by Legs McNeil
LOS ANGELES TIMES, SEPTEMBER 25, 1989: ALLEGED EAST COAST MOB FIGURE NAMED IN VIDEOTAPE FRAUD. “The criminal complaint, filed late Friday in Los Angeles Superior Court, emerged from a three-year investigation into organized crime influence in the $1 billion local pornography industry, officials said. An undercover Los Angeles police officer at one point got a job at the company under investigation, Ollinor Video Products, Inc.
“One company that received tape from Ollinor was Video Cassette Recording (VCR), a Northridge-based producer and distributor of pornography videos. Ted Snyder, 47, co-founder of VCR was found shot nine times on a Chatsworth street on Aug. 1, 1989.
“No arrests have been made in the slaying.”
Cry-Baby
BALTIMORE/LOS ANGELES/FT. WORTH, TX
1989–1990
JOHN WATERS: When Traci came to shoot Cry-Baby, she came with a gentleman that—I didn’t know until much later—was involved with her in the porno business. And halfway through the film she bonded very heavily with the cast. This shoot was like rehab.
I mean, think about it: We had Susan Tyrell; Patty Hearst; Johnny Depp, who had just had some illegal incident; David Nelson; Iggy Pop, who was totally sober, you know? We played a game with the staff: Who hasn’t been arrested? Everyone had a record.
So for the first time Traci felt like no one was judging her. I mean, we didn’t care. I used to say to her, “The only problem was that you were too good of a porno star.”
RUBY GOTTESMAN: So I pleaded not guilty and went to trial, which lasted about a year. They had three parts to the trial, and I won the first two, but on the third one they had Traci Lords waiting to testify—and her mother, who had testified in the two other cases.
My lawyer says, “A mother’s a mother, and you can’t make a mother look bad.” So the mother came with her lies, like, “Such a nice girl she was…”
PATRICIA BRICELAND (MOTHER OF TRACI LORDS): We were living in Redondo Beach. My older daughter is Lorraine, she’s 22; my next daughter is Nora, she’s 20; I have a 19-year-old, Rachel; and a 17-year-old named Grace, G-R-A-C-E, Grace. And Nora lived with us up until she was—just right before her sixteenth birthday, when she did decide to leave home….
When Nora was fifteen, she was a sophomore in high school, and she was at the age where girls get rebellious with their mothers. There was a strain between us. The move, that caused a lot of problems. I knew Nora was having a lot of problems. I knew she was concerned about money, and things were tough.
RUBY GOTTESMAN: We had a good relationship. Traci used me as sort of a confidant where she would come to me with her problems, and I would try to help her out. And Traci had a lot of problems. She had problems with her mother. She had a problem with drugs. She was having problems with producers not paying her the full amount of money she thought she was supposed to get. You know, just run-of-the-mill problems of someone working in the business.
PATRICIA BRICELAND: About a month after she left home, Nora came in and talked to me for a little while and took off again. She would come and see me for a couple of hours, and sometimes we would go out to lunch. I would say it continued like that from then up to the present time.
RUBY GOTTESMAN: Traci came to me one day in tears. She said she had an opportunity to go to London, England, for a modeling job, but she didn’t have any money to go. And I couldn’t believe it because she’d been working—she must have, at that time, made at least a hundred movies and was still working. I asked her where the money was? She just said, “I need this job. Could you lend me three thousand dollars?”
I asked when she was going to give it back, and she said she’d send it from London in thirty days. And she would call me in two weeks. I bawled her out. I told her she made a lot of money. What happened to all of it? But I finally gave her the money.
PATRICIA BRICELAND: Nora came for my other daughter’s birthday party; she came for Christmas. She would spend a great part of the day here. We would talk about family relations.
She told me she was modeling, but she didn’t tell me where she was modeling. I confronted her; she lied to me. She told me she was doing legitimate modeling. As it turned out, she was doing legitimate modeling, but she was doing other modeling, too.
RUBY GOTTESMAN: So Traci called me from London and told me the modeling job didn’t work out and that she was coming home. And two weeks after that she came over and paid me back the three thousand—and then, besides that, offered to lend me money.
