I remember the cartoons, one in particular.
** A marine biologist is standing by a water tank containing two dolphins, holding his tape recorder with an astonished look on his face when the dolphins say “just work with us, keep the sardines coming and we will see you get a nice government grant.”**
As others have said started out great slipped into crack pot science, as Sam said above just like the Discovery channel. Very sad.
Years ago, Bob Guccione became enthralled with the possibility of fusion power. He invested millions with a guy who claimed to be able tobuild a fusion reactor-needless to say, the thing never worked!
Anybody know the details of this fiasco? Supposedly, it bankrupted Mr. Guccione! And, didn’t Guccione’s son (Bob Jr.) look just like him? (Even down to that subtl little smirk!) 
My favorites were the ones with Dr. Grant Swinger, director of the Breakthrough Institute and editor of The Journal of Rejected Manuscripts!
:eek: I’ve never heard either part of that before – that the Mafia is involved in magazine distribution, nor that Guccione has Mafia ties! Do you have a cite?
When I first started freelancing, I sold a few short nonfiction pieces to OMNI way back when. Very nice editorial folks.
I’ll have you know that for the last few months, Mary Roach has been appearing monthly in Reader’s Digest. 
I don’t think that bankrupted him … that was back in the '80s, when the magazine was doing well enough to afford such idiotic ventures. It wasn’t until the '90s that the magazine fell upon hard (huh huh huh huh) times.
As many people have said, the magazine got weirder as the years progressed.
It seemed that “Omni” evolved into the “Face On Mars” magazine.
Strange that a magazine would carry articles such as “Infrared Spectrographic Analysis of Wolf 359” and “Can the Loch Ness Monster Solve the Energy Crisis?” in the same issue. Okay, I was exaggerating a bit there.
However, it seemed that Omni was trying to fill the gap between “Scientific American” and “The National Enquirer”.
“Probe crashes on Mars - Was Bigfoot Responsible?” LOL
He said his source was a science fiction author at a convention, which - as a science fiction author who has been at many conventions - is as good a source as saying that you heard it on the Internet. :rolleyes:
My opinion is that it is 99% crap. There have always been only a very few national distributors of big-name magazines, and that number has been getting even smaller of late. I can’t imagine it as a business that the Mafia would want to get involved with. Small margins, lots of overhead, and needing a million bean counters to do lots of fine tracking of small deliveries.
And I can’t see that OMNI needed the help in the beginning. It made a real splash, and soon had a circulation over a million. Later on is when it needed the help. Besides, newsstand circulation is a small part of almost every successful magazine. Penthouse was one of few exceptions, because lots of men didn’t want it sent in the mail for the wife or kids to find. But OMNI was legit enough so that this wasn’t an issue. Chasing too many cheap subscriptions to keep ad rate guarantees up is a more likely reason for a magazine to fail.
If there ever was a Mafia connection to the magazine business, I can only imagine it at a different level. When I first got into the business, each city/area had its own local distributor, the guys who drove their trucks around to drugstores and places like that and put the magazines on the shelves or racks. That kind of personal contact might have led to intimidation and double-dealing, say, with extra issues being paid for with no provision for return or even taking new mags to keep up the numbers on the old ones.
It’s harder to imagine this in the 90s when OMNI failed or having it happen in more than a few cities.
So. I can’t disprove it. But I gots my doubts.
I don’t feel like looking it up on google right now, but I’m sure Omni made it into the 90s before it disappeared.
Winter 1995 was the last issue.