NEW YORK – An adult industry icon died last week, and few in today’s industry even know who he was. Richard Basciano, a one-time boxer who fought city hall to keep his inconvenient peep show open — and won — passed away May 1 in Manhattan. He was 91.
Basciano’s Show World Center, smack in the middle of one of the priciest districts in the City that Never Sleeps, became a thorn in the side of then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani during hizzoner’s campaign to “clean up” Times Square. Despite decades of court battles, rezoning and the internet, Basciano’s infamous den of iniquity remains open, albeit without the live, nude girls that made him a wealthy man.
Born in Baltimore in 1925, Basciano grew up the son of a professional boxer. After a stint in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he followed his father into the ring for a brief period before migrating to New York in the early 1960s. There, he began selling sex magazines and fell in with real estate developer Robert DiBernardo. DiBernardo disappeared without a trace in 1986. Not until mob boss John Gotti’s sensational trial in 1992 did Basciano learn his friend and business partner was a made man whom Gotti had whacked.
Basciano himself had a mostly clean record, with only one small smudge left by a 1968 no-contest plea to federal fraud charges involving a coupon scheme and a Baltimore newspaper.
He opened Show World in 1970, tucked among about 150 similar joints in a several-block area packed with seedy businesses and sex clubs. By the 1980s, he also owned adult entertainment establishments in Philadelphia, including the Forum Theatre.
Although tenacious in business, almost everyone who knew him described Basciano as a gentleman and a pleasant person to be around. Even as he battled the city, he reportedly was good to his employees and customers, earning loyalty in a business where that’s not easily granted.
As Giuliani took aim at the sex shops in Times Square, Basciano dug in at the 22,000-square-foot sex supermarket Show World had become. In 1995, one city official called the neon emporium “the flagship of the sex industry in New York” and Basciano the city’s “porn king.” Basciano was not about to let his ship sink.
In the late 1990s, the city condemned his other dozen properties in the area to make way for new office buildings and entertainment venues. Basciano claimed the tidy sum of $14 million in the deal.
Yet Show World persevered, hunkered at the foot of two 12-story buildings at the northwest corner of 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue. Until his death, Basciano lived in a penthouse above the store.
Last year, he finally decided to sell the property — not because he no longer cared about the business or because the city had worn him down, but because the plot of land had become too valuable to resist redevelopment any longer.
Image: Screen grab of Show World Center in 2011.
