His eyes were sort of rolling around in his head, and he started saying things like, “We don’t mean so badly, but girls like this shouldn’t be around, dragging dirty pictures around to show everybody.”
I got aggravated and shouted, “What do you mean, show them to everybody? Those pictures were stolen out of my apartments”
“Shut up!” Murray said to me, and I shut my mouth. Then he turned to this pothead beside him. “Let’s go outside and talk. Who is the guy up front in the car?”
The doped-up hippie type said, “Yeah, I’m going to go away. We’re willing to settle for four thousand. Let’s settle right now.”
Murray shook his head. “No. I don’t think we should settle it right now. I think we should go outside and not discuss it in front of this lady.”
He gestured to me to open the window just a little so that I could hear what was happening, and in the pouring rain Murray stepped out on his side of the car, and the other guy got out of his door. I don’t think he knew if it was raining or the sun was shining, the way he was babbling.
The minute Murray left the car, the man in the car up front got out, too. He opened an umbrella and walked up to Murray and the doped-up kid. He acted like the leader, and although the light was bad, especially with the umbrella over his head, I could almost swear it was Mac. The same big fat-looking type. The three of them talked for about ten minutes, when all of a sudden two big strong headlights illuminated the scene. A big truck stopped behind us.
When the lights hit us I was more scared than ever, if that is possible. What the hell was happening? Were people trying to kill us, or what? But the truck driver just stepped out of the cab, and for the first time I saw there was a telephone booth there. The driver went to the booth and made a call. It seemed like he was in there for an hour, but in reality it was maybe two minutes.
All the time I wondered what Murray and Mac and the doped-up boy were talking about and what Murray was going to do. Finally the truck driver left the phone booth, and the truck pulled away.
Mac, holding the umbrella down over his head, went back to his car, got in, and closed the door after him. Then I saw Murray gesturing to the blond guy, and I could hear a few words he was saying. “Wait a minute. I’ll get it for you.”
Murray came back to the car and said in a loud voice, “I’m going to give him his goddamned four thousand and get your pictures back.”
Like a little idiot I said, “But, Murray, I don’t have four thousand dollars.”
In a rasping whisper he said, “Shut up.” And he reached in and took out a brown bag that looked like it was stuffed with something. He straightened up and gestured to the blond guy to go and stand inside the covered-over dead-end alley where he could count the money out of the rain and see that it was right.
I watched as Murray walked toward the alley, his back to me. The other guy stood with his face turned toward me, and I could see him through the rain, somewhat blurred. Then I saw Murray reaching into the bag as though to start giving the money to the young guy. Next thing I knew there were three very soft pops, and the young guy collapsed on the ground. Nobody but me could see into the alley, and then Murray walked back to the car at normal speed and shoved something into his pocket. He got into the car and we drove away. I was still sitting in the back seat.
“My God, Murray, what did you do?” I asked.
As usual, he just said, “Don’t worry.”
“But how can I help worrying?” I said. “Murray, you just shot a man, three times. I heard you shoot him with a silencer on your gun. Was that what you had in the bag?” I kept asking questions as we drove back toward New York.
Finally Murray said, “Kid, we don’t take halfway measures with bastards like these. What right do they have to blackmail a hard-working girl like you?”
“But, Murray, you still don’t have the pictures,” I pointed out.
All the way back to New York Murray didn’t say anything except, “Don’t worry, I’ll deliver the pictures tomorrow:” But in my mind I kept seeing this young boy slowly collapse and fall in the alley.
Okay, he was a head, a junkie. But I saw him lying there. It was horrible to me. He was killed to get three lousy pictures back. So I kept insisting, “Murray, please tell me what happened so far.”
Finally he said, “That jerk in the front seat didn’t see or hear me shoot the kid because I had a silencer on my gun. There’s a lot of work yet to do tonight. I’ve got to get rid of the gun.”
“But what about the guy in the front seat?” I asked. I was still worrying about getting my pictures back.
