The Final Nail in Bob Guccione&#39;s Coffin  Bob Guccione once
lived like a king. The founder of Penthouse magazine, Guccione
was once enormously wealthy (he made the Forbes 400 list in the
early '80s), and he resided in a massively ornate townhouse off
Fifth Avenue decorated with neo-Classical female busts,
Byzantine style fountains, and carved marble commodes (above).
Then he got a little too ambitious and tried to expand his
empire by building a nuclear power plant (no joke) and a casino
(slightly more plausible, but no more successful), and by the
early '00s—just as the Internet was making his flagship magazine
increasingly irrelevant—Guccione's business went bust.
Yesterday, a few of the remaining testaments to Guccione's
heyday hit the auction block. Some two dozen of the most God-
awful pieces you've ever seen were put up for sale (photos
here)—although unsurprisingly, bidders weren't exactly climbing
over one another to scoop up Guccione's old possessions. (The
commodes, for example, which were expect