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Bill Kelly says they ran Reuben out of South Florida in the late '70s in the midst of the federal government's most succesfful crackdown against porn. Born in 1927, Kelly, a Roman Catholic, attended Georgetown University in the late '40s with the brother of Mafia leader "Chin" Gigante. The brother became a Jesuit priest (in Harlem?). Kelly joined FBI in 1962 and has mainly worked against obscenity. In early 70s, a peer asked to accompany him on his porn beat in Miami's flesh district. Several years later, this man became important in the FBI and agreed to fund MIPORN which was Kelly's brainchild. Anthony Peraino, in
'70s, said, "If you could keep Bill Kelly off my ass for two years...
I could get so rich.." Take it to the bank? "We're not afraid
of you and the FBI.... We fear the IRS. SO much money we can't be bothered
counting it... We weight it and call the bank... "How much is 20
pounds of $20 bills?" Kelly suffers from spinal problems. When he's exhausted, they paralyze him. Kelly says veteran NY
pornographer Teddy Rothstein came over to him in late '70s at a trial
and asked him why he hated pornography. "Because it is immoral"
said Kelly. Teddy couldn't comprehend such a perspective and hasn't
talked to Kelly Bill remembers Teddy as a 5'4" bearded Jew who looked like an orthodox rabbi. Kelly calls Russ Hampshire - busted in MIPORN along with Walter Gernert for shipping illegally duplicated tapes across state lines - and Harry Mohney "nice guys. Russ is one of the most polite guys that I ever ran into in the business. He was always polite and gentlemanly. He's a cut above... Some of the Italian guys were not as easy to get along with. "I used to photograph all these people. I took thousands of photos. Some didn't mind it but some got upset. I took one roll after another during their four day meets because we had to identify them and some of them we didn't know. "The only time I saw Kenny Guarino smile was when the [MIPORN] jury came in with the verdict not guilty. "Dick Finney was the premier obscenity investigator for the FBI at the time (late 1970s) and he'd usually go with me to these things. He's long retired too. I'm about the only one still active. Now the main guy is Roger Truman Young in Las Vegas. Kelly retired from the FBI in 1980 but has served since as a consultant to prosecutors of obscenity. He's been married since 1956 and lives in South Florida. Kelly says pornographers are mainly interested in money and power. They fear risk and murder. Kelly says pornographers don't want Mafia in their business but the mob muscles in. Kelly says that in the early 1980s, David Friedman, who headed the Adult Film Assocation at the time, offered him $5000 a months and other perks to clean the mob out of porn, and Kelly replied he'd never "f---ing work for pornographers..." Kelly has a list of 58 pornographers who've been murdered. Kelly says that his ideal jury to try an obscenity case would be 12 Baptist grandmothers. From CourtTV.com: Interview with Bill Kelly, retired FBI Agent. Eighteen of his twenty-eight years in the Bureau were spent working on obscenity and child pornography cases. Includes the Mob's affiliation with the porn industry, "Deep Throat," the Meese Commission and the FBI's Miami Pornography investigation (MIPORN). In the late 1970's the FBI mounted an undercover investigation of the pornography industry and distribution system in southern Florida. The US District Court of Southern Florida indicted 43 people in 1980 for transporting and conspiring to transport and sell pornographic materials over state lines. (PDF) Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Bill: My name is William P. Kelly. FBI retired agent, 28 years, 8 months and 5 days of service. Retired in November 1980. I spent 21 years here in Miami, Florida. Eighteen of those years were spent working on obscenity cases. I started working on pornography cases here in Miami in 1962. The leading organized crime people in the '60s were Cangiano brothers out on Long Island. They were making these little 8mm black and white loops. The FBI successfully prosecuted these fellows and they got eight years in the federal penitentiary, which was probably the longest obscenity sentence in history. According to the 6/13/82 Los Angeles Times: Anthony Peraino and Michael Zaffarano dominated distribution of loops to Mafia-controlled outlets in New York City. According to the FBI, they sold their films secretly out of automobile trunks, coffee catering trucks, unmarked warehouses, several restaurants, a chain of meat markets and a Brooklyn candy store. Their primary sales representative was Cosmo Cangiano from Brooklyn, whose arrest record included larceny, forgery, mail theft and interstate shipment of stolen securities. Bill: There was nothing much going on nationally until 1971. Then two things happened. In 1971, an element of the Colombo family, the Peraino family, came down to Fort Lauderdale, in South Florida, to set up offices and make the "first porn movie" Deep Throat for $22,500. Its eventual gross exceeded $100 million and they kept at least half. The second thing that happened is that it hit about 300 theaters nationally in 1972. And a few weeks later, [FBI chief] John Edgar Hoover died. If he had stayed alive and in full possession of his faculties, we would not be in this terrible condition