PATRICIA BRICELAND: I found that Nora seemed to be missing school without telling me. I didn’t have any idea of what was going on.
But I heard rumors to the effect that Nora had been doing nude photography. So I confronted her with it.
RUBY GOTTESMAN: She was complaining about her mother. I told her, “You’re old enough to do your own thing. You’re not no baby. You’re twenty years old. You should know better.”
Does she look twenty to me on these box covers? You can’t tell because of the makeup. Some she looks thirty; some she looks nineteen. She looks different in every picture. There is a hundred and twenty pictures where she looks different. It’s the way they make her up.
PATRICIA BRICELAND: I told her that I heard rumors to the effect that she was involved in nude modeling, and she said it wasn’t true.
I had heard such rumors when she was sixteen years old, yes, I had. Her sister, Lorraine, told me that she had friends who said they had seen Nora’s picture in some magazines, but when I confronted Nora with that…she said it wasn’t true.
I think she probably started doing the nude modeling—I think she got involved with these people—probably just before she left and began doing it very soon after she left.
RUBY GOTTESMAN: Traci worked her head off for two years, and she kept on telling me she wanted to make a lot of money and quit.
I says, “Quit now.”
She said, “I can’t. I don’t have any money.” But she said, “You watch. I’ll come up with something.”
PATRICIA BRICELAND: Eventually I did see some pictures, in Penthouse. And I confronted her with that. They were tastefully done, basically, but they were nude pictures.
RUBY GOTTESMAN: All of a sudden, I hear a rumor that Traci has her own company, TLC, Traci Lords Company. Then I heard that they’d produced a movie in Paris. And the day after this rumor started—that she’d just turned eighteen in June or something—this movie comes out, and it belongs to her.
PATRICIA BRICELAND: I think anyone can see just by looking at these pictures she went from a chubby little adolescent—although she had a nice figure—to a much more slender, more adult face.
Just looking at the pictures, you could see the change in the face, the cheekbones and the width of her face and the weight and the way it was distributed. She was pudgy at fifteen. People consider that voluptuous, but I consider it pudgy.
SHARON MITCHELL: They screened me to testify as a witness against Traci, and I said, “What? Can you tell the difference between a seventeen-year-old tit and an eighteen-year-old tit?”
They said, “Get her out of here.”
RUBY GOTTESMAN: Caballero, which was probably in a state of receivership at that time, took over the movie—and as of last week they’ve sold a hundred thousand copies. I know for an exact fact that she got ten bucks for every copy that was sold in royalties. So she made her million dollars.
PATRICIA BRICELAND: I told Nora that if she didn’t stop I would go to the police, and I would go to Penthouse. She told me that if I did, the people that she was involved with would kill her. I believed that could be possibly true, and so I only tried to keep the lines of communications open with Nora.
LOS ANGELES TIMES, APRIL 27, 1989: DAUGHTER FEARED DEATH FROM MAKERS OF PORN FILMS, MOTHER TESTIFIES: “Traci Lords, fearing for her life, pleaded with her mother not to reveal that she was underage when she made many of her films, the porn star’s mother testified Wednesday.
“‘She told me to keep my mouth shut or I would get h
er in terrible trouble,’ Patricia Briceland said.”
RUBY GOTTESMAN: So every other movie—in Traci’s mind—became illegal. And in the law’s eyes, too. So this movie, Traci, I Love You, which she made when she was of legal age, not only sold out, but I sold approximately six thousand pieces of this movie, more than any other movie in the history of my company. And it continues selling. I just bought fifty tapes yesterday. I buy fifty at least once a week. Got to buy them in fifties to get a discounted price. It’s the only Traci Lords movie that’s out there. And it just sells out. They don’t rent it, they buy it.
STEVE ORENSTEIN: I don’t think Traci Lords was a typical kiddie porn case, or what you’d think of as a child pornography case. When this came down about her being underage, people were shocked because she was very sexually aggressive on the sets. I mean, it was quite the opposite of her being a victim—she certainly wasn’t someone getting taken advantage of.
