A prosecutor accused a Manhattan woman on Wednesday of controlling a ring of several dozen high-priced prostitutes and said that she tried to dismantle the operation when she sensed the authorities closing in.
The woman, Kristin Davis, 32, was ordered held in $2 million bail after her arraignment in Criminal Court in Manhattan on charges of money laundering and promoting prostitution.
As Ms. Davis, wearing a black hooded jacket emblazoned with rhinestones in the shape of a flaming skull, stood in front of a judge, her lawyer, Mark Jay Heller, said that she was “clothed with the cloak of innocence” and was pleading not guilty.
Mr. Heller added that his client believed she was being “persecuted” because the recent investigation into former Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s use of prostitutes had created a fervor about call-girl operations.
But Artie McConnell, an assistant district attorney, disagreed. “Ms. Davis ran a very lucrative high-end prostitution ring,” he said. “The rates for these prostitutes were anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand dollars per hour.”
The investigation by the district attorney’s office and the Police Department’s vice squad started on March 1, 2007, after complaints arose from neighbors of one of the East Side apartments that Ms. Davis is accused of using as a brothel. During the investigation, the enterprise, operating in New York, Pennsylvania and California, earned about $2 million, Mr. McConnell said. He said that Ms. Davis had cached money on the Isle of Man.
He added that he believed that Ms. Davis had been tipped off that arrest was imminent. Her Web sites stopped functioning a few days after her indictment, which was recently unsealed, he said, and her brothels were suddenly shut down and emptied. She was arrested on Tuesday.
Mr. McConnell, who had asked for $10 million bail, also asserted that Ms. Davis had at one point sought to interest reporters in writing about her and described herself on a Web site as “a madam running the world’s largest escort agency that grosses over $6 million per year.”
Mr. Heller said that figure was inflated and told reporters outside the courthouse, “She is looking forward to her day in court when she can clear her name.”
It's not. The site in question is that of Wicked Models, an alleged New York escort service that law-enforcement officials shut down this week. On Tuesday Kristin "Billie" Davis, Wicked's busty proprietor (also alleged), pleaded not guilty to money laundering and promoting prostitution.
Spitzer's reps have denied that he visited Wicked's women, but the New York Post cites officials who say otherwise. The Post notes: "A source said Davis personally serviced Spitzer."
Of course, what gets on the Internet doesn't easily get off. (Beat....) So it wasn't hard to call up the old Wicked Website from the Internet Archive.
You find, there, that Wicked was pretty much your standard $1,000-per-hour online bordello -- it goes for lots of gold text and Photoshop font effects, and carries on at great length about the time it puts into selecting girls, sounding at times like a vintner discussing grape varietals:
All of our companions are hand-picked for their beauty, intellegence (ironic sic) and demeanor. We have stunning supermodels, Ivy League Educated beauties and the sorority girl next door. We pride ourselves in qualiy (sic, irony again) and adhere to the strictest standards.
One innovation: The Wicked site had an online booking form. Say you're a socks-with-sex randy governor of a large Northeastern state and you're looking for a good time. At Wicked, you could set it up without an awkward phone call: After perusing the models, you enter in your first choice, your second choice, your personal details, and press Send. That's it! Like Amazon, but without the Proust.
When you've visited as many online whorehouses as I have these past weeks you begin to notice an unmistakable sameness to their operations. Like the food at take-out Indian or Chinese restaurants, the hooker Web sites all seem to have the same essential flavor.
Turns out there's a reason: There's a central Web site designer! A link at the bottom of Wicked's site points you to Escort-Tools.com, a Web design house that focuses exclusively on the hot field of hooker sites.
Escort Tools -- whose garish animated logo suggests plenty of necessary expertise -- offers "to design your site to your specifications, or you may select from several beautiful, ready-to-use websites."
Among other things, Escort Tools sets up credit card processing, discussion boards, e-mail newsletters, and databases. The cost? From $750 to $1,300 -- or about an hour's work for an "intellegent" lady.
Hummm. Well this is one of many stories to come in the naked city
Tags: Kristin Davis Eliot Spitzer Sex Scandal
