Harbor Blvd. Now Part of Prostitutes’ National Map

Debby is tall and blonde and hardened well beyond her 18 years. She has a knife in her purse, a crumpled wad of $20 bills in her shoe and a bad attitude.

Tonight she is working Harbor Boulevard, an Orange County hangout for prostitutes and pimps and the small-time punks who peddle their crack and heroin, and tomorrow maybe it will be Sunset Boulevard or San Diego or somewhere else.

Debby is a prostitute. She doesn’t really care where she sells her body. The strips look the same after a while, wide avenues melting into an after-hours sea of neon dotted with motels, all-night coffee shops, adult bookstores and seedy bars.

“It’s the money that counts,” says Debby, which is not her real name. “People said there was good work on Harbor. They said there’s a lot of money here. And there is. . . . Lots of guys in business suits and nice cars.”

Harbor Boulevard hasn’t always been like this. Not too long ago it was just another congested commercial thoroughfare slicing through the heart of Orange County from Costa Mesa north to La Habra--a bit tacky but always vibrant, always busy.

Some of the best of Orange County is represented here--Disneyland, the Anaheim Convention Center and the luxury hotels that surround them--but also some of the worst. Drug deals on some parts of Harbor are rampant, cheap motels cater to transients and pimps, and in recent years the boulevard has become a regular and lucrative stop on the national circuit of professional prostitutes.

The prostitution problem has become so serious that the FBI is creating a regional task force to target pimps in Orange County.

An FBI spokesman in Los Angeles said the investigation would focus on the groups of women and their pimps who approach their trade like a traveling salesman: one week they are in Portland, Ore., the next week, Boston, the week after that, Anaheim.

The operation is basically going to be aimed at the pimps and not the prostitutes themselves, the spokesman said.

The city of Santa Ana tried to go after prostitutes by declaring them a public nuisance and then barring them from the streets. A Superior Court judge rejected the plan.

“I can’t give you a solution,” the judge told city attorneys last week. “All I can say is, keep trying.”

It is 7 p.m. on a cold Wednesday and Debby is standing on Harbor in front of a vacant building a block down from a local bar. She’s wearing a black leather miniskirt, a matching leather jacket, a blue sweater and black pumps.

A delicate gold chain with a single pearl is draped around her neck and a small black purse is swung over her shoulder. In it is a list of names and telephone numbers, some cash and a knife.

She has been working Harbor for about 3 months. There is a hardness in her voice, a tone that says she has been through this before, but she seems vulnerable too, and just a bit scared.

“I started because people said there was good work here,” she says. “A friend of mine got me into it. Sure, it can be scary. I pick my dates pretty good. I look for white guys usually, in business suits.”

The threat of AIDS doesn’t seem to concern her. All the girls on the street, she says, make sure their customers use condoms. What does scare her are the occasional dates that turn violent and ugly. She related one incident:

“We were in his car, and he said he had a gun. He scared me, really bad. He went crazy, all this yelling and everything. He wanted my money. I had to jump out of the car while it was moving. Scuffed up my knees and legs real bad.”

On a busy night, women like Debby--some of them children, really--can be found on the street corners of Harbor Boulevard flagging down cars and soliciting business. It is not uncommon for groups of 20 to 30 prostitutes to gather on one corner, at 5th Street or Westminster or Hazard avenues, and boisterously yell at passing cars.

When a police car approaches, they fade out of the lights and into the shadows, some of them seeking the shelter of a 24-hour coffee shop or restaurant. And when the police leave they return, some of them so bold as to signal passing motorists by raising their skirts or their blouses.

Just 3 weeks ago, police said, there were so many prostitutes at the corner of Westminster and Harbor that their presence created traffic jams as curious motorists slowed for a closer view of the spectacle of so many in one place.

“It can be a circus out there,” says Patti Page, who lives in a mobile-home park near the corner of Harbor and 5th. “It’s a nuisance, and residents around here shouldn’t have to put up with it.”

Like Debby, most of the circuit girls are young. A few have been found to be as young as 12, but most are in their teens or early 20s.

Debby searches for the words to explain what brought her here, why she has chosen to risk so much for what clearly seems so degrading and dangerous a profession.

“I have to make money,” she says, almost annoyed by the question. “You just do it.”

Sgt. William Scheer is cruising Harbor in an unmarked white 1986 Chrysler with his partner, Cpl. Kevin Brown, a muscular ex-Marine.

For 7 hours on this Wednesday night, these Santa Ana officers are in charge of making sure that their stretch of Harbor from Kent Avenue north to Westminster is free of “circuit girls” and “hypes,” police slang for local women who prostitute themselves to pay for a drug habit, usually heroin.

“It’s really sad what is happening out here,” Scheer says. “I’d hate to see the boulevard get taken over like Santa Monica and Hollywood. You have people getting killed . . . fights, robberies, you name it.”

Scheer, 44, is a tall man with a shock of Irish-red hair and a gentle manner. He has been a cop for 16 years, 5 of them with the vice squad. He has dealt with more prostitutes and drug addicts and fast-talking con men than he wants to remember, and he has been around long enough to remember a time when it was rare to see streetwalkers on Harbor.

It is quiet tonight, and as Scheer negotiates the busy street he tells the story of how Orange County, and the 7-mile stretch of Harbor Boulevard in particular, were “put on the map” as a favorite haunt for prostitutes.

“It really began with the Olympics back in 1984,” he explains. “The police in Los Angeles put on a lot of pressure to get the hookers out of town before the Olympics began. They wanted to present a good face to the world. So what happened? A lot of them came down here. They came to Harbor and Beach (Boulevard) and found that business was good. We’ve been a regular stop ever since.”

