Ferris Alexander, Minneapolis "Porn King," 84
J.D. Baldwin
I can't believe none of my Minneapolis friends mailed me when this
news broke. I have to find out about it from a guy who lives in
freaking CALIFORNIA, dammit.
The best thing I was able to find online about Mr. Alexander is on the
"City Pages" web site:
http://citypages.com/databank/24/1162/article11110.asp
Google groups turned up the following old ABC news transcript from
1998, which someone posted last year (this should load both parts):
or, if you like,
I have attached the excellent City Pages article below. Enjoy.
Oh, and Terry: I would most certainly count Mr. Alexander as a
"political prisoner." The charges against him weren't political
(though I think RICO is an abomination to the Constitution and to
whatever God sits in judgment of human affairs), but he was most
certainly targeted and destroyed for political reasons.
The Porn Warrior at Rest
Ferris Alexander's legacy
by Mike Mosedale
Two weeks ago, when the news finally leaked out of a Wayzata
nursing home that Ferris Alexander had died on February 10,
both the Twin Cities' dailies gave the story prominent
play. "Ex-porn king Alexander dies at 84," blared the page one
headline in the Star Tribune. The following day, the editors
at the St. Paul Pioneer Press--however sheepish they may have
felt at getting scooped on a three-week old story--still
deemed it worthy of the front page of the B section.
That both papers would take notice of Alexander's demise was
not a surprise. Alexander had not been in the news much for
the past dozen years; he spent most of that time in seclusion,
ill health, or federal prison. But from the 1960s to the early
'90s, anti-porn crusaders in Minnesota cast Alexander as
Public Enemy Number One--a dirty old man whose unseemly wares
corrupted neighborhoods from Rochester to Minneapolis to
Duluth.
In that spirit, legions of city, state, and federal
authorities took a whack at Alexander's ever-expanding adult
entertainment empire. As both the Strib and Pi Press noted,
the feds finally succeeded in 1990, when Alexander was
convicted of 25 counts of racketeering, obscenity, and tax
fraud. By the time it was over, the government had driven him
into bankruptcy, shipped him to the federal pen for a six-year
stretch, and seized most of his assets, including 13 theaters
and bookstores and some $9 million in inventory.
And by the end of his life, Alexander was himself in ruins. "I
used to call him fairly regularly," recalls Randall Tigue, a
past president of the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union and a
longtime lawyer to Alexander. "In his last years, he got so
bitter. Basically, he only wanted to talk about how everybody
screwed him. Not just the government, but people who
associated with him. People in his family. His lawyers,
including me."
Strangely, neither the Strib nor the Pi Press bothered to note
the most obvious aspect of Alexander's legacy. While the
government crushed the man, his cause triumphed. The materials
that constituted the basis for Alexander's obscenity
conviction (titles such as Let's Have a Fuck Party and Leather
Sleaze) are now common fare. "Today, you can go almost
anywhere in this country, from mainstream video stores to
virtually any adult bookstore, and rent this sort of stuff,"
notes John Weston, a Los Angeles-based porn industry attorney
who also represented Alexander.
But if the government's crackdown on Alexander did precious
little to quell Minnesotans' appetite for porn, the legal
tactics it used still outrage many civil libertarians.
Alexander was convicted under a provision of the federal RICO
law. Designed originally as a mob prosecution tool, RICO was
amended in 1984 to include obscenity as a so-called predicate
offense.
In essence, that meant that once Alexander was found guilty of
an obscenity violation, the government could use RICO to take
his other assets. And that's exactly what happened. The
government seized some 100,000 magazines, books, and
videotapes and, ultimately, tossed them in an incinerator
because a jury deemed a grand total of seven videotapes and
publications in the collection obscene.
In the wake of the conviction, Alexander appealed that
forfeiture to the U.S. Supreme Court. Attorney Weston argued
on his behalf. And who presented the government's case in
favor of wholesale book burning? None other than former
Solicitor General Kenneth Starr, who would go on to much
greater fame as the Clinton-era special prosecutor.
As Weston saw it, that use of RICO was patently
unconstitutional. Some of the justices agreed. "I remember
Justice Stevens asked, 'What if American Airlines was
convicted of showing obscene films on a plane, what would the
court have to order?' My response was that, under RICO, the
court would be required to order forfeitures of every airplane
in the fleet," Weston recalls.
In 1993, a bitterly divided court narrowly upheld the
forfeiture. But, says Weston, the decision left a number of
significant legal questions dangling and, in the end, the
government never again employed the obscenity-predicated RICO
law as a prosecutorial tool. Today, he notes, the battles over
porn are typically argued as zoning and land-use issues, not
free speech conflicts.
In his prime, Alexander relished his role as a First Amendment
champion. While famously tight with money, he gave generously
to the MCLU. For a while, he even donated office space to the
organization. But in defeat, says attorney Tigue, Alexander
dwelled on the unfairness of the his experience. Despite
occasional estrangement from his late client, Tigue remains
extremely sympathetic.
"Basically, he went from being one of the wealthiest people in
the state of Minnesota to one of the poorest because he sold
publications the government didn't like," Tigue says. "People
who believe in free speech, people who believe what we read
and watch is none of the government's business, recognize
Ferris as a courageous freedom fighter."
Given the ubiquitous and ever more explicit nature of
pornography a decade later, it is hard to ignore the central
irony of the government's battles with Alexander. Take a drive
around Minneapolis's Warehouse District (or leaf through the
back pages of this publication), and it all seems very nearly
quaint.
That, of course, conforms to a long-established historical
trend. The newspaper man and social critic H.L. Mencken noted
as much in his essay "Comstockery." The title refers to the
19th-century crusader Anthony Comstock, founder of the New
York Society for the Suppression of Vice and the namesake for
a federal anti-obscenity statute, the Comstock Law, that would
later be applied to authors from Chaucer to F. Scott
Fitzgerald.
"As a bookworm, I have gotten so used to lewd and lascivious
books that I no longer notice them. They pour in from all
directions," Mencken observed. "The most frivolous lady
novelists write things that would have made a bartender blush
to death two decades ago. If I open a new novel and find
nothing about copulation in it, I suspect at once that it is
simply a reprint of some forgotten novel of 1885, with a new
name."
Mencken wrote those words in 1926. He could have been writing
Ferris Alexander's obituary in 2003.
--
_+_ From the catapult of |If anyone disagrees with any statement I make, I
_|70|___:)=}- J.D. Baldwin |am quite prepared not only to retract it, but also
\ / bal...@panix.com|to deny under oath that I ever made it. -T. Lehrer
***~~~~-----------------------------------------------------------------------
King Daevid MacKenzie, UltimaJock!
> In the wake of the conviction, Alexander appealed that
> forfeiture to the U.S. Supreme Court. Attorney Weston argued
> on his behalf. And who presented the government's case in
> favor of wholesale book burning? None other than former
> Solicitor General Kenneth Starr, who would go on to much
> greater fame as the Clinton-era special prosecutor.
...am I the only one who suspects that Starr (a) spends way too much
time and money worrying about how other consenting adults achieve
orgasm, and (b) must have a damned difficult time achieving one himself?...