Getting Screwed (2 page)

The “Friendliest” Brothel in Manhattan

J
ulie Moya is running late again. A Manhattan madam, Julie was once a working girl herself, a sought-after escort who could command thousands of dollars for a few hours of her time. Now fifty-five, she runs two busy brothels in midtown and has arranged to meet me at her “office” on 46th street and take me to one of the brothels. As I walk from Penn Station to her office (the taxi line stretched around the block), she calls me twice, apologizing for her tardiness. (This is our third get-together, and Julie has been at least fifteen to twenty minutes late each time.) When I finally arrive at 31 W. 46th Street, soaked in sweat from the 90-degree heat, Julie is still not there. But Corrine, one of her long-time managers who asked to be identified by her first name only, buzzes me into the second-floor office. There is a full-size bed in a spare front room, filing cabinets in the back room, and one small desk in the large, mostly empty middle room. That is where Corrine, a forty-two-year-old former schoolteacher, stripper, and sex worker who has worked for Julie on and off for eleven years, sits and fields calls from prospective customers. The three cell phones on the desk are constantly buzzing, each with a different ringtone. It is lunchtime, and the clients are hungry.

Corrine, who wears her light-brown hair in long braids and looks like she would fit right in at a Woodstock-style love-in, answers one phone and says, “We have Gabriela, she's new, a lovely South American girl, twenty-three. She has a tight ass and flat abs. I also have Denny, Ava, Toni, and Sophia. Daisy comes in at 5 p.m. Okay, just call back.” She answers another phone, listens, and replies: “Sweetie, you can't talk to Roxy; you can make an appointment to see her. I can give you all the
information you need. No, you can't talk to Roxy. I can help you.” She listens for a beat and then says: “For two clients, it's $480. Can I put you on hold?” She answers another phone and listens. “At 2 p.m. I have Raquel available, and at 2:15 p.m. I have Raquel and Sarah,” she says. “Sarah's donation is $300 for the hour and $200 for the half-hour.” She tells yet another caller, “Sweetie, Indira is only there on weekends. We don't book ahead; you have to call the same day.” To another caller, she says, “The donation is $250 for an hour; $160 for a half-hour. Can you hold?” At one point, Corrine is working all three cell phones simultaneously.

When the phones stop buzzing for a second, Corrine turns to me and explains that she doesn't book ahead because sometimes the girls don't show up. She shrugs. “Sometimes the men don't show up either.” Most of the clients calling in today, she explains, are regulars; they already have a pin number, so Corrine can bill their credit cards automatically. All clients have to have a pin number, and before they get that number, they go through a vetting process, to establish that they are who they say they are and that their credit cards work.

For security reasons, Corrine never gives out the exact addresses of the brothels when she sets up the appointments. She tells the men to call back when they arrive at the closest intersection and then she will direct them to the right address. When a new client arrives at the designated apartment building, one of the women who work as security goes downstairs to greet him in the lobby and offers to give him a blow job on the spot. Or she will ask him to take out his penis. “Let's see what you got,” the woman will say. If the man refuses either request, that is a tip-off. “It's an l.e. [law enforcement] check. Cops won't do it,” Corrine says. “It was Julie's idea, and it works really well.”

Corrine picks up another ringing phone; it's a client named John, who has arrived at the brothel on 28th Street. She quickly picks up another phone and punches in some numbers. When the woman on the other end answers, she says: “John for Roxy right now.” Another regular, named Doug, calls, and Corrine says, “Right now I don't have anyone available. I think it will be ten to twenty minutes.” Doug hangs up, and
finally there's a moment of silence. Corinne puts her head down in her hands and groans, “Aargh.”

A few minutes later, Julie Moya rushes in and gives me a hug, apologizing again for being late. She's wearing a low-cut pink top with ruffled sleeves and tight blue jeans. She looks hot and frazzled, her straight blond hair damp at the edges. She heads for the bathroom. “I need to dry off,” Julie says. “It's a stinker out there.”

After lunch at a quiet Italian restaurant next door, Julie drives me to one of the brothels, located in a narrow apartment building on 28th and Madison. She says she moves their locations every year or so to keep the brothels under police radar. Just eighteen months ago, there was a crisis involving one of her girls, a pretty Korean whom she calls Minna. Minna had a millionaire lover on the side who was so entranced by her that he paid for her boob job and the rental on her Manhattan apartment, Julie says. But when Minna broke up with him, the millionaire was furious. He hired a bunch of private investigators who posed as cops and started harassing the brothel, which was then located in “a very nice building” at 24th Street, Julie says. She was forced to fire Minna and move her entire operation almost overnight.

When we arrive at the brothel's current location on 28th Street, Erin, the woman in charge of security, buzzes us in, and Julie and I walk up to the third floor. Erin meets us at the door; she is a hard-faced woman in her forties or fifties who looks as if life has roughed her up a bit. The long hallways are painted a bordello black, and the bedrooms are New York apartment–style small. A double bed takes up much of the space in one room; it is draped with a burgundy bedspread, colorful throw pillows, and canopy netting designed to make the room look like somebody's idea of a sultan's harem. We find four of Julie's working girls lounging in a common room down the hall; they are in between assignations. All in their twenties, they wear slinky off-the-shoulder tops cut low to reveal cleavage, tight miniskirts, and sexy high-heeled sandals. When one of the girls sits down, I can see she is not wearing underwear. Erin introduces me to them, using their working names, not their real ones.