nationally. Hoover had five criminal priorities: espionage, kidnapping, extortion, communism and obscenity. I am sure that he would had not only me and one or two other agents working these obscenity cases nationally. That's all there was at that time. He would have had a platoon of us out there going after these people. I was more than apalled. I was double appalled, shocked and disgusted. That's the first time we had anything like that [Deep Throat] in this country. And one thing that made Deep Throat so successful was the media. Gave those gangsters probably five million dollars worth of free advertising for Deep Throat. It's a lousy movie. I've seen it a dozen times, even paid to see it the first time when it opened in Miami Beach to a line going around the block. The Peraino family had a man Robert De Salvo whose body we've never found. He went to Italy to try to collect additional money for the Peraino family. It's a bad place to try to go to collect money from the Mafia. We traced him as far as London and haven't seen him since. I imagine he's fish food. The sweeper situation operated like this. You walked up to the theater and handed over $5. You never got a ticket. Now, my wife's family's been in the entertainment business in East Tennesse since 1937 and they've never not given a ticket for anything. But these Mafia guys, for obvious IRS purposes, they're not going to have any ticket records. So you gave the fellow at the door $5 and he says, 'All right, you can go in.' So I walked in with a newspaper reporter from one of the Miami newspapers. And sitting over in the corner of the lobby was a bent nosed guy sitting. He had a counter in his hand. As a person would pay his $5, this person would click his counter. And at the end of the day, he would go up to the owner or manager, the film having shown about 20 times during the day because it was only 59 minutes. He'd say, 'Now Mr. Jones, I've been sitting in this theater all day long as I've done every day since delivering this movie. And my counter says 3000 came through today. Three thousand times five dollars is $15,000. Give me $7500 in cash right now. No tomorrow, no checks, no promises, no bologna, right now or else. Some of the theater owners said, 'What do you mean or else?' So a few of them didn't pay immediately. We found out what some of the "or else's" were. The least they would do is send a fellow or two to the theater and take the film off the projector and not let them show it anymore. And the worse thing that'd happen was that you would have a fire. So there are 300 theaters showing the film continuously and 300 checkers sending in packages to Wilton Manners, Florida, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale. And about two years after the film started showing, I got a call. "Kelly, you are not going to believe this but we have so much money down here that we can't move around the office. The money's getting in the way. We've got garbage bags full of money and we're tripping over it. We don't even count it. We weigh it. We get a stack of $20 bills and put them on a scale and it comes to ten pounds. So we call the bank and ask how much is ten pounds of $20 bills. We write that down and do the same thing with $10, $5, and $1 bills. We've probably got a couple of million dollars laying around here in garbage bags. We've got a problem here. The Perainos saw you sitting out in the parking lot of the church across the street from here a few days ago. Now they're not afraid of you and the FBI. Because almost nobody gets prosecuted for obscenity anymore. You had another guy with you and we're afraid that's an IRS agent. Now we're afraid of the IRS because those guys will take our money away from us and that's what we're in business for, to make money. So we're not going to take it to the bank because we're afraid the IRS will jump on us. We went to trial [for obscenity] in Memphis, TN, thanks to one little old assistant United States Attorney named Larry Parrish. One of the real heroes in the Justice Department in the last 30 years. He took all twelve defendants to trial and their eight lawyers to trial and he just beat them down and whacked them good and every one of them got convicted. For some reason Larry Parrish was forced out of the Justice Department. Perhaps Hollywood had an influence on that. A number of Hollywood luminaries lobbied on behalf of Harry Reems, against the government prosecuting an actor for obscenity. I talked to Harry Reems at the trial. He was as nervous as a cat on a hot tin roof. He didn't want to be associated with these guys from the mid-Meditteranean region. I think he was looking at me to shelter him and here I'm trying to help put Larry in jail along with the rest of them. Over on the side of the Memphis courtroom, closest to the river, are the twelve defendants and their eight lawyers. They must weigh about four tons. And on the government side are Larry Parrish and FBI agent Ed Donland, weighing about 350 pounds combined. And we still beat them. Harry Reems was a completely likeable guy for being so amoral. He'd joke with you. I think he was a good comedic actor. He was pretty good as opposed to Linda Lovelace who had as much acting ability as that lamp over there. She wrote a book with Chuck Traynor called "Inside Linda Lovelace" where she accuses me of all sorts of improprieties. Threatening to yank her out of bed