The Dower Power Hour

So, when we left off Reuben Sturman had made the valuable discovery that adult magazines and books lead to higher profits. Thus, he increasingly emphasized that aspect of his business, investing all his revenue into expanding his operations throughout Ohio, and then the United States. By the late 1960s, Sturman was the biggest vendor of adult magazines in the country. This attracted government attention, which was slowly losing the war against its loose definition of obscenity.

In 1964, the FBI raided one of Reuben’s warehouses and confiscated thousands of copies of Sex Life of a Cop. Although Reuben won his case, making him a hero in the rapidly expanding pornography business, this made him a permanent government target for legal action. Obscenity charge after obscenity charge floundered in court, however. Reuben Sturman became a master at hiding his identity and his money. He created more than twenty false identities, including passports and other legal documents. He fragmented his businesses and set up Canadian flunkies, who were the owners on paper but in fact received generous cuts for the use of their names. Eventually, Reuben hid most of his money in a variety of Swiss bank accounts which were virtually impenetrable. All the while, Sturman’s business boomed as he expanded into virtually every conceivable corner of the sex industry.

The government eventually got their hands on Reuben, not through the numerous obscenity charges, but through tax evasion. So much of Reuben’s profits were made on peep booth movies which required quarter deposits every 20 seconds to keep the film running. In the beginning, Reuben would offer to install the booths for free in return for a cut of the profits. Using these innocuous method, Reuben was able to completely dominate that element of the porn industry, one of the most popular before the VHS. He employed thousands of people to drive around the country, collecting his fair share. Tens of millions of dollars were collected annually through this technology.

Difficult to keep track of, the IRS suspected that Reuben was withholding money (despite being a billionaire, some years Reuben’s taxes showed that the U.S. government actually owed him money.) However, the funds were so well hidden, the fake identities so numerous and hard-to-track (Reuben even had multiple handwriting techniques so he could give false samples), and the expenditures in other people’s names meant that to catch Reuben would require years of exclusive and constant effort. Nearly twenty, as it turned out.

In 1989, Sturman was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to 10 years in jail and $2.5 million in fines. Another charge, this time for the interstate transportation of obscene material, resulted in a plea bargain for Sturman, but he was later caught trying to bribe a juror and was sentenced to 19 additional years for extortion.” Actually, his wife was the one trying to bribe a juror. With sex… because that’s what married people do for one another. Nothing says commitment like sex with a stranger in exchange for your husband’s acquittal.

What is most interesting about all this is the effect Sturman’s arrest had on the porn industry. For a few years, he continued to receive his cut of the profits even though he was in a jail cell. By the time he escaped (he was apprehended again a short time later), however, the IRS had successfully convinced most of the major vendors that whatever they owed Reuben, they now owed the government.

As I alluded to earlier, the collapse of Reuben’s business (or businesses, to be more accurate) led to a huge boom in the industry. Without having to pay the King of Porn and the restrictions on entry into the business that he had established, new entrepreneurs set up their own porn businesses. The advent of the VHS, DVD, and the Internet has led to the “democratization of porn.” In the 1960s, when a porn film cost thousands of dollars to make, most films had entertaining plots, witty humor, and compelling characters. Now amateur porn is just as popular as professionally made films and it costs less than $100 to produce; if this porn has any plot at all, it’s usually a parody of an existing film. The profit margins have virtually disappeared. Indeed, the porn industry just isn’t what it used to be; too much competition had undermined the power of the porn baron. Hugh Hefler, after all, is no Reuben Sturman.