Chapter V
WHORES BEHAVING BADLY

“Something wicked this way comes,” and with it a few satisfied customers and a trail of blood, greed, insanity, and murder. The “hooker with the heart of gold” is a myth we’ve seen smashed up against the depictions of the tart track in movies like Midnight Cowboy and lesser celluloid claptrap like Pretty Woman, where yes, she’s a hooker and has a heart of gold, but in the end, we’re all really hoping she electrocutes herself with that Walkman while making a mockery of Prince, the Revolution, and the industry.

Still and all, Julia Roberts’s considerably obnoxious Vivian is no match for the following whores of terror. From serial-killing lunatics and felonious French Quarter floozies to a debased, coke-addled porn star whose most lethal weapon was his foot-long dong, these prostitutes stirred up a heap of trouble. Welcome to the dark side of the street.

ANDREW CUNANAN

PROFILE

DAY JOBS: C. S. Lewis enthusiast; serial killer

CLAIM TO FAME: Murdered Gianni Versace

THEATER OF OPERATIONS: South Beach, Miami

This depraved man-whore made headlines when, on the morning of July 15, 1997, he put two bullets into designer and fashion impresario Gianni Versace on the steps of Versace’s South Beach, Miami, home. During a three-month crime spree leading up to his suicide in a wealthy john’s houseboat, the dashing young Cunanan killed at least five people and became notorious as a member of the FBI’s Most Wanted List.

Hailing from San Diego, Cunanan attended UCSD where he majored in history, but he found the butt beat more alluring than the ivory tower. After a brief stint slumming it—literally—in the Philippines, Cunanan had tricked up enough cash to make it back to San Francisco, where he set up shop in the Castro district and quickly became one of the more highly regarded prostitutes in town. He had myriad sugar daddies who supplied him with cash, credit, and fancy cars. Versions of Cunanan from past acquaintances, the media, and family members conjure up images of a veritable sex chameleon. One roommate asserts that he was super freakish; “heavy into the roughage and S&M, more the tying-up-and-whips type—just the degradation, not the asphyxiation.” Meanwhile an exposé in Vanity Fair poo-pooed him as “just a gay gigolo down on his luck”; however, his mother offers clarification, telling us that her son was no sexual slumdog but was without a doubt a “high-class male prostitute.” Whatever one’s fetish or financial state, a stream of men and money does not always happiness make, especially when you are convinced you have AIDS (an autopsy proved he didn’t), you have turned into a psychotic killer, and you have become oddly obsessed with the writings of C. S. Lewis.

A dark entry in the prostitution log, Andrew Cunanan is a disgrace to the profession, as his fame comes in exchange for innocent lives. Alas, he is in the sexicon and worth mention, if only to serve as a sinister reminder of what can happen if you mess with people who are greedy, deranged, and have access to your house boats.

VIRGINIA HILL

PROFILE

DAY JOB: “Bag lady” for the mafia

CLAIM TO FAME: Mob boss Bugsy Siegel’s (along with other mafia big names) #1 gal

THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Chicago; Las Vegas

During the 1950s you didn’t have squat for street cred unless you’d been with Virginia Hill, or “the Flamingo,” as she was known. Virginia was born the sixth of ten children in the rustic shit-box that was Lipscomb, Alabama, where in 2011, enterprising citizens held a hot dog sale to retire the city’s debts. That’s country living, folks.

At seventeen Virginia left the confines of Alabama for the 1933 World’s Fair in Chicago to try her hand at hooking. Young Ms. Hill turned out to be precocious in this regard, and she eventually attracted the likes and loins of big-time, old-school gang bangers ranging from the Franks (Nitti and Costello) to the Joes (Adonis and Epstein) to the infamous Ben “Bugsy” Siegel.

Hill served as a “bag lady” for the mafia, which contrary to how it may sound, did not involve her pushing a rusty grocery cart around downtown, screaming the theme song from Fat Albert at fire hydrants. No, in this case, our bag lady was an indispensible courier for the Chicago mob, moving dirty money and narcotics in her bag. Some argue her “bag” may have actually been a “suitcase,” but that’s a mystery for another day. What is clear is that the Chicago syndicate rewarded Hill handsomely for her efforts on their behalf. Homegirl once even dropped an $11,000 cold, hard gangster knot (the equivalent of about $150,000 in 2011 money) on a new house for the kinfolk back in Alabama.

When Hill arrived in California in the early 1940s and joined pelvises with Bugsy Siegel, her stock really began to rise, but Bugsy’s hotel (named, appropriately, the Flamingo) eventually floundered and their relationship soured. Heat from the authorities and Bugsy’s sinking business venture drove Hill to Paris, where she hung out long enough for Siegel’s enemies to track him down and shoot the shit out of him. When she returned stateside and was given the news of Siegel’s murder, she fainted, then ran into the arms of an Austrian ex-Nazi and ski instructor.

Virginia Hill may have been the best cocksucker in the United States, but in 2009 “Sexy Cora,” a German porn star, gave Ms. Hill a run for her money. On bail for having sex in a public park, Sexy Cora set out to break the world record for the most oral sex, with plans to service 200 men. Things went quickly awry for Sexy Cora when, according to Britain’s the Sun, “she was forced to call off the bid when she collapsed after reaching her 75th man and was rushed to hospital with breathing difficulties.” Sadly, Cora died before she could give the record another go.

Hey! What about that oral sex I mentioned earlier? Ah, yes. During the 1950–1951 U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, known also as the Kefauver Committee, Hill was hauled in to explain why she was so often seen dating known gangsters. The committee also wanted to know why her dates with men using uncreative though menacing nicknames, seemed to develop amnesia whenever the question of taxes arose, specifically the matter of Virginia’s $161,000 in unpaid back taxes. When grilled by Senator Kefauver over why she drew paychecks from so many dubious sources, Ms. Hill gave it to him. The following is an excerpt from the interview transcript:

The response so shocked New Hampshire senator Charles W. Tobey, a notoriously pompous old fart, that UPI reporter Harold Conrad said, “Tobey all but swallowed his Bible.”

Sadly, in 1966 at the age of forty-nine Virginia forced a handful of sleeping pills down her throat and dropped dead of an apparent suicide in a remote town in Austria. You will no doubt be happy to learn that she did divorce the Nazi before nodding off for good.

