The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld (18 page)

“No particular hurry,” he said. “I’m just curious.”

He saw her glance down at the seat beside her, where a brown envelope lay. Her manicured hand came away from the steering wheel. She picked up the envelope and tossed it in Giarrusso’s lap. “That’s yours,” she said.

Giarrusso tossed the envelope back into the space between them. “I’m not gonna take it,” he told her.

Norma tried her sweet talk with him, the oh-come-on-we-all-know-how-to-play-this-game routine, but Giarrusso kept shaking his head. “Why won’t you take it?” she asked.

Giarrusso thought about it a moment. “Because I don’t trust that you won’t spill your guts one day,” he said.

“I’d
never
do that,” Norma told him.

“I don’t know,” Giarrusso said. “If you thought it would cleanse your soul to tell the truth, you might.”

“My soul is the soul of discretion,” Norma said, “you know that.” She cut her eyes toward the envelope again. “Go on, take it.”

“I don’t want to do that,” Giarrusso said emphatically.

Norma drove him back to the Dueling Oaks. She’d lost this point, but now they were even, one strike each, and there would always be another match. After all, he hadn’t arrested her for attempted bribery, and anyway, the new mayor was deep in her pocket. He was getting so bold about his visits to the house that he’d begun to drive the city car over and park out front. She’d heard that Schiro’s backers had asked the mayor not to use the city car, but they certainly hadn’t gone so far as to ask him to stop frequenting the house. How could they? Most of them put in their fair amount of time too.

Norma’s house was a New Orleans institution. What the hell—it had been an
American
institution ever since John Wayne, the Duke himself, had visited when he was in town, even if he didn’t go upstairs with the rest of the movie folk he was with. (He’d spent the evening talking to Rose Mary, mostly about Pilar, his wife, then he gave her five hundred dollars, “For takin up so much of your time t’night.”)

After forty years, Norma wasn’t worried; she’d always found a way to protect herself. She still had good contacts in the police department, and new ones arriving with each class from the academy. One of those recent graduates, a smart young copper who was called Donald Pryce, had fallen head over heels in love with Terry. He was going to college at night, for which Norma respected him. Recruited for the vice squad, Pryce had learned quickly that there were many ways to supplement a policeman’s salary. He was already tipping off half the people Norma knew over on Bourbon Street, and he told Norma that he would check warrants for her as well. She added Pryce’s name to her roster of envelope recipients.

Around that time Elmo, who was always on the lookout for a deal on liquor to supply his B-drinking business, was arrested for attempting to buy bootlegged liquor from a ship at the New Orleans port. He was sentenced to eighteen months in the federal penitentiary at Seagoville, Texas. While there he contracted tuberculosis, but the prison authorities did not consider it bad enough to hospitalize him. Sarah, Elmo’s wife, dutifully ran Elmo’s lounge, the Moulin Rouge on Bourbon Street (he’d sold the Gold Room in the business district), though she complained and said she hated the French Quarter; and Norma drove to the prison outside Dallas as often as she could, usually accompanied by Elmo’s mistress. The last time she’d gone, she’d been shocked by her brother’s appearance, but she was unable to get any satisfaction from the prison authorities.

Early one evening shortly after that Jim Garrison dropped by. Acting against her instincts, because she was sick with worry about Elmo, Norma asked him to help her brother. He agreed to take the case. One of Norma’s girls, Faye, was in some trouble too. She’d been arrested for possessing marijuana, and her Cadillac had been seized. Garrison took Faye’s case as well, and Norma paid him a stiff legal fee. Again, he wasn’t interested in going upstairs, but he did ask Norma if he could open a charge account with her. She told him to consider it done, even while telling herself that there was something strange about him. After that he called for girls to meet him at a hotel. Never was he a trick at her house, and Norma sometimes wondered if it was because he didn’t want to be where he could be nabbed for
his bill, which he was always slow to pay. Whatever the reason, Garrison proved to be an entirely different kind of trick.

Suzanne Robbins was living out a young girl’s fantasy.

