The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

by Chris Wiltz

  Perhaps Chep Morrison shouldn’t have been so hasty to remove Richard Foster from the police advisory board. In 1952 Foster organized and became president of the Metropolitan Crime Commission of New Orleans, Inc., which still operates. The commission helped form the Special Citizens Investigating Committee (SCIC) (similar to but superseding the original crime committee), which in turn was responsible for hiring Aaron M. Kohn, a lawyer and former FBI agent hot from a ten-month study of corruption in the Chicago police department. Kohn was to conduct a similar investigation in New Orleans. With his arrival in New Orleans in June 1953, Morrison found a thorn in his side that resisted removal for most of the decade.

  Pershing Gervais finally ran out of money in New York, and when he returned Scheuring fired him. But Gervais wasn’t worried: He soon found a new job as an undercover agent—for Aaron Kohn.

  In a letter to Clint Bolton, Norma wrote:

  I think Aaron Kohn is all wrong about organized crime. In my line I had the nicest place in town, so why didn’t they come to me? I asked everyone I know if they were ever propositioned or had ever been shook down. They all assured me no. I had a music box, but I chose the man to put it in and he was not a character. As for dope, where I had very little contact with dope, I heard things. But I never heard some people’s names Kohn talks about, and for two years I went to the Town and Country every Sunday nite. [Carlos Marcello owned the Town and Country.] That was my nite out of the whorehouse. I knew the Vice Squad was off on Sundays since they worked late on Sat. nite trying to set some girl up either in a hotel or as a B-drinker. I knew almost everything I should not know. I tried to keep from hearing dangerous things because I had a successful whorehouse and characters are quick to put the finger on you for a stoolie. But I would hear who was on stuff and who was peddling. Kohn, I honestly believe, was wrong.

  When Kohn hit town he convinced the department store heads that New Orleans would be a more prosperous city without gambling. I was a good customer in all the best stores, and as time went on I had all the sales people tell me he hurt business. Still, they give money to the Metropolitan Crime Commission so they can get rid of the gamblers and whorehouses and wind up with more serious crime than some whore selling her ass or some man betting on a horse. That’s Kohn’s idea about cleaning up crime today. This paid reformer is out of date, so he picks on Carlos. It amazes me how intelligent men keep letting him con them. I know he had coffee with that bucket head Supt. Joseph Giarrusso [Giarrusso became superintendent of police in 1960] often. Kohn should not have needled him so much about me. I could have been his whipping boy for a long time.

  Because Norma used the Town and Country Motel when her house on Conti Street was hot, it’s an easy assumption that she was tied to Marcello, that she was part of his network of cronies or paid him in order to operate undisturbed in the French Quarter. No doubt she paid for the use of the rooms at Marcello’s motel, but there is no other evidence that Norma had business ties to the New Orleans “mafia,” nor is there any evidence that Marcello had much interest in prostitution. Rosemary James, after years of investigative reporting, believed that Marcello wasn’t interested in controlling prostitution. She said, “New Orleans was called the Wall Street of the Mafia because it had always been a money-laundering place.”

  Kohn, however, continued to investigate vice in New Orleans and its link to organized crime. Gervais told James, “In the old days, you couldn’t open a whorehouse, you couldn’t open a lottery shop, you couldn’t even beg on Canal Street . . . unless the police said okay. That was crime that was organized.”

  Kohn stuck to his investigation, in spite of threatening letters calling him a “Jew bastard” and all imaginable forms of obstruction and interference, including having money planted on his person at one point and being refused access to public records by police officials. He hired undercover agents from other cities as well as local informers like Gervais.

  Kohn found that gambling, graft, and prostitution saturated the city as thoroughly as the spring rains, not least among the police. He conducted public hearings against the mayor’s wishes, but Morrison knew it would be political suicide to refuse. Cooperating witnesses included Doris Gellman, a prostitute who had worked in several houses, including Norma’s, and Pershing Gervais and Salvatore Marchese, both of whom had been dismissed from the police department because of “unbecoming conduct.”

