Australian Penthouse

What’s the most obvious difference between your escort service and others?
We’ve thoroughly researched what men look for in a woman. Think back to the 1950s housewife: the wife was immaculately presented and her husband would come home from work after she’d spent hours making sure that she looked good.

She had dinner served, the house cleaned, and she had a twist of naughtiness.

And today’s man is looking for a 1950s woman?
Yes, but with a twist of our generation. A man wants a woman who is immaculately presented, educated—but not as smart as him—she cooks and cleans and she loves to have sex.

Where do you find such women?
Well, it’s a difficult search, but Stepfords are girls who would walk down the street and you would not know that they’re escorts.

Some have university degrees, some have high-end jobs and some are models. I’ve looked for qualities in our girls who can cook and clean, who are nymphomaniacs, and who know how to please a man.

Does hiring for cooking meals also mean hiring for sex?
If you’re hiring someone to cook, obviously the first hour is going to be spent cooking, unless you want a burned meal by having ‘breaks’.

Most of our clients request a two-hour booking, so the first hour will be cooking, and the second hour will be sex.

You can hire just for the cooking side of things or just for a corporate event but, realistically, no-one does that. They want sex at the end, and the main concept [we sell] is the whole experience, not just one side of it.

It’s not Photoshopped and you get a realistic view of what the girl looks like, without having to look through a heap of photos.

Which packages are the most popular with clients?
It’s probably a tie between the Porn Star Experience, including the ‘double fantasy’ of two girls, or the cooking. There are two things that men need: good sex and good food.

The Porn Star Experience sounds intriguing. Tell us more…
The Stepfords obviously enjoy having sex. For the Porn Star Experience, we have many clients with fetishes so we explore many different fantasies; for instance, some men like to be dominated, which is actually quite common.

This is where the naughty little Stepford can transform from submissive housewife to naughty little dominatrix.

What sort of training do you offer the girls?
We do a thorough interview process to make sure the girls are what we’re looking for and what our clients are looking for. After that, they are trained in cooking to make sure that the menu set is the same across the board.

Obviously, none of them need to be trained in sex. However, I can tell you that two of our Stepfords decided to see how it would feel to be a client instead of the professional.

They hired a male escort, who didn’t know they were escorts themselves, to see how it would feel from a client’s perspective: the anticipation of knowing that someone was going to come over and that you were going to pay them for sex… They had a threesome with a male escort, so that was a bit of training.

Despite advances in technology and safety, more stuntmen die or are injured on film sets than ever before. Penthouse speaks with seasoned vets and the new guard in Australia and America about life as a body for hire…

THE past few years have seen several high-profile accidents lead to injuries and deaths of stunt performers on films as varied as The Hangover Part II, The Dark Knight and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In early 2011, the Independent newspaper asked whether the profession required assessment, quoting an Equity (UK actors’ union) spokesperson who revealed that insurance claims from stunt accidents were rising. Downward pressure on film costs, the rise of automation and a culture of blame have all taken a toll.

Veteran British stunt coordinator, performer and second-unit director, Vic Armstrong, says that stunt work is no different to car racing or parachuting. The 65-year-old, best known for his work on many James Bond and the Indiana Jones films, says sometimes things just go wrong: “It doesn’t have to be anybody’s fault but there is an inherent risk in any stunt.”

But Armstrong is quick to point out that planning with safety in mind is the key to survival. “It should be a long and exciting life, but it shouldn’t be any more dangerous than any adventurous sport if you approach it correctly.”

The task of the stunt team is to make actions that look dangerous safe to execute, planning the set-up and logistics (stunt co-ordinator), dressing up to take the fall or bullet (stunt performer) and often directing the second unit; it involves a lot of waiting and armies of technicians to capture often a just few seconds of footage. It’s an evolving art.

In his book The True Adventures of the World’s Greatest Stuntman, Armstrong describes being asked to ride in a motorcycle sidecar for 1968’s Subterfuge, assuring the director he could even though he’d never used one in his life. Somehow, they muddled through and got the shot, but Armstrong says this would never happen with today’s endless red tape and clearances.

Australian stunt performers are determined to keep safety at the top of the priority list as well as fostering initiative to solve creative problems. Reg Roordink, stunt performer and safety supervisor on Romper Stomper and McLeod’s Daughters explains, “I never say ‘No we can’t’. It can all be done if we put the right procedures in place.”

“It’s when the output is taken away from the individual and put into so many other hands that things can go wrong, when you rely on technology more than your own spirit,” Page says.

“Physics don’t change and inertia, friction and momentum are the way we work out how a physical action will come out—that’s how we make it safe. What’s changed is that we’ve introduced so many other factors [that are] controlled by people whose arse isn’t on the line.”

And while it might be tempting to think that the stunt game is for young-uns while shuffling older performers out to pasture, guys of Page and Armstrong’s age and status have an ace up their sleeves that can help enforce the safety of the entire industry. “I’ve got to admit that I’m not physically as capable of really high-energy stuff as I was 30 years ago,” Page claims, “but experience replaces a lot of that energy so you don’t have to try as hard to get it right.

“The good thing about the aging process is that you never let go of the knowledge you’ve developed, so less is likely to go wrong.”

But the digital age means audiences are demanding ever-bigger thrills. Even Tom Cruise was prepared to dangle from straps halfway up Dubai’s 830-metre high Burj Khalifa tower. Each director wants to top the stunts filmed by the last one, but now that audiences are expecting feats of superhuman ability, are we asking too much of the men and women who have to deliver it on the screen?

New Zealand stunt artist and frequent Quentin Tarantino collaborator, Zoe Bell, 33, has seen the limits of technology take over what the human body can do, and she believes we will always chase the extreme.

“Anything we feel like we don’t have a handle on, we’re going to create technology to push it a bit further,” claims Bell. “We’ve got CGI, so there’s lots of things you’re not going to use humans for because [the stunts] would probably kill us. We just want to see bigger and better stuff all the time. That’s just humanity, not the stunt industry alone.”

