Bruce Akahoshi would be just another quiet man in the produce business here but for one part of his past he says the press can't get enough of probing. He's also the former husband of Kathryn Gannon, a.k.a. Marylin Star, the porn star still in hiding in Vancouver, British Columbia as a key figure in an insider trading scandal involving two former lovers. And he says Gannon knew, when telling him she would return to Vancouver last June, that she was high-tailing it from the law.
"The media isn't letting go of it," Akahoshi says by telephone from his office. "I've gotten calls from the Wall Street Journal to Inside Edition and People magazine, you name it, I've had it." The soft-spoken businessman also hints that he's almost had it with the attention, but he admits warily it may not go away quickly or quietly.
"She's a smart cookie," he says of his former wife. "I don't believe she's as naïve as she's let on for us to believe. She was out for the almighty dollar and she got it. Last June, the last time she called me, she said she was going to Vancouver to be an investment counselor. She knew right then she was getting away from the law."
On Dec. 21, 1999, Gannon was named in a Securities and Exchange Commission complaint alleging she pocketed over $80,000, on stock trading based on advance bank merger tips she got from former lover James McDermott. She's also accused of passing those tips on to another lover, industrialist Anthony Pomponio, whom the SEC says also pocketed over $80,000 in trading based on those tips.
McDermott and Pomponio have been formally indicted on conspiracy and securities fraud charges; Pomponio also faces a perjury charge. Gannon was indicted formally in January, but she has been in seclusion in Vancouver with her fiancé, Michael Gillies, since last year. McDermott resigned as chairman of investment banking firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods almost a year ago, after telling the firm's board he was under investigation - just as the firm was to make an initial public stock offering which they then cancelled.
Gannon, who is a legal resident of Florida and has a home there, has said from her seclusion that she was the victim of rich, vain, and powerful men and wanted to tell the whole story at the right time. Her friend, Adult Press Service president Marc Medoff, has maintained she was at work on how and where to surrender to American authorities and tell the story.
"She probably got a lot of pressure from whatever sources she had," Akahoshi says, adding that Gannon may have engaged high-profile attorney Robert Shapiro - best known for his work in the O.J. Simpson criminal double-murder case - to represent her. But Akahoshi isn't even certain the federal government will really pursue the former porn star. Medoff did not return a call from AVN On The Net as this story went to cyberpress.
"I couldn't tell what will happen," her former husband says. "She's hiding. And whether or not the government is going to pursue her is another question. Unless she's a significant witness to whatever the case may be. Because if she comes back to the U.S., she's not only in trouble with the (SEC), she's in trouble with the IRS. If you think about it, she'd be opening a Pandora's Box with unreported income."
Akahoshi says Gannon often seemed to be two people during their two-and-a-half year marriage. "When she was Kathryn Gannon, she was fine," he says. "She was a sweet girl, everything was good about her, she spent time with my family, played with the kids. (They had no children together.) When she was Marylin Star, she was just ruthless, she just went for the jugular. It's hard to imagine how anybody could understand that."
Medoff has said Gannon now wants only to be Kathryn Gannon and settle into an ordinary life, but Akahoshi thinks that isn't necessarily going to happen for her. "That's all fine and dandy, but I couldn't believe that," he says. "She likes sex too much." He says he suspected she had been unfaithful to him during their marriage, but "but I didn't have any concrete (proof), and she always played sweet with me."
Akahoshi says it is sometimes difficult being the former husband of a porn star, "in the sense that it brings up a lot of old memories and stuff. It elevates you to a different scenario. People didn't realize I was married to a porn star. There's no real difficulty (with that) now, it's just having to put up with the questions of what it was like to be married to a porn star."
After stopping to take another telephone call, Akahoshi returns to the thought. "You know, after awhile, it gets tiring," he says of those questions. "But I get the feeling that the media wants me to portray her as the innocent bystander. And I can't believe that's true. I think there's more to the story than what we read."
Akahoshi says he and Gannon broke up for good in late 1996, after she received her green card that August and packed and left the day after that Christmas. "She left me with nothing," he says. But he tries not to have regrets. "Basically, how I live is quietly. This (the media attention) has elevated the stature so to speak. It can go either way, it can be a blessing or a curse. I would like to put this all behind me once and for all, just for a sense of closure, but it's a long way from being closed. I mean, my basic story is so repetitious that it's amazing so many want to delve into it, but it's the nature of the beast, I guess."
