Kevin Chiles: Penthouse Interview

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Legendary Harlem hustler Kevin Chiles rose to prominence during the 1980s crack era. Busted at the height of the U.S. government’s “War on Drugs” in the early nineties, Chiles took the feds to trial twice. When the juries couldn’t reach decisions, mistrials were declared. But with federal prosecutors escalating their targeting of family and friends, Chiles eventually pleaded out to a ten-year sentence and was sent to prison to do his time.

It was during his incarceration years, in the belly of the beast, that Chiles founded Don Diva magazine, the outlaw’s bible.

Every issue features stories on infamous gangsters and street figures from the urban underworld. After getting locked up, Chiles could have rested on his street cred and let his legend reverberate through the chronicles of hip-hop lore. But he’s always been driven, and once he got his idea, he vowed to make Don Diva happen.

The magazine’s twist is that it interviews its subjects — many of them serving life sentences for their crimes — straight from the penitentiary. Its writers uncover stories you don’t see in mainstream news outlets, and Don Diva has an insider understanding of the world it chronicles. Chiles got out of prison in January 2004, and the magazine he founded from a cell block 20 years ago is still going strong.

Chiles and his wife Tiffany, who’s helped him run Don Diva since the start, have turned their enterprise into a thriving lifestyle brand complete with a highly trafficked website, a clothing line, DVDs, concert promotions, and books. The quarterly publication itself has been featured in the Washington Post, New York Times, VICE, and Huffington Post.

Penthouse sat down with Chiles to find out just how big he got during the eighties, who his contemporaries were, and what the Harlem drug-game was like back then. We also wanted to hear about his experience being thrown into the criminal justice machinery, his time in federal prison, and the tragic way his own mother got caught up in the chaos — subjects he’s retraced in a book he recently wrote about his life, called The Crack Era: The Rise, Fall & Redemption of Kevin Chiles.

What was it like growing up in the Bronx?

The Bronx is the birthplace of hip-hop. But prior to every urban kid having dreams of escaping the ’hood using two turntables and a microphone, most aspired to leave through hoop dreams or selling drugs. It didn’t feel like there were many other options available. In 1975, New York City was facing an economic crisis — it was nearly bankrupt. Basic city services like garbage pickup were suspended. You can only imagine how much less urgent it was for the city to address issues in predominantly black and Hispanic areas. Much of the Bronx was dilapidated, with burned-out, abandoned buildings. High crime rates made it feel like the concrete jungle was in irreversible decline. The hopelessness many New Yorkers felt was exponentially greater in forgotten areas like the Bronx,Harlem, and much of Brooklyn.

You were out there working, hustling, early on, right?

I started packing grocery bags around the age often in the local supermarket. I also offeredto carry bags for women and older people up to the tenements. I may have only made $20 to $30 dollars on weekends, but that money I gave my mom really made a difference, particularly when it came to food.One of my next hustles was selling and delivering the Sunday newspaper. I would buy a stack, sell them, then run back and buy more as needed. Sometimes, I was lucky enough to occasionallyswipe some if I caught the truck dropping them off early in the morning. My little contributions were helping, whichmeant my mother no longer had to ask for credit as often from the corner store. I also had a few bucks in my pocket for the first time, and I liked it.

You eventually started hustling drugs. What was it like at your peak?

For several years, I was netting around $300K weekly, with the bulk of the money coming from D.C., and the rest from New York. I was in my early twenties and you really couldn’t tell me anything. Everyone down with me was getting real money, living in homes and condos, driving luxury cars, rocking the latest fashions and jewels, living the high life. They were all bosses in their own rights. The crack generation got rid of all drug protocol. Previously, you had the manufacturers of heroin in Asia essentially going through wholesale distributors, aka the Italian Mafia. The Mafia had established distribution centers and retailers — aka the urban blacks they worked with.

Cocaine distribution initially started out the same. However, as Colombian drug cartels started to see America’s appetite for cocaine and expanded the market — initially through Dominicans — at some point they realized they didn’t need the Mafia to distribute its products. They needed us, in our neighborhoods, as much as we needed them, and that protocol and pipeline that had dictated how drugs were essentially distributed in America was gone. If you lived on a block, you could open up shop.It was like a flea market.

Who were your contemporaries back then?

When I first started there were a few crews in Harlem that held the top spot, including one led by Azie Faison. In 1987, Azie was shot and nearly killed, and effectively out of the game. Rich Porter and Alpo were also contemporaries. Crusader Rob and the Rutledge brothers were affiliated with me. Billy Guy was someone I knew growing up in the Bronx who attained kingpin status in Baltimore in the heroin trade.

I wasn’t limited to Harlem. My time in Washington, D.C., paralleled and then exceeded Rayful Edmond’s. I was in one part of town, the Southeast, while he was in the Northeast. Other New York City contemporaries included Supreme and Fat Cat in Queens, Domencio Benson in Brooklyn, and Fritz, who was known as the Consignment King.

What else can you say about the late-eighties drug game?

Initially, things were great in Harlem. It was young guys hustling, posturing for the top spot, motivated as much by taking care of our families as we were by getting girls and having fun. Unfortunately, a madness overtook the less than four square miles that make up Harlem. The limited territory eventually led to battles over real estate. Cats getting money were increasingly having to defend themselves against stickup crews and kidnappers. Groups like Preacher’s Crew, Young Guns, and the Lynch Mob had a reputation for robbing, killing, and extorting, as well as drug dealing. Those crews sometimes became targets, too.

Selling drugs on a major level was essentially a full-time gig, and when you were committed to everything else that came with the fast pace of living the life, most of us did not see beyond the immediate. We lived our lives in dog years. To say it was fast-paced probably undersells the drama and events one day could hold. Add to that the fact that our lives, our freedom in the streets, had such a short-term expectancy and you could further understand why so many in my generation never planned for the future. This included not buying real estate and establishing legitimate businesses.

All that money, competition, limited turf — what did it do to the scene?

It created anarchy, renegades, and increased drama. Violence, kidnapping, and murders always existed in the drug game, but back in the day, with Nicky Barnes, Guy Fisher, and even my uncle, people knew they were robbing an organization. Within those organizations, the Mafia was usually seen as a party determined to protect its distribution network. So guys had to pick and choose who to rob or they would face immediate consequences.

Once that order was gone, it was a lot easier to rob individuals. There were no rules, and the younger generation and up-and-coming hustlers didn’t really fear the repercussions. It was like Lord of the Flies on steroids.

The increasingly violent environment effectively lead to a type of arms race, where having the most guns, and the biggest guns, along with a big crew, was deemed to serve as a form of deterrence. We took arming ourselves to excessive heights. Our stash houses were stockpiled with so many weapons and body armor you might have thought we were a private militia training to overthrow a Central American nation. Every day, we prepared to fight. The enemy may have even been unknown, but the playing field had become so deadly and unpredictable that you were forced to adapt or fall prey to it.

Can you talk about what happened with your mother?

My mother, Barbara Chiles, along with two other women, Rita Faulk and Sarray Watson, were all tied and bound, before being shot in the head. Sarray was the only survivor. Sarray was visiting Rita Faulk in the Fordham Road section of the Bronx. As she was coming out of a building, she and Rita were accosted by three guys with guns. They took them back into the building and up to the roof and robbed them of all their jewelry and money. But the robbers weren’t done. They piled into Sarray’s car and another car followed them. She directed them to my mother’s place. They waited for my mother to arrive home from work, and once she did, they used Sarray to access my mother’s apartment.

My mother was killed by cowards. If they wanted me, I wasn’t hard to find. I was usually at my store, BOSS Sneakers, on 125th Street in Harlem. There was neither money nor drugs in my mom’s house. These cowards shot three women, murdering two in cold blood. Two beautiful souls died, literally for nothing. My mother’s murder was another loud declaration that we were dealing with a different kind of savage in the crack era, who followed no rules or code of ethics. Maybe I’d watched too many Mafia movies in my life, but civilians — women, children, and families — were supposed to be left out of our affairs. As for my emotions, they were overwhelming and contradictory.

Sadness and despair were being drowned out by rage, mixed in with guilt and remorse. I felt responsible for what happened. I wanted blood on my hands and needed vengeance. I wasn’t thinking rationally. I know I attended her wake, but I don’t have any distinct memories of being there, talking to anyone, or taking part in any of its planning. Revenge was the only planning I can even recall because I was in a daze, mixed with denial. Having someone you love taken from you violently is even harder than other forms of death, like disease, accident, etc. None of it is easy, but people taken from you prematurely and violently carries a different kind of burden and pain.

What happened to the killers?

I had the word out and endless resources in place to locate these individuals. Shortly after the murders, I received news

that they fled the city. My searching for them never ceased, even as the incident and the offenders were featured on America’s Most Wanted.

Chiles in Dapper Dan Louis Vuiton jacket, 1998
Chiles in Dapper Dan fur coat, 1998
Chiles and his wife Tiffany, 1999

Two of them were apprehended by law enforcement. At some point, I got word the third coward was deceased, but I have no idea of the circumstances behind his death. I didn’t attend or participate in the trials, but I knew they were convicted and sentenced to 60-plus years for each murder, to run consecutively. Many may have taken solace in some form of justice taking place. That wasn’t the case for me. Nothing would have denoted justice for the loss, and the only thing that would have taken even a distant second was me as judge, jury, and executioner.

How did the flow of drug profits into Harlem’s economy change life for residents?

The positive economic effects of the era extended well beyond people being able to buy boosted goods at a discount, or purchase TVs and VCRs on the cheap from a crackhead. There were families being fed and clothed. There were people that never had cars or taken a trip finally having the means and opportunity. Much of the money was contained and spent in the ’hood. Grocery stores, cleaners, restaurants, car washes, clothing stores, barber shops, and beauty shops flourished. None of us ever benefited from any trickle-down effects of Reaganomics, but the community definitely benefited from the money being made and spent from the crack trade.

The money was intoxicating. And while it came with a price, none of us were going to turn it down. Once the violence started becoming a regular thing, me and my crew began not only carrying weapons at all times, but wearing bulletproof vests and sometimes even bulletproof hats as well. Instead of changing our mind-set and environment, we just adapted to the madness. We would rather have been caught with our weapons than without. With my crew, there was a true structure with order and a hierarchy. We moved in precision and with a purpose. One for all, all for one.

We were a tight, insulated group, and this is what increased our chances of staying safe from foes, as well as from law enforcement. There was a true bond, a real brotherhood. We were willing to give and risk our lives for one another — we were each our brother’s keeper.

There were a bunch of warring factions during this time as well. Many of those at war had at one time been really close friends and down with each other before beefing. The fallout and deaths from the various wars within our world helped define the landscape of that era.

Chiles and Tiffany, 2009
Chiles in Hot 97’s NYC studio, 2017

How’d you get busted, and what happened after that?

It was November 1994. When I was arrested, I was on the cusp of signing a major distribution deal for my music company, BOSS Records. I had quit hustling two years prior, and though I knew I was being followed, I did not overly worry about any investigation since all my energies were directed toward my numerous legitimate businesses. Nonetheless, the government wasn’t going to let me go in peace. I was arrested under the federal kingpin statutes, which held mandatory life sentences. But I was more surprised that the vast majority of my 21 codefendants were family members who had no drug ties, and not the numerous others who I had done actual business with over the years.

Chiles and his mother Barbara at his high school graduation, 1984 Chiles and his mother Barbara at his high school graduation, 1984

Over the course of a two-year investigation and more than 8,500 taped conversations, my arrest did not include one piece of evidence that suggested I was selling drugs. However, the charges against so many of my family members and acquaintances showed me the government’s strategy. They were trying to force a plea or cooperation from me with the threat of incarcerating my loved ones, despite the fact that they never had any role in the drug game other than benefiting from my generosity. Despite these threats, I took two cases to trial, where both resulted in mistrials: eight-four and ten-two in my favor. When it was all said and done, I was sentenced to 120 months.

As much as I was reluctant to take the plea for ten years, I have to admit that once it was done, I actually felt relieved.

Can you elaborate on this reaction?

Fighting for my liberty every day for nearly three years, while also trying to keep my immediate family out of jail and continue to financially support my women and kids, was exhausting. I was on a roller coaster of emotions with every small victory countered by a devastating setback. The plea wasn’t the resolution I had hoped for, but at least it meant the uncertainty was over. I’d grown wiser during the process. I could never be the old me. I’d gotten a front-row seat to racism and classism, and how power affects policy and all of our lives. Systemic injustices aren’t just catchphrases used by civil rights leaders and militants, they’re part of the everyday fabric for people of color.

It was clear to me the government didn’t play fair. Since I took a plea, it allowed the government to seize the money, stocks, insurance policies, jewelry, cars, and my house, which they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to. It was clear all the government wanted were convictions. I was initially labeled a “kingpin,” but I ended up pleading out to possession and the sale of seven kilos of coke with no codefendants. I treated jail like it was my last two years of high school. I was simply doing what I had to do. The wants were the same, which was ultimately getting the fuck out and getting back to the streets.

Clearly, I was no longer a teenager doing teenage things, but this was probably the first time since high school I was forced to do things I did not want to. I really looked at jail as something I needed to just get through until I could resume life again.A year after my plea, I went from a low-security facility to a federal camp. My time in the low-security facility was mostly uneventful. However, when they sent me to the camp, it was like putting a fox in the chicken coop. Camp had so many less restrictions that it actually opened up a whole new set of issues for me, because it was clearly in my nature to fully exploit these circumstances. My instincts and nature led to acommissary hustle that netted anywhere from $1,000 to $2,500 a week. Additionally, while conjugal visits were not permitted, my youngest was conceived while I was at the camp. I have alwaysfound a way to match my will.

What are you doing now, and what are your future plans?

Nearly two years ago, I did an interview with Funkmaster Flex on one of the biggest radio shows in the country, Hot 97 in New York. A friend and attorney subsequently reached out. I’d previously discussed doing a book project on my life, but I never felt comfortable with the timing. With some initial reluctance, I began writing The Crack Era: The Rise, Fall & Redemption of Kevin Chiles. The book became a labor of love and therapy, one I’m proud to have the chance to share with the public. Its completion coincides with the Don Diva twentieth anniversary. The book’s release, potential TV deals, and other opportunities are the culmination of many years and hard work, and I’m excited about this next chapter in my journey.

Seth Ferranti is a former federal prisoner whose writings have been featured on VICE, Don Diva, and Gorilla Convict. He’s also the author of the crime series Street Legends, and the comic series Crime Comix.

YouTube Tightrope

Posted on by Team Penthouse

This past June, an odd hashtag shot to No. 1 on Twitter and YouTube trending tabs. #VoxAdpocalypse, it read. Circulated by conservatives and libertarians, along with some less politically driven social media users wary of internet policing, the tag referenced a demonetization controversy on Google-owned YouTube. Demonetization — meant to modify a user’s behavior and keep the platform advertiser-friendly — is when the company removes ad-placement capability on a channel, denying its creator a share of ad revenue.