Safety concerns change within the stunt industry because the type of work changes with the tastes of filmgoers. As Bell explains: “I’m in the generation that started in the martial arts and wire-work era around the time of The Matrix; it was a more precision-based art. The older guys were from the era of westerns and cowboys and did a lot of horse riding, brawling and jumping-through stuff.

“The older guys were from the era of westerns
and did a lot of brawling and jumping through stuff”

Plus, if you go back that far in time, I simply wouldn’t have been allowed to do what I’m doing because I have boobs!,” she laughs.

However the stunt industry is shaping up, it seems Australia is where it’s at when it comes to safety and a workmanlike approach that consistently delivers great results. “I love working in the industry here,” says Page.

“We don’t have the big money America has, which is actually limiting for them because they automatically throw money and technology at a problem. In Australia, we come up with innovative ideas and we’ll always have an angle because we don’t have too much money.

“People think that’s bad, but the lack of money has made us come up with some truly great stuff.” Because more money attracts more interests, the U.S. industry has been left to drown in a sea of red tape.”

“We’ve always been conscious of safety,” Armstrong explains, “but nowadays it’s all about filling in forms and laying the blame on someone else and very little about being safer. I prefer the older days when it was more free-wheeling, but [excessive oversight] is just something that’s crept into the business, the same as it has in all our lives.”

Though Armstrong’s term “free-wheeling” may horrify modern bean counters, Page says it simply means we should focus not on less caution but caution where it counts. The stunt, he believes, should begin and end with the stunt artist, not the insurance assessors.

“You’re virtually instructed like a learner driver in some of the American car rolls, with big ramps and all the technology to back it up,” says Armstrong. “’Drive here, turn left there, push that button when you get to the yellow line and hang on’. Sure, you get a big result, but you’re not feeling it because it’s just not natural.

“In the old days, we’d go out there and roll cars, set ourselves alight and jump off buildings, and we knew that if we didn’t have our arse covered, we weren’t going to get through.”

When it came to the jaw-dropping Mad Max opening stunt, Page says the tiny crew built the ramp with timber, rocks and bricks found in a nearby paddock: “If it was an American film, there would have been engineers signing off on the ramp and it would have got so complex that little things would have gone wrong.

“We stuck that ramp together virtually with our finger in the air to feel where the wind was coming from. It was done on feel.”

At 61 years old, the trademark golden mop is now infused with mercury, his face bears the striations of long-forgotten months in distant wildernesses, and he is slightly bemused at the idea that anyone could still be interested in anything he says or does.

Media-wary—for reasons which will be detailed later—yet unfailingly polite, Mangels says: “I have no idea why you are calling me. The days of being a celebrity as such are far behind me and I’m kind of taken aback that I am remembered at all.”

There is no malice in his tone. Rather, it’s one of a man who has his peace with the past and is living his present in quiet equanimity. Mostly, this involves surfing secret breaks “off the islands in the Pacific” and revegetating his property on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula.

A resurgence in attention is something that Alby will have to get used to, as Hollywood producer Paul Mason—whose credits include Lasse Hallstrom’s latest film Hachiko—recently signed a deal to document Mangels’ life story. And what a story it is. When he was eight, Alby’s Dutch parents migrated to South Australia and, by all accounts, his childhood was lived against the backdrop of the Murray River at Murraybridge.

At 23, Alby had an epiphany: there must be more to life than working as a brickie in Murraybridge. Consequently, in 1971, he and mate John Fields set off on what was supposed to be a one-off walkabout.

With a modest $400 in funds and a 16mm Bell and Howell film camera to capture their adventures, the exciting journey fomented a six-year odyssey which encompassed 56 countries across four continents. Along the way, Alby worked as a mechanic, a baker, a stockman, an unfeasibly large jockey, and an insurance salesman whose own life presented a level of risk that very few brokerages would be keen to accept.

The result was the 1977 film World Safari, the huge success of which took everybody but Mangels by surprise. Having conducted the equivalent of focus groups in schools, community halls and drive-ins, before the final product was edited, World Safari was a beguiling mix of natural wonder and ‘no-way-dude!’ moments.

“When you have six years of material to select from,” says Mangels, “chances are you will end up with a pretty dynamic product.” But there was more to the movie, which he notes, “was at one stage on at the same cinemas as Star Wars and Superman. My fondest memory of the time was that [the movie] was genuine family entertainment.

“Three generations would show up to the theatre and enjoy the film from start to finish. I don’t think you see that anymore. There was something in there for six-year-olds, 16-year-olds and 60-year-olds. I just don’t see products like that today.”

Part of World Safari‘s allure was the star’s recklessness. He exposed himself to a level of danger that khaki’d contemporaries such as Malcolm Douglas and the Leyland Brothers—not to mention antecedents such as Steve Irwin—would never consider.

Aside from the narrow escapes from both aggressive gorillas and aggressive guerrillas, Alby could always be relied upon to do himself a claret-spilling injury or three. So much so that his injuries provided fodder for running jokes with stand-up comics, who made much of the ‘mangle’ word play well into the mid-1990s.

Another special element in the Mangel mix was humour—some of it slapstick, much at Mangels’ expense. As if to suggest he didn’t take himself too seriously and didn’t mind looking silly. For example, this exchange from World Safari:
Alby: “What sort of fish is this?”
Islander: “Saltwater fish.”
Alby: “Where do you catch them?”
Islander: “Out of the sea.”

Then there were the ladies. Accompanying Alby on his escapades were women most Australian men could only dream of during their long and lonely suburban nights. While Alby was known to don a loincloth, these beauties featured in both precarious situations and the highest of high-cut bikinis.

Perhaps the most famous of his female counterparts was Sale of the Century bombshell Judy Green, who later suffered severe head injuries in a car accident with Mangels in South America. Then there was the equally striking Michelle Ells, Lucinda Dunn and Tina Dalton.

