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Amy & Joey: Crime Pays In Big Way

Their saga breeds money for many

By Craig Gordon | Staff Writer

November 22, 1993

The Amy Fisher case was just one week old when the first person stepped up to cash in.

Days after Mary Jo Buttafuoco was shot and critically wounded on her doorstep in May, 1992, a Long Island man came forward with a revelation tailor-made for tabloid TV, saying he had paid for sex with Fisher three times and that he had a secretly made videotape of one of his encounters with her to prove it.

"A Current Affair" reportedly paid the man about $8,000 for the sexy 14-minute videotape snippet, and the scramble to scoop up secret tapes, confessions-for-cash, exclusive story rights and quickie-movie deals was off and running.

Today, 18 months later, Fisher is in prison, Joey Buttafuoco is in jail for having sex with an underage Fisher - and the show-biz machine that sprung up around the case is still churning along at high speed.

The Amy and Joey saga spawned three made-for-television movies (with negotiations under way for a fourth), two books and a slew of tabloid-TV and talk-show appearances - all of which have generated countless millions of dollars for a long list of participants in the case, lawyers, moviemakers, TV networks, TV shows and publishing houses. It's impossible to say exactly how much money is involved.

Among the key players, the Buttafuocos appear to be the major beneficiaries of the whole phenomenon, a media and entertainment feeding frenzy that many say is unprecedented, even by the standards of sexy true-crime cases. The Buttafuocos are involved in deals reportedly worth upwards of $1 million. Convicted felon Amy Fisher, on the other hand, is barred from receiving any profit related to her crime.

Behind the big money deals are the more unlikely beneficiaries. These lesser branches of the Amy money tree range from a Manhattan woman who received well-paying modeling jobs after calling Joey Buttafuoco a "snake" on the "Donahue" show, to an entrepreneur who made about $100,000 from an Amy-Joey comic book, and even to an Amy look-alike who pocketed $25 for showing up at a birthday party and re-enacting the shooting with a water gun.

"The media has the power to take the most insignificant case in the country," said Buttafuoco's former attorney, Marvyn Kornberg, "and create mega-bucks for the participants."

But it's not been purely a matter of a spectacular case generating profits. At key points in the case, the media, and the rush to benefit financially, affected its course. Fisher was freed from jail on bail when a production company put up $60,000 to buy her exclusive rights, money that was used toward a $2-million bail bond. While she was out on bail, Fisher was secretly videotaped by a former boyfriend, Paul Makely, who reportedly was paid between $50,000 and $100,000. In the videotape, Fisher makes statements that prosecutors decided destroyed her credibility as a witness and made it impossible to prosecute Buttafuoco for statutory rape at the time. Then, after Buttafuoco's repeated denials on TV, new witnesses came forward, leading to Buttafuoco's indictment in March.

"A sentence of six months in prison is unheard of for the anachronistic crime of statutory rape. I mean, people don't go to jail for having sex with 16-year-olds," said Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor who has handled high-profile cases.

These developments - caused by the convergence of tabloid-TV shows coming of age at a time when a real-life sex-and-violence potboiler was erupting at their doorsteps - have raised questions by legal scholars about how the new incarnation of tabloid-TV and checkbook journalism can skew cases. While publicity has always been a factor in high-profile cases, the Fisher case - in which some of the media became not just objective observers but, at times, active newsmaking participants - has caused concern that witnesses or jurors could be tainted by big-dollar offers to tell their story.

Yet one spokesman for the granddaddy of the tabloid TV shows, "A Current Affair," says the shows are here to stay - so the system had better get used to it. "This is going to become part of the fabric of this society," said Ed Burns, a spokesman for "A Current Affair." "If, in fact, people are being paid to sell the rights to their story before prosecution occurs, then those events are going to have to be factored into the criminal justice process."

It was clear from the beginning that as this real-life suburban soap-opera developed, so would the deals. Less than a month after the shooting, Fisher's attorney, Eric Naiburg, announced that he would offer Amy's exclusive story in exchange for anyone paying her $2-million bail. In July, KLM Productions, a small partnership headed by a Smithtown doctor, took Naiburg up on the offer. Since then, the company has sold the rights for a book, "Amy Fisher: My Story," which reportedly went for $200,000 to $250,000, and also sold Fisher's rights for an NBC-TV movie. Phillip Levitan, president of KLM Productions, wouldn't say how much the company earned from the Fisher story or what kind of royalties are involved. Naiburg stresses that neither he nor Fisher has made any money off the deals.

Just after Fisher was released on bail, the Buttafuocos sold their rights to Tri-Star Pictures for a TV movie about their story in a deal that could be worth as much as $1 million. Sources say "A Current Affair" paid $500,000 for exclusive rights to interview the Buttafuocos as Joey went off to jail, with $250,000 going to Mary Jo Buttafuoco and the rest being split between the family's attorney, Dominic Barbara, and taxes. And Barbara said he is negotiating another TV movie, a book telling Mary Jo's story and a magazine article, though he won't provide details.

Money makes money, and after the major players got their share, the profits for the entertainment industry began to roll in. The three major television networks each ran a Fisher movie. Such movies cost about $2.8 million to make, and by selling advertising time ranging from $120,000 to $150,000 per 30-second spot, the movies netted the networks anywhere from $300,000 to $500,000 for NBC to as much as $1.2 million for ABC, industry insiders estimate.

The book that came from Fisher's bail money, "Amy Fisher: My Story," may have grossed $2.2 million since its April publication, industry sources estimate. And People magazine writer Maria Eftimiades earned more than $100,000 for selling the rights to her book to NBC for the Fisher movie - more than what she was paid to write it, sources say. Eftimiades won't discuss figures but said, "I`m not going to quit my day job."

Even the more traditional media saw the effects of the case. Fred Bellise, Long Island circulation manager for Newsday, said he normally expects to see a circulation jump of 4,000 to 5,000 papers on a day when a big Amy Fisher story is on the cover. But that doesn't translate into big money for the paper, he said. A circulation blip - which comes in newsstand sales - doesn't affect the paper's overall circulation or sell more ads. "When we go up 5,000 papers, we only make about $150 in revenue," he said. "That's peanuts."

There are countless other minor recipients from the Fisher fallout, from Fisher's camera-happy "john" to Bonnie Miller, a Buttafuoco neighbor who reportedly was paid $16,000 for a secret audiotape of Mary Jo Buttafuoco after the shooting, to Makely.

And an Amy cottage industry sprung up as well. Joseph Mauro, 28, of Northport, a recent law school graduate, estimates he made more than $100,000 on a comic book chronicling the saga.

Paula Fishman, 31, of Manhattan, who called Buttafuoco a "snake" on the "Donahue" show, later signed a modeling contract with Plus Models that has landed her two modeling jobs, one for a spaghetti-sauce ad and one modeling lingerie. She won't say how much she made but estimates that one modeling job paid her enough to take 10 friends out for a night of dinner and dancing in Manhattan. And while she's not planning to give up her career as a sales representative for an MRI center, a taste of the modeling life showed her that's where the big money is.