In this case, the #VoxAdpocalypse firestorm began when YouTube demonetized the channel of conservative comic and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder, host of Louder With Crowder, for repeated mocking and insulting of a Vox Media journalist, Carlos Maza, in ways the company judged offensive enough to violate its terms of service.

The hashtag got a boost from Crowder himself, whose YouTube show reached well over three and a half million people, and whose Twitter account had 900K followers. Its rise was also helped by figures like Texas senator Ted Cruz, who posted two tweets sharply critical of the video-hosting platform on June 6, the day the hashtag blew up. That same day, the popular podcaster, columnist, and Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro also issued angry tweets and on-air comments regarding the Crowder demonetization.

Crowder’s channel wasn’t the only one to get demonetized, which meant other channel creators, and their followers, took to social media to express dismay and criticize the company. Under attack from the left for the way it was handling channels trafficking in hate speech, bigotry, incitement, and extremist recruitment, YouTube had decided to more vigorously enforce its community guidelines. Demonetizing a significant number of channels (we don’t know the exact number) was one of the steps it took that early-June week.

Unsurprisingly, there were some implementation glitches. These missteps led to more outcries on social media, and more propellant for the hashtag. For example, a history teacher’s channel got mistakenly demonetized because his content included archival video of Hitler’s speeches, and keywords in its descriptive text created pings in YouTube’s algorithmic dragnet. Sweeping its platform for possible neo-Nazi content, the company had flagged the educational site as pro-Hitler. Alerted, YouTube restored monetization.

The scale of the ad-removal operation accounts for the hashtag’s doomsday pun. But the fact that #VoxAdpocalypse remained at the top of trending tabs throughout June 6, and stayed trending for days, speaks to the way the controversy intersected with matters of weighty cultural and political consequence: the power of Big Tech, online freedom, the role of the media, media fairness, the reach of digital advertising, and the ongoing conflict between political correctness and conservatism. In no way dampening the furor, some of those who used the hashtag in social media posts argued that free speech was at issue, too, and deployed language like “censorship,” “Big Brother,” and even “Stalinism.”

Senator Cruz himself raised the specter of censorship in a tweet sent to his 3.3M followers. Without getting into the nuances of how far this term actually applied in the Crowder case, which involved not government suppression of political speech, but rather a private company enforcing its policies, the Harvard Law grad referenced a notorious English court synonymous with secrecy, abuse of power, and lack of due process in a post retweeted 12.5M times: “YouTube is not the Star Chamber — stop playing God & silencing those voices you disagree with. This will not end well.”

Cruz’s tweet had a hashtag, too: #LouderWithCrowder.

The #VoxAdpocalypse brouhaha became a flashpoint for conservatives worried about social media platforms taking steps that might impact the reach of conservative online messaging, organizing, and voter outreach going into the 2020 elections and beyond. Crowder, they argued, was a casualty of political correctness gone wild, a victim of left-wing mob hysteria, and a clear illustration of a Big Tech bias against conservatives.

Cruz himself accused YouTube of a double standard, suggesting, with references to progressive comedians Samantha Bee and Jim Carrey, that the company treated media personalities on the left one way, and right-leaning figures another. As Cruz framed it, line-crossing liberal comics faced no consequences, but a conservative comic like Crowder got punished. In a June 6 tweet that outperformed even his Star Chamber post, racking up 15M retweets, the 2016 presidential hopeful tweeted, “This is nuts. YouTube needs to explain why [Crowder] is banned, but [Bee] (“Ivanka is a feckless c***.”) & [Carrey] (“look at my pretty picture of Gov. Kay Ivey being murdered in the womb”) aren’t.

No coherent standard explains it. Here’s an idea: DON’T BLACKLIST ANYBODY.”

Replies to the senator’s tweet pointed out that Crowder hadn’t been banned or blacklisted, but Cruz had made his point, and in a fiery way that works well on social media.

FOR all the online thunder and lightning, and the high-stakes issues raised by the controversy, #VoxAdpocalypse got its start in a situation no bigger than a mostly verbal conflict between two people, the battle waged via YouTube and Twitter, and featured schoolyard-style name-calling and mocking delivered by one of the participants. It began, that is, with one online political media figure deciding to get personal — very personal — about another online political media figure on the opposite side of the ideological divide.

The conservative combatant — Crowder — is better known, with a wider audience, than his counterpart, Maza.

Detroit-born, 32 years old, Crowder was raised in Montreal by born-again Christian parents and practiced sexual abstinence until he was married. Deeply conservative on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, he once wrote a column for the Fox News website arguing against premarital sex. Sample lines: “While we’re on the subject, has the whole floozy shtick really empowered any women out there?…Then again, what do I know? I’m just a young, sexless, STD-free-moron in love.”

After dropping out of Vermont’s Champlain College to pursue acting and stand-up comedy, Crowder was hired by Fox News in 2009 at age 22. Quick-witted, articulate, presentable, and comfortable before a camera, Crowder had come to the attention of the network on the strength of satire-laced political videos he posted on conservative websites and on YouTube. Crowder worked for Fox News until 2013, when the network dropped him for unspecified reasons, though some reports suggested his caustic humor had crossed lines.

These days, this former emcee at the annual conference of conservative activists and politicians known as CPAC (short for Conservative Political Action Committee) is affiliated with Blaze Media, a Texas-based media company — a conservative Vox, you might say — formed in 2018 following a merger between the Glenn Beck-founded pay-TV site TheBlaze, and the website Conservative Review, established by talk-radio pundit Mark Levin.

Carlos Maza, 31, is the Miami-raised son of Cuban immigrants. He’s the host of a Vox Media show, Strikethrough, that airs on YouTube. The show analyzes media coverage in the age of Trump, and frequently dissects Fox News stories on the Trump White House and conservative policy initiatives. In an April installment of Strikethrough called “Why Tucker Carlson Pretends to Hate Elites,” Maza pointed out that Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson — the Fox News host’s full name — is the stepson of an heiress to the Swanson frozen-food empire, a silver-spoon graduate of an elite boarding school, and a guy who became known for wearing bow ties as a young man. Then Maza played an audio clip of Carlson discussing his wealth and upbringing on a Florida radio show in 2008. “I’m extraordinarily loaded from money I inherited,” Carlson tells the show’s host, known as Bubba the Love Sponge. “I’ve never needed to work…. I’m an out-of-the-closet elitist. I don’t run around pretending to be a man of the people. I’m absolutely not a man of the people, at all.”

And yet, Maza detailed, Carlson continually bashes elites — liberal elites and coastal elites, especially — on his weekday prime-time show, and pushes populism.

As the Vox journalist’s Twitter bio makes clear, Maza is no fan of Carlson: “Marxist pig. Tucker Carlson is a white supremacist and YouTube profits from hate speech.

IG: gaywonk.” Maza’s Twitter handle,

@gaywonk, also foregrounds his sexuality.

And Crowder is no fan of Maza. For the past two years, the YouTube conservative had been delivering what he called “rebuttals” in response to Strikethrough videos. Crowder would vigorously object, for example, when Maza argued that conservative outlets like Fox News and Blaze are so politically partisan their reportage verges on propaganda.

In his rebuttals, smiling, and to laughter from show colleagues, Crowder frequently moved from argument to insult, calling Maza an “angry little queer,” a “gay Mexican,” and “Mr. Lispy Queer from Vox.” Using the tone of a comic delivering a joke, Crowder also referred to Maza as a “flamer” and “anchor baby.”

Pitching his voice high, mimicking Maza’s hand motions, he sometimes adopted a caricatured gay voice to amplify the mocking. One day he pretended to fellate his desk microphone, while referencing the Vox journalist. He also wore a “Socialism is for fags” T-shirt. Addressing his nemesis, he said, “You’re given a free pass as a crappy writer because you’re gay.” He even ran a snippet of Maza eating potato chips before saying, his manner mincing, “Bet you can’t eat just one — like dicks.”

On May 30, Maza had had enough. Since his complaints to YouTube about Crowder had gone nowhere, he created a compilation video of Crowder’s slurs and mockery and posted it on Twitter with this message: “Since I started working at Vox, Steven Crowder has been making video after video ‘debunking’ Strikethrough. Every single video has included repeated, overt attacks on my sexual orientation and ethnicity. Here’s a sample…”

As you might guess, the tweet went viral. Online outrage exploded.

YouTube, after getting ripped on social media for their inaction, sent Maza a tweet saying they’d investigate the matter. On June 4, the Bay Area-based company weighed in with this response:

“Our teams spent the last few days conducting an in-depth review of the videos flagged to us. And while we found language that was clearly hurtful, the videos as posted don’t violate our policies. As an open platform, it’s crucial for us to allow everyone — from creators to journalists to late-night TV hosts — to express their opinions w/in the scope of our policies. Opinions can be deeply offensive, but if they don’t violate our policies, they’ll remain on our site.”

That decision and statement caused more outrage. As was pointed out on social media, Crowder’s insults were not acts of opinion-expressing, along the lines of, say, “I believe personhood begins at conception,” or “Socialism is idiotic.” Furthermore, Crowder’s language would seem to violate YouTube’s policies.

For example, the company forbids content promoting hatred of people “related to race, sexuality, nationality, and immigration status.” Additionally, it forbids content that “is deliberately posted in order to humiliate someone” or that “makes hurtful and negative personal comments/videos about another person.”

What happened next? Doing an awkward about-face, YouTube decided to suspend advertising on Crowder’s channel. Their new statement read, “We came to this decision because a pattern of egregious actions has harmed the broader community and is against our YouTube Partner Program policies.”

This June 5 statement said the company would restore monetization if Crowder made changes to his channel. One of those changes? YouTube wanted him to remove a merchandise link to the “Socialism is for fags” T-shirt.

And then the story took another turn.

In a case of inelegant timing, YouTube, on that same day, announced a new initiative meant to target white supremacist videos and other forms of bigotry, including content claiming Jews secretly control the world, and material contending that women are intellectually inferior and should be subjugated and denied rights.

Apparently this move had been planned for a while, but from the outside it looked like the platform-wide sweep, and the glitches the dragnet entailed, had been in response to the Crowder situation. This spurred Crowder and many in his camp to point the finger at Maza and Vox Media, and say, essentially, “Maza and his left-wing company, partly owned by Comcast, parent company of NBCUniversal, started this whole shitshow with their bitching.”

Hence use of the media company’s name in the hashtag: #VoxAdpocalypse.

Republican strategist Andrew Surabian tweeted that left-wing media figures can get away with questionable online behavior because “they haven’t perpetrated the unforgivable sin of offending

@voxdotcom and @gaywonk.” Ben Shapiro, tweeting on D-Day, took the view that Crowder’s remarks were said in jest, and that Maza and his supporters were snowflakes for getting upset: “75 years ago: young Americans braved Nazi fire on beaches to liberate a continent and defend Constitutional rights. Today: young Americans whine about people making mean jokes about them on YouTube and demand censorship.”

To Crowder, the tempest did indeed begin with an overly sensitive leftist unable to take a joke. The language he directed at Maza? “That’s friendly ribbing,” Crowder said on his show, his manner affable as ever. “Did I ever offhandedly use the term ‘lispy queer’? I really don’t remember it, but it sounds like me. Why? Because you speak with a lisp and you refer to yourself as a queer…. It’s funny, and this is a comedy show.”

If Crowder did not seem especially upset by YouTube’s decision to pull his advertising, that was because he had other ways of making money from his channel, and knew the controversy would boost his profile in the conservative ecosystem.

In a June 11 VICE article headed “YouTube’s Bungled Crackdown On Steven Crowder Only Made Him Stronger,” a writer confirmed that #VoxAdpocalypse had been good for Crowder’s brand. Thanks to the conservative outcry, Crowder was now viewed as “a martyr standing against Big Tech overreach” in the eyes of his fans and right-wing pundits.

Plus, the YouTube decision gave Crowder a golden opportunity to slam the media for perceived bias. In protesting against his videos, he said, Vox Media was trying to “silence voices that they don’t like.” Wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the illustration of a handgun and the name of a show sponsor, gun manufacturer Walther, Crowder told his audience, “It’s NBCUniversal versus you guys. This is David versus Goliath.”

A week after #VoxAdpocalypse began, Crowder had collected 86K more channel subscribers, a big jump over his average of 15K weekly signups. He’d also sold a bunch of T-shirts and memberships to his Mug Club, which gave fans access to BlazeTV for a year, among other perks.

On June 7, Crowder even nominated Maza as his show’s employee of the month, “for selling more Mug Clubs than ever in the company’s history.”

As for Maza, he was under no illusions when it came to the impact of YouTube’s decision on Crowder’s platform enterprise, one which could be earning Crowder upwards of $1.3M annually, according to Social Blade, a social media analytics firm.

On June 5, Maza tweeted, “Demonetizing doesn’t work. Abusers use it as proof they’re being ‘discriminated’ against. Then they make millions off of selling merch, doing speaking gigs, and getting their followers to support them on Patreon. The ad revenue isn’t the problem. It’s the platform.”

(Crowder himself, on that same day, said, “We’re not really beholden to the YouTube advertiser.” This might be the only thing he and Maza agree on.)

In multiple tweets and in several interviews between May 30 and June 6, Maza drove home his point about YouTube’s platform needing fixing.

“Steven Crowder is not the problem,” he told Buzzfeed News, before mentioning conspiracy theorist and Infowars founder Alex Jones, famously banned by YouTube. “These individual actors are not the problem. They are symptoms and the product of YouTube’s design, which is meant to reward the most inflammatory, bigoted, and engaging performers.”

This echoed an earlier tweet where Maza put the matter starkly, suggesting there are people who enjoy watching a YouTube figure like Crowder engage in what Maza termed “cyberbullying.” For some percentage of Crowder’s audience, “homophobic/racist harassment is VERY ‘engaging,’” Maza said. Talking to Newsweek, he was just as blunt: “Bigotry, tribalism, and bullying…gets incredible engagement.”

And YouTube itself? The company prioritizes engagement, Maza argued, so Crowder was an “ideal creator” for their platform. Using the term “corporate cowardice,” Maza told Newsweek that YouTube is “terrified of being accused of liberal bias.”

Before YouTube changed its mind and demonetized Crowder, the tech blog Gizmodo asked how it reached the view that Crowder’s videos did not break their rules. “Crowder has not instructed his viewers to harass Maza,” YouTube replied.

But as Maza pointed out in a tweet, “His videos get millions of views on YouTube. Every time one gets posted, I wake up to a wall of homophobic/racist abuse on Instagram and Twitter.” He said one day he was doxxed by a fan of Crowder’s show and his phone got jammed with a hundred consecutive texts reading debate steven crowder. “I’m an easy target because I come off as stereotypically gay and make arguments about politics,” Maza remarked to Newsweek. “I think his fans are just following the leader.”

IF a figure like Steven Crowder, with his sponsorships, membership club, and income from speaking fees, doesn’t have to worry about YouTube demonetization, that luxury doesn’t hold for many monetized YouTubers with less platform prominence. They depend on this revenue.

