The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

by Chris Wiltz

  Bobby Frey picked a girl named Diana. Diana’s boyfriend was a third-generation pimp called BeBe Anselmo. (When Norma heard who Diana was going with, she exclaimed, “Oh my God, lightning has struck three times!” One of her girls had had a baby with BeBe’s grandfather; another of her girls had knifed BeBe the second.) BeBe the third was a heroin addict who wasn’t going to be happy with Diana’s paltry earnings that slow Saturday night. So the first thing she said to Frey was “Let’s talk business. Just what do you want to do?”

  “Anything, baby,” he said with feeling. “What do you want to do?”

  “A little bit of everything,” Diana said coquettishly, and he handed over every dollar he had.

  Joe Liemann got his penis grabbed by a cute little number named Linda and gave her every bit of his money too.

  Jerry Lankford folded his six foot eight frame onto the stairway to the third floor, where he and his girl, Julie, waited for a room. As they sat there, Julie asked, “What do you want tonight?”

  Lankford said, “All I can get.”

  “Okay,” Julie replied and took twenty-five dollars off him. She left briefly to give the money to Norma before they went to their room.

  Billy McGaha never made it out of the parlor. His girl told him to wait there for her, but she didn’t get back before there was something of a disturbance upstairs.

  All the girls turned the money over to Norma before they got down to business. Paul Nazar, though, had been charged by Soulé to follow the path of the money, since it would be their best evidence in court. It was time to get moving, because Soulé had said thirty minutes tops, then he was busting in. Nazar hurried the negotiations, and when Betty took his money, he followed her out to the balcony, talking as he went. “Do you mind if I go out to the veranda with you?” She hesitated but finally nodded. “Need a little fresh air,” he went on. He looked out over the courtyard, his eyes sweeping right and left, and said, “This is a beautiful house! I like the motif.”

  “Uh-huh,” Betty replied. She called out to Norma and dropped the money down to her.

  Nazar leaned on the rail to the balcony. “What a great courtyard!” he gushed. “All those plants . . . do I hear water? A fountain? Wow, this is really something.” All the time he talked he was watching Norma. He saw her go into the glassed sunroom, where he had a partial view of her desk to the right of the door and, behind that, another door that led to a bathroom.

  He went back into the bedroom with Betty. He talked incessantly, asking her questions such as how she came to work at Norma’s, making comments about the bed with the canopy and the pretty little chairs in the room.

  Finally Betty said, “Man, you’re a talker, aren’t you? Don’t you want to get undressed and go to bed?”

  But Nazar didn’t want to take off even his socks because he had his police ID stuck down inside them. He stalled, sitting on the edge of the bed and talking ferociously as he waited for Betty to disrobe. As soon as she was naked, he reached into his sock and said to her, “Look, darlin, the reason I can’t go to bed with you is because I’m a police officer and you’re under arrest.” Just as he said this, Julie, on the third floor, shrieked, “Norma, it’s the cops!”

  Betty, stark naked, ran out to the balcony and screamed, “Norma, Norma, it’s the police!” Nazar was right behind her, his hand on her elbow.

  Norma went into action before Betty finished screaming. Without panicking or even seeming to hurry, she eased the bartender and the sixth girl, the one who’d told Billy McGaha to wait in the parlor, out the side door, and she told Jackie to go out the front. Jackie’s nerves weren’t good enough anymore to go through this. Bobby Frey had come downstairs and was using the phone. Norma came back to the desk and said, “I knew you bastards were coppers.” She knew it in hindsight: She should have realized that college boys wouldn’t have that much money on them; she just hadn’t given it the right thought. But who were these guys? She didn’t recognize any of them, nor did she have pictures of them; she bought the badge ID photos from one of her contacts in the department. She said to Frey, “You must be new.” He offered no information.

  Down the street, Freddy Soulé checked his watch. Another two minutes and he was going in. He saw a woman rush out the front door and run down Conti Street toward Bourbon. He was about to instruct one of his officers to pursue her, but just then the radio dispatcher called with a message from Bobby Frey to proceed with Operation A, and Soulé told the officers to break down the side door of Norma’s house.