  Gervais went undercover for Kohn and testified about police corruption, then ran around town boasting that he was on both Aaron Kohn’s and Norma Wallace’s payrolls. Gellman testified that the madams called the money they paid the police for protection “towel money.” According to Gellman, after two narcotics squad officers arrested two of Norma’s prostitutes at Pete Herman’s place, the charges were dropped and the officers were transferred to a different assignment. In another case she cited a lone policeman who attempted to raid Norma’s house one night and was assigned to a patrol wagon as punishment.

  At one point while Gellman was on the witness stand, she looked around the room and told Kohn that nine out of ten men present at the hearing were customers at Norma Wallace’s house.

  Morrison interrupted the proceedings. “Just a minute, Miss Gellman,” he said. “I happen to be presiding at this meeting, and I am admonishing you not to make any statements that nine out of ten people sitting in the Commission Council Chambers have frequented houses of prostitution. I think that is a very false statement. I know it doesn’t apply to a great number of people here who I happen to know personally, and I think it’s a conclusion that isn’t called for in this Council Chamber at all. We are here to investigate the police department and not to criticize or cast aspersions upon the public. Just stick to the facts. Stick to the things you know. If you know any person present who did that—but that is another question.”

  Morrison struck out at Kohn through such witnesses. He questioned their moral caliber, and he received editorial backing from the States and The Times-Picayune. He was a master at double-talk. When Kohn called the mayor to the witness stand, Morrison told Kohn that he had heard of allegations of police graft, but he said, “No one who ever does the wrongdoing had any authority or was permitted in any way to commit the wrongdoing” (SCIC report, December 23, 1953). He accused “evil influences” in the city of attempting to defeat his good administration and return to the days when the city was wide open, “a gambler’s paradise.”

  Norma’s brother, Elmo, appeared at Kohn’s hearings, but only to testify that he rented his property at 231 Bourbon Street, the Moulin Rouge, an alleged B-drinking establishment, to someone who had apparently used it for prostitution. “But I don’t know,” Elmo said. “I wasn’t there.” Kohn asked him if he knew Superintendent Scheuring. Elmo said he did, that he played cards with the superintendent at his home on a regular basis.

  Elmo hadn’t wanted to testify at the hearings and was ill at ease, but when Gaspar Gulotta got up on the witness stand he appeared to be having the time of his life. On January 6, 1954, The Times-Picayune reported part of his cross-examination by Kohn. When asked if he knew a certain police officer, Gaspar replied, “There are a thousand policemen and I know nine hundred and fifty of them. The other fifty know me.” When asked if he knew Louie the Pimp, Gaspar said, “I don’t know anyone by that name, and if I did I would not call him that.” He admitted knowing Dora Russo, even carrying on business with her: “A few years ago she asked me to get her some airplane tickets, and I almost got into a lot of trouble. I nearly was charged with causing transportation into another state.” Then Kohn asked if Gaspar ever got an envelope from Dora Russo. “Sure,” Gaspar said. “I borrow money from her. No longer ago than last week she sent me four hundred dollars in one of those brown envelopes.”

  Gaspar allegedly had taken Robert Maestri’s place as collector and distributor of police payoffs from madams and landlords. But at Kohn’s public hearings he had (according to J. A. Walker in New Orleans magazine, May 1971) a “nimble tongue and mental agili
ty [that] rivaled his brother’s deftness in the ring.”

  When Gaspar died only a few years later, his pallbearers included former Police Superintendent George Reyer and Mayor Chep Morrison.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Big Mo

  Norma walked up the marble steps to 1026 Conti Street. The afternoon sun washed the façade of the three-story town house to a light moss green. Pots of brilliant red geraniums lined the second- and third-floor galleries behind the filigreed ironwork adorned with fleurs-de-lis.

  Norma was wearing an expensively tailored cocoa-colored wool suit, matching high-heeled pumps, and a small-brimmed hat, a feminine version of a fedora. She wore it jauntily askew, the brim slanting across her right eyebrow. She carried her brown handbag and a folded newspaper tucked under her arm. Thrown casually over one shoulder was a fur stole, which she’d needed earlier to ward off the December chill. The temperature, though, was climbing, and Norma felt uncomfortably warm.

