The Attempted Assassination of Larry Flynt

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
Romans 3:23

Biblical scholars tell us that, in the eyes of God, there are no gradations of sin. Sin is simply that intrinsic brokenness which separates us from our Creator. Jeffrey Dahmer killed and ate 17 young men and boys. I have occasionally willfully driven over the speed limit. We are both sinners equally in need of redemption.

We all come from the factory broken. Some of us spend a lifetime fighting that. Others choose simply to wallow in it. Larry Flynt transformed that ubiquitous sin nature into a profoundly lucrative business.

The Guy

The oldest of three siblings, Larry Claxton Flynt Jr, was born in Lakeville, Kentucky, in November of 1942. Flynt’s dad, Larry Claxton Sr, was a poor sharecropper who served in the US Army in Europe during WW2. As a result, young Larry was raised solely by his mom and maternal grandmother for the first three years of his life. Flynt’s younger sister succumbed to leukemia in 1951. This ultimately precipitated his parents’ divorce. Flynt’s mom opened a bar in Dayton, OH, to keep her family fed. Flynt eventually moved in with his dad because he hated his mom’s new boyfriend.

Larry Flynt ran away from home at age 15 and joined the Army using a fake birth certificate. He served honorably and returned home when his enlistment was up. He then worked in a GM plant until he was laid off because of some union troubles. Flynt bootlegged liquor for a while and eventually enlisted in the US Navy. He served as a radar operator on board the USS Enterprise and was on duty during the recovery of John Glenn’s Mercury space capsule. Flynt left the military for good in 1964.

The Businessman Finds His Stride

The following year, Flynt took his savings from the military, some $1,800 in cash, and bought his mom’s bar. This would be around $17,000 in today’s money. The club was called the Keewee. Flynt revamped the place and was soon pulling in $1000 per week (about $9,300 today). He used the proceeds to purchase two more bars.

Running a dive like that is undeniably grueling. Flynt often worked 20 hours a day, chugging amphetamines to keep himself going. However, the man had ambition. He used the profits from these three establishments to open a fourth place. This bar he called the Hustler Club. The Hustler Club was the first establishment in the area to feature nude hostesses. Larry Flynt’s strip club addressed an untapped market.

In short order, Flynt opened Hustler Clubs in Akron, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Toledo. Each place pulled in nearly half a million dollars per year. Now that he had some proper folding money, Flynt bought a tiny newspaper in Dayton called Bachelor’s Beat. This was Flynt’s first taste of publishing. He had found his one true calling.

The Smut King

In 1972, Flynt published the first issue of the Hustler Newsletter. This two-page, black-and-white souped-up leaflet orbited around his Hustler Clubs. The Hustler Newsletter was so popular that he expanded it to 16 pages and then later to 32.

In 1973, the United States entered an oil-driven recession, and business at his brick and mortar clubs cratered. In an effort to save his burgeoning empire, Flynt transformed the Hustler Newsletter into Hustler Magazine, a sexually graphic nationwide smut mag. He covered the start-up expenses by withholding payment of sales taxes on his Hustler Clubs.

July 1974 saw the inaugural issue of Hustler. Every issue challenged conventional norms and threatened to shut him down. He was being sued constantly. Flynt bought nude photos of former First Lady Jaqueline Kennedy Onassis taken by paparazzi while she was vacationing for $18,000 ($98,000 today). These illicit images went into the August 1975 issue, which sold out its million-copy print run in days. By now, Larry Flynt was rolling in money.

The Shooter

Born and raised in Alabama, James Clayton Vaughn was a product of his environment. Vaughn’s dad abandoned his family when the child was eight. Whenever he came by for a visit, the elder Vaughn invariably ended up beating James and his three siblings. When he came of age, James joined both the National Socialist White People’s Party (apparently a real thing) and the KKK. He formally changed his name to Joseph Paul Franklin in honor of Paul Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, and Benjamin Franklin. Vaughn read Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and became convinced that there was a race war coming in America. James Vaughn really hated black people.

When he acquired the means, Vaughn decided he would do his part to get that race war started. He traveled widely, killing as the opportunity allowed. Vaughn specifically targeted Jews and interracial couples. There’s not a great deal of money to be made in racially driven murders, so he kept himself fed and clothed by robbing banks.

At one point, Vaughn bought himself a copy of Hustler. It wasn’t the bondage, S&M, or depictions of graphic sexual violence that set him off. Vaughn got all energized because Flynt published pictures of a black man having sex with a white woman. He later had this to say, “I saw that interracial couple he had, photographed there, having sex. It just made me sick. I think whites marry with whites, blacks with blacks, Indians with Indians. Orientals with orientals. I threw the magazine down and thought, I’m gonna kill that guy.”

