The United States government has its hands full in dealing with the war in Iraq. There is also the problem of rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, gasoline prices going through the ceiling, the bust in real estate prices, and the failure of the Attorney General and his chief assistant to answer questions put to them by the Congressional Judiciary Committees. Nonetheless, Gonzales’s Department of Justice in Washington is hell bent on pursuing Deborah Jean Palfrey on charges that her escort service in Washington is nothing more than a front for prostitution. For the record, it is the belief of every sophisticated human being that prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. It has existed since the beginning of time and it will continue to exist until the world goes up in smoke. But the Department of Justice, under the infallible leadership of Alberto Gonzales, is determined to wipe out good old Deborah Jean Palfrey. She claims that all she is doing is running an escort service in Washington which also provides erotic fantasies for the outsized egos of its demanding customers. Given a choice, my vote would go inevitably to Deborah Jean Palfrey.
This is a morality essay. Every morality essay must have an author that is pure in heart. I confess that during my school days I ogled at several “dirty little books.” Those dirty books were small items measuring about three inches by four inches and were kept hidden from parents and teachers. At the time, Popeye was a popular cartoon, also called the funny pages, with his girl friend Olive Oyl. There was another comic called Maggie and Jigs. These dirty little books had nude drawings of Maggie and Jigs and Popeye and Olive Oyl in compromising positions. Most of the readers thought the dirty books were funny rather than being salacious. To atone for my looking at those little books, I have made pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, Tokyo, Beijing, and Perth, Australia, and I have even considered appealing to the religious authorities in Umeå, Sweden. So as you can see, having confessed my sins, my heart is pure and I am in a perfect position to write this essay.
The thrust of the government’s case is aimed at Deborah Jean Palfrey. Deborah Jean is a simple woman who buys all of her clothes from Sears and Roebuck. She wears low-heeled shoes that lace up over her cotton stockings which are rolled at just below the knee and secured by a rubber band. Deborah Jean owns no half slips; she wears the full slips that her mother used to make out of flour sacks and wears only cotton house dresses. Deborah Jean wears no makeup and certainly no earrings or necklaces. Her hair is long and is curled in a knot because, under her religion, it is a sin to “bob your hair.” She wears no rings on her fingers and her glasses usually come from the F.W. Woolworth dime store. So you see, Deborah Jean is in fact a very simple woman.
For the past several years, Deborah Jean has operated an “escort” service in Washington, D.C. Presumably when men go to Washington, D.C., they are often invited to formal dinners and Deborah Jean Palfrey performs a commendable service by providing them with female escorts. At this point, I might add that I was working as a lobbyist in Washington, D.C. for nearly four years and attended many dinners, but it never occurred to me to call an “escort” service for someone to accompany me. I suppose that just shows how naïve a country boy could be when thrust into the cosmopolitan atmosphere of Washington, D.C.
Upon closer examination, it appears that Deborah Jean’s escort service supplies some other services as well. It was discovered during the preliminary hearings on the suit against her that her girls claimed to be college-educated. It was further disclosed that for three hundred dollars they would perform erotic dances for 90 minutes for their clients. Under the arrangement with the escort service, the girls split the fee with Miss Palfrey. Miss Palfrey strongly insists that she has no idea whatsoever as to whether the erotic dancers also engaged in sexual relations, and she has no intention of asking a question on that score. Miss Palfrey says this is a matter between her escorts and her clients.
Ah, but now we have Deborah Jean’s ace in the hole. Over the years, Deborah Jean has collected a catalog of two thousand telephone numbers of her clients. I suspect also that she has made arrangements to gather their credit card numbers as well, but that point is not clear at this writing. Apparently Deborah Jean does not have a computer that is able to track down telephone numbers and turn them into names. To overcome this deficiency, Miss Palfrey has given 20% of the list to ABC News and they are trying to turn the telephone numbers into names of people. So you see Miss Palfrey is holding a monstrous ace in the hole.
When ABC News began its search of telephone numbers, it brought down two very large birds with one shot. The first person on the list turns out to be a former commander in the United States Navy who had engaged Miss Palfrey’s offerings. He is Howard Ullman. The former Commander Ullman contends that it is all a mistake and that he did not engage the services of Miss Palfrey’s escorts. Therefore, no sexual activity took place.
About two weeks after the foregoing denial, Commander Ullman has recanted his earlier testimony and says that indeed he did engage Ms. Palfrey’s escorts and that sexual activity took place. Perhaps his earlier denial was a source of agitation to his conscience.
When the Iraq war started, Commander Ullman was the author of the effort to “shock and awe” the Iraqis. The Iraqis did not go into shock and awe by our bombing campaign, but they lived long enough to see Commander Ullman having his own case of shock and awe by the disclosure of ABC News.
The second of the two who were shot down by ABC News, was the Deputy Director of the U. S. Department of State. He is Randall K. Tobias, married, 65 years old and at the State Department he was outranked only by Condoleezza Rice.
Now we come to Randy’s duties at the State Department. Randy was in charge of seeing to it that foreign governments promoted abstinence-only programs. He was also in charge of denying applications for funds from the United States for governments that encouraged or endured prostitution. Now may I ask you, how would a representative of the United States government go, for example, to the Congo and preach that every long-distance truck driver should abstain from sexual relations and that he should decline the offerings of prostitutes? Here we have a case of the United States government slaughtering people by the hundreds in Iraq, allowing thousands to die in Darfur, and demanding abstinence-only programs in the rest of the world.
