Update, 2/17/17: Broward Circuit Court Judge Ilona M. Holmes threw out the murder charge against John Snavely Thursday, February 16, 2017, ruling that the circumstantial evidence was not strong enough to proceed. Holmes had noted problems with the case, including the fact that no eyewitnesses were ever found, that Snavely's DNA was not on the murder weapon, and that shoe prints at the scene didn't match Snavely's. "This evidence is not enough," Holmes wrote in her order, according to the Washington Post.

The first thing cops noticed was the footprints. They began near the entrance to the expensive oceanfront townhouse: size-12 sneaker outlines, stamped in blood.

They wound up a flight of stairs to the second floor, across smooth white marble tiles, and around rich leather furniture. They led through the kitchen and past a bloody butcher knife hastily hidden under a throw rug. As police traced the prints to their source, the marks grew bloodier — like a grisly puzzle slowly revealing itself.

Finally, the footprints disappeared up another staircase toward the bedroom. When Broward County Sheriff's deputies pushed open the door, they were brushed back by the fetid stench of death. Samuel Del Brocco lay on the marble in a pool of gore. The pudgy 60-year-old had been stabbed half a dozen times in the chest.

Other than the knife and shoe prints, the only signs left by the murderer were two burnt matches on the armrest of a leather chair. A half-spent marijuana cigarette sat on a dresser near the body, but Del Brocco didn't smoke.

The dead man had been a successful businessman who split his time between Washington, D.C., and South Florida. He had been outgoing and well-liked. Now he was a corpse.

It would be three years before detectives would catch a break in the September 2010 Pompano Beach killing. When they did, they would stumble onto a story even darker than Del Brocco's murder — something more akin to the twisted tales of the Marquis de Sade. It is the story of a porn star stud with an endless appetite for sex, drugs, and human growth hormone; the teenage beauty queen he tortured; and a dead millionaire's dark double life. It's a story of lust, greed, and the most misdirected of American dreams.

John Snavely stood on the deck of the superyacht, all six feet and one inch of him a sex god. Behind him the setting sun blushed between Miami skyscrapers. Around him flitted female porn stars, their unnatural assets packed into bulging bikinis. But all eyes were on Snavely. The 24-year-old was 210 pounds of professional pelvic thrust: a handsome, clean-cut adult film star with a dick to rival Ron Jeremy's. It was the summer of 2011. Snavely was at the pinnacle of South Florida's booming porn business, and he acted like it.

"You'll do well in this industry, man," Snavely said knowingly to a porn recruit, handing him a drink. "You're good-looking. The ladies will love you."

Snavely could afford to be complimentary. He was that rarest of creatures in the ultracompetitive confines of porn: a male performer with a contract. Snavely was one of Bang Bros' biggest stars, pulling in six figures by having sex with half a dozen women every week on camera. His screen name was simply "Champ."

With Miami's top male porn star schmoozing him, the new recruit slugged back his beer and shook Snavely's hand.

"Champ wanted to be big," remembers the recruit, who would sign on to work alongside Snavely for Bang Bros. "The biggest porn star, the biggest partier, the biggest everything."

Snavely's path to porn stardom had begun a year earlier in typical sex-industry style: He was stripping at several gay clubs in his hometown of San Antonio. One night, an older man sidled up to the stage where the young Sylvester Stallone lookalike was gyrating in a baseball hat, sneakers, and underwear.

"Is that thing real?" the man asked, flicking Champ's crotch with his finger. It was. And when the dance ended, the stranger paid Snavely to show him his nine-and-a-half-inch penis. Soon, Snavely found himself talking to the stranger's associate: a South Florida porn recruiter named Justin Caro, better known as Baileey.

Baileey was himself a former gay porn star who now excelled at enticing young hunks from across America into similar careers. Listening to his sales pitch, Snavely was polite but confident, asking questions about how much money he could make in South Florida. "John knew how to sell himself," Baileey says. "Whether it was stripping or porn, he knew what his best attributes were."

It would take several months of flying to San Antonio for Baileey to persuade Snavely to appear in gay porn. Despite dancing for men, Snavely insisted he was straight. But Baileey nonetheless saw in him the makings of a star.

"I've been in the business for 21 years, so I pretty much know what people are looking for," he says. "John had a universal look: good-looking, clean-cut, white guy, no tattoos, well-endowed. That's exactly what the industry wants."