Trouble in Paradise

Meanwhile, Larry Flynt was veritably living in court and loving every minute of it. On 6 March 1978, Flynt was in a Gwinnett County, Georgia, courtroom answering an obscenity charge. He and his lawyer, a local attorney named Gene Reeves, had taken a break for lunch and were heading out of the courthouse in search of a salad. As the two men chatted, James Vaughn walked up with a semiautomatic Ruger Model 44 Deerstalker rifle.

I killed my first deer with one of those guns. Think of it like an M1 carbine on steroids. The rifle is gas-operated and feeds from a four-round tubular magazine. Chambered in .44 magnum, the Deerstalker hits like a freight train downrange.

Vaughn fired two rounds. Both of them struck Larry Flynt. One bullet hit Flynt in the gut and severed his spine. The other passed through Flynt with little consequence and then struck Reeves. That bullet traumatically removed the lawyer’s gallbladder before spending itself in his pancreas. Reeves recovered fully. Flynt did not.

Everyone at the crime scene recognized Larry Flynt. Only one man, a local Christian pastor named Fred Musser, came to his aid. Musser did his best to comfort the grievously injured Flynt, praying over him at the scene as they awaited the ambulance and Law Enforcement. He later reported that Flynt’s entrails were leaking out of his abdominal wound around his fingers, one of which was adorned with an enormous diamond ring.

Once Flynt boarded the ambulance, he and Musser never spoke again. Several years later, Flynt sent Musser a check for $1,000 out of the blue. Pastor Musser deposited the money into his church’s general fund.

Larry Flynt survived the shooting, but he was rendered paraplegic. He spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Vaughn simply climbed into his car and drove away.

James Vaughn was arrested for another unrelated murder in 1980. He was eventually convicted of eight killings and suspected of a further twenty-two. He admitted to the Flynt shooting while in prison. Vaughn was executed by lethal injection on 20 November 2013. In the lead-up to the event, Larry Flynt attempted to intervene on his behalf. He wrote, “A government that forbids killing among its citizens should not be in the business of killing people itself.”

In the aftermath of the shooting, Larry Flynt became fairly convinced that he had been the subject of a CIA hit. Being roundly despised by every little old lady in the United States of America is apparently enough to make a guy paranoid. He alleged that James Vaughn had been subjected to MKULTRA-style mind control.

It Gets Even Weirder…

A year before the shooting, Flynt was flying on his Gulfstream jet with evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton. Stapleton was the sister of President Jimmy Carter. I have no idea what brought these two extraordinary personalities together on that airplane.

During a particularly moving theological discussion, Flynt claimed to have had a vision from God that led him to be born again as an evangelical Christian. However, this vision was not adequate to keep him from publishing Hustler Magazine. He declared soon thereafter his intent to “hustle for God.”

The subsequent shooting caused Flynt to rethink his convictions. The man ultimately died an atheist.

As one might imagine, being the magnate of one of the world’s most lucrative porn empires made Larry Flynt fairly difficult to live with. He was married five times and fathered at least five children. Three marriages ended in divorce. His fourth wife, Althea Leasure, died in 1987 of an AIDS-related disease. In 1998, Flynt married his nurse, Elizabeth Berrios.

Paraplegia brings with it a great many significant health challenges. Chronic urinary tract infections, pressure ulcers, and coronary disease are part and parcel. Despite these trials, Flynt lived for another 43 years, dying in 2012 at the age of 78 of heart failure.

READ MORE HERE: SSG David Bellavia: It’s All Fun and Games Until Some Unwashed Lunatic Bites You in the Balls

Ruminations

Larry Flynt was an objectively horrible person. His magazine included images of naked women being gang raped and, in one case, being fed into a meat grinder. One popular Larry Flynt title, Barely Legal, specializes in young women who have only just turned 18.

One regular feature in Hustler was a cartoon drawn by Dwaine Tinsley called “Chester the Molester.” This comic ran for 13 years and catalogued the serial adventures of an insatiable pedophile named Chester. Tinsley once candidly admitted to a coworker, “You can’t write about this stuff all the time if you don’t experience it.”

In 1990, Tinsley was convicted of molesting his daughter for five years. Flynt’s daughter, Tonya Flynt-Vega, accused the porn lord of molesting her as a child as well. Flynt denied the allegations, but acknowledged that he had not been a terribly good parent.

In 1983, Flynt purportedly approached flamboyant former spy-turned-mercenary Mitch WerBell III about rigging his wheelchair with plastic explosives. WerBell was a major player in the Military Armament Corporation. He designed the classic two-stage MAC suppressor used with the M10 Ingram submachine gun. Flynt intended to gain an audience with the US Supreme Court and then kill them all with his improvised exploding medical equipment.

Larry Flynt had everything, yet he was so tragically, grindingly miserable. His entire life was characterized by hate, rage, abandonment, and monetized lust. At the apogee of his success, Flynt was worth about half a billion dollars. Now, he’s dead. His last wife, the nurse Elizabeth Berrios, runs the thriving Flynt porn empire today.

What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?
Mark 8:36

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