Word: raiding
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Call it the million-dollar panty raid. An unknown number of prurient perpetrators broke into the Los Angeles warehouse of Playboy magazine and swiped some of the Playboy empire's most valuable assets: namely, 421 hours of unedited videotape footage displaying Hugh Hefner's Playmates cavorting for the cameras. Valued at more than $1 million, the tapes constitute the raw material for such soft-porn piffle as erotic movies on the Playboy cable-TV channel and videocassette centerfolds. They included vintage rushes of Sondra Theodore, Miss July 1977 and a former Hefner girlfriend, interviews with Jessica Hahn...
...City headquarters of Jordache Enterprises, spent two days rummaging through files and carted off more than a million documents, the company's executives were shaken but not surprised. They quickly concluded that their rivals at Los Angeles-based jeansmaker Guess, Inc., were involved, and they were right. The IRS raid and a subsequent grand-jury investigation of possible tax violations by Jordache were triggered by tips supplied by Guess to one of the most powerful IRS officials on the West Coast: Ronald Saranow, who then headed the Los Angeles office of the service's criminal-investigation division. Saranow later asked...
...Bust!" With that crack of an undercover agent's voice on the Harris County sheriff's radio, an unmarked white Chrysler rips out of a gravel driveway. From other directions, four cars race down a seedy strip of highway toward an abandoned gray house. A vice raid is under way on Houston's north side, and alongside the sergeant in the Chrysler's front seat, citizen Dan Hurlbut, smut buster, unsheathes a dark cigar and relishes the upcoming catch...
...afternoon during an assault on a trafficker in lewd videos. At the house, tires screech, and officers leap out with drawn .45s. "If anything's going to go wrong, it's in the first two minutes," says Hurlbut, taking it all in from the Chrysler. Nothing does, but the raid nets only a few small-time video wholesalers. However, clues quickly lead deputies eight miles away to a cramped trailer that proves a cornucopia of hard-core videos and books...
Though the raid is a success, the skin shop is open again in a matter of hours. That doesn't faze Hurlbut, who has lost his share of go-rounds with crafty defense lawyers. He'll simply try again. "Sex shops are like fungus," he says. "If we don't apply the antibiotic, they'll sprout again anywhere." For Hurlbut, the medicine involves marshaling public awareness and applying legal pressure. "We're not on a moral crusade," he insists. "The porn people are folks like you and me, trying to make a living. We just want them to obey...