KHIONIYA GUSEVA

PROFILE

DAY JOB: Aging floozy

CLAIM TO FAME: Would-be assassin of the “Mad Monk,” Rasputin

THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Tsaritsyn (today Volgograd), Russia

Losing one’s nose isn’t always the end of the world. In fact, for some people, it’s a new beginning. And for Khioniya Guseva, a middling-to-effective prostitute in Romanov-run Russia, along with the abolishment of her nose came a revelation: She was born to be one of those people who embrace various religious zealots. This surely comes as no surprise and is a common U-turn among the naïve and/or noseless.

Guseva soon fell under the spell of Ilioder, a defrocked monk, radical anti-Semite, and former colleague of “The Mad Monk,” Rasputin. When Ilioder broke all ties to Rasputin, some assume he enlisted the past-her-prime frosty prosty, Khioniya, to stick it to his old colleague. Why? Rasputin’s meteoric rise in influence and power within the Romanov family had many embittered political and religious rivals out to cut the wild-eyed mystic down to size. A kind of Tsarist Squeaky Fromme, Khioniya was convinced by Ilioder that Rasputin was a false prophet and a nun raper, so she set out—on Ilioder’s orders—to send Rasputin back to hell.

One day, Rasputin was hanging around, probably staring at people with those penetrating eyes and making political and sports predictions, when, according to the deputy prosecutor of the Tobolsk district court, Khioniya, a woman “of repulsive ugliness, her nose was crushed and misshapen” approached him, bowed politely, and begged for a ruble. “You shouldn’t bow,” replied Rasputin, at which point “Khioniya Guseva drew a sharp dagger out of her coat and struck Rasputin in the stomach.” Khioniya then ripped the knife up to Rasputin’s navel and his guts fell out, whereupon she screamed, “I have killed the Antichrist!”

After the Mad Monk’s death, his penis turned up in Paris around 1920. In the 1970s the member found its way to a California antique dealer, and it popped up again in London during the ’90s, where an astute observer noticed that the artifact was not a penis at all, but a dried-up cucumber. But wait. In 2004, Dr. Igor Knyazkin opened the Museum of Erotica in St. Petersburg, to showcase the 15,000-plus sex collectibles he acquired over the years, including the Mad Monk’s nearly foot-long dong (11.8 inches) in all its original glory. Tests have yet to be run on the objet to determine its authenticity, but let’s hope this time it’s at least someone’s penis and not a gourd.

Typically, this would be the end of things, but Rasputin didn’t go down easy. Entrails in hand, Rasputin picked up a stick and gave Khioniya a wallop to her dome, followed by a near-mortal ass-kicking from incensed townspeople and assorted pro-Rasputin toughs.

Speculation remains that Khioniya may have been a spurned lover of the Mad Monk, or perhaps she was just an unsatisfied patient of the notorious mystic, soothsayer, and faith healer. Who wouldn’t be furious if she went to some alleged “healer” and her nose fell off? However, it seems Khioniya’s nose fell off independent of any quacky, quasi-salubrious mambo-jahambo on Rasputin’s part; the problem was most likely the result of a powerful case of Bolshevik syphilis, or a knife fight.

In the end, it would take a few more stab wounds, a good clubbing, strangulation, a flurry of bullets, the removal of his penis, and an icy dip in the Neva River to kill Rasputin. As for Ms. Guseva, the authorities sent her up to the booby hatch in Tomsk, where she spent her days in what family members referred to as “exalted religiosity.” She was released after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and never heard from again. As for Ilioder, he fled to Finland after hearing of the abortive attempt on Rasputin’s life, then moved to New York City and became a devout Baptist and a janitor at the Met Life building in Madison Square.

SADA ABE

PROFILE

DAY JOB: D-list geisha

CLAIM TO FAME: Hauling a penis around Shinigawa for a week

THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Japan

Geisha are supposed to operate on a separate plane of existence called “The Flower and Willow World,” or kary-kai. And it is a geisha’s residence in this farcical world of imagined flora and idyllic haiku that seems to make it okay for men to pretty much treat them as slaves or indentured servants. Sada Abe escaped all that. She was a risk taker who scoffed at convention. This was a geisha who would steal your heart and your penis.

In the late 1920s, Sada Abe was, by all accounts, a piss-poor geisha, a low-level drone in the Osaka geisha scene, spending most of her time just providing sex for money, which sounded suspiciously like straight-up prostitution. That being the case, Ms. Abe decided to muscle-up and join the ranks of the common streetwalkers. Abe proved to be wildly successful once she ditched the geisha routine and saw fit to hook down here with the rest of us. Abe eventually built up enough of a grubstake to—at the urging of one of her johns—begin an apprenticeship at a local restaurant. The owner of the restaurant was one Kichizo Ishida, who fell hard for Sada, despite his marriage to Mrs. Ishida. Sada fell for Kichizo too, and according to William Johnston’s Geisha, Harlot, Strangler, Star: A Woman, Sex, and Morality in Modern Japan, the pair consummated their relationship in the middle of the restaurant, with a geisha who sang a love ballad as the two writhed around like a plate of unagi-no-kabayaki, popping and sweating on the grill. Well, that’s all very romantic, but things were about to take a decidedly peculiar turn.

While prostitution is in no way unique to Japan, the Japanese do bring to the field at least one unique diversion, a culinary curiosity of the first order: the practices of nyotaimori and nantaimori, or, “eating sushi off of nude people.” Nyotaimori (a buffet arrangement on top of a female) and nantaimori (male arrangement), consists of shelling out unfathomable amounts of money to pick cold sashimi off of a goose-bumped and presumably miserable model, or “plate.” A relatively new phenomenon, scholars postulate that nyotaimori and nantaimori may have developed in response to the 1980s economic boom in Japan, when people were searching for new and ever more ridiculous ways to waste their plentiful yen.

Sada became upset because after their lovemaking Kichizo always insisted on returning home to his family, although “upset” doesn’t really do justice to what happened next. During a four-day sex binge ending on May 18, 1936, Sada and Kichizo played out the usual fantasy: They played at strangling each other with Sada’s obi before the ex-geisha brandished a huge knife and placed it on the tip of Kichizo’s penis. Nothing new about that, right? Well, then Sada killed her lover and used her knife to separate him from his penis. She did have an explanation for this move, which she explained to one of her interrogating officers: “Since we were not husband and wife, as long as he lived he could be embraced by other women. I knew that if I killed him, no other woman could ever touch him again, so I killed him.” When someone asked, “Okay, but why did you cut off his penis after you strangled him to death with that obi?” her answer was logical, “Because I couldn’t take his head or body with me. I wanted to take the part of him that brought back to me the most vivid memories.” Pretty touching stuff, but it gets better.

