Cop Porn: When the NYPD made a Porn Film – Part 1 – Podcast 130

In 1970s New York, hardcore sex films and adult bookstores raged across Times Square like a forest fire. It was great for the sex business, but it also depressed tourism and commerce, and emboldened organized crime in an already deeply beleaguered city.

The cops fought back, busting theaters and sex shops on a regular basis. It had little effect: most of the sex operators just paid the fixed fine and re-opened the next day with no further consequences. For a police force already laid low by the city’s financial crisis, it was a demoralizing and losing battle.

And so, in 1977, the Public Morals Squad, a division of the New York Police Department, came up with a novel idea: what if they set up an undercover porn production company and pretend to make their own adult movies so that they could infiltrate the shadowy alliances that connected the pornographic movie theaters to the mob-controlled film distributors?

What resulted was a law enforcement operation that was as unprecedented as it was brash and secret. Secret that is, until the story leaked to the press, and a nationwide scandal erupted.

Over the last ten years, The Rialto Report wanted to know more about this unusual police operation. I tracked down many of those involved – from all sides of the story – to establish what actually happened. We’re going to focus on three characters: Phil Russo, the cop who set up the undercover company to tackle the sex industry. Michelle Lake, the inexperienced adult film performer at the heart of the story. And Varla Romano, an NYPD detective who worked on the case. As for the rest, most names have been changed to protect the innocent – and the guilty.

This is the inside, untold story of Cop Porn.

This episode running time is 51 minutes.

————————————————————————————–

When Michelle Lake slept, she dreamed of being weightless. She floated in clear, azure oceans, the warm water embracing her, washing away her anxiety and fear. She was surrounded by dolphins – kind-eyed, smooth-skinned, and accepting. They circled her silently, and she felt safe in their presence. She smiled back at them. But when Michelle woke, the dolphins disappeared, and her heart sank back down into her chest with blunt dread. She faced reality with unease.

When Phil Russo slept, he too was haunted by mysterious creatures that lived beneath the surface. But these were different beasts. Phil’s dreams were of mole people: society’s rejects that inhabited the dark, labyrinthine passages in the subway beneath the streets of New York City. They scavenged and stole to survive, rarely venturing above ground, their faces caked in grime. In sleep, as in life, Phil was a cop, patrolling the tunnels looking for lawbreakers. Sometimes he found them. Sometimes they found him. Phil usually saw the whites of their eyes first, a split second before they attacked, pummeling him to the ground beneath a blur of blows. He woke in a cold sweat, before relief slowly washed over him. He faced reality with foreboding.

Dolphins and subterranean dwellers. The complexities of life often reside beneath the surface.

*

August 1977. A hotel room at JFK Airport, New York.

Apart from their recurring dreams, Michelle and Phil had little in common. They were from different backgrounds and generations. But at this moment, they were standing face-to-face in a beige airport hotel room.

Michelle was in her early 20s, attractive, and fresh-faced. She was nude, dripping with pheromonal sweat. She smiled with a glow that betrayed the energetic sex she’s just performed with a faceless young buck still stretched out on the bed behind her, casually lighting a cigarette.

Phil was a long decade older. He was perspiring too,