Game Over
As soon as Jeanette Maier walked into the place she liked to call her home in the country–a doublewide trailer sitting on a few acres of horse land–she knew there was a problem. Her 25-year-old daughter, Monica, was waiting inside for her. Monica’s face was tight, her eyes wide with fear. “She didn’t have to say anything,” Jeanette recalls. “I could tell just by looking at her that I was busted.”
Jeanette snatched up the telephone and called her mother, Tommie. “Did something happen at the shop?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” Tommie said. Her normally laid back voice was strained. “I kept calling but nobody would answer. Finally a man picked up.”
Jeanette’s knees started to shake. “Who was he?” she asked. But she knew even before her mom answered. The man was a cop.
When Jeanette called the house on Canal Street, a detective answered the phone. She asked to speak to the girl who’d been working at the house.
“You can’t,” the detective said. “She’s under arrest.”
Suddenly, Jeanette was dizzy. The room started spinning and she fell to her knees. The Canal Street Brothel, the business she’d spent years building, had been shut down.
Straddling the muddy brown waters of the Mississippi River, New Orleans has always been unique among American cities. Founded in 1718 by French settlers, then handed over to Spain, then back to France just in time for Napoleon to sell the city and the rest of Louisiana to the United States, New Orleans is truly a melting pot, a spice-laden gumbo of culture, race and religion. It is also a city of notoriously loose morals, a city in which almost anything goes.
Beginning in 1897, New Orleans was home to the first legalized red-light district in the United States. Located just outside the French Quarter, the district was called Storyville, named with an intentional jab of irony after city alderman Sidney Story, who fought against what he perceived as one of the city’s most devastating problems–rampant prostitution.
Twenty years later, the federal government, acting through the Department of the Navy, stepped in and crushed Storyville. It seems the Secretary of the Navy didn’t like New Orleans prostitutes corrupting his sailors.
In 2001, a new generation of Washington officials, this time at the Department of Justice and the FBI, decided that they had heard enough about hookers in New Orleans, and that they were going to put a stop to the city’s nearly 300-year-old tradition of sin and debauchery. The feds rode into town on a mission: to save the wealthy and influential men of the Crescent City from … a dozen girls in nighties. And they were going to start with a little brothel on Canal Street.
Jeanette Maier was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1958. Five months later her father dropped dead from heart failure, a complication from a childhood bout with scarlet fever. Jeanette’s mother, Tommie Taylor, found herself alone, a 19-year-old widowed housewife with two kids, so she packed up and moved back home to New Orleans.
Jeanette grew up in the French Quarter, where her grandfather owned a saloon. “She took her first steps in Tony’s Spaghetti House on Bourbon Street,” Tommie recalls.
Most women who become prostitutes don’t willingly sashay into the life. They don’t go into it because of the great pay, the wonderful benefits, or the ideal working conditions. They are dragged into it by force or circumstance, or they go because they feel like they have no other choice. Jeanette Maier was no exception. “I had a real rough childhood,” she says. She lost her virginity when she was six. One night when her mom was out, Jeanette’s uncle slipped into her bedroom. When he was finished with her, Jeanette crawled into the bathroom and tried to scrub herself clean.
When she was eight, a friend’s uncle wanted to touch her. Jeanette charged him a quarter. “I learned how to use my sexuality to get what I wanted and to make money,” she says.
At age 12 she ran away from home. In the early 1970s it was easy to get hooked on drugs. Jeanette fell hard into that trap. “I shot up anything I could get,” she says. A year later she found herself in Houston where she was gang raped and left for dead.
As a teenager, she fell in love with a Navy man. They got married and settled in Baytown, Texas. She cleaned up and started a family. But it was the mid-1970s, a time when the medical profession knew nothing about postpartum depression. After the birth of her second child, Jeanette suffered a bout of depression, so her doctor put her on synthetic morphine. Nearly 30 years later, she looks back on it and says, “It put me back on the road to disaster.”
When her husband found out about the drugs, and the affair she was having with a married couple down the street, he threw Jeanette and the kids out.
In 1977, Jeanette retraced her mother’s footsteps and fled Texas for the familiar streets of New Orleans. She managed to land a decent job but soon discovered that the pay wasn’t enough to feed her two kids and her drug habit. She found the money she needed working as a stripper. She also had a new man in her life, a biker named Crazy Johnny. One night at a strip club, Johnny said, “You can make more money working for an escort service than you can doing this.”