After carving her name on Kichizo’s arm and writing “Sada, Kichi together” on his severed truncheon, Sada lay with the body awhile, then left with Kichi’s dong in her handbag. She claims to have felt a strong sense of attachment “to his penis and thought that, only after taking leave from it quietly, could I then die. I unwrapped it and gazed at it. I put it in my mouth and even tried to insert it inside me. In the end, I intended to jump from a cliff on Mount Ikoma while holding on to his penis.” Whoa. Luckily, the police finally tracked down Sada before her boner B.A.S.E. jump and she spent six years in prison.

Sada enjoyed a degree of celebrity after her release, writing a bestselling book and becoming a brief media sensation. Some people claim she is still alive, which would make her a whopping 106. As for Kichizo’s penis, it was given to the Tokyo University Medical School, where someone once again absconded with it. And so it goes that Kichizo’s unfortunate cock continues its “journey” today, perhaps as a paperweight or charm dangling helplessly from a keychain.

BARBARA HOFFMAN

PROFILE

DAY JOB: Biochemistry student

CLAIM TO FAME: Massage parlor murderess

THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Madison, Wisconsin

If you think that a happy ending is what happens at the finale of one of Hugh Grant’s crimes against cinema, you’ve been missing out. And you must change your life. But before demanding your $15 back from the cineplex and heading downtown to the massage parlor for a “happy ending” you can get excited about, think twice. You could run into someone like Barbara Hoffman.

If you met Barbara Hoffman in Madison, Wisconsin, during the mid-to-late 1970s, you were probably either (A) looking for sex at Jan’s Health Studio, one of the whorehouses-cum-massage parlors in town, or (B) in the biochemistry department at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where Barbara maintained a 3.9 GPA, making the dean’s list by day and turning tricks at the massage studio by night. Well, this kind of ambitious routine can lead to exhaustion, frustration, and, occasionally, murder.

Now, nobody here is going to judge anybody for rocking two disparate employment trajectories, especially if one of them is prostitution. I know how the landscape of contemporary biochemistry is changing by the nanosecond—or at least I imagine that it is—so it’s clearly necessary to have a safety net to make sure your golden years are everything you dream they’ll be. However, it’s when you start to burden yourself with added responsibilities like taking out life insurance policies on your soon-to-be-dead client and your boyfriend that you start to get overextended. And that’s exactly what happened to Ms. Hoffman.

In 1977, Barbara’s boyfriend Gerald Davies walked into a police station and informed them that he’d helped Barbara dispose of a body at the nearby Blackhawk Ski Club. Sure enough, the police went out there and found a naked dead man. Police charged Hoffman with the murder of Harold Berge, one of her clients at Jan’s. Davies was set to testify against Hoffman in court until he turned up dead in a bathtub. Unexplained bathtub death can be a game-changing snag for the wheels of justice, especially as Davies left a letter to the Wisconsin State Journal and his lawyer before his death, stating, “I was scared. I was jealous, Barb is innocent and I wrecked her life. All those stories I told about Barb were false.” “Well, shit,” thought everybody, “this changes everything.” Our murderous masseuse has been cleared!

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, we are treated to a romantic description of poisoning from the character Lucianus,

Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing;
Confederate season, else no creature seeing;
Thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected,
With Hecate’s ban thrice blasted, thrice infected,
Thy natural magic and dire property,
On wholesome life usurp immediately.

Unfortunately, things aren’t so poetic once the poison kicks in. Cyanide is a choker, halting your body’s oxygen consumption. It goes down with an acrid burn, then you have to barf, and your head feels like it’s been mounted by a jaguar. Your vision will soon blur; you’ll do some “reeling”; and then, like an insouciant fart at the opera, you will collapse, and die, much to everyone’s disgust (unless it’s proven that you were murdered with cyanide, then they’ll feel bad for leaving you dozing through Tristan and Isolde again).

Not so fast. The more the evidence changed, the more it stayed the same. Tests concluded that both Berge and Davies died from lethal doses of cyanide, and it was also discovered that Hoffman had enrolled in courses that included discussions about the toxic effects of cyanide on the human body (test results concluded that if you put lots of cyanide in a human body, the human body dies). Furthermore, Hoffman’s boss at the massage parlor decided to come clean and related a conversation he’d had with Hoffman in which she expressed an interest in marrying Davies and killing him in Mexico on their honeymoon, then collecting on his life insurance policy. Davies had taken out three policies on himself worth $20,000 at the time of his death, and he listed Hoffman as his fiancée.

In the end, Hoffman was not charged in the death of her boyfriend Davies, whose death was ruled a suicide, but she was given a life sentence for killing Berge. The murder/suicide and its attendant tale of erotic massage and amino asses captivated the good people of Wisconsin, a folk normally preoccupied with binge drinking, cow-tipping, and mittens. But the collective memory of Barbara, the murders, and the media circus is decomposing like a corpse in the snow, while our ribald biochemist languishes in jail, no doubt wondering how her happy ending went all haywire.

JOHN HOLMES

PROFILE

DAY JOB: Porn star

CLAIM TO FAME: A good foot of coked-up, erotic dynamite

THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Los Angeles; wherever porno is made

Perhaps it’s not fair to include Johnny “The Wad” Holmes in this infamous roll call. Indeed, most of John Holmes’s evil deeds seem to have been perpetrated more out of stupidity than malice. And when you’re walking around with an (allegedly) thirteen-inch dick, it’s not inconceivable to presume much of the blood flow needed for proper mental functioning and advanced reasoning skills might be diverted away from one’s brain during times of sexual activity, which, for John Holmes, were many and oft.

Have you ever wondered who has the biggest penis in the world? The biggest vagina? Maybe you were afraid your cache of Google searches would get you fired. Lucky for you, I’ve already been axed for that, but not before gathering some interesting data. The owner of the world’s largest recorded penis is Mr. Jonah Falcon from Brooklyn, NY. Jonah’s penis is nine and a half inches flaccid and thirteen and a half inches erect, and as he announced on The Daily Show, he can “envelop an entire doorknob” with his foreskin. Not to be outdone, the title “Woman with the Largest Vagina” goes to a Scottish giantess named Anna Swan. Anna (1846–1888) gave birth to a baby boy whose head was 19 inches in circumference. And babies come from vaginas—so there it is.

