Killing for Smut

A porn king's life on the run

Joseph Gozzo, president of the Bloomfield (Conn.) State Bank, was uneasy. On Nov. 8, a new customer named Arbie Evans had phoned to say that he wanted to withdraw $33,500 in cash from an account he had opened only three weeks earlier. Suspecting a swindle of some kind, Gozzo summoned the police. When Evans arrived at the bank, the cops asked him to come to the station. After four hours of fruitless questioning, they placed a poster from the FBI'S most-wanted list before him. With scarcely a wince, he admitted: "All right, you got me."

It was quite a catch. The mysterious depositor was Michael G. Thevis, 46, who once described his Atlanta-based $100 billion-a-year empire as "the GM of pornography." Thevis controlled one of the nation's largest networks of adult bookstores, X-rated movie theaters, and peep-show machines. Seven months before, Thevis had escaped from a minimum-security jail in New Albany, Ind., while serving 8 1/2 years for arson and interstate transportation of obscene material. He was held without bail; police also arrested a companion, Anna Jeanette Evans, 40, who was waiting for him outside the bank, and charged her with aiding a known fugitive. In Thevis' car, police found seven guns, $1 million in diamond and emerald jewelry and $450,000 in cash.

Testifying in court last week, FBI Agent Paul King gave a startling description of how Thevis was supplied with funds from his porno business while he was on the lam. Meanwhile, new charges piled up against him. In June he was indicted by a grand jury in Atlanta for the murder of two competitors in the porn business. The indictment gave this account of the killings: Thevis shot Kenneth Hanna in November 1970 and then stuffed him in the trunk of his own Cadillac. But Thevis bungled the job by locking up the car keys with the corpse. He asked a business associate, Roger Underbill, to help him recover the keys. Then Thevis drove the car to the Atlanta airport, where the body was later discovered by police. The second slaying took place in September 1973, when James E. Mayes was blown up in his van outside his adult bookstore in downtown Atlanta.

To make sure that witnesses' testimony was on the record, a federal judge approved a plan to video-tape a description of the murders by Underbill and Leon Walters, a former Green Beret who had also worked for Thevis. But before that could be done, both men were killed by shotgun blasts. Officials in Washington suspect the Mafia arranged the murder as a favor to Thevis: they believe he sold his porno operation to the Mob this fall. But Atlanta FBI agents disagree. In four previous attempts to kill Underbill, said an official, the suspected hit men were "redneck bank robbers from around here."

During his 195 days of freedom, Thevis rented an apartment in Summerville, S.C. From a diary that an FBI expert says is in Thevis' handwriting, agents learned that he picked up clothes and funds from his Atlanta home within a week after his escape. So far, investigators have recovered $500,000 from five safe deposit boxes that were rented by Thevis under aliases.

According to Agent King's testimony, hundreds of thousands of dollars were funneled to the fugitive by Laverne Bowden, president of Fidelity Equipment Leasing Corp., the Atlanta holding company for Thevis' pornographic distribution firms and retail outlets. King testified that Thevis' father George was seen carrying paper bags and manila envelopes stuffed with cash from the Fidelity offices. Before his elimination, Underbill deposited large sums of money in a Bahamian bank account. Thevis then borrowed money from the bank. An attorney placed shares of AT&T worth $297,000 in a trust in Thevis' name at a bank on Nauru Island, a tax haven in the South Pacific. The stock was then sold on the Hong Kong exchange, and the cash was deposited in Barclays Bank in Hong Kong.

The FBI also believes it knows what Thevis did with some of the money. In his diary, according to King's testimony, the pornographer wrote "Liz [a pet name for Bowden]--$6,000," then added that a rifle had been purchased. In one of Thevis' datebooks, there is an entry on Oct. 25, the day of the Underbill murder: "RU killed." A diary also showed that the balding pornographer had been scheduled to get a hair transplant the day after the ambush but had called it off.

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