Lockdown
The Windsor Palms Care facility in Artesia, California, is a sandy-colored, low-slung building with a peaked roof in front, almost like an old Googie-style restaurant. It sits, fairly anonymous, on a broad, well-kept street lined with palm trees as its name implies. I arrive twenty minutes late on a swelteringly hot Tuesday morning in July after struggling through traffic. I’m here to talk with one of Windsor Care’s more colorful and notorious patients: Alfred “Al” Beardsley. His name may not be familiar to most people, but his place in the annals of modern American criminal history is.
“You know this is a lockdown facility?” my partner Jeff says as I meet him outside. “Apparently there are dangerous or violent patients inside—they can’t just walk in and out.” The point is underscored by a red sign at the door that bluntly warns: “Please Don’t Give Out Cigarettes or Lighters Because We Don’t Want Our Residents To Start Any Fires.” As I sign for a guest badge at the door, the female clerk there jokes with us flirtatiously. When I ask if it’s okay to bring in a case of Coke for the man we’re visiting, she smiles, “Oh that’s fine.” A beat later Jeff adds, “I’m assuming it’s that kind of Coke; maybe he wanted the other kind,” which gets a laugh out of her. I’m guessing she doesn’t get too many working the front desk here.
There are elderly patients wandering the halls in a semi-daze as we wind our way through the bland, antiseptic corridors. Jeff knocks at the door of Al’s room and calls out his name; he’s dozing in bed in a semiprivate room. “Oh hi,” he says as Jeff introduces us. “Did you try to come by yesterday?” he asks, a bit confused. Of all the people we spoke to for this book, Al Beardsley—projectionist, convicted film pirate, and (much later) sports memorabilia dealer caught up in one of the most famous criminal cases of the past quarter century—evoked by far the strongest reaction. One man, first assistant cameraman Brian LeGrady, nearly exploded in an apoplectic fit at his name: “That guy almost single-handedly destroyed my love for film collecting and my marriage!” Projectionist and collector Mike Schleiger of the Egyptian Theatre rolled his eyes when I brought up Al: “If he walked into a booth, you did not want to take your eyes off of him. Because when he walked out you’d be missing something.” Search his name online and you’ll find articles referring to him as “a delusional menace” who “once heard voices telling him to overthrow the mayor of Burbank, California.”31 I’d even been warned not to give out my phone number or personal details to him.
In person, lying in a hospital gown, Al is a far cry from the image others had painted of him: he’s tall and gaunt and speaks slowly; his right hand is paralyzed and hidden up to the middle forearm under a white bedsheet, and his chin and his face above his upper lip are moist and sweaty. His thick, bushy, red-gray eyebrows are one of his most distinctive features: they look like chalkboard erasers somebody has attached to his forehead. By his own account Al was born in 1961 in Albany, New York. He grew up firmly middle class. His father was a piano restorer; his mother a homemaker, in the parlance of the day. He credits his grandfather Alfred Antoinette with starting his obsession for the movies: “My grandfather was the head of the projectionists union in New York, used to let me go to work with him. I’d sit in the booth and watch him do his thing. I said, ‘This is what I’m going to do—I don’t care if there’s no money, I want to do it.’ My grandfather implored me not to do it. It’s something I would have liked to have done the whole rest of my life, actually. It was just fun to run a movie. Do the curtain. Do the sound call. Take care of the equipment. Do the changeovers. Steal the print on your way home.” He cracks a big smile at this last comment: Al is obviously aware of his notorious rep and even asks several times during our interviews how he’ll be portrayed in the book. “As fairly as possible,” I respond, which seems to satisfy him.
I can’t help asking Al about the injuries that brought him to Windsor Palms. He replies that he was the victim of a hit-and-run in Santa Ana: a car jumped the curb and struck him, leaving him in the bushes like “a piece of trash or a transient.” When I ask if the police found the driver, Al responds somewhat mysteriously that he knows who did it, but he’s not pursuing the perpetrator. I push him further, and he finally mouths something that seems to be the name Bob. Jeff and I exchange looks. “Bob? Bob who?” Jeff asks. Al shakes his head: “No. With the ‘M.’” We finally understand what he means—it’s the mob.
