Cobra Killer (10 page)

Cuadra said he and Kerekes also did not worry about the widespread problem plaguing most adult sites: piracy of content by users. Cuadra said his philosophy was “basically if you are going to steal it and share it, at least leave my logo on there and everyone will know where you got it. I wasn’t going to be greedy about it. I got my money, my share, and it became kind of fun.”
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Cuadra also knew how to enjoy the fruits of his labor. An avid car collector and self-professed “motor head,” he posted messages and photos frequently on Dodge Viper Club forums, gloating about his vehicles. In July 2004, he joined the Viper Club forums online, announcing his purchase of a 2004 red Dodge Viper. He gloated that “over at Tysinger (Dodge in Hampton, Va.), I only pay the sticker price. They don’t add anything in. I could get a better deal off of E-bay, butt (sic.) I cannot wait.”
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In a February 15, 2006 posting under the screen name of “Quickysrt,” Cuadra gloated that “(I) got the new Vette…but kept the Viper. Picked it up yesterday at Colonial Chevy.”
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Another forum member asked Cuadra to compare the Corvette to his Viper. “It is very comfy…I bought it as the daily driver in mind with some track use in the future. The ride is very soft (like a caddy) yet it has no body roll and feels great above 2500 rpm. It does not scare the shyt (sic.) out of me like the Viper.(I) have the navi system which is pimp but I’ll never use. Great insulation (quiet ride), lots of power, I recommend it.”
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Ever mindful of the attention he could gather, he posted that “nobody looks at me in the Vette. The Viper is the attention whore.”
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He closed out his postings in the Viper forum on December 6, 2006 responding to a club members’ prompt that asked members “What have you done this past year that’s worth mentioning?” Cuadra posted (complete with smiley faces) that he “got off drugs and (was) living life better. 2007 is going to be a real money maker.”
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Despite the online posting, it was never clear whether Cuadra or Kerekes used any drugs, although both enjoyed drinking alcohol.

Lights, camera, action at BoyBatter

Cuadra claims the original idea for doing gay porn was for him and Kerekes to videotape, produce, and distribute it under the “BoyBatter” name. The name, Cuadra said, was a “tongue-in-cheek (reference) for young men’s semen.”
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“BoyBatter started as a hobby, I was bored,” Cuadra said. But over time, BoyBatter became “Joseph’s prized cash cow,” he said.
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Kerekes convinced Cuadra that he should not only be producing gay porn videos but that appearing in the videos himself would help sales. Cuadra started with a solo masturbation scene Kerekes filmed of him. “We were just having a good time,” Cuadra said. “It did not sink in until we started receiving the orders for the movies and I recognized a couple of the names on the those order forms and I was, like, ‘Oh, alright, this is different. Here it goes.’ I remember as (the video) was uploading to the website my palms were sweaty. I said, ‘Oh boy, this is it!’”
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Cuadra said shortly after launching the BoyBatter site, it made money and quickly became the daily focus of Kerekes, who took over the site’s business operations. “That was it,” Cuadra said. “(Joe) took possession over it and that was the last time I saw it the way it was.”
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Gay porn journalist J.C. Adams of the online
Gay Porn Times
believes despite the amateur nature of the site, Cuadra had some porn star potential. “In gay porn it’s said you have to have a great face, great body, or a great dick. You have to have one of at least those three things to work. If you have two of those things you can become famous. If you have all three, you can become a star. I think in the case of Harlow Cuadra, he had at least two of those qualities.”
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It wasn’t all fun, Cuadra confessed. “A big part of me was sad. It was like, this is the mark that I’m leaving.”
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He expressed similar sadness surrounding some of his escort assignments that took him to the homes of married men where he sometimes saw family pictures displayed around the house. “It made me feel like a home-wrecker, like I was sort of facilitating that family’s downfall.”
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He adds that a “melancholy moment would place its cold hand” on his shoulder from time to time, but that he overcame his occasional guilt and shame to continue all the while “condemning my desires even as I acted them out.”
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 In its heyday, BoyBatter.com purported to provide access to “the hottest college and military studs on the planet.” Under a section called “Boy Batter Boys,” the website announced “this section is our claim to fame. The Boy Batter Boys section is updated weekly featuring only hot military and college stud boys in Norfolk, Virginia. These amateur young bucks are filmed using the very best in professional lighting and camera equipment.”
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Its first actor, gay-for-pay Army veteran Justin Hensley, was paid only $50 for his first appearance on the site, Cuadra said. Eventually, more content was added—all of it of the amateur variety—“but the sex scenes were good” even if the story lines, such as using the tried and true “seduce the pizza delivery boy” scheme, were corny. But that was all part of the plan. “We tried to be as corny as possible mocking the bigger video houses,” Cuadra said. “I paid the guys very little money. They wanted to do this.”
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At its peak, the BoyBatter site offered its approximately 7,500 members fifty-one originally-produced videos (with scenes culled from about fifteen separate video shoots) and forty-four photo galleries that included solo, couple, and group action (including many scenes shot with Cuadra or Kerekes). Kerekes gloated that the BoyBatter site eventually pulled in between $9,000 and $10,000 a month on DVD sales. Three DVDs were marketed from the site (and eventually elsewhere through other porn distributors), including
Major Hardon, Boy Splatter,
and
Young Bucks in Heat.

