History of Female Domination Magazines: 1970 - Present

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Reuben Sturman continued to run Eros-Goldstripe into the early 1980’s, along with his other companies that catered to adult entertainment. He began to run into trouble with the law when it was rumored that he had ties to organized crime.

The American journalist and writer Eric Schlosser described Sturman in a US News & World Report article in 1997:

To his defenders in the sex industry, Sturman was a marketing genius and a champion of free speech, an entrepreneur whose toughness, intelligence, and boundless self-confidence were responsible for his successes. But to anti-porn activists and Justice Department officials, Sturman was the head of a vast criminal organization whose companies enjoyed an unfair competitive advantage: protection and support from the highest levels of the Cosa Nostra.

It was Sturman's refusal to pay any form of tax that finally brought him down. In 1989, Sturman was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to 10 years in jail and $2.5 million in fines. Another charge, this time for the interstate transportation of obscene material, resulted in a plea bargain for Sturman, but he was later caught trying to bribe a juror and was sentenced to 19 additional years for extortion. He briefly escaped prison in Boron, California, but was reapprehended in Anaheim. He died in a federal prison in Lexington, Kentucky on October 27, 1997.