CHAPTER TEN

The Game

Big Mo Guillot and Norma continued to play cat-and-mouse through the midfifties. Norma always knew when Big Mo’s men were following her—they tailed her so closely she could spot them with no trouble. She enjoyed giving them the slip and disappearing into St. Bernard or Jefferson Parish, on either side of Orleans Parish, where they had no authority. Big Mo stepped up his inspections; Norma darkened her house and operated elsewhere for a few nights, writing Big Mo anonymous letters to specify the elusive madam’s whereabouts, which sent his men scurrying all over the city. One night Marie Bernard, a madam Norma liked, called Norma to say that a cop was watching her house (at 6975 Canal Boulevard) and preventing a trick from leaving. Norma drove by slowly in her Cadillac. The cop recognized her and left Marie’s to tail her to the St. Bernard line. But Marie, unlike Norma, was not gifted in her line of work. “She had a lot of bad luck,” Norma said, “and never did succeed in having a really fine house; she was battling it all the time.” Marie certainly didn’t know how to make friends with the federal agents; she was eventually sent to jail for tax evasion. The feds located the linen service Marie used, counted each towel as a trick, and sent her up.

Big Mo was promoted to colonel, and Presley Trosclair, nicknamed Foots because he liked to kick people in the rear end—even his own men—became the new vice squad commander. He operated very differently from Big Mo. Whereas Guillot was straightforward in his approach, Foots liked the setup. When it came to catching the prostitutes, he sent in young, eager-beaver graduates fresh from the academy. Norma spent more time studying the graduates’ pictures and drinking coffee at the Meal-a-Minit, disguised as an old lady.

One of these young cops managed to learn one of Norma’s passwords. He called the house and asked for a girl, but he wanted the girl to meet him somewhere other than 1026 Conti. At the time Norma was using a house near City Park, a couple of miles out Esplanade Avenue from the Quarter. She decided to send Terry, a petite girl of French extraction with skin like white porcelain against her deep black hair. Terry was beautiful, and she knew it. She fit Norma’s definition of a chippie, a girl who never went with any man for very long, but men loved Terry—she was known around town as Yum-Yum because of her specialty—and Norma trusted and liked Terry. She would leave the house with her, and Terry was one of the few girls Norma socialized with.

Terry met the young man at the City Park house and took him to a bedroom. He gave her money, she undressed, and he pulled his badge. Then Foots made his entrance. This would have been all there was to it, because Terry refused to talk, except that Terry liked the young cop. As Foots stormed around the house, Terry said to her handsome captor, “What a pity that you have to be a copper and pull a badge just when I thought I was going to enjoy myself.”

Norma said, “Just like all men—they think they are God’s gift to the human race—his ego swelled. I knew Terry loved me and would never betray me. She wanted to date the policeman, but she said that if he ever asked her any of my business, that would end the romance. But this Paul was a stud, bragging to other cops about his free piece of ass. I had connections; I knew what he was saying—‘I’m gonna get Norma Wallace because I’m screwin one of her girls.’

“Every boy that graduated out of the police academy, I was his ambition. I don’t know what it was with these guys. Seemed like they thought if they could bust Norma Wallace they would be made captain.”

Norma said nothing to Terry, and Terry continued meeting Paul at her own apartment. But the next thing Norma heard from her contact within the police department was nothing short of a call to arms. “This boy,” her informer said, “knows your girl has a kid. He says she’s no good and he’s gonna rack her up and take her kid away.”

Norma had always told her girls to be on the lookout for unusual body marks on men. “Just in case a beef came up, I kept a record: What was the size of his tool? Was it especially big or little? Did it have any marks on it?”

When Terry heard what Paul had said about her child, she told Norma he had scars on one of his thighs. Norma called her connection in the department.

Paul was brought in and accused of consorting with a known prostitute. He was asked for his resignation, at which point he denied the allegation. His superior demanded that he drop his pants. Paul resigned from the department.

“Actually,” Norma said cooly, “he owes me a lot. Today he has a very fine business, has made a great success of it. If it wasn’t for me, he’d still be on his lousy little salary, might even have been killed by now. I think about him and hope he doesn’t hate me. I don’t hate him; I just wanted to show him that wasn’t how you played the game.”

On Sunday nights Norma and Terry liked to go to the Town and Country to dance and have some drinks. Norma especially liked the piano player there, Sam Adams, who was also a tenant on Governor Nicholls Street, and always stopped whatever he was playing to sing “Mona Lisa” as Norma came in, segueing into a spoof of “It’s So Nice to Have a Man Around the House.” For Terry, Sam would sing, “Don’t sit under the Yum-Yum tree with anyone but Terr-eee!” Foots thought they were soliciting men at the Town and Country, but the motel was in Jefferson Parish, out of his jurisdiction. Then Norma discovered the Black Orchid on Foy Street in Gentilly, a place with great Italian food and an intimate lounge. She and Terry often invited some of the other girls and started the night there. So Foots sent in a good-looking young vice cop named Nick Macheca.

