‘Spy’ Had 11-Year Operation : Adult Theater Finally Exposes Investigator

For 11 years, Robert McGuire never missed a movie at the Mitchell Brothers Theatre, the only X-rated movie house in Santa Ana.

He not only watched the movies, he took notes, tape-recorded the sound tracks and used an 8-millimeter movie camera wrapped in a towel to photograph the action. If an usher came by, McGuire said, he would drop the camera into his lap and act nonchalant.

For this, McGuire, 53, a former Los Angeles Police Department vice officer, was paid $30 an hour by the City of Santa Ana, which hired him as an undercover investigator in its decade-long legal battle to shut down the theater.

City officials hoped that McGuire’s explicit reports on the films would provide evidence that the theater constitutes a “continuing public nuisance” that could be closed down legally.

But last Wednesday, McGuire finally was unmasked by theater security and escorted from his seat. “It is against our policies to bring in cameras and tape recorders,” said the theater manager, Phil Brady. “And he is hostile to us, which isn’t a good situation, either.”

On Friday, the city went to court for an order to give McGuire not only access to the theater but the right to continue recording the movies by camera and tape recorder. The hearing was postponed until Monday.

Over the years, the results of McGuire’s investigation literally have stacked up in the Orange County Courthouse. Portfolios of his reports, tape recordings and photographs are heaped under tables in two courtrooms. Each large, heavy, leather portfolio represents McGuire’s account of one week’s bill at the theater.

There had been a hearing on the theater going on for months at the courthouse, and, needless to say, the growing pile from the investigation let theater management know that someone named McGuire was spying on them.

“It was no big deal, but it was a frustrating thing for us,” said Brady. “Nobody wants an undercover spy in his business. He’d gotten in every week for 11 years, right under our nose. First we were curious, then we did start looking for him.”

The theater went to a detective agency to rent a machine that is supposed to detect tape recorders when they are recording. But in the movie theater, the device apparently was overwhelmed by the theater sound system, Brady said.

At one point, during a hearing earlier this year, theater lawyers served a subpoena on McGuire, and Brady got a good look at him, he said. Or so he thought.

“I didn’t know it, but he was in disguise when we served him,” Brady said. “He had on a false beard--kind of a red, full beard. I came back and told everyone he’s 5-8, 45 to 50 years old and has got a beard.”

Later in the week, several bearded moviegoers were asked for ID, Brady said. Meanwhile, beardless McGuire was buying his usual ticket and going in to watch the movie.

He would take his usual seat directly in front of the screen and about 60 feet back so his movie camera would get the best picture. He would set up his two audio tape recorders and get his pad and pen ready.

“It sounds like a lot, but the camera is kind of small,” McGuire said. “It’s about 6 inches by 8 inches and an inch and a half wide.”

He said he would wrap the camera in the towel to muffle the sound of its shutter. The camera took one frame every three seconds, compressing the movies onto a series of still photographs on two, 50-foot strips of home-movie film.

McGuire said he had no trouble getting into the theater, even though the management knew someone named McGuire was spying. “You can’t very well check everybody,” McGuire said. “You’ll lose your customers, I suppose.”

The theater workers knew him by sight; they just didn’t know he was McGuire, Brady said.

“We recognized him as the man with the brown towel,” Brady said. “He always came in with a neatly folded, brown hand towel.”

That’s not suspicious?

“We don’t discriminate,” Brady explained. “We welcome all kinds. We asked him once, ‘What’s with the towel?’ He said he had a bad back. We bought it. It was no big deal. . . . We’ve seen it all, believe me.”

Then Wednesday, Freddy Gonzales, a theater security worker, was making his usual twice-an-hour stroll through the theater when he walked between the screen and the seats and saw light reflect off something in the audience, Brady said. It had glinted off the lens of McGuire’s camera.

Brady recounted the confrontation:

“He (Gonzales) walks up to him and says, ‘What have you got there?’

“ ‘A camera.’

“ ‘Then you got to come to the lobby.’

“ ‘You know who I am?’

“ ‘I know now. ‘ “

Brady said he went up to Gonzales and McGuire because McGuire was refusing to budge. Brady said he used the standard tactic for intimidating someone in an adult theater audience.

“You raise your voice pretty loud. Then I said to him, ‘You’re not going to be doing that in this theater anymore, buddy!’ ”

After some more words in the lobby, McGuire left and has not returned, Brady said. “The joke around the theater now is that he’s going to start coming with a blue towel and we’ll never spot him.”

McGuire may return, however, with a court order allowing him to resume his job unhindered. If so, it will just be another day in a long career in the X-rated theater seats.

McGuire has done the same job in similar adult theaters in North Hollywood, Buena Park, Duarte and even in the suburbs of Seattle, Wash., working on similar cases on behalf of James J. Clancy, the private attorney hired by Santa Ana in the Mitchell Brothers case.

That’s a lot of movies. “Over 11 years, in all the theaters, I saw about 2,000,” McGuire estimated. “There are a lot of repeats. Like everything else, the camera techniques are getting better. As far as the content of the films, it’s about the same. The story lines vary and change, but other parts of it are about the same.”

So what has all this eroticism done to McGuire?

“I got into a pretty good regimentation,” he said. “I didn’t want to get emotionally involved in what’s going on in there.

“My view is strictly from the mechanical part. As far as going to see movies like that personally for pleasure, I wouldn’t bother.”

He declined to say whether he thinks X-rated films are harmful. “I don’t think it has done anybody any good,” he said.

He hasn’t noticed any ill effects to himself, he said. “So far, I’m OK, but who knows down the road?”

All in all, he said, he’d rather watch a good Western.