After picking up the projection bug from his grandfather in his early teens, Al worked at a string of local Albany-area theaters, including the Turnpike Drive-In, the Latham Drive-In, and even the X-rated Cinema Art. After high school he moved to the West Coast with union card in hand and wound up at the Topanga in Woodland Hills, the Bruin and the Odeon in Westwood Village, and others. “I had an obsession with Clint Eastwood,” he says. “I grew up with Eastwood and James Bond and Burt Reynolds. Was never a big Charles Bronson fan. I liked that era. I look at all these people now, and I could be standing right next to them and not know who they are. Back when movie stars were movie stars.” It was his appreciation of celebrities that led to a chance encounter that would have lasting consequences. While projecting at the Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills, he spotted football legend and actor O. J. Simpson and a date waiting in line for a screening of The Gods Must Be Crazy. “He was wearing this beautiful blue business suit, just knock your socks off,” Al recalls today. “It was O. J. Simpson in his prime.” Even now, in his frail voice, he sounds a bit smitten by Simpson’s charisma. He waved Simpson and his date into the theater for free. After this kind gesture, the two men became friends. “Not best friends, but friends,” Al points out, and they would occasionally see each other in Westwood Village, where Al would let Simpson in for free.32
In 1986 Al was hired by comedian Redd Foxx to run the screening room in a building Foxx owned. A year later he leased his own theater from musician Kenny Rogers, dubbing it the Sunset Screening Room, and began running it as a high-end private facility for directors and studio executives to watch dailies. Around the same time, Al made his first contacts in the shadowy world of film collectors through one of the best-known dealers at the time, Emil Varga. Varga, who was originally based in Detroit and later Arizona, seemed to have an almost magical network of suppliers across the country who kept him stocked with rare 35mm and 70mm prints; a number of former collectors Jeff and I spoke with referred to him with obvious affection and envy. Radio deejay Jim Zippo (who adopted his last name from a rubber “Zippo the Chimp” mask he used to wear screening Planet of the Apes in his teens at a theater in Lake Arrowhead) once drove out to visit Varga at his home in Sun City outside of Phoenix. He remembers the dealer as something of an “old-timer,” with a comfortably middle-class house with elegant furniture. But the garage was literally stuffed to the ceiling with massive 70mm prints of Circus World, The Alamo, and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which he often ran at home: “He got these Japanese 70mm machines, and they sounded like machine guns,” Zippo says. “It was just blowing my mind.” Al shares the same fondness for Varga, whom he describes as an elderly, frail man in blue overalls, who “liked to make the sale. Lived the good life. Had a lot of friends. Loved film. I went to his funeral—they actually buried him with a reel of film.”
