Sex Profits All, Except the Real Purveyors : Heidi: Hollywood sells wall-to-wall fake eroticism, but try to market the real thing and police swoop down. What’s this going to cost taxpayers, anyway?

So here we are, sitting pretty in our drug-plagued, violence-ridden, post-Bugsy Siegel town, with high-stakes prostitution on our minds.

Again.

Hello, sweetheart, give us rewrite, and, while you’re at it, pull the clips on Virginia Hill, the Mann Act, White Slavery and the Black Dahlia.

Prepare yourselves, friends, for breathless TV accounts of trysting and trick books, of flat feet tirelessly pounding summer sidewalks in search of Her Heidiship, alleged madam to the stars.

Never mind that while you’re savoring the tidbits, lingering over morsels of sex and commerce, our schools turn soft and bankrupt, thousands of county workers face pink slips and gun-crazy gangs claim every square mile in the Thomas Guide.

Do we really want $40,000-a-year cops and their $75,000 supervisors investigating this most dated version of “the Dating Game”? Nobody’s talking about organized crime, blackmail or murder.

We’ve yet to hear from a single prairie flower held against her will in the Polo Lounge.

Oh, the cops have been quoted on prostitution’s storied downward spiral: Start on satin, they tell us, wind up on asphalt. And a brace of studio big shots are reportedly nervous about jobs and wives.

Can any average, freeway-bound citizen really care which millionaire paid how many thousands of dollars not to sleep alone? Yes, when it comes to tabloid tales--but no, when cops abandon the streets for dubious stakeouts.

Does it make our city any safer, our homes more secure, to know which young woman bought a car, condo or college education with postcoital cash?

Of course not.

The really funny part is that every corner of the entertainment industry is sanctioned to profit from sex--except real-life purveyors.

Movie theaters brazenly touted Robert Redford’s “Indecent Proposal.” In rock videos, twentysomethings yearn for, pine for and occasionally succeed at coupling. And what can anyone say about writers of the Judith Krantz-Sidney Sheldon school? That readers simply flip past all those sex scenes aboard private jets, yachts and casting couches?

Sex sells, the ad men advise, and, ultimately, no one may be able to attest to that better than Heidi Fleiss.

Because while producers bid on her special brand of L.A. story, our police, by not looking the other way, have made a 27-year old woman into a growth industry, regardless of what she did or didn’t do with all those Hollywood nights.

And isn’t that romantic?