A Bland Ending to the Spicy Heidi Chronicles

Heidi Fleiss got out of jail Thursday. I was hoping for something different. I was hoping she’d bust out.

A jailbreak. Heidi on the lam. Helicopters overhead. Nationwide dragnet. Notorious “Hollywood Madam” reportedly spotted by a Cub Scout troop somewhere in North Dakota. Heidi’s mug on a post office bulletin board. “America’s Most Wanted” offering a reward for info on her whereabouts. Daily updates on six escaped California call girls, and how they fooled six California prison guards found in handcuffs. Six fugitives in leg irons with matching accessories, last seen headed toward Amish country in Pennsylvania.

FBI agents vs. the Fleiss Mob.

Alas, no such luck. Madam Heidi walked out of a federal corrections institution in Dublin, Calif., through an open gate, having served 21 months behind bars. She is scheduled to spend a few months at a halfway house, which is ironic, having gone to jail for running an all-the-way house.

I hope for Fleiss’ sake that she has learned her lesson, that she will never break the law again and that the halfway house has a lovely pool and spa.

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It seems like only yesterday that the Heidi caper was running a close second to the O.J. caper on our nightly TV news.

No detail was overlooked, right up to the moment when it was reported that the defendant was found guilty while dressed in an elegantly tailored taupe suit.

Fleiss was first arrested June 9, 1993, after a number of her business associates were snared in a vice sting, which isn’t half as much fun as it sounds.

There was an outcry--well, maybe not a very loud cry--that if Madam Heidi and her popular employees were guilty of committing a crime, then so were their customers.

Arrest the johns, Fleiss’ fans said.

Forget the fact that Madam Heidi’s convictions also included ones for money laundering and tax evasion. (That’s partly how the feds got Al Capone too.) The point was well made that during, say, Prohibition, the bootleggers might have been breaking the law, but so were the customers buying their stuff.

For a while there, this must have made individuals in Madam Heidi’s alleged “little black book” more nervous than some of them ever were in Madam Heidi’s little shop of whores.

I would have thought that customers would have had to be caught in the act to be busted by the cops. But maybe being found in a little black book is enough evidence--not to mention evidence that clients should pay in cash and use the name John Smith.

It became public knowledge that actor Charlie Sheen, for one, in 1992 shelled out something like $53,000 to Madam Heidi’s budget rent-a-date. That’s quite a tab. (I haven’t spent $53,000 on women in my entire lifetime, counting lunch, dinner, Christmas gifts, birthdays and valentines, and I’ve been dating them since I was 16.)

Charlie has been known to squander his money, particularly on drugs and Angel baseball tickets. I never thought he should have done time for using Heidi’s home shopping network, but then again, if I rent a Ferrari from someone I know to be smuggling Italian cars, aren’t both of us breaking the law? Charlie leased a lot of sports models.

Oh, well. Heidi’s out now.

She was originally convicted in December 1994 on three counts of pandering, for which she was sentenced to 37 months in prison and 300 hours of community service. (I always thought the judge should have been more specific in Heidi’s case about what type of community service.)

After the first verdicts were overturned, Fleiss was found guilty in August 1995 on the money laundering and tax dodging charges. She also later entered a guilty plea to attempted pandering, while still making an argument that our criminal courts should punish not just the panderers but the panderees.

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Bigger fish have gotten away, but Heidi Fleiss went up the river.

Well, as some old-time crook once said, if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.

Running a prostitution ring may be the world’s oldest profession, or no worse than second behind dinosaur cleanup, but it was wrong then and it’s wrong now.

While awaiting her fate, I remember Heidi ran a nice sideline business in Pasadena, selling a “Heidi Wear” line of women’s clothing. I hope she can go back to that. Christmas is coming up and I might spend as much as $53,000 in gifts this year.

I’d even be a regular customer.

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053, or e-mail mike.downey@latimes.com.