One journalist who was willing to take on the new mobsters was Manuel de Dios Unanue. Born in Cuba, De Dios came to New York City in the early 1970s and became the crusading editor of El Diario–La Prensa, a New York City Spanish-language newspaper.
One of his targets was Hector Delgado, an Ecuadorian businessman and naturalized U.S. citizen who runs a string of travel agencies. In late 1990, Delgado was charged with running a money-laundering operation that funneled more than $200 million to Colombian drug cartels and with making $22 million in five years as his percentage—a profit margin that makes the Mafia’s criminal rackets look like chump change. Delgado pleaded guilty to “structuring,” circumventing a law requiring that a report be filed for cash transactions of $10,000 or more. He received probation and continues as a licensed money transmitter.
As the city’s newspapers routinely speculated on who might be next to take over a Mafia crime family, De Dios exposed a vast criminal network that the press had all but ignored. Even the police scarcely knew of the Nine Kings, a mysterious group of drug traffickers and money launderers who masquerade as businessmen. De Dios wrote about them.
Last March, De Dios was seated at the bar of a Spanish restaurant in Queens. Two gunmen walked into the restaurant. One pressed a gun to the back of De Dios’s head and pulled the trigger twice. The job was not bungled.
The blatant murder of a journalist is a relatively new phenomenon in the American underworld. The message it delivers is clear. In the new world order, society will not be allowed the courtesies accorded by Cosa Nostra’s quaint code of ethics, which supposedly left room for the concept of innocent victims. Whether or not mainstream journalists and lawmen have the moxie to face the new reality remains to be seen.
In the meantime, la famiglia continues its decline from criminal reality to cultural myth.
II.
AMERICAN DREAM,
AMERICAN NIGHTMARE
They say it’s all about the money. They are, of course, correct. In the United States of America, the profit motive is king. And don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. You especially know this is true when you see on television an extravagantly rich person—say, a Donald Trump—assure you that the choices they’ve made in life “are not about the money.” They are either self-delusional, or lying. Most likely they are lying. Not often does anyone get rich in America unless they submit to the overriding principle that it is all about the money.
That’s not to say there aren’t other factors. Sex, for instance. In the universe of ways to get rich in the United States, sex is right up there with narcotics in its promise of sensual pleasure, danger, thrills, status, and the big payoff. Or so it would seem.
Few ever mastered the art of getting rich through the marketing of sex with as much flair and success as Jim and Artie Mitchell. They seemed to have it all. In the 1970s, they parlayed their status as pioneers in the adult film industry into a multimillion-dollar business of which the crown jewel was the O’Farrell Theatre in San Francisco, a world-renowned sex emporium. They had endeared themselves with the Bay Area’s vibrant bohemian and libertarian elite. They were the Merry Pranksters of Porn, lovable rogues whose reputation as pornographers was softened by the fact they were businessmen who brought a sense of familial camaraderie to the craft of smut mongering. Then, older brother, Jim, shot and killed younger brother, Artie, and the fun-loving image of the Mitchell brothers curdled like an after-dinner treat left out in the open too long, until its essential ingredients had congealed and lost their appeal.
Long before I was sent by Esquire magazine to San Francisco to report on the shooting of Artie Mitchell, I knew of the brothers and their operations. I lived in San Francisco for ten months in 1984–1985, working as a security guard at the Embarcadero Center in the evenings while hustling for freelance journalism assignments during the day. I lived in the Mission District, which, at the time, was experiencing a huge influx of immigrants from Central America. My rent was reasonable, and I was able to subsist at a low level.
One night, with a couple friends from my job, I went to the O’Farrell Theatre. The place was an extravaganza of nudity and sexual illusion. I visited the New York Room, which was one of many rooms with different themes. The O’Farrell was basically a strip club, but the Mitchell brothers had found a way to make it feel like a three-ring circus. They also seemed to have a sense of history; the club was rooted in the world of burlesque and stripping as a legitimate cultural phenomenon that had begun in the 1880s, when San Francisco was known as the Barbary Coast, a netherworld of licentious diversions. The Mitchell brothers were part of a long and proud tradition.