Through Varga, Al met another key operator in the underground print market: Gunther Jung at Pix Fix film rejuvenation lab. Jung, whom we spoke with separately, was born in Germany in 1929 and immigrated to the United States in 1938, at the brink of WWII. His family settled in the Bronx, where his father worked as a steel engraver. After two years of college, Jung left to work for a company called Filmtreat that did chemical scratch removal on used prints. He moved to the West Coast in the 1960s and started his own operation; when I asked who came up with the name, Jung (who speaks in terse, one- or two-sentence answers) shot back: “I was sitting at a bar one day having my usual beer, and I thought, ‘What’s a good name for a company? We fix pics—so ‘Pix Fix.’” When I spoke with him, Jung flatly denied any involvement with film dealers or collectors. But Al insists that Emil Varga sent him to Pix Fix to repair a print of Rain Man that Al had bought. “I walked into the [Pix Fix] office, sat my ass down on the couch like I was somebody, and I said, ‘I’m here to exchange this reel, it isn’t any good. I got it from Emil.’ Gunther, like Don Corleone, told me, ‘I don’t give a fuck who Emil or you are. Tell Emil to stick that reel up his ass, and get outta my office.’ My face was flush. I said, ‘Holy shit, this guy is hot.’ You know how Gunther was. Tough guy New Yorker.” Al remembers that it took a few weeks to gain Jung’s trust: “The first print I bought from him was a mint LPP print of The Wall. I remember walking away to put it in the trunk of the car, and he says, ‘Hey! I’ve got ears all over town.’ ‘What’s that supposed to mean, a threat?’ ‘No, but I’ve got ears all over town.’” According to Al, he began working with Jung, getting a steady supply of rare prints through him. (Several other collectors we spoke with confirmed that Pix Fix was a well-known print source.) These days there’s apparently no contact between the two men. When I mention Al’s name to Jung, he responds: “Who, Beardsley? I don’t know too much about him. I just know he was bad news.” When Jeff presses him for details, Jung evades the question: “I can’t remember exactly, but I know he was a Bad News Bear.” For his part, Al still seems to have a grudging affection for Jung. “He’d think nothing of threatening you or busting your windshield. But you couldn’t help but like him,” he adds, mimicking Jung’s distinctive Bronx accent.
With his own screening room and access to high-end clients with brand-new movies, along with a network of contacts gained through Varga, Al began working as a dealer himself. As opposed to many of the former dealers we talked to who are understandably circumspect about their black-market activities, Al is open and unapologetic these days talking about his inventive scams. One particularly brazen operation involved selling prints back to the very studio that owned them: “The deal was, we were both broke at Christmastime. Gunther was behind on the mortgage. He was at eviction proceedings. I just came up with a brainstorm of an idea: We had probably a couple hundred prints of Terminator 2. A couple hundred prints of Air America, all these old Carolco prints. I said, ‘Gunther, if I can sell these prints back to Carolco, then we’ll turn around and demand the salvage rights and sell the rights to Jeff, and he’ll take care of it.’ Gunther said, ‘It’ll never happen. They’ll never go for it …’ I think we made $10,000, $12,000.” An even more outrageous act of larceny involved a rare and expensive 70mm print of Lawrence of Arabia. According to Al, he tried to convince Jung, who was in charge of rejuvenating the print after a run at the Fairfax Theater, to let him have it, but in this case Jung refused, saying there was too much heat from the studio. Al was in a bind, though, having already sold the print to a collector. So he hired a moving van and sent it to the Fairfax, who turned the print over thinking it was the studio delivery service. He quickly overnighted the print to the collector before anyone knew it was gone. Say what you will, but it takes some serious cojones to pull off a con like that. Henry Gondorff in The Sting would be proud.
For a while in the late 1980s, business was good, possibly too good, because Al’s growing reputation and brazenness brought him to the attention of a growing circle of collectors. One of them would ignite a literal sheriff’s department sting operation and a highly public, decade-long feud between the two men.
According to Al, he met fellow collector Craig Call sometime around 1988 or 1989: “I was running a film for Charlie Sheen at my screening room, and Craig just showed up and introduced himself. He had the gift of gab and sounded believable.” Call, who spoke with us separately, is a teacher in his mid-sixties now, with a neatly shaved head; he has the athletic build of a lifelong dancer and choreographer, and also a kind of manic energy that erupts in occasional bursts and physical leaps. When I go to interview him, he insists on meeting me outside his Hollywood apartment and leading me into the back courtyard. “You’d never find it on your own,” he says, pointing to the unmarked door to his apartment that’s hidden next to the laundry room. “It looks like this is the entry to a storage room. Nobody knows I’m here,” he confides. It’s the kind of paranoia I’ve come to recognize in many older film collectors, who still live with the anxiety that someone will come knocking on their door one day.
