It would be another year until most Americans would hear about Facebook for the first time. He started OK! in 2005 at the apex of the Golden Age of Celebrity Weeklies.
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Desmond courted Britain’s large corps of cheap and accessible household-name soap actors and reality TV stars, buying exclusive rights to cover their weddings, births and a Hallmark store’s worth of other occasions.Īll that money also gained him entry into the celebs’ cocktail parties and country estates.īut then Dirty Des set his sights on a bigger fish: America. The original edition of OK! launched in the UK in 1997, copying the successful society-and-royalty magazine Hello! down to its almost-identical logo, but taking a more populist bent. “Dirty Des,” as the British press called him, sold his racy rags and stunned Britain by snapping up two of its oldest newspapers, the Daily and Sunday Express. He contributed generously to charities and became friends with celebrities, particularly David and Victoria Beckham and Roger Daltrey of the Who.Ī representative for Desmond didn’t respond to a request for comment on the specifics of his ownership of OK! “If your boss sets foot here he’s a dead man,” one of the goons reportedly said, as the shaken exec tearfully later recalled.įor his part, Desmond dismissed the whole episode, as described by the FBI, as “fantasy.” Testicular torture or no, the porn-rich publisher was intent on going legit and making it in the US. They jumped into the executive’s limo and “pistol-whipped him, slashed his face with a knife and applied a Taser-style stun gun to his testicles,” The Guardian reported, quoting court documents. And when the deal went sour, he allegedly had two men carjack one of Desmond’s executives on a New York business trip in 1992. Regrettably, Martino turned out to be a high-ranking member of the Gambino crime family.
Page Six reported at the end of April that OK! - the celebrity weekly launched by brash British publisher Richard Desmond - is set to stop publishing after a 17-year misadventure, making it perhaps the most expensive catastrophe in magazine history.Īnd to think it all began with a Taser to the nuts.ĭesmond’s inauspicious foray into America began when he agreed to advertise phone-sex lines owned by New Yorker Richard Martino in the mainstream publications of his stable of British porn magazines, which also included such esteemed titles as Barely Legal and Readers Wives.
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