Pubdate: Sun, 01 Dec 2002
Source: Times-Picayune, The (LA)
Copyright: 2002 The Times-Picayune
Contact:  http://www.nola.com/t-p/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/848
Author: Michael Perlstein

BIRTH OF A BROTHEL

The Infamous Canal Street Brothel Was Born Of Three Generations Of Sexual 
Abuse And Substance Abuse

As much as anything else about that night, Jeanette Maier remembers the 
aquarium. Gazing at the fish and bubbles and blocking out the things an 
uncle was doing to her body.

He was staying at their home in Galveston, Texas, when he woke her up and, 
using the name everyone called her, said, "Net, I have something for you." 
It was a typewriter, an odd gift, but she thought it was the greatest. He 
wanted something in return, though. He brought her into the room he was 
using and ordered her to lie down on the bed.

She begged him to stay away, but he pushed his sweaty, booze-stinking body 
on top of her. "I just imagined myself in the water, where it was quiet and 
safe," she said.

In a few horrible moments, it was over. She was 6.

Later that night, she tried to tell her mother about it, but her mother had 
come home drunk and passed out in the bathroom. After that, Net decided to 
keep the episode to herself. She didn't want to make her mother mad.

There was more abuse. By her uncle. By a neighbor from down the street. By 
another man who pulled her next to his wheelchair. There was so much of it 
that Jeanette began to feel detached from her own body. When she was 8, she 
turned her first trick. She had found out that her friend Della got a 
quarter every time she let her uncle touch her, so Jeanette let Della's 
uncle touch her, too.

"After a while, I just started thinking that's what men did to kids," said 
Maier, now 44. "You didn't say anything. You just kept it to yourself."

Maier no longer keeps it to herself. Ever since her arrest last spring as 
the madam of the so-called Canal Street brothel -- alongside her mother, 
who helped run the place, and her daughter, who is accused of turning 
tricks there -- Maier has been at the center of a media swirl, granting 
interviews for newspapers, magazines, television and the Internet. She has 
talked about running away from home at 12, being raped and beaten at 13, 
having an abortion at 14, losing her teenage years in a blur of drug abuse, 
turning tricks to feed her three children.

Rather than fight federal prosecutors, she copped a plea, admitting her 
role in the $300-an-hour brothel connected to a national prostitution 
circuit. She has turned over the names of her well-heeled clients in hopes 
of getting a lenient sentence, and when the case comes to trial in 
February, she may be called upon to testify against seven co-defendants, 
including alleged madams from Atlanta, Boston and Chicago, two Slidell oil 
executives accused of hiring girls for a yacht party in Mississippi, and 
her own daughter, Monica Montemayor, a 26-year-old who has been charged 
with prostitution.

Maier's mother, Tommie Taylor, 62, earlier pleaded guilty to running the 
day-to-day operations of the bordello and is awaiting her sentence. Seven 
other defendants, including sex workers from Miami, Pittsburgh and 
elsewhere, also cut plea bargains, and some may emerge as witnesses in the 
trial.

The road that led to Canal Street winds through a troubled family history, 
an inheritance of sexual abuse and bad choices that goes a long way toward 
explaining how a grandmother, mother and daughter ended up working at the 
same brothel.

"The women in our family are strong and beautiful, but they're cursed," 
Montemayor said. "It seems like my road was chosen for me before I was even 
born."

Big Trouble

The bust, a rare case of federal authorities targeting prostitution, was 
uneventful. After the FBI eavesdropped on the brothel's phones over the 
course of a year, they began surveillance of the building, a stately, white 
Victorian in a stretch of Canal where homes are mixed among churches and 
office buildings. In the fall of 2001, agents followed a working girl from 
the time she arrived at the airport. They watched as she drove a rental car 
to the Canal Street house and received a steady stream of men. After a 
week, they arrested her.