The first several times Macheca went to the Black Orchid, he brought a date with him and spent the city’s money on dinner and drinks. He watched Norma; he watched the girls; he didn’t see any of them working out of the lounge. But he knew they were slick, and, anyway, he liked the place—it was becoming a home away from home for him. He stopped bringing dates. He bought drinks for Norma’s girls, he danced with them, he tried to get dates with them, he put the move on Yum-Yum—that was for himself, not his job—but not one of them tumbled.

Foots demanded action. Macheca and his partner, Norman Macaluso, found out that “Mr. Royal” was one of the passwords to get into the house. They phoned and said Mr. Royal told them to call when they got to town. Jackie asked several questions, but she didn’t like the answers; they didn’t get in.

So Macheca and Macaluso decided to stake out the place. They picked a cold, drizzly night and sat in a van, nothing but a shell of metal, and shivered as they watched for men going up the driveway at 1026 Conti. A couple of hours went by. No one went in, but someone was coming out.

Marie, the maid, came down the driveway in her starched white dress, holding a red umbrella over her head. Macheca and Macaluso watched her cross Conti Street and walk toward North Rampart. She disappeared around the corner. They sat back to wait some more, hugging themselves to keep warm and fogging the windows in the van with their breath.

A half hour later a sharp rapping on the side of the van startled them. “Who the hell knows we’re here?” Macaluso whispered to Macheca. Macheca shrugged. He opened the van window.

Marie held out a silver tray. “Miss Norma says she knows it’s cold out here, so she sent y’all some chicken sandwiches and hot coffee.”

Setups and surveillance were not producing results for Foots. He seemed to be nothing more than a footnote in Norma’s life. He needed to find another way.

Straight through the fifties the fake shows continued to be popular, especially with couples. On the way to the house the cabdrivers liked to tell their fares about the dog and pony shows at Norma Wallace’s. Word got around about a show with a pony and a girl, but that the girl would only do it if the audience was large enough. When the couples got to the house, they’d ask Norma if the girl and pony were going to perform that night. Norma would say, “Oh, the girl was oversexed; she screwed the pony to death.” Then they’d want to know if the girl was there. “No,” Norma would tell them, “she’s dead from screwin too.”

Norma said, “What the hell. I was selling something. And the people kept flocking in!”

Then there were tales about the greased-girl show, in which a guy tried to catch an oil-coated girl in thirty seconds or less. Soon rumor had it that on the third floor Norma had installed a two-way mirror with four rows of bleacher-type seats behind it. Now the word was that the guy chasing the girl was some poor sap who had no idea people were watching as he tried to catch the greased girl fast enough so that he didn’t have to pay for her. Simone was the girl who screwed the pony (it’s really a small donkey, those in the know said); she was the greased girl too. She was known as Norma’s all-around girl—she’d do anything if the price was right. Norma did, in fact, have a girl named Simone who was called the all-around girl. Fact and legend meshed, and the legend of Norma Wallace’s house grew.

And it made Foots Trosclair hot under the collar, especially after he’d lost one of his most promising young vice cops because of Norma. He became determined to close her house down on a crime-against-nature charge. He thought of a different kind of setup; he’d use a woman this time. He sent a woman traffic cop to the Davis Beauty Salon, where Norma had been a client for nearly ten years and had a standing appointment every other afternoon. The cop made an appointment, and as she was having her hair dyed an ungodly shade of red, she chatted away to Norma.

The next time Norma saw her, the cop left the busy downtown intersection where she was directing traffic and talked to Norma through her car window. “You know, Miss Norma,” she said, “I’m out here directing traffic in the hot summer and the cold winter. I’d sure rather work for you.” Through the grapevine Norma already knew the woman was thick with Foots.

She looked the cop up and down. She had feet like doorstops—must have worn at least a size ten shoe—and that hair! “Honey,” Norma said, “you couldn’t even be a maid in my house.” She shook her head sadly. “You look like death took a holiday.”

Norma had a good friend, Poppy, a very pretty young homosexual man who lived Uptown. One evening Poppy and his burly housemate threw a big party. Norma went with Darlene Ford, a hefty woman who owned a beauty parlor in the Quarter. Norma wore a satin moiré dress with a trumpet skirt that dragged the floor in the back and a fluffy boa so long that she had to wrap it around her neck twice so she wouldn’t trip on it—all in her favorite color, a luscious crimson. Darlene swathed her ample girth in yards of luminous purple and gold silk. But they were only pinpoints of phosphorescence in a sea of color that sparkled and glittered and waved and flowed, fabulous dresses that were jeweled and sequined and beaded and bugled, with necklines that plunged in the front and stood up in the back to showcase mile-high hairdos, many of which Darlene had created.

