7/31/99

A few week ago, Luke received a lawsuit threat from Vivid Video via the law firm of Herald Price Fahringer. Krash writes about this favorite lawyer of organized crime:

It ain’t easy bein’ sleazy--which is why America’s most mobbed-up pornographers have traditionally turned to Herald Price Farhringer for relief.

“I come across as straight, conservative-looking guy,” Fahringer reflected in a 1996 Time Out New York interview. “That may help me make my cases sound more plausible.” Especially when the clients are crooked, flamboyantly-attired skells with organized-crime affiliations.

Fahringer himself is truly an American original--a determinedly self-created over-achiever who came up the hard way. Wrote Fahringer’s future client Larry Flynt in Hustler, dated December, 1975, “...Fahringer was raised in the coal regions of Pennsylvania where his father worked for a refining company. He worked his way through Penn State University by waiting on tables and fought on the Penn State boxing team. After graduation from college, he became interested in acting and worked in a road show with [popular early-Sixties novelty acts] Dagmar and Arthur Treacher. After that experience, he worked as a radio announcer, a sparring partner in a professional fighters’ camp , took a whirl at doing television commercials and worked as a salesman. Finally he enrolled at the University of Buffalo law school...”

Fahringer received his J.D. 1956. To this day he is one of Buffalo’s favorite adopted sons. In 1966, he was presented the SUNY Buffalo School of Law’s Annual Outstanding Achievement Award, its Distinguished Alumni Award in 1982, and again in 1983 [his alma mater Penn State belatedly conferred its Distinguished Alumni Award in 1985].

During his glory days as a pornographers’ advocate, Fahringer received both the 1975 Outstanding Practitioner Award from the Criminal Justice Section of the New York State Bar Association, 1975 and the Award for Legal Defense of Freedom of the Press from the New York Press Club in 1979.

With offices in Buffalo and New York City --as well as Beverly Hills to better service the porno industry via underling Paul Cambria, Jr.--Fahringer remains geographically and philosophically outside the silk-stocking orbits of law as practiced on Park Avenue and Wall Street.

“I never cared much for the establishment,” confided Fahringer in the 1975 Hustler interview. “I’ve always been opposed to authority.”

The Fahringer mystique as we know it today is inseparable from an era of colorful courtroom battles, in which the memory of the Manson Family trials and The Chicago Eight courtroom circus was still fresh in the public eye.

By comparison, Fahringer’s spirited yet suave representation of clients like Al Goldstein and Larry Flynt seemed magisterial--if only because none of his clients had to be shackled and gagged at trial. It was a time of American judicial liberalism seen neither before nor since--and Farhringer’s pleasing courtroom demeanor and chiseled good looks did not go unappreciated.

“The Warren Court was in full reign and that time,” recalled Farhinger in one of his innumerable interviews, “so we enjoyed a lot of success.” In front of juries and judges in 27 states, whether championing such mob offerings as Deep Throat in Buffalo or The Devil in Miss Jones in Cleveland, Fahringer has used, according to more than one interview, the same strategem: “I say, “I don’t have this magazine in my home, and I wouldn’t expect you to have it in your home. But that’s not what this case is about.”

Indeed, so fraught with ambiguity and upheaval was the America’s cultural terrain in the 1970s that Fahringer would successfully seize the high moral ground on behalf of America’s most prominent mob-affiliated pornographers--taking 14 cases to the Supreme Court and winning all but two.

Fast-forward to 1999: Herald Price Fahringer--winner of 1995’s Thurgood Marshall Award from the New York State Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, and attorney of record for what the New York Times, describes as “more than 100 sex shops” [including peep-show czar Richard Basciano since at least 1978]--gets his butt kicked at every level of the nation’s judiciary.

On Jan. 11, 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Fahringer’s final appeal--thus sounding the death knell for New York City’s once-profitable jack-booth, lap-dancing, fake-champagne hustle and titty-bar industries. Fahringer’s winning streak was clearly at an end: What happened?

The slippery slope traveled by this once imposing Constitutional advocate to his current role as a practically full-time porn consigliere is roughly traceable to Larry Flynt’s 1981 Cleveland obscenity conviction, which Farhringer argued all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court...and lost.

Fahringer has consistently shifted the blame for his mounting courtroom losses on the Nixon Administration’s Burger Court --and the trend of judicial conservatism a la Clarence Thomas and William Rehnquist that has continued right up to the present day.

Meanwhile, despite the squalor and blight that Fahringer’s clients have proliferated throughout metropolitan America, he remains a favorite son in Buffalo, New York. At a recent luncheon of upstate NY’s Bar Association of Erie County, celebrated toastmaster Fahringer offered up this quote from Sir Thomas More: “Yes, I would give the devil the benefit of the law, for my own safety sake."

Unfortunately, the devil is in the details--and the details are inscribed with Mafia blood. See you in hell, Counselor.