The Mayor vs the Pornographers
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I don’t remember why when I lived in San Francisco I had a very negative opinion of then mayor, Dianne Feinstein. Oddly for the most sex-friendly city in America she waged a long and pointless battle against the Mitchell Brothers, erotic enterpreneurs most famous for the film Behind the Green Door.
Feinstein empowered the vice squad of the SFPD as a sort of screwball comedy Papal Swiss Guard with the sworn duty of putting the Mitchell Brothers out of business. The O’Farrell, which Hunter S. Thompson called “the Carnegie Hall of sex in America,” was raided the way the Allies bombed Dresden. Every one of the Mitchell Brothers’ prostitution busts — there were hundreds in the 70s and 80s — was thrown out of court, a reality but that did not deter Feinstein’s finest from continuing to hit on the O’Farrell with metronomic regularity. Led by vice lieutenant Dennis Martel who paid proud to the flashlight prowess of the SFPD — he was frequently spied crawling about the O’Farrell’s back stairwells carrying a long black flashlight, and once sent 12 officers throughout the premises with flashlights in search of Marilyn Chambers’ W-2 form.
