Ben Zion Suky, whose name emerges in connection with a $48K contribution to Anthony Weiner, www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=49047 is a man of mystery but no stranger to these pages. Here’s a story we ran on www.adultcybermart.com –

Oy vey. When Jules Jordan [pictured] wasn’t looking, someone took Elijah’s seat at the Passover seder.

In recent weeks we’re coming to learn that Jordan’s celebrated piracy lawsuit against Kaytel, a Canadian distributor, was truly different from all others. And quite incestuous when you see who was involved with whom.

Jordan sued because Kaytel, through one of its companies Jacky’s One Stop, began selling bootlkeg Jules Jordan product to a company in New York called Direct Distributors. Direct was owned at the time by Ben Zion Suky.

Turns out, Suky’s also the right hand man to the Mr. Big of rabbis, Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto. If you assumed that Rabbi Pinto had once worked for the Ford Motor Company, you would be wrong.

Now, for some back story.

In 2007, Evil Angel won a piracy case when a federal jury determined that Kaytel, owned by Alain Elmaleh, illegally pirated 31 Evil Angel movies and 13 movies from Jordan, when he was a member of the Evil Angel directing roster.

Evil Angel was eventually awarded $11.2 million.

Evil Angel and Jordan uncovered the piracy ring in 2005 after East Coast distributors reported knock-off copies of Evil Angel DVDs.

After he broke from Evil Angel, Jordan, the president of Jules Jordan Video, went on to sue Kaytel Video Distribution, Leisure Time Video Canada, Inc., Elmaleh, the principal shareholder of each of the corporate defendants and Jacky’s One Stop.

In the original case, the court ruled that neither Jordan or Jules Jordan Video had standing to assert copyright claims. But last year that was all changed by an appeals court in the 9th circuit, headed by Judge Alex Kozinski no stranger to porn scandals and his own involvement in raunchy Internet websites.

Elmaleh formed 2918919 Canada, Inc. as a Canadian holding company that owns both Kaytel Video Distribution and Leisure Time. Elmaleh also owned a number of retail adult entertainment stores in Canada.

It was in the spring of 2005 that Jordan began receiving a higher than normal rate of return of Jules Jordan videos. Counterfeit copies of “Jules Jordan’s Flesh Hunter 6” and “Jules Jordan: Feeding Frenzy 2,” among other titles, were showing up among the DVDs being returned to his distributor.

Upon review of the returned merchandise, Jordan learned that the returns were bootleg copies of his DVDs. The counterfeit works were inferior and were replicated and compressed to fit on a smaller DVD, reducing the quality of the video.

Kaytel contracted with Diadem Digital to replicate thousands of copies of the counterfeit Jordan DVDs, although Elmaleh signed documents representing that Kaytel owned the rights to the DVDs.

One of Kaytel’s employees, Jacky Elkeslassy, formed a Canadian company called Jacky’s One Stop. And it was Jacky’s One Stop that sold the copied DVDs to distributors, particularly Direct Distributors in New York.

Before it closed down, Ben Zion Suky ran Direct Distributors. Suky’s also the known right hand man to an ultra-Orthodox Sephardic kabbalist rabbi, Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto. Pinto, who’s only 37, himself, is a very powerful man among Israel’s political and business elite and in the American Jewish community.

Suky is also the rabbi’s translator, gatekeeper and conduit to the outside world in America.

Aside from the Jordan legal fracas, Suky’s real estate business also faced a string of lawsuits, foreclosures and legal judgments and Suky’s also been involved in other legal entanglements involving porn companies.

Raised in Petah Tikva, an Israeli city near Tel Aviv, Suky, 33, moved to the United States 17 years ago. He’s been associated with Rabbi Pinto for a decade. Just recently Suky was the subject of an Internet piece questioning how his involvement in a high profile porn lawsuit such as Jordan’s would effect his standing in the Jewish community.

Until 2008, Suky was a principal of Direct Distributors until it shut down. In 2004, Suky bought thousands of adult DVDs from Kaytel. A June 2004 invoice shows the following: 71 copies of “Only the Best of Seymour Butt 8,” 250 copies of “Taboo 1,” 150 copies of “Natural Wonders 13,” among tens of thousands of other titles. The order totaled $14,308.

Direct Distributors specialized in cheaper, lower-end DVDs called “catalog titles,” as opposed to new releases.

In a 2006 deposition filed in a case in U.S. District Court in New York’s Southern District, Suky described meeting Elmaleh and a colleague in New York. It was then that Elmaleh told Suky that he had “a lot of movies” and “novelties” to sell.

Later, Suky would place orders over the phone and they’d be delivered by van to his Manhattan office. In the deposition, Suky said that no one ever explained to him why Elmaleh’s DVDs were so cheap, and that he never asked.

[Direct Distributors was also named as a defendant in civil cases brought by Stagliano and by Studio A Entertainment, Inc., for its role as a distributor of bootleg porn DVDs. All cases ended in settlements.]

In the Jordan case, a brief filed in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals by attorneys for Jordan states that Direct Distributors was erroneously told that Elmaleh’s firms owned the rights to the DVDs they were selling. But in one 2006 filing in a case against Elmaleh, Elmaleh alleges in a cross-claim that Suky and Direct Distributors “knew or reasonably should have known” that the DVDs were bootlegs.

A jury eventually awarded a multi-million dollar judgment to Jordan, portions of which were overturned by successive rulings. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reinstated part of the verdict and referred another part back to a lower court.

The Jordan lawsuit wasn’t the only one Suky and Direct Distributors were involved in, however.

In July 2008, a state court issued a $46,000 judgment against Direct Distributors following a complaint by Pure Play Media, Inc., another porn company.

Soon after, a new porn distributor called New Media, Inc. set up shop in the former offices of Direct. Pure Play then attempted to collect its debt from New Media, saying that Direct Distributors had simply changed its name. But New Media principal Chaim Cohen argued that he had no relationship with Direct, and a New York State Supreme Court judge agreed with him.

New Media has since closed the West 36th Street storefront, but a company with the same name is now producing its own porn films.

Meanwhile Adultdvdempire.com, an online retailer of adult films, lists 72 titles produced by New Media in the past few years. New Media maintains records at an address in Chatsworth that’s also been listed as an address by other companies owned by Chaim Cohen.

Though a court determined that Cohen had no involvement with Suky’s wholesale DVD company, the two were business partners in a number of real estate ventures throughout Manhattan.