By Dan Horn
and Sharon Turco
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The decades-old battle between Hustler and Hamilton County resumed Tuesday when sheriff's deputies seized computer equipment and sexually explicit videos from the Hustler store in downtown Cincinnati.

Jimmy Flynt

The store's owner, Jimmy Flynt, said deputies raided the store in the morning and then escorted several employees to a grand jury hearing, where they testified about store operations.

Flynt said he believes the grand jury is investigating whether videos sold at the Elm Street store violate community standards for obscenity. If the jury determines the videos are obscene, Flynt and others associated with the store could face criminal charges.

"I think this is a personal vendetta," Flynt said. "After a quarter-century, we're still doing battle with (Sheriff) Simon Leis."

A spokesman for Leis confirmed that deputies went to the store Tuesday with a search warrant, but would not say what was taken. Prosecutor Mike Allen refused to comment on whether a grand jury was investigating the Hustler store.

Flynt's brother, Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt, no longer co-owns the downtown store, but said he supports his brother's decision to sell explicit videos. He said he's confident Hustler will prevail if the case goes to trial.

"They need a bucket of water thrown in their faces," he said of prosecutors and sheriff's investigators.

The raid Tuesday is the latest in a long line of skirmishes that dates to the 1970s, when then-Prosecutor Leis convinced a jury that Hustler magazine was obscene.

The conviction was overturned on appeal, but the Flynts and county authorities have been at odds ever since.

The most recent battle came five years ago, when the Flynt brothers were charged with selling obscene videos from a previous downtown store, Hustler News & Gifts.

The case ended in 1999 with a plea deal in which the Hustler store pleaded guilty to two counts of pandering obscenity.

In exchange, prosecutors dropped charges against the Flynt brothers, and the brothers agreed to never again sell sexually explicit videos in Hamilton County.

Jimmy Flynt said the deal to stop selling videos should no longer apply because others in the community, including private dealers and satellite television, now offer movies that are just as explicit as those sold at the Hustler store.

"I don't consider them obscene," he said. "I sell these videos from coast to coast, and the only problem I have is with Hamilton County."

Flynt said the deal is unconstitutional because it bars him from selling all explicit videos, even those that may not be considered obscene.

He said he began selling explicit massage and "instructional" videos at the store last year. In the past few months, he added more movies, such as Hustler XXX, Barely Legal and Young Sluts Inc.

Flynt said his store no longer sells any of the videos that were involved in the 1999 case. It's unclear, however, whether prosecutors can reinstate the charges from 1999.

Prosecutors declined to comment and the Flynts' lawyer, H. Louis Sirkin, was out of town Tuesday and could not be reached.

If the latest investigation leads to another obscenity trial, a jury will once again be asked to determine Hamilton County's community standards.

A community's standard - or its tolerance for explicit material - is a subjective matter that is decided case-by-case.

The jury must decide whether the videos have any educational, artistic or scientific value, and whether the content is more extreme than material available elsewhere in the community.

"The videos sold in that store pale in comparison to stuff that's sold elsewhere," Larry Flynt said Tuesday.

Although there are few adult bookstores in Hamilton County, an Enquirer investigation two years ago found that tens of thousands of county residents have access to explicit material.

More than 21,000 had ordered explicit videos from one of the nation's largest mail-order companies that year, and an estimated 70,000 county residents visited adult Web sites on the Internet during a one-month period.

E-mail dhorn@enquirer.com and sturco@enquirer.com