and put her on a place to New York to testify before a grand jury. I never met her until we testified before the Meese Commission. I didn't have an opportunity to speak with her. I don't know whether I believe her [Linda Lovelace's Ordeal claims]. Chuck Traynor was a nice guy. He ended up with Marilyn Chambers, the Ivory Soap girl. I knew Traynor five years before he knew Linda Lovelace and he was a pornographer then. When it comes to whatever she said about the making of Deep Throat... I'm from Missourri, it's got to be proven to me. Because she used to do things before Deep Throat that were worse, if you know what I mean. Reuben Sturman without a doubt was the most important pornographer in the history of the world. Everybody kowtowed to Reuben who's alias was Nebeur, his name spelled backwards. I used to go to the pornographer's conventions openly as an FBI agent. With a camera with a 400mm lens on it and take pictures of all the pornographers which did not please them very much. So, to have protection, I would always have another FBI agent armed and in back of me. Reuben Sturman would come to these conventions and would be treated like royalty. And if you don't mind dealing with pornography, he was very important. Sturman was so important that the Wall Street Journal did a front page story on him in 1985 with a drawing. Pornographers would throw bags of money at him. He had over 700 corporations. Each dirty book store had its own corporation. A lot of folks call them adult bookstores. I don't. I call them porno garbage dumps. They would empty quarters out of these peep show machines into five gallon buckets. And these guys would pick up two of them, give half the proceeds to the store, and walk out with the rest. One of the big shots of the Gambino family sent down to South Florida one of his soldiers as a sinecure. He'd been a loyal soldier for 30 years, most of it spent in New York state prisons. Sent him down here with the admonition that if you want the peep show business in South Florida, it's yours. And we had some force and violence and two of the three owners capitulated. The third owner was threatened by this soldier and he did not cave. He called the FBI in West Palm Beach to say that so and so was coming up there to kill him if he didn't turn over his peeps. Two agents went running up there and arrived just as the owner of the peep show business had a gun up against his head by this particular hoodlum out of the Gambino family. The hood that saw the two agents coming was admonished by his victim, 'Here comes the FBI. Now you're going to get it.' He fled out the backdoor and into the swamps of Florida in his $500 shoes and his $1000 suit and abandoned his brand new Lincoln in front of the factory where these machines were made and we didn't see that guy again for ten years. But we encouraged him to leave South Florida and he went to Los Angeles where he died. The finest FBI agent in the United States today, and for the last 20 years, is Roger Truman Young, a relative of President Harry Truman. He nailed Reuben Sturman after a nine year effort for interstate transportation of obscenity for the grossest tapes I've ever seen. Including people having sex with animals, in one case a fellow and a chicken. There was one movie in there that Roger Young told me about. He called me up and said, 'It's called More Than A Mouthful. It's a defecation tape.' He said that he and another agent watched the film while sitting in the Las Vegas office. And they each had a garbage can between their legs because it was so gross they almost vomited three times each. And we had to show that to a jury in a Federal Court in Las Vegas. The jury came back ten to two for a conviction. The two people who voted not guilty were lady elementary school teachers in Las Vegas. There will never be another Reuben Sturman but his successor, his chief lieutenant, is a very prominent man in the industry today. His names is Edward Joseph Wedelstedt. He's based in Denver and he's got an outstanding lawyer [Arthur Schwartz]. The name of his main operation if Goalie Entertainment. Was Reuben Sturman connected to organized crime? Reuben Sturman was organized crime. But he was not Mafia organized crime. Was he connected to the Mafia? I don't think there's any doubt about that. He probably owed something to the Gambino family through the personage of Robert DiBernardo who was a capo in the Gambino family. I heard that DiBernardo started out as a soldier in the DeCavalcante family. And then he switched to the Gambinos. I've never heard of this before. He was a great moneymaker. He turned around Star Distributors on Lafayette St which was run by Teddy Rothstein. DiBernardo also owned a chain of alignment shops in the northeast. And DiBernardo was feared by everyone in the porn business. I remember on occassion asking pornographers about DiBernardo and they would just freeze. We prosecuted DiBernardo, Rothstein and Andre D'Apice in the Mike Horn series of cases in federal court. We prosecuted him in 1981 and much to the discomfort of his handsome defense attorney Herald Price Fahringer, who was one of the best First Amendment attorneys in the US, DiBernardo used to come and sit with me and talk to me during breaks in the trial. He talked about anything but the business. His father lived down here in Broward County and had cancer. And he talked about football. DiBernardo was the best looking pornographer I ever saw. He was a handsome dude. He was always wearing a suit that probably cost more than all ten of mine combined. And he'd walk into a room full of women and the women would look at him. 