When she was sixteen Suzanne left North Carolina after being run out of her house by her stepmother. For as long as she could remember she’d had dreams of a life of excitement and glamour, possibly wealth and fame, and New Orleans was the city of her dreams. She hitchhiked her way down, and when she saw Bourbon Street, which when Suzanne arrived in 1954 boasted good restaurants, Las Vegas—type entertainment, and classy nightclubs instead of the current corn-dog stands, strip joints, and T-shirt shops, she knew she’d found the place where at least some of her dreams could come true.

Suzanne, a beautiful young woman with long, curly hair and a lithe, shapely body, had a natural glamour about her. But she also had a practical side, and she took the first job she could find as a cocktail waitress at a Canal Street club. She found out soon enough that the club was a B-drinking establishment. After the men got drunk, the management either kicked them out or gave them rides a distance from the lounge, then dumped them. Suzanne didn’t much like the job, but she needed money, and beyond flirtatious talk there were no requirements.

The Bourbon Street entertainers—vocalists, comedians, and dancers—were like a big, established family, not transients taking off their clothes for a buck and then leaving town. It wasn’t long before Suzanne became part of the family. She had an openness about her, she was vivacious and had a quick wit, and she wasn’t afraid of hard work. She became an exotic dancer, first as the redheaded Wild Cat Frenchie, the Sadie Thompson of New Orleans, then as blonde bombshell Jezebel, the girl with a thousand moves, at the Poodle’s Patio. Suzanne was one of the most popular acts on the strip. People sought her autograph; she was being featured in national magazines and offered parts in movies. Much more than the glitter and glitz of her youthful fantasies had become reality.

Suzanne knew Jim Garrison from the club and from around the Quarter. After hours she and her friends liked to go to the piano bars,
like the Old Absinthe House and Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, where they saw him sometimes. One night she saw Garrison at a party, and when she was ready to leave he offered to walk her home. When they got to her apartment, Suzanne said good night, but as she turned to go inside, Garrison grabbed her. He wanted to go in with her. Suzanne tried to put him off nicely. He wasn’t her type; he was obnoxious in the club, a show-off, and he hassled the showgirls. He was also known to pick up drag queens and frequent gay bars. Garrison did his best to talk his way into her apartment, but Suzanne was firm in her refusal. He finally gave up, saying, “You won’t forget this.”

Over on Conti Street, Norma was wondering what Garrison was doing for his fee on behalf of Elmo. Her brother’s eighteen-month sentence was passing, and he was getting sicker. The charges against her girl Faye had been dropped, no thanks to Garrison, but Faye’s Cadillac remained city property.

Garrison had been busy, but not with what Norma had hired him to do. In 1961 he decided to run for district attorney. He was given no chance to win, but—dubbed the Giant by the media—he made quite an impression as he campaigned for a cleanup of the French Quarter. He was especially effective on television, and people remembered him. His victory took the city by surprise, and Garrison became the newest political darling of Uptown New Orleans.

During the campaign Garrison’s old army buddy Pershing Gervais had collected contributions from the nightclubs along Bourbon Street. The Poodle’s Patio, where Pershing’s wife, Beverly, worked as a bartender, gave ten thousand dollars each to Garrison and to Richard Dowling, the incumbent. When Garrison was elected, he appointed Gervais as his chief investigator, even though Gervais had left the police department under a cloud of suspicion. Garrison made a point that he and Gervais had been in the military together, but the Giant was too smart to hire a chief investigator for sentimental reasons. He publicly stated that he liked the idea that Gervais had ties to the underworld, followed by a reminder that Gervais had cooperated with the Metropolitan Crime Commission and Aaron Kohn. Polished and convincing, Garrison swayed public opinion and the press, and the matter was dropped. The only person who might have made a difference in
what followed was Gaspar Gulotta, the Little Mayor of Bourbon Street, but he had died in 1957.

There had always been seedy bars run by rough characters and B-drinking establishments along and right off the strip. Gervais was part owner of at least one, the Dungeon, a gay hangout, but papers were destroyed and altered to hide his ownership. Most clubs, though, like the Poodle’s Patio, were well managed and the showgirls were never allowed to consort with the patrons. Gervais told his wife that there was nothing he was going to be able to do to help them, and the first raid took place at the Poodle’s Patio.

Suzanne ruefully remembered Garrison’s threat as she was taken from her dressing room and hauled off in a paddy wagon. She was shaking so badly by the time they reached the station that a lieutenant she knew gave her a stiff drink before sending her back to the Quarter. She was in shock, but she pulled herself together and tried to get on with the show.