By 1980, Jeanette was running a pair of escort services. She advertised them in a local paper as Valley of the Dolls and Garden of Eden. She dumped Crazy Johnny and quit taking drugs. “One day I just woke up and looked in the mirror and said, ‘What the hell am I doing?’ and I walked away.” From Crazy Johnny and from drugs, but not from prostitution.
Through her escort services, Jeanette supplied girls to hotels, parties and private shows, and they were regulars at frat houses, bars and some of the city’s best restaurants. “If people knew some of the things we did on those tables,” she says, “I don’t think they would eat there.”
At shows and parties, Jeanette and the girls did a 45-minute stage routine that involved bananas and whipped cream. Then they mingled, working the crowd and making arrangements for private performances.
One night Jeanette got a call from a hotel. When she arrived for her appointment, she walked into a room filled with a dozen NFL players who were in town for a game against the Saints. It was a boozed-up locker room party and Jeanette was the only party favor. She smiled and said, “Who’s first?” A little while later she waltzed out with her purse stuffed with hundred-dollar bills.
According to Jeanette, the secret to handling so many guys at one time is a little trick she later taught to all of her girls. Wiggling two fingers in the air, she says. “I call it the prostate massage.”
In 1990, Jeanette started college. Occasionally, her seductive powers came in handy at school. “I had this one nursing class I had to get an A in, so I slept with the professor.” She got the A.
By the mid-1990s, Jeanette was making a lot of money, and the cops usually left her alone. Of course, it didn’t hurt that she was frequently the entertainment at a favorite police watering hole.
On Tulane Avenue, directly across the street from the courthouse, was a little bar called the Star & Crescent, named after the design of the New Orleans Police Department badge. It was a cop bar doing business as a private club. Through a couple of cutouts, an NOPD detective and a Treasury agent owned the place. You couldn’t get in without punching the right code into a keypad mounted outside of the door. The code was *69.
Jeanette says that she and her girls got called to the Star & Crescent a lot. “I mean, you’re doing a sexual act in front of a roomful of DA’s, judges, and police,” she says, “so how can they arrest you?”
Apparently they couldn’t, but later the FBI could.
Running an escort service had its drawbacks. Managing a bunch of call girls and keeping up with their appointments didn’t leave Jeanette much time for school. It also wasn’t safe. “The girls were always getting ripped off,” she says, “and the cops always wanted freebies.”
In 1996, Jeanette’s mom lived in a shotgun duplex on North Alexander Street, less than a block from Canal Street. In her late 50s, Tommie Taylor enjoyed drinking wine and smoking a little weed. She also had a girlfriend who supported her.
Jeanette gave up the escort service business and moved into the other half of Tommie’s house. She had a dedicated group of customers and knew she could make a nice living as a freelance prostitute. To drum up a little new business she ran an ad in a local newspaper and offered what she described as “hot body rubs.”
Soon, Jeanette’s one-woman brothel was so successful that she needed to hire more girls. To get them, she plugged into a loose association of madams who had formed a nationwide circuit of brothels. The circuit let girls work temporary jobs in whatever city they wanted and gave clients what they really craved–variety.
Jeanette and the girls worked a lot of parties and special events. Fishing tournaments were always big.
“I got so tired of taking my clothes off and putting them back on at this one fishing rodeo,” Jeanette says, “that I just made up this little sign and hung it around my neck that said NEXT.”
By 1998, business was booming and Jeanette decided to upscale. “I had all these fine porn stars coming in, and we needed more room.” She moved the brothel from the house on North Alexander to a large Victorian on the other side of Canal Street.
The owner had recently converted the stately, two-story white-columned mansion into an apartment house. Jeanette rented the ground floor, which had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a workout room, a kitchen, and a sitting room.
In the sitting room, Jeanette set up a small table with a wine book and a chessboard. Around the table were a couple of overstuffed chairs. While they waited, the men could relax with a glass of wine and enjoy a good cigar.
A long-time client described the interior of the new brothel. “It had wooden floors and marble tables. It was real high-end stuff, ultra chic. Jeanette has always had excellent taste.”
Back on Alexander Street, things weren’t going well for Jeanette’s mom. Her lover had moved out and left her with no way to pay the bills. During the 1980s, Tommie had worked around the edges of the legal profession, first in the child support division of the New Orleans District Attorney’s Office and later as a paralegal for a couple of local law firms. Just a year shy of her 60th birthday and having not had a job in several years, Tommie knew her employment prospects were slim.
Jeanette asked her mom if she would answer the phones at the brothel and manage the girls’ appointments.
