Cobra Killer (11 page)

Johnston’s stark description of Kerekes is one that Kerekes agrees with himself. “I’ve done some really bad things in my life,” he said. “I have not lived a life that has pleased or served God.”
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The dichotomy of Joe Kerekes goes all the way to his sexual identity as well. Although he spent most of his adult years in a sexually intimate relationship with another man, performed in gay porn videos, and worked as a prostitute for male clients for many years, he does not consider himself gay. The most he will say about his sexual identity is: “I still struggle with some issues of lust, but the only man I have ever loved was Harlow.”
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Does this mean he was just “gay for pay” as some performers and escorts say? Kerekes says no. “I still do not call myself gay. I just love Harlow. I have never loved another—man or woman. Through high school, ministry years—I never even thought of myself as anything but straight.”
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Kerekes said his feelings for Cuadra remain strong, though there were noticeable tensions between the two men under the strain of their criminal cases. “We are still hot and heavy. I have hundreds of letters (that) I have received since our arrest (from Harlow)…. We ‘made love’ together and simply ‘had sex’ as male escorts or in porn.(Harlow) was/is my lover, my mate, my better half.”
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Pastor Johnston recalls a day when Kerekes came to him a few years after leaving the church and after washing out of the U.S. Marines being declared “unfit for duty.” He said Kerekes confessed he had started a male escort service and was in a sexual relationship with Cuadra. It was a stark contrast from the young man he once thought could be a successful, and charismatic, pastor for an Assembly of God parish. Johnston said he told Kerekes “You have the call of God on your life. It doesn’t matter how far you’ve gone or what you’ve done, God never takes back what he gives you. God is always there, no matter what happens or what happened, to forgive and help you.”
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The pastor would not hear of Kerekes again until the spring of 2007 when news broke of his and Cuadra’s arrest for the murder of Bryan Kocis.

Joe Kerekes’ ambition

Kerekes’ journey to that low point had taken him from Bible college, studying to become a personal trainer and nutrition specialist, one month in the Marines, to a lucrative career in male escorting. “I was feeling like a failure; ministry, Marines, many good vocations, all failed,” he said.
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Escorting then, he said, filled the desperate need for money and he declared matter-of-factly, “I knew I had the gift of ‘people skills,’ so I escorted.”
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Kerekes’ ambition to succeed served him well in escorting, as he worked with as many as ten different escort services advertising him under various names and various sexual identities: straight, bisexual and gay. Most of the time, however, he operated under the names Mark or Trent. “I was pretty much the all-around gay, bi, straight male escort for all of Norfolk and Virginia Beach, because I was available 24/7,” he said.
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It wasn’t all easy. Kerekes started out living in “transitional” neighborhoods of Norfolk, including a $300-a-month apartment at 3125 Jersey Ave. and spent his nights without escort calls working the gay clubs and bars of the Hampton Road areas of Virginia.

Cuadra, who was living in Virginia Beach at the time, later joined Kerekes in an apartment at Hague Towers in nearby Norfolk. Referred to by them as a “penthouse apartment”(they actually lived on the twentieth floor, not the top floor), they later moved to a custom-built home on Stratem Court in Virginia Beach. “We started raunchy, but ended up being high-class,” Kerekes said.
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Kerekes today makes strong claims that he and Cuadra pulled in more than $1 million in 2005 and 2006 from their growing escort and amateur porn empire. Investigators would later confirm that the escort service was bringing in money in at least the six figure range, if not a lot less than the $1 million Kerekes claimed. Kerekes and Cuadra capped their investment efforts in the escort business in 2005 by buying the house at 1028 Stratem Court meant to be the base for their growing enterprise.
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“What Harlow and I built and earned (was) with only the skin of our asses, escorting,” Kerekes said.
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Kerekes continues to deny he and Cuadra faced any financial difficulties as 2007 dawned, but he told a different story on a secretly taped intercept of him and Cuadra explaining their financial woes to Grant Roy and Sean Lockhart.
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“We almost lost our house,” Cuadra said.

