Cobra Killer (5 page)

Lockhart recalled that Kocis seemed to have few friends.

“It got to a point where all we were doing was sitting in his dark house, barricaded away from the public,” Lockhart said. “We hardly ever left the house.”
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Those who did gain entry to Kocis’ home described it as a typical 2,000 square-foot home of a marginally fastidious bachelor. The “hominess” of the place, however, was at times overrun by growing stacks of paperwork, DVDs and videos related to his business.

Detective Rosencrans, who arrested Kocis in the home in 2001, said the first floor living area of the home was set up as a regular home, but the basement contained several studio “vignettes” or scenes for Cobra Video productions. By the time he was murdered six years later, the basement was little in use, detectives believed, and the burgeoning cottage industry of Cobra Video operated out of the dining room.

As time went on and Kocis began seeking out locations beyond his own home for making videos, his home’s basement became overrun with “storage of everything imaginable, tons of porn,” Kocis’ friend Wagner said. “He would be getting porn from all sorts of studios that would ask him to review it. He would look at it (and then) throw it down there. Everything, he was continually buying stuff, so it would all get chucked in the basement.
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A successful yet controversial cottage industry

Cobra Video was growing, but not necessarily distinguishing itself. Kocis lived and worked far from the center of the adult entertainment industry in California observed J.C. Adams, a Los Angeles-based journalist and blogger on the gay porn industry and a former editor of
Unzipped
and
Inside Porn
magazine. Adams’ online site, www.gayporntimes.com, closely followed the Kocis case and is considered one of the definitive news and information sites on the gay porn empire. “He wasn’t well known at all. There are so many small, little companies like his that they tend to blend together,” Adams said.
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Veteran gay porn producer Kevin Clarke was no fan of Bryan Kocis, calling him “a pariah in the porn business.” Clarke said “there are two types of people who make porn, those that are in it for the work and those that are in it for the boys. It is obvious which one of those Bryan Kocis was,” he wrote in an open letter posted on March 25, 2009 on the DeWayne in San Diego blog.
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Clarke contends Kocis only goal was “getting into (the) pants (of young men) as much as it was shooting them in porn. He was a predator and an abuser.”
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Clarke, the director of several eighteen to twenty-three year old twink videos such as
The American Way, A Young Man’s World, Ashton Ryan’s B-Boys,
and
The Seduction of a Surfer,
said “More often than not I would talk a young man out of doing porn if I thought it was not something they should do.”
He adds, “If your goal is to bed them, you come from a different place.(Kocis) was not concerned with their welfare, he was concerned with their ass.” Clarke said, “His legacy of barebacking twinks stands as a homage to the debased mind of a predator,” referring to Kocis’ practice of filming gay sex scenes without condoms. “We as an industry should protect the youngest in it; we should have stopped Bryan by speaking out.”
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The argument over using condoms in gay porn films has been brewing for a long time. Since HIV infection and AIDS swept the gay community in the 1980s, activists have continually called on porn companies to require condoms in all filmed scenes. Health officials have told the
Los Angeles Times
as recently as 2009 that they believe as many as half of the performers in gay porn movies are HIV-positive. As early as 2004, the
Times
reported that “A small number of producers, catering to customers who eroticize risk, have begun to produce so-called ‘bareback’ videos that featured actors without condoms. Industry insiders say this market—though still a niche—is growing in popularity.”
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Titan Media, one of the largest producers of gay porn, say they require condoms and believe it is a good policy. More and more younger models are applying to work for Titan with the interview process revealing they have done bareback videos in the past, reported Keith Webb, a Titan vice president.
Webb noted “an upsurge of eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty- and twenty-one-year-olds making unprotected-sex movies, which to me is horrifying, absolutely horrifying.”
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Adams believes that despite Kocis’ place as an early producer of “bareback porn,” he likely leaves no lasting legacy on the industry. He cuts through the bareback versus condom use argument in the industry. “People who hate barebacking and think it is unsafe hated Bryan,” he said. “It depends on who you talk to and their feelings on the issue.”
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The same holds true for the typical age of Kocis’ performers. Use of barely-legal performers is a time-honored sub-genre of adult content, whether it’s gay or heterosexual content, Adams said. Reactions from porn customers varies. “It’s about the same as the way people who feel about bareback react—if they don’t care for younger guys, or twinks, then they don’t care for Bryan’s videos,” Adams said.
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Kocis’ productions “were popular in that genre, that sort of twink sub-genre that he specialized in, but in the broader sense of the industry, he was not well known and was not a ‘player.’ I would say he was virtually unknown in the industry.”
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Adams believes the porn industry is open to “cottage” entrepreneurs such as Kocis because of the ready availability of advanced home-computers, affordable video cameras, desktop video editing systems, and the Internet as a natural distribution network. “This is a dramatic change from the past,” Adams said. “Anyone can set up a company anywhere and be successful and mine their own small sphere of influence. They just want to do their own thing, hire boys they think are attractive, and make the films they want to make. They are not necessarily interested in being part of the porn industry at large, or moving to California or to the San Fernando Valley, which is ground zero for the industry.”
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Revenue streams for Kocis’ operation were varied, Adams stated. Beyond traditional distribution deals such as the one Cobra had in place with Pacific Sun Entertainment, direct distribution to members or visitors to the Cobra website meant more money directly into Kocis pocket. “He likely had very little overhead,” Adams said.
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Remembering Bryan

In the end, those who had loved and knew Bryan Kocis best of all were heartbroken and dumbfounded by the fate that had become his life. They never knew him as the “pariah” or “predator” described by others, and they never could have imagined the terror that took his life.