To qualify for monetization, you need at least 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watchtime from viewers in the previous 12 months. YouTube gives the creator 55 percent of the ad revenue, and keeps the rest. Along with monetization, YouTubers can generate support from crowdfunding platforms like Patreon, and from the modest cut YouTube gives creators if their work runs on YouTube Premium, a monthly subscription service offering ad-free videos, music, and original series.

For the vast majority of smaller online creators, their YouTube income derives solely from that 55 percent revenue cut. And for this reason, it matters greatly to many monetized YouTubers how the company handles advertising on the site.

“There’s a delicate balance between advertisers, YouTube, YouTubers, and video content,” said 26-year-old transgender YouTube star Blaire White in a June 7 video titled “The Truth About Steven Crowder,” a post that’s been viewed a half million times.

White, interviewed in the September 2018 issue of this magazine (its title, “The Queen of Controversy,” referred to White’s willingness to broach hot-button issues like feminism, Black Lives Matter, transgender politics, rape culture, and fat-acceptance on her channel), went from being a “broke college student” to a high-profile YouTube creator with 670K subscribers and a platform income in just a few years. Though a vocal member of the LGBTQ community, she’s also staunchly independent, and voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Currently defining herself as “center-right” and a “Republican with liberal ideas,” with a mixed view of Trump now, she has appeared on Louder With Crowder several times.

Blaire White, in other words, is well-positioned to share some thoughts on YouTube’s operational changes, channel monetizing, and the Crowder-Maza feud.

“Over the past couple years,” White tells us, “it’s gotten increasingly harder to monetize content on YouTube. They’ve become more and more skittish about losing big advertisers — you know, like Toyota, Pepsi, the big payers. And so they’ve sort of moved more toward the direction of wanting safer content. The problem with that is, based on YouTube’s guidelines, it’s very hard to determine what’s safe and what’s not.”

Given that the content-review system remains far from perfect, White says channel creators regularly upload “incredibly safe” material that gets demonetized. “And political content especially,” she adds. “Good luck getting any of that monetized.” Meanwhile, she says, “CNN’s YouTube channel, MSNBC’s YouTube channel, late-night talk show hosts who do political segments, all those [channels] will be monetized. So there’s a bit of hypocrisy, and YouTube definitely prioritizes major media.”

When it comes to this summer’s #VoxAdpocalypse, White, referring to the platform’s many monetized creators, says “everyone sorta felt the heat” from YouTube’s tweaks to the content algorithm. As for those moments in Crowder’s videos when he takes shots at Maza, White says she gets why Maza was upset. In her June 7 video, she described Crowder’s language as “seventh-grade insults.”

Looking back at the controversy now, White says, “I don’t think making fun of someone for being gay is especially funny.” However, she also has issues with Maza’s reaction, which she found overblown. And making reference to Maza’s Tucker Carlson-knocking Twitter bio, she adds, “Calling someone a white supremacist when they’re clearly not is a lot more defamatory than calling someone a queer or flamer.” In her video, she called Maza a “tattletale” who ran to “corporate Big Mommy” — YouTube — instead of finding a less explosive way of responding to Crowder.

When asked if she thinks Crowder is homophobic, transphobic, or racist, White says, “My experience with Crowder has been good. He’s been kind to me and I’m a trans woman. I can’t reach for him being any of those things.”

Speaking to her audience of fans in that early-June video, White added a wrinkle to her take on Crowder. She said based on her interactions with him when the camera wasn’t shooting, she believes his “LGBTQ views are much more mild in real life than he portrays on the show.”

So that harsher stance he takes on his show? “It’s what his audience wants,” she said. “It’s more of an act.”

AT summer’s end, a 29-year-old YouTuber — Sweden’s Felix Kjellberg, aka “PewDiePie,” the platform’s biggest star — reached a milestone so major he got a letter of congratulations from YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, which he read aloud in a video on his channel. Kjellberg, who began his rise by posting videos of himself playing games like Resident Evil, shrieking and telling jokes, before moving into social commentary and news satire, with an anti-PC slant, had just passed the 100M-subscriber threshold.

There’s irony in this congratulatory letter, given that Kjellberg’s content controversies, which first detonated in early 2017, had caused trouble for YouTube, including negative press coverage, severed partnership deals, and criticism from organizations like the Anti-Defamation League, dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism.

It’s an indicator of the unprecedented environment YouTube has brought the world that the PewDiePie saga involves, on one end of the behavioral spectrum, grade-school kids innocently enjoying Kjellberg’s gaming videos and moments of silly satire (“my army of nine-year-olds,” the YouTuber calls his fanbase), and on the other end, a white supremacist mass murderer, Brenton Tarrant, who, while livestreaming his slaughter of 51 people at two mosques in New Zealand this past March, uttered the words, “Subscribe to PewDiePie.” It was a reference to a global meme with its roots in a campaign by Kjellberg and fans to keep a corporate channel based in India from overtaking him in audience numbers.

Powered by antipathy toward political correctness and skepticism about the mainstream media, Kjellberg’s reach extends all the way to the so-called “Intellectual Dark Web” via figures like libertarian YouTuber Dave Rubin and Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, author of 12 Rules for Life. In December of 2018, Rubin tweeted the PewDiePie meme and a video of Peterson subscribing to Kjellberg’s channel on his phone.

The blue-eyed Swede makes a lot of money, too, even with the dissolution of some lucrative deals following press coverage and social media anger at his most questionable video moments. (More on these shortly.) According to a Forbes article on top-earning YouTubers, Kjellberg earned $15.5M last year, with sponsored videos on his channel costing up to $450K.

Kjellberg got rich off YouTube, and YouTube has made a lot of money from hosting his videos. Stars like him have helped the platform cement its status as the second most popular website in the world, one spot above Facebook, and trailing only Google, according to Lifewire. Five hundred hours of video content are uploaded every minute. The company earns billions annually. YouTube needs creators like Kjellberg.

Hence that letter from the CEO.

But this dance between the platform and a creator like Kjellberg is a delicate one, to use Blaire White’s word. Along with great benefit, the PewDiePie channel has been a YouTube headache. (A plus-minus situation, not unlike the one in June when the Crowder storm arose.) YouTube walked a fine line with Felix Kjellberg — a tightrope, even — enabling his growth, and profiting from it, while fending off criticism for supporting him, and hoping he wouldn’t push too hard on their content parameters.

Their relationship grew extremely strained in February 2017 when the Wall Street Journal published a story identifying nine recent PewDiePie videos that the story’s writers said contained anti-Semitic jokes and Nazi imagery. In one, to satirize the Fiverr freelancer site, where you pay someone to perform a menial task, Kjellberg used Fiverr to hire two South Asian men and instructed them to hold up a sign reading “Death to all Jews.” In another, Kjellberg dressed in a brown military uniform and nodded along to footage of Hitler giving a speech.

In the eyes of his fans, this is Kjellberg doing what he does — pushing humor to the limit, being as irreverent as he can be, with a glint in his eye. Some of the videos were taken down, and Kjellberg said he meant no harm by them, adding, “I understand that these jokes were ultimately offensive.” But the damage had been done. Disney’s Maker Studios ended their affiliation with him. YouTube cancelled the release of Scare PewDiePie Season 2, a YouTube Premium reality series. And YouTube’s parent company Google dropped him from its premium advertising program, Google Preferred.

After repeatedly mocking the Wall Street Journal and one of the writers on the original PewDiePie story, Kjellberg eventually moved on and the controversy died down. But in late 2018, Kjellberg reignited things by recommending the channel of a creator called EsemicolonR, or E;R, whose videos have openly anti-Semitic, racist, and white nationalist content. “You also have E;R,” said Kjellberg on his channel, “who does great video essays.” He went on to speak of enjoying an E;R movie-review video that joked about Heather Heyer’s death while protesting the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia. E;R’s caption for the video uses the word “Niglet” in reference to a black character.

When an uproar followed, Kjellberg said he’d made an “oopsie” and hadn’t realized the true nature of E;R’s channel or the offensive content of the video.

Late this past summer, in a surprise move, Kjellberg announced he was going to donate $50K to the Anti-Defamation League. Why? “To put an end to the alt-right accusations that have been thrown against me,” Kjellberg said. But a short time later he changed his mind, which quieted some of his fans perplexed by the defiant YouTuber’s ADL idea.

Explaining his walk-back, Kjellberg said he should have picked a charity he was “passionate about,” instead of one suggested by an advisor. While first broaching this notion of giving to the ADL, however, Kjellberg, in a video, grew reflective, telling his audience, “I made a lot of mistakes on the way, but I’ve grown. I feel like I’ve finally come to terms with the responsibilities I have as a creator.”

Then, with a laugh, he added, “100 subs too late.”

2017 was a tough year for YouTube on the public relations and advertising fronts.

Along with the PewDiePie scandal, the Wall Street Journal and the London Times published stories detailing that YouTube’s algorithmic software had placed advertising from companies like Coca-Cola, Amazon, and Microsoft on videos trafficking in hate speech and terrorist recruitment. A huge advertiser boycott followed — the first major “adpocalypse.”

Walmart, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Verizon, and Proctor & Gamble were among the many companies to remove ads. That wave of pull-outs was followed by another one later in the year when news reports revealed pedophiles were hanging out on video channels showing children — leaving disturbing comments, and even trying to groom victims. YouTube’s pedophile problem reemerged last February when a platform user named Matt Watson posted a video demonstrating, with disturbing clarity, how what he called a “wormhole” had enabled a whole network of pedophiles to share videos, leave sexualized comments, post timestamps linking to certain video frames, and trade links to child pornography.

Watson’s video went viral, and Nestlé and Epic Games, among other companies, yanked their ads, vowing to return only if YouTube fixed its pedophile problem, one first reported on more than six years ago.

Improving its systems for identifying harmful content and keeping “bad actors” (as YouTube calls them — be they ISIS recruiters, child-sex predators, or neo-Nazis) off the platform remains job one for the company. But the scope of the challenge is enormous, with more than a billion users. At the end of 2017, CEO Wojcicki announced ramped-up efforts to prevent bad actors “from exploiting our openness,” as she put it. Steps included machine-learning techniques to find extremist content, and added staff to reach 10,000 employees “working to address content that might violate our policies.”

But as we saw in the Crowder-Maza controversy, one person’s cyberbullying is another person’s ribbing. Where does YouTube draw the line?

As the New York Times put it this past summer, “Internet platforms are the primary battlegrounds of the culture wars, [and] content moderation is going to be at the heart of it.” And in a world of ideological divisions, “YouTube can’t be what everyone wants all the time,” as Blaire White observed in her June video.

Consider the trickiness of evaluating what YouTube calls “borderline” content. In a late-August letter to millions of channel creators, Susan Wojcicki said some “controversial or even offensive content” will remain online, in order to keep YouTube an open platform. “It’s our job to strike the right balance between openness and responsibility,” she wrote.

Examples of media and pop-culture figures getting in trouble after saying or posting things judged offensive are easy to find these days, of course.

Two from 2019 that come to mind are Shane Gillis getting canned from Saturday Night Live just days after joining the cast (he’d used the word “chinks” and — in the eyes of those who blasted him on social media and demanded his ouster — crossed other lines in podcasts from 2018), and the “Sword and Scale” true-crime podcaster Mike Boudet, who was dropped by his corporate backer after posting this on his show’s Instagram channel on International Women’s Day: “I don’t understand dumb cunts. Maybe I should take one apart to see how it works.”

Boudet was already a controversial figure at the time of this post, having previously come under fire for comments about women, gay people, and the mentally ill. And though he may not have been entirely surprised by the reaction to his post, he did not take the outcome — the ending of his contract with American podcast giant Wondery — quietly.

In a SoundCloud response, Boudet spoke of a witch hunt, censorship, and the silencing of someone who believes in “independent thought.” He said a mob came after him because he’d been “deemed a bad person who says bad words.” He signed off by saying to his fans, “Maybe I am an asshole, but I’m an asshole you will no longer be able to hear.”

Shane Gillis and Mike Boudet — deserving of their fates? Were their employer’s decisions understandable, given, among other factors, the threat of ongoing protest campaigns, workplace tension, and advertiser pull-outs?

Needless to say, there was a difference of opinion on social media platforms.

But in the case of hugely popular YouTube music reviewer Anthony Fantano, a 33-year-old Connecticut native who Spin magazine called “modern music’s most successful individual critic,” there should be greater agreement across much of the ideological spectrum, if not all of it, that Fantano was the victim of a bogus, bad-faith hit piece in October of 2017.

That was when music and lifestyle mag The Fader — running content so misleading they ultimately had to delete it from the internet and offer Fantano a settlement — published a story accusing the critic of “pandering to the alt-right” on his lesser-known, meme humor channel, That Is The Plan.

Yes, the takedown article got Fantano so wrong in terms of what it implied about his politics and vision of the world that the article itself had to be taken down.

If you want a fuller picture of the controversy, the best thing to do is watch his October 6, 2017, YouTube reply titled “The Fader Response.” It’s 21 minutes of calm, devastating, witty rebuttal that wipes the floor with the distortion-filled piece. One thing Fantano does in this video, which has been viewed more than 1.3M times, is demonstrate, with social-media-post and YouTube proof, that’s he’s been entirely open about his politics over the years — and they’re about as far from alt-right as the music of Philip Glass is from a song by GWAR. As Felix Kjellberg, aka PewDiePie, might say: “Oopsie.”

As Fantano tells us in the video, delve into his online record and you’ll find “a pretty obvious liberal slant” and positivity toward some “pretty left-wing ideals.”

In 2016, on Tumblr, a commenter, using the acronym for social justice warrior, wrote, “Hey bro. Longtime fan here. Was just wondering why [you are] such a SJW vegan pussy.” Fantano replied, “Because my parents raised me right.”

In his video response to The Fader, you do get the bespectacled critic copping to the fact that yes, it’s true, he once made a joke about “SJWs.” As for the humor content on his now-defunct meme channel, Fantano says, “There was nothing on it that had any more edge or was any more out there than what you might catch on a new South Park.”

Also relevant? His vibrant openness toward all music genres, musical artists of all races, women musicians, gay musicians, trans musicians — just check

out his thousands of video reviews for a sense of his range, and the breadth of

his enthusiasms.

A critic so widely followed he was recently dubbed the “Roger Ebert of music” by the FFWD, a publication that covers online video, Fantano — who calls himself “the world’s busiest music nerd” — is now iconic enough to provide the visual inspiration for the first animated figure, a balding, round-headed security guard, to appear in the “Area 51” remix video for Lil Nas X’s colossal 2019 hit “Old Town Road,” breaker of Billboard’s record for most consecutive weeks at the top of its Hot 100 chart.

