Business Notes CRIME

Call it the million-dollar panty raid. An unknown number of prurient perpetrators broke into the Los Angeles warehouse of Playboy magazine and swiped some of the Playboy empire's most valuable assets: namely, 421 hours of unedited videotape footage displaying Hugh Hefner's Playmates cavorting for the cameras. Valued at more than $1 million, the tapes constitute the raw material for such soft-porn piffle as erotic movies on the Playboy cable-TV channel and videocassette centerfolds. They included vintage rushes of Sondra Theodore, Miss July 1977 and a former Hefner girlfriend, interviews with Jessica Hahn, and the 1989 Playboy Video Calendar. Playboy officials fear that the culprits will edit the stolen material in video chop shops and resell it in overseas markets at a discount, forcing the company to compete against its own pirated products.

There seems to have been, as well, an attempt to cover up the caper. The theft occurred in April, but the bereft Bunny keepers said nothing publicly until two weeks ago, when Playboy offered a Hefty $50,000 reward for the wayward videos' safe return.