This man made America into a nation of wankers
.A REPORTER AT LARGE about Ohio pornographer Reuben Sturman… Though his name remains largely unknown, his influence is inescapable. The revenues from today’s sex industry are difficult to estimate, but it is believed that Americans now spend between eight and ten billion dollars a year on "adult entertainment"- hardcore videos and DVDs, Internet porn, cable and satellite porn, peep shows, phone sex, live sex acts, sexual toys, and sex magazines. That’s an amount roughly equivalent to Hollywood’s domestic box office receipts… Writer compares him to Walt Disney… Mentions an F.B.I. raid in 1964 that netted copies of a paperback called "Sex Life of a Cop," a book that doesn’t contain a single dirty word. The F.B.I. also confiscated copies of Jack Kerouac’s "The Subterraneans."… Sturman filed a suit against J. Edgar Hoover… Under state laws, Sturman eventually faced obscenity indictments in California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Ohio. He hired good First Amendment attorneys, and won every case… 1968 arrests prompted Sturman to split his company into hundreds of companies, incorporated in Delaware or Nevada. The shares, officers, and board members of these new entities were listed in public documents-and Reuben Sturman’s name didn’t appear anywhere. Sturman pioneered new techniques of concealment, recruiting people in Canada who had no knowledge of the sex industry, many of them young Americans avoiding the draft, to serve as "nominees"- straw men listed on corporate records as a legal cover for the people who actually ran the companies… He also formed his own company, National Polygraph, to give lie detector tests and root out informers. The obscenity charges stemming from Sturman’s 1968 indictment were dismissed… Tells how he marketed the coin-operated peep booth… In 1975 he was raided again and within days had completely changed the corporate structure of his firm… The information in the binders left the government with a comprehensive picture of a group of companies that no longer existed… Sturman transferred his holdings to countries with airtight corporate-secrecy laws- Liechtenstein, Panama, and Liberia. Monrovia eventually became the official headquarters of Reuben Sturman’s worldwide pornography empire… Sturman had gained considerable control over the market. In addition to manufacturing and selling his own products, he was the largest distributor of independently made pornography… Tells how the I.R.S., in the person of Richard N. Rosfelder, Jr., eventually was able to successfully investigate Sturman… On November 17, 1989, Sturman was found guilty of every charge, from tax evasion to conspiracy to defraud the government. Tells how he subsequently escaped from a minimum-security prison and was recaptured… The Clinton Administration largely abandoned efforts to enforce the nation’s obscenity laws, and pornography had become widely available, mainstream entertainment. The sort of films that Sturman had repeatedly been indicted for selling were now being distributed by some of America’s largest cable, satellite, and hotel companies, which were earning several hundred million dollars a year from adult entertainment. Sturman increasingly seemed like a relic from a shady era that most industry figures wanted to forget. Writer interviewed him in 1996. Sturman died in a Kentucky prison in 1997…
Or Vegas more recently, depending.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2003/03/10/empire-of-the-obscene