There was no doubt about it; by the time World Safari II was released in 1984, Alby Mangels was the man Aussie blokes wanted to be and women wanted to do.

Alby looks back on his image as a Don Juan De Speedo with a degree of wryness. “To say that my relationship with these girls was strictly professional would be untrue, but it wasn’t like I was trawling for women. These films took four or five years to make, and like any other bloke, I had relationships in those periods.”

He also admits that having his cohorts “prancing about with not much on” was by no means a happy coincidence, considering that half of his intended audience were men.

World Safari II was such a massive hit that it outgrossed—on many levels—Ghostbusters on its Australian release. According to several accounts, it made Mangels wealthy enough to purchase a farm, a plane, a helicopter, a boat, and 80km of beachfront property on Eyre Peninsula, where he hoped to create a wildlife sanctuary.

The dizzying success of World Safari II was matched by the failure of its 1988 sequel. The formula just no longer worked, and despite an enormous marketing budget, Mangels lost the lot. It was at this point that his life began to resemble a country-and-western song. Hordes descended on Alby’s properties to buy a piece of the great man when he sold his assets—his ketch, Gretta Marie, was burnt and sunk; and his beloved dog Sam was shot.

When your trajectory is downward, there are usually a few resentful people who will gladly sink in the boot to help you on your way.

A cameraman who had not been paid after Mangels went bust told A Current Affair that in his quest for an action shot, Mangels threw his pooch from a moving vehicle, and that much of the ‘how-did-they-capture-that?’ dynamism of the World Safari franchise was staged. So comprehensive was the stitch-and-bitch segment that Mangels had women crossing streets to slap him.

Accepting that several storylines were massaged and incidents concocted, it is the accusations of animal cruelty that still sting to this day. “There’s just no way I would have done that to any animal,” Alby growls. “Let alone an animal I loved.

Besides, how could it be physically possible to throw a dog out of the back-seat window of a car while driving? The story just makes no sense, yet a lot of people believed it.” Remember: this from a man who once found a foal with a fly-blown hole in its neck in the outback, carried it all the way to the nearest farm, milked its mother by hand to bottle-feed the infant, then spent weeks nursing it back to health.

While flying over a flooded area of Western Australia, Mangels also spotted cattle and horses stranded on small islands created by the sudden deluge. With some already dead from starvation, he spent the next two days filling up a small borrowed aircraft with bales of hay and dropping it on the islands. In addition to this, Alby is a long-time patron of the Mountain Gorilla Survival Appeal.

This is also the man who, when his mate Piers Souter became a quadriplegic after falling from a jetty, created a wheelchair for him that won an Australian Design Award.

Penniless and disenchanted, Alby withdrew to the only home he had left: a caravan. Briefly contemplating a return to his bricklaying career, eventually he couldn’t deny his true nature and hit the road again with a camera in tow. Now a fairly low-key operator primarily supplying the American cable TV market, Mangels has
made more than 80 environmental documentaries.

Yet he still despairs for the future of our planet. “Yes, we are becoming more aware of humanity’s impact on everything from global warming to salinity,” he says. “But people just don’t realise how far gone the situation is. It’s not something that we need to tackle soon. Governments and individuals alike have to take action today or the wilderness areas I have spent my career filming simply won’t exist for people to experience anymore.”

Keeping a snake’s-belly profile following the collapse of his media empire, Alby went about his business in Australia and abroad, generating a spate of Elvis-like sightings which were lapped up by a public that still held a degree of fascination for him. Reports of Mangels travelling the west coast of South Africa in 1993 mingled with those of travellers seeing him scoffing a steak sandwich at the Port Wakefield Roadhouse on May 17, 1997.

When whispers of an unauthorised biography surfaced in 2007, Mangels decided that “enough crap” had been written about him, so he collaborated with Lynn Santer on the book Alby Mangels: Beyond World Safari (JoJo Publishing, RRP$34.95).

One gets the impression that he thought this would be the end of the fascination, and that he might be able to get on with a life of riding waves and producing small films in exotic locales. Never married, a black belt in tae kwan do and a two-time winner of the Australian Waterskiing Championships, Mangels is still the kind of man who many of us wish we could be; after being fêted and fucked over by the fickle creature that is fame, Alby radiates a sense of contentment. He’s obviously happy in who he is and what he does.

His opponent, Josh Shooter, is still in his street clothes—somewhat snug footy shorts and a singlet. He tugs on the singlet so frequently that it’s hard not to feel anxious when near him. Like a rubber band drawn to its limits, it seems plausible that Josh might snap at any moment.

“The only reason we don’t kick each other’s teeth in is because we want to do this five days a week,” says Shooter, the current Heavyweight Champion of local Victorian promotion New Age Wrestling (NAW). “It’s just all about business.”

NAW is just one of dozens of small wrestling promotions currently operating throughout Australia. It regularly stages shows at Melbourne community halls, RSL clubs and pubs. The average grappler can make around $100 per bout.

“A lot of guys understand that wrestling here is either a part-time or casual job, and they treat it as such,” says Mark Mercedes, co-promoter of NSW-based promotion IWA Pro-Wrestling. “But the guys who are more serious about it try to make money elsewhere.”

Mercedes is one of the few Australians in recent times to get anywhere near the big stages—and big money—of American wrestling. In the 1990s, he performed in front of tens of thousands of people on the same bills as US legends such as Hulk Hogan, Paul ‘Mr. Wonderful’ Orndorff and the Junkyard Dog. Mercedes tells us that timing is as vital as talent when it comes to finding fame in the USA, citing the career of Aussie wrestler Peter Stilsbury, aka Outback Jack, as an example.

“Back in the days of WCW [World Championship Wrestling] and Outback Jack, they were looking for very gimmicky wrestlers, and Outback Jack’s gimmick came with [the success of] Crocodile Dundee. It was the right place and the right time. When you’re trying to break overseas, unless you’re over there [in America], constantly in their face, it’s very easy to be forgotten.”