'He looks like a movie star.' And he did. However, as soon as he started talking to you, you could tell what his background was. He was a rought talking sort of fellow who belied his appearance. The Meese Commission was a follow-up to the original Attorney General's commission of 1967-70 which was put together at the request of President Johnson. The original commission consisted of 18 people, many of whom, especially the leadership, were members of the America Civil Liberties Union, not my favorite organization. Three members of the commission were favorable to my philosophy of prosecuting pornographers. But that commission handed in its two million dollar report to President Nixon in 1970, recommending the abrogation of all US obscenity laws (unless they pertained to children). They said that pornography was not a large industry, did not hurt people, and did not make much money. Well, in 1970 it was making about four billion dollars a year and it makes three times that much today. President Nixon read the report and filed it. But the report and its recommendations went through a vote in the U.S. Senate and only 65 senators voted. Sixty of them agreed with Nixon that the report should be canned. Five who disagreed were Clifford Case from New Jersey, Jacob Jarvitz from New York, George McGovern and Walter Mondale. Now, I have mentioned that several times in lectures and you could hear the audience gasp when I mentioned Mondale. An associate of mine called Mondale's office and asked him about it. And the person at Mondale's office answered that had Mondale been elected president of the United States, he would have attempted to abrogate all obscenity laws. The Meese Commission was formed in 1985 and it was given six months to report and a budget ($400,000) that was designed to it them fail. They didn't have any investigators to speak of. So about 30 of us, FBI agents, retired guys like me, postal inspectors, volunteered to work for free. The commission made something like 100 recommendations and all of them were implemented. Child pornography has never been one tenth of one percent of the overall problem with obscenity and pornography in the United States. But it gets all the grease, all the money. And you can't find it anywhere except on the internet. I challenge anyone to go into a dirty bookstore and buy child pornography. The pornographers are scared to death to deal in kiddy porn because the penalties are horrendous. Unless the heats go off and then of course they'd get into it. Because they have absolutely no commitment to morality except to make money and keep from getting murdered by their peers. They don't think about the United States as a declining cultural entity which they are largely responsible for. There are about 70 people on the Broward County's child pornography taskforce yet there have not been more than a dozen FBI agents devoted fulltime to [adult pornography]. I got thrown out of a dirty bookstore in Miami along with a chief counsel for the Meese Commission by a large bodyguard. We found out that every bookstore we went to in six cities stocked identical product. It tells you common sources, common pathways of distribution, equals organized crime. I found John C. Holmes to be a yahoo. Last time I saw him alive was at a porno convention in Chicago or Las Vegas. He was riding around the convention hall on roller skates carrying a ballon which gave me some ideas about his mental capabilities at the time. He died of a heinous disease because of his propensities for having sex with thousands of women. I have absolutely no sympathy for John Holmes and his ilk. Pat Livingstone was hired as a clerk, just out of highschool, by the FBI in Miami. Excellent employee, hard worker, smart little guy. He was short, almost bald, bowlegged, had a lisp. But tough. Ran marathons. He joined the FBI's agent training school with Bruce Ellavsky who used to look like a movie star. Then in 1977, two Dade County detectives started their own undercover operation to nail pornographers. It got to be too big for them so they came to me to have the FBI take it over. We spent about $488,000 over two-and-a-half years on MIPORN. Patrick and Bruce came down to me in August of 1977 and I trained them. I told them who their targets should be. I told them not to ask for child porn, they'll know you're a cop. And don't pay $60 for a tape that you can get wholesale for $40. And after a few weeks, they went out. We had an electronics genius named Van Ryan who wired their office beautifullly with sound and video cameras. Livingstone and Ellavksy traveled the country for two-and-a-half years. They went to Hawaii to catch a child pornographer. He wound up leading guilty and got 20 years, the most substantial conviction we got. They made 20 trips to Los Angeles, staying first class. I would follow them to porno conventions to harass them and give them extra credibility with the underworld. If I had the opportunity in a hallway or a stairway with other pornographers watching, I would deliberately bump them in the shoulder and try to knock them down. And I'd say, 'You guys are from my hometown. I don't like pornographers from