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

house of prostitution; then, because of Captain Ray’s crackdown on the Tango Belt prostitutes, she opened a second illegal business, a bar, to cover the first one. Ray’s determination to eradicate prostitution went against custom. Historically, the city’s attitude toward both prostitution and gambling had been tolerant.
    For most of three centuries gambling had been carried out openly and behind closed doors. Cockfighting was one of the earliest, most ubiquitous forms of gambling, with pits located all over the French Quarter. Predating Comus, New Orleans’s oldest carnival krewe, which appeared in 1857, the first Mardi Gras float in 1838 depicted a giant fighting cock. (Today Louisiana is one of only five states in the country where cockfighting is legal, and in 1999 the legislature struck down yet another effort to do away with it.) The Creole millionaire Bernard de Marigny, whose estate was directly below the French Quarter and is known now as the Faubourg Marigny, introduced a somewhat more elegant form of gambling than cockfights. Heavily in debt from his losses, he introduced New Orleans to the game of craps (after crapaud ,French for “toad,” or in New Orleans, “toad-frog,” theslang commonly applied to Frenchmen). The game caught on; de Marigny lost his fortune.
    By the time Norma was operating in the Tango Belt, round-the-clock gambling houses had sprung up all over the city, some catering to the low life, others more sophisticated. These places enjoyed complete police protection. Once when the legislature enacted a Sunday blue law, the state attorney general struck it down in New Orleans only—no explanation forthcoming.
    Gambling operations proliferated in the expected nightlife locations—saloons, poolrooms, and clubs—then spilled over into daylight businesses such as groceries and barbershops. Everybody was doing it, twenty-four hours a day, including prostitutes who took bets at the soft-drink stands they operated, once for the sole purpose of soliciting men.
    Prohibition was no different from anything else illegal in the city—the law was flagrantly disregarded. Good liquor was easy to get citywide, from the elite men’s clubs like the Boston Club to the cabarets of the Tango Belt and saloons like LaMothe’s (now Tavern on the Park), where Pete Herman, his brother Gaspar Gulotta, his fighting buddies and fans liked to meet. Speakeasies went to elaborate lengths to carry out their clandestine activities and convince their patrons they were safe. One called the Bat had a one-ton steel door installed to keep out federal agents.
    Norma’s bar helped her attract a more affluent and influential clientele. Early in the 1920s she established her characteristic pattern of using the very worst circumstances to improve her own. Her business acumen seemed impervious to federal agents and the local law; it certainly helped her keep well ahead of the competition and their low prices. The more she charged her customers, the more customers flocked in to hand over their money. Business was so good that one of the girls who’d left Louise Jackson’s with Norma, Dora Russo, decided to strike out on her own.
    Dora had gotten into the business almost by accident. One day she had visited Norma at Louise’s, and that afternoon a ship’s captain came by looking for some company. He liked women of substance, preferably in the form of lots of soft, cushioned flesh. He took onelook at Dora and knew he’d found what he wanted. Dora turned her first trick that day and never looked back.
    “Dora wasn’t anybody’s fool,” Norma said. “She was with me for about a year when she got smart.” Dora had been kept by a rich Jewish man from Uptown, she dressed well, and she knew how to talk. She decided that Norma had the right idea, not to turn tricks but to find them—and to hire the girls who would keep them coming back. She left Norma and opened her own house right across the street, at 335 Burgundy. From