Roger Franklin: The world gives Al the finger

No matter what you think of dirty pictures and career pimps, it's impossible to look at what fate has dealt Al Goldstein without feeling at least a twinge of sympathy.

It's not likely to last long, mind you, since the man who 36 years ago founded the infamous Screw magazine has devoted just about every waking moment of his adult life to infuriating and disgusting everyone who has ever crossed his path.

But still, as the self-proclaimed Sultan of Smut wanders the streets of New York a homeless and bankrupt bum, his fate is a reminder of how far and how quickly the mighty can fall.

As recently as three years ago, the 68-year-old publisher seemed to be sitting pretty, a perverse and perverted incarnation of the American Dream. There was his plush townhouse on the Upper East Side, the garage packed with custom-built limos, and the waterfront mansion in Pompano, Florida - a much-detested local landmark, thanks to the three-metre statue of a hand giving the rest of the world the finger he erected on the front lawn.

Channel-surf after midnight in Manhattan, and twice a week on the local cable network he would be sitting fat and sweaty and chomping on a stogie while cursing out all creation, one offender at a time.

Ex-wives, judges, the Chinese restaurant that took too long to deliver his take-out dinner, a female airport screener who refused to look down his pants - all were the subjects of rants that climaxed in the nightly **** You award.

And because peddling filth had made him rich, he could afford the sharp lawyers who somehow found ways to let him get away with it time and again.

To some, those battles made him a hero - even if they had to hold their noses while bestowing the honour. What he couldn't get was respect.

Hugh Hefner defied the puritan conventions of 1950s America and went mainstream, his Playboy empire the operator of clubs, casinos and, most recently, a thriving pay-per-view cable porn empire. Bob Guccione of Penthouse fame, another stroke merchant bankrupted by the internet's portal to free filth on demand, briefly commanded a stable of relatively respectable magazines, ones in which the models were mostly clothed.

Even Hustler's Larry Flynt had his admirers, among them director Milos Forman, who made a much-praised flick that lionised the man who boasts of having lost his virginity to a chicken.

But Goldstein? Well, as a contributor to libertarian magazine Reason once noted, the litany of obscenity raps he beat in court did more to expand and redefine the First Amendment's protection of free speech than any other player in the history of publishing, D.H. Lawrence and Lady Chatterley's randy rustic included.

Unlike Flynt, who fancies himself as a political activist and spent millions digging dirt on Bill Clinton's female accusers and presidential inquisitor Kenneth Starr, Dirty Al saw the whole world, left and right, as a target.

In 1973, for example, and already under indictment for sending obscene material through the mail, a peeping Tom offered him a folio of photos that captured Jackie Onassis nude. He published them without blinking. More charges followed, but Screw sold 600,000 copies that week and Goldstein pocketed another million or so to pay the lawyers.

"Politicians make hookers look good," he told me several years ago, when we were in the same restaurant and I approached him with a view to doing a story on his life and exploits.

"I'm a fat Jew whore-chaser from Brooklyn, but I'm honest about it. No politician can say that."

Then he turned to my son, just 7 at the time, and gave him a dollar with the advice that he should invest it in a cheap whore who could teach him about "oral techniques".

Junior didn't have a clue what he was talking about, thankfully, but the idea of a story died on the spot. What point would there have been in profiling a crusader whose only cause was a compulsion to make jaws drop? Look beneath that crusade to shock and what was left? Just more layers of the same. He did shock well, though, got to give him that - too well for his own good, actually.

Thanks to all those courtroom victories, the law's definition of what constitutes prosecutable obscenity expanded to the point where, these days, almost nothing but scenarios involving animals and kids can land a filthmonger in the dock.

In his heyday, if a New York hooker wanted to tout for business, an ad in Screw was her only option.

Today, the back pages of the Village Voice have stolen Goldstein's bread and butter, and a Google search brings up websites listing the prices and specialties of hundreds of working girls.

Slowly, as Screw's fortunes declined, so did Goldstein's. When it ceased publication a few months ago, he had run through so much cash there was none left to pay the lawyers.

The classy digs were seized, the cars repossessed and the man who had devoted decades to pissing off every friend who might have helped him discovered that, when he really needed them, there were none left worth turning to.

Now, broke, dirty and dressed in op-shop rags, he is sleeping in cars and homeless shelters. Even his own son, on whom he lavished a Harvard education, refuses to talk to him, and the only attention he gained came after an arrest for shoplifting a self-help book for sufferers of colitis.

Call it karma, if you like, or divine justice if you are more inclined to a moralist's view of right, wrong and retribution but as the deposed Sultan of Smut ambles broke and lonely about the same Big Apple he did so much to immunise against shock, he is perhaps the most ironic of victims - a victim of his own success.