Miami.' They spent a lot of money on rented jewelry, apartments, buying drinks. Everybody took the bait except two pornographers in Palm Beach who were [Gambino family] associates. And these two guys said to Ellavsky and Livingstone, 'No way. You guys are either FBI agents or you're working for Kelly.' And they were right, but everybody else took the bait and sold obscenity to these guys because they were greedy. They could have made cases against 200 pornographers but ended up charging 55. I'll never forget one case. Two guys from San Francisco, one called Walter "Frenchy" Bagnall, also known as the Dirty Frenchman, and Larry Nelson. They were homosexual pornographers. [The two FBI agents] bought one 8mm 15-minute color film with no conversation, no sound. The title was so obscene I won't even tell you what it was. But the entire plot of this epic production consisted of a black dude, maybe about 35, inserting his fist, a cucumber and a Budweiser up a young white girl's vagina. Now we're prosecuting this in federal court in Miami and Marcella Cohen is the prosecutor, the finest federal prosecutor of obscenity in the history of the United States. How do you defend a movie like this before a jury largely composed of latin women who've never seen anything like this? You say it has serious scientific value - how much could be crammed into a young woman's vagina. The defense attorney Bob Smith brought in seven defense experts. One of the them was the finest looking 40-year old woman I'd seen in my life. She was a psychiatrist from Minneapolis. The defense attorney asks, 'Have you seen that film?' She says she's reviewed it several times thoroughly. 'In your opinion, does it have serious scientific value?' And she says, 'Not only does it have serious scientific value, it has serious educational value because it fulfills a fantasy of many women who would love to have that done to them. But to be more succinct, it has serious scientific value because it shows the extent to which a vagina can be stretched.' Our great prosecutor Marcella Cohen gets up. 'Only two questions. Are you married? [Yes.] Do you have kids? [Yes.] That's nice doctor. Just one further question. Is it or is it not true, madam, that the head of a baby is somewhat larger than a Budweiser beer can?' That's true. 'No further questions.' Jury gets the instructions. Fifteen minutes later they're back in. Guilty. We originally targeted over 100 figures for MIPORN but the Justice Department chickened out on us and made us reduce the number to 55. Forty nine were convicted. Ellavsky and Livingstone were praised to high heaven as the heroes of the operation, which they were. They lived in constant danger for a long time. Ellavsky went to Boston. All of us could tell Livingstone was mentally disturbed. He was not the guy who went into MiPorn. He was aggravating. He would not answer calls. I had to mediate an almost fight fight between him and one of the prosecutors. He was off the edge from February, 1980. His undercover name was Pat Salamone. The FBI agent in charge of Louisville was told Livingstone was mentally affected by working undercover and he should never work undercover again. First thing when he gets there, an undercover assignment comes up and he volunteers for it. I would say Pat Livingstone became his undercover identity. In November of 1981, while on assignment in a suburb of Louisville, he shoplifted $150 worth of clothes while he had his four year old son in the parking in an FBI car. When he was arrested and the police took him away, he gave them his name Pat Salamone. That destroyed his credibility for the MIPORN cases. We had a four day hearing with Judge Spellman about Livingstone and his credibility, and Pat wouldn't give the judge a straight answer. The judge would say, 'When you went into that department store and was arrested, were you Pat Salamone or Pat Livingstone?' And Pat would say, 'Oh gee, I don't know, your honor. I could've been this. I could've been that.' The judge finally gave up and said, 'Well, all of your credibility is gone.' We had to re-indict all 55 defendants just based on the testimony of Bruce Ellavsky. As far as I know, Pat Livingstone never fully recovered. His life and that of his family was destroyed. He was finally given a mental disability by the labor department and trained to be a polygraph operator. When you're dealing with people in the Gambino and Colombo families, you're naturally in danger. These guys will kill you, along with some of the California people. They [Livingstone and Ellavsky] were travelling, always in dangerous situations where they would go face to face with some of these dangerous hoodlums. They couldn't carry their guns with them when they're going to meet these people. Every place they went, they'd rent two apartments or rooms. They would have an undercover room in one hotel and an FBI room in the other hotel. One thing the pornographers tried to do was stick prostitutes on them as favors. That would be terribly embarrassing if it turned out in court that these two guys were having sexual liasons with hookers that the pornographers gave them. Eventually they got two nice looking FBI lady agents, fortunately we had some at that time, to travel with these guys as their girlfriends. I saw these guys on the road and they played their parts to the hilt.
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