Intermezzo for my seven-part series about "The D.C. Madam" (2007-2008)

The tragic case of Jeane Palfrey

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Jeane Palfrey and her attorney, Blair Sibley (DEM: August 28, 2007)

Jeane asked me to be the co-author of her memoir, Washington Madam: The Deborah Jeane Palfrey Story. Blair was her best and most loyal friend.

These were the first two chapters in our book proposal.

Chapter 1:  Search and seizure

     Flying from Copenhagen to Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, October 10, 2006, Deborah Jeane Palfrey sat in her assigned seat in the last row of the plane, concerned that federal marshals might greet and arrest her as she exited U.S. Customs at Dulles airport.  Six days earlier, while in Germany buying a new home, she tried but failed to log onto her online account at the Charles Schwab website.  When she sought help from customer service, a company representative replied that her account had been seized by the U.S. Treasury Department.  He advised her to get a good lawyer.

     Between October 4 and 8, Jeane was frantic, desperately trying to discover what had happened.  Spending over a thousand dollars calling northern California from her cell phone, as well as from her hotel room in West Berlin, Jeane learned that federal agents from the IRS and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service had raided her home near San Francisco.  But the details were sketchy.

     On Sunday night, October 8, Jeane received an email from a New York-based journalist, who said he knew what was going on.  On Monday, she spoke to the reporter who suddenly became extremely abusive.  That same day, the journalist posted a report on his website, saying that the federal government “froze nearly $500,000 in assorted bank and stock trading accounts” that she owned. 

     The story, which alleged that Jeane had operated an illegal escort service in Washington, added:  “Palfrey charged clients about $300 per session and split the take with her stable of prostitutes, who were encouraged to ‘work at least three nights a week.’ . . .

     “Palfrey called the identity of her johns a ‘salacious detail’ of which she was unaware.  ‘I never kept records,’ she claimed.  ‘I protected the client’s confidentiality. . . [T]hey trusted me.’”

     The reporter also attached an unsigned copy of the affidavit upon which the search warrant was obtained.  It stated that the investigation of Jeane’s operation had begun in June 2004.

     Jeane didn’t deny that she had operated the escort service since 1993 but declared that she had closed it down two months earlier in August 2006.  However, she did insist that it was a legal enterprise, “an adult fantasy service,” one of many in the Washington metropolitan area.  She wondered out loud why she had been singled out.

     After all, in that vicinity alone, there were more escort services, advertised in local alternative newspapers and even in the Yellow Pages, than there were MacDonald’s restaurants.

     When Jeane finally arrived at her home in Vallejo, she looked around at the mess made by the federal agents during the search, trying to take a cursory inventory of what had been seized.

     Looking in four bankers’ boxes on the floor of the basement, she saw her telephone records which had gone untouched during the raid—46 pounds of telephone numbers from 1993 to 2006, which held the identities of her 10,000 clients, many of whom were in academia, big business, and journalism, as well as the military, government, and politics.

     For better or worse, Jeane was about to make history.

Chapter 2:  Early years

     Born on March 18, 1956, in Charleroi, Pennsylvania, Jeane was an average kid who spent the first two years of her life and then her teen years in this small town along the Monongahela River.  Twenty-five miles south of Pittsburgh and just off Interstate-70, Charleroi was named after a Belgium company, once the largest glass manufacturer in the world, which had expanded its business to the U.S.  The new glass-making industry in the southwest corner of the state attracted workers who settled in the Mon Valley and Washington County.

     The parents of Jeane’s father, Frank, nicknamed, “Moon,” had heralded from Ireland and Czechoslovakia; her mother Blanche’s family was of German and Pennsylvania Dutch descent.  Both had attended Charleroi High School.  Blanche graduated in 1950.  Frank, who should have received his diploma that same year, dropped out and got a job to help his struggling family in the wake of his father’s desperate illness. 

     Frank, a blue-collar worker for a grocery-store chain and a veteran of the Korean Conflict, and Blanche, a housewife, were good parents.  A Daddy’s girl, Jeane, along with her younger sister, Roberta, grew up in a decent home with God-fearing parents.  The family worshipped together at St. John’s Evangelical Lutheran Church where Jeane’s parents volunteered as sextons while their daughters did various chores for the church where Jeane was baptized.