Call was born in the early 1950s into a family with a long Mormon lineage, and grew up in New Mexico and Maryland. According to Call, the founder of the Mormon Church, Joseph Smith, had a vision that his great-great-grandfather Anson Call would “go across the plains and build a home for the saints in the west. My ancestors were part of that whole thrust of Mormons into Utah and California and even Mexico: these were American Mormons who built colonies in Mexico that are still there today. My ancestors had run-ins with Pancho Villa.” Craig fell in love with movies at an early age and started, like many of his peers, collecting two-hundred-foot Castle Films 8mm reductions of classic Universal horror titles like Creature from the Black Lagoon, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and Bride of Frankenstein. For him, love of movies trumped everything else—he remembers his eagerness in high school to get his hands on a new 16mm print from a distributor in England: “I was on the gymnastic team; I was the captain of the team. I remember vaulting over the horse and thinking ‘The 7th Voyage of Sinbad came in today—I can’t wait to get home. It’s waiting for me, it’s right there!’”
It was after college, while working as curator of the Brigham Young University film archives, where he worked on the Merian C. Cooper Collection, that his twin loves, movies and the Mormon Church, collided. Call was privately screening prints from his collection for friends and fellow students; one was The Sound of Music, which happened to be distributed by a division of the church, Deseret Books, under contract from Films Inc. A student reported him to Deseret, which demanded he surrender his print. Even today Call is obviously still deeply wounded by the incident: “I went to my bishop. I said, ‘I’m not breaking the law.’ At the same time I was this really righteous kid and wanted to do the right thing. ‘This print cost me a lot of money, are you going to pay me back for it?’ The bishop said, ‘Oh no, we just want you to give it up, along with all your other prints.’” Call refused to surrender his collection, and the incident mushroomed. Soon Call was contacted by the FBI, which had apparently been notified by Deseret Books. Call still refused to hand over his films. Thinking everything had settled down, he went on tour as choreographer of a Mormon-themed musical, when he got a frantic phone call from his mother: “She’s crying and terrified because the FBI called her and said upon my arrival back in Maryland, I was going to be handcuffed, arrested, and put in prison for twenty years for the felonies that I’d committed with regards to handling copyrighted motion picture film. My mother was beside herself. We’re this really Mormon family that never did anything to break the law.” With the help of an attorney in Kansas well versed in film copyright law, Call eventually managed to get the FBI to drop the case, but the incident ruptured his faith in his own church. It’s easy to see why he still lives behind an unmarked door.
Shortly after meeting Al in the late 1980s, Call began getting a stream of just-released, and even not-yet-released titles, like Home Alone and Rocky V, from him. Today it’s hard to imagine the John Avildsen–directed Rocky V being the cause of so much trouble, but this is the one that did it. According to Call, in 1990 Al agreed to sell him a 35mm print of Rocky V, which had yet to hit theaters, but loaned it first for a private screening at the home of a projectionist named Ned Fairbairn, letting it be known that the print belonged to Call. (When I asked Al separately for confirmation, he couldn’t recall the incident but confirmed he’d sold a print of Rocky V.) At the private screening was a man who happened to work for the film’s distributor, MGM/UA, and who was understandably upset that someone owned a print of their brand-new movie, even a turkey like Rocky V.