A few weeks later Suzanne was onstage, fully clothed in a gold lamé outfit with a cape. The audience was large that night—a good crowd of local people swelled with a tour group, ladies in cocktail dresses and gentlemen in suits and ties. Suzanne was just getting into her act when a man in khakis, his shirttails out, jumped up onstage.

Suzanne stopped the act. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, “but you’ll have to get off my stage.”

“You’re under arrest,” he replied. He handcuffed her and took her away in front of a club full of people.

This time Suzanne was not only shocked, she was humiliated. She was shoved into a van, where she sat until showgirls from other clubs were jammed inside with her. They were taken to Central Lockup. Suzanne and a dancer named Linda Bridges clung to each other, crying. They were thrown into a cell so filthy that they couldn’t sit down.

Court was even worse. As they walked up the steps to the courthouse in their modest dresses and white gloves, newspaper photographers and television cameras dogged them. They were put in the same category as B-drinkers and strippers. Suzanne’s case was dismissed, but what became clear to her (and to many of the dancers) was that Garrison was out to make a name for himself and he wouldn’t stop
there. The same places that Pershing Gervais had shaken down for contributions to Big Jim Garrison’s campaign he was now padlocking. If a dancer was onstage and moved even her hands in what could be considered a suggestive way, she was arrested for committing “a lewd and indecent act,” and the club could be padlocked for a year, which meant the end for most places.

The local people, made nervous, stopped coming. The girls stopped dancing, many giving up their careers. The smart owners bailed out before they lost everything. Then, after Garrison became distracted by his investigation into the Kennedy assassination in 1963 and his subsequent trial of the New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw for the murder, the sleazy strip joints moved in and took over. Instead of getting cleaned up, Bourbon Street became what it is today; Garrison turned the French Quarter into the very thing he said he despised.

The newspaper headlines in 1962 were full of the results of Garrison’s activities:
QUARTER CRIME EMERGENCY DECLARED BY POLICE, DA; QUARTER B‐DRINK RAIDS SNARE 15; MORE THAN 30 ARRESTED IN NEW QUARTER SWEEP; GARRISON BACK, VOWS VICE DRIVE TO CONTINUE
[after he’d served two weeks in the National Guard reserve]; 14
ARRESTED; ARREST
2 WOMEN ON VICE CHARGES
[prostitution];
12 MORE NABBED IN QUARTER RAIDS
.

Joe Giarrusso watched Garrison and Gervais’s performance in the French Quarter. They were arresting a lot of people. Some were strippers, some might have been prostitutes, but many of the cases were being dismissed. The way Giarrusso saw it, if they weren’t doing anything, what was the problem? It was what the superintendent called the Big Razoo, and he knew that notoriety was likely to follow.

Next Garrison charged the police with being apathetic about the crackdown on vice. “The same old beat men are there,” he stated in the
States-Item. “
I’d say that the First District [the French Quarter], given word from the top, could stop B-drinking in a few weeks. It’s obvious that the word is not being given and we are going to have to proceed on our own to eliminate B-drinking.”

Giarrusso immediately challenged Garrison “to file charges against any police officer who had been derelict in the crackdown on vice in the French Quarter.”

Resentment built as Garrison continued his splashy raids and arrests. Giarrusso came out with figures indicating that his men had made over three hundred arrests, while Garrison’s were responsible for only sixty. He said, “Let’s not forget that he is the district attorney and I am the superintendent of police. Don’t forget that distinction.” He would not elaborate on his statement, but it reflected his growing resentment “that the DA is trying to run the police department.”

Nevertheless, many Vieux Carré property owners backed Garrison, and through 1962 he commanded the headlines, with Giarrusso lashing back lamely as Garrison and Gervais investigated allegations of police brutality.

Giarrusso understood Gervais’s motivation—a vendetta against the police department. Garrison’s motivations were murkier, perhaps only the machinations of an egotist and headline grabber.

In any case, from nearly the first day in early 1962 that he occupied the district attorney’s office, Garrison’s actions turned Giarrusso into an adversary rather than an ally, thus setting the stage for the last act in the last house of prostitution of its kind in the French Quarter, run by the last madam. An era was at its end, and a legend was about to fall.