“WWE is not going to worry about going overseas and looking for talent when [it's] got so much happening in America,” says wrestling historian Barry York. “America’s population is more than 10 times ours, so it’s reasonable to think there is 10 times as many up-and-coming pro wrestlers there.

“And the Australian market isn’t that significant. If they had a guy who entered the ring with a slouch hat or a boomerang, it might make it a bit more interesting for an Australian audience, but they’re not going to stop watching if there’s no Australian in the WWE. So there’s no great economic incentive to recruit from the Australian talent pool, which must be very frustrating for locals.”

While the US is pro wrestling’s financial promised land, it’s not the only option for Aussie grapplers with international aspirations. New Japan Pro Wrestling, which is screened during primetime on Japan’s Asahi TV, is actually more popular with purists than the American product, mainly because it values athleticism over soap-opera acting skills.

Melbourne wrestler, Krackerjack, whose body looks like it’s been through a mincer thanks to the ultra-violent barbed-wire matches he’s been involved in, spent some time in Japan in 2005.

“Wrestling is a national pastime in Japan,” Krackerjack tells Penthouse. “It’s not as counter-cultural as it is in Australia. It’s been popular ever since the end of World War II, so [Japan] has its own legends of the business over there.

“They do shows that regularly draw 20,000 people and even the small independent shows I was working were getting 500 to 1000, and they were running those shows three or four times a week.”

Consequently, World Championship Wrestling Australia was established and shown on TV from 1964, taking wrestling to the mainstream. Ron Miller, who co-owned WCWA from 1976, says Channel Nine chose to drop wrestling from its schedule at the end of 1978, thanks in part to its interest in World Series Cricket.

This decision triggered local promotions to fold, and while some continued to stage events at small clubs in the 1980s, things were never the same again.

Back at the Maltese Cultural Centre, better known tonight as the ‘NAW Arena’, a colourful cast of oddballs make flamboyant entrances to the ring, accompanied by cheesy hard-rock theme music.

The two standouts tonight are Iron Horse Morrison, an Andre the Giant-type brute with the fluency of movement of a slasher-flick goon, and Mickey ‘Fantabulous’ Jackson, a showboating pretty boy who grabs a female audience member’s drink and erotically pours it all over himself as he climbs into the squared circle.

The hundred or so hardcore fans snap photos with everything from high-end SLRs to smartphones, and clearly enjoy themselves as they cheer on the heroes and heckle the villains. BIG Huss and Josh Shooter demonstrate athleticism and genuine technical skill befitting the main event, and the ebullient atmosphere of the crowd conveys that this evening has been a fun night out, and 15 bucks well spent.

While wrestling for the NAW won’t make these guys household names or wealthy superstars, they will keep competing for as long as they can, because while Australian wrestling may be down on the canvas, it’s not ready to tap out just yet…

She was dressed like a Latina model headed for a relaxing vacation. Her tight white pants and high heels made the young beauty look taller than her 5’9″. Flying nonstop, her destination was unremarkable—Cancun. Travelling alone and first class made Maria about the least suspicious passenger in the terminal. But she was on a mission.

For US$1000, she had agreed to accompany a suitcase to Mexico. “You won’t have to touch the bag, drop it off or pick it up. You just fly.” Those had been the simple instructions from her boyfriend, Ariel, also a model, as he described the business deal.

On her return to Buenos Aires, Maria was promised another $4000—a small fortune in economically ravaged Argentina, especially for a youngster facing stiff odds in the highly competitive fashion industry. She had allegedly flown a dry run a few weeks earlier, without incident.

In minutes, Maria’s world fell apart. Airport police pulled her aside and began questioning her about the dozens of one-kilo packets of cocaine neatly wrapped in a towel inside her suitcase. The stash was worth approximately $4 million, according to estimates from the United States’ Drug Enforcement Administration.

Maria cracked instantly, offering up an address in the chic Belgrano district of Buenos Aires. Argentine judge Marcelo Aguinsky ordered a raid that evening, and the police arrived to witness male and female models jumping off the second-storey balcony to escape.

Gustavo from Venezuela; Micaela from Argentina; and Ariel—Maria’s beau—who cracked his clavicle, pelvis and smacked his head in the mad scramble to evade the law.

At Pirovano Hospital, the models allegedly confessed that they had been sending a courier every day of the week—meaning that an avalanche of cocaine was on its way to Europe via Mexico. Where the coke came from and exactly where it ended up wasn’t their problem.

They had been tasked to come up with an entrepreneurial solution to transporting cocaine to Cancun. Their solution? Turn the normal concept of drug ‘mules’ on its arse.

This gang preferred to use ‘peacocks’, drug smugglers so hot and sexy that a border guard would be more likely to open a door for them than open their bags. The kind of women who instantly turn a man’s analytical brain to mush.

The gang’s leader was just such a female. A walking aphrodisiac of curves, attitude and cash, she was from Colombia and had an insider’s understanding of the cocaine industry, but no-one seemed to know her name.

Argentine detectives pressed her associates, but the beauty had covered her trail well. No-one could identify her. However, they all mentioned her passion for a white Pomeranian dog.

Police poured through airport records looking for a record of a passenger with a Pom. They hit the jackpot—on December 3, 2009, less than two weeks before Maria’s arrest, a Colombian woman named “Angie Sanselmente” (sic) had registered her dog and provided a hotel address.

Police stormed the room in question. They were too late—Sanclemente was gone. For the next four months, the once high-profile model—previously seen at beauty festivals in her homeland and in the social pages of Mexican magazines—went on the run.

Interpol issued an international warrant for her arrest but her lawyer stood firm, saying Angie needed to be granted the right to testify without going to prison pending trial.