Maier was at her mobile home in Mississippi when she got the news. She 
figured it was just another local bust, the kind that almost always ends in 
a guilty plea and probation. But when she contacted her attorney, she 
realized she was in serious trouble.

Racketeering, conspiracy, interstate trafficking: In all the times she had 
been arrested by local police, she had never heard these terms before. For 
the first time in her career as a prostitute, she was facing prison time, 
her attorney warned.

She knew the stakes were high when the indictment was issued April 2. At a 
news conference that day, prosecutors, FBI agents and acting U.S. Attorney 
Jim Letten were on hand to trumpet their case.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sal Perricone, chief of the Organized Crime Strike 
Force, took the microphone: "This case represents, I feel, one of the 
vilest forms of racketeering. That's the exploitation of women for the sake 
of a buck."

Cycle Of Abuse

Maier can trace her family's earliest involvement in the sex business to 
the 1930s, to her grandmother, Dorothy Lee Dolores Guillory, a French 
Quarter hellcat. Until 1917, prostitution had been legal in New Orleans as 
long as it was confined to Storyville, the official red-light district 
along Basin Street. By the 1930s it had been pushed underground, but not 
very far. People who asked the right concierge or cabby or bartender could 
order up the vice of their choice in any number of New Orleans brothels 
where the correct password opened up a hidden world of illicit sex.

In that world, Guillory worked as taxi dancer, a bar manager and, during 
Prohibition, a patron of bootleggers. Family lore has it that she never 
turned a trick herself, but 11 marriages to 10 men and a lifetime of bars, 
bourbon and extramarital affairs were scandalous enough.

"She was the original ragin' Cajun," Taylor said. "She was a renegade and a 
drunk and ball-buster. Nothing got in her way. If she didn't like the 
wallpaper, she'd tear down the wall."

It was a flamboyant world, but to Tommie Taylor, who was raised amid dingy 
bar booths and the rough trade that occupied them, it was a dark one. She 
doesn't remember exactly how old she was, but she was a young child when 
she was sexually molested for the first time. It was a scene that would 
repeat itself.

"I was pretty well passed around," she said. "All I know is I'd always be 
scared of somebody coming to the house and coming into my room and things 
happening to me."

That blur of early assaults were all by men. She remembers more precisely 
the first time she was molested by a woman. She was 7, attending a Catholic 
school in New Orleans, when she was held and Alexander Street and charged 
customers $150 an hour. Business wasn't great, but it was good enough, and 
Maier enjoyed working in management instead of labor. She soon upgraded to 
a rented house on Cleveland Street, then Orchid Street, then another place 
on North Alexander Street, a shotgun double.

It was during that second stay on Alexander that Maier's mother got 
involved. Taylor had lived a bohemian life, as a beatnik in the '50s, a 
hippie in the '60s, then as an openly gay bon vivant, but she always 
treasured decorum. She had her husbands, nice homes and respectable jobs. 
She was largely self-educated, but she found work at banks, credit unions 
and law firms, eventually becoming a paralegal. She even worked for a time 
in the child support division of the Orleans Parish district attorney's office.

But after a divorce from her fourth husband and a bad breakup with a 
longtime girlfriend, Taylor found herself out of work and out of money and 
moved into the other half of the Alexander Street double. She never 
approved of her daughter selling her body, but she tolerated it. So to earn 
money, she began cleaning up after the girls and answering telephones. 
Before long, she was giving Maier advice on how to run "a brothel with class."

In 1999, Maier moved her operation to the first floor of the two-story 
Victorian around the corner on Canal and, with Taylor's help, furnished the 
place with canopy beds and, in the front room, a marble table, fully 
stocked wine rack and assorted rugs and mirrors from Pottery Barn. The 
place was a hit, especially after Maier began advertising.

Brisk business allowed Maier to bring in more prostitutes, and through the 
grapevine she heard about hookers who "traveled the circuit" of other 
brothels throughout the country. The men loved seeing fresh faces, calling 
in advance for that week's menu of women -- "Baby" from Miami, "Georgia 
Peach" from Atlanta. The variety soon became a selling point of Maier's shop.

