The Art of Access

Before he rose to notoriety as the founder ofPenthouse magazine, Bob Guccione allegedly wrote letters soliciting customers to buy his dirty photos at the bargain rate of 10 photos for $2 under the pseudonym of “Robert Gucci.”

That’s just part of what is revealed by the more than sixty pages of FBI records on Guccione obtained by TPM through a Freedom of Information Act request. Guccione died in October at the age of 79.

Until now, it was widely held that Guccione got into the business in 1964 with the founding ofPenthouse. But the new information unveiled in an FBI file from 1964 shows that a “Gucci” who shared an address with Guccione had been under investigation in 1956 for “sending obscene photographs through the mail.”

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• Bob Guccione’s FBI File: The Italian Beauty Who Turned A Painter Into A Porn King (huffingtonpost.com)

Filed under: 1. Records that matter, 2. Doc state of mind | Tagged: Bob Guccione, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Penthouse |