>By way of the Smoking Gun, word of yet another crackdown in the U.S. government’s war on terror obscenity. According to the report, federal officials announced the arrest on Wednesday of Danilo Simoes Croce, who was charged with “conspiracy to distribute obscene material, a felony carrying a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $150,000 fine.” In support of the arrest is the postal inspector’s original complaint, also linked to in the Smoking Gun report, in which she names some of the fine features she had reviewed over the course of the three-year investigation– Toilet Man 6, Bukkake 3 and Scat Pleasures among them– and details, in precise if rather bloodless fashion, some of the action therein.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced last year that his office would begin specifically targetting “bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior” in pursuing new obscenity prosecutions and both the Department of Justice and the FBI began recruiting new task forces to pursue this endeavour. According to a press release issued at the time by the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, forty people and businesses had been convicted of obscenity since 2001, with 20 additional indictments pending at the time; there were only four obscenity prosecutions during the eight years of the Clinton administration.
