The cherry wood desk in Clifton Britt’s office serves several functions. It’s the nerve center where he fields calls from his clients, sometimes with his cell phone pressed against one ear and his office phone against the other. It catches crumbs when he eats his favorite lunch: chicken salad sandwiches. It’s also home to a unique artifact: a 13-year-old issue of Syracuse University’s African-American newspaper, The Black Voice.

On the back page of the Oct. 1, 1992, issue is an essay written by Britt back when he attended SU, titled ‘Does Slavery Exist in 1992?’ In the incendiary essay, Britt alleges that blacks are still being enslaved mentally in the same way they used to be enslaved physically. ‘The African in America is but another slave not too far removed from his ancestors,’ he wrote. ‘But the African in America is now called a ‘minority,’ no longer called a slave.’

Britt’s friend and personal assistant, Malisha Moore, read the essay for the first time when Britt pulled it out of his desk for a trip down memory lane.

‘If people in the industry saw this, they would freak,’ she said.

If what Moore says is true, then the 35-year-old Britt would be accomplishing an admirable feat by shocking his industry, one the average person would consider shockproof. Britt, in addition to being a proud SU alumnus, is the president of Mercenary Pictures, the explosively successful hardcore adult video company he founded in 2002. To most, he’s known for his work in front of the camera, where he performs sex scenes under the name Lexington Steele in such successful series as ‘Superwhores’ and ‘Hole Collector.’

Britt came to SU to follow the traditional path and eventually found himself walking a completely different one. The road he’s chosen transformed him into a self-made millionaire and took him from Syracuse’s hallowed halls of academia to the opposite side of the country, into an industry in which the word ‘endowment’ has nothing to do with scholarship money.

Britt arrived in Syracuse in 1990 as a transfer student, having attended Atlanta’s Morehouse College for two years, in the hopes of gaining exposure to new ideas.

‘I wanted to transfer from a smaller school to a larger school with the intentions of broadening my perspectives by being with people with different perspectives and different views,’ Britt said.

His SU experience was fairly typical. He lived in Flint Hall his first year on campus, then spent the next two years on South Campus. Britt studied hard, double-majoring in history and African-American studies, occasionally dropped in at the local bars (though he’s not a drinker) and trudged through deep banks of Syracuse snow.

‘I remember the blizzard of ’93; people were snowed in, literally, the drifts were above people’s doors, so people couldn’t get out of their apartments on South Campus,’ Britt said. ‘Someone said they found out statistically that STDs increased because everybody stayed inside and fucked.’

When not in class or snowed in, Britt spent most of his time with his fraternity brothers of Omega Psi Phi, often taking road trips to visit nearby chapters in Ithaca and Oswego. He briefly played on the soccer team as a walk-on in 1991, before blowing out his shoulder. He was popular, and counted Conrad McRae and Donovan McNabb among his friends on campus.

Britt’s fondest memories of being at SU are his constitutional law classes, where he delighted in arguing politics with his classmates.

‘The political science department was very dear to me,’ Britt said. ‘I had many, many, many dialogues in constitutional law class; heated, heated battles over constitutional law and governmental and political issues.’

After graduation, Britt became a stockbroker, starting as a trainee in a top brokerage and working his way up the chain of command. He was licensed as a financial adviser and working on Wall Street within months of graduating. He worked in the south tower of the World Trade Center and likely would have been a victim of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 had he stayed in that position.

Though he loved his job as a broker, Britt had other ambitions. He thought of trying adult video for a year before he took the plunge.

‘The thing about (being a broker) is it’s a real revolving door, where you find out very quickly if you can do it or not; that position really weeds out those who can’t do it,’ Britt said.

Once Britt found out he could survive the Wall Street world, he settled into the 12-hour days. Yet, curiosity got the best of him, and in 1997 he started doing some adult modeling work.

‘I said, maybe I could do something that I want to do, as opposed to looking back years later and saying ‘I wonder if I could have had a shot at being a porno guy,” Britt said.

Porn, like Wall Street, is a world that quickly disposes with those that can’t hack it. It must have required a leap of faith for Britt to move across the country to California’s San Fernando Valley, the home of most adult video production, but he had to see if he could make it.

The adult industry is a peculiar one in that performers are deemed ‘porn stars’ merely because they do porn, with no attention paid to the quality or frequency of their performances. Britt, then, is a not so much a star as a one-man constellation. He is ranked 31st among the list of the most powerful people in the $35 billion-per-year adult industry, a list that includes Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt.

He is the most heavily awarded black male performer in the industry, with 13 Adult Video News Awards to his credit, the adult industry’s equivalent to the Oscars. Of those 13 awards, three are for Male Performer of the Year, which he won in 2000, 2002 and 2003, making him the only performer ever to collect the award three times.

Paul Fishbein, president of AVN and a 20-year industry veteran, likens Britt to adult’s version of Denzel Washington. According to Fishbein, what Britt does is not easy, and someone with his attributes is hard to find.

‘Could you get in front of a camera with lights and about 10 people watching you have sex?’ Fishbein said. ‘How many people can do that? Very, very, very few. And of those people, how many of them are good-looking? How many have screen presence or charisma? Lexington has charisma. If it wasn’t for the sex, with the way he looks and handles himself, he could be a movie star.’

According to the Internet Movie Database, which Britt says is fairly accurate, he is credited in nearly 400 films, but adult performers mark their career bedposts by the scene, and he estimates he’s done between 700 and 800.

