Big Trouble

Haney asked Bobby Lee Black, a former minor-league pro wrestler, voice actor, tattoo artist and ex-con, to write a food column. With only an eighth-grade education, Black had zero experience in writing, let alone food writing. But Haney saw something in the recovered drug addict that he thought fit with Go-Go's new image, and "Tattooed Food Critic" became one of the magazine's longest-running features.

"He gave me a big opportunity that nobody else in their right mind would've ever thought of doing," Black says. "That's just the type of mind he had. He was a lateral thinker. He had the ability to see beyond the surface of things."

Go-Go's investors at Christal's weren't as enamored with Haney's approach, and their stake was soon bought out by Trygve Lode, a local actor, bodybuilder and independent filmmaker who also owns a venture-capital firm called Midgard. The magazine grew, hiring an editor and art director. But Go-Go still struggled to define its identity, and which direction it should take became an ongoing debate between Haney and his new owners. In November 2000, Haney stopped down as publisher, saying that the two sides simply had different notions of where Go-Go should go.

But there was more to it than that, according to Darlene Cysper, CEO of Midgard. The other owners felt that Haney wasn't "keeping track of the finances and getting the salespeople on board that we wanted to keep," she says, "and that's essential when you're ad-supported only." She also cites a fair amount of friction between editor Chris Magyar and Haney. "I think that if anything, he was overly ambitious," she adds. "I think that sometimes his plans extended his capabilities to carry them out. And he was a big dreamer."

And Haney had big dreams for his next project, a sure-as-shit gold mine. He walked away from Go-Go and never looked back at publishing. Instead, he returned to the adult-entertainment business, an industry he understood -- and enjoyed.

"Once Gary has done something to the best of his ability, he wants to move on and do something else," says Black, who continued writing his food column until Go-Go went out of business in 2003. He was the one who tagged Haney as "Marlon Brando on Acid," and while obesity was the most obvious characteristic Haney shared with the late actor, Black had something else in mind when he made the remark to his former boss.

"There's a level of both talent and tragedy that you see in Marlon Brando," he explains. "And that's Gary. He's a Scorpio to the edge of his bones."

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"First and foremost I am a sinner. In the purest form of the word," continues Haney's About Me on myspace. "I believe in excess, indulgence, and decadence. I live fast, love hard, and take no prisoners. I believe that being sexy is about a whole lot more than sex. And that sex is about a whole lot more than orgasm. Mine is the strangest life I have ever known."

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In December 2000, less than a month after Haney left Go-Go, a woman we'll call April went to see Haney for a job interview. Sitting in his well-furnished, comfortable Lakewood home, April told Haney that she had never worked for an escort agency before. He asked to see her ID, even though it was clear that the 35-year-old woman sitting in front of him was of legal age. Then he told her to strip. This allowed him to both check out her body, which looked pretty good, and check for wires. Once Haney was confident everything was clean, he asked April why she wanted to work for Colorado Companions.

"For money," she replied. April had three kids and a home, and her minimum-wage job just wasn't cutting it.

The real nudge that inspired her to become an escort? "Spite," April says now. "I did it for spite." Her husband had proposed that they have a threesome, and "I said, 'So you want me to fuck other people? Well, fine, then I will.'"

And she did, working for Haney.

Colorado Companions operated as a "full-service" escort agency -- and that didn't mean the girls would check your oil and fill your tires. It meant customers got sex.

Prostitution is nothing new in Denver, of course, but the industry has shifted over the past twenty years. Once largely confined to urban red-light districts, the flesh trade has become more of a suburban phenomenon. Rather than street corners, sex workers are usually located on the Internet or by phone. This migration occurred partly as a result of police efforts to crack down on prostitution on Colfax Avenue, but it also reflected technological advances that made it easier to hook up with the professional call-girl congregation and at the same time avoid the dangers of law enforcement, robbery, pimps and hard-core drug users.