Meanwhile, Angie hid out in a Buenos Aires youth hostel, dyed her hair blonde and protested her innocence via Facebook, revealing her worry of going to prison in Argentina for fear of being raped because she was so beautiful.

“That’s ridiculous, we have special prisons for suspects, she would never end up in a common prison,” said an Argentine police investigator using the alias ‘Alberto Ramses’. When asked about Angie’s role in the cocaine-smuggling operation, Ramses explained: “The type of drug smugglers has changed radically here in recent years.

We used to see humble, dark-skinned Peruvians and Bolivians, now it is eastern European women and glamorous figures”.

While it was clear that someone was behind the operation, Sanclemente was telling Facebook friends, “I’m very sad and hurt by the bad information. I don’t know how the press can destroy an innocent person… I don’t want to go to jail, I don’t deserve it. I am innocent.”

She was also in contact with friends in Barranquilla, the Colombian port city where she’d begun her modelling career, one of whom revealed in an interview, “I heard from Angie… Right now she’s shocked and scared she will get arrested. She’s also afraid for her life because this is a big drug problem and the bad guys could harm her.”

It was Angie’s combination of brains, beauty and bravura that she’d used, at the age of 20, to snare one of South America’s most competitive beauty competitions—Miss Cafe Colombia.

With four years’ of runway experience, she was known in Barranquilla as a hardworking journalism student who also sold auto parts and had been helping pay half of her family’s rent since she was only 16.

She had no known connection to the Colombian coke world then, but after being crowned Reina Nacional del Café (Queen of Coffee), she was embroiled in scandal for a different reason.

All contestants are required to be single, never married and a virgin. It turned out that Angie failed on all counts. Days after she was crowned, her ex-husband was outed, along with their marriage certificate and details of other former boyfriends.

It’s likely that Sanclemente’s involvement in the drug world began, unwittingly, when she started entering beauty pageants.

Reason being that men involved in the cocaine trade go these pageants to buy women or pay off/threaten judges so that their favourites win. As Karl Penhaul, CNN reporter in Colombia, notes, women being bought by traffickers at the contests is “outrageously common”.

“The world of [fashion] was one of the first areas that the capos took over,” confirms Alonso Salazar, Secretary of Government for Medellin in Colombia. “Many of the beauty queens who in the past rose to fame on dirty money are today renowned models.”

In his recent book, Checkmate, Colombian Police General (retired) Rosso Jose Serrano describes the narcos as having an obsession with “blonde and voluptuous” women.

He also outlines the rules for being a narco girlfriend: “They should be beauty queens, models or university students. After the capos seduce them, they buy their freedom.

In these circles, it is acceptable to have many women, and none of them should be jealous of the others… In the Mafia there are things that must be sacrificed for money or for love.”

Following her dethroning, Sanclemente moved to Mexico where she found the yin to her yang—a madly rich Mexican man assumed to be a cocaine clearing house linked to the feared Gulf Cartel.

Nicknamed ‘El Monstruo’ due to his supposed ugliness, The Monster allegedly provided Sanclemente with enough cash and gifts that she was a regular on the VIP circuit, travelling to Panama, Santiago, Los Angeles, Spain and throughout Latin America.

As for the woman herself, with most of her acquaintances too afraid to speak, the majority of what we know comes from her posts on Facebook, hi5 and other internet sites… Angie describes her passion for DJ Tiësto, Madonna, Latino pop star Juanes and Bryan Adams.

She admits a soft spot for Tobey Maguire of Spider-Man fame, and her favourite book is Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

While the press set about convicting her, one pal who rose to Angie’s defence was an old school friend, Luis Alfonso Passo, who stated that she was: “incapable of taking a gram of cocaine to their local nightclub on the corner”.

CNN‘s Penhaul disputed the notion of Sanclemente as ‘queen-pin’, suggesting, “Angie’s role would have been choosing the mules for the operation, not running the cartel.”

Furthermore, he claimed it was doubtful she had the contacts necessary to operate an ‘international trafficking gang’, given that she would have needed top Mexican cartel connections to be flying the drugs into Cancun in the first place.

It was estimated that paying off all of the right people at the airport—from those manning the check-in desk and scanner to the roaming security guards—would have cost a huge amount. Plus there was the cost of the cocaine and the payment for the bewitchingly attractive mule.

“I doubt that Angie was in charge of the operation,” confessed an Argentine police official. “This is a hard business, not really a place for women to be running the show. But might she have been in charge of recruiting the women and sending them to Cancun? Certainly.”

Until her criminal controversy, Sanclemente was a woman on the rise, garnering magazine covers in Mexico and leaving a trail of starstruck men in her wake.

Her plastic surgery to nose, butt and breasts, and her liposuctioned curves, ties to The Monster and, inevitably, to drugs are all too common in Colombia.

Her life story is similar to Sin Tetas No Hay Paraiso (“Without Tits there is No Paradise”), an enormously popular TV soap that chronicles stunning chicas, plastic surgeons and cocaine king-pins in plotlines reminiscent of Nip/Tuck meets The Godfather.

Unfortunately for Angie, she was arrested on May 26, while hiding out in a trendy suburb of Buenos Aires.

Her mother protested the former beauty queen’s innocence, telling reporters, “She is no drug trafficker, nor is she the queen of cocaine. There are bad intentions—a plot against her. She will prove her innocence.”

In September, Angie was transferred to a new prison after being assaulted and receiving death threats.

She was described by her mother as being suicidal. The degree of Sanclemente’s involvement in the clever courier system, if any, remains to be seen.

But for now, the drug lords will have to find another way to ship their illegal merchandise other than in the suitcase of a sexy and innocent-looking young woman.

Unfair competition

IN the past two years, Colombian investigators have been probing the links between drug bosses and second-tier beauty pageant Chica Med. Suspicions that king-pins were running the contest were confirmed when Yovanna Guzman, Miss Chica Med 2001, confessed all in an interview with Elenco magazine.