Randall Tobias is a familiar name to most of us who worked for AT&T. At one point, after the reorganization following the Telecommunications Act of 1984, Randy was in charge of AT&T – Communications. This was a major appointment in that he controlled the fortunes of a very lucrative part of the business. In later life, good old Randy was also the Chairman of Ely Lilly. He also served for three years as President of the Board of Trustees of Duke University. It might also be observed that another one of his functions as Deputy Director of State was to promote fidelity in marriage. So Randy is a significant figure to be brought down by the first shot out of Miss Palfrey’s list of telephone numbers.
Randy did the only decent thing, and resigned his job at the United States Department of State. He at least had the decency to get out of town, which is what Alberto Gonzales, the Attorney General, ought to do as well. Now I am not Randy Tobias’s ophthalmologist, but it appears to me that Randy must have been extremely near-sighted. Late at night, Randy has offered the thought that he needed a massage. Ordinarily, men would look under the massage offerings in the classified telephone directory, but Randy’s eyes must have given out before he ever reached the M’s. Instead his eyes came to rest on Miss Palfrey’s escort service, so he called them to send over a girl to perform a massage operation on his delicate frame. I must warn you that if you believe what Randy has said, there is a lovely bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn that I will sell you at a very decent price.
Randy has insisted that there was no sex involved. I suppose he merely got his massage together with a little erotic dancing and that was it. If Randy says there were no sexual relations, as a former AT&T employee I am obliged to give him the benefit of the doubt. Every former employee of the AT&T Company and its Associated Companies as well as the Bell Labs is bound by the Boy Scouts Oath of Honor. So if Randy said no sex was involved, then I am prepared to endorse that position with fervor.
The executives at ABC News have belatedly concluded that they are in the business of providing news rather than looking up telephone numbers from Miss Palfrey’s list. Before they reached that conclusion, their efforts had yielded the names of officials at NASA, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, military officers and a “career Justice Department prosecutor.” So you see, Commander Ullman and Randy Tobias merely led the list of those exposed by Deborah Jean’s telephone list. She still holds 80% of the list so perhaps surprises are yet to be announced.
The author of this essay wishes to make one more confession, which will establish that his heart is as white as the snow. This old author came from St. Louis where morals existed on the highest plane in concert with prostitution which took place in several downtown residential neighborhoods. During the Depression years of the 1930’s, in many of those buildings, a small red light would appear in the front window. Obviously, every cop in St. Louis was a Boy Scout who contended that his job was to direct traffic and not to disturb those nice people who had a red light in the window. If old Randall Tobias wanted to extend his program of abstinence, he should have been engaged in St. Louis. I can assure Mr. Tobias that there were several places that could have used his services to extend his program of abstinence and fidelity. But the burden of my final confession has to do with my discharge from the Army of the United States.
When November 1945 rolled around, I found myself on a creaky, antiquated bus heading for St. Louis from Memphis, Tennessee. My ultimate destination was Scott Field, where I would be honorably discharged from the Army of the United States. The bus was packed to the gills, and I found that my seatmate was a young woman, probably in her 20’s. She was also headed for St. Louis and it soon became clear that she was a prostitute and regarded St. Louis as “the big time.” She offered me her services which she said could be accomplished at rest stops in Blytheville Arkansas or in Sikeston, Missouri. I politely declined her offer which is what Commander Ullman and Chairman Tobias should have done in their encounters with Deborah Jean’s escorts. So you see, my heart is pure, which enables me to recite this tale about Madam Palfrey.
Well, there you have my thoughts about the prosecution of Deborah Jean Palfrey. If Deborah Jean goes to jail, may I ask, does this mean the end of prostitution around the world? Does it mean the end of erotic dancing in men’s hotel rooms? Does it mean that when men are examining the yellow pages looking for massage parlors, their eyes will wear out earlier in the alphabet and make them call an escort service? Does Miss Palfrey’s prosecution mean the end of legal prostitution in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Copenhagen as well as many of the other cities in Europe? Are the manufacturers of red light bulbs going to be bankrupt?
In point of fact, Randall Tobias was a fraud, as is the abstinence-only effort by the United States government. Whether the purists in the U. S. government believe that prostitution can be stamped out, the fact is that the world’s oldest profession will be here long after they are gone. So now I retire to my radio to wait for Deborah Jean Palfrey to play her “Ace in the Hole” to bring down another corpulent fraud with self induced ego.
Perhaps if Deborah Jean Palfrey, with her cotton stockings rolled up to her knees and in her house dress, is successfully prosecuted by our federal government, I can only say that in this country, there ain’t no justice.
E. E. CARR
May 10, 2007
Essay 251
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Kevin’s commentary: She was convicted of money laundering in 2008 and sentenced to five or six years in jail. Soon thereafter the poor woman turned up dead. The case was ruled a suicide, but there exists a decent amount of evidence that this was not the case. Probably the most compelling evidence was her repeated public insistence that she would never commit suicide. Unfortunately I think her “ace in the hole” was too valuable and potentially too damning. If there was no foul play, that is perhaps an even greater tragedy.