David Hebditch is still writing books and producing documentaries for television. Here he looks back at the origins of Porn Gold.
Why did we write the book?
I first worked with Nick Anning on a book called Techno-Bandits (published in 1984 by Houghton-Mifflin, Boston). It was the story of how advanced western technology was being smuggled to what was then the Soviet Union. The favourite contraband was Digital Equipment Corp’s 32-bit VAX computer (DEC is now part of Hewlett-Packard.) We got a lot of support from the US Customs Service. Since the ignominy of President Ronald Reagan setting up the Drug Enforcement Administration, Customs was left chasing the smugglers of parrots and other illicit wildlife through airports.
Nick and I enjoyed working together and decided to develop a proposal that might get us another commission. The obvious first choice was drugs and the cultivation and smuggling of heroin and cocaine. However, we soon discovered that Paul Eddy, a former journalist on The Sunday Times’ Insight team, was ahead of the game. We knew Paul and we knew he was very good. Ruling out the drugs market was a smart move on our part; The Cocaine Wars was a brilliant best-seller (Paul later turned to fiction churning out the Flint series of thrillers.)
After flirting with the idea of looking at gun-smuggling we next turned our attention to pornography. It was mostly illegal and got smuggled from places of production to places of consumption. But surely it had been done before as a book? Now keep in mind that this is 1986 or thereabouts; we couldn’t Google it until someone got around to inventing the Internet. But with the help of our agents, Blake Friedman, we managed to establish that a book about the business of pornography in the 20th century didn’t exist yet. There were books about porn – mostly against on moral grounds – but these were not works of investigative journalism and that’s what Nick and I did.
So we worked up a proposal which was sent out by Blake Friedman. To our relief, three or four major publishers expressed interest and we went off to sell the project to hard-nosed commissioning editors. We needed a big enough advance to able live off and travel globally for two years. Faber & Faber, the publisher of the hardback edition, didn’t offer the biggest advance – short by a few thousand pounds – but we liked the idea of being Faber authors. They are ultra-respectable and publish poetry! All authors want to be Faber authors.
Our editor at Faber made an important condition to the deal; we were to engage in reportage and not take sides in the pro- and con-porn debate. That was fine by us.
How did we undertake the research?
We started with zero contacts in the porn industry so we had to rely on newspaper and magazine articles to compile a list of company names and potential porn barons. We also relied on briefings from journalist friends we knew across the world. That gave us a starting-point, a target-list.
Then we carved the world up. Nick spoke German, French and Russian fluently so he got most of Europe. I’d worked previously in Scandinavia, the Netherlands and the United States so they became my patches. We’d do the UK and a few other countries together. Part-way through the project, when it became clear we couldn’t document the child pornography business without a research trip to Thailand we discussed the situation with Faber and they generously increased our advance to cover the cost.
Big research projects like this one develop a certain momentum. This energy is propelled by a basic tenet: Never leave an interview with fewer than two more names of interest and their contact details. Another tenet dictates that any critical claims or allegations need to be backed up by multiple sources with documentary evidence having greater weight than an interviewee’s word. You’ll see that come into play in Chapter 8: The Collectors: Inside the Child Porn Rings.
We went to considerable efforts to persuade people to talk to us. I spent about four hours sweating profusely in the waiting area outside Bangkok Central Prison. I’d already bribed a senior police officer $100 to get me inside to see convicted child pornographer, Manit Thamaree. It seems it wasn’t enough and I’d become the victim of a war of nerves. The cop was sitting in an air-conditioned office, waiting for me to break. My faith was restored when a Thai woman – presumably also waiting to get inside – came over to me and gave me a fan and a sympathetic smile. I’ll never forget her. (I won. No more cash was handed over.)
At the other end of the scale was my encounter with David Friedman in Los Angeles. (See Chapter 6: Out of the Porn Ghetto: Alternative Hollywood.) Dave readily agreed to an interview and he regaled me with great stories and anecdotes. He even took me to lunch – something he’d also done with the FBI agent who was supposed to be proving he, Dave, was part of La Cosa Nostra: “That would have made me the only Jewish member of a Sicilian crime gang!” Dave died in 2011.
Nick met all the major porn producers in Germany and they seemed to talk freely about their businesses and the money they were making. Of course, some pornographers refused to meet us but that did little damage to the scale and scope of our research. We pissed a few people off along the way. Rupert James was very annoyed that we had named one of his colleagues as a buyer of child porn photographs from Manit Thamaree during the time Color Climax Corporation was publishing a child porn magazine. I pointed out that the information was in the public domain and it would have been lax of us to leave it out of the book.
So, a lot of money and effort went into the research for Porn Gold and, after he’d read the draft manuscript, our editor at Faber & Faber said, “I think this is the first time a non-fiction book has delivered exactly what I asked for.”
However, the opening sentence of Andrea Dworkin’s review of Porn Gold for The Observer started, “Every word of this book is a lie.” The reaction to the book is another story.