Fantano owes his career — and his fame — to the YouTube platform. Back in 2009, having been posting stuff on That Is The Plan since 2007, he created The Needle Drop, which now boasts nearly two million subscribers. He pioneered video music-reviewing, and from the start was so good at what he did he was the first music vlogger YouTube picked for an ad-revenue partnership. His takes on high-profile albums, like Kanye’s The Life of Pablo, can grab well over a million views.

When the creators of YouTube were envisioning their platform, Fantano is the kind of figure they hoped would emerge — an independent voice, a creator on his own, who intuited that authenticity, passion, humor, and being himself was the way forward on YouTube. On this platform, you can be a music nerd, with big, blocky glasses, fighting a losing battle against your hairline, but if you work hard — Fantano has been posting multiple album reviews weekly, along with other music content, for years — you might find yourself rising so high in your field you inspire comparisons to Roger Ebert.

Prior to launching The Needle Drop, Fantano had worked in music radio for Sirius and a local NPR affiliate. We asked him to compare these experiences with his current gig.

“As annoying as YouTube can be sometimes,” he says, “I still prefer the platform. It allows me quite a bit of freedom, independence. My only boss, my only rule-set, really, comes from my fans.

If I’m not pleasing them, I’m not doing my job correctly.”

Fantano understands why YouTube felt moved to alter their monetization-eligibility rules. The current, more restrictive policy appeared in early 2018.

“Personally, I thought the ability for any channel to be monetized right out of the gate was a silly one,” he tells us, “because they were inevitably going to get to the point of what the Wall Street Journal reported on — like a Coke ad running on a white supremacist or ISIS video. YouTube shot itself in the foot with that.”

As someone who saw up close what can happen when an article is written at least in part in hopes of capitalizing off outrage clicks and social media cancel culture, we asked Fantano what is was like when The Fader went after him.

“It was a few weeks of lost sleep,” he replies. “Up until that article, people had no reason to believe anything it was saying. Maybe several hundred people unsubscribed from me instantaneously. But I gained back way more subscribers after I had sort of explained the situation. People saw the whole thing as the bunk it was.”

When asked about the Crowder-Maza clash, Fantano points to the size of Crowder’s YouTube audience, a reflection of the way the video platform has grown to be prodigious world-wide, and culture-shaping in its influence.

“If you had a platform on television where you were getting as many views as Crowder, you could not get away with calling Maza out on his name, making fun of his sexuality. You couldn’t get away with that, even on Fox News. So what makes you think you’d bear no responsibility for doing the same thing just because you’re on the internet?

“The digital platforms are bigger now,” Fantano continues. “The advertising dollars are bigger. You can’t go onto the internet and hurl a rock without hitting somebody who’s made it their profession in some way, shape, or form. And with all that power and money is going to come responsibility, accountability. You can’t keep conducting yourself, internet-wise, like every freakin’ page you’re on is 4chan. You know what I mean? It’s not reality.”

In the coming months and years, more controversies will no doubt arise on YouTube. The platform’s moderation policies and performance can’t please everyone, and will again draw fire, chances are good, from both conservatives and those on the left, depending on the issue that flares into view. The company will keep on improving its technology, when it comes to content scrutiny and other dimensions, and will keep on walking that cultural tightrope, trying to strike enough of a balance between openness and responsibility so that the worst people do is criticize the platform, rather than abandon it or try to legislate it.

And as all this plays out, a lot of us will be watching.

Phil Hanrahan is features editor and Game On columnist for Penthouse, and the author of “Life After Favre.”

JaggerXTC is a writer specializing in online entertainment. He is also a filmmaker and has worked with a variety of content creators on YouTube.

Power Couple: Adam22 and Lena The Plug

Posted on by Team Penthouse

We Should All be This Dull

Adam22 - pic 1“I think people would be surprised to find out what a humble, normal, real relationship we have,” says Adam Grandmaison.  

“Yeah,” agrees his partner, Lena Nersesian. “If someone pointed a camera on us and watched our lives, they’d be like, ‘These people are so fucking boring.’”

The thing is, Grandmaison and Nersesian really do have cameras pointed at them much of the time, and the people watching the footage don’t seem inclined to wander away. In just three years, under the nom de web Lena The Plug, Nersesian has cultivated a seven-digit following across a host of platforms, including Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube, and PornHub. Much of her content is explicit—she was 2018’s PornHub Celebrity of the Year, and Fleshlight unveiled a Lena The Plug model earlier this year. But on her more mainstream channels she also posts plenty of conventional lifestyle-vlogger material: updates on her personal life, tours of her new house, and cheerful videos of herself and Grandmaison on vacation.

Meanwhile, Grandmaison, known online as Adam22, presides over an ever-growing array of business enterprises. A BMX rider himself, he started out in 2006 running a successful BMX website called The Come Up. Three years later, he opened his clothing line and retail outlet OnSomeShit, and then, in 2015, launched his podcast, “No Jumper,” a loosely formatted interview show that showcases Grandmaison’s ear for new and breaking underground rap talent, and his knack for drawing those same artists into candid and unguarded conversations. (He did important early interviews with the likes of XXXTentacion and Lil Pump.) These days, “No Jumper” is one of the key publicity stops for any aspiring SoundCloud rapper—the bigger your personality, the better.

Grandmaison is currently toying around with writing a book, having been inspired by Howard Stern’s latest memoir, Howard Stern Comes Again. The comparison seems apt—like Stern, Grandmaison is a bad boy with a talent for talking, a fascination with the porn world, and not-so-secret entrepreneurial ambitions. By that token, Nersesian is, with her sunny personality and a sexual forthrightness that belies her conservative upbringing, the girl-next-door whose presence brings out Grandmaison’s sweeter side. 

“Our fans are fascinated by our dynamic,” Grandmaison says. “I seem to be such a rough, blunt, aggressive person and she seems so sweet, that it’s hard to imagine how that dynamic plays out. In reality, it works out great.”

I spoke to Grandmaison and Nersesian over the phone from their home in Los Angeles to learn more. It may not have been the wildest threesome they’ve ever participated in, but they were characteristically open with me.

They say that one reason actors tend to date other actors is that they’re the only ones who understand their lifestyle. Is that also true of people in the socia media world?

Adam: Definitely. I’ve seen the transition in how people act around us as we’ve gone from being regular people to being more well-known. For instance, we have some movers who’ve known us for a while, and they keep moving us from house to house, and the houses keep getting bigger. Every time we see those guys, they go, “Whoa! This is insane! This has been happening really fucking fast.” For me, I keep forgetting that shit has changed a lot for us.

Lena: There is so much maintenance that goes into our presence. In most companies, the person running it will have someone they can hand things off to. But if the whole business is your personality, that’s not possible. I can’t tell my assistant to log into my Twitter and go be me, you know? It becomes a little draining—did you update your Snapchat today? Did you update your Twitter? Your personality has to be out there constantly, and it has to be consistent for you to continue doing what you do. 

Adam: And in Lena’s case, she’s constantly choosing between doing adult content that she’s going to make more money from, or doing the YouTube content that might appeal more to her female fans, but which is much harder to monetize.

What would be the ideal ratio between those two streams for you?

Lena: Honestly, the adult stuff is probably 90 percent of my output—and that probably represents 99.9 percent of my income.

So as much as I might like it to break down fifty-fifty, I can’t just take a break from doing adult content for a whole month and act like it’s going to be okay.

What were you two like in high school? Would a guidance counselor have figured you were entrepreneurs in the making?

Adam: I think my parents and teachers were probably disappointed in me, because they could tell I was smart, but I just had a total inability to funnel that into anything positive. I wore all black and rode my BMX bike to school every day. I never went to the prom, I never went to any dances, I didn’t socialize all that much. The only stuff I was into was rap music, hardcore music, and riding my bike. That was it.

Lena: If Adam’s report card said, “Doesn’t play well with others and refuses to follow the rules,” mine was the complete opposite. I loved going to school—for me, it was an escape from being at home. I joined all sorts of activities. I think people sometimes assume I was a bad kid with a bad upbringing and that’s how I ended up where I am now. But I see it the opposite way. I don’t think you can be successful at what I’m doing if you’re not smart about it.

If you found yourself in a room with a bunch of “straight” businessmen, do you think underneath it all you’d actually have a lot in common with them? In the end, isn’t it all just business?

Lena: Not entirely. I think a lot of business talk is oriented around how groups work together, or how to get the most out of your employees. I actually went to a Tony Robbins seminar once, but it didn’t really apply to me—I think I was the only person in the room without a large staff and whose business was basically, you know, myself. 

You can also get away with behavior that the CEO of a Fortune 500 company probably couldn’t—smoking weed, talking about three-ways. But at the same time, does that limit you in terms of the opportunities you can pursue with more mainstream companies? Or do those kinds of partnerships not interest you?

Adam: I guess we’re operating on the more illicit side of things. But at the same time, it’s really a goal of ours to work with brands in a good way, and maybe persuade, say, a more mainstream fashion brand that there’s no reason they can’t partner with an influencer who’s also a sex worker, or advertise on a podcast where everyone is smoking blunts the whole time.

Lena: I think the reality is, we will mostly get brands that are in that space. We are not going to be getting Target anytime soon. But that’s great, because we won’t have to change who we are just because some brand is advertising with us.

There’s an interview you did in 2017, Adam, where you said if you ever faced a PR crisis, you thought you could survive it because of the relationship you’ve built with your fans. Not long after, in March 2018, a pair of women accused you of sexual assault. You denied the allegations—but were you right? Did your brand take more of a hit than you thought it might?

Adam: That stuff really did threaten to hinder my brand. But at the same time, the fact that I’ve been so open and honest, and Lena and I have such an open, extremely public relationship, that allowed this story to not be so big. When Kevin Spacey faced accusations, I don’t think any of us really felt like we knew Kevin Spacey. But if someone says something about me, they’re more willing to give me the benefit of the doubt in a way that someone with a less direct connection with their fans might not.

When you talk with others who make their living from social media, what are the things that make you all nervous?

Adam: Back in 2017, the YouTube “Adpocalypse” really alarmed a lot of us. [See “YouTube on a Tightrope,” on page 36.] I think at that time, I was making $50,000 a month on YouTube, and then overnight I saw that turn into $5,000 a month. That was a huge, eye-opening experience. You can’t get too comfortable—you need to pursue every moneymaking opportunity you can, whether it’s brand deals, ads during the podcast, livestreaming my fans’ music for donations, merchandising. 

Lena: Your job can be taken from you on any platform at any time. It’s up to them. I can make the same YouTube video that a beauty blogger would make and get no ads on it, simply because of who I am, not the content I put out. 

Adam: Lena’s Instagram has been deleted for months at a time for no reason. It feels like there’s nothing you can do to make social media platforms actually give a shit about hot girls. If this were an issue about a certain religious group getting their Instagrams deleted, it would be front-page news. But no one is inclined to feel sympathetic about hot girls. 

Lena: Twitter is actually the only online platform where sex workers are really safe. They don’t take down nudity. It’s definitely the most friendly platform for me.

Adam, if you had to restrict yourself to just one platform, what would it be?

Adam: I’m a YouTube guy. I love long-form content. Of course, when we do a long podcast with five minutes in the middle about white supremacist violence, even though we are obviously against it, that entire podcast will get age-restricted and demonetized. If you’re someone like [Philip] DeFranco, who’s talking about real news, he gets demonetized practically every day. Whereas if you’re a makeup blogger or doing cooking videos, you don’t have to deal with that. Nothing against makeup bloggers, but YouTube is kind of incentivizing people to make frivolous content. It sucks to see serious independent content from across the spectrum being treated so poorly. [Laughs.] Yeah, YouTube sucks.

Paul James is a playwright, editor, broadcaster, and a film and pop-culture commentator for such outlets as CBC Radio and Salon. He is the cohost of the podcast “Trash, Art & the Movies.” Follow him on Twitter: @myelbow

Photography by James Douglas

Pleasure and Pain: A History of Sexual Punishment

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Delightfully perverse kinksters have been indulging in acts of erotic punishment for thousands of years, getting a unique thrill from giving and receiving pleasure and pain.

Just as in the present day, there were those in antiquity who craved the kiss of a whip in the bedroom and actively sought to fulfill their masochistic desires.

One of the earliest known European works of visual art to depict punishment in a sexual context is a fresco unearthed in Italy that dates back to around 490 B.C. Discovered in 1960, the wall painting in the Tomb of the Whipping is badly damaged but shows a debauched three-way involving a woman being spanked and flogged by her two male lovers.

And the Kama Sutra, an ancient Indian text on sexuality, contains advice on hitting, biting, and pinching to enhance a lover’s pleasure.

History of Sexual Punishment in PictureBut that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to historical depictions and descriptions of erotic punishment.

Prominent eighteenth-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his autobiography Confessions, minced no words when it came to his love of power games in the boudoir: “To fall at the feet of an imperious mistress, obey her mandates, or implore pardon, were for me the most exquisite enjoyments.”

During the same era, John Cleland sparked a firestorm with the release of Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure — one of the first English-language pornographic novels — which described a prostitute birching a client before being punished herself in return.

A century later, Victorian Britain was a study in contrasts. Though society was bound by a rigid sense of morality, interest in sex flourished among the population like never before.

An explosion of erotic literature, artwork, and photography occurred, with an almost obsessive focus on what was considered perverse — including spanking, birching, and flogging. The floodgates had been opened, and thousands of images of punishment scenes were circulated in books and magazines. The notorious publication The Pearl, purveyor of pornographic tales, poems, and more, made a kinky name for itself before British authorities closed it down in 1880, accusing it of obscenity.

During last century’s sexual revolution, the BDSM subculture, with its power exchanges and roleplaying, emerged from the shadows and came into its own, with its transgressive elements spreading to fashion, books, and movies.

Now, daring and diverse publisher Goliath Books has assembled a striking array of erotic images from the past 300 years (some of which are seen here) to create the volume History of Sexual Punishment — in pictures (272 pages, $35).

With more than 200 illustrations and photos, this book explores the artistic representations of sadists and masochists who have left their (ahem) mark on history.

— goliathbooks.com

Rough Riders

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Joe Keene — a 34-year-old Louisiana prisoner — wears a protective Kevlar vest in case he takes a bull’s hoof or horn to the torso, or hits the ground hard. Fastening the buttons to a black-and-white striped shirt, his convict-cowboy uniform, he prays to the soul of his late mother, who passed away nine years ago. A big part of her had already died when he was convicted of murder in 2004, and his prayer is more a plea for mercy from a woman who, trying to keep her son out of jail, testified in court that the bloody khaki shorts police found at the family’s Baton Rouge apartment were hers, and that the blood was hers, too.

A bull in chute number six is huffing and heaving. Arms draped over a rail, Keene takes a look at the animal’s explosive mass of roiling muscle. A white inmate, tall, rangy, and sinewy, Keene tells himself he’s a real rodeo rider, not an animal in a zoo. Some of the spectators in this jammed arena might be here to see him get violently tossed, or worse, but Keene ignores that. When the loudspeaker announces his name and number, and he’s riding that bull, he briefly feels free. For a short, thrilling moment, his jail cell is forgotten. And if he rides well, he earns applause and accolades, and makes a good memory for those endless hours of confinement.