Guzman, a fair-haired fox, described being bought for a pile of luxuries that began with a Rolex, then progressed to cars and luxury apartments. For eight years, she was the secret lover of cocaine boss Wilber Varela.

Varela, a ruthless narco, was wanted for smuggling tonnes of cocaine into the US and for murdering his rivals. Guzman remembers him for delivering flowers but also warning shots for stepping out of line—like the time a gunman showed up at her apartment to shoot her in the leg. “He had two faces. I saw him so tender with the ones he loved, then you see the cartel killings. He always said he was the best of friends and the worst of enemies.”

Yovanna described to CNN the ‘golden cage’ in which she had lived—showered with luxuries, yet held as property by the cartel leader. “All those narcos care about is how big your breasts are. If they want you, the first thing they do is send you to their plastic surgeon to have silicone implants. But it’s them who decide how big you should be, not you.”

What drives you to continue taking nude photographs of women?
I have had a fascination with women for a long time, so I try to put my admiration for them into my art. And I love controlling that. It’s not like a wedding or a concert; I start from nothing and I get ‘this girl’ and ‘a place’, and she becomes my marionette. I pose her and make her do things that I want her to so I can come up with a cool, erotic photo that really captures a moment.

What do you look for in a model?
Her face—well, her eyes, actually, since they are the nipples of the face and, of course, nice feet. I actually look at their feet first, then pan up to the eyes. I don’t know what it is with feet. It’s my thing. When a woman goes to reach for something in bare feet, that’s the sexiest pose. But I love everything about a woman.  The dimples in the small of her back, the tiny blonde hairs on her thighs that light up when the sun hits them…I can go on and on.

How have you found working with the girls—their personalities—over the years?
I’ve been very fortunate; generally, the girls are fun to work with. I think I could count on one hand the number of girls who’ve given me a hard time. The only real stereotype concerns their lateness.

Where do you find beautiful nude models?
Finding the girls is easy. I get emails from agents daily. It’s the locations that I have a hard time finding. There’s a lot of scouting involved. I like [shooting] outside and in hotels—especially little crappy hotels. I don’t like studios.

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What makes a good nude photographer?
The more unique and creative you allow a photographer to be, the better it is for the magazine. I was doing crazy, off-the-wall stuff. The crazier it got, the more Bob liked it. It was the sexual revolution and Penthouse was the mother ship of that era. I’m like a miner; every girl has some precious stuff in her, and I have to find it.

Do you have a particular speciality?
Bob always asked for me when he had a special ‘sex scandal’ girl to shoot. I shot Gennifer Flowers at the beginning of Clinton’s presidency [Flowers allegedly had an affair with Clinton when he was Governor of Arkansas].

Shooting Jennifer was like dealing with Mae West, she had a very earthy sense of humour and a classic face. She said Clinton had a little dick, he was a lazy fuck, but he gave great head. It was interesting getting this first-hand information about our President.

What are your thoughts on the Internet?
The great bonus of the Internet is that you’re constantly in touch with your audience. It’s rewarding to see guys who are receptive about your work—to know it isn’t just a bunch of yobbos out there wanking.

A good photograph or video must be hot and it’s got to be sexy…but for him to look at it again and again, it has to have merit on another level. The guys who are coming up now are mainly shooting digital for the Internet.

They don’t know anything about film and what it does, film has become a dinosaur. The stuff I do, in that sense, may be a dying art.

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Who did you work for in the early days?
I was shooting for the Sun newspaper, Men Only and Penthouse. Playboy spotted one of my models, Lillian Muller, and flew us both to the US. Needless to say, Playboy didn’t want me; they wanted Lillian. They told me that shooting nudes and food were the hardest things in the business. “Oh dear,” I told them, “in that case, I’ll be forced to sell my pics to Penthouse.”

What’s your best professional attribute?
My greatest attribute is my dancing! I dance with the girls, make them laugh, get them to relax, and then work them to death. Cropping and framing of shots is important, and lighting and make-up is what makes it all happen.

Have you any advice for people who are looking to get into the industry?
My advice to wannabe photographers is: find the girl! We’re only as good as the girl!

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Why shoot nudes?
My first love was colour nature photography, but I was always very girl-crazy. It slowly became more obvious that I would start shooting girls.

What about Penthouse? Were you a part of the Guccione clique?
Yeah, I was totally a part of the clique. I was pretty young when I started doing stuff with Penthouse. I think that they were in a place where they needed some fresh, creative blood. Somebody called and to+ld me I should start submitting to them. I think it was really good timing. Bob needed somebody new and young. We had a great relationship.

What’s kept you shooting over the years?
Easy: I love photography. I love it like a painter loves paint. It’s the only way I truly express myself. When I’m shooting a girl and things are clicking, I think I’m expressing myself as a creative being as well as I can.

And I love the digital revolution; it’s liberated me, and allowed me to be more complete as an artist. When I do shoot on film, it feels like riding a donkey to work instead of driving a Mercedes.

What do you take pride in?

I take pride in quality. And treating my staff and models with dignity; 95 per cent of photographers today don’t do it for a love of photography or art. I don’t think it’s for a love of beautiful women, either. They do it for money. Money, money, money.

Have the models changed over the years?
I don’t think they’ve changed much. I think they’re more willing to do hardcore these days because the Internet has driven everything that way.

There are fewer good softcore girls now. Five, seven years ago, there was an amazing influx of Eastern European women who were mind-blowing in terms of beauty and attitude. But now the US government has laws that don’t allow them to come here.

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One day, the art director of Penthouse called me after one of their photographers got sick, and I took over as a favour. For 13 years, I travelled all over the world—any country, anything I wanted. All I had to do was get approval for the girl. It was the best years of my life.

What style of photographer are you?
I’ve put my life in danger many, many times in order to get the right picture, so in that way I’m dedicated. I’m an outdoors photographer. I want to rough it, and to rock it up more than usual.

