Xaviera Hollander - The Happy Hooker - My Own Story

I could see he wasn’t asking me if I wanted to make an investment, he was telling me I had to. I was making money by then, having left the UN job to go full-time into the business, so I gave Murray $2,000. He said he would put it in the street for me, shylock it. And for me, he explained, it would mean making five to ten percent interest on the money each week and of course getting it back in a short time. Naturally I let myself forget I was dealing with somebody who was involved with very many bad people and who was, even though he helped me, a pretty bad character himself.

After I gave the money to Murray I waited each week for some payment on interest, but nothing happened except that Murray kept coming around for freebies and gave me excuses why he didn’t have my money. Finally, when I started to be insistent with Murray, he said, “Look, Xaviera, don’t worry. You’ll get your money. just don’t bug me. Remember what happened to those jerks that bugged you?”

The message was very clear. Now the problem was how to stop Murray from coming around. I would gladly have given him another thousand if I never had to see him again. I was almost as worried about getting involved with Murray and his people as I was about the pictures. He even was sending friends to me and telling me to be nice to them. I would almost get sick every time he called.

And then the FBI approached me.

I was still in the same Fifty-first Street studio when the doorbell rang. The doorman called up and said the FBI wanted to see me. I was terrified, even though the murder – or maybe fake-murder – had happened three months before.

So into my apartment came this nice-looking FBI agent, Bill Tillman. He seemed to be a pleasant-type Irishman, but remembering Mac, the fake cop, I asked him if he could please identify himself. He was indeed FBI, very nice, and then he showed me a picture of Murray and asked me if I knew the person whose picture he was holding up.

I almost fainted. I really thought, Xaviera, this is it. You’re going to hang, you’re going to have the electric chair, they’ve found out you murdered this guy and are involved in a triple murder. But somehow I kept my composure.

You don’t fool around with FBI people, so I said, “Yes, I know him. He is Murray the moving man.” Then I asked this FBI man, “Why are you looking for Murray?”

Bill said they had followed his steps and found out that a couple of months ago he was at my place quite often in the afternoons.

“We’re looking for this man because he’s killed about eight people so far that we know about,” Bill told me. “He’s involved with fraud, hijacking, bootlegging, white slavery, and any other illegal thing you can imagine. What is your connection with him?”

Of course, I didn’t want to tell him what had happened and that I was a prostitute, but I was stupid enough not to take the phone off the hook, and it kept ringing, and I had to answer it, and he quickly got the idea.

“Have you had any bad experience with this man?” Bill asked.

I told him that I shylocked $2,000 with Murray and hadn’t even been paid back any interest. Bill said I could whistle for my money, and I’d better not ever see Murray again.

Just as he was leaving, the FBI man told me that he was not after prostitutes, but just don’t let him catch me fooling around with girls underage or violating the Mann Act. At that time I had been in the business only four or five months, so I didn’t know about those things. But I asked some friends, and now I’m very careful not to have a girl under eighteen working for me.

Once I took a girl friend down to Miami for convention work, but I made her buy her own ticket and we left on separate planes. That way nobody can say I’m transporting girls over state lines for immoral purposes, which is the Mann Act.

Murray called me only one more time to tell me the FBI was putting big heat on him, investigating every bar where he hung out, and he couldn’t get my money loose. I was so thankful he was going away that I didn’t care about losing the money. Then he told me something which relieved me more than anything else.

“Look, kid” – his voice was harsh in my ear – “there wasn’t any killing out there at the cemetery. I scared those bums into putting on that show for you. I figured since you ain’t gonna see me no more, you ought to know. When they found how well I was connected, they just melted away and gave me your pictures.”

I wanted to believe him, I still want to believe him, and I think I do. But I remember the FBI man telling me Murray had killed eight people, and I can still see the way the young blond guy sort of slid to the ground.

But from this experience I learned to be very careful about letting anybody get anything on me, and especially I have never let any pictures be taken of me sucking a cock or anything like that.

In my opinion, no good brothel can operate more than a year in New York without being raided at least once by police.

I have been busted three times in my own house and once in the establishment of another madam, Georgette Harcourte. Each arrest is a serious nuisance, because all we want to do is get on with our work and not bother, or be bothered by, anybody else.

You can try protecting yourself by carefully screening your phone callers, making sure there is no money exchanged until the customer has participated, or by using police locks to keep out police. Today I have an answering service take all my calls. I have special code words with my customers, and I call them back if they leave the correct message.

But no matter how careful you are, or how many precautions you take, if they want to penetrate you, so to speak, they can always find a way. The new no-knock laws make it easier for them to push their way in legally, and they don’t need search warrants to seize your books and telephones.

The methods, reasons, and penalties for arrest are as different as they are sometimes ridiculous.

A neighbor can report you for disturbance, a rival madam can report you to cripple the competition, or an irrational customer with some imagined grievance can yell police, which is, I believe, what happened to me the second time I got busted.

A little lunatic called Nicky, whom I threw out for bugging my girls and upsetting my clients, ran down to the local police precinct and filed a complaint.

“They’re running a whorehouse up there, and they discriminate against Jewish people,” he told them. The truth is that I had thrown him out because of his lunatic behavior. And certainly not because he was a Jewish lunatic.

But the police dug into all my financial business, came up with a Dun and Bradstreet triple-A rating, and told the judge I was the biggest madam operating in New York City today. It looked bad for a while, but my lawyer got the charge reduced to a misdemeanor, and in the end I got off with a $100 fine. Plus a staggering legal fee, naturally.

The arrest before that happened in my own house, too, and I admit it was partly through my own carelessness, because I was too busy that night to check out a client’s credentials. Normally I would ask a caller to prove he is a customer by identifying something in my house or describing to me the girl he saw last time. Or, if he is new, to give me another client’s name as a reference. But this night a guy named Artie called, said he was from Brooklyn and that he was a friend of Mr. Roberts.

Well, that usually would not be sufficient recommendation, because I know about six Mr. Robertses. But he sounded very charming, and also you can say I might have been a little greedy, because he wanted to bring along another three customers.

They arrived about an hour later, and the bedrooms were full, and a couple of guys were ahead of them, but they didn’t mind waiting.