Porn figure Sturman dies in prison at 73

     Associated Press
      Pornography czar Reuben Sturman, who was the focus of a high-profile 1992 obscenity case in Las Vegas, died Monday at a federal prison in Kentucky, where he was serving terms for tax fraud in Cleveland and extortion in Chicago.
      Prison officials in Lexington had no further details.
      Sturman, 73, pleaded guilty in 1992 in Las Vegas to racketeering and shipping obscene materials across state lines. He was sentenced to four years in prison.
      "Part of (the) legend (in the pornography industry) was that he took on the government and never gave in," federal prosecutor Mary Spearing said of Sturman on the day he entered into a plea agreement with authorities in Las Vegas.
      At issue in the trial were eight interstate shipments of videotapes that had been ordered by undercover officers around the country.
      They were films with titles such as "You Said A Mouthful," "Golden Showers," "Animal Tapes 1-6," "Female Domination," "The Nurse Will See You Now," "Dr. Bizzaro," "Between The Cheeks" and "Brothers Should Do It."
      They featured scenes of humans eating excrement, women having sex with horses, pigs, chickens and other animals, and acts of sadomasochism.
      To prove the Las Vegas case, the prosecution had to convince the jury that, first, the films were obscene when applying the community standard and that, second, Sturman had knowledge of and was linked to the interstate shipments.
      It was believed at the time that the federal government had a lot at stake in the Sturman trial. Three previous obscenity prosecutions against him had ended in failure.
      During his first trial in Las Vegas on obscenity and racketeering charges that ended in a mistrial in October 1991, news accounts described a jovial Sturman who laughed as jurors watched films of men and women having sex with animals. He later described prosecutors' attempts to convict him as a "government vendetta."
      Part of Sturman's empire was based out of his Las Vegas-based adult bookstore, which authorities alleged served as a major distribution center for adult books, magazines, videotapes and other sexually explicit materials.
      Sturman, formerly of Cleveland, was convicted in Cleveland of conspiring to obstruct the Internal Revenue Service in 1989. He received a 10-year sentence on the tax charges and a 19-year sentence for an extortion conviction in Chicago in 1993.
      In the 1980s, Sturman was identified by the Justice Department as the No. 1 distributor of hard-core pornography. His indictment by a Cleveland grand jury was announced by Attorney General Edwin Meese III.
      Sturman was convicted in Cleveland of hiding his ownership of businesses selling sexually explicit materials throughout the United States and Europe and skimming taxable revenues to banks in Switzerland and the Netherlands.
      Prosecutors alleged during his Las Vegas trial that Sturman controlled an empire of adult bookstores and movie theaters originating in Cleveland and including businesses in Las Vegas, Reno, San Francisco and San Diego.
      His arrests on pornography charges go back decades. In 1964, he was indicted on charges of receiving lewd books, but he won a U.S. Supreme Court ruling three years later that the material was not obscene. He was acquitted of obscenity charges in 1976, and similar charges were dismissed in 1980.
     The Review-Journal contributed to this report.