“Yeah, we were behind, we were behind two or three moths, they were about to take it,” Kerekes added.

“The Viper, everything was back in payments,” Cuadra said, noting they caught up on payments just enough to keep it from being repossessed.
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Despite all the financial challenges, Cuadra said “any chance (Joe) can take to act like a big shot, he’ll do it. That is (why) Vegas is the only town that makes him feel comfortable in his skin. It’s over the top. That’s Joseph Kerekes.”
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The employees of BoisRUs

A list of eighteen to twenty-two year old “boys” was employed occasionally by Kerekes and Cuadra, but it is unclear how many “employees” were ever a part of the escort service beyond Cuadra and Kerekes themselves.

Three of those men were called as witnesses in the 2009 murder trial of Harlow Cuadra. Justin Hensley said he was out of work in April 2005 when he answered an ad for male dancers placed in the classified section of the
Virginian-Pilot
newspaper, and Kerekes offered him work.

As he started working with Cuadra and Kerekes, “it was (just) an escort business, and then it picked up into the gay pornographic production, gay porn videos to be specific,” Hensley said, by July 2005.
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Hensley, a soldier in the U.S. Army, would later be deployed on two tours of duty to U.S. military operations in Iraq. But before leaving to serve his country, he spent time serving male clients procured for him by Cuadra and Kerekes—escort work that brought him a maximum of $250 an hour. Hensley described clients of the escort business as high-level executives, military officials, and political figures. His claim that a U.S. Senator was among the clients for BoisRUs was never confirmed.

“Mr. Kerekes pretty much was the boss of (BoisRUs), he mostly answered the phone and set up everything, but he occasionally went on calls with myself. Mr. Cuadra pretty much did the escorting full-time,” Hensley said.
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His escort work eventually led to at least one on-camera performance with Cuadra in the very first BoyBatter gay porn production. Despite his growing involvement with the gay business enterprises of Cuadra and Kerekes, Hensley said he was engaged to be married to a young woman and was only “gay for pay.” “I grew to be a friend of Cuadra because he took care of me,” Hensley said.
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Another young man affiliated with Cuadra and Kerekes’ enterprises said he earned up to $250 for an hour spent with clients and that he witnessed a well-oiled operation where Kerekes ran the booking for the escorts under the BoisRUs company, and Cuadra ran the pornography company.
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Andrew Shunk, who regularly worked out with Cuadra and Kerekes at the Big House Gym in Virginia Beach, said the couple “usually worked out once a day, usually in the morning for at least an hour, and it was mainly muscle building,” he said.
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Shunk and Hensley described a tight relationship between the men, with Kerekes acting as the muscles and Cuadra as the brain.
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They said Kerekes worked to keep Cuadra happy and pleased, an assessment confirmed by Kerekes mother. “Joe went out of his way to make Harlow happy,” Rosalie Kerekes said.
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His efforts to keep Cuadra happy, however, did not prevent Kerekes from continued angry outbursts in their home and elsewhere. Joe’s temper remained legendary.