What a spectacle! Men dressed in women’s clothes and some of them so beautiful no one would have known they weren’t women. Everyone was drinking champagne and eating the delicious food that Poppy had spent days cooking. They were having a wonderful time—until the next-door neighbor came out on his porch and yelled that he had called the police.

The crowd broke and began running down the long steps from Poppy’s raised house, tripping on their skirts and twisting their ankles in their high heels so that it was a wonder they didn’t kill themselves. Norma’s long, gold Cadillac Coupe De Ville was parked right in front. “I jumped in my car, and you’ve never seen anything like it. Fairies with dresses on jumped in with me. Some were riding on the hood. Darlene, who weighed about two hundred and fifty pounds, couldn’t get in the car because it was so loaded. So she jumped up on the running board, and I took off. The car was tilting; wigs, high heels, and purses were flying.”

Norma drove a couple of blocks. Everyone looked back to see the cops pulling up in front of Poppy’s house; they all screamed. Norma whisked them away.

“I always did say there were three sexes—the male, the female, and the otherwise. I can guarantee you we would have made front-page headlines on that one.”

It seemed like everybody heard about it anyway. Norma’s police buddies kidded her for days. But it got Foots thinking. He had arrested a young homosexual on a crime-against-nature charge. He figured the boy knew Norma, so he offered him a deal.

A few weeks later Norma’s young friend called her: He had a couple from out of town who wanted to see a show, could he send them over? Norma turned him down flat. Jackie tried to talk her into it, but Norma refused. Later her friend leveled with her—the couple was a vice cop and a policewoman, and Foots had set it up.

“Gee, I must have been born with a veil,” Norma said.

Headlines across the front pages of the city’s newspapers charged Chep Morrison and Joe Scheuring with laxity and called for Scheur-ing’s removal as police superintendent. Scheuring had been indicted by the Orleans Parish grand jury for malfeasance in office, but Judge Bernard Cocke dismissed the charge. One of the city councilmen, Fred Cassibry, decided to take on Scheuring’s ouster as his personal cause. Morrison, more stubborn than ever in the face of this adversity, stood up for his appointee while Scheuring insisted that Aaron Kohn had gathered his information from “the scum of the underworld.” But when the Special Citizens Investigating Committee delivered its final report in April 1954, the first of its thirty-nine recommendations was the dismissal of Scheuring. Morrison, for the public record, traced the committee’s information on lotteries and prostitution to that gleaned during the early days of his administration, when Adair Watters was superintendent. He insisted that Scheuring had eradicated these problems. In November 1954 the Louisiana Supreme Court reversed Judge Cocke’s decision to dismiss the malfeasance charge against Scheuring. Still, the mayor refused to fire Scheuring.

So Judge Cocke cleared Scheuring of the charge the following January, and Scheuring immediately filed a lawsuit against Councilman Cassibry for defamation of character, asking a hundred thousand dollars in damages. Morrison and Scheuring seemed invincible.

The tables turned when Kohn served a ten-day jail term for contempt rather than divulge his sources to the grand jury. After his release he came to be regarded as a martyr for the cause of law enforcement. Irate citizens saw him as a victim of political intimidation. They wrote letters and made phone calls. Finally, they marched on City Hall.

The demonstration got to Morrison. With more underhanded machinations he had one of his loyal administrators call for the removal of Scheuring. Morrison continued to defend his chief publicly; the chief continued to refuse to resign. Whatever took place behind closed doors will remain a secret, but less than a month later Scheuring retired with accolades for his accomplishments and sacrifice.

Morrison had escaped total disgrace, but Kohn, the SCIC, and his own stubbornness had damaged his reputation as a progressive administrator. The mayor, though, still had ambitious political aspirations. Second in command to Scheuring was a retired army officer and a churchgoing resident of silk-stocking Uptown. In a savvy political move that gave his administration a fresh image of credibility and respectability, Morrison named Provosty Dayries as his new police superintendent in 1955.

Dayries was known as a man of honesty, integrity, and, above all, fairness. He adhered to a strict moral code; he remained above the political fray. He liked to wear a uniform reminiscent of World War II—brown jodhpurs, khaki shirt, short brown jacket, and big black boots. He carried a riding crop, which he snapped smartly against his boot with good effect. Around City Hall, though, the outfit and the attitude got him called Mr. Military, the Iron Man, and Mr. Stoic.

Too fair-minded to consider a frame, Dayries continued inspections in the mode of Big Mo Guillot. Norma, however, assessed him as a “goon,” meaning not the gangster type but someone who is not street-smart.

Late one night she was looking out the front shuttered window toward the alley when a big Buick swooshed up fast to the door. Four men flew out of it, three uniforms and one in what appeared to be an English riding outfit—boots, whip, the whole nine yards. He strode directly to the window. Norma slammed it down. He called out, “I’m the superintendent of police.”