JOHN WATERS: In Cry-Baby Traci played a sexpot—which is always the best way to rid yourself of an image, by playing it and making fun of it. That’s what Johnny Depp did, too. He was on Jump Street, and he hated playing a teen idol, so I said, “Stick with us; we’ll kill that.” And we did—in the right way, you know?
LOS ANGELES TIMES, OCTOBER 24, 1989: VIDEO PORN DISTRIBUTOR GETS ONE-YEAR SENTENCE: “A Woodland Hills video distributor was sentenced to a year in prison Monday for selling videotapes of teenage porn actress Traci Lords in violation of child pornography laws.
“U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon sentenced Rubin Gottesman, 56, to an additional term of three years’ probation and fined his company, X-Citement Video, $100,000.”
RUBY GOTTESMAN: The mother actually won the case, so when it came down I got one year. They recommended that I go to Boron Federal Prison in California, but the judge said, “No, you’re a child pornographer, so you go to Forth Worth, Texas, where they have all the people like you.”
But Fort Worth was nice—I mean, for a jail. It wasn’t bad.
JOHN WATERS: During the making of Cry-Baby, the federal agents raided the set to make her come back to testify. Traci was terrified. I remember her sobbing—Patricia Hearst was comforting her—and Traci saying, “I’m so embarrassed.”
I said, “Don’t be embarrassed; everyone here’s been arrested.”
So I think we made her better. We rehabilitated Traci Lords.
STEVE ORENSTEIN: Why did I get five years’ probation, and Ruby did time? Because I was silly, and I made a plea bargain. I mean, I had an attorney every day telling me to make a deal. Because it wasn’t just the Traci Lords stuff, it was some bondage product as well, and that was potentially a problem. But that was dropped from the trial.
JOHN WATERS: Traci Lords fell in love with my best friend Pat Moran’s son—who practically grew up on all of my sets, and who’s now a very successful propmaster. So he and Traci had a big, very straight wedding in an Episcopal church in Baltimore.
RUBY GOTTESMAN: Once I was in jail, I got friendly with the cop in the dorm, and there were, like, two hundred and eighty guys on the floor. And they made me like an orderly. The cop was like a nice guy—he took a liking to me, you know? He’d bring in bagels for me, and shit like that. A nice guy, some Irish kid. And I was in charge, right?
JOHN WATERS: The day before the wedding, the priest asked Traci, “Have you been baptized?”
And she said, “Yes.”
Later, Pat said, “You’re half Jewish—you weren’t baptized. Go over to John’s, and he’ll do it.” See, I’d been ordained by Johnny Depp’s lawyers to marry Johnny and Winona in the Universal Church. I talked him out of it because they were both too young. But I have these powers, so I’m legitimate, and I do happen to have a tabernacle. So I figured, “Well, come on over.” And I played this record of castrated altar boys. I got all black tulips, and I wore all black.
Did she have to get naked or wear white robes? No, certainly not—we were doing the opposite of getting naked. We were wiping away males’ defiant sexual behavior toward her, ha, ha, ha.
RUBY GOTTESMAN: One day, around lunchtime, I was supposed to be watchin’ that nobody steals nothin’. My job was cleaning the phones—I’d disinfect the phones. So I’m hangin’ around the phones, and here comes this redneck guy. There’s a group of like twenty guys, and I recognize him to be one of them, with the tattoos and the beard and the hair—a redneck, you know?
He asks, “Your name Rubin Gottesman?”
Holy shit. I says, “Yeah, why?”
He says, “I’ll be right back. Wait here.”
Now I’m lookin’ for the cop. There’s no cop. The redneck comes over, and what is he bringin’? A four-year-old AVN with a story about me.
And he says, “Is this about you?”
I says, “Yeah.”
He says, “I thought so.” I became a hero. These guys, they’d come over and say, “Can we borrow the USA Today, just the sports section?” I says, “You can have the whole paper.”
JOHN WATERS: I wiped away her sexual defiance, and I wiped away males’ piggish behavior to her. And Traci started crying. She was scared, I think—because she didn’t expect quite this much of a production when she came over. I took it dead seriously.
