EPICANTHUS

Porn Director Chico Wanker Wang and Actress Haley Paige Got a Taste of L.A.’s Adult Entertainment Industry, and It Eventually Killed Them

Since this is a tale oozing from the depths of Southern California’s sleazy porn industry, everything and everyone must be taken with a shot of tetracycline or at least a grain of salt, including me and my BS

—YK

The discovery of the body of Inkyo Volt Hwang (aka pornographer Chico Wanker Wang) in a Morgan Hill motel room Sept. 29 and the death of his wife, 25-year-old Maryam Haley (aka porn star Haley Paige), in a King City motel 37 days earlier has the San Fernando Valley’s porn industry abuzz with rumor and recrimination.

The usual coterie of porn industry hangers-on and self-serving informants has emerged, and the tragic tale of Inkyo and Maryam swells to mythic proportions via weblogs like Reverse Cowboy, Luke Ford Is Back and Adult Video News.

“Wang n’ Haley = Sid n’ Nancy.”

By most accounts, the Haley-Hwang death spiral began this summer. Hwang, 38, was taken into custody by arrested by officers from the LAPD’s West Valley Division in the early morning hours of June 29 and booked on felony assault and kidnapping charges. The alleged victim? Maryam Haley.

But by July 3, Hwang was out of jail, and a month later Inkyo and Maryam were married in Las Vegas. Then, they dropped out of sight, some say to kick drug and alcohol addictions.

So-called adult entertainment insiders insist that Hwang was a fugitive suspected of Haley’s murder and that he committed suicide rather than be apprehended. However, subsequent reports say only that Hwang was with his wife at the time of her death, that he was interviewed by King City police and released.

What he did in the weeks between Haley’s death and his own is not clear. His residence has been reported as being in Woodland Hills and/or Gardena.

Porn Valley chatter in early September speculated he was holed up in San Felipe on Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. But, in fact, he traveled to the Economy Inn in Morgan Hill, an hour’s drive north of King City, on a bus after his car broke down on the highway.

Maryam Irene Haley was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, the child of a biracial couple. Rumors about her parents being cultists, abuse by an uncle and being “entrusted” to live and travel with her father’s acquaintances abound.

After island-hopping the Pacific to New Zealand and Australia with one such an acquaintance, Haley returned to San Diego and was working at a Blockbuster video store when she answered an ad for “nude modeling” to raise rent money. She was 19.

All told, she appeared in nearly 300 adult videos. She directed the adult video Virgin Territories in 2006. She reportedly began living with Hwang in early 2007. Before Hwang’s June 29 arrest, the couple had planned to wed on July 11.

A 1.5 generation (born in Korea, but raised and educated in the U.S.) Korean American, Inkyo Volt Hwang grew up in Manhattan Beach, Calif. In 1991, He earned his undergraduate degree in political science and later a master’s degree in screenwriting from UCLA’s film school.

At age 28, Hwang was charged and convicted of assaulting, kidnapping and raping his longtime Korean American girlfriend. Despite pleas for leniency by the alleged victim, he served two years and two months of a four-year sentence in state prison. He also was ordered to pay about $32,000 in fines and restitution.

Shortly after his release, he stepped into the world of porn for the first time, approaching Extreme Associates’ Robert Zicari for a job. He was hired as an editor and Internet author. There he created a porn gossip website for Luke Ford, a controversial freelance journalist who was credited with breaking the recent Antonio Villaraigosa-Mirthala Salinas extramarital affair story.

Hwang became widely known in the porn industry after taking over the Ford website and writing under the name Chico Wanker Wang, a pseudonym based on Chico Marx, one of the famed Marx Brothers.

Here’s an excerpt of a 2005 interview of an intoxicated Inkyo “Chico Wanker Wang” Hwang by Luke Ford from Ford’s new site lukeisback.com:

Luke: “When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?”
Chico: “I wanted to be a lawyer.”
Luke: “What did your family expect of you?”
Chico: “To be a doctor or a lawyer. It was a Korean family.”
Luke: “What kind of crowd did you hang out with in high school?”
Chico: “I had friends who dicked around. I was drunk constantly.”
Luke: “Did your parents know you were getting drunk?”
Chico: “I’m sure they(knew). I couldn’t lie to my parents. They didn’t do anything about it.”
Luke: “Why were you drinking?”
Chico: “Because I’m an alcoholic. I don’t do any drugs. I need a vice. Drinking and cigarettes are my vice.”
Luke: “When you studied screenwriting, who were your influences?”
Chico: “Quentin Tarantino, Jean Luc Godard, Harry Reems. I wrote my masters thesis on how Forest Gump (1994) was the greatest martial arts movie I’ve seen. It had everything from jujitsu to karate to everything you could imagine.”
Luke: “How did you get into the porn industry?”
Chico: “While I was at UCLA, I saw that Rob Black was running for mayor [of Los Angeles in 2000]. I decided to call Extreme. I got connected to Kevin Kleinrock. I asked him what Rob’s positions were. They had no positions.
I had a meeting. They had no positions. I gave them libertarian positions. I said I’d start a website. It was the first website I created. RobBlackForMayor.com. One thing that I had going for myself was that I could accrue friends on the Internet. I
realized that the Internet was bigger than video. Five years down the line, the Internet and video-on-demand is going to be bigger than the mechanism for distribution of DVDs and VHS.”