  Chaos had erupted in the house, with naked girls screaming and crying, cops crawling all over the place, and doors coming down, but Norma continued her smooth preparations. As soon as Frey turned away from the desk, she pulled her nightly record from the drawer. This she kept on tissue paper. She also took about a hundred and twenty-five dollars she’d collected from these supposed college boys and handed the money to Marie. Then she held the tissue paper over the toilet and put a match to it. She flushed it away.

  No one seemed to notice the maid go out the back door. Marie put the marked money in a garbage can and moved it into Mike Persia’s car lot next door. Then she slipped back into the house. As far as she could tell, she was invisible.

  But Soulé had seen Norma pass something to the maid, and he assumed it was the marked money. His attention had been diverted, but now he told Norma he wanted the money the officers had given her.

  “You’ll never find it,” she told him. She’d felt no nerves at all as she’d hidden as much evidence as possible, but now she could feel herself getting angry. “I was supposed to be notified of this,” she snapped.

  Soulé asked her what she meant, but she refused to answer. He told her she might as well give up the money.

  She opened her desk drawer. “Help yourself,” she said, and waved her hand over the night’s take. Soulé picked up the money, about five hundred dollars, but his marked bills weren’t there. Something else in the drawer caught his eye, though. Photographs—of himself! He shuffled through them and pictures of a number of other officers. He had no idea where she could have gotten those pictures, and she wouldn’t tell him.

  He said, “I’m not leaving until I get the money.”

  “Suit yourself,” Norma replied. She sat in her chair behind the desk.

  The white tuxedos and the girls, dressed again, started coming downstairs. Terry caught Soulé’s eye. “Can I talk to you a minute?”

  “Sure,” he said.

  She cut her eyes toward the second parlor. He followed her in, and she closed the door. “I’m friends, good friends, with one of your officers.”

  “Who’s that?” Soulé asked.

  “Donald Pryce. Do you know him?”

  “Sure. I know him.”

  “We’re more than friends; we’re lovers,” Terry said. “It’s serious.” Soulé lifted his eyebrows; he nodded. “Do you think you could just let me out the back door?” Terry asked.

  Soulé smoothed his mustache with his thumb and index finger, then shook his head. “No, I’m gonna arrest you. Unless you want to be a witness for us. Then I’ll let you go.”

  “No way.”

  “Then I’m sorry,” Soulé told her, and he laughed, a rather wicked laugh for the Jellybean.

  In the sunroom he and Norma got into it about the money. “You’ll never see it again,” Norma insisted. She sat with her arms folded and refused to say another word about it.

  “Then I’m gonna tell my officers here to start bustin up the place, punch holes in the walls, whatever they have to do,” Soulé told her.

  “Where’s your warrant?” Norma wanted to know.

  That was a problem. Soulé worked over his mustache. Given the hour, it would be impractical to try to get one. He was thinking too that the woman he’d seen running from the building could have taken the money with her.

  Norma was thinking about Jackie as well. She was glad that she and not Jackie had let these scoundrels in; otherwise, she knew she would have gone th
e rest of her life blaming Jackie. But she’d done it herself, and she had no excuse for letting down her guard. Thinking about it was making her very tired. She watched Soulé as he thought, his thumb and index finger running repeatedly over his mustache.

  Soulé decided to let the money go. As they were all leaving the house, Nazar sidled up to Norma, cupping her elbow with his hand. “No hard feelings?” He looked at her with his beautiful, sleepy eyes.

  “You’re a little son of a bitch,” Norma told him. She moved her elbow away. He was the touchy-feely kind; she could even feel his eyes on her. She asked his name. “Good theatrics, Nazar.” He laughed. Nice teeth too. She lowered her voice. “Why don’t you have dinner with me one night? I’ll take you to the Black Orchid.” Nazar agreed immediately. “Give me a call,” Norma said, and off she went to Central Lockup.

  On June 10, 1962, Norma Wallace was arrested on three serious charges—prostitution, pandering, and letting the premises for prostitution. When they booked her, she lied about her age. The newspaper reported that she was forty-nine. She was sixty-one.

