The Bad Boys of Porn

We love it when porn stars break the rules. But when does bad become just plain wrong?

In the mercurial, fickle world of porn, stars can rise and fall in the amount of time it takes their cocks to do the same. Seven years ago Jeremy James Sons was just another hunky underachiever, jobless and living with mom and dad in Denton County, Tex., his only apparent activity being the rigorous workouts that turned his once-skinny frame into a 235-pound rack of grade-A beefcake. But in 2002 everything changed for the young man: He became Mark Dalton, porn superstar.

Though he never did anything but jack off on video, Dalton’s nude photos appeared on the cover of Men magazine twice that year, once for his runaway win as “Man of the Year.” Dalton’s impeccable physique and towheaded good looks soon graced the covers of other adult magazines, plus mainstream rags like Men’s Health and Muscle & Fitness. He seemed poised to cross over into pop culture too, with two spreads in Playgirl and a nationally broadcast TV appearance on The Jenny Jones Show, where the stud confronted his high school tormentor.

Yet Dalton’s personal life began to unravel when previous troubles with the law came back to haunt him. Convicted in 2001 for possession of the “date rape drug” GHB (which he may have been using at the gym for its anabolic properties), Dalton initially received a five-year suspended sentence. But when a woman he was living with accused him of domestic violence, he was ordered to jail in November 2004. Though he was granted parole just a year later for good behavior, a second incident with a second female companion got him sent back to the slammer in May 2007.

Although his private life was a wreck, Dalton’s career blossomed during his prison “intermission.” His tour of America that year landed him the highest personal-appearance paychecks the industry had seen since Jeff Stryker in his heyday. Mark Dalton, the good son from Texas, had found porn transcendence as the quintessential “bad boy.”

“That’s the morbid curiosity of the American public,” sighs Dalton’s longtime agent, David Forest, a music and adult industry veteran who himself is no stranger to trouble with the law (more on that later). “Folks love to see people sprawled out on the street with their heads cracked open. Likewise with stars who went to jail. There’s just something about it, like, ‘What do they look like now?’”

 There’s Bad and There’s Bad

“As we grow older and into our gay skin, bad boys are the kind of guys we go for—the kind of boys who picked on us when we were young, or the jock type that we could never have,” says Howard Andrew, CEO of FabScout Entertainment in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “That’s more universally appealing than the young, pretty twink.” Andrew is something of an expert on bad boys—he guides the careers of over 100 porn stars, many of whom have naughty personas that seem to land them the industry’s choicest jobs, like piggy Geoffrey Paine, swaggering youngster Dean Tucker, tattooed shit-talker Ricky Sinz, inked Wolverine look-alike Logan McCree, African-American ass-buster Diesel Washington, and depraved bottom Jackson Wild. But despite their wanton interiors and butch exteriors, none of them are quite ready to join the FBI’s most wanted list.

One client, however, did come close: swarthy stud Nickolay Petrov, a.k.a. Edmon Vardanyan. Petrov, 23, was picked up by the feds in January for stalking and beating an elderly Florida couple. For a while FabScout’s headquarters was Petrov’s home away from home; he spent at least one weekend there each month—which, in retrospect, Andrew calls “kind of scary.” Still, the superagent gained few insights into Petrov’s nefarious activities. “Nickolay had been with FabScout for over a year. He was part of my family,” says Andrew. “In the month or so leading up to [his arrest], he’d had two live appearances that went terribly wrong: one where he had a fight with someone, and one where drugs were involved and he simply walked out of the club he was dancing in. I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t have any clue what.”

Birds of a Feather

“Classic porn actors like Billy Brandt or Ryan Idol are called bad boys, but they were just difficult sometimes. That’s really a different thing than Nickolay Petrov,” says Forest. “A lot of people would say I’m a bad boy,” he chuckles, alluding to his own arrest in 1993 for pandering. Forest spent nearly two years in jail for the offense, returning to porn star management after his release. Since then his agency, Forest Men, has become something of a magnet for unruly young dudes trying to turn a serious buck with their butts and cocks. “I have been involved with just about all of the most notorious bad boys—I don’t know why,” laughs Forest. “Like people say, birds of a feather flock together.”