In the end, the offer was too tempting for Snavely — a poor kid from the wrong side of San Antonio — to ignore. He flew to Los Angeles for his first porn shoots. Then he moved to Fort Lauderdale in early 2010, staying in what Baileey called his "model house," a low-slung, three-bedroom home in Searstown.

Baileey signed Snavely to Jet Set Productions. Under the contract, the 23-year-old was required to shoot as many as six scenes a week. Snavely was a natural porn star, Baileey says. "There's more to it than just standing there and having sex," he says. "You have to know how to hold your body and how not to make ugly faces. And you have to stand up to the occasion, of course. But John was always very professional. He was known for going multiple times."

Snavely was "gay for pay," Baileey says, but only to a point. "He wouldn't do oral, and he wouldn't bottom." Adopting the alternate screen name of Joshua Logan, Snavely featured in gay skin flicks such as American Gangbang, Ass and Ladders, Big Dick Mechanics, Pizza Boy Gangbang, and, in perhaps his most famous role, as Ronnie in the porn parody The Jersey Score.

On set, Snavely was every bit the stud. Off set, however, he stayed away from his male co-stars. "John kind of kept to himself when it came to the gay porn," Baileey says. "I think it's awkward for anybody who identifies himself as straight and does gay porn for the money. It does take a toll or weird people out."

So it was no surprise when Snavely left Jet Set after just a year to join Bang Productions, Florida's biggest porn studio. Under his new contract, Snavely would shoot straight porn for popular reality-themed websites such as Bang Bros and the Dancing Bear.

Snavely moved to South Beach and began living large. With years of stripping experience and the physique of an NFL tight end, he was the undisputed star at Dancing Bear, a series of fake reality shows in which a male stripper in a bear outfit has sex with whichever women — bridesmaids, birthday girls, bachelorette partygoers — are lucky enough to have hired him.

"Champ was a porn star," says another friend who worked at Dancing Bear. "He was a good-looking white guy with a big dick. Girls flocked to him. You know? He was the only guy, to this day, where girls would line up like ten or 12 deep for him. Now, mind you, the girls are getting paid to suck dick, but still. None of the rest of us had that."

At Bang Bros, Snavely made slightly less than he had shooting gay porn. But he made up for it by stripping at clubs in Miami and Fort Lauderdale. Between the two jobs, he could make $4,000 a week. He sent $500 a month to his mom back in San Antonio, but spent the rest almost as soon as he earned it.

"He loved to spend money, man," says the friend from Dancing Bear. "Watches, shoes, clothes, name-brand shit. He felt like a nobody if he didn't have a BMW or some kind of ridiculous car. That was his feeling about himself: He needed it; he deserved it."

Snavely also loved nightclubs like Space or LIV, and adored the drugs that went with them. "He would say, 'I popped ten pills last night!'" the friend recalls. "I was like, 'What? Ten pills? How are you even alive?' And he would snort $100 to $150 of coke every night like it was nothing."

When he wasn't popping pills or performing sex acts on command, Snavely was pumping iron. He worked out at David Barton Gym on the Beach and, later, at Gold's Gym in Hialeah, ingesting copious amounts of HGH to fuel his workouts.

"He was a perfectionist," says the friend, who, like others in the porn industry, spoke to New Times on the condition of anonymity. "He always wanted to be better, bigger, stronger."

Snavely also chased women, whether it was dating porn stars off set — defying industry rules — or girls he met around Miami. "This guy got more sexual attention from females and males than anyone I've ever known," says the friend, noting that Snavely sometimes slept with a different woman every day of the week — and that was on top of shooting porn. "How can you develop as a person when you are getting that much attention?

"Champ had a compulsive personality, whether it was sex, drugs or money," the friend continues. "He wanted all the trappings of success, and he didn't feel good if he didn't have them."

When things were going well, Snavely bragged to strangers about having sex for a living and bought friends drugs, drinks, and concert tickets to deadmau5 — his favorite musician. "He was a wild man when he went out," says a porno cameraman who often filmed Snavely. "If you've watched Jersey Shore and seen those kids go crazy, you know what I mean."

When Snavely later moved to an apartment in Edgewater, he would get so drunk and high that he'd break furniture or jump off his fourth-floor balcony into the swimming pool 30 feet below.

But when things didn't go his way, he could flash a frightening side. When one female co-star complained to the director that Snavely was rude and self-centered, Snavely snapped, unleashing a string of expletives. His mood could change from cheery to overcast in an instant. When asked about his childhood, for example, he would suddenly clam up.

