He filled his palace with Chinese antiques, French Provincial furniture, and painted the ceiling like the Sistine Chapel with scenes from erotic Greek myths. Earning hundreds of millions of dollars in coins, Thevis built a hotel-sized mansion, where he liked to tower over a model city of Atlanta carved from ivory. The slaying was just part of a campaign of murder, arson, and extortion that Thevis used to seize control of the country’s pornography market. Somehow still alive, he begged for his life as blood gurgled in his throat, but Thevis raised the gun and put a fourth bullet into his head. Hanna’s knees buckled and he dropped to the floor. Instead, Thevis pulled out a pistol and shot him three times in the chest. With Thevis expanding his business nationwide, Hanna perhaps expected to hear about a business opportunity. A year earlier, Hanna had quit Thevis’ company, Cine-matics, to join a rival peep machine maker in New York, called Red Vought. Their meeting took place in the warehouse, where they chatted among stacks of magazines like Weekend with the Boss and Young Humpers, and boxes full of rubber penises and vaginas. In the conservative Deep South, Mafia-like firms battled for its obscene profits, as Atlanta became America’s murder capital.Īt around 8 a.m., just before his staff arrived, Thevis welcomed onto the property his friend and former partner, Kenneth Hanna. During the sexual revolution of the 1970s, the peep machine racket would earn an estimated $2 billion. Thevis leased them to adult bookstores, where the lustful and the curious locked themselves in a private booth and kept the action rolling by feeding it quarters. It was like a jukebox for porn, with an 8mm projector that played a 15-second loop of erotic film. In his factory, Thevis manufactured a new machine that was taking the sex industry by storm. He liked to boast that 99 percent of America’s adult magazines and films flowed through his sprawling warehouse, where 300 workers arrived every day.
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