Producer of Adult Videos Indicted on Tax Charges : Canoga Park: IRS agents arrest one of the nation’s biggest distributors of X-rated tapes. He is accused of skimming money from his company.

Mark Carriere, described as one of the nation’s leading makers and distributors of pornographic videotapes, has been indicted on seven counts of tax evasion, filing false tax returns and conspiring to obstruct the Internal Revenue Service.

Carriere, 35, of Los Angeles and Indiana was arrested Friday by IRS agents while conducting business for Video Exclusives, his Canoga Park company that manufactures X-rated videos. On Tuesday, U.S. Magistrate Volney V. Brown in Los Angeles set bail at $1 million and scheduled Carriere’s arraignment for Nov. 30 in Indiana, where the tax charges were filed, a government spokeswoman said.

If convicted on all counts, Carriere faces a prison term of up to 29 years and fines up to $700,000. Representatives of Video Exclusives said the company had no comment on Carriere’s arrest. Attempts to reach Carriere’s attorney were unsuccessful.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced that the indictment stems from an investigation that began in August, 1989, after the IRS was told that Carriere was involved in skimming “large sums of cash” from his mail-order distributing company, Multi-Media Distributing Co. Inc. of Gary, Ind.

The indictment states that two sets of financial records were kept, one to keep track of incoming money and the other to prepare tax returns for 1986 though 1988.

For the three-year period, Carriere declared an income of $2.96 million and paid taxes of $905,958. The IRS charges that Carriere’s taxable income in those years was “substantially in excess” of the amount claimed.

According to the indictment, mail-room employees separated cash from checks and money orders that were sent in by customers. The mail-room supervisor did not turn the cash over to the bookkeeper for deposit but, instead, stored it in safes located around the business, according to the government.

In October, 1989, the IRS raided the Indiana plant and took away four safes containing $548,409.15, according to the Department of Justice.

The indictment is the latest problem for Carriere. FBI agents raided Video Exclusives last month as part of an ongoing investigation into the transportation of obscene material across state lines.

Little-known in the industry a few years ago, Video Exclusives recently grew into one of the nation’s leading adult entertainment companies in terms of productivity and profits. In 1983, when Carriere moved to California from Indiana, he said he was doing $3 million a year in sales. That had increased to $30 million earlier this year, he said.

His tax records, provided by the Department of Justice, show how his business prospered in the late 1980s. In 1986, Carriere declared taxable income of $108,502. Two years later, he reported income of $2,086,243.

Video Exclusives invested in a 7,500-square-foot sound stage in the San Fernando Valley with eight sets, the biggest in the pornography trade, and produced up to 70 movies a year, Carriere said in an interview several months ago.

His secret, he said, was producing large quantities of low-budget tapes.

“I’m always looking to cut corners, to cut people out of the picture,” Carriere said in the interview.

Jeremy Stone, an editor at Adam Film World, an industry publication, said Carriere was “probably doing better than anybody else in the industry has ever done.”

Carriere watched every phase of his operation on 10 video monitors in a large office furnished with a bubbling fish tank and littered with stacks of X-rated tape boxes.

Carriere once joked that he planned to put nameplates of competing companies he intended to absorb over the doors in his office. But when asked whether he wanted to control the industry, he said no.

“See what happened to Reuben?” he said.

Reuben Sturman, a Cleveland and Van Nuys resident who once operated a worldwide pornography empire, was convicted earlier this year of tax evasion and sentenced to 10 years in prison.