"Champ was a great person," says one friend. "But he had a dark side."

With every scene, every money shot and fade to black, Snavely felt a little surer that he'd escaped the streets of San Antonio. But the ghosts of his childhood would follow him to Florida, haunting him until the night he met Samuel Del Brocco.

John William Snavely was born February 9, 1987, into what can generously be described as a shit situation. Not much is known about his father, other than that he was never around. What little is known about his mother isn't good.

Lisa Johns was a train wreck. When John was just 8 years old, his older brother, Justin Johns, called cops to report their mom was trying to break into the air-conditioning to huff the Freon inside. When Justin tried to stop her, Lisa Johns beat him with a stick until police arrived.

It was far from her first arrest. A year earlier, she had been busted for making "terroristic threats." And when John was just 12, his mother abandoned him in the parking lot of their apartment complex to go on a bender. The binge ended when a cop spotted Johns slamming into the curb of Bitters Road. When a police officer tried to pull her from her car, she tried to run him over before speeding off in her badly damaged vehicle.

When Johns was finally caught, she was dragged from her car smelling of booze and calling the cop a "motherfucker," "queer," and "faggot." Then she told the officer to "suck my dick" and said that "my cock's bigger than yours."

With their father nowhere in sight and their mom frequently in jail, John and his brother Justin learned to fend for themselves. Police records show Justin paid the family's bills by selling drugs, at least until his first arrest in 2001. He was sentenced to two years in prison. Without his older brother around, John took up Golden Gloves boxing. The pastime helped protect him in the poor, dusty neighborhoods of San Antonio, and also gave rise to his later reinvention as Champ.

John's other pastime, however, was petty crime. The offenses ranged from ridiculous to absurd. When Snavely was 17 years old, security guards spotted him and friend Kevin Hullender breaking into a parked car. When the rent-a-cops chased Snavely, he dove into some bushes and took off his pants. Police soon arrested him, retrieved his pants, and discovered a screwdriver, pot, and alprazolam in the pockets. Hullender had cocaine and counterfeit cash on him. Snavely was sentenced to two weeks in jail.

Two days before Christmas of 2006, Snavely and two friends spilled out of a Cadillac and onto the streets of downtown San Antonio. Snavely stopped on the side of the street to pee. When a passerby complained, Snavely whipped a collapsible baton out of his back pocket and threatened to beat the man.

When cops caught up with the trio a few blocks later, Snavely called a Hispanic officer a "fucking spic" and told him, "Your fucking dick is small like that China man [partner of yours]." He then asked, "Where the niggas at, because you punk bitches don't have it on me.

"I'm going to go to your house and I'm going to fuck your wife," Snavely snarled at the Hispanic cop before adding that he was a light heavyweight boxer and would "kick your asses." (This time, Snavely got 100 days behind bars.)

He racially insulted nurses at a hospital, regularly got into fights with Hispanics, and led cops on a comical 2008 chase. Police arrived at his apartment to arrest Snavely on an outstanding pot charge, but he pretended not to be home. Then his cell phone went off in the attic and Snavely fell through the ceiling. (Charges were dropped when he went to prison for another crime.)

But Greg Hullender, whose two sons were both arrested alongside Snavely, says John simply grew up on the wrong side of what could be a rough city. "Honestly, he's one of the people I preferred to have my sons hang around with," Hullender says with a Texas twang. "He was very intelligent. He wasn't one of those kids who talked like he was black or whatever. He was very well-spoken.

"He was very good with his fists too," Hullender says. In San Antonio, that came in handy. "He was gentle, but if you did something to hurt him or one of his friends, he would take care of you right quick."

That dangerous side would be of use when Snavely started stripping in San Antonio. He began by dancing for women but switched to stripping for men because it paid better. Soon he was offering "private dances" to male customers. He would go with them to their homes, leading them to believe they'd get more than a dance. Then he'd demand $500 up-front, do a short striptease, and leave abruptly. What could the suckers do? Snave­ly was 210 pounds of muscle, and they certainly couldn't call the cops. It was a scheme Snavely would repeat in South Florida — with deadly consequences.

Samuel Del Brocco stepped off US Airways flight 1703 on a sweltering Saturday morning in September 2010 and slipped seamlessly into his second life. For several years, the former 1970s pop singer and self-made millionaire had flown to South Florida to act out his secret fantasies. He would land at Fort Lauderdale Airport and flip a switch, transforming from Samuel Del Brocco the straight D.C. socialite into man on a mission for gay sex.