Seven years after I visited the O’Farrell Theatre, in 1991, I was living in New York City, a published writer with a first book that had been selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year under my belt, a fact that carries some cache in the insular world of New York media. An editor from Esquire magazine—Bill Tonelli—contacted me and said he’d like to meet. We met for lunch. It was the kind of encounter of which there are dozens taking place on a daily basis in Manhattan—a writer and an editor meeting and getting to know each other. Tonelli asked me what, if anything, I was working on. I mentioned that I was considering doing a book on the O’Farrell Theatre in San Francisco. It would not be a crime book or a book about the porn business, per se, but rather a sex-positive book that encompassed a year in the life of a remarkable establishment. Tonelli thought it was a splendid idea for a book. We said good-bye to each other and expressed the desire to work together at some point down the road.
Within days of my lunch with the Esquire editor, I was off to San Francisco to meet the Mitchell brothers. Already, I’d had a phone conversation with Jim Mitchell and told him of my interest in doing a book on the O’Farrell Theatre. He was open to the idea. “Come on out,” he said. “We’ll show you around the place.”
On my first day at the O’Farrell Theatre, after meeting Jim and Artie, I could see something was wrong. Contrary to my previous conversation with Jim, he had no intention of allowing anyone into the inner sanctum of their business operations in the way I was suggesting. I’d been told the brothers were feuding, and it was obvious from the tension whenever they were in the same room that there was a bad energy loose within the universe of the Mitchell brothers. I returned to New York disappointed that my idea for a book was not going to materialize. Then, less than a week later, I got a call from a mutual friend of the brothers and mine.
“Did you hear what happened?” he asked.
“What.”
“Last night, Jim shot and killed Artie.”
Later that same day, the editor Tonelli called me and said with some urgency, “We want you to go back out there and do a piece on the shooting.”
This was not the story I had intended to write about the Mitchell brothers. Tonelli said that Esquire was going to assign someone to write the story; if it weren’t me, it would be someone else. I felt that it was my obligation as a journalist to take the assignment.
On the surface, Jim and Artie had achieved the American Dream. Their business ventures made them rich and famous beyond their wildest expectations. But the success they found in the American marketplace could not overcome the structural flaws in their relationship. In the end, the pressures of the porn business may have had less to do with their demise than the more primal strictures of blood and family.
For some, the level of success achieved by the Mitchell brothers represents a world beyond dreaming, something to be viewed in movies and on television, where riches and sensual pleasures abound, and “reality” is a fungible concept squeezed into thirty-minute time slots, with false narratives, fake survival games, and the illusory promise of fame and fortune.
In the early 1990s, the Asian community in New York City and elsewhere in the United States was in the throes of trauma. The 1989 uprising in Tiananmen Square in the People’s Republic of China, which led to the massacre of citizen protestors by the Chinese military, set o
ff a wave of undocumented migration from Asia. New York City was on the receiving end of a massive influx. Many of these desperate, undocumented immigrants resorted to using organized crime syndicates to smuggle them halfway across the world into the United States. Once they arrived, they were indebted to the smuggling overlords and at the mercy of gangsters. Representing the lowest rung on the ladder of assimilation, to this struggling generation of migrants the full measure of the American Dream as experienced by, say, the Mitchell brothers, was about as likely as a trip into outer space.
Over a five-year period, I covered criminal activities in Chinatown as if it were my regular beat. I wrote a book, Born to Kill (1995), about the arrival on the scene of a Vietnamese gang, and also a number of articles mostly from the point of view of people in the community who were being exploited and victimized. The underworld activity was made more insidious by the fact that the New York Police Department didn’t have much of a grasp on what was happening in Chinatown, and the media was generally indifferent, except to occasionally report on gang shootings and violent extortions in the most sensationalized way possible.