There are two kinds of photographers: ones who take pictures and ones who make pictures. I’m a photographer who makes pictures. Everything I do is preconceived. I think about what I do. I plan it, I get the props, I drag them all over the world…in order to get the shot.

There needs to be a story—an element of danger, an element of humour, something exciting and original—instead of a girl sitting on a bed sticking her fingers in her pussy.

What do you think of magazines today?
I feel that if somebody would come out right now and change the look of the magazines, and grow some balls, people will go to the stands and buy them. There’s no question about it.

So what’s the problem, specifically?
A major problem is that [publishers] are scared of taking risks nowadays—taking chances on something unexpected—because they’re afraid of how it might affect circulation and sales.

I was chatting with Bob Guccione once, and he asked me to shoot a girl-girl pictorial. Originally, I said “no”, that I’d pass out from nerves, and Bob said: “Mark my words, in 10 years it won’t be something people bother talking about”. I learned that it’s a lot easier to shoot two girls than one!

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But as the chattering classes howled about what a disgrace it was, shock jocks grumbled about the neutering our iconic Aussie sense of humour. What changed so dramatically in such a short time?

From the 1808 Rum Rebellion until the football, meat pies, kangaroos and Holden cars days of the 1970s, Australia enjoyed national representation by a very distinctive figure. He—no sexism intended, but it was almost always a male figure—was coarse, disrespectful, simple and funny. We’ve seen him epitomised in characters from sport (Shane Warne), politics (Bob Hawke), entertainment (Rodney Rude) and business (Kerry Packer).

He’s the larrikin, and he’s been a staple of Australian cultural life for a long time. Until now… Around the time we stopped hearing the phrase ‘lucky country’, we also adopted other models of national character besides the stoic, sardonic rural type with little time for hierarchical authority and a unique language to share his disdain for it.

When globalisation took hold in the ’80s, we wanted to see (and sell) ourselves as latte-quaffing sophisticates, particularly in the city-based hubs of media and social commentary.

It generated a unique social and cultural tension—even though we envied the urbane cool of New York or London, we kept contempt for ‘wankers’ dear to our hearts. Like the curmudgeonly grandparent we had to lock away during parties, we loved the larrikin even though we were a bit ashamed of him.

Just watch some of the movies from the New Wave era—where the blokes are all ockers, chasing beer and roots, their long-suffering women safely distanced from such behaviour by their British accents.

The larrikin might have thrived for so long in the pre-media age because of our healthy suspicion of authority, perhaps the cultural memory of a time when it transported our ancestors to far-flung, unforgiving penal colonies for inconsequential crimes.

Now, it seems the inner urbanite in our national character is winning. The onslaught of political correctness has taken its toll, and like the rest of the world we’ve been overrun by the unstoppable hegemony of American culture, tailored to appeal as much to a Yackandandah sheep farmer as it does a Hezbollah footsoldier in the Gaza Strip.

But there’s a class division in Australia like there is in Britain or anywhere else, and that’s the one between city and country. Though our national mythology is largely based around the bush, most Australians live in coastal capitals where we’re more familiar with rap music and broadband internet than billy tea.

“The larrikin evolved as a cultural point of reference through early twentieth-century texts like CJ Dennis’s The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke,” says Anthony Lambert, an expert in cultural identity at Macquarie University. “But the characters actually lived and worked in the city.”

But still, we’ve dropped the larrikin from the cultural consciousness of city living, haven’t we? “We may not associate larrikins with the city,” Lambert adds, “but it was the cheeky, relatively unsophisticated characters that shaped the local version of reality show The Apprentice, even though it was set in the boardrooms of the Sydney CBD.

Many urban Australians would suggest this framing of identity is fairly outdated, but I think ‘larrikinism’ is alive and well in the country and city.”

More interesting is the proposition that the larrikin might merely be an illusion, or at best a local version of a universal figure. Most countries or racial groups only gain a toehold in history after considerable hardship, and it’s human nature to respond with humour.

The very word ‘larrikin’ isn’t even Australian—it’s an old Irish word with the same root as ‘skylarking’. “I’m sure there are some parallels, analogues of larrikins in most cultures,” says broadcaster and intellectual Phillip Adams.

“Bob Hawke rolled up to me at some do and told me the one about the two corpses on the Hume Highway—one was a politician and the other was a kangaroo. The difference was there were skid marks before the kangaroo.

“At the time I thought it was wonderful, a larrikin Prime Minister telling a good Australian joke. But when I checked I found the original joke was about Route 66 and the corpse of a skunk. So it’s an illusion to think it’s exclusively Australian. We just claim it as our own.”

Adams thinks you only have to look as far as another people who thrived out of suffering as the early Australians did. “There’s a great similarity between the heavy irony of Australian humour and Jewish humour,” he says.

“The battering rural Australians have had is a bit like the sense of Jewish irony having to survive almost infinite problems with Yahweh [God]. It produced a similar comic attitude to expect the worst.”

Adams also points out that a lot of the larrikin’s trappings were extreme—and fictitious—satirical exaggerations. As the producer of 1972′s The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, he remembers scriptwriter Barry Humphries’ motivations very well. “The film was an act of exorcism,” Adams recalls. “[Humphries] hated the ocker.”

The real division of larrikinism in Australia might not be between city and country, or rich and blue collar, but past versus future. Political sensitivity and a more sophisticated (and litigious) society have transformed the cultural landscape—maybe that’s why we love it when a subversive example of larrikin humour sneaks past the cultural gatekeepers, such as with The Chaser.

“The larrikin is never far away from the way Australians think about themselves,” says Macquarie’s Anthony Lambert. “You might also argue we’re so distant from such images—in the cities at least—we can laugh at them as lesser forms of ourselves.

“I have a feeling it’s a little of both. Most Australians want a foot in both camps, a claim to being ‘Aussie’ in a romantic, laid-back sense but not one that diminishes Australian-ness as something less than other developed countries.”

