A Women's Memoir of Sex, Scandal & Seduction

I was interviewed and asked if it was harder for a woman to get ahead in business? I laughed, “Are you kidding? I love being a woman. Sex inequality? Yes! Absolutely - it’s such an advantage!” This might have been a man’s world, but it was directed in many ways by the women.

Wolf of Wall Street in the sex biz - Sometimes real life is so absurd,

it’s hilariously funny, and you just can’t make this stuff up.

The story starts in the year 2000, a time when men around the world have completely lost their minds as they discover naked girls on the Internet. Young college tech geeks who are writing the future of our entire online universe: how to deliver super-fast porn; how to chat live with a naked girl; and how to stretch a guy’s wallet ten days from Sunday. We’re in the middle of an “Adult Internet Expo.” I’m well known in the industry, not as my sexy scream-queen alter ego, but as a major mogul, the supplier of naked pics to almost every site out there.

Just how did a cute young British girl end up running with the wolves? The story cuts back to my sexy pic biz in the 80s with characters - Guccione, Hugh Hefner, Larry Flynt and the likes - to the 1-900 number phone biz, to the birth of the Internet, through the dot com explosion and its ultimate demise. A mind-blowing exposé of what was really going on behind the scenes. The technology we take for granted today, social media and the way we transact business on the Internet was all founded in porn. This follows the crazy characters who created it and the outrageous stories that are so funny, it’s hard to believe they’re true. The extremes to which men will go to make money and get laid are so absurd, they will have you laughing your ass off.

At 19, a UK Model, I fall into the Hollywood wannabe actress scene. But beneath this petite blonde coy exterior is a feisty little entrepreneur. I start dating a photographer who shoots for a nudie magazine. When he clears out his “trash,” I proceed to fish out the contents and sell it for $30,000! My enterprise expands as I get UK photographers to shoot nude pics I can sell in the US. The first editor I meet is one of the few women:

I am sitting in her office reception when suddenly a door opens, and the strangest sight appeared. A very tall lady in pumps, stockings and a miniskirt, carrying a small little man on her back, jogged across the reception. The man bounced like a little backpack on her back, screeching the most bizarre erotic noises.

“That’s Yvonne,” the receptionist said, like nothing was out of the ordinary.

Yvonne promptly dropped the little man, who quickly scurried off through the opposite door.

“Hi, you must be Gail” Yvonne said, as I tried not to look too shocked. “That was one of my art guys; gets a piggy-back ride as a treat. It gets him off. How was your trip in?”

“Err...great thanks.”

I started buying out back libraries, and while other 20 yr-olds were spending money on makeup and handbags, I was buying out all the material from Penthouse and the likes, going back to the sixties. Pretty soon, I owned The Largest Erotic Library in the World.

Enter phone sex company. Their backers are a bunch of “old-school New Yorker types.” It wasn’t until years later that I realized they were a well-known mob family. I’m out with the Italian founding fathers, who are trying to understand their investment:

“And what do the girls talk about?” Tony asks, confused. “I mean, do the guys really get off from these calls?”

“Well actually, you’d be surprised. A lot just talk about boring stuff, like shopping for their mother,” I tell him.

“What?!!!” Big Tone scrunches his face in disbelief.

“Yeah, some of them just want someone to talk to.”

“Yo, Micky, is this right? Some of these phone sex calls are about shopping?!” Tony shouts across the bar.

“We don’t care what they talk about, as long as their credit cards go through,” Micky replies.

“Okay Gail. Let me get this straight,” Tony continues, trying to wrap his head around it. “Some geezer calls a phone sex number and pays like a dollar a minute to talk about shopping!!!” Tony’s shaking his head in disbelief.

“Yeah. But more like three dollars a minute,” I correct him.

“What da fuck! Joey, have you heard this, some guy calls a phone sex line and talks about shopping with his mother, and we’re getting like three dollars a minute!!!”

I’m now running all over the world setting up phone lines for the mob and making them millions! I’m in mass nudie pic production and start my own break-out success: Barely Legal magazine.

In between the insane business stories, I share my personal love life, where I show I’m just as vulnerable as most women when it comes to love. I throw in some spicy details and the occasional girl–girl model experience. And my earlier modelling experiences, where I left some guy handcuffed to a dungeon set wearing a school girl uniform and frilly panties, and the many bizarre Hollywood casting sessions I ended up in.