Tommie had to think about it, but not for long. It was either help her daughter at the brothel or enlist at McDonald’s on the senior citizen program. She chose the brothel. “I’ll do it,” she told Jeanette, “but we’re going to make some changes.” Tommie met with some of the girls and told them the same thing. “You’re going to act like ladies, and you’re going to be treated like ladies.”
One of the first things that had to change was what they called the place. “I hate the term whorehouse,” Tommie says. She borrowed a term from the British–who know a thing or two about brothels–and dubbed the house the “Knocking Shop.”
According to Tommie, after she took over managing the house, the quality of the clientele skyrocketed. “Forty percent of our clients were doctors and lawyers,” she says. “We also had several of the city’s biggest restaurateurs.”
Tommie was a tough manager. She woke the girls up every morning at 7:00. Much of the brothel’s business came during the day. “I don’t know why they call them ladies of the evening,” Jeanette says. “They were ladies of the afternoon. Most of the guys were on their lunch hour.”
“We ran a clean house,” Jeanette says. The FBI later found a typed list of rules stuck to the refrigerator door. The first one was NO DRUGS.
Rates started at $250 per hour, per girl, but Jeanette says that if she had a celebrity porn star in, the price for an hour of sack-time jumped to $600. Customers had to pay for the full hour. There were no per minute rates.
Brothel girls were also available for special parties. A couple of local businessmen rented three or four of Jeanette’s girls to entertain their clients during trips to the Mississippi gulf coast in their boat, a 41-foot Sea Ray named CRIME SCENE. According to Jeanette, the price was $3,000 per girl.
Jeanette says her girls typically took home $5,000 to $10,000 in cash each week. And the work wasn’t that tough. Each girl could see 10 to 15 clients per day. “You’ve got to remember,” she says, “we didn’t spend an hour with each of them. Two minutes here, three minutes there, maybe a total of three hours work a day.”
Today, looking back, Jeanette is not the least bit ashamed of the business she built. “There is a need for prostitutes,” she says. “We balance everything out. We let a guy live out his fantasies.”
Some of the fantasies at the Canal Street Brothel got a little rough. For those who liked that kind of stuff, there were whips, chains and a lot of leather. Jeanette says that most of the clients who wanted to be dominated were Republicans. She cracks a smile, then adds, “They wanted to be spanked and tortured and wear stockings–Republicans have impeccable taste in silk stockings–and these are the people who run our country.”
Jeanette is no stranger to politics. She and her girls used to party with a former Louisiana governor who is now serving a 10-year federal prison sentence in connection with charges unrelated to his penchant for prostitutes. Jeanette also had a three-year affair with an ex-mayor of Baton Rouge, the state’s capital. The ex-mayor, a former LSU football star, later died in a French Quarter flophouse after binging on alcohol and cocaine.
As far as presidential aspirations, Jeanette says, “I loved Clinton. He should have visited the brothel.” She laughs. “But he can still look me up the next time he’s in town.”
Jeanette says that her 21-year-old daughter, Monica Rene Montemayor, who turned her first trick at 16, asked to work at the brothel. “She was threatening to sell herself out on the street where I knew she would get hurt,” Jeanette explains, “so I brought her into the house to protect her.” She set up Monica with a couple of her older clients, men whom Jeanette knew she could trust.
From Monica’s perspective, protection was only part of the reason her mom brought her into the brothel. “A fresh young girl,” she told ABC news. “That’s a lot of money.”
One of Monica’s first brothel customers was a big–some sources say the biggest–name in the New Orleans restaurant business, but after someone else got Monica pregnant, Jeanette says she took over servicing the restaurant owner.
When Monica came back to work, she got the client back but it didn’t take her long to figure out there was something different about him. “He used to be so easy,” she complained to her mother. “Now you’ve got him doing all this weird shit.”
With a wicked grin, Jeanette says, “I got him into S&M, and she said I ruined him.”
Another long-time customer, one who didn’t turn out to be so trustworthy, was a New Orleans lung surgeon with a cocaine addiction.
Like many criminal cases, the Canal Street Brothel investigation started out with an informant’s tip. FBI documents refer to the snitch as CS-2, government lingo for a confidential source, but to everyone else he is Dr. Howard Lippton. Pot-bellied and middle-aged, Lippton has a chubby face, drooping jowls, and an arch of dark hair crowning his high forehead.