     Like their parents, Jeane and her sister attended Charleroi High.  To make money for her clothes and entertainment, Jeane, a good student, worked as a waitress at Bell’s J.I.B., a local family-style restaurant on Fallowfield Avenue.  A shy, sensitive, and sheltered girl who had a childhood crush on Ricky Nelson of Ozzie and Harriet, Jeane rarely went out.  Her date to the junior prom during the spring of 1973 was a then-closeted gay friend.  So, despite the fact that she was a healthy and fairly well-adjusted teenager, she was viewed by some at her school as one of the weird kids. 

     Even though she didn’t really drink, smoke, or do drugs—and never would, beyond an occasional glass of wine—and was selected as a majorette in her senior year, Jeane had a huge problem, which caused her to quit the squad.  Then a petite brunette who didn’t smile very much, Jeane says, “I was unpopular in school and bullied by different groups of girls from the seventh to the twelfth grades.  Things became so bad that in January of 1974 during Christmas break in the middle of my senior year, I came close to a nervous breakdown.   Instead, I boarded an Eastern Airlines flight and moved to Florida alone.  My parents were devastated by my departure.  My mother told me that after seeing me off at the airport, they went home whereupon my father went to his bedroom, closed the door and proceeded to cry like a baby.”

     Florida wasn’t completely alien to Jeane, whom some wrongly thought had left Charleroi after getting pregnant.  When she was two years old in 1958, Jeane’s mother and father had moved and lived in East Orlando—near Cape Canaveral where they could watch the Mercury and Gemini programs’ astronaut launches in the distance—staying until November 1965 when Jeane was nine.  The family then returned to Charleroi.  (She would later view her early years in Florida as the happiest period of her life.)

     When she arrived again in Orlando in 1974, two months before her eighteenth birthday, she moved in with the family of an old friend.  But Jeane wasn’t comfortable with that situation and left shortly after she turned eighteen.  Now completely alone, Jeane rented a room at the Young Women’s Community Club (YWCC) on Hillcrest Street, a YWCA-like operation, and received a job as a waitress at a local Ponderosa Steakhouse.  Remarkably, despite the huge upheaval she had experienced, Jeane immediately enrolled at Colonial High School and still received her diploma with the Class of 1974.  The girl at Colonial voted Most Likely to Succeed that year was Delta Burke, who soon became Miss Florida and later a popular television actress.  Jeane’s parents flew down for their daughter’s commencement.

     Throughout high school, Jeane’s goal was to be a flight attendant and to travel the world.  During the summer after graduation, Jeane went to Kansas City to attend the Weaver Airline Personnel School for a four-to-eight-week course.  During her studies, she stayed at the nearby six-story Chatham Hotel, which the school had converted into a dormitory.

     In the midst of a national recession, few airlines were hiring.  However, while at the school, Jeane was interviewed by the Central Intelligence Agency, which offered her a clerical job in Washington, D.C.  Jeane said, “What a shame they didn’t convince me to take the job because I would’ve been a damn good agent.  I had the mind for it.  But I just didn’t want to spend the required time in the typing pool.  And that’s what they were going to hire me for, even though I believed that they might groom and teach me for something better.”

     A girlfriend of Jeane’s, who went to the same flight attendant school, did take the job—and wound up in the CIA’s Senior Intelligence Service, taking course work at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University along the way.

     Shortly after Jeane returned to Orlando, she enrolled at Valencia Community College for the winter semester of 1975.  Although she still lived at the YWCC for $100 a month, she left her job as a waitress at Ponderosa and accepted a more lucrative position as a cocktail waitress at an upscale local nightclub where the tips were better, especially for a once-skinny brunette who had blossomed into a pretty young woman.  Jeane insisted, “I just realized that I could make more money doing that.  I’m a capitalist.  I didn’t like all of the cigarette smoke, but, back then, cigarette smoking was allowed at restaurants.”

     After two years at Valencia, Jeane, who always remained in close telephone contact with her parents, transferred to Rollins College in nearby Winter Park where she entered as a junior.  In addition, she left the YWCC and moved into her first apartment, still maintaining her dream to become a flight attendant and to travel all over the world.

