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Chapter 57
The Darkness That Grew Like a Cancer
The dividing line between legitimate business and organized crime is blurry, vague, often nonexistent.
In the world of theatre and movies, the dividing line is even thinner.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, theatre and crime generally went hand in hand, and all too many theatres doubled as brothels.
The result was that “theatre” literally became a dirty word that was not to be spoken in polite company.
That is why there was an effort in the USA in the 19th century to move theatres into town halls and city halls,
where they were called “Opera Houses” or “Academies of Music.”
That began to divorce entertainment from scumbags.
As for movies, nearly from the beginning they were run by criminal enterprises.
There have been books and articles about this, but none, so far as I am aware, is comprehensive.
If anyone were to write an honest history of the Hollywood studios, that author would probably
commit suicide by a high-powered rifle fired into the back of his head from across the street,
and he would then accidentally fall out of a
There is public proof that the lines between legitimate movie business and criminal movie business
are often indiscernible.
As we learned above, the Art Theatre Guild of America, Inc., booked foreign,
There are more anecdotes, which are undoubtedly true, which I got from various people in the know,
including porn star Jerry Butler
(real name: Paul David Siederman) and porn producer
Dave Friedman,
but I dare not publish them because I do not have documentation to verify their assertions.
The claims would never hold up in court without that documented verification.
One claim concerned a lawsuit that was dropped as soon as the defendant said on the phone to the plaintiff:
“Look, I run this town. If you give me trouble, I’ll have you killed.”
Interesting, huh? I dare say no more about that until I get hard evidence.
As for another claim, until I can get documented verification, you might want to watch this video
https://youtu.be/theEiUcGLXo in its entirety, and pay especial attention to 51:43.
(Yes, that was my old buddy Dave Friedman on stage at 51:26.
We got along, I guess, because he had started his career as a projectionist,
because he was madly in love with all the machinery,
because he adored the same old movies and specialty movies that I adored,
and because we shared the love of the showmanship of the old palatial stage theatres and movie palaces.
We could really talk shop, and he seemed to know everybody that I knew.
That’s not surprising, because he seemed to know everybody in the world.
He was a carny at heart, and I found that endearing.
I still can’t understand why on earth he agreed to be the face of that ugly criminal porn business.
An honorable guy representing a dishonorable industry. Puzzling.
I felt so awful when one of my later employers swindled him. What could I say? What could I do?)
You might also wish to check Business Week, 4 April 1975,
which you can find excerpted here,
and be sure to read both columns all the way to the end of the page.
You may balance that with this.
Remember, also, that Paramount Pictures’ The Godfather could not go ahead without Mafia approval,
and that many Mafiosi and their families appeared in it as extras.
Makes you think, doesn’t it?
Word on the street (for which I can find no solid documentation) is that the whole point of producing The Godfather
was to make it a whitewash, to give the general public the impression that the Mafia did not deal in drugs.
(Spoiler alert: The Mafia did deal in drugs.)
You might wish to read “What’s with Hollywood’s Connection to Big Crime?,” National Post, 13 January 2016.
And maybe this one, too: “You Never Knew the Mafia Was Connected to These Movies,” Grunge, n.d.
Want more? Paul Callan,
“Hollywood’s Godfather Shame: New Book Lifts the Lid on the Mafia’s Control of Cinema,”
Express, 18 September 2012.
See also Seth Ferranti, “This Guy Infiltrated Hollywood for the Mob and Pulled Off a Major Scam,” Vice, 11 November 2018.
Still another, Richard L. Olsen, “The Mob and the Movies,” The Los Ángeles Times, 5 July 1987.
As for organized crime’s involvement in the porn business, here’s a good introduction:
Ralph Blumenthal and Nicholas Gage, “Crime ‘Families’ Taking Control of Pornography,” The New York Times, 10 December 1972.
A more important article is Nicholas Gage,
“Organized Crime Reaps Huge Profits from Dealing in Pornographic Films,” The New York Times, 12 October 1975.
Another
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Because I occasionally talk about pornography, some people quickly conclude that I am a debauchee — WRONG! —
while other people quickly conclude that I am a prude — WRONG!
I care nothing for porn movies.
With the rarest exceptions, they are unwatchably awful;
they are made by people who have no interests, no sense of humor, no understanding of human emotions, no concept of irony, no concept of affection,
no concept of characterization, no concept of mood, no concept of narrative;
they present sex in the ugliest and most sickening ways imaginable;
and they insult my intelligence.
My fascination, on the other hand, is with the business structure:
the money, the laundering, the extortion, the arsons, the thefts, the “redecorations,”
the tax fraud, the political protection, the human trafficking,
the disappearances, the contract killings.
Why? Because it seems connected with the movie business overall, I think.
It seems connected with stage theatre and publishing, too.
I have worked, at the
For the record, here are the porno houses that plagued Albuquerque. There may have been others, too, but this list is, I think, pretty complete.
Most of the opening and closing dates are approximate, because I have no ability (and no wish!) to research this exhaustively.
That’s 26 — or 28 if you want to count the
Found it! My memory was off. Roscoe was not mentioned.
And it wasn’t Friday/Saturday, either.
 I think this was the only day this ad ever ran. You know, that cartoon drawing is not at all bad. I’m a bit surprised that someone on a porn house’s payroll would do such a nice cartoon for a newspaper display ad. After all, the other ads for those places were decidedly inept and downright ugly.  Okay, here’s my excuse: When I clipped this news article back in 1977, I stupidly neglected to mark where it came from. So I decided to do a search on the online newspapers, but this article isn’t OCR’d properly and so it does not come up in any search. Courtesy of searches in other newspapers, I worked out that this must have appeared on or around 27 April 1977, and so I just went through the online papers page by page until I found it. When I found it, I made the above collage.                
Text: Copyright © 2019–2021, Ranjit Sandhu.
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