Heir's date-rape trial loses its Luster

By ROGER FRANKLIN Herald correspondent

If she didn't have a fugitive son to worry about just now, Beverly Hills matron Elizabeth Luster would be free to occupy the idle moments between Rodeo Drive shopping expeditions by making plans for a celebration of her grandfather and everything he did to change the face of sex in America.

Frankie, the family calls him. Frankie Factor, better known to the rest of the world as Max, the young man who arrived in the US almost a century ago with several trunkloads of the theatrical cosmetics he had developed for the cast of Russia's Imperial Opera.

Unlike the decadent dames of the Old World, corn-fed American women regarded the rouges, powders and eyebrow pencils he had come to peddle at the Chicago World's Fair as the accoutrements of whoredom. They would stop at his booth, tut-tut at the Lodz-born chemist's immoral wares and move on.

But Frankie, who had defied his rabbi father's wish that he devote his life to the Torah, was a man with a sharp eye for the main chance. In another of the fair's exhibits, he saw the future on a silver screen and knew at a glance that it needed him.

It was the moving-picture exhibition that captured his imagination. Like his fellow gawkers, Factor was transfixed by the flickering images. Unlike them, he noticed that the actors' faces were wan and washed out, bleached to a ghostly anaemia by the bright lights that the primitive film of the day demanded.

Frankie went straight to New York, where the first studios were springing up in Brooklyn and Queens, and then followed when the industry migrated west, where the seed of what soon came to be known as Hollywood was taking root beneath the cloudless Californian skies.

Once America's women noticed that their idols were sporting face paint, he reasoned, the stigma would vanish and they would flock to him in droves.

They did, and the rest is history. By the middle of the Roaring Twenties, Max Factor lipsticks and mascaras were staples in five-and-dime store across the US and he was a millionaire many times.

Every red-blooded American woman felt free, as his ads promised, to "look like a movie star".

It's a supreme irony, when you think about it. Movies made the family fortune - and now, with an international manhunt under way for Max's great-grandson, it is filmed images of a decidedly more sinister sort that are keeping a mortified Elizabeth Luster, 69, out of the malls and boutiques.

Last week her son skipped out on a million-dollar bail rather than stand trial for allegedly drugging and raping what police prosecutors say may be as many as 200 women.

The proof: a collection of 17 home videos of victims passed out on the bed in the master bedroom of 38-year-old Andrew "Drew" Luster's beachfront home at Mussel Shoals, not far from Malibu, where the trust-fund baby grew up in the certain knowledge that the inherited fruits of his great-grandfather's genius would underwrite an endless summer of surfing, sex and inspired idleness.

The worst of the videos have been culled and edited into 60 minutes of hard-core highlights that prosecutors insist would oblige any jury to convict.

"This is what I dream about," one snippet catches Luster telling the camera. A beautiful strawberry blonde, passed out on my bed, waiting for me to do with her what I will."

Over the next several minutes, he is seen stripping her naked, amusing himself by inserting a variety of household objects into the victim's vagina and then, smiling all the while as the camera rolls, raping her repeatedly. Throughout it all, she never moves a muscle, not even a twitch.

According to prosecutors, the muscle-bound Luster never went anywhere without a vial of gamma hydroxybutyrate, the notorious "date-rape drug" better known as GHB.

Easily extracted from a cocktail of caustic chemicals that any reasonably proficient high school science student could distil from paint thinner and lye, it mimics a compound found naturally in the brain that immobilises the muscles during deep sleep.

Small amounts, a mere drop or two, were once used to relax and dilate the cervix during childbirth. Larger quantities, however, produce an initial reaction almost indistinguishable from drooling drunkenness - which is how prosecutors say Luster made his move.

After spotting a likely prospect at a bar, he would slip a teaspoonful into her drink and then gallantly carry her to his car, assuring barmen and bouncers that she was in safe hands.

Who could have suspected that Luster's intentions were anything less than honourable?

The locals knew him as the rich kid who didn't have to work, the perpetual surfer seldom seen without his beloved German shepherd.

"This wasn't some creepy guy living behind a bush some place," says Santa Barbara Rape Crisis Centre's Grace Huerta. "This is a good-looking, wealthy, educated man."

Before he vanished, apparently after telling friends that the local district attorney's leaks to the press had robbed him of any chance of a fair trial, Luster had been insisting that the videos, far from damning him as a monster, were actually the proof that he was finally to do something productive with his life.

He had decided, he said, to become a professional pornographer and those home movies were mere rehearsals for the career to come. The girls were all conscious, he insisted, and if they weren't, then they had downed the GHB in the full knowledge that it would render them helpless.