I cultivated sources and pitched many story ideas to magazines during this period and encountered mostly a lack of interest. The media in general was far more interested in nostalgia for the Mafia, a story then centered around the prosecution of Mafia boss John Gotti, than they were about a contemporary crime phenomenon that was having a traumatizing impact on an entire generation of immigrants. The Village Voice was the only media outlet I could find that offered the opportunity to address some of these issues with the kind of depth and complexity that was required.
The final piece in this section is an article I wrote for the op-ed page of the New York Times upon news of the death of George Whitmore Jr. I got to know George while researching and writing The Savage City (2011). Whitmore’s ordeal was a significant part of that book’s narrative structure. I am still touched by having known George Whitmore, still outraged by what he experienced in his life, and will forever be astounded by how many citizens are blind to the racism and injustice that infects the U.S. criminal justice system on a daily basis.
The pursuit of the American Dream is a potent opiate, both a powerful motivational elixir, with potentially hallucinogenic qualities, but also a disease-ridden whore. It is a journey that can lead to astounding levels of achievement and success, or result in marginalization, exploitation, and the destruction of the human spirit. In the desire to reach the promised land of acceptance as a fully endowed citizen of the commonwealth, or to attain material comfort and/or prosperity, some will make it, and some will not. Whether striving at the highest levels of attainment or down at the bottom wallowing in the mud, the desire to survive and thrive is a harvest that occasionally bears the same bitter fruit: dead bodies.
1.
CAIN AND ABEL IN THE SKIN TRADE
Esquire, June 1991
Jim and Artie Mitchell were sexual revolutionaries, rich hippie pornographers, San Francisco righteous dudes, brothers to the end.
In a city accustomed to spectacular endings—where ritualistic cult killings, political assassinations, savage whims of God, and run-of-the-mill urban mayhem have all been absorbed into the local lore—it was still a shocker. PORN KING SLAIN, BROTHER ARRESTED read the headline in the February 28 San Francisco Chronicle. Outside the Bay Area, the shooting of one pornographer by another might not have elicited much surprise. It is generally a sleazy business, the common wisdom goes, where guns and indecency are standard issue. But here, at least, the Mitchell brothers and their theater had done a great deal to dispel the stereotypes.
A career such as theirs could have started only in San Francisco, and only in that adventurous, gentle time immediately following the Summer of Love. Certainly, there is no other place in America where a pair of pornographers would have been seen so indulgently; the brothers were, to many, simply very naughty boys who provided a bit of local color and controversy. Even along the licentious avenues of New York City, no such quarter would be extended to smut mongers—no tour buses would deposit foreign visitors at Times Square’s peep shows, as they did at the Mitchell brothers’ establishment.
In the years since the late 1960s, Jim and Artie presided over a burgeoning empire that extended far beyond their city’s boundaries. Beginning with their production of Behind the Green Door, the landmark 1972 skin flick starring Marilyn Chambers, the Mitchell brothers’ name became widely synonymous with “quality,” at least to the extent that such a thing existed at all in the business. They made dozens more movies over the years and opened a half dozen sex-show emporiums in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The flagship of their empire, the O’Farrell Theatre, is located in one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods, but its outer walls are adorned with elaborate, colorful murals depicting jungle and underwater scenes. Inside, the plush red carpets, cleanliness, and state-of-the-art lighting and sound equipment are a far cry from the dreary, sticky-floored porn parlors found in most cities.
While the performers strutted their stuff in the various showrooms downstairs, upstairs in the office, Jim, Artie, and a collection of friends and colleagues could usually be found drinking beer, shooting pool, hatching all kinds of outlaw schemes. The Mitchell brothers’ coterie included an assortment of celebrated counterculture types, such as the late Black Panther leader Huey Newton and writer Hunter S. Thompson. On the wall above his desk, Jim had a framed letter from Abbie Hoffman, thanking the brothers for their generosity during a visit to the theater in the 1970s.