This morning, the first thing Del Brocco did was pick up his gray 2009 Porsche Carrera and drive it to a car wash in Pompano Beach. He then headed to his beachfront townhouse, which his maid had spent the past two days polishing.

Del Brocco ate dinner by himself at Kelly's Landing in Fort Lauderdale around 8 p.m. Then he set about buying some drugs. Between 9 and 10 p.m. he met a local dealer near a Burger King at 17th Street and Federal Highway and bought cocaine and pot.

Next, Del Brocco did the rounds at his favorite strip clubs. At first he was disappointed that his preferred dancers weren't performing. But at Boardwalk on North Andrews Avenue, Del Brocco spotted someone even better taking the stage: a six-foot-one stud whom the announcer introduced as Champ.

How, exactly, John Snavely and Samuel Del Brocco started talking that night isn't clear. But Broward County detectives believe Del Brocco plied the young stripper with coke and weed while at the club. Then, sometime around midnight, Snavely forced his footballer's frame into Del Brocco's Porsche and the two drove back to the millionaire's Pompano Beach pad.

They had never met before, but both had experience with such late-night liaisons. Authorities believe the evening played out like this: Snavely demanded $500 in cash up-front before numbing himself on more of Del Brocco's booze, cocaine, and marijuana. Del Brocco then demanded the younger man start dancing.

Maybe Del Brocco got too touchy for Snavely's liking. Or perhaps the stripper cut his performance short, angering his host. But something sparked an argument between them. Snavely stomped out of the bedroom. When he got to the downstairs kitchen, he paused. He could easily keep going, down the stairs, into the garage, and home. Instead, he pulled open drawers until he found what he was looking for: a long butcher's blade.

Snavely burst into the bedroom. He thrust the knife into Del Brocco's chest, sinking its blade over and over again until the old man collapsed near his bed, according to an arrest affidavit. As Snavely walked back downstairs, his size-12 Nikes left a bloody trail. It wasn't until he reached the kitchen that he realized his hand still gripped the murder weapon. Snavely wiped off the knife, threw it under the rug, and walked into the night.

When the popular Del Brocco didn't answer his phone the next day, people in D.C. became worried. Carlos Larraz feared that his diabetic friend had suffered a seizure, and called the cops. When they arrived Sunday evening, Broward Sheriff's deputies found the front door ajar.

Suspicion initially fell on four friends Del Brocco had named in his will, but all had alibis. So the investigation returned to the evidence left at the scene: the bloody footprints and trace amounts of DNA collected from the half-smoked joint and a can of Diet Coke. Detectives believed the killer was a male stripper, but the DNA didn't match any known suspects.

It would take cops three years to trace the crime back to Champ. In that time, Snavely would rise to the top of Florida's porn industry. Secretly, however, he would simultaneously descend into a madness made of drugs, jealousy, and his own terrible secrets.

On the surface, Snavely's life was picture-perfect. He had the cars, bling, drugs, and women that he'd always wanted. He had completely become Champ.

But those closest to him saw a shadow descend on Snavely. "The kid was carrying serious weight," says one of his best friends at Dancing Bear. "He wasn't a secretive person, but he was always watching his back. He didn't tell even his closest friends everything, obviously."

Snavely was haunted by other forces as well. He had thought that switching to straight porn would be simple. Instead, his gay porn work followed him wherever he went. He avoided the subject but would explode when confronted about it on set. "The porn world is more judgmental than the normal world," Snavely's friend says. "Champ definitely wished he had never done the gay porn."

Maybe it was sexual self-doubt that drove Snavely's porn exploits. Perhaps it was just the relentless pursuit of cash. Either way, he kept cranking out scenes despite his spiraling drug use and late-night stripping scams. The show had to go on.

Champ had sex with hundreds of women onscreen, often chasing them off-set as well. But one was different from the rest. In January 2011, Snavely showed up to a porn shoot and found himself opposite a buxom brunet with a button nose and beautiful brown eyes. She didn't seem tired or jaded or worn out like the other women. She was fresh. She was a beauty queen.

She was 15 years old.

"John was definitely my first love," says the girl, whom we will call Amber. "This hasn't really been easy for me."

Amber won't say whether she and Snavely had sex on set. (The Broward Sheriff's Office is investigating.) But she will tell New Times about the two years she spent with Snavely: 24 months of jealousy, drugs, and dark secrets.

