Unemployed Porn Shooter Takes Voyeurism to the Streets

SAN FRANCISCO—The SF Weekly’s Lauren Smiley has published a neat little piece about out-of-work porn photographer Rikki Ercoli (pictured), who was last employed as a photo editor for Falcon Entertainment three years ago. Now, “hunkered down in his apartment like James Stewart in Rear Window,” he’s still shooting, but his subject matter has changed, to say the least. “Ercoli tells us he wakes up every Thursday night to the tell-tale clinking of glass,” wrote Smiley. “He then gets out his video camera and starts filming out the window of his apartment of eight years, into the parking lots wedged among Market, Gough, and Otis streets, next to Chris Daly's Buck Tavern bar. He says the action has really picked up in the last three years.” Apparently, the homeless denizens in that part of the city are taking over at night, raiding the trash, creating havoc and leaving the streets a mess by the time the sun rises. "Last night my neighborhood just totally got taken over," Ercoli said. "I screamed at the police. It was 4 a.m. and crackheads had the whole street demolished." He’s posted his videos to YouTube and organized a Yahoo group called Brady Neighbors, even going so far as to invite SFPD's Southern District Captain Charlie Orkes and Supervisor Jane Kim to a meeting of the group to hear their concerns, all to no avail. Apparently, the city has instituted a program in which its main recycling company, Recology, pays the police overtime wages to thwart the trash thieves by ticketing them, but Smiley writes that Ercoli, through his videos, “has the evidence to prove that those measures aren't working.” Who says life after porn can’t have meaning?