NEW YORK – “‘Porn’s New King’ sentenced to over 14 years in prison,” the New York Post headline screamed. Any reader could be excused for expecting the article to be about the likes of Larry Flynt or Steven Hirsch.
The “king” in question isn’t Flynt, Hirsch or anyone else who has ever published a single frame of actual pornography, however. In fact, other than the media, I’m not sure anyone else who has heard of, done business with or been scammed out of their money by Jason Galanis has ever referred to the man as a king of any kind, let alone a porn king.
In his latest round of legal trouble, Galanis has been sentenced to 173 months in prison for “defrauding a Native American tribal entity and numerous pension fund investors of tens of millions of dollars in connection with the issuance of bonds by the tribal entity,” as the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York stated in a press release issued late last week.
If defrauding a Native American tribe and pension fund investors doesn’t sound like a porn-related offense to you, that’s because it clearly isn’t.
You won’t soon hear any of the prosecutors connected to Galanis’ case describe him as a porn king, either. Unsurprisingly, the suits who prosecuted Galanis prefer more relevant descriptors like “co-conspirator.”
“In a brazen securities scheme designed to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else, Jason Galanis and his co-conspirators cheated both their tribal clients as well as the investing public,” acting U.S. Attorney Joon H. Kim stated in the release. “After defrauding a Native American tribe into issuing bonds, Jason Galanis and his cohorts sold the illiquid bonds to unwitting pension funds and then stole the proceeds for themselves. For his role in this campaign of theft and deception, Jason Galanis will now spend over 14 years in federal prison.”
So, if he was convicted of “securities, commodities and investment fraud,” why then does the Post insist on using the old, never-true, entirely irrelevant title “porn king,” not just in the most recent case, but seemingly every headline it has ever published pertaining to Galanis?
The answer, of course, is the clickbait value of the word porn. Had Galanis been referred to as the “king of credit card processing” 13 years ago, it would have been just as true as the king of porn claim (which is to say not true at all), but somehow I doubt we’d have seen numerous Post headlines in subsequent years harkening back to the one time somebody somewhere called him the “New King of Credit Card Processing.”
While the Post’s sensationalist tendencies are hardly limited to porn-related clickbait, if you were to go by the headlines alone, you’d think Galanis was neck-deep in the porn business — at the very least, a publisher of a popular video series, if not the owner of a MindGeek-sized operation. How else does one become a “porn king,” if not by making money off porn?
In Galanis’s case, all it took to be proclaimed the New King of Porn was to put together a 2004 deal to buy a rapidly dying IPSP that had long since passed its heyday. The IPSP was iBill, which notoriously imploded 2006 under Galanis’s watch, leaving investors and clients in the lurch for millions of dollars.
If that’s all it takes to be the king of porn, Larry Flynt sure took a lot of substantial legal risks for no reason over the course of his career.
Porn king or not, Galanis is about to embark upon a different sort of reign, one that encompasses a lot less territory than even being a petty monarch of the erotic internet. His new fiefdom’s square footage will measure three digits or less. Instead of being encircled by a defensive moat, its border will be marked by iron bars. Instead of serving to protect him from invaders and interlopers, the palace guards will be tasked with keeping Galanis inside.
Despite all of this, I’m sure the next time the Post (or any number of other outlets) has occasion to write about Galanis, it will persist in referring to him as the “new king of porn.”
After all, when it comes to communicating the news of the day, why let little a picayune like the truth mess with tradition?
[Ed. note: In February, Galanis received a separate 11-year sentence for securities fraud in connection with now-defunct insurance company Gerova Financial Group Ltd.]