Despite their unusual first encounter on set, the porn star and the beauty queen had a normal — almost boring — relationship. At least until it went violently awry.

She called him Dragon. He called her Bird. They would spend hours inside Snavely's South Beach apartment, watching movies. For Amber, it was an escape from her wealthy but broken family. For John, it was the closest thing to a normal childhood he would ever get.

Mentally, they were an equal match. But in every other way, Snavely had the upper hand. He was twice her size. And when he left her to go to a shoot or to party on the weekend, she was effectively trapped inside his apartment. At first, her family worried that she'd been kidnapped before grudgingly accepting that she was seeing a porn star.

It wasn't easy dating the Champ. He had sex with other women and stripped for gay men for a living. "He liked the porn, but he always said it would mess us up somehow," Amber says. "He felt like he couldn't be completely faithful to me with his job. He didn't feel right about it. Sometimes it felt like cheating." Eventually, she became convinced he was cheating on her outside of work, too.

"At the end of the day, I knew he loved me," she says. "I thought that was enough. It was stupid." She posted pictures of them eating out at expensive restaurants on Instagram and Facebook.

But jealousy also consumed Champ. He began believing that his underage girlfriend was running around on him, even though she could barely leave his apartment. When he caught her texting another man, he smashed her phone. Five separate times.

"He tried to isolate her so that she couldn't talk to us," says Amber's grandma, a short Cuban woman with highlighted hair and spectacles. "She wouldn't leave him. God knows why, but he drove her crazy."

Fueled by drugs, Snavely's jealousy spun out of control. One night, his flatmate was washing the dishes when Snavely slowly walked into their shared kitchen. The hulking porn star was clutching something dark in his hand. He was somber, almost crying. "I cut off her hair," he mumbled. "I cut off her hair.

"I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry," he said. "I shouldn't have done this. I'm freaking out." Snavely had been interrogating Amber over her supposed infidelities when he suddenly grabbed a pair of scissors and snipped off a swath of her hair, he confessed.

That wasn't the end of the abuse, either. A few months later, the flatmate saw Amber emerge from Snavely's room with dark spots on her face. She tried to disappear inside, but he grabbed her and asked her what had happened. "He burnt me," she said. "He burnt me last night."

Snavely had held a lighter to his knife, then pressed the burning blade to Amber's face, arms, and legs, according to police reports. He was trying to coax a confession from the beauty queen by destroying her looks.

Horrified, the roommate called the cops. But Amber wouldn't cooperate. When the flatmate took her to her grandma's house, Amber instead called Snavely to pick her up. Later that day, the flatmate received a call from the Champ.

"So you're going to the police? That's where we're headed with this?" Snavely shouted.

"He wanted to know if I was trying to fuck his girl or take his shit," the flatmate remembers. "I started freaking out. This dude had chopped off her hair and burnt up her face. Who knew what he was going to do to her? I kept having visions of her being tied up somewhere or dead."

Snavely and Amber lay low for several months, staying in hotels. But the porn star couldn't hide from himself. His drug addiction was getting worse, and the law was creeping ever closer. On December 9, 2012, Snavely and three friends were pulled over in Fort Pierce. Cops found marijuana, Xanax, and amphetamines in the car. Snavely took credit for the drugs, claiming he had a prescription for the pills. While at the police station, Snavely asked for some water, snatched a Xanax, and downed it before cops could stop him.

He was busted again during a similar stop this summer. On June 22, he and one of the same buddies were rolling around South Beach in a gray BMW with the windows down, smoking pot and bumping EDM, when cops caught a whiff. When they stopped him, officers found Snavely literally covered in weed. "The defendant was observed to have loose marijuana on his clothing," the arrest report says. Inside the trunk were "suspect steroids, HGH, and syringes."

Snavely quickly bonded out of jail after each arrest. But the law was on to him. When he was sentenced to probation for the Fort Pierce drug arrest, authorities took a swab of the inside of his cheek before he was released.

On the morning of July 25, Snavely woke up at Amber's apartment after a late night of stripping. He drove south to his Edgewater apartment, parked his BMW, and poured himself a bowl of cereal. Suddenly, a staccato burst of fists began pounding on his front door. Before Snavely could get up from his couch, cops smashed the lock and swept into his living room with their guns drawn.

After three years, Samuel Del Brocco's murder had caught up to Snavely. The cheek swab from his drug arrest had been entered into a statewide database, where it matched DNA from the Coke can and half-smoked joint left at the Pompano Beach apartment.

