Bob Guccione's Penthouse secrets bared

A Wealthy hedge funder who began buying unclaimed storage lockers as a hobby has uncovered a treasure trove of artifacts from the estate of late Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione.

Jeremy Frommer, a former Royal Bank of Canada managing director, snapped up a series of Englewood, NJ, storage spaces to find the meticulously preserved possessions of the flesh magnate who went from the Forbes 400 to bankruptcy. Discovered were unpublished nude photos of Madonna and Lauren Hutton complete with negatives and release forms, correspondence with players from Dick Cheney to the Unabomber and a woman claiming to be Fidel Castro’s lover, reels of footage and one-of-a-kind artifacts from his infamous epic “Caligula” and an unpublished manuscript. Also discovered were 63 oil paintings and other works by Guccione, a renowned art collector and artist himself who showed with Roy Lichtenstein.

“I went to a tag sale with my daughter, and I’m not a tag-sale kind of guy,” Wall Street whiz Frommer says of getting the buying bug. “Soon I asked, ‘How much for everything in the house?’ ” Frommer has since acquired more of Guccione’s estate and partnered with producer Rick Schwartz to preserve the legacy and launch a potential exhibition and other projects.

Amid the collection, seen by Page Six, are Guccione’s personal files detailing his ’80s coups of publishing nude photos of then-Miss America Vanessa Williams and a takedown of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart. The trove also contains countless shots of Penthouse Pets and amateur submissions, cartoons and sketches with Guccione’s notes, plans for an ill-fated Penthouse Boardwalk Hotel and Casino and personal effects including journals, a camera, jewelry and bound appointment books. The possessions, still being catalogued, even include a pic of a young Arnold Schwarzenegger engaged in what appears to be a sex act, as well as boxes of home movies.

The priceless collection also reveals an obsession with archrival Hugh Hefner, with many mock-ups of campaigns humorously attacking Playboy and its iconic bunny.

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