Holmes was born John Estes in 1944 in Ashville, Ohio. His father abandoned the family when John was still a baby, and he was raised by his mother and stepfather, a violent alcoholic who John said would often arrive home after barhopping and throw up on him and the rest of the family. John eventually tired of this ceremony, and at age sixteen he drove a fist through his stepdad’s face and headed out into the world, armed with a dream and a dong he once described as “bigger than a payphone, but smaller than a Cadillac.” A photographer discovered John, or rather, John’s miraculous penis in a public restroom and the young man was soon making 8 mm porn loops and modeling for Swedish Erotica, using a variety of stage names to keep his identity under wraps. Holmes eventually rose up through the ranks to become the most sought-after penis in the industry. But, with fame came drugs, and with drugs came some of the worst decision making the porn industry—or any industry—has ever seen.

As the Superfreak says, “Cocaine is a hell of a drug,” and for Holmes it was no different. When the 1970s came to an end, John was drug-addled, broke, and limp but trying mightily to turn tricks in order to pay for his habit. In 1981, he even played a part—the extent of which is unknown—in the robbery of a Los Angeles drug dealer and club owner named Eddie Nash. Nash struck back with a vengeance, instructing his goons to pummel Holmes until he gave up his accomplices, which he did. The ensuing bloodbath was known as “The Wonderland Murders”; four people were bludgeoned to death at a rented house on Wonderland Avenue in Laurel Canyon. Nash may have forced Holmes to participate in the killings as an act of penance, although this was never proven.

“My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.”

—Harry S. Truman, thirty-third U.S. president

What is proven is that at some point during his pornographic exploits and whoring, Holmes contracted AIDS. In the mid-1980s, still broke, under constant investigation, and a mere shell of his former self, Holmes kept the disease from everyone but his manager, who forbade him to “act” in any more movies. Undaunted, Holmes made films in Italy, neglecting to tell his costars he’d been diagnosed with AIDS. He reasoned that everyone in the porn industry would eventually succumb to the disease anyway, but that was just a convenient excuse. Holmes’s decision haunts the industry to this day. The Wad eventually died of complications from AIDS in 1988, assured a place in the hall of pornographers, prostitutes, and people with really poor judgment. Whether he was a murderer remains to be seen, but through porno reruns, long John and his lurid legacy continue to inspire, disgust, and intrigue to this day.

GERDA MUNSINGER

PROFILE

DAY JOB: Political provocateur; Russian spy

CLAIM TO FAME: At the head of Canada’s first real sex scandal

THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Canada/East Berlin

With Canada, you never know what you’re going to get. The country would be almost like a box of chocolates, were it not for the maple syrup lobby threatening to defenestrate anybody who dares mess with their sap. That statement wasn’t even remotely true, but that you believed it for even a second indicates exactly the kind of weird behavior we can expect from Canucks.

On March 4, 1966, when John Diefenbaker, the House of Commons Tory Opposition Leader, chastised Justice Minister Lucien Cardin for botching Canada’s National Security (from what or whom, one might ask), Cardin leapt up and snorted in that snooty French-Canadian argot that sounds a lot like a hedgehog reaching orgasm, “[Diefenbaker] is the very last person who can afford to give advice on the handling of security cases.” Cardin then beseeched Diefenbaker to “tell about his participation in the Munsinger case when he was Prime Minister!” much to the amusement to those tuned in to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the continued consternation of Canadian politicians, too cold to really give a rat’s ass in the first place.

For the love of back bacon, the House seemed to be thinking, Okay, we give up—what’s the Munsinger case? The atmosphere in the chamber turned awkward and icy. So what was the Munsinger case that got JM Cardin in such an exasperated state and nearly brought down the sitting government? Well, gather around the fire, y’all. . . . It all started with a prostitute named Gerda Munsinger.

Gerda was born in Germany in 1929, where she was briefly married to an American serviceman. After immigrating to Canada in 1955, Munsinger slogged through a number of temporary jobs, eventually finding a more permanent position as a waitress and hostess at the Chez Paree nightclub. According to the CBC, it was at the Chez Paree that Gerda came into contact with, and then advanced to the bedrooms of, some of Canada’s most prominent politicians, including members of parliament and Defense Minister Pierre Sévigny.

History is fraught with legendary cover-ups. But one cover-up they don’t tell you about took place in New Guinea during the early 1970s: Operation Penis Gourd. Its mission? Covering up the Dani tribe with clothes. The Dani were a “Stone-Age” people, according to some members of the Indonesian government, and needed to be civilized. According to an article in The Economist:

Jogging shorts and dresses were airlifted to the Baliem Valley in central Irian Jaya and distributed to the natives. An American missionary present at one distribution recalls that next day men were wearing the shorts on their heads and women were using the dresses as shoulder bags.

Operation Penis Gourd, as you may have divined, was a fantastic failure. The Dani remain mostly nude to this day, although in reality, it was the Indonesian government who were caught with their pants down.

Canada’s first sex scandal was launched, but somewhere along the way, they lost Gerda. It turns out she was quietly deported back to East Berlin in 1961. But never mind that. In 1966, when the scandal broke, Cold War paranoia was still acute, so any mention of spying was enough to make even a silly government like the one Canadians mounted crumble and fall. Beware! Communists are coming for our comedians, our moose, and our hockey skills!

In fact, then prime minister Lester Pearson was so eager to close the books on the Munsinger “spying” case that he had a go at deflecting the issue by turning the discourse to Canada’s death penalty. The debates on this perennial topic, unlike the discussions surrounding the Munsinger investigation, were heated but progressive, and would ultimately lead to Canada’s abolition of the death penalty. Rumors circulated that Munsinger was dead, although she was eventually found by a reporter for the Toronto Star who claimed Gerda was very much alive, eager to clear her name, and hanging out in Munich. But, as these things go, Gerda’s fifteen minutes were up, and in a truly postmodern Warholian twist, she wasn’t even there to enjoy it. The Canadian government established a Royal Commission that ultimately found neither a security breach nor evidence of any crime committed.