According to Call, he was incensed that Al had attached his name to the illegal print: “I was so angry at Al. I said ‘Why would you do that?! Why would you tell people?! This is a new film, you can’t do that!’ Al just laughed and laughed.” Within a week Call was contacted by a film rejuvenator named Tom Ogburn, saying that MGM/UA wanted to see Call’s print. Ogburn, now deceased, was another fascinating character in the Hollywood collector and dealer underworld. I knew him briefly in the early 1990s when he did print inspection for the American Cinematheque, where I worked as a programmer, and remember him as a loud-voiced, gregarious man who was always in need of money. According to Al, Ogburn had a bad gambling habit: “Every day at my screening room he would call me up: ‘How ya doing? Got anything hot over there for the weekend?’—meaning movies that hadn’t come out yet. I trusted Tom—I think everybody did who encountered him—but he was in bad shape financially.” Ogburn’s claim to fame was a chemical process he’d invented called Tomacote, that protected prints from scratches and extended their life; many collectors we spoke with consider it something of a magic elixir for film. He was even hired by Universal Pictures to frantically Tomacote several hundred release prints of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List after the black-and-white prints began burning under the glare of too-powerful modern projectors. My writing partner Jeff, who knew him well, laughingly recalls that Ogburn was less than safety conscious: “[He] would smoke when he was using Tomacote: it was an oil-based film cleaner, and he’s basically pouring gasoline on film while he’s smoking!”
Call reluctantly surrendered his illegal print of Rocky V (which in true collector fashion he’d already sold to someone else). The next day he received a call from Ogburn, who said the studio wanted to talk with him, but when Ogburn and the MGM/UA employee came to pick him up, they instead drove him to a Culver City restaurant to meet with a group of men headed by Tom Sheil of the MPAA. After wining and dining Call, Sheil proceeded to say, “We’ve been watching Al [Beardsley] for a long time. We have photos of him taking prints out of theaters that are never returned. We know he’s stealing from theaters, but we know he has other sources at film labs, and we want to know what they are.” When Call said he was uncomfortable with that, Sheil responded, “You’re going to be in a lot of trouble if you don’t cooperate.” After extracting promises that he could keep his film collection and that he would not be forced to wear a wire or be contacted by the FBI (with whom he’d already had several painful encounters), Call reluctantly agreed to help set up Al Beardsley in a sting operation masterminded by the MPAA. Given his past history of harassment by the law and even a department of his own church, it’s easy to understand Call’s actions, even if it meant betraying a privileged source in the underground network of film collectors and dealers, who depended in many ways on mutual secrecy and anonymity.
“At the time I was working at a chiropractic therapist office in Toluca Lake,” Call recounts. “What happened was, the next thing I knew I was called at work by the FBI. They said, ‘We’re calling for Tom Sheil, we want to wire you.’ I said, ‘Excuse me??’” After Call steadfastly refused to wear a wire, the FBI dropped out of the case, and the MPAA went to the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, which agreed to handle the operation. On the day of the sting, the sheriff’s department gave Call $1,500 in marked bills to pay Al for 35mm prints of Predator 2, Home Alone, and Rocky V. (In retrospect, it’s almost a public service that Beardsley and Call were taking beauties like these out of circulation.) Call describes the day of the arrest: “I met Al at his screening room on Sunset Boulevard where he had everything. I tried to talk him out of it one more time—I wanted him to go free. But he refused. He wanted his money and wanted it now. He was helping me carry the film out to my car on the street. The sheriffs surrounded us and handcuffed us and put us in separate cars. I was shaking and scared; I’d never done anything like that in my whole life. I remember Al saying, ‘You fucker! You turned us in!’ I said, ‘Al, I did not—it was your big mouth that got us in trouble!’ It was that kind of exchange as we were being put into the cars.”
According to Al, he was caught unaware by the highly publicized arrest on December 3, 1990, which was widely trumpeted as showing the MPAA getting tough on film pirates once again. The impact on his business running the Sunset Screening Room was almost immediate: “I got such a reputation from that film deal that I was involved in with Craig Call. All the management was scared that I’d steal their prints. Hurt my ability to work in the end.” To this day, he still blames Call and Ogburn—fellow members of the underground fraternity of film collectors and dealers—and not the MPAA, for setting him up. If anyone thought the arrest spelled the end of it, though, they apparently didn’t know Al Beardsley.