Forest’s most infamous client may have been Ryan Idol (a.k.a. Marc Anthony Donais), one of the most wildly popular adult performers of the 1990s. Idol, who showed off his still-buff bod on Broadway last fall in a revival of the gay-bathhouse comedy The Ritz, was back in the news this past February for allegedly receiving stolen funds from a politically connected sugar daddy (see sidebar, page 50). This is not Idol’s first run-in with the law. Forest describes a 1993 incident in which Idol tore up a New York hotel room and refused to pay for the damages, prompting a visit from New York’s finest. (Police called to the scene found a note from Forest to the square-jawed top arranging for a pay-to-play escort session. The discovery eventually led to Forest’s arrest in Los Angeles on charges of pandering.)

Idol next made headlines in March 1998, when he threw himself out of a third-story window, sustaining critical injuries. “Ryan jumped out of that apartment in New York City because he’d had 20 martinis and couldn’t find any coke to perk himself up,” recounts Forest. “He was drunk and he wanted to die.”
Still, according to Forest, “All of Ryan’s bad-boy antics, as far as the law was concerned, were very, very minor. The times I had to get him out of jail were for things like back-talking an airport official or shooting a gun off into the air—all stupid stuff.”

For all of Forest’s associations with—and acceptance of—the unsavory, he maintains an old-school professionalism when it comes to managing performers. As long as the work gets done, that is. “I recently washed my hands of a model because he truly became a bad boy—he didn’t go and do his job. It’s not breaking the law; it’s breaking the rules.”

Forest’s East Coast counterpart is quick to concur. “When a performer doesn’t look the way he is supposed to look when he shows up or he opens his mouth and has an attitude with a director, that’s bad,” says Andrew.

Generally, a performer who acts out because of drug or personality problems isn’t fired, he’s simply not rehired. That’s because the studio has already spent production money—sometimes tens of thousands of dollars—to hire him, fly him to the filming location, feed him, costume him, and put him up at a hotel. “[The studios] definitely turn their heads and look the other way [if a performer is misbehaving],” Andrew attests. “It’s much easier to pull the model off the set, have a five-minute conversation, and start again than it is to put the model on a plane back home and then have to search around for a replacement, rewrite the scene, et cetera.”

Working It

Some insiders believe that this see-no-evil philosophy only hastens these bad boys down their self-destructive paths. Then again, “some guys are just addicted to trauma and emotional pain,” declares porn star turned director Chris Steele.

Steele has walked that path himself. As a performer, he built a legion of fans with his commanding dick slinging in flicks like Heat and the Shock and Aftershock sets, and in recent years expanded his success to behind the camera as well, writing, producing, and directing a string of hit movies for Falcon Studios and Jet Set Men. By most accounts the 42-year-old Texan is one of the most respected and popular men in the industry, but this straight-shooting stud has a surprisingly shady past.

“They called me ‘Drunk Dracula,’” Steele confesses. “From ages 19 to 21, I fought my sexuality. One night while on ecstasy I asked my hairdresser to marry me. I was on crystal meth through the whole ceremony.” Steele’s subsequent DWI arrest was, he now claims, “the best thing that ever happened to me.”

By the time Chi Chi LaRue discovered Steele in 1998, he’d been clean and sober for a decade—a sobriety that he maintains to this day. Now, as a director, he finds himself confronting the bad-boy ways he once embodied—and he seems resigned to the fact that his first responsibility is to his studio: At the end of the day the work must be done, addictions and sticky legal situations be damned.