Norma had never seen Dayries. Her response was to pull the shade and put out the hall light. The next thing she heard was “Break down the door.”

Norma was home alone, and, as usual when she was in, the front door was unlocked. A few minutes later, though, down came the unlocked door. She heard one of the uniformed cops coming around from the back say, “I could have told you the door was unlocked.”

Dayries walked into the hall and found Norma standing with her arms folded. “Now you’ve done it!” she said.

Irate, Dayries countered, “You pulled that window down in front of my face!”

Norma knew two of the cops who had come in with him; they’d been trying to catch her for a long time. She called them by name. “They brought you here, and you’re going to be terribly disappointed,” she told Dayries. “But come along—I’ll give you a tour of the house.”

On every wall hung the nude paintings. Dayries looked at each one, making no comment. He stopped in front of a nude girl on a horse. Norma waited; still, he remained mum. “Superintendent,” she said finally, “isn’t that a beautiful girl?”

He took his time answering, then amazed her by saying, “I think the horse is pretty too.”

“Yes,” Norma agreed, “but nobody wants to screw a horse.”

Dayries tapped his crop against his boot, then continued through the house. He knocked on walls and opened drawers and closets on the first and second floors. Norma led him up the stairs to the third floor. She knew what he was looking for; sure enough, he spied a cabinet and became fixated, but only for a moment. He moved on, bending to peep under a low bed.

“Superintendent, please,” Norma said, “it’s dusty under there. You don’t want to crawl in all that dust, do you?”

He rose. “I’ve had a lot of complaints about this place,” he told her. He looked out the window to the alley below. “Men come down that alley.”

“Yes,” Norma agreed, “every drunk ever passed puked in it. They named it Puke Alley, in fact. They urinate in it too. It’s had a lot of play. One night a couple of girls had a knife fight down there. Some poor do-gooder came along and tried to put a stop to it. They cut all his clothes right off him, left him nothing but his tie.”

Dayries made no comment but turned his attention to the cabinet. “What have you got in there?”

“Listen,” Norma said, “I can’t hide anybody in that cabinet. It’s way too small, right?”

“Where’s the key to it?” He rapped his crop against the door.

“I tell you what—why don’t you bust it open and see what’s in it?”

He looked at her. “I’ll take your word for it.”

Back downstairs he asked her for her maiden name. When she told him Badon, he wanted to know if she was kin to the Badon from Covington who had been in the army with him. She said that was her cousin, and Dayries began chatting about the army as he strolled to the back of the house. Norma’s maid, Marie, sat in the kitchen.

“What’s she doing here?” Dayries wanted to know.

“She’s keeping me company, Superintendent. With your permission.”

Once he had satisfied himself that he’d been through the house thoroughly and was preparing to leave, Norma said, “Who’s going to fix my door?” Dayries didn’t reply—more of his strong, silent routine. Norma pressed the issue. “Are you going to send over a carpenter?”

She decided she had stumped him. “Never mind,” she said dismissively, “I’ll fix the door. You can go.”

When Morrison appointed Dayries, he asked his new superintendent how long it would take him to clean up the city. Dayries thought about it and said he could do it in two years. The mayor gave him the command to get started. But either Morrison didn’t know his man or he underestimated him. Dayries approached his charge with alacrity, high standards, and a true determination to institute change, qualities that are not always appreciated in the Big Easy.

One evening one of the city’s politicos was being feted for his upcoming marriage. The party was taking place at Lenfant’s, a restaurant on Canal Boulevard that had an enormous banquet room. The mayor, the district attorney, the councilmen and assessors, the sheriff, judges—everyone who was anyone in city politics was there. Even the legislators had come in from Baton Rouge. Everyone was drinking and eating the mounds of shrimp and crawfish heaped on the tables. The room was dark; they were watching a movie.

Whenever Severn Darden, the district attorney, raided a house of ill repute, he confiscated any pornographic films he found and stored them in the basement at City Hall (now Gallier Hall), where the mayor’s office was. The films were shown any time there was a stag party.

One of the mayor’s aides was running the projector. The only sounds he heard other than the movie were the sucking of crawfish heads, the slurping of drinks, and the guffaws and whistles of the men in the room, until there was a loud bump-bump-bumping at the door. He stopped chewing and turned the volume down. The door flew open, someone switched the lights on, and the superintendent of police bounded into the room. He wore his jodhpurs, boots, and a felt hat. In one hand was his whip, in the other his police whistle, which he began to blow with a piercing breeh! breeh! breeh! stopping only to bellow, “This place is raided!” as the room flooded with uniformed cops.

Judges, councilmen, assessors threw down their napkins, spit out their crawfish, and hauled ass to the opposite door of the room. Only two people didn’t move, the mayor and the aide running the projector. The aide calmly popped a crawfish tail into his mouth; he wasn’t about to get up for anybody. After all, he was eating his crawfish, and, anyway, he was with the mayor. What could possibly happen to them?