While he still performs in all of his movies, Britt’s life is not quite as sexy as some might imagine, now that his main focus is on running his business. Now, his days are similar to those spent as a stockbroker.

‘My reality now is a 10 to 12-hour day at my office where I’m fielding calls on my cell phone, on my office line, while answering e-mail with two to three people in front of me at my desk, and simultaneously screening a movie,’ Britt said.

Moore, who knows Britt on a personal and professional level, calls him a ‘powerhouse.’

‘A lot of people think he was given the opportunity to own his own business, but what they don’t know is him,’ Moore said. ‘They don’t know he was a Wall Street broker. They don’t connect the bigger picture and say, ‘Well, maybe he took what he learned on Wall Street and put it into porn.”

In his role as an entrepreneur, Britt has to deal with the uncommon challenges of an uncommon industry. As a black man in the adult industry, he faces racism, which he calls ‘pervasive and overt.’ Mercenary shoots reels upon reels of interracial movies, the most lucrative genre according to Britt, but shooting interracial scenes can bring out an ugly side of the industry. He encounters white female performers who don’t want to perform with him because he’s black. Britt says this is because some performers are afraid of how their families will react – not to the porn, but to the interracial sex.

‘The problem with some cases is that some of these girls’ families genuinely don’t want them to have sex with black men,’ he said. ‘The girls don’t want to push the envelope that far, because it’s okay to do scenes, but it’s not okay to have sex with black men, because then their family would really turn their back on them.’

Despite this, Britt has no hard feelings against those performers.

‘I do not believe that there is any individual that has the right to tell a female who she allows into her body,’ Britt said. ‘So for whatever reason that girl does not want to work for me or with me, whether it’s that she doesn’t do scenes with black men, and that would be cast as racism or racist, the bottom line is that it’s her body.’

Britt has also encountered situations in which he has been personally offended by the racial implications of how a scene was portrayed. He described one instance in which the director wanted him and the other actors to climb trees, wielding African spears, then leap on a white woman and perform a three-on-one. Britt declined to do the scene, but admits earlier in his career, before he was able to command the bargaining power he has now, he was likely to do scenes he wasn’t comfortable with once he showed up to the set.

If slavery exists in 2005, as Britt wrote it did in 1992, then he is enslaved to his own naked ambition and a singular obsession with dominating the adult industry. He works out for 90 minutes a day, seven days a week. To maintain his physique, he typically eats just once a day. He wakes up between 4:30 and 5:30 a.m. every morning, without exception.

‘I wake up at 5:30 because my buyers on the East Coast are at work by 8:30, so if my feet are not on the floor at 5:30, I’m behind the eight-ball,’ Britt said. ‘It’s just a matter of putting everything into the business, and I’ll do whatever it takes.’

Luckily for Britt, his odd eating schedule, early waking hours and a habit of leaving the screen door open are only the minor flaws that annoy Tanya Faulkner, his girlfriend of five years. Faulkner is also an adult performer, appearing in scenes under the name Vanessa Blue and directing under the name Domina X. The couple met in 1999 at the AVN Awards, when Faulkner asked Britt for his autograph. They later performed a scene together in a film before they started dating.

‘I was just doing the job,’ Faulkner said. ‘I knew I was working with him and I knew he was cute, but we had never had much conversation before we met, and he was trying to talk to me, but I was like, ‘Shut up and let’s just do the scene.”

After a two-year courtship, Faulkner gave in.

‘She gave me a hard time for our first two years of knowing each other before she finally acquiesced to my pursuit,’ Britt said.

Britt and Faulkner work together to create films for Mercenary, which in some cases finds Britt having sex with other women while his girlfriend directs the action. ‘I’m fortunate enough that I can remove myself from being his girlfriend in the moment,’ Faulkner said. ‘When I’m behind the camera, I’m just doing the job.’

Britt and his girlfriend share that natural inclination towards stoicism. That’s the only possible explanation for how the two can be a happy couple in the adult industry and how they can perform despite the drawbacks of being adult performers. The 2004 HIV outbreak that started with performer Darren James and led to a month-long production moratorium didn’t even give Britt a moment’s pause.

‘I know that it could have been me, and the only difference between me and Darren is that Darren caught HIV and I didn’t,’ Britt said. ‘It could have been any of us.’

‘This is a game of death; it’s a bloodsport. And that being said, everyone of us knows we are taking a pair of dice in our hands and we’re throwing it down on the table every time we step in front of the camera,’ Britt said.

Britt continues to throw down those dice though, because he genuinely loves what he does. He’s proud of his achievements in the adult industry, and as evidenced by the fact that an old Black Voice has made it into his desk, he’s proud of the education he received at Syracuse.

‘I made 1.3 million dollars in my first seven months of business,’ Britt said. ‘Any entrepreneur will tell you to come out the box and achieve a million dollars in revenue in your first year of business is outstanding, and I attribute that to every single day of being educated by those professors at Syracuse.’

Britt’s education, his drive and his relentless pursuit of excellence have made him the man he is. His success story puts him in a position to brag about his achievements and be begrudged by no one, as he does in the trailer reel on one of his company’s DVDs. Britt, just having completed a scene, is lightly sweaty and looking too exhausted to muster up sarcasm when he stares directly into the camera and says, ‘I’m still the best in the world; don’t forget it.’

Published on November 9, 2005 at 12:00 pm