Young Bucks in Heat
earned a controversial nomination by DVD distributor Pornteam.com as one of the Best Films of 2008, even while its producers and stars, Cuadra and Kerekes, remained jailed on murder charges.
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Kerekes said his job was to keep the BoyBatter site going on a daily basis, and he employed an unusual (and possibly illegal) tactic to keep the site’s name in front of potential clients on a daily basis. Kerekes said he would use the credit card numbers of former clients of their escort businesses, www.boisrus.com and Norfolk Male Companions, to buy refundable, one- or three-day passes to various gay porn sites where he could drop in ads and “reviews” of BoisRUs and its services. He would quickly cancel the orders before the “introductory period” ended, keeping the customer’s credit cards from being charged.

In addition, up to forty PCs and laptops were fired up each day from inside their home, he said, with “spam” ads running in chat rooms all over the Internet. America Online, MSNBC, Yahoo, and MSN chat rooms were especially targeted but had to be “rebooted” each day because of aggressive efforts to kick commercial “chatters” out of the various chat rooms.

Kerekes said keeping the website and related enterprises going each day was hard, demanding work. “Whenever I would complain to Harlow about how the escorting was going, he’d tell me to go back and take care of the computers.”
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Later in prison, a jailhouse informant would report that Kerekes said Cuadra had to do most of “the mule work” of the escorting business, while he ran the business side of things.

Cuadra’s good looks and large endowment won notice from others as well. Jason Sechrest reported that Falcon Studios, the “big daddy” of the gay porn world, approached Cuadra when it was casting two of its 2006 productions,
Riding Hard
and
Dripping Wet.
Cuadra was never cast, however, in any Falcon productions.
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Sechrest quoted a Falcon casting agent as saying when they approached Cuadra about “becoming a porn star,” he replied by e-mail that he “already was a porn star” because of his work on Boybatter.com.
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Joseph Manual Kerekes

