by Legs McNeil
GINGER LYNN: Not long after I had amnesia before the grand jury, the feds told me they were investigating me for tax evasion. So they kept their word—if I didn’t help them, they would make my life difficult.
Well, I had always paid my taxes, so I wasn’t worried.
TOM BYRON: Ginger’s tax trouble started the same time mine did. First of all, her lawyer fucking put her on the stand. I never went to trial; I fucking pled out, you know?
JOHN WATERS: Suddenly all the studios want to see what I want to do. And all of them want to let me make Cry-Baby, right? So Imagine Films did Cry-Baby, with Brian Grazer producing. I told him I wanted to use Traci Lords, and he said, “Fine.”
If I’d been any other director at Universal, they probably wouldn’t have let me use Traci.
GINGER LYNN: I’d paid my taxes, so they spent five years—and I heard one man was paid a hundred thousand dollars per year—to watch every movie I’d ever made, to look at every layout, and read every interview. In those days, it wasn’t mandatory that companies send 1099 tax forms to employees; they could send the records to the government. Most companies did; a few didn’t. I ended up going to trial over two thousand and eighty-seven dollars and four cents—and they didn’t want me to pay.
TOM BYRON: Ginger went on the stand and said that the reason she didn’t keep her fucking files straight was because she was on coke all the time. And, “Oh, I’m the poor porn victim.” Consequently she was found guilty and was subjected to the mandatory daily drug testing. But for her sentencing she hired my lawyer. She did thirty days’ probation, and then she had to go to rehab. But she ended up going to jail because she came up dirty on the drug test.
GINGER LYNN: I was put on probation, and then some things happened—it was directly related to the entire fiasco, mess, charade—whatever the hell you wanna call it.
I ended up spending four months and seventeen days in federal prison. How was it? I have a lot more character now, ha, ha, ha—you thought I could lick pussy good before? You should’ve seen me after I got out of prison!
I was in with murderers and rapists and weapons dealers and drug dealers, you know? Two girls got knocked up while I was in there. I was the only other white girl there. I was fortunate enough to have several women who I did favors for, who took care of me and protected me. You know, you learn to assume the position very quickly. I was not raped. I was not injured.
But I saw a girl—who was a snitch—taken to a room by several girls; she was sodomized with a toilet brush, and one of her eyes was put out.
It was an experience I wouldn’t wanna go through again.
JOHN WATERS: Traci read for me a couple times. She came in the first time looking great. She had on—very smart—no makeup, a pair of jeans, and a T-shirt. Traci looks mighty good in a T-shirt. But she’s very quiet and very shy, the opposite of a porno star.
DAVE FRIEDMAN: I said to the attorney for the Adult Film Association, “We’ve got to strike back. This little broad [Traci Lords] fooled a lot of people. People are in real serious trouble now. How did she get a California driver’s license? How did she get a passport using this phony ID? She is capable of a misdemeanor and a felony—using phony ID to get a passport and a license.”
And the lawyer says, “Oh, well, we don’t wanna turn her against us.”
I said, “How much more damage can she do?”
Against my better judgment, I didn’t go on the CBS News and say it. The lawyer talked me out of it.
RUBY GOTTESMAN: Now I stop sellin’ Traci’s movies; all the movies are comin’ back from my customers. I’m gettin’ back a couple thousand of her movies, right? I’m givin’ ’em back to the manufacturers. And I had maybe a hundred left that I couldn’t give back.
STEVE ORENSTEIN (RUBY GOTTESMAN’S PARTNER): I didn’t really know Ruby Gottesman until he offered me a job. Jeff Levine, who I worked with at CPLC, went out on his own and was doing business with Ruby. Jeff called me and said, “Ruby’s looking for someone to run his warehouse at X-Citement Video. I think you’d be good; if you’re interested, give him a call.” Ruby was running his company mostly out of his house; he wanted someone to run the warehouse and take over some of the buying—things like that.
RUBY GOTTESMAN: One day this Japanese guy comes in—his name was Steve Suzuki, like the motorcycle. Nice American and everything. He says, “You got any, uh, Traci Lords movies?”