Business cards soon started circulating in the collector world marked with the MPAA’s logo and stamped “Craig Call: Special Agent, Sting Operation.” When I ask Al if he had anything to do with printing the cards, he flatly denies it, although he does say, “MPAA was considering suing me for using their copyright-infringed business card logos,” which sounds like a left-handed admission of guilt. Much more public was a fairly jaw-dropping letter that Al sent out to an undisclosed number of film collectors, dated December 17, 1990, two weeks after the sting, which reads in part:
Dear Fellow Film Collectors,
I am sending you this letter as a courtesy, I have recently been set up by a “Man” named Craig Call. Mr. Call won my confidence about 6 months ago when He mysteriously moved to Los Angeles from Utah.
Mr. Call set me up in a “Sting Operation” with the M.P.A.A. in order to receive a $15,000 reward.
If you have any pending film deals with Call I would strongly suggest you cancel them to protect yourself and your family from arrest and prosecution.
To date I have lost a total of 63 prints and my legal expenses are in the thousands.
Due to pending litigation I will not go into the particulars of My case until I have been cleared of all charges, but I am enclosing a copy of a Legal Document that Call recently filed against Me (for His own protection). I will also keep all collectors updated on this case….
Please feel free to pass this letter on to other Film Collector’s you may know.
Yours Truly,
Alfred Beardsley
Cc: The Big Reel
Somewhat astoundingly, Beardsley included with this missive a Xerox of an injunction filed with the California Superior Court preventing him from harassing Call. How this would inspire “fellow film collectors” to take Beardsley’s side against Call is anybody’s guess. In the injunction prohibiting harassment, Call made the following claims:
Since that time [of the arrest] Defendant has made harassing phone calls at my home and place of business. He and “a friend” have impersonated Sheriff’s Deputies in an effort to enter my home for theft and vandalism purposes…. The Defendant and his “friend” have called my personal friends and threatened to have them arrested (again impersonating Sheriff Officials) … and recently made threats against my life and well being in front of witnesses to the extent that I had to be warned by the MPAA to not even return to my own Apt. for a few days.33
The rivalry between the two men didn’t end there, though. On August 9, 1999, the trade paper The Hollywood Reporter ran an unusual article headlined “‘Lion King’ print return bares a saga of revenge.” In a twist worthy of Shakespeare, Call was attempting to sell a print of the Disney animated film The Lion King for one thousand dollars in the collector magazine The Big Reel, when the MPAA was tipped off by none other than Al Beardsley, who spotted the ad and saw his chance for some payback. He wrote a suitably outraged letter to the MPAA demanding they seize the print and prosecute Call. According to the Reporter, Call had already been tipped off that he’d been ratted out to the MPAA and voluntarily offered to surrender the print to them, which he claimed was “a junked print from England that was very, very worn” and that, quite magnanimously, he was “trying to sell […] for a friend who need[ed] the money to help pay for a heart transplant operation.” Call couldn’t help sniping that there were dozens of other Disney films being advertised for sale in the same issue of The Big Reel and that he felt “singled out.”
Even the deals-and-dollars-obsessed Reporter couldn’t help being fascinated by the decade-long feud between the two film dealers and collectors. Al was ultimately fined more than $300,000 in the 1990 case and ordered to pay $200,000 in attorney’s fees and sentenced to four years’ probation but went bankrupt before he could pay the massive fines and fees. “Craig, for his own selfish reasons, chose to destroy my life,” Al vented to the Reporter in 1999. “Now, he has the audacity to try to publicly sell The Lion King. If he thought I was going to stand by and allow him to do it without a protest to the MPAA, he’s sadly mistaken.”