"If these were rapes, do you think - does anyone think - I'd be crazy enough to leave the evidence lying around the house? Not even hidden away, but right there on my bookshelves?" Luster asked a reporter for The Daily Telegraph weeks after his arrest in July, 2000. "Everything you can see on those tapes is consensual. The case is a set-up."

Prosecutors scoff at Luster's argument, saying he had grown cocky and careless.

GHB strips victims of any ability to recall what happened to them and cannot be detected in the blood or urine more than 48 hours after ingestion. Why should he have taken precautions, they ask? He had pulled the same trick so many times he must have thought himself untouchable.

A jury will get to decide that question, since the judge has ruled that Luster will be tried in absentia. But in the meantime, even readers of the supermarket tabloids can't help but have noticed the inconsistencies in the prosecution's case.

For starters, police admit that repeated searches of Luster's home turned up not a drop of GHB. The closest they came was a collection of small, screw-top bottles bearing hand-lettered labels like "knock-out drops," "frigid fluid" and "lollypop juice".

When a police witness produced them unexpectedly on the witness stand, Luster's lawyers objected. Did they contain GHB? No. Well, what was the clear liquid? The forensics expert insisted he didn't know because lab tests were taking longer than expected.

Later, the same lawyers evinced mock surprise, saying the fluid was nothing more than tap water. The vials, they said, were innocent props for Luster's pornographic home movies.

In one of those videos, which the judge refused to admit as evidence, Luster rebukes a sex partner for appearing too alert. In early December, when the judge rejected the request and announced that he would no longer tolerate defence attempts to delay the trial, Luster's lawyers complained publicly that their client was being railroaded.

It was then, the defendant's friends suspect, that a life on the lam began to seem preferable to a conviction that might well oblige him to spend the rest of his life behind bars.

Just before Christmas, when the trial was adjourned for a 10-day break, his legal team succeeded in freeing him from the electronic monitoring device he had been forced to wear since his arrest.

The judge agreed, but insisted that Luster report to police twice a day.

Last Friday morning, as he had done every other day, he followed those instructions to the letter. But that night, when police stopped by his home at 8pm, they found it empty, the wardrobes stripped of all but winter clothes, and his car, dog and surfboards all missing.

Court buffs have good reason to lament Luster's vanishing act because the trial promised some of the finest legal drama since the Kennedy clan's William Kennedy Smith beat a rape rap in Florida more than a decade ago.

From the circumstances that led to his arrest, to the details of life and love in the luxury lane, Luster's case has them all.

He was tumbled, according to police, after picking up a young woman and her boyfriend at a local bar.

The couple had been drinking when they encountered Luster, who drove them to his home where the boyfriend passed out on the couch after first having sex with his sweetheart on the back seat of Luster's car, while he followed the action in the rear-view mirror.

At Luster's house, while the others staggered to the front door, the girl - identified only as "Carey" - ran down to the water, stripped and went skinny-dipping.

By her own admission, Luster brought her inside and put her in a warm shower, where he joined her for sex as her beau snored on the sofa. After that, she says, he drugged her, turned on the camera and raped her.

The next morning, when she awoke in his bed, he again had sex with her - twice, although she insists neither episode was consensual.

Two days later, when it was too late to detect any lingering trace of GHB, she went to the police. Luster's lawyers say her criminal complaint had nothing to do with rape and everything to do with guilt about cheating on an angry boyfriend.

Luster's home was raided, the videos seized and he was dragged away in handcuffs to spend months behind bars, before eventually being freed on bail.

By then, his case seemed hopeless. Police had sifted through the videos, identified at least 10 other alleged victims and persuaded three of them to testify against him.

Now, as California police issue worldwide alerts, Luster's whereabouts are anybody's guess - and everyone who knew him has their own theory. To fellow surf bums at his favourite beaches, "he's gone south, where it's warm, man, and the waves are cool", as one put it.

Others speculate that their buddy laid a careful trail of false clues to confound investigators and may be trying to lose himself in Eastern Europe or Asia. No one seems to have the foggiest notion, least of all his lawyers, who told the judge that their client may have had "an accident" - perhaps a euphemism for suicide.

One thing is certain, if Luster is on the lam, he won't want for money. According to prosecutors, who admit they only scratched the surface of his financial affairs, he may have as much as US$40 million ($75 million) in discreet bank accounts, many of them overseas.

While the police try to pick up the trail, and those whose lives Luster touched - the victims, his family and two kids from a failed marriage - dodge reporters, another casualty of the case tries to keep its brand name out of the muck: consumer-goods giant Proctor & Gamble, which bought Max Factor from Frankie's heirs back in 1973 for US$480 million ($900 million).

"We have no connection with Andrew Luster, none whatsoever," a company spokesman stressed. Plenty of other people only wish they could say the same thing.