A recent article reported that on December 9, 2005, Gary Don Haney was arrested on charges of aggravated robbery and second-degree assault, identifying him as the owner of Touch Companions, a company that operated out of a house at 3121 York Street.
To be the Larry Flynt of the Rocky Mountains - that was Haney’s big dream, according to the story.
The article went on to say that according to a police report, Haney had called a female employee to the residence two nights earlier and accused her of "conducting professional business on the side and therefore taking money from him." He then struck the woman on the head multiple times with a baseball bat and repeatedly punched her in the head, body and back. But he avoided hitting her in the face.
The woman told police that Steve Papson, Haney's business colleague and the owner of the house, began to close doors and windows so that her screams wouldn't wake the neighbors. Papson, the article reported, then took her purse into a bedroom while Haney removed $560 from her jacket pocket, telling her that she owed him $5,000 more for all of the calls she had stolen. Haney threatened to kill her and her daughter if she went to the police, the woman reported.
As the sordid story spread throughout Denver's underground escort industry - which, despite its product, is guided more by standard business practices than street-hustling principles - the reaction was a mix of shock and disappointment.
The 34-year-old Haney, wrote Jared Jacang Maher on westword.com, had spent almost two decades in the adult-entertainment business and had, just a few years before, been the owner of Colorado's premier escort agency. Although people knew that Haney had slid downhill recently, no one would have pegged him as a low-life, woman-beating street pimp. It didn't jive with the image he'd built of himself as the cunning but kindhearted Big Daddy of Denver's nightlife.
Haney not only likes things big, Jacang wrote, he's big himself - over 350 pounds on a 5-foot-9 frame. But his stable of female companions who exchanged sex for big cash didn't seem to mind. Nor did his business associates. If you get big enough, Haney figured, no one can touch you.
Jacang’s story continues by reporting that living the high life of lofts, limos and limitless drugs, Haney could see his big idea so clearly: a media empire built on man's most primal instinct. A whole world of sex - real sex - just a click or a phone call away. He wasn't looking for mainstream acceptance of the "adult lifestyle," but he did think there were ways to make it more classy, safe and profitable. It could be done. And then he would leave it all behind for something even bigger.
Instead, Haney got trapped in the underbelly of the sex world, wrote Jacang. For all his Big Daddy ideas, his big needs - for sex, for drugs, for money to buy the drugs - landed him in jail, just a big pimp behind bars.