Jeanette says that during the 1990s Lippton spent lots of money on cocaine and prostitutes but rarely had sex with any of the girls. “He was too paranoid to have sex,” she says. “He would make the girls look out the window of his apartment the whole time they were there because he thought someone was out to get him.”
There were people out to get him.
One night Lippton called Tommie from a payphone. “He was crying,” she says. “Somebody had beat him up.” Tommie went out and found him huddled on a street corner, his face a bloody mess.
Tommie speculates that Lippton caught the beating from a drug dealer he owed money. Jeanette guesses it was a pimp who smacked him around, probably because the doctor didn’t pay for a hooker, or maybe because he wrote the girl a bad check. Both women say that Dr. Lippton had a lot of trouble with finances. If you want proof, Jeanette says, just ask Bill Clinton.
According to newspaper reports, in 1998 Lippton wrote two $10,000 checks for a pair of tickets to a Democratic fundraiser. He got his picture taken with the president, but both checks bounced.
In 2000, Lippton’s cocaine and hooker habit led to a problem with the federally funded Medicare program. Someone tipped off the feds that Lippton had been submitting fraudulent bills for several years, charging the government for respiratory therapy treatments for the elderly that he hadn’t performed. It didn’t take long for the FBI to turn up about $1.3 million in fake Medicare claims. They also turned up more than $333,000 in personal checks the doctor had written to Jeanette Maier and Tommie Taylor. It made the boys at the FBI kind of curious.
According to Kyle Shoenekus, Lippton’s attorney, in a CBS News interview, FBI agents dragged the doctor into their office for questioning. During the interrogation, one of the agents asked a very simple question, “Dr. Lippton, do you want to go to jail for a very long time?”
Caught with his hand in the Medicare cookie jar, Lippton started spinning a tale about a mob-operated brothel that he said was really a front for a Mafia heroin and cocaine distribution network.
In the days before and after 9/11, FBI agents eavesdropped on the brothel’s telephones and recorded more than 5,000 calls, most of them about men wanting sex. The New Orleans Times-Picayune quoted an FBI summary of one recorded conversation between Tommie and a prostitute named Sunny: “Tommie told Sunny that Victor was coming at 4:30 p.m. and Larry was coming at 5:30 p.m. Sunny asked if she could have a break after 5:30 p.m. because she was behind on laundry, that she was running out of sheets.”
Another summary, quoted in the Times-Picayune, dated September 13, 2001 said, “Girl needs to be at the Windsor Court (a posh New Orleans hotel) at around midnight, room 1117. Don’t send her until David (the doorman) gets back. The customers are tugboat owners who have a lot of dough. Jeanette says $300 an hour.”
In one tape-recorded call, a customer asks how much a girl is going to cost. Jeanette says, “It’s either 15 (hundred) for the evening, or 300 an hour.”
The feds had stumbled upon a crime syndicate of scantily clad women.
On April 2, 2002, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in New Orleans unveiled a 16-count indictment, charging Jeanette, her 62-year-old mother, her 25-year-old daughter, and nearly a dozen other women with conspiracy and interstate travel in aid of racketeering.
Beaming at a press conference over the success of the yearlong investigation, Assistant U.S. Attorney Sal Perricone proclaimed, “This case represents what I feel is one of the vilest forms of racketeering, and that’s the exploitation of women for the sake of a buck.”
What he didn’t say was exactly who was exploiting whom.
Although the FBI investigation had identified hundreds of the brothel’s exclusively male clients, their names were conspicuously absent from the indictment.
When reporters, hungry for salacious details, tried to get their hands on the client list–rumored to contain the names of some of the wealthiest and most powerful men in New Orleans–U.S. District Judge Ivan Lemelle, the federal judge hearing the case, sealed the court records.
“It was an interesting move that made a lot of people suspicious,” says Laurie White, a New Orleans defense attorney who represented Joanne Hansen, one of the women slapped with conspiracy and racketeering charges. “I didn’t see any reason for it except to protect the guilty.”
As an attorney in the case, White did manage to get her hands on the list, and after looking at it, she realized that federal prosecutors were probably scared to go after many of the people on the list, which included some of New Orleans’ best-known doctors, lawyers, business owners, and athletes.
Another New Orleans defense attorney who worked on the case said the list also included a judge, a local TV personality, and a couple of city councilmen.
In November 2002, government and defense lawyers met in Judge Lemelle’s chambers and squared off over the secret customer list. Defense lawyers, convinced the government was treating their female clients unfairly, threatened to go public with the men’s names. According to one of the lawyers in the judge’s chambers, the one name that kept popping up during the tense meeting was that of the son of the former head of the Louisiana Republican Party.