Al continued to have his own skirmishes with the law: around the same time, the October 30, 1999, edition of the Burbank Leader reported that Al had announced plans to run for the local city council—just as he was being placed in custody by two Burbank police officers. He’d gotten into an argument with the officers outside a fast-food restaurant, because his car stereo was too loud, and while they were questioning him, they discovered an outstanding 1994 warrant related to a DUI and driving with a suspended license. During the arrest Al told the police that he was employed by O. J. Simpson; and in a subsequent interview with the Leader, he claimed that he was “a personal assistant to Simpson and managed his memorabilia,” and that he suspected “his association with Simpson played a role in the way he says officers treated him.” And how did the cops suspect Simpson was his boss? Easy: the star’s Hall of Fame football was sitting in the front seat of Al’s car. Ironically, while the officers were searching the vehicle, they also discovered a film canister containing one of Simpson’s movies (although it’s not clear which of O. J.’s movie masterpieces it was: Capricorn One? The Cassandra Crossing?), and a seriously miffed Al noted that they “tossed it all over the place, treating it with no respect, like it was nothing.” When I press Al further about the Burbank incident, he says it was all taken out of context. I ask if he can remember which of O. J.’s films was in the car, and he insists they were still photos, not a 35mm print, which may in fact be the case, because it was still photographs that led in part to the ultimate, fateful encounter between the two men that had started years before at a screening of The Gods Must Be Crazy.
By the early 2000s Al had long given up the Sunset Screening Room and working as a film dealer in a market that was quickly vanishing; he now was buying and selling sports memorabilia, apparently trading in part on his association and friendship with O. J. Simpson. His troubles with the law multiplied: in 2000 he was committed to six months in a psychiatric facility after he violently rammed his car into a vehicle driven by journalist Will Rogers, who’d written articles on Al that he disagreed with, to put it mildly.34 After his release Al was charged with stalking a Riverside woman and, in a separate incident, threatening to kill a police officer after getting a citation for urinating in public, for which he was placed on probation. According to Al, in 2007 he was contacted by another memorabilia dealer he’d known for over twenty years, Bruce Fromong, who offered him a list of items for sale. Al wasn’t interested in buying them himself but offered to help Fromong sell them for a commission. Separately, Al had been contacted by a man in the Bay Area who legally purchased abandoned storage units. The Bay Area man had recently made a fairly remarkable find—he bought an anonymous storage unit that turned out to belong to O. J. Simpson’s mother and contained, according to Al, “thousands of childhood and growing-up photos of O. J. Simpson as an infant, up until his football days and of all of his siblings and children, wives, father, aunts, uncles.” Al agreed to help him sell these items as well, again for commission.
Al was soon contacted by a man named Thomas Riccio, who’s been described as “an ex-con whose rap sheet includes at least four separate felony convictions, including arson, prison escape, and stolen property charges,” according to the website The Smoking Gun.35 According to Al, Riccio “took it on his own to call O. J. and tell him that I had his family photos, football awards, trophies, all of this list. O. J. asked him to ask me if I would give him some samples. I took pictures of the items and photos and faxed them to Riccio, who faxed them to Simpson.” Simpson apparently promised to give Riccio two hundred signed copies of his autobiography to sell if he assisted in getting the memorabilia and family photos back from Al and Bruce Fromong.
On September 13, 2007, Al and Fromong were lured to the Palace Station Hotel in Las Vegas under false pretenses: “Riccio said his client was a wealthy client from the software business and works, I believe, out of Vegas. We’d do the deal in Vegas. I agreed. Bruce agreed. Little did we know that O. J. had to be in Vegas at that same time for a wedding and was planning on wrapping up two pieces of business at the same time.” After bringing the memorabilia and photos to Riccio’s hotel room, he and Al went to the bar. “I had a drink and, I believe, a hamburger that Riccio paid for. He feeds you before he screws you,” Al says dryly. Returning to the room, they waited with Fromong for the fictitious millionaire buyer to arrive. Instead, his onetime friend, the celebrity he used to sneak into movies for free back in Westwood Village, O. J. Simpson arrived with several companions.