I says, “I got ’em, but I can’t sell ’em to you. It’s against the law.”
He says, “Yeah, but I’m sending them to Hawaii—nobody’ll know over there. Then they’ll take ’em to Japan.”
STEVE ORENSTEIN: When I got the phone call about Traci, I dunno, my reaction was probably just that we had to deal with it, whatever that meant—make a decision about what to do with the stuff because as innocent as it was at the time, we really didn’t know what to do with it. The guys in Texas would return them, and the manufacturers wouldn’t take them back.
So we’d say, “Well, put ’em upstairs with the defectives.” And then along comes this guy, who says whatever he says to Ruby and convinces Ruby to sell them to him.
Remember, this was self-censorship. Nothing was coming down at this point, and everybody was pulling it from the shelves everywhere. And it wasn’t some “taboo” product. It was normal product that was being sold up until yesterday.
RUBY GOTTESMAN: So I take Steve Suzuki upstairs, and I sell him a hundred movies, right? For cash. Then what happens is, he says nothing and leaves.
STEVE ORENSTEIN: Steve Suzuki was actually a customer for a year or two—undercover for the LAPD. And I guess when the Traci Lords thing came down, he was in a joint investigation with the FBI. And since he was already a customer, he just started asking for all these things everywhere he did business.
RUBY GOTTESMAN: Then I get the call where Suzuki says, “Yeah, I’ll be there on Friday—just try to have as many Traci Lords movies as you can. I’ll take them all.”
And I hang up the phone, and I says, “This guy’s a cop.”
STEVE ORENSTEIN: I mean, I dealt with Steve Suzuki. That’s why they indicted me, too. At one point Ruby asked me to go upstairs and help Steve, and I said no. Then Ruby went up there, and I guess I just thought, “I’m being out of line. I guess I’ll go and do my job.” Whatever. I don’t know. It was like, “I guess I should go do it.”
RUBY GOTTESMAN: So I get rid of all the Traci Lords movies. But, sure enough, they come on Friday and bust me. I was drivin’ around, and I got a phone call, and a guy told me, “There’s twenty FBI agents at the Denny’s on the corner.”
So I pulled in, and there’s the FBI agents, lots of LAPD, and they’re all over the place like I was the most wanted, right? They put me in handcuffs, and some guy comes over and says, “You know, Ruby, you’re in big trouble.”
STEVE ORENSTEIN: I wasn’t even in the place when the cops showed up, so I don’t know what they did. I got a call after they were in there, and I called the attorney, who said, “Don’t go in. It’s Friday—and they like to arrest everyone on Friday.”
At this point they had already arrested Ruby, and that’s really who they wanted anyway. So I just went to the office and turned myself in. Again, it’s one of those usual things. They’re surprisingly all nice and everything, asking questions about the movies and the girls and that sort of thing.
DAVE FRIEDMAN: When Ruby got involved with the Traci Lords thing, of course I took his side on it. Even though Ruby’s a guy I don’t think too much of.
STEVE ORENSTEIN: Part of my plea bargain was that I was supposed to testify against Ruby. But I was never called as a witness.
LOS ANGELES TIMES, JUNE 16, 1989: LORDS VIDEO AGENT CONVICTED OF CHILD PORNO CHARGES: “Holding that ‘the law is designed to protect children until they are adults,’ a federal judge Thursday convicted Van Nuys video distributor Rubin Gottesman of three child pornography charges stemming from the distribution of a trio of films in which teenage porn queen Traci Lords app
eared.”
GINGER LYNN: Was I thinking about Traci while I was in prison? Not so much. I tried to keep a very positive attitude and surround myself with my friends, and I did that by writing a lot of letters. And you can make two phone calls a day. I called my friends, my family, my attorney. At one point, I called the Wall Street Journal. Some things happened that were really ugly, and between Hard Copy and the Wall Street Journal I was out quicker than I thought I would be.
Everybody wanted to know, Why? You know, I’m a little porn star. I wasn’t running the industry. I’m not some Mafia wife. I just fucked on film. I felt like the government’s sacrificial lamb.