Morrison wiped his mouth and slowly rose from the table. Dayries stopped the whistle screaming; he stood at attention. Behind him were naked people, larger than life, as the movie continued to roll.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” the mayor said. Then he began to yell, his voice getting louder and louder. “You stupid son of a bitch, you Uptown asshole, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?” He shook with rage. “If you and your men are not out of here in the next minute"—he raised a fist—"you and every goddamned cop in here is fired!”

From his chair the aide watched as the tide changed directions. Now policemen were hauling ass out the door and councilmen and assessors and judges were turning back toward the tables. Dayries was red in the face, but with great aplomb he cracked his whip, just a little off his mark—he aimed for his boot but caught himself on the thigh. To his credit, he didn’t wince. Instead, he clicked his bootheels together and executed a perfect military turn.

The door slammed shut. The aide was the first to break the silence in the banquet room. “Oooooo, ooooo,” he wailed, “hit me, beat me, make me write bad checks!”

The men at the stag party went wild.

Norma was miffed about the expense to replace her front door. When she heard about the Lenfant’s fiasco from her myriad contacts and customers in city government, she went directly to her lawyer’s office. “You tell him,” she said to Arthur de la Houssaye, himself an Uptowner and member of the Boston Club, “I’ve been inspected for lunch, dinner, and supper. They ring the bell when I’m bathing, I let them in. I get out of a sound sleep for an inspection. I’ve had it!” The truth of it was that the stiff-spined, aristocratic superintendent just wasn’t as much fun as Big Mo Guillot. He didn’t know how to play the game.

De la Houssaye went to see Dayries. He reported to Norma that, without any hesitation at all, the superintendent had agreed there would be no more inspections without a search warrant.

Dayries never went to Norma’s again, but Joseph Giarrusso, the head of narcotics and soon-to-be assistant superintendent of police, arrived with the first warrant. He’d acted on good information, but when he got to the house, Norma was home alone. Gracious as an Uptown socialite, she invited him in and offered the commander a glimpse of her collection of nudes. As they walked around the house, Giarrusso found himself wondering how old Norma was. He knew she was older than he was, but just how much older was hard to tell. She was attractive—shapely, not sloppy like some middle-aged women; she kept herself well.

Twice more Giarrusso got warrants. Each time he was well informed and each time the house was as quiet as a graveyard. He understood that Norma was as well informed as he was.

Years later Norma told Wayne Bernard that, after those three trips to the house, Joe Giarrusso extended an invitation of his own. “Giarrusso got Bubba to set him up with Norma,” Wayne said. “He asked her to meet him on the levee behind Ochsner Hospital, out in Jefferson Parish. She met him, but nothing took place. She said, ‘If he wants to meet me somewhere, let’s go to the Royal Orleans, the Roosevelt, someplace nice like the Blue Room. Don’t tell me to meet you on the Mississippi River levee, for God’s sake!’ “

That’s when Norma gave Joe Giarrusso the nickname Old Bucket Head. He was to become the next superintendent of police, but even if Norma had known that she wouldn’t have cared. In the late 1950s Norma was at the absolute top of her game. She was irreverent, she was cavalier, and, above all, she picked the men she wanted to go to bed with.

Norma spotted John Datri at the head of a Mardi Gras parade, carrying the flag. He was part of the mounted police unit. She liked his tall, lean good looks—he was dark haired and young, just her kind of man. Not only that, she liked how he looked on a horse.

“Who’s that guy?” she asked the friend who was with her at the parade.

“Aw, you don’t want to mess with him—he’s trouble,” her friend said.

But Norma was looking for trouble. In the couple of years since she’d bought the Waggaman property, her marriage to McCoy had not gotten any better; it was almost finished if their sex life was any indication. John Datri was young—younger than Mac—and virile.

On Decatur Street was a place where off-duty police met. Norma and Terry haunted the joint until they found Datri and a friend there one afternoon. Norma sent Datri a beer. He told the bartender to send it back.

“Do you know who that is?” the bartender asked.

“Yeah, I know. She’s that old ex-whore, that madam—I don’t want to mess with her. I get in enough trouble without looking for it.”

Norma brought the beer back herself. “What’s the matter?” she asked. “You won’t drink my beer?”

“I don’t want to get involved,” Datri said.

“You won’t get involved,” Norma assured him. “No one’s trying to set you up.” So he drank a few beers with her.

She then proceeded to set Datri up. She got Terry (Yum-Yum) to arrange a double date with Datri’s friend—Yum-Yum with Datri, Norma with the friend. They were to meet at the Black Orchid. Datri’s friend had some trouble convincing him they should go, but in the end Datri couldn’t resist Yum-Yum.