“He’ll be taken care of, too,” Murray said, staring out the windshield at the wet street.
“He’s going to he killed, too?” I tried to keep my voice low.
“That’s about it,” Murray said. “Two of my boys were hiding behind the cemetery walls.”
He laughed harshly. “Those finks couldn’t pick a sweeter place – for me. In about ten or fifteen minutes that slughead in the front seat will wonder where his hopped-up friend is, and when he goes to look for him…” Murray laughed again.
“When he sees his buddy lying in the alley, my two guys will grab him. And what happens after that, I’ll tell you tomorrow.”
At five minutes to nine Murray left me off in front of my apartment and said he would see me tomorrow. I went up to my apartment just in time to answer the bell, when this straight lawyer I had a date with came around. Here I had been going through the most scary hours of my life, and this lawyer comes in fresh and peppy and says, Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you. Regards to the stockbroker and this and that.
I could hardly talk. We went down to Chinatown to a restaurant. I dropped two plates on the floor be fore I got down half a spoon of wonton soup.
Finally I told the guy, “Listen, I’m so shook up about something I can’t tell you. Take me to a hotel. Fuck me. Do whatever you want, but don’t take me home. I don’t want to go home. I’m not even going to work tomorrow.”
I told him the story about halfway, not everything, of course. He was nice, and he took me to his room and fucked me all night and gave me a hundred dollars in the morning even though I, for the first time in my life, just lay there like an Egyptian mummy.
The next morning at eleven o’clock the lawyer dropped me off in front of my house and I was just about to walk up to my apartment building when I saw Murray in his moving van. There was a big smile on his face, and an envelope in his hands. I went over to him, and he took the pictures out, and there were all the pictures Mac had stolen that night.
“Murray,” I said, “come up and tell me what happened.” So Murray came up, and we had some coffee and he told me everything.
Right after he left me off, he had to dispose of the gun. Meanwhile the two Mafia guys at the cemetery grabbed Mac as he was leaning over the young blond guy, who was dead with three bullets from Murray’s gun with the silencer.
“Listen, buddy,” they said, “if you don’t show us the place where the pictures of the girl are, then you’ll end up like your pal here, dead. Right?”
Mac got in their car and took them to some crumby apartment in Queens. Murray’s guys found thousands of pictures of girls, different girls they had been blackmailing for the last year or two.
Murray’s guys knew what I looked like, and Mac was so scared from seeing his dopehead friend dead that he gave them my pictures immediately.
But Murray and his Mafia guys weren’t content just to get my pictures back. These blackmailers were working without what you might call a franchise from the Mafia godfather or whatever in Queens.
They made Mac tell them who was behind this whole blackmail syndicate, and he was so scared he said, “Okay, it’s a lawyer in Brooklyn.”
Mac took them to this lawyer, and then Murray’s hoods grabbed him, too, and three people were taken care of in total.
The two Mafia guys and Murray had to dispose of three bodies that same night.
; This is what Murray told me, and obviously I realized that I had to compensate these guys for their services. At least it wouldn’t be $5,000.
But in the meantime, I was being so stupid and such an idiot that after Murray told me all this and showed me he had my pictures back, I said, “Murray, I don’t want those pictures in the house anymore. I don’t want them. You get rid of them for me.” So far he hadn’t asked for any money. But eventually Murray charged me two thousand dollars for services rendered.
And, of course, this morning was not the last time I was to see Murray. Just a few weeks later he came back to see me and suggested I ought to invest my money with him. By lending it, I would get back more in a couple of months.
I could see he wasn’t asking me if I wanted to make an investment, he was telling me I had to. I was making money by then, having left the UN job to go full-time into the business, so I gave Murray $2,000. He said he would put it in the street for me, shylock it. And for me, he explained, it would mean making five to ten percent interest on the money each week and of course getting it back in a short time. Naturally I let myself forget I was dealing with somebody who was involved with very many bad people and who was, even though he helped me, a pretty bad character himself.
