The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld Read Online Free PDF Page A

would jump all over the superintendent of police, who would then order a crackdown, and the Tango Belt would come under siege. Captain Theodore Ray, a dignified, stodgy man, an upholder of discipline and law and order, had been given the charge to eradicate prostitution from the French Quarter, and he was arresting prostitutes all over the Tango Belt.
    “I had to get around Ray somehow,” Norma said. “There were two adjacent entrances to Pete’s building on Burgundy Street. Inside one, I opened a bar. The other entrance bypassed the bar for the stairway. This gave us a great escape route. Behind the bar we put a peephole in the door. If the police came in, we could get out on both Burgundy and Conti. This arrangement gave me liberty and peace of mind.
    “But the part I liked the best about it—outwitting Captain Ray had caused me to run a more discreet operation. With discretion, I got a better class of clientele. I always did say, Without the police, I’d never have made it for forty years.”
    On New Year’s Eve 1923, Norma put on her long-waisted dress with its short, pleated skirt, her stylish brown cloche, and a string of fake pearls good for twirling. The stars looked frozen in the sky above the French Quarter, but she wouldn’t have to be out long to gather a few dates and take them upstairs for some holiday cheer and auld lang syne.
    She strolled along the sidewalk in front of 938 Conti. The street was still noisy with celebration, but people would be clearing out soon, finding a place to be at midnight. Norma spotted Nellie Jolie, a tall, well-groomed brunette who made a great deal of money, coming from the direction of the Cadillac Club, on the corner of Conti and North Rampart Streets. She had a man on each arm, the three of them in high spirits. They disappeared behind an iron gate in a seven-foot red-brick wall. Across the street the Chinaman was open, but no one was interested in chow mein or coffee on New Year’s Eve. Another girl, Edna, passed the café and waved at Norma. Edna’ssweetheart was Eddie, an ex-fighter and friend of Pete’s. But she wasn’t with Eddie. She and a date were undoubtedly going to rent a room somewhere. Norma saw Bobbi Hackett too. She was tipsy, tripping along the brick sidewalk, her date loud and raucous, Bobbi laughing boisterously with him, but Norma knew that she was still broken-hearted over losing her lover. A few weeks earlier he’d been murdered at the corner of Tulane and Jeff Davis Parkway, out from the French Quarter.
    Norma hustled a few men upstairs and was about to call it quits so that she and Pete, after they saw in the new year at their establishments, could rendezvous for a little celebration of their own. Besides, she was cold.
    She saw the two men walking toward her and waited. Two more and she’d have a full house. One of them walked with a swagger—the kind of man Norma liked, full of himself and ready to unload a roll of money on one of her girls. The men walked purposefully, straight for her. As they got closer, she noticed that they seemed awfully sober.
    Norma was arrested for the first time that night, December 31, 1923. The charge was soliciting for prostitution, and the arresting officer, the one with the swagger, was Detective George Reyer, a policeman known for being as colorful as some of the characters he collared. Reyer would eventually become chief of police, and Norma would come to respect him and like him, mostly because of the hands-off attitude he developed toward prostitution. But that night Norma, along with a score of other girls caught in Reyer’s roundup, saw in the new year at night court, where sleazy lawyers grubbed for clients among the drunk and disorderly benchwarmers and heavily rouged, scantily clad women. Then she went home to business as usual.

CHAPTER THREE
    Vidalias and the Good Men
    Congress passed the Volstead Act in 1919, and Prohibition began the following year. Norma opened one illegitimate business, a