The Adult Industry has more associations that a $50 hooker.

Bill Margold called to clarify that it was Ron Sullivan and the late Perry Ross who began the Adult Video Association in 1987 and that it was Pinky Stolbach who later started his own organization The Free Speech Legal Defense Fund which in turn became The Free Speech Coalition under Lenny Friedlander.

“I lived this history,” states Margold noting how Stolbach made sure that his [Stolbach’s] girlfriend Carol got on board the gravy train.

“Her salary was outrageous,” says Margold. “Up to that point nobody had been paid to do anything. They were paying her an exorbitant amount when Mara Epstein did as much work and was equally valuable. And then when it got off the ground, Gloria Leonard was the figurehead of the whole thing.”

Margold notes that Free Speech “forced” him to take money by 1998.

“They told me they would throw me off the board if I didn’t take the money,” says Margold.

Porn Valley- Few of this current porn generation, I’m sure, remember Bill “Pinky” Stolbach. Pinky’s name came up in a conversation I had with Jack Stephen Saturday night.

I wrote what I thought was a rather knee-slapping piece this week www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=27512 about Jack and his porno league-leading statistic of having received its most number of death threats.

Jack enjoyed the reminiscences so much that he volunteered dinner at Fleming’s, a hoity toity steak joint here in the Valley. During more of the same memory lane-tripping, I ask Jack, who always deemed Pinky his nemesis, if he’s heard of any recent sightings.

Pinky left the business under dubious sets of circumstances years ago and Jack thinks he was last spotted at Brent’s Deli. Now that might have been a while ago, and Jack’s not sure if those reports were accurate.

To describe him, Pinky was, like his nickname, Pink in the face with mottled skin from excessive sun exposure and wispy blond hair. He was a pretty hefty guy.

To explain, Pinky was the salesman at Cinderella back in its heyday when it had 40 employees and didn’t have to make payroll with advances on personal credit cards. At the time, Stephen was its Vice President. But Pinky, often as not, would lend the impression that he was the co-owner of Cinderella along with Charlie Brickman.

This would always drive Jack nuts. And I documented some of this office rivalry, politics and tension in a porn movie I wrote way back called Adult Video Nudes. I even got Pinky doing a cameo by playing himself in a scene lensed in a urinal with him rehearsing a testimonial speech to Reuben Sturman. Hysterical.

Among his accomplishments besides golf banquets and drinking lobster butter [no lie], Pinky started up the Free Speech Legal Defense Fund, the forerunner of The Free Speech Coalition.

Instead of life, liberty and the pursuit of happy porn, it became an elitist organization of Pinky’s golf and nineteenth hole drinking buddies. I always suspected it to be a con job thus providing Pinky extra spending money for caddy and greens fees.

Pinky alone raised a quarter of a million dollars from the industry by selling his own version of a possible 9/11 and how the Barbarians [the Feds] were at the gate and how the industry needed this huge, legal war chest to vanquish them. Those exact words, I might add, when Pinky’s group began holding its version of Amway meetings.

Predictably, its successor, The Free Speech Coalition, used the same sales pitch while another of its directors, Bill Lyon, deployed the successful Pinky business model. Unfortunately, the white-haired Boston politician-looking Lyon had to resign in the wake of a credit card scandal.

Jack remembers a time that Pinky took it upon himself by leasing a Rolls Royce as a company car and causing, as you might suspect, a bit of disconcerting uproar by swearing it was at the insistence of Charlie Brickman. The car broke down somewhere on the road during its maiden voyage.

However, it was when the FBI raided Cinderella in 1992 that Pinky’s quick thinking and ego rose to the occasion and led to a federal indictment for him and Brickman. During the raid, Pinky was all but doing comedy stand-up for the Feds, while Brickman was telling him to shut his face.

Stephen remembers coming in to work that morning with the Feds arriving about the same time. He recognized one of them as Steve Swann. He knew Swann from past conversations when Stephen was being set up on a bogus kiddie porn beef- from someone who issued him another of those death threats, no less.

However, Swann’s playing it cool, like he didn’t know Stephen. [Swann later told Stephan he knew about the Cinderella raid’s being in the works but couldn’t tell Stephen beforehand.]

“I’m nervous, and I go into Charlie’s office to tell him what’s happening,” Stephen says of the raid.

“And I’ll never forget what Charlie said: ‘Calm down. It’s only the FBI. Let’s go see what they want.’”

Stephen also remembers Brickman walking out into the lobby as cold as ice telling the Feds to wait while he calls his attorney John Weston.

“The FBI waited until Weston got to the Valley to look at the search warrant,” Stephen recalls. “But here’s Pinky posturing with The Feds. He’s telling them how he plays golf with Reuben.”

According to Stephen, the Feds, in dead silence went through the Cinderella files paper by paper, file by file. When they told Stephen it was time for his Polaroid, he replied, “No thanks- I got plenty of them,” and walked out the room.

Stephen would only answer their questions with a polite, “I wish to speak to my attorney.”

One Fed wanted to engage him in conversation about the company’s contract girl, Kascha, but Stephen didn’t take the bait.

Thanks to his yap, Pinky got indicted for interstate transportation and had to register along with Brickman as a sex felon. But that wasn’t the end of it. The Feds visited Stephen’s home in Woodland Hills several days later and attempted to coerce his wife Vickie into testifying against him.

Consequently, Vickie had to go to Florida and stayed four days amid legal haggling that subsequently dropped her as a potential witness. Vickie recalls how her lawyer- some guy about 6’5” – got into it with the government’s lawyer about her not testifying.

“I remember crying how I didn’t want to go to jail,” says Vickie.

The obscenity case wound up costing Cinderella over $400,000. Brickman and Stolbach got felony convictions but no jail time. They both had to register as sex offenders.