would bring back huge sums of cash. He was acting as a courier—as well as other things.

  John specifically talked to the district attorneys about arson. I know he talked about the Israeli/Lebanese Mafia connection with Eddie Nash, and I know he also had a connection to a Chicago family—a hitman who’d graduated to overseeing the porno connections here in Los Angeles. God knows what else he did.

  But I guess they didn’t believe John had anything.

  DAWN SCHILLER: John asked me what the police had asked me, and I said, “They wanted to know about the people that were murdered.”

  John said, “I went to go get my messages, and when I got back in the car, they put a gun to my head. I was forced to open the door for them,” meaning the door at the Wonderland Avenue house. Then he said, “And I had to watch”—and there was such horror on his face—that horrible scene flashed in his face—that I realized this was real.

  SHARON HOLMES: I guess the gist of the matter was, they would see about making the arrangements—as long as John testified against Eddie Nash. Whether John was just completely terrified for himself and his family, or just for his family, I don’t know.

  DAWN SCHILLER: After about three days of this—between the Bonaventure and the Biltmore—John comes in and says, “Well, that’s it.”

  I said, “What do you mean?”

  He said that they were letting us go.

  I said, “What happened to the protective custody?”

  And he said, “They don’t want that anymore.”

  It didn’t make sense to me, but the police were packing up and everybody was leaving. So they drove us back to Glendale. And they let us go.

  I mean, they weren’t holding us, so I thought, “Well, good. He’s out of jail, and we don’t have to disappear from our families and change our identities.”

  Then John said, “We’ve still got to worry about the people that want to kill me….” He said, “We’ve got to run. We have to run!”

  I assumed Sharon was going with us, but John told me that she was going to stay in Glendale and make sure that the animals were okay—and that she would meet us later.

  SHARON HOLMES: They drove Dawn and I home. John was with Detective Lange.

  TOM LANGE: John and I are in North Hollywood—over here off of Lankersham—and I was gonna drop him off. He had to pick up his car, which had been impounded. I looked at him, and I said, “Listen, there’s no tape recorders here. There’s nobody else here, John—there’s only you and me. Tell me, this son of a bitch Nash, did he do it?”

  Holmes says, “Yeah, Nash did it.”

  He said it with sincerity, and he looked me in the eye when he said it. At that point I knew everything that we thought was true. But it’s one thing to get him to say it to me—and it’s another to get him to testify.

  Then he said, “But you’re not gonna hear it from me.”

  DAWN SCHILLER: They let us go late in the afternoon but by the time we got back to Sharon’s it was evening. I dyed John’s hair black. Then he and I went out and spray-painted his Chevy Malibu—primer gray with a red top. It was really crappy. It was like so fucking bad. It had big spray-paint drips all over it.

  Later that night, we met Sharon at the grocery store parking lot. I don’t know if she had to go and get whatever little money she had out of the bank, but she gave it to us.

  SHARON HOLMES: When John asked if he could borrow money from me, I said, “I know you’re not borrowing it; you need it. I have twelve hundred dollars, and you can have it. Meet me a
t the Safeway.”

  When he met me, John asked if they could stay at my house, and I said, “No, but I have the keys to another place where I’ll be moving, and you can stay there.” So he and Dawn stayed there that night—in the attic. John said he had some things he had to do the next day—which, I found out later from Dawn, meant going directly to Eddie Nash’s.

  DAWN SCHILLER: John went to get money from Eddie Nash to leave town. He dropped me off at Dupars—the coffee shop down the road from Eddie’s on Ventura Boulevard—where I had waited plenty of times before. Word was that there were all these contracts out on us, and the police were probably going to come back after us.

  It’s “us” because I was hooked back up as his girlfriend—again.

  But before John went, he said, “I’m going to tell Eddie that I’ve got all this information written down and addressed to a bunch of different officials, and if I’m not back in an hour, then it’ll be mailed. So if he doesn’t let me leave, you know, everything I know will be out.”

  That’s when I realized that all the information John was going to tell the cops about Eddie was real.

  TOM LANGE: We definitely felt John Holmes was gonna get whacked because it was evident that he knew too much. But right after we released him, Holmes went straight back to Eddie Nash’s—so now, of course, you can’t trust him.

  DAWN SCHILLER: It was over an hour before John came back. I said, “What happened?”

  John said, “Let’s get out of here,” and he paid my tab, and we went outside. He said, “What time is it?”

  I told him it was evening; it was already night.

  John said, “I went up there, and Diles put a gun to the back of my head, and he made me get on my knees and beg for my life. And Eddie asked, ‘Why the fuck shouldn’t I blow your brains out right here? Why should I believe you? How do I know you didn’t already tell them everything?’”

  So John had to convince them that he hadn’t told the cops anything.

  TOM LANGE: John probably felt that he’d go up to Nash and say, “Hey, I didn’t tell ’em anything. They had me for days, and they have no idea what the hell they’re doing, and I didn’t tell ’em a damn thing, Eddie.”

  That’s probably why he went up there.

  DAWN SCHILLER: John played the bluff—he swore that he had someone waiting for him, that if he wasn’t back—and he was already late—he had a bunch of letters addressed to a bunch of different people, ready to go.

  I think a thousand dollars is what John was going to ask Eddie for.

  So Eddie ended up letting him go after begging for his life, and we were supposed to come back in an hour and check the mailbox. Immediately I said, “Fuck it. There’s a bomb. It’s a fucking booby trap! We’re going to go up, and they’re going to get us both! Let’s not go!”

  TOM LANGE: John Holmes tells me on the one hand that Eddie Nash was the killer, and then he goes up there for dope. This is the type of person you can’t trust—once they start talking out of both sides of their mouth.