A number of book ideas to document this unusual empire have been hatched, including one by Thompson, who spent almost a year at the O’Farrell ostensibly working as the night manager. (His book has yet to be published, but those close to the theater remember his months there as one of the O’Farrell’s more ribald periods.) The brothers’ circle also included Warren Hinckle, the rabble-rousing, eye-patch-wearing newspaper columnist. Hinckle figured prominently in the theater’s most celebrated bust, the 1985 arrest of Marilyn Chambers for allegedly allowing a customer the privilege of “digital” penetration during her striptease act. Over the next week, Hinckle wrote a series of articles ridiculing the police department, which had used thirteen officers and a dozen or so backups to arrest the unarmed—and unclothed—porn queen. Hinckle’s columns touched off public outrage, not at the brothers but at the police.
So I wasn’t the first journalist to be seduced by the goings-on at the theater. In mid-February, I arrived in San Francisco to spend the better part of a week with Jim and Artie, in hopes of writing a book at some point on them and their operation. Jim had read and liked The Westies, a book I’d written about a group of Irish gangsters in New York City. Earlier we’d talked on the phone a few times; he seemed open to the idea of my spending time there and writing about them. “I have to check this out with my brother, Artie,” he said, “but, yeah, come on out.”
The last time I saw Artie Mitchell was in the middle of the afternoon, and he was rolling a joint. Carefully. The city had been suffering through one of those periodic dry spells when the gourmet herb that grows in nearby Humboldt County had yet to be harvested. Since Artie had a reputation as something of a connoisseur, he wasn’t about to waste the last of his stash. It was a tight, lean joint.
The office at the O’Farrell Theatre, the brothers’ base of operations since the day it opened in 1969, is up a flight of stairs. In the center of the room is a pool table. An old jukebox stands against one wall. A refrigerator in the corner is usually stocked with beer, and a selection of newspaper clippings relating to the theater have been framed and hung haphazardly around the room. Most conspicuous, though, is a bank of six surveillance monitors that dominates one wall. One of the monitors constantly reveals a gathering of nude and partially clad women lounging in a dressing room down the hall.
Even though he had precious little marijuana left that afternoon, Artie passed his joint around the office without hesitation. Wi
th his scraggly brown beard and equally unkempt shoulder-length hair (a baseball cap hid the fact that he was as bald as a Kojak on top), forty-five-year-old Artie cut a raffish figure. He usually had a mischievous glint in his eyes, in keeping with his nickname, Party Artie.
Jim, on the other hand, though he possessed a gentle voice and gracious manner, seemed stern next to his brother. At forty-seven, he, too, was bald on top, but his remaining hair was neatly trimmed and starting to gray. Though he presented himself more conservatively than Artie, the family resemblance was strong. In the early years, when both wore glasses and mustaches, they looked like twins.
It was Artie who gave me an upstairs tour of the theater, gleefully taking me down hallways and around corners, past seemingly oblivious naked performers.
From the rafters, where the light and the audio technicians were positioned, we could see inside the New York Room, where a dancer shimmied her way down a long stage that reached out into the audience, a rather traditional strip act. The Ultra Room was set up like a nightclub, with customers sitting at tables in front of a semicircular stage. The curtain opened to reveal a shower, where five women hosed and fondled one another, then walked out into the audience dripping-wet. Elsewhere in the theater, in the Kopenhagen Lounge, customers sat in the dark with red flashlights, which they shone on the performers as they danced and simulated sex acts.
Back in the office, Artie reached into the refrigerator and pulled out a nonalcoholic beer. When I asked why, he replied, “They say I’m an alcoholic. They say I’ve got a problem.” He took a hit off a joint and held the smoke there in his lungs. There had been a touch of sarcasm in his voice. Jim, perhaps sensing something in his brother’s tone, suddenly excused himself from the room.
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