‘Girls Gone Wild’ Robbery Was Ordered By Mob Boss, Robber Claims

A 2004 home invasion robbery and assault against Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis was not simply an attempt to extract money from the then-multimillionaire creator of the popular video series—a series centered around young women willing to flash ther breasts for Francis's video cameras, and was once a staple of late-night TV infomercials. The attack was ordered by one of New York’s top Mafia crime figures, the man convicted of the bizarre assault now says, according to a report by the New York gossip site Page Six.  Darnell Riley, who also goes by the name Riley Perez, has a new book scheduled to be published next week in which he details his assault on Francis. The attack, he told Page Six, was ordered by Matthew "Matty the Horse" Ianniello, a longtime Genovese family mobster and, at the time, acting boss. “I was asked to rough him up,” Riley told the site, of his attack on Francis. “I worked with guys, if they told you to do something, you don’t ask questions.” In addition to robbing Francis in his home, Riley also “ordered Francis to lie face down on the bed, pulled down his pants, and revealed what he’d brought with him to Francis’ house: a video camera and a sex toy—which he posed suggestively on Joe's posterior,” according to an account of the incident by Dateline NBC. The resulting video was supposedly to be used as extortion material against Francis. In his Page Six interview, Riley did not say why the Mafia hoods wanted Francis “roughed up.” Ianniello—who avoided the fate of many mobsters and lived to be 92 years old, finally dying at his Long Island, New York, home on August 15, 2012—controlled many of the strip clubs and porn movie theaters in New York’s Times Square in the 1970s, the long-bygone era memorialized in the HBO TV series The Deuce. “Matty the Horse” also controlled numerous gay bars and nightclubs in the 1960s, an era when the gay nightlife scene remained underground and was often subject to police raids—a problem that Ianniello’s Mafia muscle could solve, for a price. Riley was apprehended after Francis’s then-girlfriend, the socialite Paris Hilton, learned that he had committed the attack from Hollywood party gossip. Riley pleaded guilty to the charges in 2006 and served nine years behind bars in California. But Riley is now making promotional appearances for his book, What Is Real: The Life and Crimes of Darnell Riley, and says that he bears no ill will toward Francis, who reportedly now lives in Mexico with his wife and two daughters. “He was the victim. I was the perpetrator,” Riley told Page Six. “There’s no vendetta. The book is not about exacting revenge.” Photo by Mantra Films / Wikimedia Commons