By the film's end, Broden says, the suitor strangles two of the women in clear plastic bags. It might be fringe material, he says, but a search for "rape videos" in the Google Internet search engine yields 68,000 hits. (In fact, while this story was being reported, a colleague received an e-mail spam in his America Online account pitching several extra-nasty rape and torture tapes.)
Although legal experts say an "everyone speeds" defense likely will not get far in the courts, Broden's evidence does illustrate that the rape tapes at issue are not all that unusual. Given the prevalence of these videos and DVDs, it is as if an entire freeway of Mercedes-Benzes appear to be flying by at 120 mph, and the feds have pulled over one stolen Ford.
Tavis Coburn
Garry Ragsdale, pictured here after his arrest in 1998, sold adult porn over the Internet for about eight months. It took the feds five years to make an example of him.
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Indeed, federal officials working in a different capacity have helped at least one porn producer whose tapes Gartman ripped off protect his right to the material.
After the 1998 bust, Ragsdale quit that part of his Internet operation for good, his attorney says. Garry, who is now 34, is working at a gym. His wife, Tamara, is home raising their kids.
Gartman, meanwhile, hardly skipped a beat. Moving to Reno, Nevada, with his wife, Lynn, he went back into business, this time with some material allegedly purloined from ZFX Productions Inc., an Orlando, Florida-based company specializing in bondage and sex torture films. Its elaborate Web site, which advertises DVDs and videos streamed over the Web, opens with an image of a woman, bound and gagged, hanging upside down from a gallows.
In summer 2001, according to pleadings in a federal lawsuit, a ZFX employee surfing the Web came across several videos from the company's 130-film inventory that Gartman was apparently pirating and selling on the Web. ZFX's lawyer, Jules Zalon, set up two "buy-busts" similar to the one employed by DPD. He found the Gartman films to be simply duplications of ZFX productions, only with the titles and credits removed. At least that was the case of the ones that actually arrived. Zalon says his private investigator paid Gartman's company $316 for four titles. "They took his money, but he never received any of those videos," Zalon says. (If that didn't show chutzpah, perhaps this does. One of Gartman's new operations appears to be named after the postal box customer who blew the whistle on him in Dallas.)
Among the bootleg tapes that did arrive was The Tool Box Abductions, described by ZFX promotional material as a "journey into the inner lair of Jake and Leroy, two deranged psycho rednecks" who in their "grungy shop" bind, gag and brutalize two women "vacationers." It's "not recommended for the faint of heart."
ZFX sued for copyright infringement and obtained temporary restraining orders from federal judges in Reno and Dallas. Company employees and federal marshals "hit" two houses in Reno and one in Arlington allegedly used by Gartman and several friends and family members.
Zalon, reached at his New Jersey office, says Gartman was at the Reno house, and he immediately offered to pay a settlement of $100,000, with $25,000 payable immediately. Gartman wrote a check on a company account. Several days later, it bounced.
ZFX pressed on with its lawsuit and obtained a $450,000 default judgment in Nevada when Gartman, his wife and two other defendants failed to defend themselves in court. Shortly afterward, Gartman and his wife moved and left no forwarding address.
Brown, the Fort Worth attorney who says he spoke to Gartman about the ZFX action, and Zalon both say they believe Gartman moved to Canada to avoid ZFX's efforts to collect.
Linda Groves, the federal prosecutor in the Ragsdale case, declined to say whether her office remains interested in Gartman and wouldn't comment on any aspect of the matter.
"My client is no longer pursuing him," Zalon says, declining to identify who that person is.
Corporate records in Florida show ZFX is run by Samuel S. Kettula and his wife, Sheri. The Kettulas own a new home on the outskirts of Orlando appraised for taxes at $373,000. Unlike the Ragsdales--who have had TV crews canvassing their street and reporters at their door--the Kettulas have received no public scrutiny or attention for what they do.
The only time the name of either of the people behind movies such as Southern Discomfort and Phallicide and Tied Tales has appeared in the press was last year, when the Orlando paper listed Sheri Kettula as a finisher in the Walt Disney World Marathon. Her time was just over five hours and 18 minutes.
Meanwhile, the feds are getting ready to fry up Dallas' small-time pornographers. If convicted, Garry and Tamara Ragsdale could be fined a maximum of $750,000 each, and they face prison time of up to 20 years.
