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Originally Posted by After Shock Media
Hasnt Ohio been on the industries and particularly flynts balls for decades now?
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In the 10 plus years I ran adult stores and strip clubs, I can tell you that I have personally been arrested at least 50 times in Ohio, and sadly that is no exaggeration. The humorous thing is that not a one of those arrests resulted in a conviction. Here are some of the offenses I have been arrested for:
Obstructing official business...our arcade areas (the sections that housed our video and dancer booths) were private areas that you had to pay an admission fee to enter. Since we did not have a liquor license I did not have to permit uniformed police officers to enter and inspect without a warrant. That didn't stop them from arresting me at least 10 times for denying them entry, and labeling it obstructing official business.
Promoting public indecency...because I "allowed" customers to masturbate in video booths, even though the video booths were not in a public area, but a private area that you had to pay admission to enter, and was covered in signs that told you not to enter if you were offended by depictions of nudity or hardcore sex.
Promoting prostitution...we had the old style dancer booths at our Ohio store, where the dancer was on one side of the glass and the customer on the other, with a phone to communicate. It was like live phone sex. A couple of vice officers offered a dancer $500 to bring another dancer into her booth and do a two girl show. Now the dancers all knew this was prohibited, but if I offered two female Wal Mart cashiers $500 cash in their face they would do the same. That doesn't mean Wal Mart promotes prostitution, it just means money talks. Anyways, they arrested the two girls on prostitution charges, and I got called into the store (I was at my girlfriend at the time daughter's birthday party) and was hit with felony promoting prostitution.
Violating video booth ordinances...this one is a pisser. The head vice cop at the time that I had an excellent relationship with asked us to put mirrors in the corners of the video booths, so he could see that there was only one person per booth, which was a city ordinance. We used to get a lot of gay guys trying to have sex in the booths, as well as guys bringing in prostitutes from the projects next door. We didn't want that either, so we did with no problem. Eventually he got promoted out of vice, and the new crew that came in would use the mirrors to watch customers masturbate and arrest them for public indecency, even though it was a private area. Since the video booth ordinances didn't say anything about mirrors and we did it as a courtesy to the previous vice regime, we pulled the mirrors down. On separate occasions they arrested both my assistant and I for a violation that didn't exist, for removing the mirrors.
More obstructing official business...when they started arresting our customers for public indecency we decided to defend them in court, using our local counsel, famed first amendment attorney Louis Sirkin. Initially when the customers were arrested they would just go to court, bend over and take the fine, since they were too embarrassed to fight, which was potentially fatal to us as we could get shut down as a public nuisance with too many arrests and convictions at our address. When we started to defend them we won every time, using our "it's not public indecency in a private area" argument. So the cops decided to hustle the customers out of our store when they were going to cite them for public indecency, tell them they were banned and were never allowed to come back (which they had ZERO right to do, as we were a private business), and prevented us from speaking to them so we could tell them we would defend them in court. So what did I get arrested for this time? Trying to speak to the customer after the cops were done with their paperwork (they never took them in after arresting them, just cited them and released them) to tell him we would serve as his legal counsel. I was told to go back into the store, I argued that I had the right to speak to the customer since they were done with him, and back to jail I went.
Even more obstructing official business...this particular store was in Dayton, Ohio, right next door to a real shit bag housing project called Parkside Homes. You might recognize this name from the woman who made national news several months back for microwaving her baby, and she was an esteemed resident of Parkside Homes. Gunshots were a normal sound every night, and we had to employ round the clock armed security. Part of their duties was to chase prostitutes from next door off the lot. Well, the vice officers liked to set up shop right in front of our store using female officers to portray prostitutes in a sting operation, and I was arrested several times for obstructing official business for chasing them off our lot, which was private property. I didn't care if they wanted to do a sting, as the way I see it the hookers were our competition for money, but doing it in front of our store, in our private lot, and arresting our customers was bullshit. I was also arrested for coming outside of the store and videotaping them in our lot after we won an injunction stating they had to stay on the public sidealk and couldn't go on our private property.
Yes, this was a very long winded rant, but the moral to this story is Ohio fucking blows for running an adult business...