Fleiss Convicted on 3 Pandering Charges : Courts: Jury deadlocks on two counts and acquits her of drug allegation. She could get more than eight years in prison.

By SHAWN HUBLER and NORA ZAMICHOW

Dec. 3, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, who for three years ran a notorious ring of high-priced, short-skirted prostitutes for Los Angeles glitterati, was convicted Friday on three counts of pandering that could send her to prison for more than eight years.

The jury deadlocked on two other pandering counts and acquitted Fleiss of a cocaine charge.

The seven-man, five-woman panel spent four days deliberating in Los Angeles Superior Court before reaching a verdict in the steamy, high-profile case that has titillated the nation and rekindled the age-old debate about whether prostitution should be considered a crime.

Fleiss, 28, who was arrested in an elaborate 1993 police sting, was visibly shaken, dropping her head down on the table when the guilty verdict was announced. Because pandering carries a mandatory minimum sentence, she faces imprisonment of between three years and 8 years, 8 months.

“I’m still in shock. My heart has never beaten so fast,” Fleiss, the daughter of prominent pediatrician Dr. Paul Fleiss, said in a telephone interview later from his Santa Monica condominium, where she took refuge after posting $75,000 bond.

“I heard them say guilty on the first count, and then I just couldn’t hear anymore. I just went blank. . . . My father was crying--he said, ‘Be strong and think of something positive,’ but I can’t even think.”

Judge Judith L. Champagne set a preliminary hearing on sentencing for Jan. 20, but no firm sentencing date was set.

Fleiss sat grim-faced through the court proceedings, sighing at one point, throwing her head back at another. Her father--with whom she faces a federal court trial in January on related charges of money laundering and tax evasion--hung his head and wept in the first row of the courtroom seats.

The verdicts came after four days of contentious, back-and-forth deliberations that was occasionally halted by a forewoman who blew on a whistle to keep order.

Because some jurors were apparently unaware of the penalties required by state law, they appeared stunned--and in some cases remorseful--Friday when reporters informed them that Fleiss must serve at least three years in state prison.

“Oh no, that’s way too much,” said forewoman Sheila Mitrowski, a 48-year-old phone company clerical worker from Bell Gardens. “You’ve got kids out on the streets dealing drugs, for crying out loud, and they get probation.”

Mitrowski said half the jurors, including herself, wanted to acquit Fleiss when deliberations began. However, “we went right by the law,” she said. “We haggled about it for four days.”

Juror Nancy Reyes seemed on the verge of tears upon learning that Fleiss faced prison.

“I don’t think she should go to jail for it,” said Reyes, 24, a Monterey Park secretary. “I just don’t think it’s fair that she has to do time for something like this. It’s upsetting. . . . Hey, she didn’t kill anybody.”

Prosecutor Alan Carter said the mandatory sentence is appropriate because panderers--the legal term for madams and pimps who procure prostitutes for clients--capitalize on the weakness of prostitutes.

“People who go into the prostitution business are usually pretty sad souls, and they’re exploited by panderers,” he said.

Carter added that the verdict “demonstrates how wrong people have been” about the ability of juries to reach rational decisions.

Fleiss’ mother, schoolteacher Elissa Fleiss, said she was flabbergasted.

“There’s something flawed about people who can’t decide about the guilt or innocence of admitted parent-killers and people shown on camera smashing the head of someone else, and (who) then find Heidi guilty,” she said, referring to the Menendez slayings and the beating of trucker Reginald O. Denny during the 1992 riots.

“I just don’t believe the good of society has been served by putting Heidi in jail,” Elissa Fleiss said.

A grand jury indicted Fleiss in September, 1993, after a complex, multi-agency undercover sting operation in which the key player was a Beverly Hills detective posing as a Hawaiian businessman. Her arrest shook Hollywood, which instantly began to buzz with rumors--never publicly verified--that her clientele included entertainment industry figures.

In a lavish Beverly Hills hotel suite, hidden cameras filmed the activities of four women dispatched by Fleiss to entertain four police officers posing as Japanese businessmen celebrating a deal.

To buttress the case, police also had taped the phone conversations between Fleiss and Beverly Hills Detective Sammy Lee that led to the two fateful assignations with prostitutes on two consecutive evenings. In those conversations, Lee explained to Fleiss that he wanted one woman to arrive June 8, and four the next evening when his colleagues arrived. He also asked Fleiss to provide a small quantity of cocaine for the second evening--a request that she said would be “no problem,” according to tapes.

Samantha Burdette, a Colorado-born model, arrived on schedule June 8, and returned the next night with three other women and a small quantity of cocaine. After more than an hour of conversation--with the undercover officers speaking gibberish that they hoped would pass for Japanese--the four women did a striptease with only their own humming for accompaniment as about 20 officers watched from the next room via the surveillance camera. As the last of the four got down to her underwear, police stormed in and placed them all under arrest.

