PHOENIX – Many years ago, an attorney friend of mine gave me some sound advice about running an adult business. I’ve carried it with me ever since: “Never piss people off unnecessarily.”

What he meant was, while it’s inevitable an adult business will piss off some people (seeing as how some people sincerely believe porn is a tool of the devil and possibly an Ebola-infected vampire, as well), the business should do what it can to avoid pissing off people who aren’t reflexively angered by porn’s mere existence.

The people porn companies should endeavor not to upset include, but are not limited to, employees of the porn companies themselves, neighboring businesses, local area residents, performing talent (if applicable), random crazy people who like to set things on fire and local law enforcement personnel.

Apparently, nobody gave the same advice to William James Hartwell, who on Friday was convicted of operating a brothel in Phoenix, despite Hartwell’s claim his business was a legitimate adult content production studio.

“All sexual conduct that took place at the studio was for the purpose of exploring and expressing an individual’s sexuality via safe and legal adult content creation,” Hartwell argued in his defense.

That sounds good on paper, but unfortunately for Hartwell, it appears he didn’t take measures to avoid upsetting people who could seriously undermine his defense, including the putative “talent” in his employ.

Several women pleaded guilty to various prostitution-related charges and either testified against Hartwell at trial, provided information to the police, or both. Far worse, Hartwell allegedly sexually assaulted two women who had told him they no longer wanted to be a part of his scheme. (Hartwell was acquitted on one of the charges against stemming from the alleged assaults.)

No matter how you slice the above, it’s hard for me to square it with the way prosecutors have described his enterprise: a “cleverly disguised” brothel.

Maybe they just don’t make clever disguises like they used to, but nothing about this sounds particularly clever to me.

You know what would have been clever on Hartwell’s part? To run his operation like an actual adult business, then let the prosecutorial chips fall where they may if he were ever to be raided by the cops.

For example, instead of having prospective clients respond to an online ad then drive to a gas station from which they would call from a payphone to be given the address of the “studio,” Hartwell could have contracted with adult talent agencies to get male and female talent, then create at least some content that was worthy of commercial distribution.

If he felt legitimate content production was less profitable than charging male clients to have sex with his talent, Hartwell would still have been wise to create something commercially available, even if it was just uploaded to tube sites, simply because it would provide some cover to his less-than-legal side business.

Instead, what Hartwell came up with was a scheme that might fool a small child but wasn’t about to pass the smell test from any prosecutor with enough functioning brain cells to recognize a painfully obvious front operation when he saw one.

Hartwell’s idea for this scheme seemed to be to hide in plain sight, but only after he’d been caught trying to hide. In other words, by taking such a sketchy approach to bringing in customers, he assured any cop who caught a whiff of his business would be suspicious immediately. A porn studio that has its “male talent” call from a fucking gas station to get its address? Sure, that sounds legit.

By the time the sting operation began, and the joint FBI-police task force investigating started planting and recruiting informants among Hartwell’s clients and employees, his goose already was thoroughly cooked. All the informants did was show the cops exactly where to hammer the final nails into his idiotic coffin.

Even if he weren’t accused of being a violent, abusive shitbird on top of being a ludicrously ineffectual criminal, I would have no sympathy whatsoever for this abject cretin, because he’s a living insult to the very notion of cleverly-disguised criminal enterprises, an illicit corporate form for which I have a certain grudging respect.

As Ricky Roma might say, where did this guy learn his trade?

Image: William James Hartwell, from booking photo, 2013.