Never on Sunday
Taki
It would take the greatest bloodhound reporter of all time to discover a person with a good word to say about Eliot Spitzer, the first man ever to bully Congress for an invite on bond insurance so he could meet with cutie-pie Ashley Alexandra Dupré in Room 871 the night before. When the crumbum finally threw in the towel, the cheers could be heard all the way to Biloxi. Spitzer was a bully who went after innocent people who could not afford the bad publicity that a federal indictment brings in America. None of his high-profile cases ever came to court, yet he rode the charges all the way to Albany. The best, of course, were the two prostitution rings he claimed to have broken up on his way to becoming governor. A friend of mine, Hank Greenberg, who was hounded by Spitzer for years and spent tens of millions defending himself — all charges were thrown out of court, but not before Greenberg’s health and reputation had gone south — compared Spitzer’s methods to the ones used by Nazi judges to relieve Jewish businesses of their rightful owners. And this in 21st-century America.
Spitzer changed the law involving Johns, making it a federal crime punishable with a year in jail. Which means if life were fair he would have to do at least ten years. (He spent more than 80,000 greenbacks during the past ten years.) Mind you, I’d be doing much more than that if the laws were retroactive. It’s a shame I did not know about the Emperor’s Club, because I find Ashley Alexandra cute, but the idea of following Spitzer is a real turn-off. Oy veh, that’s what’s wrong with the oldest profession. It’s not the girls; it’s the grotesque men who use them.
Spitzer will now go into rehab and have his flunkies spread the word that it was a victimless crime. I ain’t so sure about the latter. When I was young in Paris I used Madame Claude girls most days. (But never on Sunday as I would always be with my wife after playing polo.) Back then girls had to rely mostly on their looks, brainy jobs being scarce. Claude was a nice woman who played fair with the girls. She never told me what percentage she took, but she tried to protect the girls by picking certain nice clients for particularly delicate gals. Although I say so myself, I was considered a nice John, clean, young, thin, mercifully quick, and very discreet when I’d occasionally meet them with their boyfriends chez Castel’s or New Jimmy’s. Some of them were real lookers and even ended up in the Almanach de Gotha.
This was the fun side of using hookers. Claude’s girls were semi-pros at best. In reality, prostitution is a horror story. Incest sets young women up for prostitution, and most of them have been sexually abused by the time they turn pro. The pimps take up to 80 per cent and also put them on hard drugs in order to control them. Most of the girls now working in London, Paris and Milan are from Eastern Europe and have been trafficked by pimps. Their clients are almost as grubby as the pimps, certainly much uglier, but girls will tell you they’d rather do this than have to work in a sweat shop back home. Yet most of them are brought over on false pretences, have their passports taken away by the pimps, and are punished severely if they don’t play ball.
Spitzer was right in breaking up prostitution rings but I have yet to read that any of the pimps are in jail. It was all soundbites and publicity handouts. The same applies here in London. If any of the fuzz really cared to put a stop to it, all it has to do is go to the expensive hotels around Belgravia and Mayfair and follow the rich Arabs and Russians who hang out there. I guarantee a 100 per cent success rate. I suppose escort services, like the one Spitzer used, offer more protection to the girls, but the scuttlebutt has it that this modern Elmer Gantry even asked for unsafe sex. Spitzer’s old man is in real estate, and the Murdoch network described him as old money. It’s old money all right, during the late 80s. The 1980s. His holier-than-thou offspring, having been caught in flagrante, promises to come back and work for the public good in future. Puhlease, as they say in the Bagel. Save it for those who believe that the earth is flat. Or for your poor wife who enjoyed being the state’s first lady. She should now sue for divorce and demand a large share of the old man’s fortune. What Spitzer should be forced to do is time, then community service in Eastern Europe, lecturing pimps about the evils of using women. Now that would really be atonement.
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