He was awarded a green card through a lottery system. Nevertheless, he had greater ambition than being a porn star, and he got lucky.

By the age of 25 Andrei Treivas became an exclusive porn actor for Falcon Studios, who, without his counsel or permission, had given him an Americanized name – Michael Lucas. Treivas began his porn career in Munich by working in straight films, but while in France he began an association with Jean-Daniel Cadinot in gay porn. Three years later he was living in New York city, with stops in Germany and France along the way. He earned a law degree from Moscow State Law Academy in 1994, after which he owned and operated a travel agency. Michael was given his mother's maiden name at birth specifically because Treivas sounded less Jewish than his father's surname, Bregman. His great-grandfather was a rabbi who was murdered in his own synagogue by the Nazis. He was the target of anti-Semitism as a youth, and some of his ancestors had been killed in the Holocaust. Born in 1972 in Moscow, activist, columnist, documentary film-maker, lecturer, porn star and explicit gay film producer Michael Lucas (birth name Andrei Treivas) was raised in a secular Jewish family during the oppressive communist era.