Sharon Mitchell never told Tony Montana that he has HIV.

Opinion/Editorial

Gene Ross interviewed Tony Montana last week on set of the new film “Flight Attendants”. Tony is working in the crew. Tony starts off by saying he died of AIDS last year. Tony had stopped taking his cocktails and medications and almost died last year. He’s back on his medication and feeling better now.

Tony says he ‘fell off the wagon’ last year, wound up in a coma, was pronounced dead, and woke up weeks later. Tony’s wife, Laurie Holmes/Misty Dawn, was by his side and helped him recover. Laurie was once married to John Holmes before he died from complications caused by AIDS in 1988.

Tony was diagnosed with HIV back in 1999. AIM never notified him. Rocco Siffredi had called him to say how sorry he was after hearing the news. Tony had no idea what he was talking about. Because of Sharon Mitchell and AIM, Tony could have kept on working and infected his costars without ever knowing.

Sharon Mitchell tried covering up what Marc Wallice did in 1998 after he knowingly infected his costars with HIV. The only reason anyone knew anything was because Luke Ford was the first to break the story. She never notified Tony in 1999. But she did notify Darren James in 2004 over the phone he is HIV positive and said they were also releasing his name to the press. Now in 2009, Sharon Mitchell never told anyone in the adult industry that a woman has tested positive for HIV. The only reason Sharon said anything is because the rumors started appearing on the forums.

Sharon Mitchell says AIM handles everything privately unless there’s a widespread problem. While AIM’s administrator Brooke Hunter says this isn’t a major event and the infected performer didn’t work that much at all. So to them it’s no big deal, not a major event, and it’s all kept private unless there’s a widespread danger (goes public). One person infected is one person too many! Everyone in the industry should be told of new infections but were never informed until a week later after only the rumors were first posted on a forum.

So once again we have another case of Sharon Mitchell’s incompetence. Her negligence and greed knows no bounds and she continues being the dark cloud of doom over an entire industry.

You can read Tony’s full story at AdultFYI and also after the jump.

As a porn performer and a human being, Tony Montana’s been down some pretty bad roads. But one of them came to an end, at least so it seemed, June 3rd of last year.

“I died of AIDS,” says Montana. I ran into Montana on Will Ryder’s Flight Attendants set this week where he’s working crew. I ask him to repeat this last statement because the guy I’m talking to is presumably as healthy as the horse that won the last Preakness.

By being back on the cocktail and feeling pretty good again, it’s fair to say Montana is as far removed from a casket a year later as this latest porn HIV episode is from what’s really known about it.

Rumors, gossip. Same as it was with Montana when he himself was diagnosed with HIV back in 1999. The first person to tell him his porn career was over you’d think would have been AIM. Nah. Instead, it was Rocco Siffredi who called to express his regrets at hearing the news. At first, Montana had no idea what he was talking about. He thought Rocco was nuts.

[Montana’s father heard about the news in the LA Weekly.]

But that’s how it was back then. The dead guy was always the last to find out.

“There was a dead pool on me,” Montana recalls.

“That’s why I ran the AIDS Marathon a year later- to prove something.”
Montana feels he needs to do things like this if for nothing else to prove that in his existence and longevity there’s hope.

Sometimes you lose even that, and Montana explains how he “fell off the wagon” last year, wound up in a coma, was pronounced dead, then several weeks later found himself in a hospital bed.

At least this is the way Montana’s telling the story, and I’m only taking notes. I ask him what he thinks of this latest HIV story. As you might expect, this opens the floor to a lot of discussion. Tony’s never been a shrinking violet as far as venturing a opinion or revealing deep truths about himself.

For instance, Montana chuckles remembering an incident involving a former girlfriend and performer Crystal Gold. Gold once told people that Montana ripped her ovaries out. I remember that as being the upbeat part of their insane relationship. However, Montana was more famous for being the suitcase pimp boyfriend of Blondie back in the Eighties.

In fact, Montana had just come across some old school papers of hers back when they were living together. They split up in 1987. Montana recently got in touch with her mother who’s living in Michigan and forwarded them to her. He says Blondie’s got two kids now- a boy and a girl, 8 and 10. As for himself, Montana’s got a 21 year-old stepdaughter who only learned he was in the business when she saw him in a porn movie.

“She was watching one with her boyfriend,” laughs Montana.

“I asked her why she was doing that.”

Montana asks if I remember the time I had him presenting an award at the AVN show.

“I was running from the cops all night,” he laughs. To hear Montana tell it, that was putting it mildly. He’s been in jail for kidnapping, racketeering and international trafficking. With all that activity on his rap sheet and all the bad hombres he’s been involved with, you’d think he’d been through enough scares. But the HIV-thing really put the fear into Montana.

He began his career in porn back in 1979 when he shot for Las Vegas photographer Johnny Costano. Montana remembers a lot of porn performers getting their start first through Costano then moving up the ranks to Jim South and World Modeling.

“Between the gangbangs, orgies, shooting up everything under the sun, doing live sex shows and fucking everything between here and Alaska, it was a big party,” he says.

“You name it, I did it.”

Except the party’s been over for awhile and Montana’s been having nightmares about it for ten years.

Montana thinks the way the whole business is conducted now is for crap, that a girl coming out of high school, is presented a gilded picture of riches without being told she could die from a disease.

“They ought to tell her the real reason why she’s being paid so much money is to take those risks,” he continues.

Montana talks about the time a girl in the business was offered $25,000 to do a five black guy gangbang and asked his advice.

“I told her not to do it- she was from Lincoln, Nebraska- I told her she’d never be able to show her face in Lincoln, Nebraska again if she did it. She wound up on Venice Beach doing drugs.”

“But people think they’re invincible-until it happens to them,” Montana continues.

“We push the envelope in this business. You play, you pay only a lot of the new people don’t know what they’re getting into. Even if a girl only does 10 movies, she’s going to be remembered for it the rest of her life. Then she has to tell her little girl- ‘oh, that’s not me.’”

Then, again, some people don’t seem to be bothered by facts. To illustrate, Montana’s telling this other story about the time he’s in a bar and a girl makes a pass thinking he looks pretty good for an older guy.

“I told her I have HIV, you have to when you’re a public figure,” Montana insists.

“I tell people I’m nuclear.”

Only the girl in the bar wants to fuck Montana just the same and convinced herself it was a turn on knowing he had a deadly disease. Montana swears this is true.

“It’s like fucking with death,” she told him. Montana passed on the opportunity.

Posted in: Brooke Hunter, Darren James, John Holmes, Laurie Holmes, Luke Ford, Marc Wallice, Porn News, Porn Star, Rocco Siffredi, Sharon Mitchell, STDs, Tony Montana