Soldier of Fortune Calls for Help

Soldier of Fortune magazine has appealed to readers for money it says it needs to keep publishing and fight a $9.4-million court judgment.

The Boulder,Colo.-based magazine is appealing the award to the family of a woman whose killer was hired through a Soldier of Fortune classified advertisement.

A jury in Houston made the award in March in response to a lawsuit filed by Gary Wayne Black, 18, and his grandmother, Marjorie Eimann, 64. They had sought $22.5 million.

Sandra Black, Black’s mother and Eimann’s daughter, was fatally shot in February, 1985, at her home in Bryan, Tex.

Black’s husband, Robert, was convicted of paying John Wayne Hearn $100,000 to kill her. Hearn is serving three life terms in Florida for that slaying and two others. Robert Black has been sentenced to death.

Robert Black contacted Hearn through a classified ad Hearn placed in the magazine in 1984.

Attorneys for the magazine said they had no way of knowing the ad was for an illegal activity and noted that the publication stopped accepting personal service ads in January, 1986.

Maintaining that Soldier of Fortune’s owner, Omega Group Ltd., was denied First Amendment rights to freedom of speech, the magazine has formed the Omega First Amendment Legal Fund.

“This will not be an easy battle,” the editors wrote in the July issue. “There are many liberals and those of leftist persuasion who would like to see SOF go under, and they’re marshaling their forces to that end. Yet, if we let this abridgment of our personal freedoms go unchallenged, then we surely open the door to Big Brother and his minions of the thought police.”

Mark Carson, an accountant hired by the magazine to be trustee of the fund, said about 500 readers have sent in donations for a total of $12,000 to $15,000.