  The article about the bust was on page 12 of the front section of The Times-Picayune. It was at the bottom of the page and was four paragraphs long. Norma had called in a favor.

  “A good piece of work, Freddy,” Giarrusso said. He drummed his fingers on the folded newspaper. “Jail will be a bitter dose for her.”

  “If she goes,” Soulé said. Not one of the girls had given a statement. The girlfriend of that pimp BeBe Anselmo—her mother had been so upset that Soulé had thought sure the girl would rat on Anselmo. Instead, she married him. No statements, no marked money, just naked women and his cadets. He wouldn’t want to call it.

  Giarrusso shrugged. “True.” Suddenly he laughed. “Don’t you know there’re some big people praying right now. She’s upset; if they play it right in the DA’s office . . .”

  Soulé sat across from the Chief. They looked at each other, then Soulé watched as Giarrusso threw the newspaper into the trash can next to his desk. He had more disappointing news: He told the Chief he thought Donald Pryce was tipping people off. Giarrusso flipped his hand. “He’s gonna deny it, then it’s gonna be his word against a prostitute’s.”

  But with Garrison and Gervais raking through the city, the last thing Giarrusso needed was a policeman like Donald Pryce. They had a way of dealing with his kind. At the end of June, Giarrusso transferred Pryce from the First District, the French Quarter, to the Fifth, out toward the Industrial Canal, a rough and dangerous district riddled with shoot-outs and murders, a far cry from the razzle-dazzle of Bourbon Street. And they watched him. Closely. Pryce turned in his resignation effective July 31, 1962, only a year and three months after he’d joined the NOPD.

  Freddy Soulé had been on the force for nearly twenty years, and he’d seen it happen too many times before. Bourbon Street had been the ruin of many a young cop. They had a name for it; they called it the Policeman’s Graveyard.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Jailbird

  At seven o’clock Norma got the familiar rush that came every night when the house on Conti Street opened for business. This particular night she was in Waggaman, and she was alone—no husband, no phones, no girls, no dates. Since the June 10 bust McCoy had been miserable, saying he knew it would come to this, and now she might go to jail. He was drinking more than ever. Last week he’d stopped at a barroom and all the linens for the house had been stolen out of the car. They’d had a terrible fight over it, and Norma had told him to go away and let her have some peace and quiet.

  She put on a tight red cocktail dress with deep décolletage to highlight her greatest assets. She meant to get his attention, and she remembered where it had been riveted. The straight skirt fell just below her knees and showed off her shapely calves. She took her time with her hair and makeup. When she was ready, she slipped her feet into matching red high-heeled pumps and slid behind the wheel of her Cadillac.

  Over the years Norma had kept up with Wayne Bernard through his aunt and her best friend, Elise Rolling. She knew Wayne still worked at Avondale Shipyards six days a week, that by the time he was twenty-one he’d been married, had a child, and divorced. That had been a year ago; he was twenty-two now—and legal. She did not need to play coy with Elise, so she had asked her where Wayne would most likely be found on a Saturday night. Elise gave her the names of several lounges over on Fourth Street. And the Mist, right there in Waggaman, was also a possibility.

  Norma guided the Cadillac around the long gravel horseshoe drive in front of her Waggaman property, under the low-limbed, moss-hung oaks, and turned right on River Road. She took the long way, following River Road until she could intersect with Fourth Street where it began in Westwego then ran through Marrero and Harvey to Gretna.

  The Fourth Street “strip” was studded with nightspots—restaurants, lounges, nightclubs, and dives. Norma drove slowly past the Keyhole, the Gay Paree, Scorpio’s, and the Moulin Rouge. It was barely eight o’clock, and she could tell from the numbers of cars in the parking lots that she’d found the Saturday night action. But she turned the Cadillac around and drove back to Waggaman. She parked in front of the Mist, a low cinder-block building with an off-center, V-shaped roof—1950s-modern, Elvis architecture—fronted with four aqua lightning bolts that zigzagged from the roofline to the ground. She decided to try the Mist first.

  Wayne and a few of his friends sat in a booth in the bar inside. They usually met for drinks there to decide where they were going for the evening, and sometimes, after barhopping over on Fourth Street, they’d wind up back at the Mist for a late-night breakfast.