There’s a whole heap of pageantry before Keene gets to ride, though. “It’s going to get wild and western, you can tell!” says a ring announcer on horseback, speaking into his wireless mic. Behind him, caged and corralled animals snort and buck in agreement.

A prisoner with a heaven-sent voice sings “God Bless America.”Later, the audience stands and applauds in honor of the U.S. military as America’s wars are recited. The clapping surges at the mention of Operation Desert Storm and the Iraq War. There are people throughout this arena who fought in these wars, or are the children of those who did.

After “The Star-Spangled Banner” is sung, a cowgirl in tight jeans and a snug denim jacket, waving a big American flag, does two laps of the ring on her horse. She’s trailed by a decorated wagon bearing a banner inscribed “Friends of New Orleans Police Department.” Riding up front in the wagon, a “king” and his “queen” wave to thousands of spectators, people who have traveled here from Georgia, Alabama, Texas, and Mississippi. As the announcer hails the various states, people roar. Louisiana gets the biggest cheer, though, because that’s where we are.

We’re on the 18,000-acre grounds of the Louisiana State Penitentiary, the country’s largest maximum-security prison, 130 miles northwest of New Orleans. It’s known as Angola Prison, a name nodding to the land’s antebellum history as Angola Plantations, worked by slaves, many born in Africa’s Angola. It’s also called “The Farm” and “Alcatraz of the South,” though that second moniker is dying out. On one weekend every April, and four October weekends, this purpose-built arena hosts the Angola Prison Rodeo.

Ten thousand spectators cheer ten rodeo events, including Bust Out, Joe Keene’s favorite. The name is a winking reference to a prison break. Bust Out features six convict-cowboys on six angry bulls, with the animals sprung from their chutes simultaneously. The last man still atop his bull wins. Since most of the prisoners are untrained, they generally bite the dust as soon as the chute-gate opens. But Keene is a 19-time Bust Out champion. In fact, he won this event the day before. However, on this April Sunday, he doesn’t have his best stuff. He rides well for a few seconds, then hits the ground.

“I just didn’t feel right — in the only place I ever feel right,” he tells me later.

As a rodeo clown distracts his bull, Keene is dragged clear by fellow convicts. Then “Summer of ’69” starts playing, and spectators whoop along to Bryan Adams recalling the best days of his life. I hear a clown mutter the phrase “bad dude,” and I’m not sure if he’s talking about Keene, his bull, or Bryan Adams.

Moments later, the ring announcer declares, “And now, Pinball!”

In this event, convicts wearing Kevlar and face-guarded helmets stand inside hula hoops set on the dirt. A bull is released into the arena and rampages around. The inmate brave enough, or lucky enough, to hold his ground longest wins. This year, Pinball is sponsored by Daniel Miremont, president of a Baton Rouge sewer system company.

Joe Keene was convicted of murdering a Baton Rouge man, who was bludgeoned and strangled with Keene’s belt, in the victim’s apartment. He had an accomplice, a local drug-dealer.

Keene, 20 at the time, changed his story in the three statements he gave to police, but it appears he had been doing some minor plumbing work for the victim, and was in need of money to pay for drugs. He claimed his accomplice had threatened to shoot him unless he carried out the attack.

In email exchanges we have after the rodeo weekend, Keene focuses on the fact that his accomplice was able to plead to a lesser charge. He says it’s not right that “someone can hold a gun to your head and make you kill someone, and they walk away with the less part of time.” Neither prosecutors nor the jury found Keene’s account of the killing credible, however.

Keene tells me he’d never been in trouble before the murder, that he turned himself in to the police, and that I’m the first person he’s told this to. Loneliness is a theme in what he shares, and he is full of regret: that his parents sought to cover up his crime, and that he’s the end of the line for his father’s genes. When he reflects on his incarceration, Keene says, “I am…just waiting to die, which is crazy … you know.”

Being white, he is in the minority here — 80 percent of the inmates are black — but as a man serving life without parole, he’s also in a majority. Life without parole is the only sentence, besides the death penalty, that Louisiana gives for murder.

According to a Sentencing Project report, Louisiana has more people serving life without parole than Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee combined. This in a state that has had America’s highest incarceration rate for years. Its number of prisoners has grown 30 times faster than its population since the late seventies. Some hold up Louisiana — with its strict sentencing and pronounced law-and-order ethos — as an emblem of what’s good about America’s justice system. But for others, the state represents what’s horribly wrong with it.

Angola is often referred to as a “company town.” That company being the prison. But for over two decades, it would have been more accurate to call it a city-state governed by an absolute monarch. Longtime warden Burl Cain, who stated that his top priority was “moral rehabilitation,” introduced a Baptist seminary, prizefighting, and a culture of corporate kickbacks and side deals that led to his stepping down in 2016 amid corruption inquiries.

The island of Manhattan could fit inside the prison’s sprawling property, which is given over to farmland where gun towers and razor wire don’t predominate. The prison houses 6,300 prisoners and employs 1,800 staffers, from corrections officers to maintenance workers.

The past isn’t a foreign country at Angola Prison. To be reminded of this area’s bitter plantation history, you just have to gaze out over the landscape. Seated on horseback, mostly white guards patrol the fields of wheat, corn, soybeans, sorghum, and cotton that mostly black inmates harvest under a relentless sun for as little as four cents an hour.

Many of the prison staff live with their families on-site, within the B-Line, a small town, essentially, with its own parks, swimming pool, tennis court, fishing lake, and nine-hole Prison View Golf Course, which is open to the law-abiding public. To play the prison links as a non-staffer, you just have to give 48 hours’ notice before turning up with your clubs.

“It’s a great place to grow up,” says a teenage girl serving food at one of the rodeo’s various concession stands. “My dad’s a warden. I wanna be one, too.”

More than 70,000 people visit the Angola Prison grounds each year, viewing it as a Louisiana attraction. It’s not just the rodeo and golf course, with its tee markers in the shape of handcuffs, that draws them. The prison’s place on the dark tourism trail is secure thanks to its museum, which houses “Gruesome Gertie,” an electric chair built by inmates in which 87 of their peers were executed, including Elmo Patrick Sonnier, subject of Dead Man Walking, the book and movie. In 1991, the chair was retired in favor of lethal injection.

Angola’s biggest draw, though, is the rodeo.

Some of those seated in the 30-year-old arena are there to see murderers, armed robbers, and rapists get tossed and stomped by broncos and bulls — as though justice has found another way to be meted out. Others, mostly sorority girls in short shorts and abbreviated tops, appear to be shopping for husbands. And then there are the prisoners’ families, for whom this is an opportunity to see their captive fathers, brothers, and sons appear in a special public setting, with a chance to shine. The arena atmosphere is heady, sometimes hysterical, and has something of the Roman Colosseum, an Old West medicine show, and a slapstick comedy routine about it.

Five hours before the rodeo starts in earnest, the grounds beside the arena are taken over by an arts and crafts fair, where inmates do a keen trade in items they’ve created inside the prison: paintings, carvings, jewelry boxes, furniture, leather goods, wooden duck calls. Keene himself, who draws and paints, has been exhibiting at the fair for six years, he tells me.

“I have a lot of people that come back to the rodeo to buy stuff from me year after year,” he says. Some of them, he adds, just want something “they can say came from a killer.”

The food stands sell Louisiana staples like catfish po’ boys, and red beans and rice. There’s a petting zoo whose animals bring forth excited squeals from children. Some of the prisoners selling art are inside individual steel-mesh cages, tarped for shade, set in a few rows. Others, designated “trustees” by the prison (a category dependent on the convict’s crime and behavior in lockup) can walk freely, mingling with customers. Some convicts sit quietly in patches of shade and cuddle their grandkids. Others try out their rusty charms on women, the ice-cream sundaes in their hands doing most of the melting. The impression is one of wholesomeness under mild duress — a warm smile with a few missing teeth.

If a patron, after some bartering, wants to purchase an item from a caged prisoner, the man passes a slip of paper through the mesh, which is then carried to a cashier kiosk.

No one’s taking photos, since cameras and cell phones are not permitted on the grounds.

Prison guards mill around, of course, though a lot of them are also positioned at the entrance to the rodeo and fairgrounds, or are selling drinks at the food stands.

Calvin Stewart, one of the organizers of last year’s Angola work stoppage (protesting the prison farm and its forced labor, which he likens to a slave system), tells me to keep an eye out for Keene. I ask where he is, but I’m met with shrugs and guesses. (I’ll later learn he’d been inside the arena, helping prep the animals.) As I search, one of the caged men, a small white guy with a mustache, gives me a stare so cold my blood freezes. I don’t know what crime he committed, but I’ve never witnessed a look projecting that kind of darkness.

I meet a trustee prisoner-artist with dark brown hair and a goatee, a couple of decades older than Keene. Referring to the men in cages, mostly rapists and pedophiles, he says to me, “Someone should have said, they’re the ones not allowed anywhere near women and children. I can tell you that watching movies with them isn’t a lot of fun.”

During an autumn rodeo weekend in 2017, a convicted killer and a 13-year-old girl were seen emerging from a restroom together. Her family claimed a sexual violation took place. It became a national story — an alleged rape taking place during the rodeo. The convict, Laderrick Davis, serving a life sentence, was transferred to another prison, in part for his own safety. Then on November 10, the parish sheriff and chief of Louisiana’s prison system said the evidence gathered, including the results of a rape kit administered to the girl, showed no sexual contact had taken place. They also said the girl denied any contact.

The statements prompted one family member to tell New Orleans news station WGNO, “I feel like it was a cover-up. I feel like they are trying to sweep it under the rug.”

IN 2004, the year he represented Joe Keene, attorney D. Bert Garraway was attacked in court by another one of his clients, who put him in a headlock and slashed at his face and neck with a razor.

“I’ve contended all along that this guy is nuts,” a bloodied Garraway said. “And to be honest, this pretty much confirms it. What kind of rational person would attack his own lawyer?”

His client might well have been crazy, and a criminal, but there isn’t much love for defense lawyers around these parts, either.

As Angola is to the prison-industrial complex, so Louisiana is to shoddy legal defense. Reading about Keene’s crime and trial, I discovered a classic case of American-style injustice, a story that Keene, poor and semiliterate, with an eighth-grade education, had no hope of articulating on his own.

The jury found him guilty of both conspiracy to commit second-degree murder and second-degree murder, for which he was sentenced to hard labor for 30 years and life imprisonment, respectively. But an appeal against the conviction filed by a second public defender raised serious questions about Garraway’s handling of the case.

Keene claims that he had asked to plead guilty to manslaughter, which could have resulted in a shorter sentence, but Garraway had not allowed it.

“I wish I had the money to pay for a lawyer like the other guy,” he says by email.

A Louisiana defense lawyer who reviewed the case for me shared this opinion: “Only an idiot would have gone to trial without considering other options.” Speaking on the condition of anonymity, this lawyer said the case was mishandled in such a way as to make one think that the original defense attorney was “drunk, incompetent, or receiving kickbacks.”

The late D. Bert Garraway was a regular court-appointed attorney for the indigent accused, who had a rap sheet of his own. Convicted in 1988 of attempting to extort undercover federal agents on behalf of a client whose landfill site had been used as a chemical waste dump, he was disbarred for three months and sentenced to 300 hours of community service, which he completed as an attorney in the public defender’s office. Upon fulfilling this requirement, Garraway continued working as a defense attorney.

Opposite him in the Keene trial was Baton Rouge district attorney Doug Moreau. A diehard, God-fearing Republican, a former Miami Dolphins tight end, and a longtime broadcaster for LSU football games, Moreau put more people on death row than anyone else in Louisiana during his 18-year tenure as DA. He sees his old job in simple terms: “A person would be on death row because of something he did. He’s the one who started the process.”

The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution states that “in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right…to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.” Two-and-a-quarter centuries later, millions of Americans lack proper legal representation.

In 2017, a report for the National Association of Criminal Justice Lawyers (titled “State of Crisis: Chronic Neglect and Underfunding for Louisiana’s Public Defense System”) asserted this about representation for people without means accused of crimes in Keene’s state: “The gravity of the situation there will require a concerted, sustained national effort to alleviate it. The widespread injustice faced by poor people in Louisiana’s courts, a disproportionate number of them people of color, demands the attention of everyone concerned about human dignity and fundamental rights.”

Statewide, public defense offices have blamed funding shortfalls on a drop in revenue from traffic violations. The claim is understandable. In Louisiana, these offices are primarily financed by traffic tickets and court fines, and traffic tickets have fallen 35 percent in ten years.

The dearth of funds means fewer lawyers and more cases per lawyer. Increased caseloads mean slower processing times, and increased backlogs of criminal cases mean more pretrial clients being held in jail, at a cost that is — at around $55 a day — greater than what would be required to adequately fund a defense.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, lawyers often have to double as their own support staff, doing duty as social workers and in-house investigators that Louisiana is also shamefully short of.

“I love it. I love it,” says Bubba Dunn of Angola Prison’s controversial, bleacher-packing spectacle.

Dunn — a former professional rodeo rider — serves as the stock contractor for the spring and autumn event. “It’s an old-time rodeo. Reminds me of how it used to be. Man versus beast.

That’s why people come here. Nobody wants to see anyone get killed, but they damn sure don’t want to miss a good wreck.

And the riders, they go for it because if they make money, they’ll have money for the canteen and they’ll get to buy their own clothes — not just wear prison-issue.”

The rodeo, which has been running since 1964, brings in around $450K during its April weekend. It is a source of pride for anyone connected with it. Angola officials see it as a tool of rehabilitation and are happy to cite reduced prison-violence numbers as proof of its efficacy. The rodeo helps pay for a raft of educational programs, re-entry training in such certified trades as auto repair or air-conditioner installation, and recreational supplies.

Inmates look forward to the event and associated Hobbycraft Fair, as it’s called. The rodeo and marketplace bring prisoners that brief taste of freedom. And they can make real money. They get to keep 85 percent of any Hobbycraft profits, with the rest going to the Inmate Welfare Fund, and state and local taxes. Cash prizes up to $500 are awarded to winners of the rodeo events. And then there’s the prestige that goes with winning the custom belt buckle if a rider is crowned the rodeo’s “All-Around Cowboy.”

On the other hand, there are the injuries, and the fact that spectators assemble in the thousands to watch incarcerated amateur participants, the majority serving life sentences, get thrown off bulls and broncos, as weekend entertainment. Convict-cowboys regularly break bones, or get lacerated by a bull’s horns. One rider in the 1970s, shaken by an enraged bull after a fall, spent the rest of his prison life as a quadriplegic.

There’s also the way the rodeo has a way of fortifying racial and socioeconomic stereotypes. African-American riders, riders from disadvantaged backgrounds, appear as, yes, human pinballs in a public arena to provide viewing enjoyment for a paying audience — a crowd whose racial mix roughly reverses that of the prison. The audience is predominantly white.

