Partners in Crime, but Not in Doing Time
Dear John . . .
Yeah, you, Mister Got-$100-and-a-Condom-Let’s-Party, Mister Just-Pretend- I’m-Richard-Gere-and-You’re-Julia-Roberts.
Got busted, did you? Picked up a hooker and were going at it in the back seat when the cops spotted you, and next thing you knew, you were phoning the wife to come post your bail?
Well, here’s a little something you might like to know:
When the cops recently arrested a bottle-blond nicknamed Babydol Gibson for allegedly running a string of call girls--thousand, two thousand-dollar-a-night dates, pal, too rich for your blood--they found something more:
A Rolodex and a log of the names of some 400 men who had very probably availed themselves of the services offered. Prosperous men, some of them, important men, maybe even big spenders in the Charlie Sheen league.
But if you think you’ll find yourself sitting next to any of these noted gentlemen in arraignment court, you’re dreaming.
These men won’t be seeing the inside of a courtroom unless they watch “Law & Order” reruns. Police even inked out their names “to protect their identities,” and have no plans to prosecute. And there you are on the police blotter, sport--fingerprints and all.
So, how do you like them apples?
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A business transaction in the flesh trade seems plainly to be crime a deux; like a thief who sells his hot wares to a fence, both buyer and seller are breaking the law.
But under the law, it can’t always be handled that way. The penal code virtually requires either catching the john in the act (lewd conduct, and sex-for-money if he admits it), or catching him in the act of trying to buy the act (usually propositioning an undercover cop tricked out like a streetwalker).
“In order to prosecute a john, or male defendant,” explains Earl E. Thomas, assistant chief of the city attorney’s criminal division, “we have to have a credible witness to testify that the solicitation or act of prostitution itself was consummated. We can’t do that using a streetwalking prostitute as the primary witness.”
What, then, are the odds of a cop catching a thousand-bucks-a-throw girl and her client in mid-cavort in a $500 hotel suite (which is where a naked LAPD detective spent the evening gathering evidence on Babydol’s business, but that’s a story for another time)?
What chance that an undercover woman cop could infiltrate such a high-stakes operation, and get the goods on madam and clients?
Which is why we get two categories of johns--the guy sentenced to the orange Caltrans vest, and the big man in the pinstriped Armani vest. Mr. Schmo and Mr. Dough.
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The double-double standard, john vs. john, is a latter-day elaboration on the more ancient matter of john vs. prostitute.
Moralists, civil libertarians and women’s rights defenders have pointed out that, from Mary Magdalene to Heidi Fleiss, the hooker gets a much bigger share of society’s shame, and the john a bigger share of its sympathy: poor guy, with a wife and kids and a job, he was just out looking for a little fun.
Mindful of that, Assistant City Atty. Bill Sterling, supervising attorney in the Hollywood courthouse, says his credo is “the only way I can be tough on the prostitutes is to be tough on the johns.” In years past, when men were nabbed with prostitutes, “we used to reduce the charge to trespassing without a second thought.”
Because a sex-related misdemeanor raises red flags and official eyebrows, Sterling gets attorneys pleading, “ ‘My client’s a teacher, he’s going to lose his license, my client’s an accountant, a doctor, he has a very sensitive job, he’s going to have immigration problems.’ We can’t make distinctions.”
Part of the shame offensive in vogue against prostitute patrons are remedies that owe something to creative sentencing and something to Jerry Springer:
Certain cities have put johns’ names in the newspaper. Miami blazoned them on billboards. Twice, Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson has tried to get the names of arrested johns aired on the city’s cable channel.
But San Francisco has a widely copied “john school,” a boot-camp diversion program for the first-time offender. He has to sit and hear about jail and AIDS, and the lowdown on the low life from prostitutes who survived it, who stand there and tell him that behind the practiced smile and the come-hither come-on, they’re thinking what a creep he is, thinking, some of them, that they’d like to kill him.
Pity these women will never get to say that to the men in Babydol’s black book. If they could, they’d tell the big spenders what they least want to hear: that the rich aren’t any different after all, whatever the size of their checkbooks.
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Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.
