Beverly Hills Sting Targets Call Girl Ring

The long-rumored heiress to the Beverly Hills Madam’s exclusive call girl ring was arrested at her Benedict Canyon mansion after four of her alleged employees were picked up in a vice sting, police said Friday.

Heidi Fleiss, 27, was taken into custody Wednesday on felony pimping, pandering and narcotics charges.

Although Fleiss has denied in previous interviews with The Times that she was involved in prostitution, Los Angeles Police Capt. Glenn Ackerman said a months-long investigation showed she was operating a “highly sophisticated prostitution ring” where call girls turned $1,500-an-hour tricks in “a milieu of money and, well, shall we say, power.”

Fleiss, a mercurial, rail-thin brunette whose alleged clientele is said to run from international financiers to movie stars and sheiks, was a relatively obscure figure until last year, when Elizabeth (Alex) Adams, the onetime Beverly Hills Madam, accused her of stealing her wealthy clientele and masterminding the theft of Adams’ nest egg--a cache of jewels.

Although news accounts never mentioned Fleiss by name, the notoriety made her a target whose “own big mouth did her in,” Ackerman said. Others were eventually convicted of stealing Adams’ jewels.

Rather than arrest Fleiss immediately, police planned a sting, Ackerman said. He refused to divulge details of the arrest, which involved Beverly Hills police, the FBI and Los Angeles vice officers.

But Fleiss, reached at her home, where she is free on $100,000 bond, said events leading to the arrest began when a high school friend introduced her to a man she said was a wealthy Japanese businessman who was buying a house from her mother.

“I had a bad feeling about him, but (the friend) kept saying: ‘No, he’s a great guy, he drives a Testarossa and everything,’ ” Fleiss said.

The businessman turned out to be an undercover Beverly Hills police officer. Sources close to the investigation said he had contacted Fleiss, offering to pay $1,500 apiece for four call girls and half an ounce of cocaine.

When the women showed up at his room in the Beverly Hilton Wednesday night, sources said, they were taken into custody. An hour later, police took Fleiss into custody, along with a 17-year-old who was living in her house.

Fleiss is scheduled to be arraigned July 8.