An adult book store in the early 70s was raunchier than had been the case only a few years earlier. One found sections devoted to swingers and group sex (with mostly fabricated ads); soft core “T and A” magazines; hard core “action” books and magazines, some labeled as sex education tracts, others featuring illustrations of intercourse positions (with a variety of positions and partners); materials on gay,  transvestite, bondage, sadomasochistic, and water sport themes; sex toys (vibrators, and inflatable effigies of life-size females, were popular); photographs, including “cum shots,” of women with their pubic hair on view; and rubber goods. Some of the high priced paperbacks might be wrapped in plastic. This might indicate innovative and daring contents, or simply that the bookseller was stuck with the titles and was trying to get rid of them by tricking people into believing that they were hot stuff.  The films and videotapes were kept in locked cases. There were also shelves or counters for the tabloid “underground newspapers” such as Screw. Peep booths with gay loops may have been connected to neighboring booths by “glory holes,” through which men could insert their penises. There may have been “rap booths” where one could talk to a young woman. Representative stores would have included G and A Books, Rector, Rage, Black Jack, Forsythe, Midtown, Kinematics.



   

One of the sleaziest of the Adult Book Stores of the hard core period, 210 W. 42nd Street. Once owned by Mishkin, later probably run by organized crime figures. Photo courtesy of Joe Vasta, Vasta Images, New York City.
Image copyright 2002 by Vasta Images.








The liberal obscenity laws of the 1960s made it possible by the end of the decade to issue not just printed erotica, but also XXX films, and adult video tapes with little risk of successful prosecution beyond the municipal level. Entrepreneurs added massage parlors, topless and bottomless bars, and live sex shows to vice zones such as Times Square, easily affording the higher rents and monthly leases the landlords held them to. In fact, in some establishments the area devoted to printed materials served both as a physical front section and as legal facade to provide First Amendment legitimacy for prosecutable film and live-action porn. Beginning with Mayor Lindsay’s administration, city officials faced a more complex dilemma than that posed by a set of honky tonk book and magazine stores which police could periodically and dramatically raid. Shops carried more shocking products than they had five years earlier, but lawyers’ insistence on new First Amendment protections had the collared owners and clerks back in their shops the next day. The frequent clean-up raids became, along with pimpmobiles, one of the standing jokes of
Fun City. Erotica had become more lucrative than ever, certainly for distributors, but equally for real estate moguls, bankers, and investment speculators. As peep loops, films, and VCRs raised the financial stakes, organized crime began setting up its own version of corporate enterprise, the extortionate monopoly. In 1973, the precedent of Miller v. California made interstate distribution of pornography prosecutable according to the standards of the community into which items were sent. Afraid to risk federal penalties, publishers had little choice but to rely on organized crime to ship their products beyond the purview of New York’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Booksellers as well as performers knew that somewhere in the hierarchy of their industry lurked Mafia figures such as Robert DiBernardo of the Gambino family, John "Sonny" Franzese and Anthony, Joseph and Louis Peraino of the Colombo crime family.

   Al Goldstein readily admitted that the mob distributed Screw Magazine; he could get no one else to dare do so nationally, or even in New York City itself, where no one wanted to displease crime bosses by competing with them. Martin Hodas, as we have said, developed ties to wise guys by 1970. Another example is Stan Malkin, who worked out of  Liberty Gift Shop (later Forsythe Books) and owned a Times Square topless bar. He published Unique, Wee Hours and After Hours Books in the mid 60s. The paperbacks were soft core, but had covers by leading fetish artists Gene Bilbrew and Eric Stanton. 







Bilbrew, illus, Wee Hours Books, 1966. Source: The Art of Gene Bilbrew (website),
http://www.dushi.com/bdsm_art/work/bilbrew/bookcovers.html





Malkin ran a distribution outfit called Satellite. He may have sold it to Cleveland pornography kingpin Reuben Sturman.

    A final example of organized crime involvement in Times Square by the late 60s is the smuggling conviction of Leonard (“Lenny”) Burtman, an important publisher of fetish and sadomasochistic books and magazines with offices first on W. 46th Street, and later in the 50s. Times Square bookstores carried his fetish booklets and magazines extensively, and his distribution system was more far-reaching than those of Mishkin, Klaw, or Brown. Some of his corporate names were Burmel, Selbee, Exotica, Pigalle, and Epic.







A Lenny Burtman production, with cover by Gene Bilbrew(?), c.1960






In 1969 Burtman, his partner, and an employee of Satellite Distributors who himself may have had mob ties, paid $4,000 to Charlie “The Blade” Tourine, of the Genovese crime family, to bribe a customs agent to release two shipments labeled “cups and saucers” which actually contained pornographic booklets from
Denmark. The second of these broke open and therefore the scheme was discovered. Burtman told police that Tourine had kept most of the money, and that he and his partner were afraid to ask for a refund. However, testimony showed that their concern was that the agent had not been not paid enough to keep silent once the scheme had failed. Burtman and his partner were sentenced to one year in jail and a $5000 fine. Angry that the publisher’s demand for a meeting allowed police, through an undercover agent, to learn of the scheme, The Blade was probably sorry he ever got involved with fidgety booksellers. His type was of a different ilk, with a more alpha-male concept of "the action." A decade later, they had replaced the older middlemen who got Times Square clientele their dirty books and related paraphernalia.
A paperback "case history" (Star Distributors Ltd 1979); at that time most likely an over-the-counter item.