Others in the city were not pleased by their business endeavors and tried to close them down. One of them was Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), then a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and later the city's mayor.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, their response to her campaign was to put her private phone number on the O'Farrell's marquee with the message: "For a Good Time, Call."
The brothers' personal lives were as complicated and expensive as their business dealings.
Seemingly inseparable, both were married and divorced multiple times and fathered numerous children.
Jim was relatively quiet and contained while Artie was known as the party guy. But at 45, he was caught in a spiral of drug and alcohol abuse that prosecutors later said stimulated increasingly erratic behavior that disrupted the business.
Their empire came crashing down on Feb. 27, 1991, when Jim Mitchell, armed with a pistol and a rifle, went to his brother's home in the Marin County community of Corte Madera and shot him to death.
Prosecutors said the killing was a coldblooded act sparked by a dispute between the brothers over the future of the business.
Mitchell claimed that the shooting was an accident that happened when he was trying to persuade his brother to seek treatment for drug and alcohol addiction.
Convicted of voluntary manslaughter, Mitchell was sentenced to six years at San Quentin State Prison but served less than three years. After his release in 1997, he lived quietly, raising horses at his ranch near Petaluma.
Several of his brother's children filed wrongful-death suits against him that eventually were settled out of court.
"Rated X," the film based on their lives, appeared on Showtime in 2000.
Directed by Emilio Estevez, it starred Estevez as Jim and his brother Charlie Sheen as Artie.
jon.thurber@latimes.com