In one of those brilliant Canadacentric instances where you’re not sure if they’re kidding, serious, or just French, Charles Lynch, Bureau Chief of the Southam News agency at the time of the scandal, held out hope that the “Munsinger Affair” might serve to ramp up Canada’s “dull and unexciting” image and spur large numbers of tourists to attend Expo ’67. And, by golly, it came to pass. Canada played host to the most widely attended World’s Fair in history to date. Gerda died in Munich, for real this time, in 1998.

MATA HARI

PROFILE

DAY JOBS: Exotic dancer; ineffectual spy

CLAIM TO FAME: The original femme fatale; executed by firing squad for espionage

THEATER OF OPERATIONS: The Netherlands; France; Germany

Born in 1876 in the Netherlands, Mata Hari (née Margaretha Geertruida Zelle) is more famous for being executed as a German double agent during World War I than for anything else, but she is of particular interest as a whoretesan. After answering an ad placed in a Dutch newspaper by a man seeking a wife, an intrepid young Margaretha left home with her new husband and settled in Indonesia.

Her husband, a captain in the Dutch Colonial Army, turned out to be an alcoholic dolt who beat her brutally and often. He also kept a second wife, and he fooled around with various other women native to Java. When Margaretha had had enough, she again flung herself to the four winds, and one of those winds blew her into a dance company, where she adopted the stage name Mata Hari.

There may have been a small mix-up. Prior to her arrest in France, Mata Hari maintained that she had in fact been in the employ of France as a spy in German-occupied Belgium, where she met with a German consul to give him bogus documents—no harm, no foul, n’est-ce pas? It’s curious, then, that Mata Hari, perhaps in a fit of confused allegiances and/or nudity, failed to inform her French spymasters of this bit of freelance espionage and double-agentry. I mean, come on. It’s the cardinal rule of espionage and prostitution: Never double-book.

Mata Hari’s reputation grew as a dancer and as one who wasn’t afraid to take it off if the price was right. Her act eventually took Europe by storm, and she became the in-demand doxy to a number of famous politicians and to royalty, including, it’s been rumored, the Crown Prince of Germany. As for her career choices, she is unapologetic, as quoted in The True Life Fiction of Mata Hari:

I took the train to Paris without money and without clothes. There, as a last resort and thanks to my female charms, I was able to survive. That I slept with other men is true; that I posed for sculptures is true; that I danced in the opera at Monte Carlo is true. It would be too far beneath me and too cowardly to defend myself against such actions I have taken.

Since the Netherlands was neutral during the Great War, Mata Hari was able to travel freely all over the world, shaking her equal opportunity moneymaker, much to the chagrin of Allied authorities, who suspected her of being a German spy. Eventually, Mata Hari found herself hoisted by her own leotard. In Paris, French and British intelligence intercepted a series of “secret” transmissions that resulted in the exotic dancer’s arrest, as Mata Hari may have been a little too eager to please the epaulet-wearing military set. Always a sucker for a man in uniform, Mata Hari once quipped:

I love officers. I have loved them all my life. I prefer to be the mistress of a poor officer than of a rich banker. It is my greatest pleasure to sleep with them without having to think of money. And, moreover, I like to make comparisons between the different nationalities.

French officers = People fit only to be farted on, decided Mata Hari when the stoic French authorities in uniform proved, for once, immune to her charms. They accused her of treason and espionage, and in 1917 they sentenced her to death by firing squad.

Facing her executioners, Mata Hari is said to have ripped open her Amazonian outfit and roared, “A harlot yes, but traitor never!” before the bullets pierced her chest, a femme fatale to the end. While a profound doubt still lingers as to her actual guilt, Mata Hari has attained the status of a mythical figure, the quintessential female spy: gorgeous, resourceful, courageous, loyal, and scantily clad to the end.

LA MALINCHE

PROFILE

DAY JOB: Turncoat (when wearing one)

CLAIM TO FAME: Confidant to conquistadores, specifically, Hernán Cortés

THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Aztec empire (modern-day Mexico)

Was La Malinche (also known as Doña Maria and Malintzin) a feminist prototype? The first Mexican-American? A traitor to her people? A vessel of modernity? Scholars have argued for all of these interpretations—but a prostitute? ¡Que escandaloso! Some remain convinced that La Malinche was nothing more than a depraved strumpet. That she was forced into prostitution is not a mitigating factor for this tough crowd.

Born around 1502 in Coatzacoalcos, a pre-Columbian Mexican province, La Malinche was an indigenous beauty fortunate enough to be a part of the privileged, educated Aztec class under the emperor Moctezuma. Her father was an Aztec chief, although after he died, Malinche’s ruthless mother sold her into prostitution to traders for some quick change and then held a mock funeral for the little girl, who was soon sold again to a cacique in Tabasco.

La Malinche’s response was an oath along the lines of “To hell with this,” and she wandered the streets of Tabasco until the Spanish conquistadors, led by Hernán Cortés, invaded the region in 1519 and took La Malinche, along with a few dozen other young women to serve as domestic labor for his travelling marauders. La Malinche eventually endeared herself to her captors, becoming the favorite of Cortés, translating, providing cultural insight into the Aztecs, advising him on tactical maneuvers, and even fighting by his side in battle.

Becoming a prostitute does not seem to have been her goal, although for those fans loyal to Team Tenochtitlan, what La Malinche did to her own people was a straight-up painted puta move.

La Malinche remains part of the indelible iconography of Mexico, although unfortunately not in sixteenth-century nudie books. Nobel Prize–winning author Octavio Paz, in his essay “The Sons of Malinche,” writes of the “Chingada” (translated offensively as “The Fucked Mother”), an overwhelming whore character who encapsulates all manner of misfortune in Mexico:

If the Chingada is a representation of the violated Mother, it is appropriate to associate her with the Conquest, which was also a violation, not only in the historical sense but also in the very flesh of Indian women. The symbol of this violation is doña Malinche, the mistress of Cortes. It is true that she gave herself voluntarily to the conquistador, but he forgot her as soon as her usefulness was over. Doña Marina becomes a figure representing the Indian women who were fascinated, violated or seduced by the Spaniards. And as a small boy will not forgive his mother if she abandons him to search for his father, the Mexican people have not forgiven La Malinche for her betrayal.

That’s an awfully big grudge for just one little Latina.

