On January 11, 2007, Harlow Cuadra and Joe Kerekes got together for dinner and drinks with two people they were desperate to do business with at the posh 'Le Cirque' restaurant in Las Vegas, Nevada. Thirteen days later they would kill someone.
What must they have been thinking on this day, a wee bit over two years ago? And what led them from dinner to murder in thirteeen days? Based on the facts we know (
and thanks to PC, we actually know a LOT), I'm going to try to answer those questions - day by day - over the next ten days. So, join me now as we crawl into the minds of Harlow and Joe, nearly two years ago...
First though, to understand their likely frame of mind on this night, we need to briefly look at how they ended up here at this porn convention in Vegas at this particular fancy restaurant on the 11th.
In a nutshell, the reason was money. Harlow and Joe needed money, and they needed it
badly. This is a stone cold fact, and it cannot be overemphasized.
For those unfamiliar with Harlow and Joe's now well documented pre-murder financial crisis,
click here. I wrote this a year ago, and since then there's only one thing I'd add: It's very probable (IMO) that Harlow and Joe's primary home loan was (or I should say is) one of these currently infamous "subprime" mortgages.
Here's a quote from a bestseller I'm currently reading (
Niall Ferguson's The Ascent of Money:
"'Subprime' mortgage loans are aimed by local brokers at families or neighborhoods with poor or patchy credit histories...
...And most had introductory 'teaser' periods, whereby the initial interest payments - usually for the first two years - were kept artificially low, back-loading the cost of the loan....[causing] a huge upward leap in interest payments in the third year of the loan."
Both italics are mine. First italic point, when your main source of income is a felonious activity in your state...it's fair to assume your bank would look upon your creditworthiness, at best, as "patchy."
Second italic point, Harlow and Joe bought their home in December of 2005. Yep. Assuming this was your typical "subprime" mortgage, Harlow and Joe would have been feeing the extreme financial pain of their new drastically higher payments in (da DUM!)...January of 2007. Hm, yepsters, WHAT a coincidence.
You combine that with disappointing revenues from
their lacklusterly reviewed "Boybatter" new porn site endeavor, and you begin to feel the degree of financial desperation Harlow and Joe must have been in two years ago. So, when
Brent Corrigan casually suggested they finally meet at the big porn trade show out in Vegas that month, you can bet Harlow and Joe jumped at the chance. As Harlow admits in the
Roecker interview, he saw it as a juicy "carrot" to good to pass up.
Harlow also admitted (in a now deleted blog post) checking out and running the Alexa numbers on Brent Corrigan's web site early on, and thus they knew of the huge and rabidly loyal online fan base Brent possessed. "Online" is the key word to keep in mind here. Harlow and Joe needed more income NOW, not later, so when they spoke to their roommates (such as Justin Hensley) of making a small fortune off of Brent, I don't think they were thinking so much in terms of DVD sales (which would take a while to produce and distribute and finally reap profits from) but in online Boybatter subscriptions, the electronic dollars from which they could collect almost immediately.
So, you can see what their object is at this dinner meeting. They HAVE to get Brent onto Boybatter. They NEED the online subscription surge a demonstrable porn megastar like Brent will bring to their relatively obscure porn site. They can't just settle for Brent and Grant's original proposal, which was for Harlow to simply shoot a scene for Brent Corrigan Online (and collect merely a standard scene fee). They HAD to be profit participants. They gotta pay those bills and mortgages, and they need to pay them NOW.
So, they tap the last of their available credit on the few cards they can still draw from, and they fly out to Vegas...at their own expense. They pick prectically the most expensive restaurant in Vegas in a Hail Mary attempt to impress Sean and Grant; to convince them, I suppose, that Boybatter was "bigleague." Joe's $6000 Bernini rabbitskin faux-chinchilla coat (now the namesake of a erudite blog) perhaps was bought with the same purpose? Anyways, it is clear from all this that Harlow and Joe were the supplicant party going into this meeting. And like good negotiators, they were doing the best they could to obscure this desperation from Sean and Grant.
Unfortunately for Harlow and Joe, Sean and Grant were not fooled. In fact,
Brent shared his insights about the deal to Jody Wheeler in "either an IM chat or a phone call" BEFORE the murder, stating that "a company out of Norfolk, Virginia wanted to pay him a huge some of money to star in their movies" and that he was "skeptical." The "kind of money the outfit was offering was pretty much unheard of. Too good to be true."
I believe what happened at the dinner was, Sean and Grant politely listened to Harlow and Joe's drunken sales pitch (complete with breaking glassware), nodded their heads a lot...and then more or less gave Harlow and Joe the brush off. And they used the current settlement talks with Bryan as a convenient brushing excuse (ie, "...well, sounds good, but we have to wrap up this lawsuit thing, so, maybe sometime, ok? We'll call you later. And thanks for dinner!").
