[buddy i con]

This thread brings back a story I hadn't remembered in a long time. After getting my BS, I spent about ten years in the workforce before deciding to go back and get a masters. At that time I found an old college friend who worked professionally by then, and we rented a duplex more or less between the University and where he worked. He and his girlfriend used to get pretty loud sometimes, but nothing racy to report. Once though I was snooping around in his room, don't remember what I was looking for, and I found his stash. It was the usual stuff, a few Penthouse as I recall, but mostly the harder stuff like Club. There was one odd little publication though.

It was smaller than a magazine, larger than Penthouse Letters, not very many pages, and printed on cheap newsprint. It was all stories and ads. It didn't take very long to skim the stories. Most were pretty crappy, not any better than a lot of the stuff in OCC's Fiction threads (no offense intended). There were two very strange child pedo stories though. I don't know if fiction stories constitute child porn, they were pretty obviously fiction, not well written, and labeled as fiction. All I remember about them is that they were kind of weird stories, not just under-age. The thing was so crappy, short and badly printed that I couldn't imagine anyone paying for it, certainly not my housemate. He had nothing at all even remotely under-age in nature, not even "Barely 18", or one of those mags. It was mostly typical adult erotica though, only a couple under-age stories.

Flash forward a few years and I ran across the publication again, in the used section of an adult bookstore. It was in a bundle of old magazines. I wondered again were in the hell it came from. Then several years after that I ran across it again, only in a very different context. I read about it in the media, with a pretty good description of one of the weird under-age stories, and I think even a blurry thumbnail snap shot of the cover. I can't remember where I found the story about it, but it was most likely the internet. It turned out that it was published by the FBI, and supposedly used, or it was intended to be used, in operations to catch people dealing in child porn. As I recall, the story was about an inquiry into the appropriateness of the FBI spending money on something like that. By then I'm wondering, how the hell did the FBI get it circulated, and how did my housemate get a hold of it?

My housemate had gotten married by then, had a kid even I think, and I'm sure he had gotten rid of the thing many years earlier. It was printed on such crappy paper, it had maybe even fallen apart by then. At the time I first ran across it, I didn't want to have anything to do with it, not knowing if it was even legal. Now I kind of wish I had a copy of it, along with the news story about it of course. Given it's interesting origin, a collector of early porn would probably pay good money for it today.