It shouldn't surprise us that the unimaginable would happen in a gated Orange County neighborhood close to the 73 toll road. Vice cops say Laguna Niguel computer entrepreneur Eric Paul Anderson—a major trafficker in counterfeit hard drives—held a second job: pimp. According to prosecutors, Anderson ran a high-end prostitution ring from his aunt's $1.85 million house, answered to the name Thor Magnum, and rented out his wife to gentleman callers at $500 an hour.
There's no mystery to the moniker. Anderson—a tall, natty 37-year-old with sausage-sized fingers, a thick neck, perfect hair and a car salesman's confidence—attributes the name Thor to his “Viking” facial features. With no prodding, he also told a female undercover deputy that he uses the name Magnum in celebration of his enormous penis.
That's not all that's special about Anderson. He apparently isn't handicapped by marital jealousy. Orange County sheriff's deputies claim that Anderson sold numerous women by the hour including his own spouse, the slim, attractive, 35-year-old Lynda Michelle Anderson (a.k.a. “Sabrina”). For $500 an hour, records show, the couple supplied a Rockport Drive bedroom, condoms, lube, dildos, vibrators, gag balls, anal beads and whips.
I can tell you from other criminal cases that customer dissatisfaction is an occasional problem in Southern California's illegal sex market. But here again, Anderson was Ferris Bueller-special. According to police interview notes, his commandment to his female employees was simple: “Fuck the shit out of [the customers] so they will come back.”
If you doubt the effectiveness of Anderson's business plan, know that even while deputies raided the house, customers—including a prominent Orange County businessman carrying $400 cash and his own vibrator—arrived for their afternoon appointments. Deputies confiscated detailed financial records including names, telephone numbers and dates, and believe Anderson may have earned as much as $50,000 a month in cash from his stable of prostitutes. He found some clients at local sports bars.
Our state's legislature deems prostitution—of the non-political sort—a crime and, thanks to a tip and then the sheriff's sting, Anderson and his wife now face stiff prison sentences if they are convicted. Prosecutors charged the couple with two felonies—pimping and pandering—and a misdemeanor, “keeping a house of ill fame for the purposes of prostitution and lewdness.” Deputy District Attorney Kelly Grogan said the couple could face as much as seven years in state prison. Arrested a year ago, the Andersons are free on $35,000 bail each and awaiting trial.
Before a Jan. 5 pre-trial hearing with Superior Court Judge John Conley, Anderson and his wife—who now live apart—spoke with confidence to each other about what they perceive as the prosecution's weaknesses and seemed more annoyed by the fees their Los Angeles-based defense lawyers are charging. When one of the lawyers arrived, he bragged to Anderson that he'd once successfully defended a Mafia boss. Everyone on the defense declined to comment on the record.
The case began in November 2005 when Deputy Michelle Hall received a tip that a brothel was operating in a South County residential neighborhood. Checking computer websites OC Platinum Connections, City Vibe and Comefiesta.com, undercover deputies found Thor Magnum and his contact information. On two occasions, deputies called and made appointments with specific women listed on the websites. Each time the undercover officers were told to put $500 cash in an envelope marked “gift” and leave it on a credenza near the front door of the alleged brothel.
In December 2005, Anderson sold his wife, “Sabrina,” to Deputy Joseph William Balicki, undercover and wearing an electronic eavesdropping wire, for $500, according to court records. Balicki told colleagues that Sabrina undressed him and “then tried to perform an unsolicited sex act” on him. Balicki, the subject of a 2004 Weekly cover story for killing an unarmed elderly Latino and then mocking the death with a derogatory graphic on his office desk, reported that he made an excuse to leave before Sabrina could complete a sex act.
The following month, another undercover deputy asked Magnum for an appointment with “Brooklyn,” who was going for $400. When he arrived, two young women answered the front door, one wearing a sheer dress and the other a bikini. The deputy left cash on the credenza, chose one woman, took her to a bedroom, stripped, jumped on a bed, and watched the lady masturbate him “briefly,” he reported. At this point, sheriff's deputies raided the house, finding an actual customer busy in a second-floor bedroom.
Deputy Hall claims that at the raid Eric Anderson explained away all the women and sexual equipment in the house simply by saying, “They're all my friends and I'm a swinger.”
Hall followed up by asserting that Anderson was running a brothel.
“He said he could see my point,” Hall recalled during a pre-trial hearing.
If there are any doubts about Anderson's boldness, consider that prosecutors claim he continued to operate the brothel even after he'd been arrested by FBI agents in December 2005 on computer trafficking charges. A month earlier, a federal grand jury indicted Anderson for masterminding a $2.5 million counterfeit computer hard drive scheme that victimized Sun Microsystems, Inc. Using various corporate entities, Anderson paid software engineers to extract genuine code from the legitimate corporation's computers, attached false metal plates with Sun Microsystems' trademark on other hard drives and then sold the fakes to vendors. In just one three-month period, FBI agents say, Anderson trafficked more than 1,000 counterfeit computers.
Anderson pleaded not guilty in the federal case, but changed his plea last year after one of his co-conspirators, 22-year-old David Joseph Kerkes, agreed to testify against him and Arthur Dennis Hernandez, 40, of Laguna Niguel. U.S. District Judge David O. Carter sentenced Kerkes to one day in federal prison plus a year in a community correctional facility. Hernandez received a term of 30 months but is appealing. Judge Carter is scheduled to punish Anderson for the scheme next month. In the meantime, Carter has ordered him not to break any other local, state or federal laws.
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.