Prostitution Reigns
“I’ve got men who give me $15,000 here, $10,000 there. I shoot for the moon.”
The record is unclear whether Frank Colacurcio and Rose Marie Williams had any kind of working relationship, but they operated in similar ways—getting out of jail and going straight back to work—and they ran in the same circles. When first arrested in the late sixties for running a call girl ring, Williams had a little black book that was rumored to include names of some of Seattle’s leading citizens: judges, politicians, and corporate execs. But following her guilty plea, the book was sealed in a court file—by a judge—where it remains locked away today.
Just as Colacurcio-connected madam Ann Thompson had ruled the prostitution market along with Nellie Curtis in the fifties, Rose Marie began her rise to acclaim as Seattle’s beauty queen-turned-prostitute in the sixties, reigning as Madam Washington into the next century. The five-foot-seven brunette had been crowned Miss Washington USA in 1958—her hobbies included skiing, swimming, and sewing. A distant neighbor to Frank at the north end of Lake Washington, she too would prove to be an enduring police target. The onetime $300-an-hour madam had become legendary and seemingly invincible—frequently busted but rarely convicted, each time wiser to the ways of caution. She expertly insulated her operations and screened customers to ferret out undercover officers. She operated out of hotels, apartments, and parlors, as well as her home in a tree-shrouded neighborhood near Bothell. It was not until the nineties that law enforcement finally began to concentrate on ending the Rose call girl era. Continuing to operate as a prostitute and madam for decades, she was almost daring them to catch her. So for more than seven years, police focused on Williams’s businesses, arresting and turning some of her female prostitution workers into criminal informants, and sending in male undercover cops willing to get naked in the line of duty. Police denied that officers actually had sex—if you don’t define sex as getting your penis rubbed with oil, as one cop’s was. At least two civilian police informants involved in making cases did have sex, one of them repeatedly for almost a year. Police never disclosed the details or said whether taxpayers paid the informants for their hard work.
By the late nineties, police felt they had enough evidence to go to court. Prosecutors brought both criminal and civil charges that included the likely confiscation of all of Williams’s properties. According to documents presented to King County Superior Court, Rose attracted some of her clients by advertising in the dependable classified pages of Seattle Weekly, where sexual innuendo was a marketable commodity—and usually not just innuendo. Her in-call and out-call businesses included Karen’s Personal Services, Touch of Magic, and Ambiance Massage/ Escort Service. The latter allegedly was run out of a third residence Williams had an interest in, near Seattle’s Green Lake. It was located in a residential neighborhood but had one feature other nearby homes lacked: white wrought-iron security bars covering all the doors and windows. There was also an array of security lights, and the address was posted in three places on the front and back of the house.
It was at that home, watched over by police, that sex workers were schooled on topics such as how not to get caught. They were informed, for example, on how to check a john’s true identity. If an escort was called to a hotel, she should look “for medicine prescriptions, business cards, luggage tags, [or] airline tickets that indicate the customer is not a police officer or a ‘bad trick.’” Prostitutes, who got to keep half of a $200 sex fee, sometimes talked in code to regular customers. “Dessert” understandably was intercourse, although “tea and crumpets” of all things was masturbation. “She said that if I thought they were a cop,” one sex worker said, referring to Rose’s dozens of male clients, “not to say anything, just leave—that if the man starts the conversation out by saying, ‘So I get a blow job for X amount of money,’ then they would probably be a cop.” According to the women, regular code-knowledgeable customers who asked for “XYZ” got intercourse for $300. If they asked for “ABC,” they got “the basic package ... a Jacuzzi or a shower and a deluxe nude massage and a hand job” for $200. The madam did much of her own customer screening. Typically, after a grilling about marital status and work, “Williams asked me if I was a police officer,” recalled one of the customers who stripped naked and paid $200 for a sexual massage at her home brothel. The split-level residence/bordello was across the street from her own family home in a manicured neighborhood that includes a grade school, whose parking lot she used for her customers, police said. “I told Williams that I was not [a cop],” recalled the customer. “Williams commented that ‘You just never know.’”
