By JAMES R. PETERSEN
From The Playboy Forum (forum@playboy.com)
December 1994
David Dirmeyer is a postal inspector in Memphis, Tennessee. He
dreams of a better life, one in which he is "Lance White," crime fighter.Not long ago, Dirmeyer, using the name Lance White, discovered cyberspace, the wonderful world of computer bulletin boards where people can exchange ideas, pictures and opinions without buying a stamp. In cyberspace he discovered the one thing that postal inspectors since the turn of the century have been obsessed with: sex.
Lance White found a bulletin board called Amateur Action, operated by Robert and Carleen Thomas of Milpitas, California. It offered some 17,000 computer-scanned images, or GIFs. For $99 a year, subscribers could download images of, well, some really weird shit.
White took the six-month membership for $55. He ordered a bunch of fetish videos depicting such acts as urination, three women and a Great Dane, a mock rape (the victim giggles throughout the attack), female torture (like a Jane Fonda workout tape, but with everyone wearing leather masks) and enemas. The videos were sent UPS, which must have really pissed off the postal inspector. White also downloaded GIFs showing a woman having intercourse with a pony, someone fucking a pig, someone else performing oral sex on a horse and--shining like a beacon of normality--a come shot on a woman's face.
Amateur Action claims to be the nastiest place in cyberspace, and it had attracted attention before. The high tech squad of the San Jose, California police department, which, when it is too tired to go after offenders in its own neighborhood, likes to cruise computer networks looking for deviants, had already seized (and returned) the Amateur Action computer system. It found no images of child porn. There was some stuff labeled "young girls"--but they recognized the 18- to 25-year-olds as both young and adult.
Lance was not to be stopped.
He went through Uncle Sam's private stash of child porn. He contacted Robert Thomas and mentioned that he had some "unusual stuff," some "action magazines." (Apparently the government thinks everybody knows these are code words for child porn.) Shortly after this enigmatic exchange, Thomas received an express mail delivery (Lance was at least true to his employer). Inside were magazines showing kids engaged in sex. Dirmeyer, now going by his real name, followed the delivery with a search warrant for, among other things, all records of business dealings with Lance White.
The case was tried in Memphis. Of the 70 citizens in the jury pool, only a few had computers, one had a modem and none had cruised the Internet. One had a son who had recently been cured of an addiction to pornography, but that, insisted the father, wouldn't keep him from being fair. A jury was chosen and members were asked to judge the videos and GIFs by local community standards.
The only person in Memphis who had ever done business with Amateur Action was Lance White. In fact, the person who had brought obscenity into Memphis was Lance White. It's not as if the Thomases were dispensing this stuff on street corners or pre-empting "Roseanne" with enema videos. There was no threat to the local community at all.
But Memphis prides itself on setting the moral tone for the nation. In the early Seventies prosecutors hauled the cast and crew of "Deep Throat" all the way from Hollywood to Memphis for a months-long obscenity trial and media circus. "Deep Throat" had never been shown in Memphis. It's called venue shopping--what postal inspectors do to make life a little more interesting in towns that have no Times Square. Create a crime, then arrange to have it committed in the most conservative town in America. The porn posse had dragged Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw, to Wichita, Kansas. It waited until the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit (artistic photos of S&M and gay sex) reached a Cincinnati art museum to make a bust. Juries in those trials found the accused innocent.
The Memphis jury found the Thomases guilty of 11 counts of obscenity, including the come shot. They face up to 55 years in jail and millions of dollars in fines.
The jury saw through the bogus kid porn charge, and held that Lance White-David Dirmeyer had entrapped the Thomases.
How many self-important postal inspectors does it take to subvert the Constitution? One.