While Cuadra was the up-and-coming “twink” star in the BoyBatter stable, it was Kerekes who was the star of
Major Hardon.
Cashing in on his brief, one-month military career that ended when Kerekes was kicked out of boot camp, Kerekes sported a traditional high and tight Marine haircut for his role as the slightly older and bossy Trent in the movie. As the DVD’s cover describes it,
Major Hardon
tells the story of “three young marines (sic.) determined to find a way to release their tensions and end up helping each other achieve their mission!”
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Kerekes appears in all three of the movie’s scenes featuring three other more “twinkish” actors credited as Jason, Justin, and Seth. Kerekes in the role of Trent leads the climatic three-way orgy to end the epic.
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The BoisRUs escort website listed Kerekes as “Stud Marine Trent” and twenty-four years old (about ten years younger than his actual age). His description noted (falsely) that he was a Marine and emphasized other characteristics such as his muscle tone, hairiness, his tan, and the fact that he was a “dominant” lover.
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Another listing for “Chris” on “All American Escorts” showed Kerekes’ picture and described him as a twenty-one-year-old college student who was sexually versatile and promised: “Currently a college student. Please call me for after school fun. You will not be disappointed.”
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It was a long way from Kerekes’ initial career path as a youth pastor that he said put him in the pulpit of the Hampton, Virginia mega-church, Bethel Temple Assembly of God. The Bethel Temple congregation, which describes itself as “a multi-cultural, interdenominational church that exists to bring people into dynamic relationship with Jesus Christ,” apparently saw potential in a young Kerekes.
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The Kerekes family landed at Bethel Temple at the end of a trail of various other churches his mother Rosalie took him and his two younger siblings to as a “Navy widow.” Her husband often away on long deployments, Mrs. Kerekes raised her children in a “strict and Godly manner”
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and “We went from church to church (during) most of my childhood,” Joseph said. “At seventeen, I started faithfully attending Bethel Temple and soon thereafter began an intense discipleship under Pastor Ron Johnston.”
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Joseph Manual Kerekes was born December 30, 1973 in Butte, Montana while his father was on Navy assignment in the northwest. In 1982, the family settled in Virginia Beach, Virginia where Kerekes’ father Fred was assigned by the Navy.

Kerekes describes his childhood as “wonderful” because he believed he had the best mother and father in the world. “Dad was gone a lot, he served twenty-four years in the Navy with long deployments, but mom stayed home with us.”
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He would tell others that the family didn’t have a lot of extra money, even rationing use of their air conditioner to save money.
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In school, Kerekes was outgoing and popular and scored good grades into high school. Upon high school graduation, he won financial support from Bethel Temple to attend Valley Forge Christian College in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania (ironically, just over 100 miles southeast of the site where Bryan Kocis would one day be murdered). The school traces its start to revival meetings started in a Pennsylvania campground in 1931. It claims as its mission “To prepare individuals for a life of service and leadership in the church and the world” and tells prospective students, “If you hear God calling you to full-time, vocational ministry, or if you sense him leading you to serve him in the marketplace,” then VFCC is for them.
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Kerekes says he earned Dean’s List citations for each of the three and a half years he attended the school. He never graduated, however, after angry outbursts and struggles with his impulsive behaviors caused him friction among the evangelical and fundamentalist students and faculty. He left the seminary and eventually the church amidst his struggles.
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Kerekes “falling out” with the church occurred when he was just twenty-three. It would not be the last time his temper and behavior would do him in. Kerekes takes the blame on himself, saying many people in the church and his family were supportive and encouraging of him despite his anger problems. “I received unspeakable favor from the senior pastor, Ron Johnston,” Kerekes said. “I was the youngest person ever to stand and preach in Bethel’s pulpit (in a) 6,000 seat sanctuary.”

Kerekes recalls his preaching as a “magnificent” experience where the characteristically charismatic Pentecostal worshipers “rose to their feet in tremendous applause.”
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He added via a 2007 blog posting while awaiting trial that “I rose quickly in the church and was ministering on a weekly basis and there were some who did not like this, so there was controversy over it, but when I left the ministry, my love for people remained the same, thus energizing my escort career.”
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His church mentor, Bethel Temple’s former senior pastor Johnston, told
Out
magazine that he sensed Kerekes was in a struggle between good and evil in his life. “There’s a dichotomy in Joseph,” Johnston said. “There are two Josephs. I would see a Joseph that on one side was extremely kind and good, and on the other side he would lose it. I’ve seen this before with people that were demon-possessed.”
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