At the Black Orchid, as arranged, Yum-Yum asked Datri’s friend to dance; Norma asked Datri. They danced and talked, then Norma said, “Do you see what’s happening here?” Datri didn’t. “We’re going to swap dates.”

“Whose idea is that?” Datri wanted to know. He’d been having a few ideas about Yum-Yum.

Norma told him it was her idea; she told him how she’d always liked a man on a horse. When she finished she asked him, “So, do you mind?” By that time Datri didn’t mind at all.

Datri’s friend called him off to the side. “I’ve got bad news for you,” he said. “Yum-Yum wants me.”

“Son of a bitch!” Datri snarled, trying to keep a straight face.

Norma called Datri the Wild One. “Date-tree,” she told him, “you’re crazy.” Datri claimed he was crazy because he’d been on the USS Enterprise when the Japanese bombed it. He would take a dare on anything, like playing chicken at night on horseback on the narrow top of the Mississippi River levee, or getting in the middle of a bunch of bikers fighting with broken bottles and breaking it up. Or throwing an envelope with his cut of bribe money in it back at a fellow police officer, saying, “Stick it up your ass.” Or cockily telling Big Mo Guillot that he knew Norma Wallace paid him off.

Norma Wallace, 1920s, with her beloved Vidalia, a police dog whose name became a local term for an out-of-towner seeking a prostitute.

Norma, standing behind Andy Wallace and his bootlegger cronies. She took his name and the seven-carat diamond ring she’s wearing before he eventually shot and wounded her.

Norma, 1930s. “Whores make good wives, but madams don’t. When you’re making money in a whorehouse, that makes you independent and hard to get along with as a wife in the first place.”

Norma with her second husband, Pete Herman, at Shady Pond, her farm in Pearl River, 1936.

Pete Herman was twice the world bantamweight boxing champion before becoming a French Quarter nightclub owner. Norma first operated above Pete’s Ringside Bar and Lounge on the corner of Conti and Burgundy.

1026 Conti Street, late 1940s. Once owned by Ernest Bellocq, the famed photographer of the Storyville prostitutes, and located across the street from the Greyhound station, Norma’s third business address was in many ways ideal.

Canal Street, early 1950S. At the Meal-a-Minit, Norma disguised herself as an old lady to spy on the cops who frequented it and to learn the new faces.

Norma first saw John Datri mounted, at the head of a Mardi Gras parade, carrying the police flag. Off duty, he would soon dress in cashmere and drive the gold Coupe DeVille that marked him as Norma’s new companion.

Norma Wallace at her second grand jury appearance, 1954.

In 1962, every cadet out of the police academy wanted the instant prestige that would come with shutting down Norma Wallace’s forty-two-year operation. Top left, Big Jim Garrison, the New Orleans DA, who sought to reform the French Quarter; top right, Officer Paul Nazar, whose upset stomach and Mediterranean eyes gained him entrance to 1026 Conti Street; left, Frederick Soulé (center, with bowtie), commander of the vice squad that finally busted Norma.

Below: Norma’s house in Waggaman, later the Tchoupitoulas Plantation Restaurant, where men paid well to finally introduce Norma to their wives. The nudes that once hung at 1026 Conti (above) were transferred to the walls of the restaurant; there, however, the patrons were required to keep their clothes on.

Wayne Bernard, the boy next door who fell in love with “Mrs. Patterson,” at their getaway in Poplarville, Mississippi, 1972.

“It’s amazing what a little Bacardi and Coke will do”: Norma in the living room of Tchoupitoulas, circa 1965, when her relationship with her youngest husband was at its stormiest and most romantic.

“If the truth will make you clean, I’ll come clean . . . all the way.” Norma’s tell-all interview at age seventy-one won her an invitation to speak at the New Orleans Press Club, where she received a key to the city.

Or getting a vasectomy.

“What’s that?” he asked Norma.

“They just go clip-clip.” Norma scissored her fingers through the air.

“Wait a minute!” the Wild One yelled.

“Date-tree, you can’t go on having children like this.” His fourth had just been born. “You can’t afford what you’ve got.” Then she dared him to get a vasectomy. He went to Dr. Frank Gomila’s office and had it done.

Datri liked going to bed with Norma. He liked her body, which was better than those of some twenty-five-year-olds he’d slept with—her large, perfect, creamy white breasts, her milk white pubic hair. He liked it when she told him, “Date-tree, you Italians are the best lovers in the world,” and he’d say, “Aw, go ahead. You gotta tell that to all the dagos.”