I think I splattered some holy water on Traci—Evian.
RUBY GOTTESMAN: They wanted my magazines. I was gettin’ sent in, like, twenty porn magazines a month. But then they stopped at Christmastime. The government had, what’s-his-name—Jesse Helmes—put somethin’ on a rider that said, “No magazines with sexual things can be sent to federal prison.” So no Playboy, no Penthouse, no nothin’. As a matter of fact, not even any pictures of your girlfriends, like, in bathing suits.
JOHN WATERS: They were married for quite some time, and they did break up, but they don’t hate each other. I still see Traci. She came to the premiere of the new version of Pink Flamingos with me—and she said a really funny thing in the Los Angeles Times afterward. She said, “I didn’t do anything that bad.”
RUBY GOTTESMAN: Yeah, I got out of jail, but I had a very bad personal life. My oldest son got murdered in a drug thing. He was twenty-seven. He was meeting with a guy that owed him money—seven thousand—and the guy set him up with a robbery, and the robbery turned into murder. Some Israeli Mafia guys, I found out later.
He had over a million dollars in cash. They probably tortured him to find his money. I couldn’t find a nickel. I have no money from him. And they took all his money, hit him on the head with a board, and he died. They found him in the trunk of a car after nineteen days. That was a terrible thing. And since I’m a pornographer, and he was drug dealer, the cops wasn’t lookin’ for no murderer.
BOBBY ELKINS: You know, it’s really a horrible thing. Ruby’s kid was really nice. I kind of liked him, even if his father was a jack-off.
After, the son started to sell dope and make some money. Some people say Ruby grabbed the money from his kid for a deal he was doing.
I don’t know what happened, but they found his kid in a trunk of a car.
STEVE ORENSTEIN: I like Ruby. He’s definitely a character, but I didn’t realize he was crazy. I don’t know if he’s crazy, he’s just…Ruby Gottesman had a reputation for how he dealt with people—vendors, let’s say. Well, when we became partners, I started being treated like another vendor, so it didn’t go too well.
The books were fine. It was just that payments weren’t being made on time or at all. I’m sure I wasn’t too happy about it. We were partners for about two years, and then we split up.
That’s when I started Wicked Pictures.
Divorce: Porn Style
LOS ANGELES
1990–1991
TIM CONNELLY: When Teddy Snyder got murdered, nobody was surprised. The story going around—you know, the porn story, the inside story—was that he owed people money. He was in way over his head.
PHIL VANNATTER: I just looked at Sharon Snyder, and I knew she was a strung-out coke addict. She looked like hell. I kn
ow for a fact that she burned her nose out when she was with Teddy. And what we found out was, Teddy had been meeting Victor Diaz over on Blackhawk Avenue under the pretext of picking up some cocaine from him.
TOM BYRON: Marc Wallice had told me on a couple of occasions that Teddy had gotten a little out of hand and stuck a gun in his face.
Teddy liked to film his wife with other guys, having sex. I guess they were all coked out, and he would lose his mind, pull out a gun, and threaten them both.
PHIL VANNATTER: Bobby Genova told us about a diamond ring Teddy had, with “TED” spelled out in diamonds—and we were able to run that down to a jewelry store down in Dallas where Sharon had sold it after the murder. Sharon had reported it to us as stolen at the time of the murder. She had flown down to Dallas and sold this ring. She needed money, apparently, for coke.
TIM CONNELLY: Teddy Snyder was one of the worst cocaine addicts I’ve ever known. And I never saw him snort it, but I knew people who did—and these were guys that wouldn’t come out of their offices all day, you know? They would go to work, and then stay in their office and snort coke. And I heard stories from them about Teddy buying ounces of coke every week.
PHIL VANNATER: I was looking into Sharon’s background real strong, and one day I answered the telephone at the station and it was Dennis Fitzgerald calling from Fort Wanimi. We didn’t know each other—I just happened to answer the phone. He says, “I have a guy up here talking about this big-time pornographer who was killed down in Los Angeles.”