No second chance for Washington madam as politicians flourish

DENIS STAUNTON AMERICA:WHEN DEBORAH Jeane Palfrey, the so-called DC Madam who ran a call-girl operation in Washington, was charged last year with prostitution-related racketerring, she was adamant about one thing.

"I'm not going back to jail," she told Dan Moldea, a journalist who was working on a book about her.

"I'll kill myself first. I'll commit suicide first." This week, Palfrey did just that, hanging herself with a piece of nylon rope in a shed behind her mother's mobile home in Tarpon Springs, Florida. Her 76-year-old mother Blanche, with whom Palfrey took refuge after her prostitution agency was shut down, found the body, along with two suicide notes.

Palfrey had been convicted two weeks earlier of racketeering, money laundering and using the mail for illegal purposes. She was due to be sentenced on July 24th and faced the prospect of between four and eight years in a federal prison.

Palfrey's case created a stir last year when she gave volumes of her phone records to ABC News and posted them on the internet, identifying some of her high- profile clients. They included Louisiana senator David Vitter, a Republican who won the election proclaiming his commitment to "family values", and former state department official Randall Tobias, who oversaw Aids relief programmes that promoted sexual abstinence and insisted that grant recipients swore to being opposed to prostitution.

Palfrey started her call girl business, Pamela Martin Associates, in 1993, after she emerged from an 18-month stint in prison for an earlier prostitution operation. She had suffered greatly behind bars in a particularly rough women's prison, developing stress-related illnesses and vowing on her release never to return to the prison system. "It damn near killed her," Moldea said.

"She said there was enormous stress - it made her sick, she couldn't take it, and she wasn't going to let that happen to her again." Once outside, however, Palfrey discovered like hundreds of thousands of convicted felons in the US that nobody wanted to employ her and she soon went back into the sex trade.

She always insisted that her business was a legal "high-end erotic fantasy service" that only employed women with college degrees who were well versed in current affairs. They charged $250 (€162) an hour, visiting homes and hotels in Washington to play what she described as "quasi-sexual" games with clients.

Palfrey professed herself shocked to find out that some of the women actually engaged in sexual acts as well as role-playing, but a number of prostitutes and clients testified at her trial that sex was very definitely part of the deal.

Palfrey placed advertisements in Washington magazines but ran her operation from California. Clients would call and she would set them up with escorts, who would post a percentage of their earnings to a PO box of Palfrey's in California.

Between 1993 and 2006, Palfrey employed more than 130 women and made a total of $2 million, according to prosecutors. One of the women, a former college lecturer called Brandy Britton, hanged herself in January, a few weeks before she was due to go on trial on prostitution charges.

"She couldn't take the humiliation. Her whole life was destroyed," Palfrey said.

The US attorney's office in Washington, which prosecuted Palfrey, offered condolences to her mother this week but made no further statement. As they look back on their work in exposing the DC Madam, prosecutors cannot claim to have affected the US capital's booming prostitution business.

After all their efforts, two women are dead and a 76-year-old mother has endured the horror of finding her daughter hanging from a metal bar in a storage shed.

As for Palfrey's clients, they're doing just fine. Vitter, who appeared with his wife to apologise for using the call girl service, is still in the senate and has faced no criminal charges.

Tobias hasn't been prosecuted either but has moved home to Indiana to take up a comfortable post as president of the Indianapolis airport authority.

Some critics complained about the appointment but the city's mayor urged them not to be so harsh, adding that he believes in second chances.