Some label the rodeo barbaric. Others argue that it has time-tested value — proven benefits — both for the prison population and for the way the prison operates as a whole.

Angola administrators vigorously defend their event in the face of criticism, which comes from observers both within Louisiana and nationally. One of those observers is Ashley Nellis of the Sentencing Project, a justice reform advocacy group. Says Nellis: “Prisoners benefit from being able to earn a little money. That’s a wonderful thing, but it’s not really a skill. [The rodeo] makes them feel connected to the community, but at the same time it reinforces our tendency to assume the violent nature of prisoners.”

Incarceration is said to serve four purposes: deterrence, incapacitation, retribution, and rehabilitation. Redemption is a different matter. Whatever a prisoner’s good works — his long hours of farm toil and artistic output — there’s little hope of redemption for him in Angola Prison without Christ. The federally funded Baptist seminary program, which was started by Burl Cain in 1995,

offers four-year college degrees in ministry, including instruction in Greek and Hebrew, as well as preaching. The students are usually lifers, and the assumption is that they will help other prisoners work through the issues that led them to commit crimes.

Cain is quoted by Texas state senator John Whitmire, a Democrat who has run the senate’s criminal justice committee for years, as saying: “With a moral attitude, even if an inmate will not be set free in this world, he looks forward to being free in the next.” Whitmire was impressed by the Angola program, and pushed the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to create its own seminary. There are now similar prison seminary programs in Mississippi, Georgia, New Mexico, Michigan, and West Virginia.

Legend has it that when Harry Whittington of the Texas Board of Corrections — the man who years later was shot by then-Vice President Dick Cheney while hunting quail — voted to abolish the state’s prison rodeo at Huntsville, a Lone Star flag behind him fell to the ground.

Earlier this year, Representative Ernest Bailes introduced a bill to reinstate the Huntsville rodeo, where Johnny Cash performed his first prison concert in 1956. This rodeo, which had taken place every Sunday in October for 55 years, ended in 1986 in part because its stadium was past the point of affordable repair. Making the case for a revival, Representative Bailes said, “Profits from the rodeo ticket sales alone would help fund education, recreation, and medical programs for inmates across Texas, as it did for so many years before.”

If we can judge a society by its prisons, the fact that officials in both Texas and neighboring Oklahoma want their prison rodeos to make a comeback tells us a lot.

Prison system budget issues late last century led to the demise of all but Angola’s rodeo, with insufficient funds available for infrastructure improvement and to pay staff to run the events. Meanwhile, in multiple prison systems, funding can now be found for religious training and the promotion of a narrow band of cultural values. And a couple states are weighing a return to an event where, like at Angola, prisoners would sing for their bland supper, and provide a spectacle, complete with chances for blood, concussions, and broken bones, to the paying public.

On that April Sunday at the prison rodeo, Pinball — an event with a $250 top prize — takes a turn for the ugly when a pair of prisoners get smashed by the bull and can barely move. They are helped out of the ring without fanfare, however, because Convict Poker is up next, and that’s always a crowd favorite.

In Convict Poker, four helmeted inmates sit at a small table as if playing cards, only to be rudely interrupted by a raging bull, which invariably sends the entire setup skyward. On this occasion, one inmate is catapulted into the air and lands in a worryingly crumpled heap. The dirt ring fills with several comrades trying to distract the bull in case it decides to add a trampling to the man’s woes.

Arguably, the main event of the festivities is Guts & Glory. It’s the biggest deal for the participating inmates anyway, because of the substantial prize money. A red poker chip is tied to the head of Angola’s angriest Brahma bull, which is then released into the arena. Prisoners compete to grab the chip and avoid getting battered or gored by the 2,000-pound beast in the process. Whoever retrieves the chip, if anyone, wins $500 in cash. Six weeks after that April installment of Guts & Glory, and the other rodeo events, I receive an email from Joe Keene.

Referring to his Bust Out ride, he writes, “I fell wrong and broke my collarbone and messed up my shoulder. I can still feel the bones moving where they shouldn’t be. They are talking about having to put a plate inside of me.”

In spite of his tumble, Keene scored well, notching a 78.5 on a hard ride, though it wasn’t enough to win. He tried to get back in the ring, to compete in another event, only to be told by medical personnel that he was too injured to continue.

Losing his crown as Bust Out champion hurts him more than any physical injury could, though these days, pain of one sort or another is simply a constant. “I am dead but alive,” Keene says, speaking of life without parole. “But that’s the hand that life has dealt me and so many others.”

The only thing that would mitigate his pain is forgiveness, but the forgiveness Keene craves is in the hands of very few people — his mother, his father, and his victim — and they are all dead. He would like to forgive himself, but he needs to be shown how. Until then, there’s the next rodeo, and the next, and the one after that.

(Note: The names of two Angola inmates have been changed in this article.)

Elle Hardy is a writer currently based in the American South. She hails from Australia and has reported from places like North Korea and Turkmenistan.

Dennis Hof: What A Dead Pimp Can Teach America About Forgiveness

Posted on by Team Penthouse

After the larger-than-life owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch died, his whores asked, “What would Dennis want us to do?” Alice Little, America’s highest-earning legal prostitute, concluded he would want her to charge a john to be her funeral date. When I wondered what Dennis would want me to do, I concluded he would want me to write. Dennis loved free press as much as pussy.

I first met him in 2015. To promote his memoir, The Art of The Pimp, Dennis had invited me to live at the Bunny Ranch for a week. When I arrived, the night madam led me to a room that had three fireplaces, vertical blinds, and a view of a wooden porch shaped like Ron Jeremy’s penis. I woke up to the sound of a hooker blasting Lana Del Rey’s “Born to Die.” Dennis’s first words to me that morning: “Heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s off to work we go!” His fantasyland seemed like a parody of a parody of a brothel.

I was skeptical of Dennis—press releases like “PROSTITUTES FOR RON PAUL” prepared me for a man who spoke in sound-bites—but over Heidi Fleiss Veggie Burgers at the Bunny Ranch restaurant, Dennis confessed his public image was a facade. For instance, he always held a cigar in photos, but actually never smoked. Larry Flynt had told him, “Never let them take your picture without a cigar.” When Dennis lied, he winked. He told the truth even when he fibbed. He was not a Hugh Hefner, who claimed Playboy’s nude pictorials were art, superior to pornography. Dennis learned radical honesty reading Flynt’s Hustler, Al Goldstein’s Screw, and Bob Guccione’s Penthouse, the canon of smut.

As a working-class boy in Arizona, Dennis loved dirty magazines and idolized big-breasted blondes with nasty attitudes. The legend goes Marilyn Monroe kissed an eight-year-old Dennis on the cheek at the Arizona State Fair, inciting his first erection. In his memoir, Dennis writes, “Marilyn Monroe has just sealed my fate. To this day, I can’t resist a glammed-up blonde, especially if she’s got red lips.”  Marilyn was a kind creature, whereas Dennis’s mother scared him. She dominated his weak father; masturbation was Dennis’s respite. When he grew up, Dennis swore he would control his own fate. He was thinking he’d own gas stations.

The public only met Dennis when the 52-year-old brought his brothels into American homes via the HBO reality show Cathouse. Dennis bought the Bunny Ranch in 1993, at age 47. This purchase marked the start of his fourth career.

Throughout his teen years, Dennis worked at a gas station. After he knocked up Shirley, his high school sweetheart, and first wife, he began managing the pump, saving every paycheck. He leased a decaying gas station in the late sixties, and by 1971, he was the owner of five filling stations. During the seventies and eighties, Dennis reinvested in three different businesses: a towing company, a parking garage, and a time-share sales operation.

He was miserable. According to The Art of the Pimp, Dennis craved more sex. He paged through porn rags like a law student studying for the bar exam, claiming his wife could not keep up with his sex drive. Driving to and from his companies, he passed the Moonlite Ranch. Listening to his gut one day, Dennis swerved into the parking lot.

Inside the run-down, century-old brothel, Dennis experienced a courtesan for the first time. Lounging in her bedroom, post orgasm, he realized he was inside one of the fantasies he had read about in Hustler, Screw, and Penthouse. He also realized he was a dog. And in a brothel, he could embrace his canine instincts. “It’s good to be called a dog,” he told me. “It means you’re man’s best friend.”

America’s least judgmental man was born.

Over the next decade, Dennis kept returning to the Moonlite Ranch. He met sex legends, like Andy Kaufman and Bob Zmuda, and listened to them discuss press stunts and their wildest sexual sojourns. In his memoir, Dennis describes topping them all when he showed up at the Moonlite Ranch with his own dad. Most would gag at the thought of bringing their old man to a whorehouse, but Dennis knew his dad had spent years dreaming of a roll in the hay with someone other than his grouchy wife. He wanted to fulfill his pop’s fantasy. This was Dennis. He accepted—and celebrated—each individual at their basest core.

Many baby boomers digested Hustler, Screw, and Penthouse, and occasionally fucked hookers. They all dreamed of living the lives of porn titans, but Dennis is perhaps the only man who, in middle age, decided to join the sex trade and surround himself with dozens of sexy, curvy women.

When he bought the Moonlite Ranch and rebranded the bordello Dennis Hof’s World-Famous Moonlite Bunny Ranch, he claimed to have spent half a million dollars renovating the place, installing red velvet couches and new bedrooms. Dennis wanted to reach the “sex legend” heights of his idols. He wanted to be the Walt Disney of brothels.

As the Bunny Ranch’s new owner, he changed the rules. Whereas before hookers lived in “lockdown,” banned from leaving the brothel, he let them roam free. The women set their own prices and could now fuck women. At weekly tea time, Dennis lectured the girls on what men wanted and taught a new sales system. A visitor rang a bell, sounding an alarm through the brothel. In their red pumps, hookers clicked down the halls, forming a lineup. They introduced themselves. The man picked his girl. While she led him on a tour of the brothel, the other girls ran into designated spots. If the man lost interest in his first pick, a woman was standing there ready to intercept.

Whereas other pimps hid their techniques and avoided media, Dennis bragged about the mechanics of his operation to the press. He staged elaborate press stunts, like hiring John Wayne Bobbitt as a greeter after his wife Lorena chopped off his cock. On Cathouse, Dennis normalized lineups and sex workers. Feminists compared his methods to a chicken farmer, but as Madam Lydia, one of his employees, pointed out, the lineups decreased women’s emotional labor, as they didn’t have to constantly engage in elaborate, interpersonal seduction-of-customer contests with each other. Dennis’s innovations led to higher sales, and by the end of his life, he had bought the majority of Nevada’s brothels.

Dennis was a shrewd businessman, but he was imperfect. He took half a girl’s earnings—too much—and has been accused of getting violent with some employees. (He denied all accusations.)

Dennis Hof at Work

Many girls loved him. After his death, hookers tweeted about how he visited them in prison and rehab. When a competing brothel fired a pregnant hooker, he hired her. In the parlor, he rubbed her belly, jokingly calling the fetus “Dennis Jr.”

Perhaps Dennis’s controlling tendencies stemmed from his love of hookers. “Women. Jesus. What a gift!” he writes in his memoir. I watched one blonde lie to him about leaving town to visit her grandmother, then never return. Dennis fell into a funk. “I teach the tricks how to trick, then I get tricked by my own tricks’ tricks,” he said. Dennis hated to see hookers go. He rarely left his brothels, and I believe it was because he was scared of the heartbreak out there in the big, vast world. Walt Disney was only safe at Disneyland; Dennis was only secure at his brothels.

When she got out of prison, Heidi Fleiss, the notorious “Hollywood Madam,” was shocked at Dennis’s taste in women. Where she traded in sophisticated, well-educated escorts—girls who could blow you, then discuss the latest issue of the Economist—Dennis sold girls straight out of Hustler. How could he make money? Fleiss visited and watched as one trucker after another paid for a trick. New-money men came in hordes. Most brothel owners cater to business tycoons. Dennis believed everyone deserved to live their fantasies. He realized there was also a lot to be made off of horny average Joes.

Men paid to live inside Dennis’s world, but Dennis liked to please everyone. The weekend the Washington Post published President Trump’s “Grab ‘em by the pussy” tape, I attended Dennis’s birthday party. I looked up at the brothel’s neon sign and saw my name beside those of Flavor Flav, Joey Buttafuoco, and Ron Jeremy. Dennis wanted everyone to feel like a king. And he had a gift for boosting your morale when you needed it.

I experienced this firsthand last fall when I was doxxed after BuzzFeed leaked an email where I called a woman fat. Vice fired me. I lost childhood friends and family members over the bad joke. Dennis called and told me to stay in the Bunny Ranch for a bit. He asked no questions. He was just concerned about my safety. To make me feel better on my arrival, Dennis instructed fifty hookers to scream, “FUCK VICE!”

I later learned that a media executive visited the Bunny Ranch after she was fired, knowing she’d be feeling better by the time she left, thanks to Dennis. Heidi Fleiss came to call Dennis her “most loyal friend.”

A lot of people claim they “don’t give a fuck” about what others say, but Dennis truly did not give a shit. And he would never allow the negative opinions of others to influence the way he thought about someone. He’d make up his own mind.

With Dennis’s death, Flynt, Fleiss, and Ron Jeremy are America’s remaining sex celebrities. A rich sensibility—tongue-in-cheek humor, shamelessness, a complete embrace of sex, media pizzazz—is endangered. Many view this attitude as an outdated, heterosexual one, but in Dennis, what the sensibility really embodied at its core was an acceptance of everyone for who they were—even those society deemed pariahs.

I know some of his friends were shocked that Dennis invited Joe Arpaio, former sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County, an immigration firebrand who ran a tent prison, to his final birthday party and political rally in mid-October. At first, I was offended, too, but I can’t say I was surprised. Joe was probably nice to Dennis, and America’s pimp took him for who he was in the moment

As America’s culture war rages on, we could take a hint from Dennis Hof. In the age of Trump, many talk about the importance of empathy and mindfulness, but we just lost the most thoughtful man in America.

Dennis Hof with Legal Prostitutes

Working Girls Remember Their Pimp

Since Dennis Hof died, feminists, Christians, and sex-trafficking hysterics have disparaged his name. But few have heard from the women who tricked in his bordellos. In advance of Dennis’s memorial, Penthouse asked some of his favorite working girls to pen tributes to the man they called “Daddy D.” May he rest in love.