After I gave the money to Murray I waited each week for some payment on interest, but nothing happened except that Murray kept coming around for freebies and gave me excuses why he didn’t have my money. Finally, when I started to be insistent with Murray, he said, “Look, Xaviera, don’t worry. You’ll get your money. just don’t bug me. Remember what happened to those jerks that bugged you?”
The message was very clear. Now the problem was how to stop Murray from coming around. I would gladly have given him another thousand if I never had to see him again. I was almost as worried about getting involved with Murray and his people as I was about the pictures. He even was sending friends to me and telling me to be nice to them. I would almost get sick every time he called.
And then the FBI approached me.
I was still in the same Fifty-first Street studio when the doorbell rang. The doorman called up and said the FBI wanted to see me. I was terrified, even though the murder – or maybe fake-murder – had happened three months before.
So into my apartment came this nice-looking FBI agent, Bill Tillman. He seemed to be a pleasant-type Irishman, but remembering Mac, the fake cop, I asked him if he could please identify himself. He was indeed FBI, very nice, and then he showed me a picture of Murray and asked me if I knew the person whose picture he was holding up.
I almost fainted. I really thought, Xaviera, this is it. You’re going to hang, you’re going to have the electric chair, they’ve found out you murdered this guy and are involved in a triple murder. But somehow I kept my composure.
You don’t fool around with FBI people, so I said, “Yes, I know him. He is Murray the moving man.” Then I asked this FBI man, “Why are you looking for Murray?”
Bill said they had followed his steps and found out that a couple of months ago he was at my place quite often in the afternoons.
“We’re looking for this man because he’s killed about eight people so far that we know about,” Bill told me. “He’s involved with fraud, hijacking, bootlegging, white slavery, and any other illegal thing you can imagine. What is your connection with him?”
Of course, I didn’t want to tell him what had happened and that I was a prostitute, but I was stupid enough not to take the phone off the hook, and it kept ringing, and I had to answer it, and he quickly got the idea.
“Have you had any bad experience with this man?” Bill asked.
I told him that I shylocked $2,000 with Murray and hadn’t even been paid back any interest. Bill said I could whistle for my money, and I’d better not ever see Murray again.
Just as he was leaving, the FBI man told me that he was not after prostitutes, but just don’t let him catch me fooling around with girls underage or violating the Mann Act. At that time I had been in the business only four or five months, so I didn’t know about those things. But I asked some friends, and now I’m very careful not to have a girl under eighteen working for me.
Once I took a girl friend down to Miami for convention work, but I made her buy her own ticket and we left on separate planes. That way nobody can say I’m transporting girls over state lines for immoral purposes, which is the Mann Act.
Murray called me only one more time to tell me the FBI was putting big heat on him, investigating every bar where he hung out, and he couldn’t get my money loose. I was so thankful he was going away that I didn’t care about losing the money. Then he told me something which relieved me more than anything else.
“Look, kid” – his voice was harsh in my ear – “there wasn’t any killing out there at the cemetery. I scared those bums into putting on that show for you. I figured since you ain’t gonna see me no more, you ought to know. When they found how well I was connected, they just melted away and gave me your pictures.”
I wanted to believe him, I still want to believe him, and I think I do. But I remember the FBI man telling me Murray had killed eight people, and I can still see the way the young blond guy sort of slid to the ground.
But from this experience I learned to be very careful about letting anybody get anything on me, and especially I have never let any pictures be taken of me sucking a cock or anything like that.
7. ARRESTS
In my opinion, no good brothel can operate more than a year in New York without being raided at least once by police.
I have been busted three times in my own house and once in the establishment of another madam, Georgette Harcourte. Each arrest is a serious nuisance, because all we want to do is get on with our work and not bother, or be bothered by, anybody else.
