US subsidiary of $50,000,000 international porn business apparently headquartered above Connie Hickle's flower shop in Northwood, Iowa

Kyle Munson/Des Moines Register

Aksarbent knows what you're think­ing; that we got drunk again and stole some­thing from the Onion. Oh, no we didn't! It's from the Des Moines Register. Clark Kauffman wrote it and he's an actual, professional, walk-around-in-the-snow journalist, so there, and he said this started in 2004 when the former Worth county prose­cutor, Chad Belville, sold Connie Hickle his building, then rented back the upstairs office.

Belville was elected county attorney in 1998, beating by 34 votes a longtime incumbent. But shortly after he took office, he was arrested for second-offense drunken driving. He resigned and was treated for alcoholism, and a special election was scheduled to fill his position.
     Although he had no driver's license, Belville decided to take another shot at the county attorney's office. He won the special election in a landslide, 1,309 to 581. He then spent a week in jail on his drunken driving conviction and reclaimed the job of Worth County's top law enforcement official.

     "The people of Worth County decided they'd rather elect an inexperienced drunk than the other guy," he said.

     He served two years as prosecutor and was twice subjected to a public reprimand from the Iowa Supreme Court Board of Professional Ethics and Conduct — once for the drunken driving convictions and once for comments made to the media about a criminal case he was prosecuting. He resigned in 2002, before his term was up. The reason, he said, was that he was coming out of the closet as a gay man. He moved to Arizona, where he was licensed to practice law, figuring Phoenix would be more tolerant of his status.

Chad Belville in Bangkok, from his
Myspace page; totally not from
the Des Moines Register

One of Bellville's current clients is Fraserside LLC, which owns the copyrights of a large adult film library and which is suing the owners of two adult websites for infringement. Fraserside is a US subsidiary of Private Media Group, a $50 million Nasdaq-listed corporation based in Cyprus and Spain and which is considered a global leader in adult entertainment.  The case is being heard in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa because Fraserside supposedly is based there.

"Oh, Lordy," Hickle said. "I had no idea. I am not OK with this. I don't believe in pornography, and, oh, my, I just don't see Northwood as the sex capital of the world. We have all these Norwegians here. Can you imagine that?"
     "I think I'll be calling him," she said. "I have a sense of humor, but not this kind of a sense of humor. But I don't know. The more I think about this, the funnier it gets."