And he liked talking to Norma. He liked her stories about the house, because he never went to Conti Street. She told him that when a girl wanted to work for her, she made her strip down. If she passed the inspection, Norma hired her and got her a new wardrobe. Norma told him that she paid the IRS every year, like religion, in the neighborhood of five thousand dollars; that she’d had a fabulous love affair with Phil Harris; that of all the movie stars who’d ever come to her place, Don Ameche was the pussiest-eatin son of a bitch she’d ever seen—"He ate every girl in the house!” And Norma told Datri why she liked younger men: “When I feel like I want to get laid, I want somebody who can get a good hard-on, not some old boy who can’t.”

Datri also liked to go out with Norma. One night they arrived at the Black Orchid just as a fight broke out. Datri spun one of the guys around and decked him. “Good shot, Date-tree,” Norma said, and they walked into the lounge as if nothing had happened.

Datri was getting his kicks. He tooled around in Norma’s gold Coupe De Ville like he owned it. At first he didn’t like the cashmere sports coat she wanted him to wear to the Town and Country—“Button the top button of your shirt,” she said, “I like the hood look"—but he got used to it and started liking it enough that she bought him another one. He liked the leather jacket too and the cigarette case with the built-in lighter and the money she put in his pocket every night they spent together. He especially liked the outboard motor Norma gave him for Christmas. She’d sent George, her porter, to get it but told Datri, “He doesn’t know an outboard from an outhouse,” and gave him the money to get it himself.

Foots Trosclair heard about the outboard, and he wanted to nail Datri and take another shot at Norma too. One night he went to Datri’s house and told him to take a ride. In the car he casually asked Datri what time it was. Datri looked at the heavy gold watch on his wrist and gave him the time.

“Where’d you get the watch?” Foots asked.

“You know where I got it,” Datri growled. The watch had been a gift from Norma and was engraved with both their initials on the back.

“Give it to me,” Foots demanded.

“Over my dead body! The only way you’re gonna get this watch is to cut my arm off!”

Foots took Datri downtown. He wanted him to make a statement about his relationship with Norma. Datri started, “I, John Datri, am making this statement under duress and against my will.”

“No, no, no!” Foots yelled. “That’s not what I want!” He ripped the paper out of the typewriter. Datri continued to start each statement the same way; Foots ripped out each page and stomped it on the floor. They shouted, they threatened violence. They went on like that until one of the other officers made them both go home. Foots eventually got Datri by sheer luck—he walked into a barroom brawl and found Datri in the middle of it. Datri got fired.

But that was some time after he and Norma had drifted apart, no big scene, just a natural end to their yearlong affair. A few weeks later Datri ran into Yum-Yum at a country-western bar on Magazine Street.

“Ummmmmm,” Yum-Yum said, “I’ve been waiting a long time.” She drove him to the Town and Country Motel. Datri had half his clothes off when Yum-Yum took him in the chair.

Datri didn’t think Yum-Yum was better in bed than Norma—well, except perhaps in one category. “That’s why they called her Yum-Yum,” he said.

Late one afternoon Norma drove over to the Davis Beauty Salon. It wasn’t her regular appointment day, but sometimes she popped in for a quick fix if she had special plans. Davis didn’t mind that Norma never bothered to phone ahead; she always tipped him well, often as much as fifty bucks.

The salon was being painted, and cans of terra-cotta paint had been stored under the carport behind the building when the painters left for the day. Norma nosed her spotless white Cadillac, only a few months old, between the carport posts and crashed into the paint cans.

Janice Roussel, one of the stylists, heard the clatter and yelled to Davis, “Franky, I told you to tell those painters to move the cans!” She was mortified when the back door opened and Norma walked in.

“Franky, baby,” Norma said, “you won’t believe what just happened.” She leaned back in one of the shampoo chairs and closed her eyes, completely relaxed.

Davis chuckled and kept working on his customer. Janice grabbed a handful of towels, went out to the car, and tried to wipe off the paint. She came back in, crying with frustration.

“What the hell, Janice,” Norma said. “I can buy another Cadillac.”

Davis was so amused by the episode that he told two hairdresser friends about it. “You do Norma Wallace?” they shrieked. They insisted that he take them to one of the girlie shows.

Davis had never been to the house on Conti Street. Norma told him to drive to the back, where she’d be waiting at the door to the parlor. She gave the three men drinks, then took them to the second parlor off to the side of the courtyard, where a big blonde was playing the piano and several girls were dancing. They took their seats, Davis next to Norma. The piano player thumbed a run down the keyboard, gave a flourish, and a girl jumped up on the chair in front of one of Davis’s friends, where she did a slow strip. Moving to the music, she writhed and rubbed her hands down her bare body, dancing closer and closer until she was right in the guy’s face. Then she started on the next fellow.

Just when it was Davis’s turn, there came a thumping on the outside wall. The piano player abruptly stopped, and she and the girls disappeared, swift and silent. Norma took an envelope from the drawer of a small mahogany table and stuck it through a slot in the wall Davis hadn’t noticed. Then she called the girls back, but Davis was ready to call it a night.