Of course, recent backlashes against larrikinism have proven what a different society we live in from when Hoges invited the world over for a shrimp on the barbie. When Tourism Australia—from advertising devised by Sydney agency M&C Saatchi—asked prospective visitors, “Where the bloody hell are you?”, the response ranged from a new cultural cringe at home to outrage overseas, the British government even banning the offending ads.

“Forget the crap you hear about why people visit Australia,” he says. “What they like most isn’t the Opera House or Uluru. They like Australians, and what they like about us is our character and irreverence, which was without doubt born out of the larrikin era.

“But let me remind you of another stereotype in our illustrious history—the wowser, sworn enemy of the larrikin. No fun. Serious. Probably religious. Anti everything. Well, they’re still lurking around and easily offended, it seems, by words like ‘bloody’.”

McFarlane adds that the renaissance of the wowser is manifesting itself in a ‘nanny state’ culture. “Frankly, we could run a profitable advertising agency just running TV commercials on what people can’t do, like gamble, drink too much or have unprotected sex—all of the stuff that the Australian larrikin once lived for.”

So maybe, even though we’ve stopped holding the larrikin up as a cultural figurehead for our values so visibly, we still love and try to adopt his irreverent attitudes to life. He was never much of a leader, anyway…

There are brave men and women around the world who face questions such as these every time they front up to work. Christopher Hart, the maestro behind big-budget Digital Playground productions Pirates and Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge, is one such courageous soul.

Hart is a qualified recording engineer, songwriter and producer with a background in mainstream movies, television shows and commercials. His first attempt at an adult soundtrack—Pirates—netted him an Adult Video News Award for Best Music in 2006.

“I didn’t look at it as composing for porn,” says Hart. “I saw it as scoring a film, and for that you need to know orchestration, arranging and the effects different instruments have.”

Hart tells us that both Pirates and Pirates II had completely original scores, composed specifically for each movie. “We recorded strings, flutes and a huge variety of other instruments. The Pirates movies have about 90 minutes of non-sex scenes in them, which is comparable to feature films. We wrote more than two hours of music for each film.” But this is not the industry standard.

“This is very rare in adult films,” explains Hart. “Usually, there’s no budget at all for a composer and they put in some music from a music library. That’s why porn music is often so bad. They say the music doesn’t matter, but the relationship between sound and image is important.”

Closer to home, award-winning songwriter, score-writer and television star, Glenn Dormand, is another musician who fell into composing soundtracks for adult films. “I was working a day job and a colleague mentioned he was going to make a porn film with some money in the budget for a score,” says Dormand.

“I’d just had a minor hit on the radio with a song Tex Perkins and I had written together (‘Fake That Emotion’), so I was the most famous musician he knew. I was in my mid-twenties and had just broken up with my girlfriend, which meant that I had one stipulation: I’d need to be on set to find true inspiration.”

Dormand, best known for his work as Machine Gun Fellatio’s Chit Chat Von Loopin Stab and as a presenter on musicMAX, worked on porn soundtracks and sets between the demise of his first band, Vrag, and the many joys of his second, MGF.

“We wrote tracks that would work over a long period of time, whether that was 10 minutes or 20, and then we’d arrange them to best highlight the images.

“Though the old ‘wah’ is an industry standard and surprisingly still works well, at the time we opted for drum and bass, which was very popular and effective. We’d build with string pads, then get crazy with the drums. We also used a lot of slide guitar.”

Aside from the artistic details, the process of score production is fairly straightforward. The music is written, or cut together, scene by scene while the film is in ‘locked picture’ mode—meaning it is edited the way it should eventually be sold.

“The tricky thing is, the director can do re-cuts and take out scenes after the film is locked,” Hart tells Penthouse. “That means the last couple of weeks before the deadline are crazy and consist of 18-hour days.

“For Pirates, we also worked with the movie before all the heavy effects work was put in, so in the beginning we would only see the actors and a green background! We would write certain themes—the hero theme, the villain theme, the love theme and so on. And then we would compose scene by scene, and put in variations of the themes. In Pirates II, they travel around the world, so we got to write a lot of ethnic music, too.”

However, Cherry2000, an AVN-nominated electropunk band from Sydney, experienced the process from the other end.
“Producers used to cruise MySpace looking for tracks—this was back around 2006. They’d pick a song off your page and say, ‘Can we use that?’ Money rarely changed hands, but there was usually a bit of quid pro quo going on.”

Songs from the band’s first two albums were cherry-picked, and their music ended up on a soundtrack that was nominated for an AVN Award.

“A porn producer named Jack the Zipper got in touch with us,” says Cherry2000 singer Rachael Chaos. “He was doing ‘alt-porn’ with an up-and-coming video company. He asked if we would like to give him some music to use in his films, and we said yes. It became an ongoing relationship, though we never got paid.”

It was during that little adventure that their quid pro quo relationship with Jack eroded to nothing. Before the tension, though, Cherry2000 had written the title track for Jack’s next film, King Cobra. The song didn’t make the cut, but the lyrics were printed on the DVD cover, with no credit given to the band.

“It was annoying, but we were still flattered,” says Andy Rantzen. “The thing is, there were times when we felt we were being taken for a ride, but there were also times we did feel valued. People like Kimberly Kane and Eon McKai had respect for the musicians they worked with.”

American porn star-turned-director Kimberly Kane, whose film Live In My Secrets won Best Music Soundtrack at the 2010 AVN Awards, acknowledges there is good and bad in the industry. “Most pornographers are in porn to make an easy buck,” she says, “so they’re all about quantity over quality—the soundtrack is the last thing they think about.

“But great audio lends an important depth to any movie. I know the best pornographers in the world and they care about every detail of their films. That’s what makes them the best.”

For Hart, it’s even simpler than that, “You don’t put on crappy music when you want to seduce someone, do you? You put on smooth jazz, sexy R&B or hard rock. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and a lot of directors seem to forget that.”