The Champ had finally been knocked down.

For the first time in his life, John Snavely is not ready and raring to go when the camera comes on. Before lowering his large frame in front of a Broward County Jail videocam, the imprisoned porn star hesitates offscreen. He takes a comb from his pocket and brushes back his black hair, which has grown longer than Champ's customary buzz cut. Then he places a huge pair of plastic glasses over his dark eyes and sits down for his only interview.

"Everyone thinks I'm a killer just because my life was taboo," he says into a telephone receiver. "All I have to say is that I'm innocent."

True to his reputation, Snavely is charming and polite. He says stripping and porn were his tickets to a better life. "I would go to the gym and see guys with better cars and ask them how they got it," he says. "I worked two jobs to help out my mom and grandma. But what do you do when the money just doesn't add up? I'm not a bad person. I'm not a drug dealer. I'm not the kind of guy who carries a gun. I'm just a guy who was presented with an opportunity to make money and took it."

He claims that Baileey "tricked" him into gay porn and that when he tried to back out of his first gay shoot, he was told he'd be blackballed from the industry. "Baileey manipulated me," he says. ("There's not much to be tricked about," counters Baileey. "You can't be surprised into sticking your dick in somebody's ass.") Snavely says his drug problems stem from self-medicating in order to perform onscreen. And the police report about torturing Amber is ridiculous, because "I would never put my hands on a woman."

As for the murder, Snavely won't say whether he ever met Del Brocco. But he offers several other scenarios, starting with the suggestion that one of Del Brocco's employees killed the old man for his money. As for how his DNA could have ended up at the crime scene, Snavely points to the $25,000 reward for Del Brocco's killer. A rival porn star could have stolen his semen from a porn shoot and put it at the Pompano Beach apartment, he says. Or the drug-dealing husband of a woman Snave­ly was seeing could have set him up.

Broward detectives say the answer is much simpler: Snavely did it. His DNA is all over the crime scene. His footprints match those in Del Brocco's apartment. Snavely danced at Boardwalk that night. His fingerprints were found on the passenger door of Del Brocco's Porsche. And during a police interview, even Snavely "seemed to question himself about whether or not he could have been involved in the victim's death and not remember it due to drug use," according to the arrest affidavit.

News of Snavely's arrest for second-degree murder didn't exactly stun South Florida's porn community, either. Some had heard about what he did to Amber. Others simply knew him as a party boy who could do anything while on drugs.

His coworkers at Dancing Bear were sickened but not surprised by the arrest. "Champ told me once that he had been sexually abused as a kid," says one Dancing Bear performer. Snavely was "in denial" about his own bisexuality, the friend adds, and could easily have been set off by Del Brocco's demands for sex.

Given his charm, it's not surprising that Snavely has his defenders. Both of the women he was dating at the time of his arrest visit him in jail, where he is awaiting trial. One wakes up at 7 a.m. on Sundays to ensure she's the first (and only) visitor.

What is surprising is that the other one is Amber, the woman Snavely abused for two years. "I am definitely convinced that he is innocent," she says. Amber regularly takes to porn sites to defend Snavely's reputation in the comments section.

"You think about a porn star, a stripper, and you think he's the bad guy," she says. "But I do [beauty] pageants. Do you really think that a girl who does pageants would be with someone who is as bad as they say? You don't know the guy. You don't know what he's been through. Everyone just talks all this crap about him on the internet, but they don't know his story."

Yet some of the people who know Snave­ly best have also lost faith in him. For years, Greg Hullender defended his sons' best friend against his detractors. But when he and his sons learned about Champ's gay porn career, their perceptions changed. "Whatever happened to him in Florida must have changed him," Hullender says.

Even Snavely admits that his ascent to the top of the South Florida porn industry cost him his soul. Dressed in black and white pinstripes, he lowers his voice and looks over his shoulder when talking about his time in the sex industry. "Talking about that can be dangerous in this place," he tells a reporter.

Snavely says he plans to move back to San Antonio to support his mom as soon as he gets out. He's done with stripping and porn, he says. "At first, you're impressed that they'd pick you to do porn," he says. "But after ten shoots, it gets dull."

Long before his arrest, Snavely felt as if he were losing himself to his onscreen alter ego.

"It became my personality," he says just before the video system shuts off and the jail visit abruptly ends. "I couldn't just be John from Texas anymore. I always had to be Champ, Champ, Champ."