Jul 12th, 2007, 11:27 AM
New Orleans, Prostitutes, Senator Vittner, this story has it all!
I found this story by way of Harry Shearers blog, and it is just the most god damn beautiful news story I have read in years. You have to read the whole thing to truly appreciatte it. It's like a wonderful ripe peach and it's everything I love about America. I have no idea if the allegations contained are true, and I hope you understand I don't care. It's just a beautfully told story. Read and enjoy.
By Kate Moran
Staff Writer
Jeanette Maier, the madam known for operating a high-end brothel with her mother and daughter, said Tuesday that U.S. Sen. David Vitter made occasional visits to her business beginning in the mid-1990s after the two met at a fishing rodeo where she and her prostitutes were hired to entertain local politicians.
After the initial meeting, Maier said she saw Vitter at the bordello and knew him as someone who patronized her call girls. She denied having a personal relationship with him and said he had stopped visiting the establishment by the time it was raided by federal agents in 2001.
"Sometimes we'd cross paths," Maier said of their encounters at the house.
"He was not a big regular client that he's so clear in my mind that I can remember every time he walked in the door."
Vitter, a Republican, did not respond to numerous attempts to contact him for comment.
Maier's attorney, Vinny Mosca, cast doubt on her recollections Tuesday. He said investigators seized a list of client names, nicknames and phone numbers from the brothel, but those documents never implicated Vitter.
"Through all my association representing Jeanette in the case, his name never came up," Mosca said. "It's not on the list. He was not caught on the wiretaps. That doesn't mean he wasn't there, but in all this time I never knew him to be. To my knowledge he didn't go to the brothel."
Vitter this week became the first elected leader outed as a patron of the Washington escort service run by Deborah Palfrey, the so-called "D.C. Madam." He is the first elected official connected to Maier, known locally as the "Canal Street Madam." The only other clients named, a pair of Slidell businessmen, were charged for hiring prostitutes for a private cruise.
The senator apologized Monday night for a "very serious sin in my past" in connection with the Palfrey case, but he made no public appearances Tuesday.
Maier, 48, spoke openly about Vitter's patronage of the New Orleans brothel in an interview Tuesday, as she sat atop the king-sized bed in her Gretna home. The bedroom was decorated in a Southwestern motif, and a rosary hung from the headboard. She puffed on a cigarette as she talked.
She said she decided to name Vitter as a client because she was angry that the Washington allegations made him look like a one-dimensional adulterer, when she sees him as a "good man" who has helped the New Orleans area recover from Hurricane Katrina.
"All I wanted to get across when I saw the paper this morning is this bitch -- she calls herself a madam -- she's gonna throw this number out without a face, and without telling people what good he's done," Maier said, adding that the allegations would "just piss off his wife and create all this havoc in his life."
She said the women who worked in her brothel considered Vitter a decent man.
"I know he's not a drug addict," she said. "I know he's not a person that would down talk a woman. I know that he's respectful. I know from what I've seen that he is honorable, that he's a good man. His wife should be very proud of her husband irregardless of what he's done."
She added, "He was not a freak. He was not into anything unusual or kinky or weird."
Maier said he favored one prostitute named Wendy Cortez, though she was not sure if that was the woman's legal name. Many of the women use aliases with clients.
Maier confessed to working as a madam after agents raided her establishment, and a federal judge sentenced her in 2003 to six months in a halfway house and three years on probation. At the time, the judge chided prosecutors for pursuing the three women who ran the brothel -- Maier, her mother and her daughter, who also worked as a prostitute -- rather than the well-heeled men who frequented it.
That probation period has ended, and Maier is making soy candles and selling them at craft fairs. She is thinking of setting up erotic Web cameras to earn money because she says it is difficult to find a job with her felony record.
A television movie was made about the brothel case starring Annabella Sciorra, the actress who also played Tony Soprano's paramour Gloria Trillo on "The Sopranos." Maier is working as a consultant for a possible a television series about her story and hopes to do a book that will unmask some of the community leaders who supposedly visited her bordello. She said Vitter will not be named.
"I didn't want to put anyone I respected in the book," she said.
In the four years since her sentencing, Maier has kept mum about the names that investigators uncovered in her client list, although the subject was a topic of water-cooler speculation for years.
"I'm not out to ruin a marriage," she said. "I'm out to help a man. I want his wife to see what a wonderful man he is. Men do things like this by peer pressure, by the good ole boys club.
"I want his kids to know he's a good father," she continued. "Just because he had sex out of wedlock -- so what? At least he stayed with his kids. How many men leave their children and wives and don't give a shit what happens to them, and then their wives become prostitutes so they can feed their children?"
Vitter, 46, and his wife, Wendy, have four children ages 13 and under.
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