Prosecutors contended that Fleiss willingly procured women and drugs, knowing it is against the law. But defense lawyers argued that she had been entrapped by overzealous vice cops--in legal terms, induced to commit an act that never would have occurred had not the police set events in motion.

As deliberations progressed, several jurors who first leaned toward acquittal on the grounds of entrapment began to pull back, Mitrowski said. They eventually decided that only in the case of Burdette had police gone too far and manipulated her.

The key, Mitrowski said, was the fact that Burdette was summoned to the hotel by the “customers” twice. The police could have arrested her on her first visit, the forewoman said. “With Samantha, they didn’t get her on anything but what they had set up themselves.”

Police have contended that they needed a second night of evidence to strengthen their case.

Another juror, a West Los Angeles woman who spoke on condition of anonymity, said she and some other panelists felt that Fleiss had been entrapped on all counts, but could not find adequate evidence to persuade the rest of the jury.

Consequently, she said, the jurors were forced to bargain with each other in order to reach a verdict and avoid a painful deadlock.

Her aim, the juror said, was simply to make sure that Fleiss was not convicted on the cocaine charge, which she believed to be the most serious.

“You have to give a little and take a little. We didn’t want to come up with a hung jury,” she said.

Judges routinely instruct jurors to avoid such bargaining. They are instructed to decide each count strictly on its merits.

Fleiss lawyer Anthony Brooklier had already planned to appeal the conviction on the grounds that mandatory pandering sentences constitute cruel and unusual punishment. After hearing news accounts of what he described as jurors “horse-trading” their votes on various charges, Brooklier said he will add the claim of jury misconduct to his appeal.

Ironically, Brooklier mused, had jurors gone the other way--convicted Fleiss on the cocaine charge and acquitted her of pandering--she would have been eligible for probation.

Fleiss, too, said she was stunned at some jurors’ intentions.

“I heard some of them talking afterward (on TV), and I couldn’t believe it,” she said sadly. “They thought they were doing me a favor” by convicting her of pandering rather than the drug charge. “They thought I’d just get a ticket or something.”

Juror Reyes said she believed that police were “definitely overbearing” in pursuing Fleiss. Referring to testimony that a smoke detector went off in the room where police were monitoring surveillance cameras as Burdette disrobed June 8 for undercover vice cop Lee, Reyes said derisively: “They were probably all smoking and getting off on the video they were watching.”

But other jurors said they felt that justice was served. Juror Darryl Kitagawa said he did not believe that the police had acted inappropriately or induced Fleiss to commit a crime.

“I felt there was no evidence of entrapment on any of the pandering charges,” said Kitagawa, a 42-year-old Department of Water and Power illustrator who lives in Los Angeles.

Several jurors said they fought frequently during agonizing deliberations.

“We played the video and audiotapes. We played them and played them,” said juror Maria Campos, 38, a hospital receptionist from Northeast Los Angeles. “There were a lot of arguments. We were arguing constantly.”

Jurors revealed that little was said during deliberations about the identities of Fleiss’ clients, who--according to Fleiss, her prostitutes and undercover surveillance tapes--included several well-known Hollywood producers, rock stars, foreign diplomats and international businessmen. The names of these customers have not been made public; Judge Champagne ruled out possible disclosure in court early in the proceedings.

Fleiss, a high school dropout, said she got her start working as an assistant for onetime Beverly Hills madam Elizabeth Adams. She said she was Adams’ assistant, not a “working girl.” However, according to a search warrant affidavit, Fleiss was “Elizabeth Adams’ No. 1 ‘girl’ until she broke off . . . to start her own prostitution business.”

Fleiss maintained her own business for three years before running afoul of police, according to police surveillance tapes of her phone conversations. It was hardly a clandestine operation. There were wild parties, including a bash for Mick Jagger that trashed Fleiss’ house. There was almost constant club-hopping arm in arm with one celebrity or another.

It was a time of giddy days and gallivanting nights that abruptly ended in the police sting operation.

In the months before Fleiss’ trial for pandering, her problems grew.

She was arrested in September after drug tests--a term of her probation--indicated that she had used stimulants and depressants. As a result of those tests, she was assigned to a Pasadena-based drug rehabilitation program, where she spent two months. As a condition of her release from the program, she undergoes drug tests five days a week.

In federal court, Fleiss and her father were charged in August with money laundering, bank fraud and conspiracy to hide her income from her prostitution ring. Daughter and father have pleaded not guilty to those charges. That trial, scheduled for January, may well unveil the identities of Fleiss’ clients because many reportedly wrote checks to her from personal accounts.

Fleiss hinted after her arrest that she might publicly name her clients. Later--after legal proceedings began--she simply expressed frustration that she could be punished while the men go free.

On Friday, however, she was more concerned with her own predicament.

“I don’t care about anything but what’s happening right now,” she said. “Even if the guys were going down too, that wouldn’t help me, would it?”

Times staff writer Bob Pool contributed to this story.