But Rose’s instincts failed her after all those years: one of the prostitutes she instructed on how to beware of cops was herself a cop—a King County Sheriff’s undercover vice detective named Ruby, who was hired by Williams’s sex operation, Karen’s Personal Services. Detective Ruby gave at least one massage, apparently nonsexual, in the line of duty. And the customer who denied being a cop was one too. Mike, a King County vice detective, got fondled by Williams on his first visit to Williams’s downstairs massage parlor. On his second visit, Mike pulled out only his badge and arrested her.
Among items discovered in a police search of the homes were three phone-answering machines, four caller-ID boxes, and an assortment of sex toys, condoms, dildos, a whip, and a riding crop. A $60,000 stash of $100 bills was found by cops in a safety deposit box. Her business could take in as much as $900 a session, police said. One customer, according to vice records, spent that amount over three hours and required a few extras such as a feather, a mirror, candles, and a scarf for him to wear.
Williams claimed the charges were untrue. “They claim to have taken down all these license numbers of men going in and out of the house. Those were my son’s teen friends, visiting, nothing else. The police were outside watching, writing down license numbers!” And the money? “I made my money in restaurants,” she said, “and kept it around in cash.”
In 2000, after pleading guilty and avoiding a public trial, the madam went perfunctorily to jail. She was given ten days behind bars, fifty days of home detention, and ordered to do 240 hours of community service in return for a guilty plea to felony money laundering and promoting prostitution. Though she faced losing all her assets, worth nearly $1 million, she ended up forfeiting only the $60,000 under the plea deal, along with profit from the forced sale of the brothel across from her suburban home. The loss came to more than $200,000, likely the largest penalty ever rendered in a local prostitution case.
Who were her clients? Just like years earlier, when a judge sealed her black book, a Rolodex of apparent clients was never revealed, because of her guilty plea. By law, customer names were deleted from police files released to the press, and Williams said there was “nothing in that [Rolodex] but my friends and associates.” In a court statement, one of the sex workers described them as mostly “older gentlemen, married, most of them range from [their] late twenties all the way to sixty-something ... well-to-do clients, you know, important men. One has known her since high school. One of the gals who worked for her met an older gentleman and [is] now driving around in a Mercedes.” She added: “Rose sort of puts me down [for] being stupid [because] I’m not getting everything I can from a man. She mentioned, ‘I used to be in this business when I was young like you. You know, I’ve got men who give me $15,000 here, $10,000 there. I shoot for the moon.’ That’s her exact words to me. In her eyes ... men are money.”
During court proceedings, the bobbed and bespectacled Williams—her looks aided by plastic surgery, according to ex-employees—had little to say other than that she had been through a lot. The madam’s attorney claimed she’d been inactive as a prostitute for years until, while working as a legitimate masseuse, she simply relapsed when someone made a too-tempting offer. A grim Williams seemed embarrassed and distraught. In interviews with detectives, some of her ungrateful former sex employees called her an intimidating and “mean ... very mean” boss, accusing her of sometimes taking an unfair cut of their sex earnings and charging prostitutes rent of $1,500 a month to live in her brothel home. “She watches me, she took down the blinds before I moved in,” said one worker. Another said, “She was very cold ... just a time bomb.”
In 2008 a production crew, developing a television series on failed beauty queens to be hosted by John Waters, was in Seattle filming interviews for a segment on Rose Marie. The willowy and shapely Madam Washington looked damn good at sixty-eight. She agreed to be interviewed for the series, she said, to set the record straight, claiming there was never any little black book with the names of her customers as stated (and sealed) in court records. She still seemed hurt that Seattle Weekly reported some of her customers parked at a neighborhood school. “They never did!” she protested.
She was proudly an ex-madam, recalling how she was asked to leave town whenever elections approached—apparently so as not to be linked to her whip-me, hurt-me politician customers—and said “close friends” on the police force often tipped her off when the vice squad was about to bust her massage and escort operations.
She didn’t want to be asked about any names or specific details, something she reiterated in later phone calls. She said she had given up both drinking and the career that made her infamous. She took care of seven dogs and was a bit of a crusader for sobriety. Once she had pleaded guilty in 2000, she said, “there was no way to continue on—other than move to Nevada, I suppose.”
As of this writing, the beauty queen series has yet to air; however, her distant neighbor Frank was about to get a lot of exposure.