Sarah, a tiny spit of a blonde wearing a short shiny-silver skirt, speaks up first. She is Israeli, she says, originally from Russia, and has been living in New York for the last three years. “I'm studying art history at Hunter College,” Sarah says. “I want to do art authorizations — you know, check for counterfeits.” When I ask if her family, still in Israel, knows she is doing sex work, Sarah says, “N.O. I say my ex-boyfriend helps me.” Sarah confides that the first couple of times she was assigned a client, she “chickened out.” Corrine had to tell Sarah's prospective customers, who were cooling their heels outside the brothel, waiting to be buzzed in, that she had become unavoidably ill. Corrine was terribly sorry; would they be willing to party with someone else?

A tall, voluptuous blonde strolls into the lounge, and Sarah grins. “Natasha loves sex,” she says teasingly. “She's from Russia too.” Natasha says that she came to New York two years ago on “vacation,” and has been here ever since. The other women titter and Sarah winks, implying that her Russian friend is here on an expired visa. Seated at the other end of the sofa is Rachel, a pretty, light-skinned twenty-one-year-old with soft features, dark hair, and a curvaceous figure. She has been working at Julie's for only three weeks. “It took me a while to figure out the rules and everything,” Rachel says. “Not everybody makes you feel comfortable.” It is clear she is referring to her clients; it is equally clear that with Erin hovering in the background, she doesn't feel comfortable saying anything more. Next to her, knees pressed primly together, sits “Paris,” a slender brunette with large breasts who lives in New Jersey and attends Rutgers University.

Paris says that when she graduates, she'd like to work with children. “This helps me pay for school,” she says. She views sex work as a “normal job,” and when she isn't in class, she drives in from Jersey and parks in a garage nearby. When I ask how much parking costs, she says, “$40 a day” and shrugs, as if to say, that's nothing compared with what she can make in a few hours here.

When I ask the women if they like what they do, Sarah says, “Sometimes you have good days; sometimes you have bad days.” Her coworkers giggle knowingly. While we're talking, Julie wanders into the lounge and
admonishes Erin about a stain she found on one bedspread. “You need to wash this before the next client comes,” she says. “It's so unprofessional.”

Before coming to New York, I had heard there was going to be a protest against the
Village Voice,
the alternative weekly that owned
backpage.com
, a classified ad website that includes ads for sex workers. The Coalition against Trafficking in Women (
CATW
) and several religious groups had mounted a campaign to shut down
backpage.com
on the premise that it encourages underage prostitution by allowing traffickers to solicit clients for minors. The New York chapter of Sex Workers Outreach Project (
SWOP
), a national advocacy group for sex workers, was going to stage a counter-rally at the protest, which was slated to be held in front of the
Village Voice
's offices in Cooper Square the same day as my visit to New York. When I told Julie about the event, she immediately offered to accompany me.

Earlier that day over lunch, Julie had a lot to say about the folly of trying to shut down websites that allow sex workers to advertise their services. “If they ditched backpage, I think it would put more people on the street,” she says, picking at her salad. “It doesn't make sense.”

In 2010, after the murders of several sex workers who advertised on Craigslist, public pressure (and the threat of lawsuits by several state attorneys general) forced Craigslist to shut down its adult classified section. But Julie says sex workers still advertise on Craigslist; they simply migrated to other sections, such as the therapeutic and casual encounters sections. “They just write in code. They say, ‘I love 200 roses.' What they mean is, I charge $200,” Julie says.

Advertising online, Julie says, allows sex workers to screen potential clients more carefully and practice safe sex. Julie herself requires all her workers to use condoms, and more than once, she or one of her security personnel has had to remove a client who was insisting on “bareback sex.”

Back at the brothel, several of the sex workers insist that they would never have sex without condoms, and Sarah tells a story about how she found a rash on one man's “pee pee.” That threw her into a panic. “I called Erin, and she checked in and said I should ask him to put a cover on it even for a blow job,” she says. “But he was fine with it.”

As she talks, Sarah stands behind Natasha, playing with her hair and rubbing her back; they are obviously good friends. She looks at Erin, who has been standing in the back, listening to the chatter. “Erin has helped me so much,” Sarah said. “I'd never done this before.” Erin nods briskly. “This [work] will leave you with a chest full of colorful stories to tell when you're eighty years old and sitting on a porch somewhere,” she says, and the young women laugh, as if amused by an image that, to them, must seem impossibly remote.

Too soon, it's time to leave for the rally, and Julie and I head downtown in her huge white
SUV
. As we drive by Cooper Square, we can see a cluster of people with pink umbrellas milling around. Julie takes a sharp right and heads to a small corner lot that has cars stacked on top of each other; she seems to know every off-street parking space in Manhattan. Having been a working girl in New York City since the early '80s, Julie never takes public transit if she can help it.

By the time she parks her
SUV
and we hike the two blocks back to Cooper Square, the backpage protest has kicked into full gear. About twenty-five people, including a priest and several nuns, are marching in a circle, pink umbrellas held high. Several women have tape over their mouths; others are holding signs that say, “Village Voice pimps children.” The marchers whose mouths aren't taped are chanting, “Village Voice, you have a choice, prostitution has got to go,” and “Village Voice, you have a choice, sex trafficking has got to go.” They are accompanied by two dashiki-clad men in dreadlocks banging on drums.

Antitrafficking groups such as
CATW
and Equality Now openly acknowledge that they are opposed to all prostitution, not just sex trafficking. U.S. law defines trafficking as “the recruitment, harboring, transportation, provision or obtaining of a person for labor or services through the use of force, fraud or coercion.”
¹
In a recent interview, Taina Bien-Aimé, executive director of
CATW
, argued that very few women are in the sex trade of their own choice; the vast majority of sex workers, she said, are being exploited by a third party. On its website,
CATW
says that “all prostitution exploits women, regardless of women's consent,” and the organization is adamantly opposed to decriminalizing prostitution
for that reason. “Do we want the type of society where we foster second-class citizens who have to cater to a man's fantasy?” Bien-Aimé said. “This is gender-based violence.”