LAS GOTERAS

PROFILE

DAY JOB: Gangbangers

CLAIM TO FAME: “The Mexican Dwarf Wrestler Killers”

THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Mexico City (DF), Mexico

When news broke that “Lucha Mini” stars, La Parkita (“The Little Ghost”) and El Espectrito Jr. (“Mini-Death”), were seen with prostitutes in Mexico City before a match, nobody was surprised. The legendary whoremongering, dwarf-wrestling twins were always up to party serious. What was surprising was that the two favorites of the Lucha Mini circuit were found dead—drugged and robbed—in room 52 at the Hotel Moderna in Mexico City, apparently killed by Las Goteras, or “The Drops,” a ruthless gang of streetwalking rameras who’d rather “pick your pocket than pleasure your pecker.” (Author’s quotation marks; author thinks this would be a good slogan for Las Goteras if they are looking for internal and external advertising and branding services. Contact author directly for rates.) But really, who are Las Goteras, and what the hell do these streetwalking gangs of murderous prosties want? Love, just like the rest of us, probably.

Pequeño Olímpico is the Barry Bonds of Lucha Mini, or “Mini-estrella,” the art of Mexican dwarf wrestling. Why not the Hank Aaron or the Willie Mays? Because Aaron and Mays played the game with honesty and fundamentals and without the aid of performance-enhancing drugs, which, in the case of Pequeño Olímpico, are, in an ingenious physiological coup, administered through his pituitary glands. You see, Pequeño Olímpico is not a “little person,” but merely a little person, standing five feet six and a half inches tall. I’m no expert, but that’s no dwarf. That’s a short guy in a mask and tights trying to get a head up on the competition. Five foot six and a half? That’s not much shorter than I am, and you don’t see me—like Señor Olímpico—defending my crown as two-time champion of the Campeonato Mundial Mini-Estrella, the World Series of mini-estrellas, try as I might.

Let’s not be naive, though. Money can’t buy love, but it can sure as hell buy a lot of drugs, food, sex, and other essentials that may or may not be featured on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. These wily and ruthless Goteras were all about satisfying those needs that can be satisfied with a pocket full of plata.

The modus operandi of Las Goteras was to find a Juan or two, spike their drinks with a quantity of Mexican eyedrops and hork the unsuspecting clients’ money and clothes. In the case of La Parkita and El Espectrito, the two Goteras got a bit too heavy handed with the eyedrops, and the result was la muerte for our hapless Mexican minis. Apparently, the two floozies failed to calculate the difference in molarity required to poison a four-foot tall guerrerito as opposed to a typical-sized luchador. But, come on. Just maybe there’s a little bit of La Gotera in everyone. Who among us hasn’t thought about drugging a dwarf-wrestler, dragging him to a dingy Mexican no-tell motel, and taking his money?

The tale of Las Goteras is shrouded in both mystery and Spanish, but stories like these are valuable. They remind us that no matter what kind of raunchy, Byzantine fictions we dream up, things are happening in hotel rooms across the planet that are simply beyond a normal citizen’s ability to imagine. Could this prove that Heisenberg was right about uncertainty and that Einstein was wrong about God not playing dice with the universe? If God is playing dice with the universe, I’m thinking those dice are loaded and weighted in such a way that chaos and absurdity carry the day. For evidence of this, one need look no further than TV Azteca footage showing the funeral procession in which hordes of mourners are wearing Mexican Lucha Libre masks in honor of the diminutive departed.

On May 23, 2011, a criminal judge sentenced three members of Las Goteras for their roles in the Lucha Mini murders. Two, a man and a woman, were sentenced to twenty-four years in prison, while another Gotera got twelve years.

VALERIE SOLANAS

PROFILE

DAY JOB: Writing manifestos

CLAIM TO FAME: She shot Andy Warhol

THEATER OF OPERATIONS: New York

Remember The Little Rascals TV episode where the boys in “Our Gang” inaugurate “The He-Man Woman Hater’s Club” because not one of them has been invited to the Valentine’s Day party? What, you may ask, does this episode of The Little Rascals have to do with the lady who shot Andy Warhol?

Well, Valerie Solanas started her own club that served as a kind of “She-Woman Man-Haters Club,” but she called it the “Society for Cutting Up Men,” or SCUM. Spanky’s He-Man Woman Haters Club may have been the inspiration for SCUM, but Valerie’s platform was considerably more sinister. The Little Rascals’ goal was simply to exclude women, while Solanas’s purpose leaned more toward the extermination of men altogether. Perhaps Valerie should be applauded for her breadth of vision, but SCUM’s charter contains some hard-to-swallow rhetoric. Here’s an excerpt from Valerie’s “SCUM Manifesto”:

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex. . . . The male is a biological accident.

Damn, Valerie.

But let’s start at the beginning. Solanas was born in 1936 in Ventnor, New Jersey, which ipso facto provides a good excuse for acting like a lunatic. She was, however, smart, impulsive, and ambitious. The problem was that her father sexually abused her and then abandoned the family while Solanas was still very young, so maybe we need to cut her some slack for the extreme ideology she later adopted. While exhibiting increasing lunacy, Ms. Solanas managed to secure a psychology degree from the University of Maryland. That would be a “good looking out” to the Terrapin’s Psychology Dept.

Prostitution helped Solanas pay for college, where she engaged in lab work that she believed offered proof positive that the existence of men was accidental and wholly unnecessary. After her stint in graduate school, Solanas sat down in earnest to write the “SCUM Manifesto,” and in 1960 she found her way to Andy Warhol in New York City. Still making her way as a prostitute in the Big Apple, Ms. Solanas attained a kind of hanger-on status at the Factory, the home of Warhol’s art studio and the place to go for a good old-fashioned orgy.

In 1967 Valerie Solanas was determined to make her mark as a writer, and she thrust her theatrical opus, Up Your Ass upon Warhol. She was under the impression he would eventually produce this play in which the main character is a fast-talking, man-loathing prostitute. The play was so graphic even Warhol was grossed out, and he tossed it, much to the dismay of the fragile scribe.

The sad truth is that Solanas was, by now, deeply disturbed as evidenced by her decision to off Andy Warhol. After putting a bullet in the artist, she was sent to prison and passed around to various mental institutions.

As for Up Your Ass, after Warhol died, the play finally turned up in a mountain of the artist’s literary detritus, which was about to be tossed into the trash bin. Solanas’s main character is her alter ego, Bongi, a street-smart lesbian panhandler, and the play itself is “garbage-mouthed, dykey,” and “ anti-male,” by the playwright’s own account. In spite of Solanas’s apparent low opinion of her own work, when the play finally opened in 1999, an audience actually showed up at the George Coates Performance Works Theatre in San Francisco, and after the premiere a critic published a review in The Spectator Magazine:

No small part of the enjoyment to myself and other freaks is the attention paid to pussy, cock and balls . . . and of course, turds. Scatologists will feel right at home with the parts about cooking and dining on shit. (With chopsticks, no less!)

