Al Goldstein

Al Goldstein (died December 19, 2013) was the publisher of Screw, which he co-founded with Jim Buckley in 1968, each putting in 175 dollars. He was arrested 19 times on obscenity charges in the magazine's first three years, and in 1974 a federal judge threw out an obscenity case against him, after which, the Associated Press reported, "the willingness of the government to prosecute such cases waned." He died at a hospice in Brooklyn, at 77.¹

Before Screw

Goldstein was born in Brooklyn. Before founding Screw he served in the Army, sold insurance, drove for the gossip columnist Walter Winchell, was jailed in Cuba for taking unauthorized photographs of Raúl Castro, and, as a photographer for Pakistan International Airlines, was present in 1962 when Jacqueline Kennedy visited Pakistan.¹

Screw and Midnight Blue

Screw sold 140,000 copies a week at its height. "I really need the attention of being arrested, because that means I'm still bugging the establishment, that I'm still gadfly to the state," he told Playboy in 1974. The magazine was later outdone by Larry Flynt's Hustler and other publications; in 1974 Goldstein launched a cable television show, Midnight Blue, which ran for nearly thirty years.¹ Screw reviewed R.C. Horsch's The Erotic Memoirs of a Male Chauvinist Pig in 1973; Goldstein wrote that the sex in it was disgusting.²

Later Cases

In 2002 he was sentenced to 60 days in jail for harassing a former secretary with threatening telephone calls and editorials; an appeals court overturned the conviction, ruling that prosecutors had used overly inflammatory language at trial. In 2003 he pleaded guilty to harassing one of his four former wives with obscene telephone messages. Screw folded in late 2003 and Goldstein filed for bankruptcy protection; he at times slept in a car and lived in a homeless shelter in Florida.¹