  Whenever the door opened everybody turned an eyeball to see who was coming in. When Norma walked in that night, their eyeballs popped. “Who the hell is that?” one of the guys asked.

  But Wayne knew who it was—there was no mistaking Mrs. Patterson, with that hair like Marilyn Monroe and those dark sunglasses. She walked up to the bar, a fire red hourglass on high heels, and he pushed his way out of the booth, all those guys pulling on him, creating quite a ruckus, but Wayne didn’t say a word. He just slid on up to the bar right next to Mrs. Patterson. They had a drink, and then they left together, while Wayne’s friends gawked from the booth.

  They drank and danced their way through the hot spots along Fourth Street, until at two or three in the morning, on the dance floor at Scorpio’s, Mrs. Patterson put both her arms around Wayne and said, “Come on over to the house with me.”

  “But Mr. Mac’s going to be there,” Wayne said.

  Mrs. Patterson told him no, Mac wouldn’t be there. She said they were separated, she’d put him out.

  She had locked herself out of the house, but the bedroom window was open, so Wayne muscled himself up and over the sill, checking to see if Mr. Mac was in the bed. He wasn’t. Wayne dropped to the floor, went around the front to let Mrs. Patterson in, and then they finished what they had started all those years ago under the oak tree before Snapbean almost stepped on them.

  The next morning Mrs. Patterson served Wayne breakfast in bed—coffee and French toast, eggs and bacon—on a big silver tray. She had on a negligee, and he could see that she was wearing nothing underneath. She watched him as he ate; then he pushed the big silver tray to the side and pulled her down on top of him. What Mrs. Patterson served up he’d never had a taste of before, and he wasn’t sure he could ever get enough of it.

  But it wasn’t heaven quite yet. Wayne and Mrs. Patterson would go out one night, then he wouldn’t see her for a few days. The next evening, she’d show up at the Mist. Sometimes he went home with her; sometimes she would vanish into the night.

  Suddenly Mrs. Patterson stopped dropping in at the Mist. She just disappeared. Wayne regarded the situation with his usual imperturbability, figuring that he wasn’t what she fancied, that she didn’t want anything more to do with this old country boy.

  Norma disappeared from Wayne’s life because she decided to go to jail.

 
One consideration was the publicity a trial would bring. After her arrest she had managed to subdue the newspaper publicity, and she had hidden out from the TV cameras, but a trial would mean a big blast, and then everyone in Waggaman would know who she was.

  Ed Baldwin, the lawyer Norma used for certain underworld activities, including any criminal charges, was ready to go to court and fight. Before the trial, though, Norma decided to talk to the judge, Bernard Cocke, a customer and, Norma thought, a friend. Behind closed doors, without her lawyer present, Norma and the judge came to an agreement.

  The morning of the trial Norma told Baldwin that the judge had said if she went to trial with a jury and was found guilty, he’d give her a year and a day; if she pled guilty, three months, and she could do it in six weeks.

  In the hallway outside the courtroom, Norma said, “I’m going to plead guilty.”

  “You’re what?” Baldwin demanded to know if she knew what she was doing.

  “I have a good reason, Baldwin.” He could see her mind was set.

  The way Norma figured it, for six weeks Wayne was probably safe in Waggaman—but to leave him for a year, so dangerously close to all those good-looking young women who swooned over him in the West Bank lounges, could only be folly.

  Norma knew she’d been off her game because she had been considering quitting the business. She and McCoy were at such odds that she was on edge all the time, so she’d said she would give it up. She sat in the courtroom wishing she’d done it sooner so she could have quit clean. If she had, she would have been the only big-time landlady who’d never gone to jail.

  Some of the vice cops from the bust sat in the back, waiting to see what would happen. For a fleeting moment Norma wished she had listened to Baldwin and tried to beat the charges just to show them.

  Judge Cocke sentenced Norma, banged his gavel, and called for the next case. She was handcuffed and led from the back of the courtroom through connecting corridors into Parish Prison. She felt stripped, laid bare in some indefinable way. For the first time since she’d been a teenager in Memphis, she was utterly powerless.