  DAWN SCHILLER: So we went up to Eddie Nash’s. John pulled the car up—I got down underneath the blankets in the back—and John jumped out.

  I didn’t see him walking, but I heard his footsteps. I heard a mailbox open and close, and he came right back into the car, then we took off as fast as hell.

  I opened the envelope, and there was five hundred dollars. It was only half of what we asked for.

  SHARON HOLMES: John called and said, “We’re going to be leaving tonight. Meet me at the Safeway again.”

  So I met him there. He asked me again if I would go with him, and I said, “No, I won’t.” Then I went over to Dawn—because I thought he was going to beg and plead again—and said, “I’m sorry I turned my back on him.” I hugged her and said, “Take care of yourself, and take care of him the best you can.” Then I walked over to my car, watched them leave, and went home.

  That was the last I saw of John—for a while.

  DAWN SCHILLER: Then we took off. It was really bizarre because once we started getting out of the area we got in a better mood. We just played some music and drove through the desert.

  The sun was coming up the next morning—you know that dusky light? Well, a hawk flew in front of us, and we hit it and killed it. John flipped out. He said that from a hunter’s point of view—and John was a hunter—that this was a very bad omen. He got really pale about that; it was like a really bad sign.

  There was a long silence after that.

  Part 7:

  Getting Out

  1981–1984

  Method Acting

  LOUISVILLE/ST. MATTHEWS/MIAMI

  1981

  PAT LIVINGSTON: I was ready to strap on my Pat Salamone identity and roll anytime. I had my goatee and my Salamone look. And I was fairly famous then. Or at least well-known, no question about it. So I went in and talked with Joe Griffin and Mike Griffin—they were on the Louisville FBI organized crime squad, and they were aware of MIPORN. So we talked about me doing undercover work.

  GORDON MCNEIL: I got a call from the FBI supervisor in Louisville, asking me about using Pat Livingston in an undercover operation up there. I told him, “No way. Don’t use this guy in an undercover op. Absolutely, positively, do not use Pat in any undercover capacity.”

  PAT LIVINGSTON: They had a police chief down in that area—a bad guy that they’d been trying to get for a long time. He had some New York connects, and they thought I would be a good guy for that. So we talked about the possibility of an undercover operation. They had information that people had to pay this guy to open up a lot of businesses. I was told to go to this hick town in Kentucky, get to know him, and see what I could dig up.

  So that’s what I was assigned to; for the first three weeks I was off on this cop getting pictures and doing surveillance.

  VICKIE LIVINGSTON: On November 8, 1981 a local station telecast the MIPORN story on a fictional TV show called The New FBI. And Pat was riding this great high from it—just as he was going back undercover.

  PAT LIVINGSTON: There was no question that the show was based on the MIPORN story. The names weren’t the same, but the situations were. They even had Dick Phinney on the set advising them.

  Phinney told me they were specific about it—he told them about funny instances that happened along the way, and you could see them in the story.

  I was trying to figure out who was supposed to be Bruce and who was supposed to be me.

  VICKIE LIVINGSTON: Nobody ever mentions that TV show, but I think it’s important—to understand what happened next.

  PAT LIVINGSTON: On November 10, 1981, I pick up my youngest son, Greg, at day care. I got the bureau car, and I drive us down to the Bacon’s Department Store. Greg was sleeping, so I left him in the car. I was just knocking around Bacon’s, and I’m looking for lamps for the house. So I’m looking around; I got some clothes—picked up some jeans, I forget what else—and put the clothes in a bag. Then I went from that department to the lamp section and was stopped by a security guard.

  The security guard came up to me and said, “I need to talk to you.”

  HOPE JOHNSON (BACON’S SECURITY GUARD): He was dressed really nice. He had a three-piece suit on. He looked kind of foreign to me—I don’t know if it was the beard or the mustache—and I thought, “He’s gonna steal.”

  And then he went through the men’s department with this big old bag. He picked up a Christian Dior sweater and looked around at the salespeople, but he didn’t bother to look at me, probably because I looked like some schoolkid. Then he went to the back of the department, got over to where some jackets were, lowered the bag to the floor, shoved the sweater in there, picked the bag up—and when he picked that bag up, he looked up at me.

  Then he walked around an iron railing and put his hand on the door, getting ready to go out.

  PAT LIVINGSTON: I was in the back part of the men’s shop, near where the coats were. I couldn’t have got to the door. There was a metal railing betwee
n me and where the door was. You had to walk out by the cash register and out of the building. I wasn’t going away from the store. I was still in the store, shopping.

  HOPE JOHNSON: He just argued with me all the way up the escalator. I don’t like to make a scene, and he kept saying to me over and over, “I don’t understand! What is this all about?” He kept after me, over and over.

  I said, “We’ll talk about it when we get to the office.”

  But he kept at me so much—all the way up the escalator—that I went ahead and said, “It’s about the sweater you put in the bag.”

  We got to the top of the escalator on the third floor, and I said, “I want the bag.” Because I thought he would dump it on me. So I took the bag from him.

  PAT LIVINGSTON: When did I give her the bag? Probably somewhere between going up the escalator and going into the office.

  HOPE JOHNSON: When we got to the office, both of my bosses were present—Mr. Imhoff and Mr. Nally. They asked him, “Where did this bag come from?” He said he didn’t know. He was very excited, very jumpy, nervous.

  PAT LIVINGSTON: They asked, “Are these yours?”

  I said, “Yeah.”

  They asked, “Did you pay for them?”

  I said, “No.”

  They asked, “Why haven’t you?”

  I said, “Well, I haven’t paid for them yet. I’ve got the money here.”

  They said, “We’re gonna have to call the St. Matthews police.”

  I said, “Fine. Call them.”