“Don’t worry, Franky,” Norma said. “It’s all part of the game.” His two friends still wanted a free trip upstairs.

But Davis was thinking about his car parked out back and newspaper headlines and the business he might lose. He didn’t care if he hadn’t gotten his turn; he wanted to leave. “I guess I just don’t have enough of the animal in me,” he told Norma, his car keys jangling in his hand.

Norma picked up the phone. “Bubba, I got something for you, honey.” A couple of her girls had been working at the Sugar Bowl Courts on Airline Highway when they spotted four high rollers driving around in a Cadillac. Four men were wanted in connection with a series of robberies in Jefferson Parish. The previous night they’d hit the Chesterfield Southport, tied up the night watchman with venetian blind cords, taped his mouth, knocked him out, and left him in the casino.

Bubba went out alone, riding reconnaissance as he did almost every night. Around midnight he spotted a car pulled up behind some hedges. Sure enough, it was a Cadillac, and four hoods were sitting in it. Without thinking Bubba pulled his big nickel-plated gun and approached the car. It was only after he’d announced himself and declared the men under arrest that he realized he had no idea how he was going to get four armed robbers out of the car by himself.

Coming down the sidewalk he heard clip-clop, clip-clop, a woman out walking alone. “Hey, lady,” he called to her, “I’m from the sheriff’s office. Will you call over there and tell them I need some help here?”

The woman looked at Bubba’s big, shiny gat and took off at a dead run. That woman ain’t gonna call nobody, Bubba thought. He held the gun steady, but he could feel himself breaking out in a cold sweat. Any minute these bozos were going to get smart enough to realize they had him.

The howl of sirens coming from all directions was a sweet sound indeed. The robbers were caught red-handed with the money from the casino, cordless venetian blinds, and a roll of tape. They’d also stolen a sack of brand-new chips, which they planned to take back to the Chesterfield and cash in.

Norma’s brother, Elmo, got in on the game too. In the late fifties Elmo was running a couple of lounges, one of them the Gold Room on St. Charles Avenue. He heard on the radio that a girl had been brutally murdered and found in a canal down in Plaquemines Parish, below New Orleans. He had a feeling she was the girl who’d left his lounge about four that morning with a man Elmo knew by name. He called Norma; Norma relayed the information to Bubba; Bubba called a friend in the Plaquemines sheriff’s office. About an hour later the officer called back and said, “Bubba, you hit it right on the head.” They’d located the man’s car and found strands of the girl’s hair as well as a bloody hatchet in the trunk.

Another time Norma called Bubba to tell him that an escaped convict had been showing up at about four or five o’clock in the morning to see one of her girls. Bubba hid out in a truck belonging to the Holzer Sheet Metal Company, next door to 1026 Conti. He had a clear view of Norma’s driveway and back entrance. In the very early morning he saw a lone man coming up the drive. Bubba scrunched farther down behind the wheel of the truck. Then he sat up a bit—the guy walked exactly like someone he knew.

The man got close enough for Bubba to see his face, and Bubba practically fell on the floor of the truck. This was a big-name judge. He walked right up to Norma’s back door. When Norma slid open the little window, the judge said, “Is the coast clear, baby?”

“Yeah, honey,” Norma said, opening the door, “come on in.” Later she told Bubba, “He’d have soiled his pants if he’d seen you.”

It took a few nights, but Bubba got his man, and the escapee was returned to prison. His colleagues were impressed. “What’s the deal, Bubba, you got a crystal ball?” they asked.

“Yeah, I got me a crystal ball,” Bubba told them. He just didn’t say that it had gray hair.

Bubba Rolling became chief of detectives in Jefferson Parish, but Norma never paid him one dime for protection. With Bubba, information bought another kind of insurance.

Many big-time politicians patronized Norma’s house regularly. Most of them, like the judge, had charge accounts. Occasionally, though, these big boys would get out of hand, which was a sticky situation for Norma. She couldn’t call the New Orleans police; they would have loved to throw a few judges, or even the governor, in jail—Earl Long used to plan gubernatorial campaigns in Norma’s kitchen, then his driver would take him over to pick up Earl’s paramour, the Bourbon Street sensation Blaze Starr. So Norma would call Bubba, as she did the night the legislators came in from Baton Rouge and got drunk and rowdy, then belligerent, and started pushing her girls around. Bubba brought them back to Baton Rouge in his police car, even paid the girls for them. The next day the legislators were hungover, humble, and apologetic.

Norma kept information on everybody who was anybody in her big black book: their identification marks, their nicknames—like Uncle, Sunshine, Shoestring, Pin, Toothpick, Licorice Stick, Cow-boy—how much they owed, how much they paid, when they were there, the girls they liked. She had them all, should it ever come to that. In the late fifties, at the height of her power and influence, someone asked Norma if there was anyone she didn’t have in her pocket. It took her a moment, then she said, “The President.”