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Who was in the business back then?
By 1973, the United States hardcore pornography industry was consolidated under one guy, basically, a guy named Reuben Sturman from Cleveland, Ohio. Sturman had a friend -- one not of his own choosing -- named Robert DiBernardo. DiBernardo worked for the Gambino family, the crime-Mafia family in New York. Matter of fact, Gambino is the guy who John Gotti had killed, and that's the reason John Gotti's in prison, because he had Sammy the Bull kill DiBernardo.
But DiBernardo went around the country with Sturman in what we call "the tour." He took Sturman around and retired all the other independent pornographers and said, "Reuben's our guy, he's going to take care of all the business. You people can be landlords, we'll send you a nice rent check, thanks very much."
And so, pretty much all of the peep-show business, all of the magazine and paperback book and all video and film production and distribution in this country was pretty much controlled by that one guy.
Oh, yeah it was all Reuben's empire. What about Larry Flint (Hustler), Hugh Hefner (Playboy), and Bob G (Penthouse) - the three biggest mags in the business, in the 70's and today - NONE of which was owned by Reuben. Reuben was a distributer. He had very little to do with production EVER.
Out of Cleveland, Ohio?
Cleveland, Ohio. That's where he started in the late 1960s, selling comic books and porno. At one time, he supplied almost every adult bookstore in the country. ... Sturman was indicted for racketeering in Vegas in 1987. He was finally convicted in 1989 of tax evasion in Cleveland. We convicted him when I was at the Justice Department of racketeering and obscenity in 1991.
... He eventually died in prison, just a couple years ago. Now his empire is split up among maybe a half a dozen of his former lieutenants, who now control pieces of the country. So we now have six porno princes instead of one king.
He started by selling comics from the trunk of his car. He ended up giving away his distribution business to his employees. Today, they make up a small percentage of the distribution business. I do very little business with them as their prices are not as good as some of the other folks in the business.
And if obscenity really isn't illegal, if hardcore pornography is within your community standards, then it doesn't have to stay in the video stores and in the adult bookstores and on porno websites. It could be everywhere. If R-rated movies can be everywhere, so could XXX. ...
BULLSHIT! You still have to control access to minors, and even though a locality has to provide some means for an adult business to be in the community, it can be zoned to death with local ordinances.
Yes. And in a sense, that's why the Justice Department prosecuted maybe the 25 biggest producers, and maybe two dozen of the biggest distributors of pornography. A lot of those people who were indicted and convicted or pled guilty to felony charged in the early 1990s are still the same people running the porn industry today and supplying the cable companies and the Hot Network. There's not many of them. They run the whole industry now. It isn't all under one guy, but it's under a table maybe seating 40, 50 men. And they run it today just like Sturman had them run it 20 years ago.
40 or 50 men? There are hundreds of video companies alone, putting out close to 1,000 movies every month. Not to mention dozens of novelty manufactures, and Lots of different retail chains and one store outlets (like little 'ole me). We are running a legitimate business as is MOST EVERYONE in the business.
The difference was that Janet Reno just did not like doing obscenity cases. She wouldn't prosecute obscenity violations when she was the prosecutor in Florida, and she didn't like doing it at the Justice Department. It's not that she's a bad person or anything; it's just that she didn't like doing it. Maybe she never saw it, or it wasn't properly presented. They still said that the Justice Department's units could do more extreme materials or organized crime people. But the idea that had started when the first President Bush was president -- we would enforce the federal law against everyone who was violating it -- that sort of stopped. ...
Or maybe - Reno believed in FREE SPEECH!
That's true. ... When Clinton was elected, they didn't encourage us to keep going. They told us to concentrate more on child pornography. They told us to find big gangsters and more extreme material. They didn't let the section continue with the projects with the mainstream hardcore porn industry. So that was becoming obvious, that we were going to get the people who had already been charged and investigated. But the people who hadn't gotten indicted in the first round probably wouldn't see another prosecution until there was a change in the White House.
Yeah - isn't it AWFUL that Clinton used the unit to go after CHILD PORNOGRAPHY?
People still know, "No, I don't want that." So I think the American public has a standard that's always going to be higher than they're willing to do. People always have a higher standard than we can accomplish. Men will always be willing to look at stuff that we know we shouldn't. Kids will tell lies even though they know that lying is not the best policy, and people will take stuff that isn't theirs even though they know that stealing is a crime. I think it's the same thing with porno; it's just a vice, and vice has an attraction. And people still can feel that, "It's not good, but if nobody's looking, I'll try it."
WTF? I don't even have a comment for this. But let me tell you that my customers come from all walks of life. Lots of couples come in and pick out a movie together. This is ENTERTAINMENT we are talking about.
I have to stop now - this is getting me just a little hot under the collar, and it is hard to concentrate on this between the customers.
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