BIRTH OF A BROTHEL

The Infamous Canal Street Brothel Was Born Of Three Generations Of Sexual
Abuse And Substance Abuse

As much as anything else about that night, Jeanette Maier remembers the
aquarium. Gazing at the fish and bubbles and blocking out the things an
uncle was doing to her body.

He was staying at their home in Galveston, Texas, when he woke her up and,
using the name everyone called her, said, "Net, I have something for you."
It was a typewriter, an odd gift, but she thought it was the greatest. He
wanted something in return, though. He brought her into the room he was
using and ordered her to lie down on the bed.

She begged him to stay away, but he pushed his sweaty, booze-stinking body
on top of her. "I just imagined myself in the water, where it was quiet and
safe," she said.

In a few horrible moments, it was over. She was 6.

Later that night, she tried to tell her mother about it, but her mother had
come home drunk and passed out in the bathroom. After that, Net decided to
keep the episode to herself. She didn't want to make her mother mad.

There was more abuse. By her uncle. By a neighbor from down the street. By
another man who pulled her next to his wheelchair. There was so much of it
that Jeanette began to feel detached from her own body. When she was 8, she
turned her first trick. She had found out that her friend Della got a
quarter every time she let her uncle touch her, so Jeanette let Della's
uncle touch her, too.

"After a while, I just started thinking that's what men did to kids," said
Maier, now 44. "You didn't say anything. You just kept it to yourself."

Maier no longer keeps it to herself. Ever since her arrest last spring as
the madam of the so-called Canal Street brothel -- alongside her mother,
who helped run the place, and her daughter, who is accused of turning
tricks there -- Maier has been at the center of a media swirl, granting
interviews for newspapers, magazines, television and the Internet. She has
talked about running away from home at 12, being raped and beaten at 13,
having an abortion at 14, losing her teenage years in a blur of drug abuse,
turning tricks to feed her three children.

Rather than fight federal prosecutors, she copped a plea, admitting her
role in the $300-an-hour brothel connected to a national prostitution
circuit. She has turned over the names of her well-heeled clients in hopes
of getting a lenient sentence, and when the case comes to trial in
February, she may be called upon to testify against seven co-defendants,
including alleged madams from Atlanta, Boston and Chicago, two Slidell oil
executives accused of hiring girls for a yacht party in Mississippi, and
her own daughter, Monica Montemayor, a 26-year-old who has been charged
with prostitution.

Maier's mother, Tommie Taylor, 62, earlier pleaded guilty to running the
day-to-day operations of the bordello and is awaiting her sentence. Seven
other defendants, including sex workers from Miami, Pittsburgh and
elsewhere, also cut plea bargains, and some may emerge as witnesses in the
trial.

The road that led to Canal Street winds through a troubled family history,
an inheritance of sexual abuse and bad choices that goes a long way toward
explaining how a grandmother, mother and daughter ended up working at the
same brothel.

"The women in our family are strong and beautiful, but they're cursed,"
Montemayor said. "It seems like my road was chosen for me before I was even
born."

Big Trouble

The bust, a rare case of federal authorities targeting prostitution, was
uneventful. After the FBI eavesdropped on the brothel's phones over the
course of a year, they began surveillance of the building, a stately, white
Victorian in a stretch of Canal where homes are mixed among churches and
office buildings. In the fall of 2001, agents followed a working girl from
the time she arrived at the airport. They watched as she drove a rental car
to the Canal Street house and received a steady stream of men. After a
week, they arrested her.

Maier was at her mobile home in Mississippi when she got the news. She
figured it was just another local bust, the kind that almost always ends in
a guilty plea and probation. But when she contacted her attorney, she
realized she was in serious trouble.

Racketeering, conspiracy, interstate trafficking: In all the times she had
been arrested by local police, she had never heard these terms before. For
the first time in her career as a prostitute, she was facing prison time,
her attorney warned.

She knew the stakes were high when the indictment was issued April 2. At a
news conference that day, prosecutors, FBI agents and acting U.S. Attorney
Jim Letten were on hand to trumpet their case.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Sal Perricone, chief of the Organized Crime Strike
Force, took the microphone: "This case represents, I feel, one of the
vilest forms of racketeering. That's the exploitation of women for the sake
of a buck."

Cycle Of Abuse

Maier can trace her family's earliest involvement in the sex business to
the 1930s, to her grandmother, Dorothy Lee Dolores Guillory, a French
Quarter hellcat. Until 1917, prostitution had been legal in New Orleans as
long as it was confined to Storyville, the official red-light district
along Basin Street. By the 1930s it had been pushed underground, but not
very far. People who asked the right concierge or cabby or bartender could
order up the vice of their choice in any number of New Orleans brothels
where the correct password opened up a hidden world of illicit sex.

In that world, Guillory worked as taxi dancer, a bar manager and, during
Prohibition, a patron of bootleggers. Family lore has it that she never
turned a trick herself, but 11 marriages to 10 men and a lifetime of bars,
bourbon and extramarital affairs were scandalous enough.

"She was the original ragin' Cajun," Taylor said. "She was a renegade and a
drunk and ball-buster. Nothing got in her way. If she didn't like the
wallpaper, she'd tear down the wall."

It was a flamboyant world, but to Tommie Taylor, who was raised amid dingy
bar booths and the rough trade that occupied them, it was a dark one. She
doesn't remember exactly how old she was, but she was a young child when
she was sexually molested for the first time. It was a scene that would
repeat itself.

"I was pretty well passed around," she said. "All I know is I'd always be
scared of somebody coming to the house and coming into my room and things
happening to me."