“It saddens me that even in death, Dennis continues to be maligned as a villain or memorialized as a caricature. He was neither. Much has been made of his sexual relationships with the women who referred to him as “Daddy”—his detractors view it as evidence that Dennis saw women as objects—but as his platonic, lefty feminist protégé, I feel morally obligated to dispute this perception. The man I knew wanted to close the gender pay gap, supported LGBTQ rights, and identified as a freethinking atheist. Even when we disagreed, we never exchanged unkind words. He was genuinely the most pleasant man I’ve known.”
                  —Lydia Faithfull, a former madam at the Alien Cathouse

“I met Dennis in 2014 when I began researching his brothels as part of my doctoral work. He was the only brothel owner who opened his doors to me and encouraged my research. I will always be grateful for the opportunities that followed, but I am most grateful for the bond we developed. Dennis served multiple roles in my life: boss, mentor, friend, motivational speaker, and role model. His faith in me helped me have faith in myself. Dennis changed my life for the better, and I will miss him every single day.”
                  —Christina Parreira, UNLV Sociology Ph.D. candidate and a former working girl at Love Ranch Vegas and Alien Cathouse

Dennis was so much more than just a boss—he was a friend, a mentor, and a role model. He revolutionized the legal sex-work industry, taking us out of the shadows and into the limelight. His legacy of empowering women to be successful on their own terms will continue on, though we will miss him terribly.
                  —Alice Little, the highest-earning working girl at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch

“Dennis was a great businessman and completely transformed the legal brothels in Nevada. I had known him for seven years, and during that time, he taught me the value of hard work and confidence. All Dennis wanted from his brothel employees was for them to succeed and to be their best, most confident selves. He was truly the legal brothel industry’s champion. His legacy will be remembered as one of bravery and extreme success.”
                  —Ruby Rae, working girl at the Moonlite Bunny Ranch

Man of the Moment: J.D. Vance

Posted on by Team Penthouse

It’s time for J.D. Vance — author, lawyer, venture capitalist, and product of Kentucky-holler hillbillies turned Ohio Rust Belt residents — to start limbering up the ol’ vocal chords, since if the past presidential election is anything to go by, Vance will be in much TV demand.

Why? Because most pundits didn’t see that happening, and it happened in part because Trump was able to win states like Ohio and Wisconsin, which went to Barack Obama in 2012. After the election-night surprise, Vance’s phone wouldn’t stop ringing. Cable-news producers wanted to book the guy who seemed to have a gut understanding of white working-class Trump voters, especially in the Rust Belt and Appalachia.

Hillbilly Elegy CoverHere’s Vance on how he spent November 9, 2016: “From 6 A.M. until around 11:30 P.M., I was on television effectively constantly, this idiot with a book.” He offered that remark to the Washington Post, and noted that the book went to No. 1 on Amazon the next day.

Expect to hear a lot more about Vance’s page-turner, Hillbilly Elegy, and not only because Trump and his base — people Vance grew up with in Middletown, a declining steel-mill town north of Cincinnati — will be in the news every hour until the 2020 election.

There’s also a Netflix movie coming, with Ron Howard directing, and it started shooting in Georgia this summer. Amy Adams is playing Vance’s mom, addicted to heroin and weddings (she married five times). Glenn Close is playing Mamaw, Vance’s foul-mouthed, “pistol-packing lunatic” of a grandmother, who stepped in to raise Vance, and believed in him.

It was Mamaw’s faith that helped propel Vance to Yale Law School after a four-year stint in the Marines and college at Ohio State. And it was at Yale that Vance, now 35, began writing about his past.

Like a third of Kentucky’s Breathitt County “Hillbilly Corridor” residents, Vance’s maternal grandparents left home looking for jobs between 1940 and 1960. They ended up in Middletown, and brought their hillbilly ways with them, as Vance vividly details. His granddad was a violent drunk, and in one act of retaliation, Mamaw served him an artfully arranged plate of garbage for dinner. (Something tells us that scene might make the movie.)

Missouri native Gabriel Basso (Super 8, The Big C) is playing J. D. Vance. As for the man himself, he’s back in Ohio, after time in San Francisco working for a Peter Thiel-founded investment group. Based in Columbus, Vance is now running a nonprofit, Our Ohio Renewal, focused on the opioid crisis and bringing business investment to overlooked communities.

Vance has said he’d rather solve problems than talk on TV. But with a movie in the offing, and another presidential election looming, smart money says he’s got some talking in his future.

In Focus: Photographer Ryan Calderon

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Ten years ago, Ryan Calderon picked up a camera to help his friend with a photo shoot for his clothing store. From there, it didn’t take long for the self-taught photographer’s style of capturing and editing images of beautiful women to get noticed, and the models he was shooting started referring him to their friends in other industries.

These days, Calderon’s seductive shots have amassed over 200K Instagram followers (@ryan__calderon) and comprise an impressive portfolio that features some of the adult industry’s biggest players.

While Calderon grew up and currently lives in the beach town of Santa Barbara, he frequently travels to Los Angeles for work. He says he rarely shoots in the same place twice, and prefers locations with “raw beauty,” such as deserts, or basic indoor settings. “I like that ‘at home just lounging around’ feel if I’m shooting inside.”

The photographer’s signature style is all about catching intimate moments and recreating visuals the way the mind would, and he’s a master of the crop and unconventional angles. “For example,” Calderon explains, “when you think back on an amazing night with a wild one,

your mind will break the moment down scene by scene, and the smallest details come to life like snapshots. You can be sitting at work and, all of a sudden, an image of those lips is in your head. Just the lips. I try to replicate the thoughts you can’t erase.”

Calderon counts both movies and history as inspiration, and will often base a shoot around something he found in a thrift store. He also keeps an arsenal of random objects at home for when the right model comes along. “I always have several ideas in the tomb for months, even years, just waiting for the stars to align,” he says.

His advice for young photographers? “What I’ve learned is not to take things too seriously. Don’t get anxious about when things are going to happen, just have fun taking advantage of the opportunities that will eventually come.”

The Gritty Truths Behind Military Recruitment Today

Posted on by Team Penthouse

“When I came to this assignment, everyone said, Oh, you got it easy — the South? Military community? You got nuthin’ to worry about…but it’s been hard. A legit hustle. These kids grew up during the wars, seen their parents come and go. They know what military life is really like…can’t sell them on the perks, on the adventure. Yeah, the economy is good. That makes [recruiting] harder. Yeah, there’s a lot of kids out there who can’t qualify, because of the various requirements. Can’t speak to national trends. But here? Here it’s the wars, man. It’s killing me.” Continue reading “The Gritty Truths Behind Military Recruitment Today”

Christina Applegate: Alive and Kicking

Posted on by Team Penthouse

Back in the late 1980s, when Married … With Children was making a name for the brand-new Fox TV network, Christina Applegate was making prime-time viewers slobber as the dimwitted Kelly Bundy, with her big blonde hair, sexually charged one-liners, and skintight heavy metal outfits.

(Fun fact: Kelly was modeled after a white-minidress-wearing “rock slut” Applegate had seen in the 1988 documentary, The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years.)

In reality, however, Applegate’s teenage self couldn’t have differed more from the sexpot role that catapulted her to fame. Inward and intense, she recently told the L.A. Times she was a “dark kid,” adding, “I always thought serious projects were going to be my jam. But the show really helped me to let go of being so serious all the time.”

Applegate got into acting because her single mother, an actress and singer, couldn’t afford a babysitter, and would bring her months-old daughter to auditions. This was how she landed her first roles: as her mom’s child in a Playtex baby-bottle commercial, and on a 1972 episode of Days of Our Lives.

Following her 11-season run as Kelly Bundy, Applegate starred in several sitcoms (Samantha Who?, Up All Night), appeared in movies (The Sweetest Thing), sang and danced on Broadway (in Neil Simon’s Sweet Charity), and did animation voiceovers (King of the Hill). But it was the role of Veronica Corningstone in the 2004 Will Ferrell hit, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, that put her back on America’s radar. It’s a part she’s described as “one of the best times I’ve ever had in my life.”

Alongside Applegate’s decades of comic acting, she’s endured plenty of real-life drama, including a breast cancer diagnosis in 2008, after which she underwent a double mastectomy. The harrowing experience led her to create a foundation, Right Action for Women (@RightAct4Women), which provides education and assistance to women who are at increased risk for the disease.

Happily, 2019 is turning out to be a good year for the 47-year-old, who’s enjoying yet another career high point with the release of Netflix’s critically acclaimed “traumedy,” Dead to Me. In July, she received an Emmy nomination (Lead Actress in a Comedy) for her role.

Applegate plays Jen, a widow who recently lost her husband in a hit-and-run. When the show begins, Jen is about to meet her new BFF, Judy (Linda Cardellini), in a grief counseling seminar. Unbeknownst to Jen, Judy was driving the car that killed her husband. The ten-episode series, now gearing up for a second season, paints a smart, funny, and nuanced portrait of the two women’s lives, relationships, and their imperfect reactions to loss.

“Some people have been confused by [the show],” Applegate told the New York Times. “But in life we laugh and cry and we get surprised by things and we get shocked by things and people are not what they seem. It’s what life feels like—dark and twisty and funny.”

Linda Cardellini and Christina Applegate Linda Cardellini and Christina Applegate in Netflix’s “Dead to Me”

The Crying of Gilgo Beach

Posted on by Team Penthouse

I was once told by a woman who calls herself a witch that I was a prostitute in a past life — or, rather, in her own words: a woman of ill repute. I’m not normally one to put stock in this kind of thing, but when she told me that, I didn’t have to engage in a lot of mental gymnastics for it to make a strange sort of sense.

The woman’s words came back to me when I found myself compelled to investigate the unsolved murders of sex workers whose remains were discovered lined up along a lonely beach-town road. There were times it did feel like a past life had hijacked my brain, convincing me to fall in with an internet crowd trying to solve the Long Island Serial Killer case.

These sleuths are stay-at-home moms, taxi drivers, psychics, people on bed rest, bankers, and even a former Las Vegas haunted-house employee — dedicated amateurs who’ve spent years scouring the internet, looking for anything the authorities might have missed, anything that could lead to the capture of a canny killer believed to have been operating in the shadows for 20 years.

Early on, I told myself I wouldn’t become a desktop detective. I rationalized the time and energy I began directing toward this mystery by classifying my interest as basic human curiosity —

I just wanted to know who these people, these keyboard Sherlocks, were. It seemed worth looking into, journalistically — a varied group of Americans attaching themselves to a notorious serial-murder case.

And yet here I am, one cold January day, walking the shoulder of Ocean Parkway on a desolate barrier island off Long Island’s southern shore. I’m following a video map I found on YouTube, one that traces the steps of the killer, who used this stretch of road as a secret graveyard. The map shows where the perpetrator is believed to have carried his victims’ bodies, wrapped in burlap sacks, from a car and dumped them in bramble, mere feet from the road’s edge.

No one knew a killer had been depositing bodies and body parts in the South Shore region of Long Island when Shannan Gilbert went missing in the predawn gloom of May 1, 2010.

Ocean Parkway Road View

Shannan, a 24-year-old escort from Jersey City, New Jersey, had advertised her services on Craigslist. She’d arrived at her client Joseph Brewer’s house in Oak Beach, a small, gated community off Ocean Parkway. But something inside Brewer’s house freaked her out, and she called 911. Although police have not released the 911 tape, her mother, Mari Gilbert, heard portions. She says her daughter was screaming, “They’re trying to kill me!” They could refer to Brewer and Shannan’s driver, Michael Pak — but Suffolk County police have cleared both men. Investigators claim she sounded psychotic — possibly a reaction to drugs. She bolted from the house, away from the two men, banged on neighbors’ doors, and vanished.

After weeks of nothing, the search for Shannan slowed down. Her family accused the police of not trying hard enough to find her because she was.… just a hooker.

Then, on December 11, 2010, police officer John Mallia and his cadaver dog, Blue, were training on Ocean Parkway, near Gilgo Beach, minutes from where Shannan was last seen, when Blue found a woman’s skeletal remains. They turned out to be the remains of Melissa Barthelemy, another escort who advertised on Craigslist and had been missing for a year.

Mallia and his dog would later find the bodies of three more young women placed only hundreds of feet apart on Gilgo Beach. Each of them had been strangled and started to decompose at another location — a pattern that has been linked to serial killers who engage in necrophilia. Like Barthelemy, these women were found inside burlap sacks. The victims were Amber Lynn Costello, 27, Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, and Megan Waterman, 22.

Using a search party of cadaver dogs, divers, and helicopters, Suffolk County PD would go on to find the corpses or body parts of six more people scattered along Ocean Parkway. Some of the remains discovered at Gilgo Beach turned out to be genetic matches for body parts found 20 years earlier elsewhere on Long Island.

A pair of hands and a skull matched a mutilated torso found in Manorville, 40 miles east. A skull matched a pair of legs that had washed ashore on Fire Island in 1996. There was an Asian male, still unidentified, found in women’s clothes. There was the corpse of an African-American toddler wrapped in a blanket whose DNA connected it to another corpse, the girl’s mother, found a mile away.

Currently, there are more unidentified victims than those police have identified. After the additional discoveries, investigators struggled to establish whether this was the work of one killer or possibly more. A single-killer theory was easier to support back when all the victims were a similar type: petite, white escorts.

Police eventually found Shannan Gilbert a year later, in nearby wetlands off the road, badly decomposed. Her death was ruled an accidental drowning — overexposure to the elements having weakened her until she collapsed.

Still convinced she’d been in a drug-induced episode, police suggested she ran through the marsh, disoriented. The Suffolk County PD does not include her as one of the victims of the serial killer — something Shannan’s family struggles with. On the one hand, they hope she wasn’t murdered. On the other, is it really just a coincidence that a fifth woman, also a sex worker who advertised online, was found dead in a swamp near Gilgo Beach?

When asked if police were taking this serial murder case seriously enough, former Suffolk County police commissioner Richard Dormer, who worked the case until he retired, made a point of saying he hung the photos of these young women in his office.

“They look like your neighbors,” Dormer stated. “Nobody deserves to have their life snuffed out. Police departments everywhere take murder very seriously. Doesn’t matter the occupation of the victim — if you were murdered, we’re obligated to represent that person.”

But Lorraine Ela, mother of Megan Waterman, says she’s convinced the cops have put her daughter’s case on the back burner. “This is too big a case for Suffolk County to handle,” Ela tells me, and notes that she rarely hears from police anymore. For a time, in 2015, when the FBI began assisting and Suffolk County got a new police commissioner, Ela was hopeful there’d be increased action on the case. But her phone has since stopped ringing.

This silence is one reason Ela and family members of other victims turned to case websites and desktop detectives for support, updates, and possible leads, however unofficial.

THE first place I find extensive, user-gathered information regarding the case is the YouTube channel of Gray Hughes. He made the video-map I used to navigate Ocean Parkway. When Hughes reads about a crime scene, he logs onto Google Earth and drops a pin. He often then replicates the scene and its physical setting with a program like 3D Studio Max and posts the video for user analysis.

When it comes to the Long Island Serial Killer case, Hughes is trying to provide a resource that can help people visualize the crime scene. He hopes it might trigger a memory in someone who has been through the area, perhaps a beachgoer, someone who might have seen something suspicious.

“I feel like it gives the viewer a better feel for the location,” Hughes tells me.

It does exactly that. His Google Earth video’s point-of-view is one of a person standing on the shoulder of Ocean Parkway — the same view the killer might have had after pulling over with a body in the car. Hughes’ video pans slowly left to right, scanning the barren landscape. During winter, with the beaches deserted, Ocean Parkway is so isolated it’s not hard to believe a killer could dispose of a body, or bodies, even in broad daylight.