  She unlocked the ornate iron gate between the gleaming white, fluted columns flanking the recessed front door, stepped into the foyer, and entered her apartment through the French doors. Inside it was cool and dark. She kicked off her shoes and stripped down to a cream-colored silk slip. Barefoot, she crossed the red Oriental rug in her bedroom, picked up the newspaper she’d tossed on the bed, and went out into the sunroom off the courtyard, her office. She sat at the desk and opened the newspaper to the section devoted to city news. On the top page were two rows of photographs, the fall graduating class of the police academy. From the desk drawer Norma took a pair of scissors and cut out the photos, trimming closely around each face. She lay the head shots, widely spaced, on pieces of blank white paper. Carefully, she studied each one. Then, with a pencil, she began to draw hats on the paper over their heads, mustaches on some of the faces. She tried a full beard on one, a goatee on another. She switched the faces to different hats and facial hair. After a while she sat back, satisfied.

  She checked the diamond watch hanging around her neck on its long gold chain. Nearly coffee-break time. She went back to her bedroom and sat at her dressing table. Artfully, she applied a coat of pale pink lipstick, coloring outside the natural lip line to make her lips look fuller. She rubbed two small spots of rouge on each cheekbone the way old ladies do, as if they can’t see well enough to blend the color properly. Next she put on a cheap pastel blue suit with a boxy jacket that made her large breasts look matronly, and a frumpy skirt, a little too long to be fashionable, that covered most of her shapely legs. She completed the outfit with white net gloves, a pair of low-heeled, black, sensible shoes, and a brimless blue hat, a few shades darker than the suit, which she perched squarely on top of her head, bringing its little blue veil down over her brows. She let her shoulders slump. The image in the mirror was of a woman twenty years older, undistinguished and, she hoped, unrecognizable.

  Norma walked through the Quarter to Canal Street. She headed for the corner of University Place, to the Meal-a-Minit. She went in—taking mincing, old-lady steps—and sat at a table in the back where she could see the door and most of the restaurant. Opening the newspaper to the society section, she perused the pages for Dorothy Dix’s advice column and pretended to read while she watched the door.

  They started swaggering in, the men in blue, shiny silver badges, black-strapped nightsticks. They sat at the tables, talking, smoking, slurping coffee, giving the waitresses the eye. Some of them, even the young ones, Norma knew because they’d visited the house; she scrunched lower in her seat, her head bent over the paper. A few new ones came in, and from under her veil she memorized their faces. Half an hour later they drifted out, no bills to pay, just tips for the waitresses.

  Norma waited until they were back on the street, paid for her coffee, and walked with her little, halting steps across Canal Street. As soon as she was in the Quarter, she threw her shoulders back and lengthened her stride. She’d done a good day’s work. Now she was ready for whatever the night would bring.

  Captain Joseph Guillot was the reason Norma began memorizing the faces of policemen. Big Mo, as he was called because his voice boomed as loud as the guns on the battleship Missouri, had been dispatched to the French Quarter by Superintendent Joe Scheuring soon after the Nashville contractor died to “break the Quarter loose,” Norma said.

  At one point during Aaron Kohn’s hearings early in 1953, Norma had realized that she was the only madam operating. Everyone else had shut down, frightened by the depth of the SCIC probe. So she sold the house on Girod and Saratoga and bought one at 520 Governor Nicholls Street, one house up from where she had lived with Bill Carver. She and Mac moved in and began renovations while Norma continued to rent the apartments at 1026 Conti to Blue Room musicians. Mac was happy with this arrangement. Then one day Norma ran into one of the Good Men on Canal Street. He said, “Why don’t you call me a girl?”

  She couldn’t stand it: She just had to “cheat” a little, her term for arranging tricks during times of intense police activity. She cheated whenever Mac played golf. He didn’t know a thing about it until she kicked all the musicians out of 1026 and went back to work. “It was just too slow,” Norma said. “I had to have action.”