“I’m not out to change the world,” he observes with a sigh. “The problem is, these young guys start reading the press about themselves, and they start believing they are truly famous. They go out and get fucked up in public and raise hell. But contrary to popular belief, alcohol and drugs are not conducive to getting an erection.”

Steele relates two encounters with former Jet Set performers that left him reeling. “Brad Rock pissed me off so bad—we had to trash his scene,” recounts Steele. “It was a bar scene, and the set decorators had put real bottles of liquor out. Brad asked if he could have one shot. I said, ‘OK, if that helps you.’ The next thing I see is that he’s chugged the whole bottle. All of a sudden, in the middle of the scene, he crashes over. Apparently he was on ecstasy too. That’s a lot of money down the drain.

“Sebastian Young was another one who caused me grief. He had been out all night partying. He looked terrible and didn’t want to perform. We got him cleaned up, and I said, ‘You are doing the scene, and you are pretending it’s the best thing you’ve ever felt.’ Funnily enough, that’s the performance of his everyone keeps talking about, and he was totally wasted. On the Proven Straight DVD, Sebastian is listed as a nonsexual performer because he did the dialogue one day and then partied all night and said, ‘Oh, I’m sick.’ Then he blew off some thousand-dollar personal appearance gigs I arranged. He absolutely did not show up for the plane.”

Steele believes Young has been corrupted not by the adult industry but by “West Hollywood drug dealers.” And that’s not the youth’s only problem. According to Steele, Young is “on the run—he’s wanted in Florida and can’t leave Los Angeles.” Sure enough, Sebastian Young is listed as “absconder/fugitive” on the official Florida Department of Corrections website under a charge of “probation felony” in relation to an arrest for “battery upon person 65 or older.”

Not surprisingly, Young tells a different story. When asked about Steele’s assertions, Young flatly denied being on the lam. “I had a situation that got dealt with—a personal situation that I had to deal with with a lawyer,” he says. Regarding the director’s account of the on-set shenanigans during Proven Straight, Young countercharges that Steele and Jet Set “would love to see me be a little bitch and say ‘yes, sir’ when I should be saying ‘no.’ Me, I would rather sabotage something and be a complete asshole and show these people that I don’t need to do porn to make money. When people make an offer and they don’t live up to that offer, a person is not going to show.”

Steele, clearly fatigued by Young’s antics, says, “I washed my hands of him. I don’t care how attractive you are, when you abuse alcohol and drugs, you won’t be attractive for long. Because for every hot guy there are another dozen ready step in.”

Since it’s hard to find a porn star who doesn’t party, it does raise the questions: When is a bad boy too bad? And can “badness” be measured empirically?

The B Scale

“I’ve never been arrested, but I should be,” claims self-described “power bottom” Cory Koons, who is enthusiastically trying to cadge some bad-boy cred for himself. He does, after all, have the tattoos and the satanic facial hair of a true thug. He also escorts for select clients for $300 an hour. But in real life, Koons is a fashion industry stylist—hardly a wayward-enough occupation. In fact, if he were truly dissolute, he wouldn’t be working a job at all. Still, Koons forges on with his litany of transgressions: “I got pulled over for running a red light when I was 20, had a [blood alcohol level] of .05 and my license was taken away for a year. I got caught smoking pot as a college freshman at U.C. Berkeley and had to go to Narcotics Anonymous group meetings. I chase the dragon, have inappropriate bareback sex, poke big holes in loaves of bread, Reese’s cups, and Peeps at the supermarket. I practice the ancient art of bonsai. Does any of this count?”

While this flippant list is endearing—and Koons certainly registers higher on the sleaze-o-meter than, say, the Bel Ami boys, nothing he’s ever done qualifies as hardcore criminal activity. If his eager perversity is used as the baseline of badness, it’s a few steps up (or down) the scale to find the always controversial Michael Lucas, who called the Koran “today’s Mein Kampf” in a guest editorial for the New York Blade and, according to New York rag Chelsea Now, was arrested for assaulting his neighbor, though Lucas denies it; hard-partying Falcon exclusive Erik Rhodes, who blogs about “shooting up so much crystal that I had no control of my arms and legs”; Josh Weston, who, along with a slew of other mainstream performers, is now making bareback films; and former Falcon and Jet Set star Jason Adonis, who, according to the New England Blade, is currently out on $40,000 bail after allegedly assaulting a guy who made disparaging remarks about his dinner companion.

