Video-Shop Fires Spur Inquiry : U. S. Looks for Links in Blazes at 4 Sex-Film Outlets

Federal investigators are searching for links among fires at four Los Angeles-area distributors of sexually explicit movies on video tape for home viewing.

Two of the businesses were among 13 destroyed last month in a fire in Calabasas. The other 11 businesses were of a different nature.

“We haven’t found any connection yet, but you have to look at them when you have a pattern,” said John Kursteiner, Los Angeles supervisor of arson investigations for the U. S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. “Just because you have a pattern doesn’t mean they are related.”

Calabasas Fire ‘Suspicious’

The first two fires occurred on March 21 at World-Wide Video Inc. in Tujunga and on May 13 at Liberty Video Co., a distributor on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood. The other fire, in Calabasas on June 14, destroyed Top Stop Inc. and Xcitement Video Co.

Federal and county investigators are virtually certain that the first two fires were set. They have labeled the Calabasas fire as “suspicious.”

Federal law allows the bureau to assist local authorities in arson investigation. Kursteiner said the agency usually gets involved in cases where there are fires at one type of business or when the damage in a suspicious fire is more than $1 million.

Kursteiner put the total damage to the four video distributors at $4 million. He estimated the value of the destruction at all 13 businesses in the Calabasas blaze at $4 million. Fire officials say that fire was the most costly in the San Fernando Valley so far this year.

The Calabasas fire started in a room where Top Stop keeps its inventory of video tapes and later spread to Xcitement and the other 11 businesses, bureau investigators said.

The two firms involved in the March 21 and May 13 fires share management and, according to one employee, are affiliated. Liberty Video shares management with World Wide Video and is run out of World Wide offices on Sunset Boulevard. In a recent interview, a woman who described herself as an accountant with World Wide Video said she was also president of Liberty. The woman identified herself only as Phyllis. She said Liberty has become defunct since the fire, the latest in a series of difficulties for the company.

Defendants in Lawsuit

World Wide and its president, Jim Sicilia, are defendants in a lawsuit filed earlier this year by three other adult-film distributors in federal district court in Los Angeles. The three companies accuse Sicilia of illegally duplicating their films and marketing them through World Wide outlets in California, Nevada and Washington.

The plaintiffs are Caballero Control Corp. of Canoga Park, considered among the largest adult video distributors in the nation, and two other California companies. The March 21 fire at World Wide came as attorneys for plaintiffs in the case were preparing to conduct a detailed review of World Wide’s books as part of the forthcoming trial’s discovery stage, said C. Dennis Loomis, a Westwood attorney representing the plaintiffs. Loomis said many documents important to the trial were destroyed.

Steinman could not be reached for comment.

Sgt. Allen Humphries, an arson investigator with the L. A. County Sheriff’s Department, said investigators were still not confident the Calabasas blaze was set.

“We have reason to believe that the fire was suspicious, but we’re not absolutely certain that it was arson,” he said. A bureau investigator said that, unless it is determined with certainty that the Calabasas fire was caused by arson, federal statutes will not allow the bureau to continue investigating.