How gay porn star Ryan Idol [pictured] became involved with John Katopodis, a businessman and former member and president of the Birmingham City Council, is provided in this back drop to a story linking Idol to a charity scandal in Birmingham, Alabama:

John Katopodis:

He (Idol) first came to me on the recommendation of Elton John. A state senator with whose family I’m close, his mother in law lives in the same building as Elton John. Years ago I was invited to a progressive dinner. It started in the basement and moved up until we were finally in Elton John’s penthouse where he served chocolate pianos.

Several years later when he starting his AIDS foundation…(convicted Atlanta Mayor) Bill Campbell asked me if I would help. He asked me if I could help Anthony — who he had known apparently in rehab — with some kind of productive work.

Katopodis said he hired Donais to do commercials for Robert Turner Optical, which he owned at the time, but Donais continued to struggle with alcohol.

“He continued to have relapses until he jumped from a New York hotel room and did serious damage to his body,” Katopodis said. “He had a near death experience, a religious conversion. Another mutual friend — John F. Kennedy Jr. — asked me, wasn’t there a way through my You Help Foundation that I could get him some meaning, some structure in his life. I agreed to do that.”

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David Forest:

I first found out about John (Katopodis) from Ryan when Ryan started to talk about his ‘godfather.’ I became Ryan’s manager in 1992, and this guy was already in his life.

All I can say is that John Katopodis has maintained an amazingly close relationship with Ryan Idol for years and years.

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The restraining order

In March of 1996 David Forest filed for a temporary restraining order against John Katopodis in Los Angeles Superior Court. Katopodis said he never knew it was filed, and that he was never served. Forest insisted he had the papers served in Birmingham.

Why did you file a restraining order against Mr. Katopodis?

David Forest:

He (Katopodis) thought I was feeding drugs to Ryan Idol. He though I was in love with Ryan Idol. He started calling and harassing me to the point I got a restraining order.

I was being harassed by John Katopodis. He was calling late at night. He’d harass me on the phone. It was terrible.

After I got arrested in November of ’93 he (Katopodis) decided he would call me up and have a tape recorder and pretend to be a client. He carried on a conversation with me on the phone that he taped and sent to the vice department in LA that was very incriminating for me. It certainly did not help me at all. It was very incriminating.

This guy was out to get me. He was so anti-David Forest to the point that he interfered with my management of Ryan Idol because he didn’t want Ryan to be in the Triple X business. He didn’t want Ryan Idol to be living in LA.

Forest later acknowledged that it might have been a friend of Katopodis who called to set him up:

I ran an escort service called Brad’s Buddies, and that is illegal. You can’t run an escort service in most any state because that’s setting up sex.

He called, asking ‘What does Ryan do?’ ‘What are we going to do sexually?’ I talked freely with this guy. He was taping it, he sent it to the lietenant of detectives.

John was absolutely not a client. He was pretending to be a client.

Katopodis said he took part in a sting, that he urged Los Angeles police to crack down on Forest the way police had just cracked down on Heidi Fleiss.

Forest was a pimp and a drug trafficker. Anthony’s girlfriend — he always had a live-in girlfriend by the way — asked me to intervene because Forest kept providing Mr. Donais, who was in rehab, with drugs. I finally decided when things were not being pushed along like they should, I went to the vice squad in LA and set up a situation where we would once and for all convict this guy.

He said he had a friend, a prominant businessman in Homewood, call up Forest and tape the conversation.

“My role was intimidation,” Katopodis said. “I called him (the police) up and said ‘You’re arresting Heidi Fleiss, but he’s operating a male prostitution rinng and you’re doing nothing about it.'”

Katopodis said the restraining order was likely “his way of trying to debunk my testimony. We were in the courtroom to testify against Mr. Forest when he changed his plea to guilty.”

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Sweet Home Alabama

Forest said Katopodis tried relentlessly to get Idol to move to Alabama, away from him and the porn business. It was a point of contention, of course, because Idol was one of the top two or three stars “of all time” in the male porn business, Forest said. “Ryan Idol will never be forgotten. He is a humongous legend of gay porn.”

At one point in the 1990s Idol did move to Birmingham for a few months:

Katopodis:

“When he moved to Birmingham for a short time it wasn’t far enough away” from the porn world. “People kept coming up to him, recognizing him. He was that big a deal, apparently.”

Forest:

When he (Katopodis) moved him to Birmingham to get him away from me and the business it didn’t work. He had his own apartment but John bugged him to death.” John definitely wanted to help Ryan rehabilitate. He wanted Ryan down there with him. He tried that and it was a disaster.

Ryan took vacations with this guy and everything. I don’t blame Ryan Idol for anything. I have no revenge to get on Ryan Idol, don’t feel he did anything wrong. If I had some man … who claimed to be my godfather I’d hustle him for everything I could get. Nobody ever claimed Ryan Idol wasn’t a hustler.

Katopodis said the two took only one vacation together, a family-style tour of Italy in which Idol took his girlfriend, along with former councilwoman Nina Miglionico, former councilman Jimmy Blake’s wife and several others. Mrs. Blake confirmed the story.

“I was trying to get everybody distracted from their problems,” Katopodis said. “It was a sort of family thing, hardly nude beaches in the south of France. We had an audience with the Pope, a private audience with the Pope.”