In early 2005, porn producer and actor Ashley Gasper realized that someone was bootlegging his films. Counterfeit copies of “Jules Jordan’s Flesh Hunter 6” and “Jules Jordan: Feeding Frenzy 2,” among other titles, were showing up among the DVDs being returned to his distributor.
According to a recent decision issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Gasper soon learned that a Montreal firm was making illicit copies of the movies and selling them to wholesalers. The primary client of the Montreal bootlegger was a New York-based company called Direct Distributors, Inc., run by a young Israeli named Ben Zion Suky.
Suky, now a real estate developer, isn’t just another businessman involved in two litigious industries. He’s also the right-hand man to a powerful Sephardic kabbalist rabbi with growing influence among Israel’s political and business elite and in the American Jewish community.
So close is Suky to Rabbi Yoshiyahu Yosef Pinto that he owns property with the rabbi’s wife. He is the rabbi’s translator, gatekeeper and conduit to the outside world in America.
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