In the days immediately following his death, the Kocis family grew frustrated with increasingly sensational coverage of the case. “I think it tears them apart when they perceive public attention may be focused on things other than bringing the perpetrator to justice,” said Bryan’s former attorney, Al Flora, Jr.
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Flora issued a statement on behalf of Kocis’ family that said, “Now is not the time for insinuating that his life is worth something less because of his involvement in a lawful adult entertainment business or his lifestyle. Our society demands that justice be achieved. Public attention and media concern should focus on the murder of this young man and the devastating impact that this crime has had on his family. No court has ever determined that Bryan Kocis was a pedophile or sexual predator subject to Megan’s Law restrictions or that he was operating an illegal Internet porn business.”
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In later interviews, Bryan’s parents and sister attempted to paint a more complete picture of the man known to most only as a gay porn producer with an appetite for younger guys killed in a murder.

“He was the type of person that did things for people,” his mother Joyce Kocis tearfully testified at a sentencing hearing for his convicted killer. “We heard stories after (he was killed) about the generosity he would do.”
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His father Michael, sputtering his words between deep sobs of grief at the same hearing said, “I broke down and cried” when learning of his son’s death. “He was basically burned beyond recognition…(and) I couldn’t do a damn thing about it.”
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Michael Kocis described his son as a companion on hunting trips and someone who had saved his life during an earlier heart attack. “He would drop everything to help me out.”
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His mother reminded those following the case, “He was a very loving and giving person. He wasn’t like the media portrayed him, as a gay pornography producer. That was not Bryan.”
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One of his two sisters, Melody Bartusek, said, “It never mattered to us if Bryan was gay or not because that was his own personal life and not ours. He never flaunted (being gay), and what he did in private was up to him. All that mattered was how well he treated us (his family), and he was an amazing son, brother and uncle. He always put us before himself, and he would do anything for us.” 
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Bartusek said her brother was “a good, honest person in a bad, dishonest business.”
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She added, “He was the most thoughtful person I ever met.”
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Kocis’ parents said their son had promised he would end his adult porn business in 2008 and focus instead on his dream of a restaurant. “When he made a promise to his mother, he always kept it,” Michael Kocis said.
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Unfortunately, it as a promise he would not live to fulfill.

The Rise and Fall of the Cobra Empire

“Although Cobra Videos are categorized as amateur, you’re not gonna find anything amateurish about these hot young guys auditioning for a talented, up and coming production company.”

—Radvideo.com review of Cobra Video

During the years 2001 and 2002, major events were happening in the life of Bryan Kocis that would foretell how he would live the rest of his life. Amidst a bankruptcy filing and the humiliation of his arrest on child sexual abuse allegations, Kocis had pressed “play” on his dreams of creating a gay porn company specializing in twink videos.

For those unfamiliar with the vernacular of the gay porn world, “twink” describes clean-cut, thin, smooth young men, usually between eighteen and twenty-four years old. In earlier gay decades, they would have been described as “chicken.” Whatever you call them, “twinks” are popular content for gay porn in the youth-obsessed American culture. Bryan Kocis was fond of twinks too, and he intended to use that interest in launching porn venture, Cobra Video.

The company got underway in earnest in 2001, with the video release of
Casting Couch I, Austin’s Beach Buddies, Outdoor Boyz, Ethan’s College Buddies,
and
Campus Boyz I and II.
⁽¹⁾

In his earliest releases, producer/director Kocis is credited as “Bryan Phillips,” a nom de plume he later dropped for his real name.

The scenario for
Casting Couch I
runs eerily familiar to the earlier allegations brought by a fifteen-year-old boy in a criminal investigation of Kocis and showcased the gay porn genre he was perfecting.
Casting Couch I
consists of nine scenes, seven of which feature young men seated on a futon sofa in Kocis’ home, answering introductory questions about themselves, their sexuality and their sexual interests. As Kocis himself described it on the Cobra video website and in other promotional materials, “We do some close shots and, of course, the ‘Mystery Hand’ has to give him a lil (sic.) grope.” Kocis himself never appears on camera, though his voice is heard asking questions off-camera and his hand sometimes intercedes on camera to touch the men.
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Kocis discloses in his description of
Casting Couch I
on Pornteam.com that “I had to get three forms of ID on little Jonathan as this nineteen-year-old guy looks much younger than his years.” He adds that in one of two duo scenes in the video, the pairing of an actor named Tim with Austin required “an early session we had done for practice” when Tim “had just turned eighteen.”
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Kocis’ commitment to casting young guys in his videos found a welcome audience among gay porn buyers. An online review posted of one of Kocis’ early efforts noted that “although Cobra Video videos are categorized as amateur, you’re not gonna find anything amateurish about these hot young guys auditioning for a very talented, up and coming production company.”
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A description of
Casting Couch III
contains a troubling reference from Kocis. Whether true or just suggested to help sell the video, he notes that one of the actors will “tantalize you when you hear him talk about his first experience at eight years old and then how he purposely was bad at school so he would get sent to detention with a very special teacher.”
Casting Couch III
shows scenes filmed around various parts of Kocis’ home, including his upstairs bedroom and the living room (where he would later be murdered).
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Campus Boyz I
was reviewed at Radvideo.com as “the video that started the ball rolling from this great studio (Cobra)” and dubbed it “a true classic for its time, and a real trailblazer when the amateur bareback niche first made a comeback.”
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