She raised rates to $300 an hour, and the success afforded her more time to 
spend on the plot of land she had bought in Picayune, Miss. She'd stay for 
weeks at a time at her double-wide trailer, riding her horse, Banner, 
nearly every day. After a few more years, she might be able to retire to 
the country for good, she thought.

But as long as she had the brothel, which Taylor dubbed the "Knock 'n' 
Shop," Maier wanted a clean business. She carefully screened her clientele 
and imposed strict rules against hard drugs and alcohol. Unlike some sex 
houses, the working girls weren't locked down or held to strict hours. It 
was more of a family atmosphere. Taylor cooked for the hookers and, 
occasionally, invited them to her nearby apartment to mingle with her gay 
friends, smoke marijuana and listen to jazz on her front porch.

Maier said her biggest regret was getting her daughter involved. The 
alternative, though, was to let Monica continue her life of stripping and 
turning tricks whenever and wherever there was a paying customer.

"I didn't like it, but I knew Monica was going to work regardless. The 
other way, working on Airline Highway or whatever, was even worse. I know 
it makes no sense to normal people, but I did it to protect her," Maier said.

End Of The Line

In the fall of 2001, the Canal Street brothel business was rolling along. 
Maier rarely turned tricks anymore, her mother had taken over the 
day-to-day management, and Monica had secured a regular customer, a sugar 
daddy, who paid her $700 a week, an arrangement that let her give up the 
hourly gigs with strangers. The customer, a well-known local restaurateur, 
didn't even want sex, Montemayor said.

"He would smoke a joint, get a full-body massage and complain about his 
mother-in-law," Montemayor said. "Every Wednesday afternoon at 2 o'clock."

What Maier and her family didn't realize was that the FBI had been 
listening to everything: men making appointments, girls arranging to fly in 
from out of town, conversations with other madams and Monica's sugar daddy 
begging to see her even though she was pregnant.

It all came crashing down when a wealthy doctor got caught stealing $1.3 
million from Medicare. Lung surgeon Howard Lippton, a longtime regular 
whose canceled checks showed he spent more than $300,000 at Canal Street 
and its earlier incarnations from 1994 to 1998, became a federal witness 
and told the FBI everything he knew. His cooperation led to the wiretaps, 
and the wiretaps delivered the government's case.

As part of his plea bargain, Lippton pleaded guilty to a single count of 
health-care fraud. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison and is expected 
to be one of the government's star witnesses.

Facing The Music

Former customers aren't calling, but the media are. Maier has granted 
interviews with everyone from Newsweek to CBS' "48 Hours." She has posed 
provocatively, but clothed, for a fellow madam's Web site. And she's about 
to launch her own advice column in a local men's magazine.

Away from the spotlight, the bust has brought about another first for Maier 
and her family. As they await sentencing, Maier and Taylor have been 
required to meet regularly with a therapist. Montemayor, as part of her 
bond obligation, also gets weekly therapy. In addition, the women have been 
forced to lean on one another, partly because money is tight, partly 
because the circus of rich men and party girls and hangers-on is gone. 
Maier, estranged from her siblings, is in bankruptcy, and she and Taylor 
have been forced to share a cramped apartment. Maier's boyfriend pays the 
bills. As for her children, Sammy is struggling with a drug habit and Alex 
is awaiting trial on robbery charges in Jefferson Parish. The situation has 
been painful, especially for Montemayor, who said she has been having 
nightmares, cold sweats and screaming fits.

The therapy sessions and discussions that spill over at home have brought 
out long-buried stories about abuse and drugs and degradation and bad men 
and bad choices.

"It brings up too much stuff that should be locked away," Montemayor said. 
"Besides, we don't need anybody to step in and tell us what we did wrong. 
We have to look at each other and deal with that hell every day."
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