And which porn icon, pray tell, is the baddest of them all?

At this point in the conversation, Cory Koons unveils a tantalizing tidbit: “I had sex with Marcus Allen in Never Been Touched—he’s really bad.” Indeed, if there is any one thing that XXX professionals seem to agree on, it’s that 2003 Freshman of the Year Marcus Allen, a.k.a. Timothy Boham, is about as wicked as porn stars come. The star of Little Big League, Never Been Touched, and Ripe allegedly murdered a Denver-area businessman, then fled for the Mexican border, where he was apprehended. Colorado court documents state Allen suffered from bipolar disorder and fits of rage.

Although Never Been Touched was one of Allen’s last films before he made the news, Koons had no indication of his darker side. “He didn’t let on to any of that. He was really into me sucking his cock, which I did constantly, even through breaks—he had a nice dick. I had to shave my beard because he doesn’t like facial hair. He showed me a photo of his two half-Japanese daughters; they look like I did as a child. I know he likes Asians, so that’s the reason why I was in the mix. Other than that he was really nice, and really beautiful. But when he would start fucking me, he’d lose his hard-on.”

Allen had climbed the XXX ladder faster than any star in recent memory. That his brief coronation as porn’s crown prince of innocence ended in such a grisly debacle still rankles his former industry benefactors. He, like Nickolay Petrov, will not be making a triumphant return to the set anytime soon. But is there redemption in porn?

Back From the Bad

“I was supposed to headline two different movies for two different companies—and I mean star in, not just be in—that I no-called, no-showed. That means the whole production crew was there waiting, and I just didn’t show up because I was fucked up. There have been at least five different movies that I fucked off for dope.” So acknowledges Nick Capra, the dirty-talkative, dark-eyed star of more than two dozen pornographic smashes for such studios as Rascal, All Worlds, Studio 2000, TitanMen, Mustang, and Hot House. He even appeared in an appropriately titled compilation called Bad Boys Vol. 5 with Paul Barresi in 2006. Ironically, although adult video is the forum in which his cocaine- and methamphetamine-fueled destruction played out, Capra calls porn a positive influence in his life.

“My experience with drugs spans longer than my experience in porn,” he explains. “I’ve had an ongoing battle with drug addiction since I was 19. I entered the adult industry in 2002, when I did my first movie for Chi Chi LaRue. It was called Finish Me Off, and I was 27 at the time. I managed to have my longest period of sobriety due to my career in porn—at the beginning. I got clean because if you look at models, for the most part they’re in good shape and healthy. People like Chi Chi don’t tolerate drug use on the set. They don’t tolerate that whatsoever. Obviously, it didn’t keep me clean. My addiction was bigger than my love for being in porn.”

Capra’s affection for smoking speedy drugs became so bad that in 2003 he landed in the ER with respiratory failure: Doctors had to perform an IMV (invasive mechanical ventilation), which means they ripped open his chest and used machines to massage his innards, forcing him back to life. “I never thought I needed help before that. I thought I could change of my own volition,” Capra says. He subsequently checked himself into a substance abuse program in San Diego for a complete detox. “I know that a lot of people have a problem with the 12 Steps, but it’s brought me to a really great change in my life,” says the sobered-up stud.

Much like Chris Steele, Capra doesn’t try to seek converts to the clean life. “There are plenty of people in the industry that very kindly tried to reach out to me, like Jett Blakk from Red Devil Productions, who did everything he could to help. And Steven Walker from Channel 1 spoke with me. But I just couldn’t be touched,” he admits. “If any of my war stories would help these boys, I would tell them. But ultimately, drug addicts are such self-centered creatures that they have to experience things on their own.

