BangBros Accused of Underage Porn

The last thing the director did before shouting "action" was serve Amber a slice of pizza. She understands now that it was a ploy: one final nod to normalcy before upending her life forever. But back then, at age 15, she was too distracted by the party and the promise of easy money to realize she had been duped into porn.

At first, she was told she would be in a music video, then that she'd be an extra in a strip scene. Sit in the background and smile, she recalls being told. All for an easy $100. Instead, the teen beauty queen soon found herself having sex on camera with a man nearly twice her age — a man who would be accused of murder.

"I was manipulated," says Amber, now 18 years old. "They were putting digits in my face and throwing a good-looking guy at me. I was 15 and surrounded by temptation. It messed up my whole life."

Broward Sheriff's Office

Porn star John Snavely was fired after it was revealed he had sex with a minor on- and off-set.

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More About

• John Snavely
• Jeffrey W. Greenberg
• Olivier Caudron
• Pornography
• Sexual Offenses

Amber (not her real name) isn't alone. At least two other underage girls have appeared in films for Miami porn mogul Jeffrey Greenberg in the past three years, according to court and police records. Amber says the real number might be much higher.

Technically, of course, this is child pornography, and making it could carry up to ten years in prison. But for Greenberg, that risk appears to be just the cost of doing business. A certified public accountant who has never been convicted of a crime, he has become one of the biggest players in porn over the past decade. As manager or director of Miami's two biggest sex studios, BangBros and Reality Kings, he presides over an estimated $18 million empire. His name is behind scores of websites specializing in everything from MILFs to Latinas to something titled Team Squirt. And because his companies film thousands of women per year, he is almost single-handedly responsible for South Florida's emergence as an epicenter of adult film.

When underage girls such as Amber get pulled into this vortex of vice, lawyers for Reality Kings or BangBros sometimes pay them to shut up, police and court rec­ords show. She won't divulge how much she received because she's afraid of losing the money, but her anger is audible in her carefully chosen words. "What they did to me was very, very wrong."

Neither Greenberg nor his attorneys would speak to New Times about claims by Amber and the other two girls. "BangBros takes age verification procedures very seriously," a spokeswoman told New Times.

Amber's nightmare began in January 2011. She was still in junior high, but the cute Cuban-American already looked far older than 15. Her dark hair spilled over a curvy frame, which the outgoing teen frequently flaunted in bikinis and tight dresses.

Her family wasn't so much broken as never formed in the first place. Less than a year after she was born in 1995, her 22-year-old, unmarried mother accused Amber's father of domestic violence. Seventeen months later, she sued him for paternity.

With her single mother working all the time, Amber was raised by her grandparents near Jackson Memorial Hospital. But the elderly couple's quaint apartment couldn't contain her. She began going to whatever clubs would let her in. It was the dark side to her beauty pageants, in which she would parade around in bathing suits and flash Vaseline smiles. During a trip to the now-defunct downtown nightclub Mia, a man named Radrico gave Amber an older woman's driver's license. It opened a Pandora's box of premature adulthood.

In Miami, it seems the difference between clubbing with friends and filming porn is a fake ID and a sleazy dude. The latter was named Andy Bombino. He was a short 19-year-old with curly hair and a chin-strap beard that made him look like a leprechaun. In 2010, he was arrested for pot possession.

It's unclear whether Bombino knew Amber was only 15, but in interviews with police she described him as "a friend." It was Bombino, she later told detectives, who found a self-described "talent recruiter" named Teddy Cubillos online.

It wasn't difficult. Cubillos has at least five Facebook profiles featuring different spellings of his name and eerie, unsmiling pictures of him next to celebrities including Pitbull and Ricky Martin. All five sites are flooded with status updates asking for female extras for mysterious shoots and music videos.

On January 27, 2011, Bombino dropped off Amber and two friends — one of them age 17 — at a red-and-beige warehouse near Miami International Airport. They were met by Cubillos, who cast a cursory glance at her stolen ID, according to a police report. He then handed the girls over to Venetian Productions, a company contracted by BangBros to shoot porn for its websites. Amber signed a "performer agreement," another sheet titled "records keeping for models," and a W-9 under her assumed identity. Except for the tax form, all the documents were cosigned by Venetian Productions producer Amy Carroll. (Carroll hung up when contacted by New Times. Cubillos did not respond to repeated requests for comment, and Bombino could not be reached.)

Amber's first shoot was for a website called Haze Him. "It started off being college videos, like tailgating and stuff. It wasn't even sexual," she says. She made $100, went home, and returned six days later. The next time was different, however. She found herself in a room with dozens of other women, some of whom looked even younger than she. Someone passed around pizza. And then the hard-core porn began.