He left the adult film business a quarter century ago, but former adult filmmaker Noel Bloom still remembers Stanley Fleishman as a giant in a small and somewhat fragile body.
"He was probably the greatest guy around to deal with," says Bloom, the former head of Caballero. "Truly a gentleman, yet like one of the guys. If you were out with him, it wasn't like you were with your lawyer."
Not that it hurt when Fleishman was your lawyer, Bloom says. He remembers only too well a case involving his former company which Fleishman took on - all the way to the Supreme Court.
"In the 8mm days," he remembers, "the police came in and they'd take everything in the place and put you out of business. One time they did that with us. They even brought a judge to our premises to sign the search warrant. Stanley went to the Supreme Court and argued, and the ruling came that they could only take five per item and return everything else."
Bloom sold Caballero twelve years ago and has since created Celebrities Just For Kids, a children's entertainment firm he still operates. He hadn't seen Fleishman in about five years, since a lunch date, and was saddened by the 79-year-old's death.
"Stanley was a believer," he says. "He was really a fighter." And, he continues, Fleishman had another quality: the judges before whom he argued cases respected him, even soliciting his opinions in cases he wasn't involved in.
"But he would get vehement (in court)," Bloom remembers. "He would stand there and sometimes start screaming, getting emotional, he'd hold onto a lectern with one hand, have his crutch in the other swinging in the air, and be yelling. Once the judge had to tell him, 'Stanley, please, calm down, I don't want you to kill yourself'."
