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Des Moines, Iowa – from www.desmoinesregister.com – Just off the main street in tiny Northwood, there’s an unoccupied, nondescript office now rented by the former county prosecutor.

It’s right above Connie Hickle’s flower shop, and it serves as the principal place of business for an Iowa company run by an international distributor of adult films.

Hickle was not pleased to hear about this. What she thought was a dormant law office is, at best, a mailing address for a company involved in explicit films and, at worst, a storage site for the company.

“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?”

Her upstairs neighbor is Fraserside LLC, the copyright holder of a vast library of adult films that includes “Cleopatra” (not the Liz Taylor epic), “Gladiator” (sans Russell Crowe) and the more imaginatively titled “Pornolympics.” Those and several other adult films are now the focus of litigation taking shape in an Iowa courtroom.

Hickle owns not just the flower shop but also the upstairs office. She purchased the 120-year-old building from former Worth County Attorney Chad Belville in 2004. In fact, she now rents the upstairs office to Belville, who practiced law there before moving to Arizona where he now resides.

Belville is the attorney for Fraserside, which is run by Private Media Group, a Nasdaq-listed corporation that’s considered a global leader in adult entertainment. According to court records and Securities and Exchange Commission filings, Private Media Group is based in Cyprus and Spain and has assets of $50 million.

“The amazing thing about these adult-film companies is that they destroy whatever fantasies you might have about the business,” Belville said. “You walk into their offices and it’s people sitting at computers. No naked people.”

Belville’s path from Worth County prosecutor to attorney for Fraserside was a circuitous one. As a newly licensed lawyer, he 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.

He said that when one of his clients, Fraserside, was looking for office space in the United States, he suggested his old law office in Northwood, population 1,989, because the rent would be cheap and Iowa has a good work force.

According to Belville, the Northwood office now functions as a “storage facility” for the company. Hickle said she wasn’t so sure about that. She said that she hasn’t seen anything stored in the office and that little if any mail has passed through it. She said Belville never told her anything about an adult-film business.

“He said he wanted to maintain that as an address for his law license in case he comes back to Iowa,” Hickle said.

Belville said, “I have actually kicked around that idea of coming back to Iowa and serving another term as county attorney.”

Like Hickle, Mayor Randy Severson was surprised to learn that Northwood has any connection to a major international distributor of explicit films.

“I’ll be darned,” he said. “I had no idea. That’s pretty sad when you’re the mayor and you don’t know about something like this, isn’t it?”

Fraserside’s Iowa company is now suing the owners of two adult websites, claiming copyright infringement. Because Fraserside is, at least in theory, based in Northwood, the case is being heard in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa. The company claims Youngtek Solutions has pirated such Fraserside films as “Lust Treasures” and a “Star Wars” parody called “Porn Wars.”

The Northwood company says in court papers that “pirates of pornography train like professional sports players before a big game; they are masterful at their craft and execute with precision. They diligently find ways to hide assets and identities while exploiting weaknesses in their prey.”

Fraserside claims the alleged pirates “have no feeling of philanthropic responsibility.”

Youngtek Solutions has yet to file a response to the complaint. No trial date has been set.

In the meantime, Connie Hickle said she’s not sure whether to laugh or be upset about the office she’s renting to Belville.

“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.”