“I’ve learned a little more about myself and the frailties I have, and I love what I do,” adds Capra, who has written perceptively about his experiences on his PornStudBlog.com. “I never appreciated what I did before. It was fun. It was fast, exciting, and dangerous, the way porn is supposed to be. But I never got to experience the joy of being sexually free like this. I love having sex. I love doing it on camera. I love other people enjoying my sex. I appreciate all those things now. I’m coming back now. It’s been a year. I’m getting ready to do movies again, and I know that the name Nick Capra, to a lot of studios, is a liability because of all the things I pulled. There was nothing alluring or glamorous about what I projected to other people. It was just tragic.”

Spin and Party

Is bad good for business? It may sell videos for a short amount of time, but sustained delinquency is hard to maintain. Just ask Howard Andrew—he strives every day to get bookings for his guys, promoting their tough images just enough for the models to remain desirable but always stressing their accessibility and professionalism. “I don’t think the public looks at bad behavior in a positive or negative light,” remarks the FabScout honcho. “I think it depends on what they were arrested for. If it’s somebody who has beat up their boyfriend 10 times and has been in jail 10 times, I don’t think that’s someone who’s going to go anywhere in the industry.”

David Forest agrees. “A good example is Mark Dalton. I didn’t want to publicize [his legal troubles],” he states. “However, it’s important to tell the truth to the public, so they understand what’s going on, as opposed to the bogus stories that get floated around. I don’t think arrests and convictions are good things, but you have to put a spin on it. Like when Jeremy Tucker grabbed the mike at an AIDS pool party and said, ‘All you people are gonna die!’ Or when Ryan Idol would miss jobs because he got drunk the night before and missed his plane. You have to stand up and support your stars. Mark Dalton is a personal friend of mine and a big star, but recently he’s chosen to allow these women to live at his house and then gotten in trouble with them. I don’t think that the public is going to stop buying Mark’s movies if he does a good job in them; I don’t think they are going to stop seeing him [perform] live. I have a feeling that when Mark gets out of jail in 2009, he’s going to need money worse than ever. He’s trying to keep his house payments up so he doesn’t lose his home, and there’s no business now for him to do solo scenes. Not that you can get rich off of doing movies, but he can get a $25,000 payday if he fucks and gets sucked. So we’ll see. I’m hoping that come February when he gets out, he’ll be willing to make a deal like that.”

Forest announced in early July that he was selling his agency to Howard Andrew, so Dalton’s big deal will likely happen via FabScout. Meanwhile, in light of his experience with Nickolay Petrov, Andrew has tightened up his company’s screening process, but he stops short of asking aspiring ass fuckers for full disclosure. “I don’t ask them if they were sexually abused as a child, I let them tell me as much as they want to tell me,” reports Andrew. “I guess I could have them put it all on an employment application: ‘Besides being a bottom and having your butt eaten, have you ever been arrested for beating up your teacher?’ or ‘Before you poured coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts, did you ever sell drugs to a child?’”

It’s not likely that the fans’ fascination with porn star misbehavior will end anytime soon—nor will the studios be hiring psychologists and drug counselors along with body-makeup artists and fluffers—so tales of XXX bad boys who fuck up as much as they fuck will continue for as long as there is porn. For example, did Sebastian Young in mid June really liberate his dealer’s Porsche to take it for a joy jaunt, flip the extravagant ride on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, flee the scene, and incur a whole new set of felony arrest warrants, as superstar turned director Chad Donovan—as well as Chris Steele, via Sebastian’s girlfriend’s mother—alleges? 

So let’s give the final observation to bad-boy wannabe Cory Koons, who gets to the heart and groin of the matter most succinctly: “Like the greatest bank robbers, the best bad boys are never caught.”

By Sean Carnage