BILL MARGOLD: What I think saved us in the long run was that, lo and behold, Penthouse discovered that they’d shot Traci under the false identification, and Penthouse then pulled out the other piece of identification that Traci had used—a passport, which implicated the federal government. I don’t think the government wanted to be implicated in child pornography—and if Tracy had fooled them, they were as culpable as we were. Their neck was on the block. So all of a sudden the Traci Lords thing started to lose its ferocity.
GINGER LYNN: The last three months in prison, I was in Gateway, which is a halfway house. There were seven women, and the rest of them were men. I got out during the day to go on jobs. I had an audition to act on NYPD Blue. I was there under a different name; no one in prison knows my name because the guys can get to you.
Anyway, I walked into the studio, and I saw Traci Lords sitting there.
Now, I’m in prison at the time. I’m only out to go to this audition. And my heart’s beating so fast I can’t stand up. I go up and get the script, and I’m reading through it, and there’s one line that reads, “I wanna lick your lollipop.”
I put the script back on the desk, walked out, and called my agent. I said, “I’m not doing this.” It had nothing to do with that line about licking the lollipop, though. I was in shock that Traci was there.
My agent says, “Get back in there. Get the role first, then turn it down.”
So I go back in, I audition, and they put me on hold—which means they want me for the role. Now, I’ve never had this happen in my career, ever. So I take the script back to prison, and I’m running my dialogue with my bodyguard, who picks me up every day and takes me back to this place in Echo Park. I’m working really hard on it—and eventually I go before Steven Bochco and the entire team for a second audition, and they say, “The role is yours.”
For some reason, I was so hung up on the fact that I was doing time—and I was so angry at Traci—that I turned it down. I said, “You know what? I can’t do this. I don’t wanna say this line.”
They said, “You know what? We’ll take the line out.” So that was kind of a little get-even for me—Traci didn’t get the role, I got the role…. And I did it while I was in prison, ha, ha, ha!
Another Mob Hit?
LOS ANGELES
1989
TOM BYRON: Was it big news when Teddy Snyder got shot in front of his Rolls Royce holding the vial of coke? Oh, that was so poetic. Well, it made the newspaper.
LOS ANGELES TIMES, AUGUST 20, 1989: KILLING OF PORN PIONEER STILL BAFFLES POLICE, PEERS; INQUIRY AFFORDS RARE PEEK AT “PLAYPEN OF THE DAMNED”: “Police say Snyder was found shot to death at 11:15 P.M. near his parked car at Blackhawk Street and Wilbur Avenue. He had been shot four times in the front of his body and five times from the rear. Three wounds bore gunpowder marks. Nearby witnesses reported hearing a loud argument before the shots.
“Law enforcement officers familiar with the case said details of the killing show that Snyder may have known his assailant and tried to run away as he was being shot.
“Sharon Snyder, now four months pregnant, said her husband had been trying to get out of the porn business because customers were not buying products anymore. ‘Maybe people aren’t as perverted as we thought,’ she said.”
PHIL VANNATTER (LAPD DETECTIVE): I didn’t know who Teddy Snyder was until the Devonshire detectives—realizing they were dealing with a big-time pornographer—called us in. About eight to ten hours after the actual murder occurred, we took it over.
When we interviewed Sharon Snyder, she said she’d been doing laundry, and Teddy just disappeared; she didn’t even know he was leaving.
TOM BYRON: I think Paul Thomas is the one who called me up and said, “Hey, hear about Ted Snyder? He just got fuckin’ blown away.”
I went, “Well, that’s not surprising,” ha, ha, ha. But that came with the territory, man. People were gettin’ whacked all the time.
LOS ANGELES TIMES, AUGUST 20, 1989: KILLING OF PORN PIONEER STILL BAF FLES POLICE, PEERS, INQUIRY AFFORDS A PEEK AT “PLAYPEN OF THE DAMNED”: “Amid the loose papers and frayed girlie posters of a bankrupt porn empire, Bob Genova telephoned a business acquaintance in Philadelphia with the latest news.
“‘You hear what they did to my partner?’ asked Genova, whose company had earned a reputation for B-movie porn.
“‘They killed him,’ he boomed in a nasal voice that echoed into the hallway outside his office, where a visitor waited to see him. ‘It’s hard to figure. I’m all by myself now. They’re whittling me down.’