That blur of early assaults were all by men. She remembers more precisely
the first time she was molested by a woman. She was 7, attending a Catholic
school in New Orleans, when she was held and Alexander Street and charged
customers $150 an hour. Business wasn't great, but it was good enough, and
Maier enjoyed working in management instead of labor. She soon upgraded to
a rented house on Cleveland Street, then Orchid Street, then another place
on North Alexander Street, a shotgun double.

It was during that second stay on Alexander that Maier's mother got
involved. Taylor had lived a bohemian life, as a beatnik in the '50s, a
hippie in the '60s, then as an openly gay bon vivant, but she always
treasured decorum. She had her husbands, nice homes and respectable jobs.
She was largely self-educated, but she found work at banks, credit unions
and law firms, eventually becoming a paralegal. She even worked for a time
in the child support division of the Orleans Parish district attorney's office.

But after a divorce from her fourth husband and a bad breakup with a
longtime girlfriend, Taylor found herself out of work and out of money and
moved into the other half of the Alexander Street double. She never
approved of her daughter selling her body, but she tolerated it. So to earn
money, she began cleaning up after the girls and answering telephones.
Before long, she was giving Maier advice on how to run "a brothel with class."

In 1999, Maier moved her operation to the first floor of the two-story
Victorian around the corner on Canal and, with Taylor's help, furnished the
place with canopy beds and, in the front room, a marble table, fully
stocked wine rack and assorted rugs and mirrors from Pottery Barn. The
place was a hit, especially after Maier began advertising.

Brisk business allowed Maier to bring in more prostitutes, and through the
grapevine she heard about hookers who "traveled the circuit" of other
brothels throughout the country. The men loved seeing fresh faces, calling
in advance for that week's menu of women -- "Baby" from Miami, "Georgia
Peach" from Atlanta. The variety soon became a selling point of Maier's shop.

She raised rates to $300 an hour, and the success afforded her more time to
spend on the plot of land she had bought in Picayune, Miss. She'd stay for
weeks at a time at her double-wide trailer, riding her horse, Banner,
nearly every day. After a few more years, she might be able to retire to
the country for good, she thought.

But as long as she had the brothel, which Taylor dubbed the "Knock 'n'
Shop," Maier wanted a clean business. She carefully screened her clientele
and imposed strict rules against hard drugs and alcohol. Unlike some sex
houses, the working girls weren't locked down or held to strict hours. It
was more of a family atmosphere. Taylor cooked for the hookers and,
occasionally, invited them to her nearby apartment to mingle with her gay
friends, smoke marijuana and listen to jazz on her front porch.

Maier said her biggest regret was getting her daughter involved. The
alternative, though, was to let Monica continue her life of stripping and
turning tricks whenever and wherever there was a paying customer.

"I didn't like it, but I knew Monica was going to work regardless. The
other way, working on Airline Highway or whatever, was even worse. I know
it makes no sense to normal people, but I did it to protect her," Maier said.

End Of The Line

In the fall of 2001, the Canal Street brothel business was rolling along.
Maier rarely turned tricks anymore, her mother had taken over the
day-to-day management, and Monica had secured a regular customer, a sugar
daddy, who paid her $700 a week, an arrangement that let her give up the
hourly gigs with strangers. The customer, a well-known local restaurateur,
didn't even want sex, Montemayor said.

"He would smoke a joint, get a full-body massage and complain about his
mother-in-law," Montemayor said. "Every Wednesday afternoon at 2 o'clock."

What Maier and her family didn't realize was that the FBI had been
listening to everything: men making appointments, girls arranging to fly in
from out of town, conversations with other madams and Monica's sugar daddy
begging to see her even though she was pregnant.

It all came crashing down when a wealthy doctor got caught stealing $1.3
million from Medicare. Lung surgeon Howard Lippton, a longtime regular
whose canceled checks showed he spent more than $300,000 at Canal Street
and its earlier incarnations from 1994 to 1998, became a federal witness
and told the FBI everything he knew. His cooperation led to the wiretaps,
and the wiretaps delivered the government's case.

As part of his plea bargain, Lippton pleaded guilty to a single count of
health-care fraud. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison and is expected
to be one of the government's star witnesses.

Facing The Music

Former customers aren't calling, but the media are. Maier has granted
interviews with everyone from Newsweek to CBS' "48 Hours." She has posed
provocatively, but clothed, for a fellow madam's Web site. And she's about
to launch her own advice column in a local men's magazine.

Away from the spotlight, the bust has brought about another first for Maier
and her family. As they await sentencing, Maier and Taylor have been
required to meet regularly with a therapist. Montemayor, as part of her
bond obligation, also gets weekly therapy. In addition, the women have been
forced to lean on one another, partly because money is tight, partly
because the circus of rich men and party girls and hangers-on is gone.
Maier, estranged from her siblings, is in bankruptcy, and she and Taylor
have been forced to share a cramped apartment. Maier's boyfriend pays the
bills. As for her children, Sammy is struggling with a drug habit and Alex
is awaiting trial on robbery charges in Jefferson Parish. The situation has
been painful, especially for Montemayor, who said she has been having
nightmares, cold sweats and screaming fits.

The therapy sessions and discussions that spill over at home have brought
out long-buried stories about abuse and drugs and degradation and bad men
and bad choices.

"It brings up too much stuff that should be locked away," Montemayor said.
"Besides, we don't need anybody to step in and tell us what we did wrong.
We have to look at each other and deal with that hell every day."