I hate how you can never get a reviewer to state whether or not he or she actually liked or disliked a performance. A ticket to the theater is just too damn expensive to purchase on the promise of turds, cocks, and balls alone, usually.

After stints at numerous state institutions, Solanas was released crazier than ever and spent the rest of her days harassing everyone around her and whoring. She died a lonely death in a welfare hotel in San Francisco in 1988, a bewildering little rascal to the end.

AILEEN WUORNOS

PROFILE

DAY JOB: You’re looking at it

CLAIM TO FAME: America’s most famous female serial killer

THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Florida highways and byways

It’s hard not to fall in love with Aileen Wuornos, especially when you see her disrobe in The Devil’s Advocate, starring fellow prostitute Al Pacino. Incorrect. I’m thinking of Charlize Theron, who played Wuornos in the movie Monster. It’s significantly harder to love the actual Wuornos, a woman who was probably nothing like Charlize Theron, and who was definitely not afraid to shoot you. Although it’s hard, probably impossible, to fall in love with Aileen, sometimes it’s easy to sympathize with her.

Aileen Wuornos (née Pittman) was born in 1956, raised in Troy, Michigan, and it just got worse from there. She never had the pleasure of meeting her father, a schizophrenic pederast serving a life sentence (until he hung himself in his cell) for the rape and attempted murder of an eight-year-old boy. When Aileen was six, her mother abandoned her and her brother, leaving the two shit-out-of-luck siblings with their grandmother, who died soon thereafter of liver failure, and their grandfather, who sexually abused and beat her.

According to numerous sources, around the time she turned eleven, Aileen began to prostitute herself for cigarettes and spare change, and she also began to have sex with her brother who was a year older. Even a dime-store psychologist can see that early on her concepts of sex and sexuality were outré, to put it mildly. Already Aileen’s life seemed to be testing the limits of crappy cosmic card dealing. Yet, killing folks is no way to behave; you can’t just go around shooting every asshole you meet. If you could, Karl Rove would probably not have lived long enough to go so bald.

Remember that breakfast cereal you invented called “Cereal Killers” that featured images of famous serial killers on the box? And did you receive a dismissive response from General Mills, too? Well, Aileen’s old watering hole, the Last Resort Bar, in Port Orange, Florida, actually did manage to capitalize on mealtime murderabilia, selling “Aileen Wuornos Crazed Killer Hot Sauce.” “Warning!” reads the label, “This Hot Sauce could drive you insane, or at least off on some murderous rampage. Aileen liked it and look what it did to her. . . . Not to be used by women with PMS.” I know, our idea was better, and it was not so sexist. I’ll let you know what the folk at Kellogg’s say, but it doesn’t look promising.

By 1989, Aileen the hooker had climbed the criminal ladder to Aileen the “Damsel of Death.” Aileen was a self-described “exit-to-exit” hooker who earned around $1,000/week working I-75 in Florida. Her average workweek consisted of fifty tricks, give or take a few. Who knows why or when she went completely bonkers, but by the time of her capture in 1991, Wuornos had killed seven men.

Initially Aileen claimed that her first “victim,” a man named Richard Mallory, had violently raped her, a mistake that prompted her to do him in. She claimed the same about the other six murders, although no indisputable proof could be found to substantiate her claims. When she was convicted at trial, she howled, “I’m innocent. I was raped! I hope you get raped! Scumbags of America!” a claim that might strike a more sympathetic nerve if she hadn’t stated quite cavalierly shortly before her execution, “I robbed [the men], and I killed them as cold as ice, and I would do it again.”

In 2002 when asked if she had any last words before her execution by lethal injection, Wuornos clarified everything: “I would just like to say I’m sailing with the rock, and I’ll be back, like Independence Day with Jesus. June 6, like the movie. Big mother ship and all, I’ll be back, I’ll be back.” Mother ship? Where did she get that New Age bombast? Did Tom Cruise slip the prison chaplain a copy of Dianetics? It would be just Aileen’s luck.

AMANDA LOGUE AND JASON ANDREWS

PROFILE

DAY JOBS: Modeling; acting in porn; Tweeting

CLAIM TO FAME: Natural-born idiots

THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Florida

How many times have you screwed yourself by thoughtlessly shooting off a text, talking about how you’re horny and about to murder somebody? If you’re anything like prostitutes/porn stars Amanda Logue and her boyfriend Jason Andrews, you are going to encounter real trouble.

Like many a doomed relationship, this one was about sex and greed. Jason was a Brit, an aspiring DJ with a penchant for techno and gay-for-pay. Amanda was a toothy fetish model, aspiring escort, and Southern belligerent. Together, they made porno movies, marketed themselves to both sexes and dreamed of a future together doing basically the same things, but with more money.

In 2010, a few weeks before they planned to commit the grisly murder of a tattoo artist who’d hired Amanda for a kinky sex party in St. Petersburg, Florida, the prosty pair posted pornographic videos of themselves grunting, shopping at a local flea market, and Tweeting bad puns about murder: “we’re killing time waiting for a party to find us”; and “something exciting surprises in store for here tonight.” One wonders, were they just trying to remove any lingering doubt about the depths of their stupidity? Regarding their deadly itinerary, the two went on to have a grammarian’s nightmare of an exchange on their Blackberries, illustrated by court transcripts released to the media:

Records from the court proceedings confirm that Andrews waited outside while the sex party was in full swing. After the guests left, Andrews apparently entered the victim’s home with a bottle of something and Amanda was, indeed, horny, although we are left to speculate on what kind of moral and/or physical evacuation of the bowels Andrews was referring to while in the loo.

If Jason and Amanda’s texts provide any insight as to their performance that night, we can probably use our imagination with some accuracy to reconstruct the scene and their tense conversation in the moments leading up to the murder.

A man lies naked on a massage table. Amanda dances around to something soulful and mellow to provide irony, probably Lionel Richie. Jason comes in complaining of cooties in his stomach and holds an empty bottle of Kaopectate.

