Ruby Gottesman, An Adult Industry Founder, Dead at 86

LOS ANGELES—Rubin "Ruby" Gottesman, best remembered for helming early adult industry "one-stop" distributorship X-Citement Video, has died at the age of 86. The cause was multiple inoperable cancers brought on by non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. He had been admitted to Cedars-Sinai Hospital in early May, and died on Saturday, May 11. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Gottesmann spent much of his early life in Coney Island, where he picked up the nickname everyone knew him as: Ruby. During the Korean War, Ruby was drafted into the Army. Based in Baltimore, he served his country as a cook for the troops stationed there—but he could not resist selling ice cream on Coney Island during his furloughs (and sometimes while AWOL, though he was discharged from military service with honor anyway). "Early on, my dad had a lot of jobs," his daughter, Gail, told AVN. "He sold ice cream at the beach when he was a teenager, but one of his main jobs was selling plastic slipcovers, and I think he knew somebody out here who was in the business, Norman Arno [owner of VCX], and he came out here for two weeks and fell in love with it. Then we moved out here [in 1972] and he bought a house in Calabasas after six months of living here, and then he became a distributor in the industry; at first, he distributed the giant films, 8mm, I think. I think he worked for Norman Arno first before he went out on his own, which I think might have been when Norman died. My entire life, he was in the adult entertainment industry, and everybody knew it, and there were certain people I wasn't allowed to play with because of that." X-Citement Video became quite successful, and Gottesman a well-respected name in the industry—so much so that in the late 1970s, in what many refer to as the "St. Valentine's Day bust," Gottesman and several prominent producers and distributors in the industry were arrested by federal investigators. "My dad was in Vegas, and they took away my mom," Gail remembers. "I was in high school. They came to my house and raided my house and it was insane. No one was there, so they took my mom instead, and she was in the caravan with everybody else, and my dad had to turn himself in over the weekend. There was this giant porn bust and they came around and took everybody and it was a lot of big people involved in that. It could be like maybe 1978, '79." "I've known Ruby since I got in the business 35 years ago," recalled Kevin Beechum of K-Beech Entertainment. "He was a great guy. We used to do a lot of business together back in the day, and he used to be around when the government was after us; he stood his ground like all of us did back in the day. Definitely a pioneer in the business. He started out working for VEP [Video Entertainment Productions] with Tommy Sinopoli and Norm Berkoff. ... The thing about Ruby was, he was a good guy; he was always good to me. We always got along." Gottesman survived that arrest, and continued to grow X-Citement—and one of the people who helped with that growth was one Steve Orenstein, who'd begun working for Gottesman in the early '80s. "I used to do business with Steve Orenstein then in their garage or whatever, this little warehouse building back in the day, when Orenstein was with him," Beechum recalled. Though Orenstein was not available to be interviewed at press time, he did speak with AVN in 2013 of his time at X-Citement, revealing that it was in 1989 that Gottesman offered him a partnership in the video production company Gottesman wanted to set up. “Six years after I was working with Ruby, he said, ‘You remember one day I said you’ll have your own money and we’ll do something together? I want to get into production. I want you to be my partner,’" Orenstein recalled. "At first, I said, ‘I’m not interested,’ but he convinced me.” While Gottesman’s contribution to the new enterprise was basically putting up his building and staff, it was left to Orenstein to do all the grunt work. “I did all of the work, and interviewed directors to shoot our first movie,” Orenstein recalled. “So we started the company, and I remember John Stagliano was one of the people we interviewed, who either was directing already or wanted to direct. But as it turned out, Stuart Canterbury directed our first movie, Sleepwalker, and it just took off from there. ... I’d worked for Ruby for six, seven years at this point, and we were partners in the video production for two-plus years, and being partners brought up challenges that just working for someone didn’t. That’s partly why I said I didn’t want to do it in the first place, and we wound up splitting up over those issues." Orenstein left that partnership in early 1993, and founded Wicked Pictures, which he still owns, in March of that year. Gottesman continued to run X-Citement, and continued to have the love and respect of his employees. "My dear, dear friend Glenda worked for Ruby," recalled veteran salesperson Bonnie Kail, "and Glenda got very, very sick and Ruby was wonderful about all the work that Glenda had to miss, and go through chemo and all that. He was just so supportive and wonderful to her, and that meant a lot to me." But as time went on, it was clear that the authorities were gunning for him, perhaps because of his good reputation in the industry for honesty and fair dealing. In June, 1986, Gottesman was approached by L.A. vice cop Steve Takeshita and FBI agent Nellie Magdaloyo, who posed as adult retailers looking to buy videos. Eventually, in early 1987, Gottesman agreed to sell 49 Traci Lords videos to the pair, and later to ship eight more to Hawaii. In late May of 1986, Lords, who had worked in XXX movies for two years using a false ID, had revealed herself to have been underage when she made the majority of her videos, so Gottesman was charged with advertising obscene matter depicting a minor with intent to sell