It would take a master economist to chart the complex interplay of greed, shame, and revenge involved in settling on a price for selling out a lover or, as the case may be, a client. Or maybe—isn’t this often so where powerful men are concerned?—something in between. Not that calculations aren’t made on Flynt’s side as well. “Look,” he says, “if we can take down a well-known U.S. senator, we’ll pay the money—we’ll pay the million dollars. But when you get down to congressmen, they’re a dime a dozen. If they’re from some remote area of the country, they’re not worth very much—maybe 25, 50 grand. But presidents and senators are really big paydays.” That said, he declines to lay out a detailed price list, though he estimates that over the years he has spent in total upwards of $5 million on such matters, between bounties and investigative costs.

Here’s a boring question: Is any of this ethical? Checkbook journalism—paying for sources—is frowned on by most journalists and forbidden at most mainstream publications and news outlets. The fear is that, for money, a source will tell you whatever you want to hear, true or not—like waterboarding but with a carrot instead of a stick. Another issue that journalists don’t typically broach is that paying sources opens up a can of worms: If you pay one, do you have to pay all of them? And at a time of shrinking news budgets?! On the other hand, for someone with a book or movie to promote, the publicity generated by an interview, especially a juicy one, could be considered payment in kind. And no one seems to feel that paying former public officials and other newsmakers to write book-length memoirs undercuts their veracity or is in any way unethical. Perhaps what’s good for Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins should be good for The New York Times and even Hustler? I don’t believe that, but you can’t dismiss the question out of hand.

As for anyone’s qualms about rummaging around in politicians’ private lives, that train seems to have left the station a decade ago, if not longer. You could even argue that sexual conduct is a relatively weighty issue in an era when presidential elections can be decided by the loudness of a candidate’s sighs during a debate. For his part, Flynt has long since made his peace with being vilified (if it was even an issue for him to begin with; he has, after all, admitted to having had sex with a chicken in his youth). He recounts a favorite anecdote, about an interview Livingston gave The New York Times shortly after the Speaker-elect resigned. “They asked him what he thought about me, and he said he thought I was a bottom-feeder. So they called me for a comment and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s right, but look what I found when I got down there.’ ”

Speaking of descent, *Hustler’*s editorial offices are located seven floors below Flynt’s executive floor. The elevator opens onto an unmarked lobby whose only feature is a large table with a marble top upon which sits a Jacuzzi-size urn full of multicolored fake flowers. Beyond a door, the actual magazine offices are decorated with stained beige carpeting, filing cabinets with pornography piled on top, and battered, generic-issue office furniture. Though the magazine has been edited here for 12 years, the offices have the thrown-together, transient look of a TV production office or the headquarters of a political campaign.

A word about the magazine’s content. There is a popular conception among those who don’t read it—abetted by the 1996 Miloš Forman film, The People vs. Larry Flynt, which dramatized the publisher’s free-speech battles but downplayed how precisely he was exercising his rights—that Hustler is a slightly raunchier, blue-collar version of Playboy. This isn’t quite true. The magazine, which started publishing nationally in 1974, is much, much raunchier. In an airbrushed, Vaseline-lensed era, it established itself with brightly lit, sharply focused, speculum-like views of the female body. There has been evolution. Today’s Hustler pictorials feature not just genitalia but also penetration, ejaculation, sex toys, sodomy, and pretty much everything else that one or two or more people can do without endangering their health, risking arrest, or involving other species. (Though same-sex impulses are rationed strictly to the ladies.) None of this is unique on contemporary newsstands. What continues to distinguish the magazine from its competitors (in what the magazine industry refers to without embarrassment as the “men’s sophisticates” category) is (a) its calculatingly offensive, aggressively un-P.C., sometimes ugly, sometimes misogynistic sense of humor, a defining part of its editorial DNA, and (b) an increasingly liberal, or at least anti-Bush, political stance, an outgrowth of the magazine’s historic support of nose-thumbing politics. If Al Gore had an id, is this what it would look like? Though Hustler now publishes columns by old lefties such as Nat Hentoff and Robert Scheer, its singular voice, tapping into cultural resentments that more typically underscore conservative politics, is best captured in a recent cartoon that features President Bush ejaculating on Condoleezza Rice’s backside—semen features in a lot of Hustler humor—while comparing himself to Strom Thurmond and using a racial epithet. (Flynt says he usually votes Democratic, except when he’s casting protest votes for Libertarians, which is another way of cross-sectioning the magazine’s point of view.)