Paranoia comes naturally to people in the online amateur-detective world. It’s what happens when you immerse yourself in dark details, labyrinthine theories, and rosters of potential murder suspects in unsolved serial murder cases — cases where the killer might still be at large, and perhaps reading your latest website post.

Fear has both fostered and destroyed relationships in this digital community. It’s a subculture of distrust, anxiety, and information. It’s a realm rife with clues and red herrings, do-gooders and trolls. It’s hard to get people’s real names.

“Zero,” for example, was suspicious of me from the start.

“I’m a little curious about you,” he tells me online. “Your questions are so specific. I’m wondering if there is more to why you are looking into all this.” I tell him he can google me. Or check my Facebook. I assure him I’m a real person.

Zero responds, “I say this kind of thing to everyone.”

He has his reasons for wondering if I am legit. After he began posting about the Long Island Serial Killer, aka LISK, in 2013, he was targeted by trolls. His website, liskdotcom.wordpress.com (still online but rendered inactive in 2014), is both a museum of factual evidence and an archive of paranoia-tinged comments.

All the case theories are here, from a police cover-up to demon worshippers, from snuff films to the sex-and-death orgies of millionaires. Zero’s own emails arrive jammed with giant blocks of information. He helps me try to get a grip on this vast chaos of truth and fiction, evidence and fantasy. He’s preserved hundreds of emails between him and others (persons of interest, possible witnesses, fellow desktop detectives, victims’ families), as well as screenshots of almost any online mention of this enduring mystery.

Zero’s site was part of a second wave dedicated to the case, succeeding the now-defunct LongIslandSerialKiller.com, which went live in the days after the first bodies were found. That site got substantial traffic from amateur sleuths, family members of victims, and Long Island residents unsettled by the notion that a serial killer might still be out there, poised to dump another body.

But the site’s chat room also became a place of slander, wild rumors, and trolling. People accused fellow visitors of being the killer. Everyone I’ve spoken to about LongIslandSerialKiller.com believes the killer himself not only visited the website, but might have posted. Anxiety escalated. Certain commenters banded together out of fear the killer was stalking them — even if they lived in different states, hundreds of miles away.

The site’s founder, overwhelmed, eventually shut it down. But new websites popped up. One of these, Catching LISK, created by MysteryMom7, captured the founder’s growing paranoia. At one point, MysteryMom7 thought the killer had sent a drone to spy on her. She claimed it crashed in her backyard.

Two camps would come to frequent Zero’s own site. There were those working to unlock the mystery, and those pushing wild conspiracies. In the first camp was a woman named Linda. Bedridden after an accident, she became engrossed with the case’s complexities. Linda and Zero made it a goal to keep the conspiracy camp from spreading misinformation to the victims’ families. Zero spoke with Shannan’s mother, Mari, and offered to make sure certain people weren’t “in her ear.”

Understandably, Mari pursued any shred of possible hope, and cast a wide net in seeking help. She contacted people like Jerrie Dean, founder of Missing Persons of America. Dean has compiled an almost Bible-size list of missing people. Some entries date so far back, the victims were last seen on stagecoaches.

Dean told me the same thing she told Mari: She thinks something set Shannan off in the house, which led to a dissociative break. She believes Shannan’s death was accidental. However, she also believes former Suffolk County police chief James Burke was, in her words, “lazy,” and “didn’t care about [those young women].” (Reader, put a pin in Burke’s name.)

According to people posting on the internet, the Long Island Serial Killer is a clean-cut sociopath, a shoe freak with a nice car, a wife, and kids. He’s a South Shore local, religious, bisexual, well-spoken. He’s a doctor and periodic drunk. He’s a bald narcissist. He’s corporate and charming. He’s a fisherman with a truck. He’s a small-town cop who keeps corpses for sex. He’s a transient, blue-collar, 50-year-old white male. He’s a depraved sadomasochist who summers on the shore.

The internet has put forth various persons of interest. There’s Joseph Brewer, the john. There’s Michael Pak, Shannan’s driver the night she disappeared. There’s someone known as “The Drifter” — a man who claims to have partied with Brewer and even self-published a “fictionalized autobiography,” detailing the supposed drug-fueled prostitution parties at Brewer’s house.

Rooted deep in the online discussion is the notion of a possible police cover-up. This theory began with the fact that the killer used Melissa Barthelemy’s cell phone to call and taunt her teenage sister. The sister, Amanda, received several phone calls from a calm-sounding man telling her that Melissa was a whore and that he was “watching her rot.” Some desktop detectives believe the killer is somehow connected with law enforcement because during these disturbing calls, he’d hang up just before the call could be traced. When police were able to ping the phone’s general location, it turned out the killer had placed the calls from crowded places like Times Square or Madison Square Garden. Former police commissioner Richard Dormer dismisses this theory. He says anyone who’s seen some cop shows knows that tracing protocol.

But there’s also James Burke, onetime Suffolk County police chief. In 2015, Burke was arrested for beating up a young man who stole a canvas bag containing pornography and sex toys from Burke’s SUV. The beating happened while the thief was shackled at a county police station. Burke went on to cover up the assault, and eventually pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice and violating the man’s civil rights.

Burke’s past is fodder for conspiracy theorists who accuse him of mishandling the LISK case — and maybe even being the killer himself. Back when Burke was a sergeant, he was caught having sex with a drug dealer and prostitute. Even still, he rose to become police chief. Moreover, when Burke was a teen, he testified in court against his friends, whom he watched beat a 13-year-old Smithtown boy to death in the woods and stuff rocks into his mouth. They wonder about Burke’s account of the murder.

The theory that would take firmest hold on websites fingered Dr. Charles Peter Hackett. For years, Hackett was an Oak Beach resident: a middle-aged, overweight man with a prosthetic leg. A group of commenters worked hard to build a link between the doctor and the death of Shannan Gilbert. Hackett became the internet’s top person of interest after Mari said Hackett called her in the days after Shannan went missing. Hackett, Mari said, uttered something very strange, saying he ran a “home for wayward girls.” Though Hackett denied all this and claimed he never hosted Shannan, phone records confirm he did in fact call Mari.

A past trauma in Zero’s life might help account for his obsessive drive to illuminate this case. When he was 16, living in California, his best friend’s mom was killed by William Suff, aka the Riverside Prostitute Killer, convicted of murdering 12 women and suspected of many more slayings. When Suff’s photo appeared on television, Zero said his friend recognized him immediately.

Zero used to work at the Fright Dome in Las Vegas, a haunted house. His character had long scraggly hair, a ghoulish, blood-smeared face, and a Manson Family “X” on his forehead. It might be tempting to label Zero a morbid person, drawn to horror, and conclude that’s what led him to the LISK case. But from what I gleaned, Zero truly does want justice for the victims. He’s seen firsthand the destructive aftermath of a serial killer’s crimes.

When not entertaining every data speck, Zero also has had to deal with those trolls, and face some bizarre accusations, like “devil worship.” He had his name posted on websites and victim-memorial pages, with commenters suggesting he might be the killer himself. Some of this stuff began with a person I’ll call Money, who would also accuse her ex-husband of the murders.

Money claimed to be working with the FBI. Zero didn’t think she was a real person at first — just a troll with an alias. But it turned out she used her real name, worked at a bank, and Zero called her once. What really pissed him off was how normal she sounded. He says she believed she was sincerely helping the case.

Zero tells me Money and MysteryMom7 eventually joined forces.

“I contacted Long Island Homicide once, because they insisted I was endangering them,” he says. Money’s case theories are twisty and kooky, connecting everyone from James Burke to Zero to Hackett to the actor Michael Fassbender.

Money commented extensively on Zero’s site and Facebook memorial pages. She highlighted a group of men known as the Carney Construction Crew, or CCC, whom she alleged kill women for sport. She claimed her ex-husband and Hackett were CCC members. At first, Zero and others dismissed this stuff, like they’d rejected her Satanism theories. But then Zero and MysteryMom7 began receiving vague, spooky threats on their websites.

Zero shows me some visitor comments, the first by “Teps.”

Teps: Disregard everything said about the CCC. All falsification and wishful thinking. Go about your regular business and leave the CCC out of this.

Lightweight: CCC got no beef with you. Why you dragging CCC through the mud?

452inLondon: Carney Construction Crew after you? Do not take any chances. Shut down this website…. Take it to the pavement where it is more private.

To me, the comments read like the words of cartoon villains. They could have been typed by anybody. Zero, though, eventually came to think there might be something to the CCC. And he tells me to visit the site Websleuths for more.

Pages: 1 2

Bad Moon Rising

Posted on by Team Penthouse

When director John Landis and his music team needed a song to score two minutes of screen time just before their film’s protagonist, American backpacker David Kessler, grows a pelt of black body hair, deadly fangs, and vicious claws, they turned to “Bad Moon Rising,” a 1969 Creedence Clearwater Revival song written by John Fogerty.

The movie? An American Werewolf in London, a now-canonical 1981 horror-comedy that makes darkly humorous use of popular songs throughout. Van Morrison’s “Moondance” scores a sex scene, and versions of “Blue Moon,” sung by Bobby Vinton and Sam Cooke, appear, too. But the CCR song is a high point, ushering in the famous werewolf transformation scene, and Landis would later say “Bad Moon Rising,” with its ominous lyrics joining a sprightly tempo and catchy riffs, fit the “mood” of his hybrid movie.

As it happens, a spooky Hollywood film was central to Fogerty’s inspiration. If the song’s name came from a little book of scribbled title ideas he’d been keeping since 1967, it was a movie released in 1941, a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, that got Fogerty going lyrically. Eventually called The Devil and Daniel Webster, the film was based on a short story of the same name by Stephen Vincent Benét, and published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1936, during the depths of the Depression.

In Benét’s story, a New Hampshire farmer named Jabez Stone sells his soul to the devil for cash to overcome his debts, then enjoys a stratospheric rise to local power before the Dark Lord arrives to collect and Webster has to intervene and defend the farmer at trial.

“[His] crops were the envy of the neighbourhood,” Benét writes of Stone’s rising fortunes, “and lightning might strike all over the valley, but it wouldn’t strike his barn.” In the movie, we see dark, distant clouds, followed by destroyed fields. “But not my wheat!” shouts James Craig, who plays Stone. “I’ll have a rich harvest!”

John Fogerty saw the movie on TV when he was young. Born in 1945, Fogerty and his bandmates in Creedence Clearwater Revival were classic suburban California kids, raised in El Cerrito, on the east side of San Francisco Bay, during the early days of television. In the late sixties, after ten years hustling the band through various names and styles, they finally had the attention of radio listeners.

The singles “Suzie Q” and “Proud Mary” had sold well, and Fogerty was becoming more productive as a writer. He composed songs in near-silence while his wife and young children slept at night. In that unlikely laboratory—quiet and domestic, even while the greater American culture resembled a powder keg, with both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy assassinated just months earlier—Fogerty remembered the old black-and-white movie and start putting words to chords and a melody.

In 1993, speaking to Rolling Stone, he highlighted a post-storm sequence in the movie: “Everybody’s crops [are] destroyed. Boom. Right next door is the guy’s field who made the deal with the devil, and his corn is still straight up, six feet. That image was in my mind. I went, ‘Holy mackerel!’”

And so, taking inspiration from a subdued, 15-second scene in a 1941 movie, John Fogerty wrote some of the most nightmarish lyrics to ever appear in a Top 40 radio hit: “I hear hurricanes a-blowing/ I know the end is coming soon/ I fear rivers overflowing/ I hear the voice of rage and ruin.”

It may not be the archetypal Creedence song, this tune which climbed to No. 2 in America and topped the U.K. charts. “Fortunate Son” is truer to their sound and energy, “Down on the Corner” is easier to dance to, and no riff, by anyone, has ever bettered “Up Around the Bend.”

Nevertheless, “Bad Moon Rising” embodies everything that made Creedence great. It has its own marvelous intro hook, soon supplemented by the band’s perennially underappreciated rhythm section: Doug “Cosmo” Clifford on drums, Stu Cook on bass, and Tom Fogerty, John’s older brother and the group’s painfully deposed onetime frontman, on rhythm guitar. It’s also a vintage John Fogerty production, an audio tribute to Sun Records’ slap-back stomp. Despite its dark lyrics, it’s just so fun.

Fogerty never wrote love songs, and contrary to Creedence’s ubiquity in Vietnam-era-set movies, he didn’t regularly channel his songwriting gifts into political-protest anthems or social-minded songs, either. “Bad Moon Rising,” like “Up Around the Bend,” “Run Through the Jungle,” and so many others, is mostly a litany of images, a summoning of a mood. In this case, the mood is literally apocalyptic, even though the tune and beat are as bouncy as the band ever got.

Perhaps that bounce helps account for the song’s strikingly durable legacy, even by Creedence standards.

It’s been covered by 20-plus artists, in multiple musical styles, including reggae. It’s appeared in two dozen films and TV shows, from Blade to The Big Lebowski, from Mr. Woodcock to Kong: Skull Island, from The Walking Dead to Alvin and the Chipmunks. In Argentina, it’s used as a stadium soccer chant. And it’s the subject of the most famous misheard-lyric joke this side of “Purple Haze.” People frequently interpret the chorus’s closing line, “There’s a bad moon on the rise,” as “There’s a bathroom on the right.” Fogerty occasionally lightens up his own song by singing that blooper lyric in concert.

Then there’s Sonic Youth, a defiantly un-Creedence-like postpunk noise band who took much harsher stands on social issues and specific politicians, including Ronald Reagan, when they first emerged from the early-1980s New York underground. Their second album, released in 1985, is their angriest and darkest, almost devoid of melody, and filled with impressionistic lyrics about Native American genocide. The record’s title? Bad Moon Rising.

(CCR trivia: They were the first band to mention “Ol’ Ronnie,” as they called him, in a rock song. He’s in verse three of “It Came Out of the Sky,” from Willy and the Poor Boys, released in 1969.)

“Bad Moon Rising” still floats amiably through our culture, enriching road trips, cover bands’ setlists, and classic-rock radio programming. It has amassed numerous cultural reference points over the years, in part because it emerged from so many references itself. A river of storytelling, stretching from Goethe’s Faust to the Saturday Evening Post to Hollywood, flowed through “Bad Moon Rising” before Creedence ever recorded it, following days working the song out in Doug Clifford’s back-garden shed.

Since 1969, it’s picked up the Coen brothers, Manhattan art rock, jokebook mentions, horror movies, and so much more. Let’s assume it will continue to

echo, inspire, and create cultural linkages, growing like Jabez Stone’s corn, reference-wise. After all, in “Bad Moon Rising,” the storm never arrives.

John Lingan is the author of “Homeplace: A Southern Town, a Country Legend, and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk.” He lives in Maryland with his wife and two children, and is writing a biography of Creedence Clearwater Revival for Da Capo Press.