  Then Big Mo Guillot did all the landladies a big favor: “He ran all the pimps out of the French Quarter so fast it wasn’t funny,” Norma said. “They were all scared to death.”

  The word went around that Captain Guillot was a “good” policeman. For the landladies that meant business as usual. The following Christmas many of them decided to show their appreciation by sending the captain a gift. Norma did not join in. She told Jackie, “Those idiots didn’t keep the sense they were born with.” Norma knew that if you called your man wrong, you went to jail, and she didn’t know Guillot well enough yet.

  Big Mo was not amused. He packed all the gifts in a police wagon and hauled them back to the houses. It was more than a warning: He began “the inspections,” as Norma termed them—entering the houses, peering into every nook, checking under every rug. He came to Norma’s at all hours of the night, arriving with a policeman so small that Norma wondered how he’d ever gotten into the police academy. They’d ring the side doorbell, and when Norma opened the door, Big Mo would lift the tiny policeman in and they’d go through the house. They tapped on the pecky cypress walls of the parlor, checked each room, and searched the depths of every armoire. Sometimes this could take hours. Not only that, but the inspections occurred routinely, often more than once a week. Big Mo suspected that Norma had a hideout, and she was afraid he would find it; she decided it was time for elaborate security measures.

  The hideout was behind the parlor, the entrance to it in the courtyard, to the side of the stairway. At one time there had been a dungeon “with a wall where slaves were shackled, and the hideout had been a runway to the dungeon. It needed a new, undetectable door. The inside wall of the courtyard was tongue in groove; her carpenter made the door fit so flush that it was difficult to see any lines where it met the wall. Once the iron bar inside was slid into place, it was nearly impossible to find a crack. For extra camouflage, Norma put tall tropical trees—palms, ficus, hibiscus, and banana—in rolling boxes. When the door to the hideout was bolted, she rolled the trees in front of the entrance.

  She also had a buzzer system installed. A girl was stationed at the window in the entrance hall during operating hours. If she spotted a police lookout or a suspicious looking car drove into the alley, she threw the buzzer, which meant, Get to the hideout as quickly as possible!

  Norma developed a system of spies. Her spies kept Big Mo’s house under surveillance until his car was in the driveway and all lights were out, then called Norma to tell her that the captain was away for the night.

  As another precaution, she rented a condemned building around the corner on North Rampart Street. When Big Mo and the little policeman arrived, the girls could escape through the gate at the end of the Conti Street driveway and into the boarded-up building until the inspectio
n was over.

  One night a police lookout was across from the house when a regular customer, weaving a little with all the drinks he’d had over on Bourbon Street, came up the driveway and rang the back doorbell. Norma slid open the little barred window she’d installed in the door.

  “You idiot,” she said, “don’t you see that policeman across the street?”

  “But, Norma,” the date slurred, “I wanna come in!”

  Norma nearly took his nose off when she slammed the little window in his face. She turned to Jackie. “Tricks don’t have a lick of brains!” Jackie nodded.

  Another night the girl at the front window threw the buzzer—Big Mo was driving up the alley. Norma led two other girls and their dates through the gate to Rampart Street. The dates took off; she and the girls entered the condemned building through a specially rigged piece of plywood. But this time Big Mo got Norma. Norma was arrested three times in 1953, twice by Big Mo. He personally took her to be photographed and fingerprinted.

  The young sergeant behind the desk asked Norma her age. As usual, she lied. “Thirty-eight,” she replied.

  Big Mo laughed. “Oh, come on, you old bitch,” he taunted, “you’re as old as I am. Don’t tell that boy that!”

  “Okay, forty-seven,” Norma said, and Big Mo laughed some more.

  Norma made a hundred-dollar bail and left while the night was still young. The story was on the front page of The Times-Picayune the next day, October 13, 1953. The second time Big Mo got her was four days later, in a surprise ambush at 1026 Conti—he had the door down before anyone could respond to the buzzer and get to the hideout. As always, though, Norma didn’t spend so much as a night behind bars.