I think I know what this SEO spammer did.
He took a domain
http://www.jp-whaling-assn.com/ after it expired from the Japan Whaling Association and used its PR6 to work as a doorway page(?) to link to his absexx.com pages.
Backlinks for the jp-whaling-assn.com even has CNN articles linked to it, hence the high PR
Archive from 1997 showing the original domain contents:
http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://...ling-assn.com/