The problem was aggravated, Scheer said, with last year’s Super Bowl in San Diego, when many fans stayed in Orange County motels because there was a shortage of rooms in San Diego. The prostitutes returned in force.

“Harbor Boulevard has become known,” Scheer said. “I talked to one girl from Texas, one of the ‘circuit girls,’ who told me she learned about Harbor from a story on prostitutes that ran on CNN.”

Authorities say one of the most popular current circuits includes Tacoma, Wash., Monterey and Salinas, Houston, Albuquerque, N.M., Louisville, Ky., Washington, Boston and Orange County.

If police launch a crackdown in one city, the pimps move their operations to another. But they are never gone for long. The money is just too good. The average weekly take for a prostitute on the circuit is between $2,000 and $3,000, all of which goes to the pimp who takes care of expenses.

Perhaps, Scheer said, it was destined that Orange County would make the circuit. The same factors that have put other areas on the map--wealth, a steady influx of tourists and business travelers, a well-lighted thoroughfare busy at all hours--are here as well.

And there is an added attraction to Orange County. Scheer said pimps prefer Santa Ana and Garden Grove, as well as parts of Beach Boulevard in Stanton, because they know that when their women are arrested, they are likely to be released within a few hours because there is no room at the Orange County Jail.

“These guys are no fools,” he said. “Time is money to them. They know that here, with the jail being overcrowded, chances are their girls won’t be off the streets that long. It’s a real incentive to work here.”

Brown spots a rusty Ford with two people in the front seat behind a motel known as a hangout for prostitutes. The patrol car pulls behind the Ford and the occupants get out, a middle-age man wearing a straw cowboy hat and a fast-talking “hype” named Julianne, who says unconvincingly that there was nothing going on with this stranger. She was simply hitching a ride down Harbor.

Julianne is 34 but could easily pass for 50. She is wearing blue jeans, a dark sweater and dirty tennis shoes, and she is flying high from a recent injection of drugs. As she talks in a rapid-fire stream of jumbled thoughts and half-truths, she gestures wildly with her hands, alternately laughing and pleading and crying. Scheer has heard this story before a thousand times.

“Man,” she begins, “I got four kids and I’m going to go straight . . . I swear. I’m going to get into a methadone program, soon. This time I’m going clean. Straighten up my life. I mean, man, I was a manager in a restaurant once!”

Scheer tries to calm her, talking to her in soothing monotones, asking her questions, getting the same old answers.

“How long have you been hooking?” he asks.

“How long? You mean how long? Oh, 15 years. I don’t know. I’ve been doing heroin and other stuff for longer than that. But I’m going to get straight. I just need a little help, you know. If I got a little help, man, I could go straight. You know?”

At Scheer’s request, she pulls up the left sleeve of her sweater and exposes a long ugly scab and open sore running almost the entire length of her forearm.

It’s from injecting cocaine, she explains, something about an allergic reaction to the impurities in the drug she often obtains in exchange for sex in the front seat of some stranger’s car. This is typical with “hypes,” Scheer explains. They keep shooting the drug up their veins and going to bed with anyone who comes along until they die of an overdose or AIDS or end up in jail.

At the height of her drug use, Julianne said she spent $1,000 a week on her habit, earning it by working the streets. Now older and tired and increasingly unable to compete with the younger circuit girls, she says she has resorted to stealing to maintain her habit.

“Let’s see the other arm,” Scheer says.

Julianne rolls up the sweater over the other arm to the elbow. It is covered with small green heroin tracks, dozens of them, the result of more than a decade of abuse.

“You see a lot of them like that,” Scheer says, returning to the boulevard and scanning the sidewalks for the next sad story. “She needs help.”

Debby sits awkwardly in a metal chair at the Santa Ana police substation at the corner of Harbor and 1st Street. She voluntarily agreed to come here so Scheer and Brown can check the records to see if she has had any prior convictions for prostitution.

She is the only woman here this night. Sometimes, when the circuit girls are out in force, it is not uncommon for this small office to be packed with 30 or 40 prostitutes being photographed and fingerprinted.

Debby is nervous, and when she answers questions her eyes rarely leave the floor. She shrugs her shoulders when asked about the knife, explaining simply “it’s for protection.” They all carry them, she says, although razors seem the weapon of choice for a lot of the girls.

There is a story about an aunt in Anaheim, but that proves to be a lie. She is really staying at a local motel, and she produces a key from her right shoe to prove it. Then she says her name really isn’t Debby, it is something else, but even that is almost impossible to confirm.

Finally Debby begins to talk about her family. Her mother was a drug addict who died when she was 8 and her father, well, “we just never got along.” So she left her hometown outside Portland, Ore., and came to Anaheim, where she began walking the streets.

She says she is a high school graduate and that one day, perhaps, there is college in her future.

“I’d like to study the arts, maybe theater. I don’t know, maybe. If I get the money. That’s why I’m working,” she says.

Scheer can find no record that a “Debby” or the other name she has given them has a prior conviction. Her mood begins to change as she realizes she is about to walk out the door. She smiles for the first time.

“Debby, let me ask you something,” Scheer says.

“OK.”

“Can I see your arms?”

Debby pulls up her sleeves. The arms are clean of any marks that would indicate intravenous drug use.

“Good girl,” Scheer says. “That’s real good. You keep it that way.”

Free of drugs, Debby could walk away from all this madness if only she had the will to do so. Maybe, Scheer thinks, just maybe she will.

When it is time to let her go, Scheer turns to head out the door to return to street patrol. He stops short of the exit and turns to face Debby for what he hopes is the last time.

“Hey, Debby, good luck,” he says.