Tales of Times Square: Expanded Edition by Josh Alan Friedman

$15,000 in quarters one afternoon from Hodas. During the first two months of 1969, eighty-five percent of the quarters shipped to Chemical’s main branch, according to a vice-prez, were brought in from Hodas’ peeps.
    By 1970, four hundred film peep machines were scattered about New York City, according to Senator Everett Dirksen’s alarming anti-smut exposé in the Reader’s Digest . The Organized Crime Control Bureau estimated more than a thousand by 1972. They were in dark backrooms of porn bookstores, which reeked of urine and old orgasms, shown by nickelodeon or projected in curtained-off booths. Viewing time in the good old days was two minutes for a quarter; inflation would drop this to thirty seconds in just a dozen years.
    Martin Hodas, by 1970, owned two Lincoln Continentals, a swimming pool, and a forty-foot cabin cruiser, and raised a large family on Long Island. He commuted to his office, East Coast Cinematics at 113 West 42nd, listed in the phone book, unlike other porn store bosses who still ran business from backrooms of Little Italy social clubs at that time. According to a police raid of Hodas’ office in January 1972, the Poppa of the Peeps was taking in twenty grand a week. He served a year in the slam for income-tax evasion, then returned to the Square, where his stores began to pale next to the newer ones.
    Peeps became the meat-and-potatoes attraction, as common to Times Square as slot machines are to Las Vegas. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Times Square is the boundless variety of sexual nightmares and sweet dreams depicted in thousands of ten-minute loops. Loops were the tough, heartless training ground for the first generation of porn stars, a fifteen-year phenomenon made obsolete by video. This was pornography’s strongest medium, in which one could pick his favorite female creature, crystallized into a perfect 8mm, ten-minute rhapsody, and pop one’s cookies. After a preview in the booth, a washed-out color reel could be obtained up front for $18.
    Some of the first, true to cliché, were ground out by hardened criminals in grungy basements on 42nd Street, with syphilitic junkies fucking for a $50 fix. Before professionals entered the field, any moron could pose behind camera as a director, for his personal perversions. Bobby Surretsky, a short, fat con man of many crimes and aliases, pushed gay hardcore into his newly acquired Midtown Books in 1967, at 138 West 42nd. He filmed his own primitive loops across the street, much of it S&M and kiddie porn. By 1969, he was moving 2,500 reels for ten grand each week. The pimp who supplied little boys for his films turned him in to the FBI, who discovered Surretsky had recently cashed $400,000 in bogus police paychecks. Surretsky turned informer, served two years in jail on a murder conspiracy, and was last reported to be in the coin business.
    There were good pornographers and bad pornographers, same as in any field. Toby Ross, one of the early pros who was beloved by some of his actors, Was the only black director in porn. Having made hundreds of flicks by the mid-1970s, he stated his own strategy of directing to Marc Stevens: “You can be used... but not misused.”
    The earliest loops—the first pornos produced by organized companies with ongoing series—went by the brand names of Kiss, Pretty Girl, Color Climax, and Lasse Braun (from Europe). Stars of Sex presented Tina Russell, a reigning loop queen of the early seventies, while the Collection series introduced Candy Samples. Young John Holmes, out of rural Ohio in the early 1970s, looked like a monkey, with a lantern jaw and greasy crewcut—he began his career in endless loops for Playmate, Kama Sutra, and Limited Edition. The Diamond Collection was the raunchiest of the straight loops, each ending with an ugly female specimen blubbering under a harsh facial come shot. Club International (not the mag) tapped even more misogynous territory, like “Maternity Ward Sex,” featuring