Gambino Mafia Family Lawyer Tries to Have Activist Fired (Letter #2)

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MIPORN By Luke Ford

On Valentine's Day, 1979, at noon (EDT), a synchronized force of 400 FBI agents swept into porno movie theaters, warehouses, retail stores and offices in 13 major U.S. cities, arresting many of the mob's biggest names in porn on federal obscenity and racketeering charges. Among the 58 persons arrested - 33 from California - were brothers Louis and Joseph C. Peraino - rounded up in the New York office of their company Arrow Film and Video. They were charged with interstate shipment of obscenity in the form of hardcore videos titled Candy Stripers, Liquid Lips, His Master's Touch and Hollywood Cowboy.

Michael Zaffarano was the one casualty. When officers arrived at his New York office, 58-year old "Mickey Z." suffered a heart attack and died on the spot, clutching a reel of pornographic film that the officers presume he was trying to destroy.

"We killed him for sure," said one policeman at the scene, "and we saved the taxpayers a lot of money."

Zaffarano's death created a power vacuum in organized crime's now international porn operations, touching off maneuvering among the main Mafia families for dominance of the sex trade. In November of 1981, Joseph S. Peraino, 55 years of age at the time, was wounded outside his Brooklyn home by men armed with 9-millimeter handguns. A member of the Colombo family, Joseph was one of the major figures behind Deep Throat.

On January 4, 1982, Joseph's competitors struck again, chasing him and his 31-year old son Joseph Jr. down a street in the residential section of Graesend in Brooklyn. The pursued men screeched to a halt at 431 Lake St. and ran up the stairs onto the front porch of a modest brick duplex. The Perainos pounded on the door seeking refuge until a barrage of gunfire cut them down. The father was seriously wounded in the buttocks and legs; the son was hit six times in the head and killed. An innocent bystander was also killed.

As Joseph S. Peraino lay bleeding, with his murdered son at his side, he refused to tell police who fired the shots, what kind of car they drove or which way they went.

For their convictions in the MIPORN case, Louis Peraino and Joseph C. Peraino received prison terms of six and three years. They were not charged with film piracy, even though police found at their Arrow offices more than 50 major Hollywood movies as well as equipment capable of reproducing them in quantity. The list of films confiscated included most of the box-office hits of the previous decade - Animal House, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Sting, Star Wars and The Godfather, Parts I and II.

Looking tired and short of breath, their father Anthony Peraino was sentenced that same month in Memphis to ten months in prison and $15,000 in fines for his original 1976 Deep Throat conviction and subsequent bail-jumping charge. After five years as a fugitive, the ailing Peraino family head turned himself in to authorities in 1981.

The shootings and convictions marked the end of the Perainos dominance in porn. As part of their sentence, the Perainos were supposed to abstain from all dealings in the masturbation business. They didn't. Instead, they hid their work through false names and dummy corporations.

MIPORN prosecutors convicted numerous pornographers such as Russ Hampshire and Walter Gernert for bootlegging legitimate movies and offering them on videocassettes. The mob forced the sale of pirated tapes through the video dealers they controlled. Movies such as Superman II, Star Wars, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, for example, made fortunes for the thieves who copied them and offered them for sale on tape. Another charge leveled was that since these men presumably controlled much of the video cassette distribution of adult films, they violently suppressed the pirating of their own films, such as Deep Throat or The Devil in Miss Jones. About 60 persons in porn have been knocked off by the mob since 1969.

The government gained convictions of 45 out of the 55 pornographers arrested in MIPORN through the effective work of Fort Lauderdale prosecutor Marcia Cohen. When she took time out to have a baby, a less competent prosecutor took over one of her cases, allowing Ken Guarino to escape conviction.

Prosecutors spent years trying those accused in the MIPORN investigation because of the superb lawyers the mobsters and pornographers could afford to hire. One example is Beverly Hills lawyer Elliot Abelson who represented the Perainos, Milton Luros and Reuben Sturman. Until 1971, he was an assistant district attorney for Los Angeles County before giving that up to earn the big bucks by defending pornographers.

