If Damon Runyon had been writing about porn producer/director Nicholas Steele, he might have referred to Steele as Pay ‘Em Later Nick.

A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of breaking bread with one of the former contract girls for Bluebird USA. I say former because she was contemplating suing the company because they weren’t paying her. Neither were the other contract girls having an easy time of being compensated.

Here’s the problem. Bluebird’s owner Paul Chaplin was over in England doing his thing while Bluebird’s landlord, Steele, was overseeing the Las Vegas operation.

Bluebird was already showing signs of wear and tear. Once located in Porn Central, Bluebird, reputed to have “deep pockets” moved to Vegas to “downsize” its operations. Except Steele, who drives a Mercedes and lives in a gated community wasn’t downsizing.

As track & field goes, the bulky Steele who’s been in the business since the early Nineties was never known in porn circles for the hundred yard dash to the checkbook.

In an eBook which you can find on the Internet, Rev. Robert Billman in Chapter 37 of “From Preacher to Porn” states as much. Billman says that his daughter Christianna had gone into a partnership with Steele. She had worked for Steele as a makeup artist and set designer.

“Like a lot of people he [Steele] had some good points, Billman writes.

“But they were balanced out by his jerk side. It was a love/hate relationship between the two of them. He loved her and she hated him,” Billman continues.

“He lived with her awhile, they were always fighting. NO one in the family liked him. He was going through a divorce. I guess his wife didn’t like him, either.

“He did have talent as a porn director and made some pretty good pictures. His budgets were three times as much as [Cash Markman’s] were. But, from the time I met him, I got complaints from people that worked for him, that he took forever to pay them.”

That sounds like Steele’s M.O. The same which ultimately brought down his company Ultimate Pictures.

In March of 2011, Bluebird had big marketing plans. They brought in Kelli Roberts from LukeFord.com to head up their Internet marketing division. The company wanted to work on branding the girls. And Roberts, known for her Internet savvy, discretion and common sense seemed like a likely candidate.

The plan was to build micro-sites to promote the Bluebird movies and more micro-sites to promote each of the performers. A budget was drawn up and it was determined that by June or July, August at the very latest, ads would be running on various porn URL’s to establish momentum for Bluebird’s entries come awards time.

So by the end of last year, the idea was that you’d be seeing Bluebird promos all over the porn industry Internet. The saturation bombing sounded like a good idea. Didn’t happen. Part of which, judging by the passage in the Billman tome, Steele likes to take care of himself, first.

An illustration is provided if you go back to a shoot from 2000. Steele had taken a bunch of porn performers to Venezuela including John Decker, Dale Dabone, Evan Stone, Rita, Faltoyano, Jewel Valmont [Ava Vincent] and Brianna Banks.

The movie titled Emerald Rain for Adam & Eve was the product of that trip.
Depending whom you talked to it was like the Bataan death march. With the exception of Steele being fanned by natives while hot and sweaty performers scrambled for eatable food.

I’m not coming up with that hyperbole on my own. It was documented on Luke Ford’s old gossip site in an article titled “Welcome to the Jungle”.

One of the performers e-mailed Ford and detailed a pretty grim portrait…

Read the entire story later today at… www.adultcybermart.com/adultfyi/