“They were let in by Riccio. They all charged through the door,” Al recalls. “There was a lot of yelling and threats. I went into shock mode. This happened quick, and I wanted to figure out what was going on. I didn’t know if they were cops or crooks. They were all well dressed.” I ask if he knew something was amiss when he spotted Simpson, and Al nods. “He started yelling at me. Told me he trusted me and was surprised to see me there. Thought I was a straight shooter, how could I be involved in having his shit there?” According to Al, two of the men were armed with guns. They frisked him and Fromong, disabled the phone lines, and demanded their cell phones; Fromong surrendered his, but Al refused. The entire encounter was over in about seven minutes. Bizarrely, it later came to light that Riccio recorded the encounter on audiotape in an attempt to get evidence that Al and Fromong were illegally selling the memorabilia; on the tape Simpson shouts out, “Don’t let nobody out of this room. Motherfucker, you think you can steal my shit and sell it?”
“It was quick,” Al remembers of the infamous incident. “They packed up everything in pillow cases and boxes. And O. J. was standing there like the town crier with his litany of bullshit, until somebody came up and whispered in his ear, ‘It’s time to go.’” After Riccio chased Simpson and the men into the parking lot to recover some of his own items they’d mistakenly seized, he returned, and “he said O. J. told him to tell me that if I told the National Enquirer about it he’s gonna sue me. I said, ‘Fuck the National Enquirer. I’m calling the cops.’”
Ironically, Al insists that he had no desire to punish his former friend Simpson, the celebrity he once so admired: “I just called the police to get my stuff back. I didn’t want to press charges. Because O. J. that night, he went home, I went home. We made up on the phone, but the damage had been done.” Simpson was ultimately found guilty on ten counts, including first-degree kidnapping charges for Beardsley and Fromong, and robbery and assault with a deadly weapon. Simpson’s currently serving a thirty-three-year sentence for the crimes at the Lovelock Correctional Facility in Nevada. In yet another surreal twist to the case, while Al was giving national TV interviews about the Simpson assault, he was spotted by his startled parole officer (from the 2003 incident involving a threat to a police officer). Since Al was giving interviews in Las Vegas, he was obviously breaking his California parole. He was quickly arrested and brought back in handcuffs.
The notoriety from the Simpson case continues to follow Al around, although it’s hard to see how this man, semiparalyzed, shuttled from hospital to hospital, has benefited from it. “I know my partner that went with me [Fromong], he lost everything ’cause of that case. He wound up losing his house, he got caught shoplifting at Costco for fifty bucks,” Al observes sadly. “I said, ‘Look, Bruce, I know you want to make money off this case, and it’s going to happen for good or bad. Don’t go hard on him; it’s a bullshit case. They want to nail him for ’94, and they want to use us, and you could see that.” When I ask if he still considers Simpson to be a friend, Al simply replies, “He’s in jail for a long time. I got my own problems.” That, if anything, seems to be the last word on the subject. The gods truly are crazy.
I ask if I can take pictures of Al lying in bed for the book, and he agrees, then asks how they look. I show the pictures to him. “God,” he whispers, appalled. I ask if he’d ever done any acting in his younger days. “No. Only in front of the courthouse: ‘Not guilty,’” he says with a weak grin.
The interview finally wraps up. Al looks glad for the company, although he’s obviously exhausted. Maybe we caught him on a good day, but the Al we interviewed (on two occasions) was far from the notorious film pirate and “delusional menace” that had other collectors like Craig Call and Brian LeGrady fuming at the mention of his name. Instead, the Al I met was surprisingly lucid and frank, talking openly about his criminal past and dodgy activities like lifting a 70mm print of Lawrence of Arabia from the very theater that was showing it. I can’t say I exactly liked him, but I don’t think he was trying to get me to like him. He was just talking about the brazen cons and film switches he used to pull, that are now a thing of the past. And maybe in the end that’s worth a little respect.
We walk past the other patients of Windsor Care listlessly wandering the hallways and approach the exit. Jeff has to reach up and push a black button on the wall to summon the front desk clerk. A sign by the button reads: “Please Be Aware of Patients Trying to Leave Behind You.”