You can try protecting yourself by carefully screening your phone callers, making sure there is no money exchanged until the customer has participated, or by using police locks to keep out police. Today I have an answering service take all my calls. I have special code words with my customers, and I call them back if they leave the correct message.
But no matter how careful you are, or how many precautions you take, if they want to penetrate you, so to speak, they can always find a way. The new no-knock laws make it easier for them to push their way in legally, and they don’t need search warrants to seize your books and telephones.
The methods, reasons, and penalties for arrest are as different as they are sometimes ridiculous.
A neighbor can report you for disturbance, a rival madam can report you to cripple the competition, or an irrational customer with some imagined grievance can yell police, which is, I believe, what happened to me the second time I got busted.
A little lunatic called Nicky, whom I threw out for bugging my girls and upsetting my clients, ran down to the local police precinct and filed a complaint.
“They’re running a whorehouse up there, and they discriminate against Jewish people,” he told them. The truth is that I had thrown him out because of his lunatic behavior. And certainly not because he was a Jewish lunatic.
But the police dug into all my financial business, came up with a Dun and Bradstreet triple-A rating, and told the judge I was the biggest madam operating in New York City today. It looked bad for a while, but my lawyer got the charge reduced to a misdemeanor, and in the end I got off with a $100 fine. Plus a staggering legal fee, naturally.
The arrest before that happened in my own house, too, and I admit it was partly through my own carelessness, because I was too busy that night to check out a client’s credentials. Normally I would ask a caller to prove he is a customer by identifying something in my house or describing to me the girl he saw last time. Or, if he is new, to give me another client’s name as a reference. But this night a guy named Artie called, said he was from Brooklyn and that he was a friend of Mr. Roberts.
Well, that usually would not be sufficient recommendation, because I know about six Mr. Robertses. But he sounded ve
ry charming, and also you can say I might have been a little greedy, because he wanted to bring along another three customers.
They arrived about an hour later, and the bedrooms were full, and a couple of guys were ahead of them, but they didn’t mind waiting.
They were a happy bunch of guys – one Jewish, one Irish, and two Italians – they had a drink and sat around and talked and joked.
Meantime, they asked me to send out for three other girls for them, which I was happy to do. The girls arrived, and one of the men flashed a badge and identified himself, after pushing me his fee in advance.
“Hey, Pussycat,” he said, “we’re not exactly what you think we are, we’re not johns.” Which amazed me, because they had pretty authentic hard-ons in their pants. “We’re police officers, and you’re under arrest.”
This time my lawyer got me off with another hundred-dollar fine on reduced charges by proving this was entrapment.
“Entrapment” means that a police officer deliberately causes you to commit a crime, and he cannot then legally arrest you for it, which is fair.
Another method the police use to bust you is to wait downstairs and grab a client as he leaves and intimidate him into fingering you, so to speak.
They ask him has he paid to get laid, and if he says, “No, I was just visiting my mother,” they say, “Okay, we’ll take your name and address and just let your wife know what a dutiful son you are.” The guy gets frightened and tells all. Then they either bring him straight back and confront you with your accuser, or they wait until more customers come in so they can catch you all together in the act.
This is the way I was busted, for the first time, in the house of Georgette Harcourte, and I still remember it as a very ugly and degrading experience.
At this time I was working mostly for Georgette, because Madeleine caught me passing my cards around among her clients and sort of rejected me. I felt bad about it, because Madeleine’s was definitely the best house in town and had the most sophisticated clientele. Georgette’s clients were mostly drunk stockbrokers and freaks, and most of her girls were unattractive. Also, I must point out that Georgette’s 50-50 split was less fair than Madeleine’s 60-40. Financially Georgette was so tough that if you had to take a taxi from here to Timbuctoo she wouldn’t give you a break. In her house the girls were never allowed to fix themselves a cold drink, much less have something to eat, even if they were there over four hours. In my house the girls can eat and drink what they want.
The Happy Hooker: My Own Story Page 10