"Certain parts of the country are uptight about porn," Abelson told Parade in 1979. "Even within states attitudes differ." Los Angeles is so tough that filmmakers moved to San Francisco where it verged on the impossible to convict anyone for anything. "Tucson is cool, Phoenix is hot. Dallas is hot, Houston is not. If you're in LA City, things are hot. If you're in LA County, they're not. And so it goes."

Abelson said the government's war against pornography cost it as much as $50 million a year. "There's no doubt that the attorneys defending pornography have had a tremendous advantage. The prosecutor must prove not only that the defendant did it, but also that what he did was wrong. Second, the attorneys defending porn have been doing it for a number of years, and that's all they do. I can try a pornography case without a note because I've done it so often. But I've come across so many prosecutors trying their first case who didn't know what they were doing. When the client has enough money to pay for expert witnesses, we win 90% of the cases." (Parade)

Undercover agent Michael Livingston's arrest in 1982 for shoplifting damaged his credibility on the witness stand and complicated the MIPORN prosecution.

"I've known Pat since he was an 18-year old clerk," says Bill Kelly. "Years of working undercover affected him as he began to model the gangsters he impersonated. Pat did a lousy job on the stand during the MIPORN cases, changing his stories and appearing shifty. That allowed six pornographers, including Sturman, to go free."

In 1981, David Friedman through an associate offered Kelly an office, expense account and $5000 a month to run the Mafia out of porn but Kelly refused, saying that he'd never work for a pornographer.

By 1983, Michael Wisotsky and his uncle Myron controlled between 500-700 peepshow machines in Southeast Florida, frequently located in adult bookstores that the Wisotsky's owned. The two men tried to thwart the MIPORN prosecution through attempted bribery of key witnesses.

Frightened by the MIPORN investigation, the adult industry toned down its product in the 1980s, eliminating rape, bondage and all forms of explicit violence from its hardcore sexvids. America has some of the toughest restrictions on sexually explicit materials in the world. They are largely self-imposed out of fear that raunchy product may bring obscenity convictions - a favorite method of the feds to get at the mobsters running porn - in culturally conservative areas of America such as Oklahoma City, Dallas, Tallahassee and Memphis.

Carlo Gambino's lieutenant, Ettore Zappi, charged with overseeing the Gambino's porn operation, died in 1986. Veteran wiseguy Natale Richichi took over his role.

After the Perainos fall from power, and the demise of Michael Zaffarano, the Mafia's main man in pornography became Robert DiBernardo, a long time partner with Mickey Z. A former member of the DeCavalcante family, DiBi joined the Gambinos in 1976.

Robert controlled Mike Thevis's operations. "Don't forget, Mike," a police wire-tap recorded DiBi saying when Thevis boasted of owning 90 per cent of the peep show machines in the country, "you manage the machines. The family is in charge."

DiBi met frequently with godfather Paul Castellano at his Todd Hill mansion - the highest location in New York City - on Staten Island. But while friendly with Paul to his face, behind his back, DiBi supported the ambitious drug dealer John Gotti.

"He [Paul Castellano] uses me," DiBi once said in a conversation bugged by the FBI. "He makes me look bad. Look at DiBi. He makes his money in pornography. Like he's some kind of high-and-mighty. Mr. Fucking Clean. Does it stop him from taking his cut? Sorry, Paul, you don't wanna touch those dollars - there's pussy on 'em. Ha! He'll take 'em anyway. He wants it both ways. Get paid. Act clean. My ass." (Boss of Bosses, p.238)

That the Gambino family's main men like DiBernardo talked bad about Paul Castellano back in 1983 gave the FBI an early warning that the godfather was in trouble. On December 16th, 1985, Castellano and his chauffeur were gunned down in a Mafia hit that led to the ascension of John Gotti.

Talking ill of the Gambino's next boss, John Gotti, ended DiBernardo's career.

In 1984, when Geraldine Ferraro was the Democrats vice presidential candidate, news broke that her businessman husband John Zaccaro managed a building in which a DiBernardo company leased space for its porn operation. Through her husband, Ferraro received $350,000 in rent from DiBernardo, which she used to finance her political campaigns.