Meanwhile I was a wannabe mainstream actress staring in numerous B-Movies and manoeuvring the Hollywood casting couch

Go To B-Movie Archive

Everything changed in 1993 when a client wanted to license;

THE RIGHTS TO USE IMAGES ON THE INTERNET

I’m sitting on a library of over one million images, and I owned them outright. Overnight the value of my library increased exponentially. But some just stole my images. This brings me to file the first ever Internet Copyright Lawsuit. The judge granted me $1.8 million! And a piece of paper setting legal precedence on the Internet! My business model changed from licensing images to making more suing people who stole them!

Gail Thackray | Running With Wolves | Book Back Cover

Life seemed good, until a bank “error” in the amount of $60 million a month with my name on it!

The FBI wanted to know where the $60 mill a month was going. How come I didn’t get a whiff of this money? The story broke on the front of The New York Times. A famous crime family had been taken down, and my guy Micky was taking the rap. My life flashed before me.

I pick myself back up and make a deal to sell my library to Playboy. It’s the mainstream dot com boom, and a new wave of craziness has arrived. I forge a deal at Yahoo to reroute their entire “adult” searches through my office, and as the traffic explodes, we scramble to get banks of servers! The tech race is on! A little internal politics going on at Playboy; and my deal goes in toilet.

Fed up with the adult players, I jump into bed with mainstream billionaire movie producer Jay. Real bucks to buy real traffic and take my company to a whole new level! It’s a money-churning machine and a match made in heaven. That is, until I decide to literally jump into bed with him. I still haven’t learned that mixing business and pleasure can get a tad bit complicated.

It’s a new roller coaster when Larry Flynt hires me to run his company.

Larry was probably the most uncouth man I have ever dealt with. Didn’t bother me much. Certainly, after all my experiences as a model and the whole Hollywood actress casting couch scene, I didn’t seem to have much in the way of boundaries in the shock department. Larry and I were having lunch at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. This was our regular meeting spot to go over business deals. As I arrived and sat down, Larry held up his index finger and middle finger together, running them under his nose and taking in a deep sniff.

“Hmmmm, ah, yes,” he sighed deeply, with a huge grin from ear to ear. “Not gonna ever wash these fingers. That was some good pussy licking!” he proudly announced.

I rolled my eyes and sat down.

Husband number two is taking the reins on my company, going a bit over the top on suing people using his credentials at the FBI to force creative settlements. Deals look great when he’s on his up coke high, but on the drug down slope, he’s getting my company into all kinds of sticky situations. While I’m running Larry Flynt’s shop, my company profits are going up my husband’s nose.

Add in actor Tom Sizemore, who’s moved into my guest house along with all his Hollywood bad-boy friends that are over pulling up a lawn chair to watch the nudey shoots going on. And a few other crazy stories, like trying to sell back the naughty phone sex pics of Mr. Newspaper Billionaire’s wife from the modelling she did for me that ended up in phone sex ads for the mob.

It’s a wild sexy ride that’s slightly out of control, and my coked-up husband is on a drug-induced rampage. It all ends rather dramatically, with him being taken off in handcuffs.

I have a midlife crisis, do a 180, and pack away my multimillion-dollar library to become a spiritual guru. Yeah…totally true. My clients have gone from 90 percent men to 90 percent women, and I’m travelling the world as a speaker, empowering women. My adult sex biz is behind me, and no one knows the true story of my background…that is, until I wrote this book.

Through all this insanity, I’ve managed to be a mom and have a normal family side, blessed with three stunningly beautiful daughters, all of whom have become successful in their own right: my oldest, a sought-after artist who happens to be one of the last-ever Playboy Playmates.

Skip forward to 2017. I am awoken in the middle of the night to a massive explosion. A high voltage tower has blown up right above the ranch, and my house is surrounded by a 500-foot wall of fire. Running for our lives, burning lumber falling all around us, we barely escape. At the end of the book, an unbelievable twist of fate closes this story forever. But, I don’t want to spoil the ending…you’ll have to read the book!

For more information contact Gail Thackray wolves@gailthackray.com