“Three weeks after Teddy Snyder’s body was found punctured by nine bullets in a quiet San Fernando Valley neighborhood, the death of the balding pornographer with a taste for gold chains, leisure suits and luxury cars remains a mystery to police and to Snyder’s colleagues in Los Angeles’ billion-dollar adult film industry.
“There is no shortage of theories about his death.”
PHIL VANNATTER: To me it didn’t look like a mob hit because Teddy was shot numerous times, right out in the middle of the street. It wasn’t in his front yard, it was on the other side of the Valley—on Blackhawk Avenue, in the Devonshire Division. He lived on one side of the Valley and was killed on the other. I said, “You know, I never heard of a mob hit where they machine-gunned somebody right in the street, in a prominent neighborhood, a nice neighborhood. Normally it’s one or two shots to the head.” And this guy was shot with what appeared to be an automatic weapon—just sprayed with it.
This homicide reeked of a drug deal gone bad.
BOBBY GENOVA: Nowadays there are so many drug deals that go awry.
LOS ANGELES TIMES, AUGUST 20, 1989: KILLING OF PORN PIONEER STILL BAF FLES POLICE, PEERS; INQUIRY AFFORDS RARE PEEK AT “PLAYPEN OF THE DAMNED”: “One theory is that drugs were involved; he was regarded in the industry as a heavy user, and a vial of cocaine was in his hand when he was found dead on a Northridge street.
“A law enforcement investigator familiar with the case said the killing had the appearance of an organized crime–style hit. Court records show that the Northridge company Snyder founded, Video Cassette Recordings Inc., owed money to a company allegedly controlled by a man linked by federal prosecutors to an East Coast crime family. And VCR’s offices have been searched as part of an ongoing investigation by a state and local law enforcement task force probing organized crime links to the porn business.
“However, many in the porn industry doubt that organized crime was involved in the killing. ‘It’s much ado about nothing,’ Genova said.
“Whatever the reason for Snyder’s death, Genova is shedding no tears for his partner, calling him a drug abuser and creep who did not care about their failing business.”
PHIL VANNATTER: During our interviews we found out that Patty, Sharon Snyder’s older sister, had apparently dated and almost married a capo in the Gambino family. My partner, Detective Kirk Mellecker, immediately jumped on that with blinders and said, “Oh my God. This has got to be a mob hit.” But I thought it had to do with Teddy and Sharon’s narcotics involvement or with Teddy’s business in the Valley.
TIM CONNELLY: Once Teddy was at work all day with Bobby Genova, it was almost like they were playing mob, you know? They didn’t seem like real mob. But there was a lot of stuff going on with those guys.
LOS ANGELES TIMES, SEPTE
MBER 25, 1989: ALLEGED EAST COAST MOB FIGURE NAMED IN VIDEOTAPE FRAUD. “A man authorities describe as a New Jersey leader of an organized crime family has been charged with setting up a ‘bogus’ company in Chatsworth to defraud other firms out of more than $1 million worth of videotape and equipment, most of which was distributed by Los Angeles pornographers.
“Martin Taccetta, 38, of Florham Park, N.J., who federal and New Jersey authorities say is a prominent member of the Lucchese crime family, faces conspiracy and grand theft charges along with three alleged business associates. All four men are expected to be arrested today, district attorney’s officials said.”
BOBBY GENOVA: I knew I was a logical suspect. Two days after the shooting I walked into my warehouse and along comes this big Mercury Marquis. These two detectives came out and introduced themselves. They made an appointment to come over to my house at 7:00 P.M. on Friday evening.
These guys saw drugs, sex, Mafia, and thought they had a high-profile case. I knew their theory was cockamamie. They were bumbling and fumbling.
PHIL VANNATTER: Bob Genova wasn’t really a lot of help, but I never felt he was involved. He seemed very upset by the fact that Teddy had been killed. And apparently they had made a lot of money together. A lot of money.
And Patty—Sharon’s sister—was apparently the brains of the organization. I don’t think Bobby Genova was very bright, to be honest. I think he was riding on Teddy’s coattails.