In the mid-80s, after decade assembling a porn empire, Robert wanted to relax, he told friends and family. He gave his daughter a $15,000 gold watch and helped his youngest son become the first DiBernardo to graduate from college.

In 1985, after running out of appeals, DiBernardo faced a five-year prison sentence for his MIPORN conviction. Moreover, another federal investigation began to focus on his role in child pornography.

"Despite his troubles, DiBernardo was known within the Gambino organization as a ferocious money-earner, and he was entrusted with investing the organization's rich cut from the concrete industry bid-rigging scheme. That reputation for making money grow on trees led Gotti to promote him to capo shortly after taking over the family [early 1986], but almost at once, he realized his mistake. The problem was that DiBernardo... was skimming a good portion of the payoff money entrusted to his care, and building his own real estate portfolio, which by 1986 amounted to over four million dollars. Much worse, there were rumbles that DiBernardo had tried to deal his way out of his imminent prison sentence by attempting to become an FBI informant. And to top it all off, he was also reputed to be attempting to forge a secret partnership with the Genovese Family's New Jersey division. In sum, enough malfeasance for a death sentence. On June 5, 1986, DiBernardo and his white Mercedes disappeared. Men of the Westies, the eager gang of killers from Manhattan's West Side..." (Goombata p. 247-248)

DiBi's final mistake was not showing up to an important meeting of all capos at the Ravenite Club shortly after the bombing to death of Frankie DeCicco. Angered by the disrespect and tired of Robert running him down behind his back, Gotti ordered DiBernardo's assassination.

After DiBi's 1986 death, Richard Basciano, who had nothing to do with the assassination, ran the Mafia's New York-based porn businesses. Richard based his empire on his $15 million real-estate holdings, wrote Newsday 4/18/93. He owned Show World, New York's largest porn operation.

Public records filed since DiBi's death show that Basciano bought increased shares in 16 separate DiBernardo partnerships and corporations that make money from porn and real estate.

Video's emergence in the '80s changed the Mafia's porn role. No longer could the mob dominate distribution by simply running adult theaters and peep shows. Gotti and Basciano allowed businessmen without ties to the Mafia to move into retail stores. Immigrant entrepreneurs, particularly from Israel and Sri Lanka, multiplied X-rated video shops in New York neighborhoods from Greenwhich Village to Queens.

"It used to be if you wanted to open a sex shop you'd have to get permission," said William Daly of the Mayor's Office of Midtown Enforcement. "Now that the mob has lost muscle, they don't have control of the industry like they used to."

Daly estimates that New York City's mobbed up porn industry earned $160 million in 1992.

To increase his profits, Basciano leased his Times Square buildings to separate corporations under his control to carry the retail sale of X-rated tapes and toys. Richard's partners are veterans Theodore Rothstein and Nathan Grama, both of whom were convicted for Interstate Transportation of Obscenity in MIPORN. In 1986, Basciano was convicted of mail fraud.

In 1994, an Israeli porn shop owner told the New York Daily News: "Everything used to be owned by the Mafia. But in 1986 John Gotti let everybody in."

"The days of Mob influence are gone," claimed a Sri Lankan businessman. "There's no money in the business for them. Tapes used to be $100 each. Now they're selling for $3:99."

Father Dale Hansen, whose St. Luke's Lutheran Church on 46th Street in New York made the presence of several sex shops illegal thanks to new city zoning laws, will not be sorry to see pornographers leave his area. "They should go back to Sri Lanka and rape that country if they are going to do this [porn]."

Sri Lankans worked for the Mafia through the 1980s and moved into ownership when the Mafia left.

Already in wholesale electronics, porn enabled Israelis to diversify.

Many shop owners pay a direct tax to the mob and all of them buy their product from mobbed-up porn distributors such as General Video of America.

New York zoning law changes closed most of Times Square's sex shops in the mid '90s, but Basciano profited as always, selling many of his buildings to the City. Back in 1977, Show World received a $65,000 loan from the federal Small Business Administration. In 1989, officials with David Dinkins' mayoral campaign paid tens of thousands of dollars to rent office space from Richard.

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