or distribute and possession or control of obscene matter depicting minor in sexual conduct. After his conviction in U.S. District Court, where Gottesman was represented by, among others, prominent First Amendment defenders Stanley Fleischman and John Weston, the case eventually arrived at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that sections in the Protection of Children Against Sexual Exploitation Act of 1977, which required that Gottesman "knowingly" trafficked in child pornography, were unconstitutionally vague, and reversed his conviction. However, the government appealed that ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court, and in November of 1994, the high court reversed the lower court and found him guilty as charged. (Incredibly, Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas dissented from that ruling, saying in their dissent that, "The Ninth Circuit's interpretation is in fact and quite obviously the only grammatical reading. If one were to rack his brains for a way to express the thought that the knowledge requirement in subsection (a)(1) applied only to the transportation or shipment of visual depiction in interstate or foreign commerce, and not to the fact that that depiction was produced by use of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct, and was a depiction of that conduct, it would be impossible to construct a sentence structure that more clearly conveys that thought, and that thought alone. The word 'knowingly' is contained, not merely in a distant phrase, but in an entirely separate clause from the one into which today's opinion inserts it.") But convicted he was, and shortly thereafter, Gottesman turned himself in, with the district court sentencing him to nine months in federal prison, which he served during 1997. "The IRS came to the office," Gail recalled about the time her father was imprisoned, "they scoped out everything they wanted to take, like the furniture, and we had to pay them like $5,000 a week because of taxes and stuff. It was insane. And my ex-husband [Jimmy Marzullo] proceeded to handle the business and I had to go on bed rest because I was pregnant with my second daughter. Jimmy took the business down and did everything against my father. He lied to people and didn't pay people back and then when my dad got out, he just almost killed him, and then we split up." Gottesman tried to get X-Citement back on its feet again, but was ultimately unsuccessful, and he wound up taking a job at an adult bookstore in Bakersfield, California—one of a chain owned by someone Gail refers to as "Primo." He also worked as the assistant to Charlie Brickman, the owner at Cinderella Distributors for six years, and by 2006, he had moved back to Los Angeles, worked for Robert Hill Releasing for a while, and then retired. He eventually moved to an assisted living facility in Hollywood, which is where he lived until this recent hospitalization. One side effect of Gottesman's having been convicted of "trafficking" Traci Lords tapes is that he wound up on the national Sex Offender Registry for his "crimes." "That was the worst part of this, and he didn't care," said Gail. "At the end, they came to his assisted living and he was just so pissed off. He hated the feds, he hated the cops. They thought he was some kind of gangster guy. He was kind of connected when he was younger." One of the last times Gottesman made an appearance at an adult industry event was about two years ago, when industry veterans Michael Warner (Great Western Litho), Ron Braverman (Doc Johnson) and Steven Hirsch (Vivid Entertainment) arranged what AVN founder Paul Fishbein referred to as "The Old Pornographers Dinner," and besides Gottesman, it was attended by Beechum, Fishbein, Fred Hirsch (Steven's father), former VCA owner Russ Hampshire, and even Larry Flynt—reportedly, almost 100 industry veterans and their wives attended. "My dad did business with Flynt a little bit at the beginning, and he would deliver stuff to the Playboy Mansion also," Gail recalled. "He knew the Mitchell Brothers; he went that far back. Ron Braverman was there. Russ Hampshire was there; my dad knew him; they worked together a lot." "Ruby was one of Vivid's first supporters," Steven Hirsch told AVN. "He was a great guy and one of the legends of the adult business." "Ruby was a real character in the business, a true salesman and a fun-loving guy," Fishbein assessed. "I saw him about a year and a half ago and he looked great. We will miss him." In fact, Gottesman was a great supporter of AVN, especially in its early days. "My dad read AVN; it was his favorite, and Paul was his favorite," Gail Gottesman recalled. "I remember my dad would—when things were good, he would get a table for the awards, always, and they were always haggling ... my dad would always try to work him down in price; I sort of remember that a little bit. I remember Paul when he was pretty young. "I want everyone to know this about my dad: The adult entertainment industry, he told me when us kids were little that we had nothing to be ashamed of; there was nothing wrong with what he did, and that killing and murder and all this other shit that was on television was worse. We grew up believing that everybody had the right to watch what they wanted to watch and read what they wanted to read. He was extremely liberal, and we knew what he did, and he was proud of it and he fought for it and he believed in the First Amendment and he loved the industry." Gottesman had lost both of his sons when each was 27 years old, and his wife Barbara passed in 2001, so in his later years, Gottesman refocused his life around granddaughters Haily and Danielle. Besides the granddaughers, Gottesman is survived by daughter Gail, son-in-law Jake, and nephew Richie and Richie's wife, Julie. A private memorial service will be held for Ruby Gottesman on March 15. Those wishing to attend may contact Gail Gottesman for time and location.