     Realizing that she could travel on her own, she went on her first trip abroad and visited Russia with a tour group of strangers between her junior and senior years.  However, she viewed the country and the communist state to be grim, bleak, and oppressive.  More than anything else, she was happy to be an American.

     After her graduation from Rollins in the spring of 1979 with a B.A. in criminal justice an a 3.6 grade-point average, she went with another group to China, where she experienced complete culture shock, amazed with Chinese society and its people during her three-week trip to Beijing, Shanghai, and to various locations in the countryside.

     Although a passive feminist who knew that men and women were equal, she was basically apolitical—neither a Democrat nor a Republican.  She started volunteering her time, working with disadvantaged children while keeping her job at the nightclub.  She took two months off during that summer to work on behalf of handicapped people at an Easter Seals-sponsored camp.

     After scrimping and saving, Jeane had enough money to buy her first condominium, a new three-bedroom, two-bath home in Orlando with her own courtyard and a common pool and tennis court for $26,800.

     After Delta Airlines said that she was too old to become a flight attendant, Jeane discovered that she had a natural aptitude for interior design and began doing freelance work.  Because she wasn’t making much money, she continued to work as a waitress where she had no benefits—no health insurance, no sick time, and no paid vacations.  In 1982 at age twenty-six, after a brief stint working at Disney World, Jeane gave up waitressing and focused on her career as an interior decorator.

     Unlucky in love, Jeane went into a long funk.  “I’ve always been alone, but I have never been lonely,” she said.  “I have always been comfortable with myself and could live on a deserted island.  I am usually a very optimistic person.”

     Sensing that she was floundering, Jeane’s wanderlust got the best of her again. . . .

Jeane Palfrey on my role:

I didn't want a writer of sensational Hollywood works.  I really need a hard-core investigative journalist here.  I thought, this is the man to do it.  He's a good and decent man, and very upfront and straightforward.  (Washington Post, August 8, 2007)

From the Acknowledgements page of attorney Montgomery Blair Sibley's book,Why Just Her:

The term 'gentleman' has all but disappeared from the landscape of the District of Columbia.  As such, my thanks are mandatory to Dan Moldea, who refused to let that sobriquet expire by always behaving towards Jeane and me as a gentleman. 

From the book, Long Shot by two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Tyler Bridges and his co-author, Jeremy Alford:

Dan Moldea was a veteran investigative journalist who had partnered with Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt in 1998 to expose Republican sex scandals during the impeachment saga of President Bill Clinton.  Moldea had already changed the course of history by bringing down Louisiana Congressman and presumptive House Speaker Bob Livingston for having an affair. Now he was about to set in motion the events that would topple [U.S. Senator David] Vitter, who was Livingston’s Bayou State successor.

On the evening of Thursday, July 5, 2007, Moldea drove home from dinner bearing a compact disc imprinted with politically explosive data that he had sought for months. A file on the disc listed some 300,000 phone calls from the 10,000 to 15,000 clients of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the D.C. Madam, now under federal indictment for running an escort service that reportedly catered to an A-List of Beltway clients. A judge earlier that day had issued an order allowing Palfrey and her attorney, Montgomery Blair Sibley, to distribute the telephone list. Because Sibley feared that prosecutors in George W. Bush’s Department of Justice would immediately ask a higher court to block that ruling, he mailed CDs containing the list to 50 reporters that same day. The reporters would begin receiving the CDs the following Monday.

Moldea, who wanted a head start, had arranged to meet Sibley for dinner that night at Morty’s Delicatessen, a favorite haunt, to get a jump on the competition. . . .

     Here is a catalog of the seven-part series about my association with Jeane Palfrey, aka “The D.C. Madam,” excerpted from my memoir, Confessions of a Guerrilla Writer.

Catalog

1/7:  Cowboy and Lightfoot

2/7:  “Are you two working together?”

3/7: “So tell me about David Vitter”

4/7:  Morals of a Muckraker

5/7:  “Are you okay?”

6/7:  Suicide before prison

7/7:  Opposition research