Luke: “Why are you in this industry?”
Chico exclaims: “Pussy! Why do you look at me so straight? You’re so straight-edged.”
Luke: “Why else?”
Chico: “It’s easy. Dealing with so many retards in the industry, anyone with half a brain, even if they’re a drunken fool, it doesn’t matter. You can go far.”
Luke: “Why do you think girls do porn?”
Chico: “Because it makes them more money than flipping hamburgers.”
Luke: “What are your ambitions?”
Chico: “I want to start my own Internet company. I was one of the guys who started Meatholes, Midnight Prowl. I think those are the most phenomenal sites out there. I don’t know how long I’ll be in this industry for.”
Luke: “Do you have more friends inside or outside of the industry?”
Chico: “Both. If you have more friends than the fingers on your hand, you have way too many friends. That’s my philosophy. It’s a Korean philosophy. Your family comes first. The people who pay you come second. Your friends come third. No matter what.”
Luke: “Do your parents know you’re in porn?”
Chico: “They have no clue. They think I’m a computer nerd. And guess what? If you call them up, they won’t understand a single thing you say.”
Luke: “How would they react if they found out?”
Chico: “First, I’d have to visit my mom in the hospital. She’d have a heart attack. Second, before I killed myself, I’d end up killing you. Other than that, it’s no big deal.”
Luke: “Have you dated many girls in porn?”
Chico: “I’ve fucked many girls in the industry, hundreds. I haven’t dated many.”
Luke: “How do women you date outside the industry relate to you working in the industry?”
Chico: “I don’t relate to them at all. I can’t. Once you get into porn, you can’t date civilians. How are you going to bring it up? ‘Oh, I shoot double-anals for a living.’ Or, ‘I shoot girls taking
15-loads on their face for a living.’”
Luke: “Do you date girls within the industry or do you just have sex with them?”
Chico: “I’m asexual.”
Luke: “Do you want to get married and have kids one day?”
Chico: “I do. My parents want grandkids.”
Luke: “When do you think you will do something about that?”
Chico: “As soon as I find the perfect person?”
Luke: “Is it important to you to marry an Asian?”
Chico: “My parents would find that important but I don’t at all.”
Luke: “What do you love and hate about the industry?”
Chico: “I don’t take it seriously. The industry is humorous. The characters in it make the industry.
“What I love about the industry is the amount of freedom I have to do what I want creatively.
That’s the only thing I love about the industry.”
Luke: “Do you think any of your work counts as art?”
Chico: “No. I’m a cameraman. Maybe some of the storylines I create. I doubt it. My major goal is to make porn for people to stroke to.”
Luke: “How much have you worked on Hollywood scripts since you’ve been in porn?”
Chico: “Very little.”
Luke: “Do you think you have left an important part of yourself die?”
Chico: “No. Mainstream, porn, internet. It’s all about relationships. In porn, if you step in and you have half a brain, you’re in. On the other side, where everyone has a high IQ, you step in and you’re not halfway through.”
Luke: “Is it important to you to create a lasting work of art?”
Chico: “No. As long as people like my work, I’m cool. I have no ego about this kind of crap.”
Luke: “How has your time in the industry affected you?”
Chico: “It’s made me asexual. I like girls now that are not naked. When I go into my office, I see five or six naked ladies a day. About two weeks ago, a girl came by. She wanted to fuck. I said, ‘Listen girl. I’m asexual. I don’t give a fuck.’ She got totally naked. I said, ‘You know what would make you really sexy? If you wore a parka.’”
Luke: “How would the people who know you best describe you?”
Chico: “As a psychopath drunk who’s even-leveled and straight-edged. I’ve always been a straight shooter. I don’t let a lot of people into my circle. Once you’re in, you’re in, and once you’re out, you’re always out.”
Luke: “How do you decide what’s right and wrong?”
Chico: “From my [Buddhist] religion.”
Luke: “What are some of its principle tenets that are different from the way ordinary American people live?”
Chico: “You don’t hurt people intentionally. You don’t overreact. You don’t do anything that is going to undermine another person’s career. You don’t take someone else’s money. That’s about it.”
Luke: “What would Buddhism say about your drinking?”
Chico: “Buddhism would probably react negatively. I’m not a hardcore Buddhist.”

Most porn insiders are expressing sympathy for Haley Paige and distancing themselves from the generally reviled Wanker Wang. But a few friends of Hwang have surfaced to say they view both deaths as tragic, adding Hwang was trying to get his young wife to kick heroin but failed in large part because he was an unloved addict himself.

“But please don’t use my name.”

Meanwhile, The New York Times reports the porn industry’s salad days may be over, done in not by censorship or morality or decadence, but ironically by the Internet, a phenomenon driven in its early years by porn. But the downturn in the bottom line hasn’t blunted the stream of young women coming to the Southland with visions of porn stardom as AVN’s “Fresh Off the Bus” department attests.