Returning to a more fact-checkable reality, the next day a relative found the victim’s body in a scene of absolute carnage, while Logue Tweeted that she and Jason were “laying around eating popcorn and watching movies.” You know, throw them off the scent. Jason (code name Addison) and Amanda (code name Sunny Dae) were soon caught and charged with murder, dizzying as that prospect may seem.

MARY “BRICKTOP” JACKSON

PROFILE

DAY JOB: Jacking you up (and off)

CLAIM TO FAME: “The meanest woman in New Orleans”

THEATER OF OPERATIONS: The Big Easy, Louisiana

Mary Jane Jackson didn’t suffer fools—or anybody, really—and what’s more, she often kicked or stabbed the mortal shit out of anyone who got in her way. She was born in New Orleans in 1836, and at the age of thirteen she began a life of prostitution. By fourteen, she had established herself as the mistress of a local bartender. When the bartender decided that Mary, now seventeen years old, had become too much to handle, he locked her out of his establishment, leaving her to fend for herself alone in the Big Easy. Mistake. Mary, in a roaring fit of pique, rhino-charged back into the saloon and walloped the man, taking with her most of his nose and an ear in the fracas. The wrath of the redhead they called “Bricktop” was now a legitimate cause for concern.

Prosthetics have come a long way since John Miller fumbled around every morning, trying to attach his ball and chain arm, get breakfast ready, make the bed, and so on before doling out his daily ass whuppings. In fact, in 2011 a British man became the world’s first person to have a Smartphone docking system built into his prosthetic arm. But fear not. Even this incredible innovation will not be much help to Captain Hook. You get shit service on the high seas, and he probably doesn’t have many buccaneers with whom to play “Words with Friends,” anyway, considering his ornery disposition.

Bricktop soon moved on to a bordello on Dauphine St., where she was popular with the boys; she was beautiful, even glamorous, once you cleaned all the blood, nose parts, and other gory morsels off of her. Her presence made for a rambunctious house, however, and she was hard-pressed to find a respectable bagnio that would have her. Bricktop finally landed a steady gig at Archie’s Dance-House, and for the next year and a half, she terrorized the freak out of folks on Gallatin St. and surrounding areas.

While on the job, Bricktop committed two gruesome murders using her signature weapon: two five-inch blades attached by a center grip made of German silver. Talk about “a thing of beauty.” Imagine a perpetually agitated, prowling, hobgoblin-whore with long red hair and hands like the business end of a Cuisinart. As per usual, she was given the heave-ho from Archie’s, where they frowned on employees eviscerating their clientele.

Miss Jackson decided to go total freelance, and complete dementoid, eventually teaming up with Bridget Fury and one or two other Louisiana coquettes. The local papers had a ball. Here are some gems from an article describing Bricktop after another murder arrest in 1861:

In 1859, “Bricktop” and two other women knifed a man who objected to their foul language. In her short prison term for that offence, “Bricktop” encountered John Miller, temporarily serving as a jailer. Usually on the other side of the law, Miller had lost an arm and replaced it with an iron ball and chain attached to his stump; it constituted a horrifying weapon. The pair worked the old trick known as “buttock and twang.”

This year, Miller took a whip to “Bricktop” to give her a trashing. It was a mistake: “Bricktop” flogged him! She started by dragging him around the room by his own ball and chain. She bit his hand when he pulled a knife, then used the weapon to kill him.

Ah, the buttock and twang. That old gag. The buttock and twang would typically involve Bricktop removing a man’s pants, while Miller snatched the victim’s wallet and using his bowling ball hand smashed the guy’s head in. Bricktop was sentenced to ten years, but nine months into her sentence, the governor let loose most of the prison population, including Bricktop, who was never seen again. For this reason, some people in cineaste circles consider her the Keyser Söze of strumpets.

DELIA SWIFT (BRIDGET FURY)

PROFILE

DAY JOB: Mentee of Bricktop Jackson; pickpocket; thug

CLAIM TO FAME: Being furious

THEATER OF OPERATIONS: Late nineteenth-century New Orleans

Unlike her friend, mentor, and partner in crime, Mary Bricktop Jackson, Delia Swift wasn’t a local girl. She found her way to New Orleans via Ohio. But make no mistake about it, shortly after her arrival this violent vixen became a major figure in the seedy New Orleans underworld of gangs, brothels, and bedlam. Swift, like Bricktop, began her career as a prostitute around the age of twelve, selling her body while her father served as the whorehouse fiddler, until he killed a girl, leaving Delia with nothing.

Luckily, Delia was a skilled pickpocket, attractive, and completely demented, so she fared better on the street than most. Delia, who by now had been aptly renamed “Bridget Fury,” was also absolutely in love with knifing people. Convicted for shanking one fellow, the Fury escaped from a penitentiary in Cincinnati and made her way to New Orleans. Arrested in New Orleans, the state of Louisiana tried to send her back to Ohio, but the Ohio governor was no fool. He was content to let the New Orleans Police Department (an explosive oxymoron if there ever was one) deal with that troublesome redhead. Yes, along with a pair of sisters and sundry stragglers, one of the most feared gangs in all of New Orleans—a town known for ferocious gangs—was led by two wild and crazy hookers who looked a lot like a cross between Little Orphan Annie and early drafts of Botticelli’s Venus, where she was painted to look drunk and violent. It’s really not fair or accurate, though, to mention Annie in the same breath as Bricktop and Bridget Fury. Annie’s tween gaucheries look like child’s play next to those two.

The fuzz finally caught up with Bridget Fury and threw the book at her: life imprisonment. She had dozens of collars ranging from murder to throwing eggs at other hookers. An open and shut case? No. What followed is part of a continuing pattern to this day, but with somewhat less press coverage. It turned out that so many of the city’s top politicians, johns with political clout, were impressed by whatever Bridget Fury had going on that they granted her a general amnesty after she served just four years—a shady deal that was also afforded Mary Bricktop.

Can a girl really be guilty if she was born with a short fuse? The answer is yes, especially if after that fuse burns down, she traipses around town, carving up passersby on the street. Court transcripts from the period examine the issue:

We have seen her several times before the Recorder, and always wondered at the wildness and good-humor expressed by her face, and the politeness of her demeanor in Court. Though so smooth and smiling outside, it appears that she is in reality another Lucretia Borgia; that is a fiend incarnate when insulted.

So the message here is don’t judge a trick by his or her cover. And watch your back, especially in Louisiana.