The nature of Harlow and Joe

Needing a place to stay, Hensley said he began living with Cuadra and Kerekes in September 2005, first at their townhome on Link Court in Virginia Beach and the later at their Stratem Court home. He would describe, however, a less-than-ideal living condition. “They both pretty much wanted me to stay there and work all the time and not have a social life,” Hensley said. “I couldn’t go out. I (could) go down the street to get lunch, but I had to come back. I could only leave on the weekends.”
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Hensley rejects suggestions that Kerekes was domineering over Cuadra. Kerekes could be “a loud mouth,” Hensley said, and Cuadra “just kind of put up with it.”
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“I grew to be, you know, a friend of (Harlow), because he took care of me and (Cuadra and Kerekes) had their disagreements about things, but I don’t think Harlow would do
anything
for Joe,” Hensley said.
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Hensley said he finally decided to leave in March 2006 when a fight between Cuadra and Kerekes went too far, with Kerekes firing off a Glock 9mm handgun inside the house during a fit of rage. Kerekes himself admits to throwing table lamps, computers, and other items at Cuadra during other arguments.
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Hensley left, he said, because “I was worried about my well-being.”
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He said he did not witness the gun being discharged, but heard it from an adjacent room as Kerekes and Cuadra engaged in a disagreement that quickly grew to yelling and screaming.
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Hensley said he could be certain that it was Kerekes who fired the gun “because I walked in there afterwards. He was the one with the handgun in his hand. I’m pretty sure if he wanted to shoot Harlow in close proximity, especially with a handgun, he would have hit him.”
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Shunk would also later confirm he saw bullet holes in the walls of the Stratem Court house and “from what I was told, Joe discharged the weapon in the house.”
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Whether Kerekes had the will to kill Cuadra or just scare him, no one will ever know. The relationship between Harlow and Joe could be complicated. The partnership of Cuadra and Kerekes was punctuated by their declarations of intense love for one another. Joe had Harlow’s last name “Cuadra” tattooed on his buttock. But they also were haunted by periods of growing jealousy as outside sexual partners were constantly being introduced because of the demands of their escorting and porn enterprises.

Hensley recalled another frightening experience when Kerekes’ temper exploded. He described a scene where he and Cuadra were riding in a car driven erratically by Kerekes. “When they picked me up (that day), I don’t know what (Kerekes’) attitude problem was…but when they picked me up, we jumped on the Interstate …and (Kerekes) was flying through lanes, swerving through traffic and then got over to the HOV (high occupancy vehicle) lane and punched it; and he was going well over 140 miles-per-hour,” Hensley said.
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Hensley also recalled a day when Kerekes was drinking heavily and grabbed him by the throat and pinned him, briefly, against a wall inside the Stratem Court home. Earlier in the same day Kerekes had kicked in the door to Cuadra’s bedroom and punched a hole in the wall. “(Kerekes) snatched me up and said, ‘If I ever needed you to do anything for me, would you do it?’ And I just kind of stopped and stared at him,” Hensley said. “I was worried about my physical well-being pretty much. I mean, I wasn’t going to let the man sit there and try and manhandle me, because I can defend myself.”
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Hensley said he overcame his initial intimidation and fear of Kerekes. “He looks like he’s on steroids and, honestly, I saw the kind of weight he was lifting, and, you know, his anger and attitude problem,” he said. “But when I got to know him, no, I wasn’t intimidated by him. It was all size and mouth and that was it.”
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He said he also witnessed instances where Cuadra stood up to Kerekes’ verbal harangues and told Kerekes to “shut up.”

Cuadra, while on trial for the murder of Bryan Kocis, described Kerekes as “a sociopath” and said as a result, “We don’t have any friends.” Sociopath or not, Cuadra never left Kerekes and stayed by his side until the moment of their joint arrest on murder charges.
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Harlow and Joe’s business model

Kerekes described Norfolk Male Companions as “a large, impressive and proficiently working machine” that had the potential to make millions. By all indications, the escort business desperately needed to be successful. Between the two men, Kerekes and Cuadra had racked up a mountain of $988,695 in debt by the time it all came tumbling down in 2007. “Yes, our bills were massive, but only because we wanted them to be,” Kerekes tried to explain. He claimed the couple needed daily income approaching $3,900 to meet their personal and business expenses.
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The “earn it—burn it” style in which they lived was noticed by others. Kerekes father, Fred, told a magazine writer that the couple ate out at most every meal, often favoring Boston Market for a quick dinner. But other times they went all out, dropping thousands of dollars on meals. “Joe had a $6,000 chinchilla coat he bought in Vegas,” Fred Kerekes said. “It was leather inside—reversible. He had a 3.5 carat diamond stud in his ear. Harlow’s was 2.5 karats. They always wore Rolexes.”
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Kerekes’ father also knew where much of the money came from—credit card cash advances or purchases and a second mortgage on their home. “I knew they were out of control,” he said.
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