The pressure in the room was explosive. Suddenly, Assistant U.S. Attorney Gaynell Williams, one of the lead prosecutors, lurched to her feet. “I don’t feel very good,” she said. “I think I need some air.” She staggered toward the door and just barely made it into the hallway when she toppled over. As she fell, her face hit the wall. Her eyebrow spilt open and blood poured down her cheek. Lawyers rushed to her side. Someone fanned her. Someone else tried to stop the bleeding. Moments later, an ambulance arrived and medics carted off the government attorney.
After the brothel case became the butt of late-night talk show jokes, the feds brought in a pair of ringers. Al Winters and Bill McSherry, a couple of seasoned federal prosecutors, stepped in and started negotiating a deal. The prosecutors who had indicted the case, Sal Perricone and Gaynell Williams, dropped out of sight.
In the end, court records show that the government dropped the original 16-count indictment in exchange for everyone pleading guilty to at least something.
One of the defense attorneys who worked on the negotiations said, “The government took the position that they probably made a mistake, and they wanted to bring the whole thing to a close.”
Jeanette got the stiffest sentence: three years probation, six months in a halfway house, and a $10,000 fine.
Even the boat got in on the deal. Prosecutors let the CRIME SCENE plead guilty to a felony–transporting prostitutes across state lines. The two businessmen who operated the boat were allowed to plead guilty to a rarely used maritime misdemeanor. Judge Lemelle fined the boat $80,000 and let the two men off with one year of unsupervised probation and a $500 fine.
In a case in which some of the accused faced decades behind bars, not a single defendant went to prison.
When asked if he thought that pressure from the brothel’s high-placed customers forced federal prosecutors to dismiss most of the charges, an FBI agent who worked on the investigation said, “Who the hell knows? You’d like to think not, but you can never tell.”
The case even made it onto Capitol Hill. At a hearing on terrorism, Senator Patrick Leahy, a democrat from Vermont, said, “I realize it comes as an enormous revelation to the American public that there might have been prostitutes in New Orleans. I mean who knew?”
After the sweetheart deal the feds offered Jeanette and after Judge Lemelle handed out those lightweight sentences, talk about the brothel case died down. Then Jeanette, Tommie and Monica started showing up on national television and making vague references to a few of their more bizarre customers. That was followed by talk of Jeanette coming out with a tell-all book and helping with a made-for-TV movie about the brothel. According to published reports, one network, which gave a green light to develop the movie, says that a primary source for the script is Jeanette’s diary. Turns out there really is a little black book.
But sometimes little black books can be dangerous. In 1995, Sylvia Landry, another famous Louisiana madam, also had a book, a book in which she claimed to have written a lot of important names. After she was arrested, Landry tried to use her book to leverage a deal with prosecutors, but something went wrong. Despite her threat to name names, Landry ended up with a six-year prison sentence. Less than a month later she was found dead in her jail cell, a bed sheet tied around her neck.
If Jeanette does go ahead with a book or a movie, a lot of the gossip and apprehension that got stirred up in the higher echelons of New Orleans society when the brothel case first came to light will very likely come bubbling to the surface again.
Will Jeanette ever name names? She isn’t exactly saying–not yet. But she did tell ABC news, “There were a lot of men who were nervous, and they have every right to be.”
Asked if the idea of making enemies of all of those rich and powerful men makes her fear for her life, Jeanette just shakes her head and smiles. “I’m not afraid of dying. I’m afraid the guy at the funeral home is going to have sex with me and not pay me for it.”
This story is based mostly on personal interviews the author conducted with the people involved.
Other research material was obtained from the following sources:
TELEVISION
ABC, Prime Time Monday, “All in the Family,” October 6, 2003.
CBS, 48 Hours Investigates, “The Canal Street Brothel,” June 4, 2003.
COURT RECORDS
U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Louisiana, case number 02-078, U.S. v. Jeanette Maier, et. al.
NEWSPAPERS
The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
The Advocate (Baton Rouge, La.)
The RustonDailey Leader (Ruston, La.)
WEBSITES
TheNewOrleansChannel.com (Website of WDSU-TV, Channel 6, New Orleans)
BOOKS
Arceneaux, D. Guidebooks to Sin: The Blue Books of Storyville. New Orleans: The Historic New Orleans Collection, Williams Research Center.
Rose, Al. Storyville, New Orleans. Tuscaloosa, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1974.