Bob Guccione, the founder and publisher of the adult magazine Penthouse who once studied for the priesthood, has died at the age of 79 after losing a long battle with cancer, the hospital said. Guccione began publication of Penthouse in Britain in 1965 and four years later in the United States, breaking new ground in the porn industry by being the first to show female pubic hair and then full-frontal nudity.
A smuttier alternative to Hugh Hefner's original Playboy, Penthouse took off in the 1970s and by 1982 the New York-born publisher had built an adult entertainment empire and amassed an estimated 400-million-dollar fortune. Guccione got left behind as porn became popular on video and the Internet, and after a series of bad investments he lost everything including his palatial Manhattan apartment and classy collection of Impressionist art.
Born in 1930 in Brooklyn to a Sicilian immigrant family, he was raised a Roman Catholic and flirted with the idea of going into the priesthood before abandoning his first wife and child to go to Europe and become a painter. Due to a lack of financing as he set up Penthouse in the mid-1960s, Guccione would photograph models for the magazine himself, especially the so-called "Pet of the Month" centerfold. As Internet porn undercut Guccione's empire in the 1990s, he embarked on a series of risky investments that ended in disaster, including an ill-fated Penthouse casino project in Atlantic City.
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