They then posed for a quick photo-op with a stumbling bird-flipping Harlow outside the restaurant (yeah, LOL, THAT made a good final impression I'm sure...you can pretty much tell by the look on Brent's face here how greatly he would prefer to be elsewhere), and that was that. As they left the Bellagio parking lot, Sean and Grant were probably secretly hoping to never hear from those two clowns again.
Unfortuntely for them (and others), 'twas not to be.
Because getting back to what Harlow and Joe were probably thinking at this point...they clearly missed the brush-off signal. Whether it was the excessive alcohol consumption, or the desperate wishful thinking brought on by their financial crisis, or a combination of both...they came away with a far more rosy impression of where their proposed "deal" stood (as will become apparant in a couple of days).
And that wraps this day up.
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Oh, what's this? I'm forgetting something, you say? Hmmm, what could I possibly be forgetting?
Oh, that. Oh yeah, someone said something, or other. About our neighbor to the north, IIRC. Hmmm yes that.
Hm. Well you know, I've actually been doing some
re-musing about THAT. Which may raise an eyebrow or two, but here goes:
Recall that the whole point of this exercise is to try to put ourselves in Harlow and Joe's shoes over these next few days. So lets try and look at this from their angle...and see if maybe, just maybe, there is another more likely explanation for this that we have never considered before.
Now, we know that Joe made some comment at this dinner about "sending" Bryan elsewhere. And we know Grant said no, no thanks! And we know Grant thought the whole thing a joke at the time. And we know Grant duly reported it to the police after the murder, in which joke essentially became a reality. We know all these things from the various court filings,
especially the CCTs (in which Joe basically affirms Grant's description of this offhand remark to a tee).
The way I see it, there are actually two possibilities here: 1) Joe was floating a serious murder proposal "trial balloon" at this moment to Sean and Grant; or 2) Joe was indeed merely joking. OK. Lets take a good HARD look at the first explanation, ie, the one virtually everyone up to this point has (perhaps lazily) been assuming to be the case.
Now, pretend you want to make a SERIOUS proposal to someone (who you barely even know) to murder someone else (who you know, at best, only by reputation). When and where and HOW would you choose to make such an incredible proposition?
Would you do it while everyone is sober and thinking seriously? Or would you wait until everyone is so drunk they can barely understand what you're trying to say (Brent: "He'll just come back.")?
Would you do it in a unpopulated place, unlikely to be overheard? Or would you do it in a place where you are surrounded by nearby diners, attentive waiters, hovering busboys refilling your water glass, etc.?
Would you do it in a secluded place, unlikely to be seen? Or would you do it in a Vegas hotel-casino, where a ZILLION cameras are trained at you, watching your every move?
In other words, is there a STUPIDER time place and manner to propose murder than like this? At Le Cirque?? After several rounds of drinks???
If I were Joe, and I
really wanted to float such a shocking trial balloon...GOOD GAWD there MUST have been better opportunities that weekend to do so. I mean granted, Joe is not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed, but c'mon, he must have realized no one would take such a suggestion seriously, delivered in the time, place and manner this one supposedly was. Thus I find myself no longer believing in the first possibility above.
In other words, not only did Grant have good reason to believe Joe was joking, GRANT WAS RIGHT. Joe WAS indeed merely joking. On that day, at that time, anyways. Thus I no longer believe murder was hatched on (or before) this day, as we've all too rashly assumed. No, the actual murder plan did not arise for several more days, I think. And we have paid FAR too much attention to this lamb dinner (and this Canada comment) than it actually deserves.
The Vegas dinner on the 11th was but a interesting prelude IMO, nothing more. Days more monumental lie ahead.
This is interesting, in that it tells us a couple things. One, it confirms that their Boybatter porn operation was indeed failing. If Harlow was reduced to working for Falcon at the base industry scene rate, then obviously Boybatter DVDs were not, after overheard is factored into it, selling well enough to earn them a better return. Being their own porn studio was harder than they thought, it would seem.
Second, it confirms the severity of the hang-up call. They saw their bridges with Grant pretty much burnt, and so, accepting BCO's original offer to work for them was obviously no longer a practical option at this time. Even though it wouldn't take care of their immediate financial woes, Harlow needed to find additional income streams, so might as well get the ball rolling on that now. Harlow puts down as a reference the only person connected with Falcon he knows...Brent Corrigan:
It is perhaps soon after this rather crushing self-admission of failure and diminished options that Harlow and Joe began to seriously consider a more radical and immediate solution to the "direct competition" that stood in their way: Bryan Kocis of Cobra Video.
