"Dr. Reddy is a little bit crazy professor, and a little bit passionate entrepreneur," Glickman says. "But while his strong suit is his ability to create these unparalleled condoms, his acumen as a businessman was unfortunately not quite as superior."

Tracing the trail through a succession of legal filings, what appears to have happened is this: Almost immediately, Reddy Laboratories International Ltd., the Bermuda corporation Reddy had created to manufacture and distribute the Pleasure Plus, ran into severe financial problems. Throughout the mid-'90s, Reddy struggled to keep the company alive but was eventually forced to sell off all its assets -- which were, chiefly, the two patents he had registered -- to creditors.

The largest creditor was the company's own president, John E. Rogers, and by 1998 he ended up owning the patents. Rogers, who formed PTI for the sole purpose of exploiting the patents, contracted with another firm, Global Protection Corp., to make and sell the Pleasure Plus. (Incidentally, the CEO of GPC, Davin Wedel, was the college roommate and former business partner of Condomania's Glickman.) Neither Rogers nor Wedel returned Salon's calls.

But Reddy was not dissuaded, and he ended up demonstrating a little more business prowess than he has been given credit for, not to mention some timely globalization savvy. He returned to his native India, secured some $7 million in financing, and set up a condom factory that produced his latest invention, the Inspiral, a condom with a single twisted protuberance slithering its way around the main chamber. His new company, Reddy Medtech, contracted with a Michigan businessman, Brian Osterberg, to distribute the Inspiral in the United States through Osterberg's company, Intellx. (On advice of counsel, Osterberg declined to comment on active litigation.)

John Rogers, Reddy's former creditor, was not amused. Although visually, the spiral pouch on the Inspiral was not identical to the P-shaped pouch on the Pleasure Plus, Rogers viewed the fundamental "pouch on pouch" innovation as identical. In March 1999 Rogers' company, PTI, sued Reddy in the U.S. District Court for New Jersey, seeking a preliminary injunction preventing the importation and sale of the Inspiral.

The injunction was denied. In one of the more entertaining opinions in a patent-infringement suit you are likely to run across, the District Court judge, Joseph Greenaway, ruled that PTI would be unlikely to prove infringement in a full trial and determined that there was no reason to grant an injunction. Greenaway's decision was later upheld by an appeals court.

But the story doesn't end there. Four years later, PTI renewed its legal quest, this time filing suit in Illinois against Church & Dwight, the consumer products conglomerate that sells Trojan condoms, which had by then concluded a deal with Reddy to sell a third condom, the Twisted Pleasure -- a condom that has two spirals winding around the main chamber. PTI also filed suit against Intellx in Michigan in March 2005, and in August 2005 the company lodged a complaint against all the parties involved before the International Trade Commission, a federal agency with jurisdiction over anything imported into the United States. (Excluding the ITC complaint, the other cases have all been stayed, pending the outcome of a new case in New Jersey, with the same Joseph Greenaway presiding.)

Why this flurry of new activity after several years of silence? There are a couple of possible reasons: the patents at issue expire in 2010, so there is a limited amount of time left to profit from them. Perhaps more important, the entry of Church & Dwight and Trojan into what PTI considered its specialized market niche posed a much larger threat than the initial appearance of Intellx and the Inspiral. Trojan is the largest-selling brand of condoms in the United States. As a result of the Twisted Pleasure's entry into the market, reads part of the ITC complaint, PTI and GPC have been "unable to price the Pleasure Plus product at a premium, the Pleasure Plus product being relegated to lower level shelves and/or pegs, loss of market share and loss of major customer Walgreens."

"This is speculation," says Glickman, "but I'm sure that John Rogers and Davin Wedel never agreed with the earlier court. At that time it was just Inspiral and Pleasure Plus, but once Church & Dwight got involved, it was a different story. The Twisted Pleasure has been enormously successful -- it's a top seller for Condomania -- and perhaps it was that success that prompted the folks behind Pleasure Plus to revisit the issue."

In the past three years, Glickman explains, growth in condom sales worldwide has been flat. "And that's a little distressing, given HIV, STDs and all of that is still out there and on the rise. But what has been growing is the specialty condom sector, these condoms that feature bells and whistles that are distinctly different from your standard condom. That market is growing 18 percent to 20 percent a year."

Glickman himself has a partnership with condom innovator, Frank Sadlo, to produce TheyFit condoms, which come in 55 sizes -- soon to be expanded to 90! -- and which he says have been hugely popular. He notes that there are condoms that now come preloaded with a dab of benzocaine -- designed, paradoxically, to numb the penis, as a boon to those suffering from problems with premature ejaculation.

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