He’s a solitary figure in starched jeans and a crisp blue workshirt, intent on the green-eyed temptress beckoning to him from the computer screen. “I would really like to meet you and find out the things that you like,” she purrs.
He smiles, notes her prices and office hours, and then types her an e-mail-a little story he’s made up about who he is and where he is and how he’d love to spend some time with her.
Whether she’ll respond is a toss-up. You never can tell with these girls.
But there are so many of them. He moves on to the next girl’s web site. “Dive into my sea for all the treasures,” this one offers cheerily.
So it goes for Doyle-married, middle-aged, father of two-whose job is unique in all the world. Doyle works for B&T Management, or “Butts and Tits,” as the employees know it, a cover name for the Dallas Police Department’s vice squad.
Operating out of grungy fourth-floor offices behind a heavy metal security door inside an anonymous, smoked-glass box downtown, Doyle and his fellow officers perform duties ranging from enforcing alcohol, obscenity, and gambling statutes to investigating bigamy cases and busting perverts who expose themselves in city parks. B&T also handles prostitution.
Until a couple years ago, that mostly meant street walkers, massage parlors, some out-call services, and the fancy women who work hotel lounges.
Then came Diana of Dallas.
By reputation a courtesan of Hogarthian appetites, she is the lusty queen bee of Dallas’ illicit flesh traffic, die city’s top-dollar date at up to $425 an hour, $3,000 for an overnight.
She is also a Dallas original. Nearly two years ago, Diana redefined synergy when she coupled the world’s oldest profession with its latest technology and instantly created something totally new – The call-girl homepage.
It was a stroke of marketing genius.
Randy net surfers, until then accustomed to nothing much more potent than grainy peep shows online, immediately thronged to the pioneering URL. Diana’s innovation also sparked an explosion of copy-kitten web sites and a mini-epidemic of freelance cyberharlots who since have stolen much of die upmarket play-for-pay trade from Dallas’ conventional escort services, who once owned it.So far only one of the 14 girls he’s arrested via the Internet has had a prior police recored of any sort, much less previous arrests for prostitution.
Officer Doyle
The upheaval also alarmed the Dallas Police Department, which responded with a weapon of its own-detective Doyle. Last autumn, the nine-year veteran of the vice squad was assigned to patrol the Internet in search of Diana and the rest of die newly minted escorts who’d flocked there.
Doyle clearly relishes the challenge. A genial native Texan with a cop’s trademark wariness around the eyes, he joined the police force at age 28 after working for some years in the city’s building services division. He served at first as a patrol officer, then spent a year answering domestic violence calls.
He likes the vice squad because he doesn’t have to wear a uniform, gets to travel all around the city instead of being stuck in a single station house, works a variety of usually interesting cases, and isn’t as likely as other officers to get shot at.
Doyle enjoys the cat-and-mouse game of matching wits with Internet call girls, although he’s resigned to the fact that he’ll never eradicate the fledgling entrepreneur-Diana has permanently uncorked the cybersex genie. But he is waging a guerrilla war on them, snatching up the unwary, working his patient way to what he believes will be an inevitable confrontation with the redoubtable Diana herself.
The model of the modem working girl first arrived in Dallas from Virginia on April 19,1995. Diana(until you are caught, there are only first names in the sex trade) remembers the exact date because as she and her family were driving into Texas, they heard over the radio how Timothy McVeigh’s gigantic bomb had destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that morning. Then thunderstorms and tornadoes tore through Dallas in the night, leading Diana and her family to wonder what manner of alien shore north Texas would prove to be.
She adapted quickly.
Just turned 23, the buxom young mother of two had posed for naughty calendars and worked as a club dancer in Virginia Beach, where local laws keep the girls in bathing suits and out of their customers’ laps. It was a recipe for meager returns from hard work that Diana didn’t particularly enjoy anyway.
In Dallas, she performed at area men’s clubs in various states of undress for the better part of two years before finally wearying of the scene altogether. An intractable case of stage fright made her decision to quit dancing that much easier.
She contacted a couple of out-call agencies and soon was at work as a full-service escort. But that didn’t last long. She objected to the agencies’ practice of directly skimming $100 from her every date, leaving Diana to negotiate her “tip.” What was more, no matter what kind of girl they’d describe, clients always got Hobson’s choice-the escort nearest the door. This meant that the earthy, five-seven, hazel-eyed Diana might find herself trying to jolly up some morose schmo whose heart had been set on a Kate Moss. As she explains it, when someone walks in looking for a Sony, don’t try to sell him an RCA. Disappointed, Diana quit and struck out on her own. She placed big ads in the weekly sex-trade circulars available in adult book shops all over Dallas, as well as a “huge” ad in the Dallas Observer.
Her photos left little to the imagination, and Diana’s customers liked it that way. Business was good, but she knew it could be a lot better. Diana discovered that the deep-pocketed out-of-town sports often were here and gone before she could service them. A lot of potential business was slipping away. She needed some way of grabbing these guys’ attention before they came to town.
“There’s gotta be a way!” she told herself.
There was: the World Wide Web.
Diana didn’t own a computer, but she’d seen web sites before and knew that they are almost completely unregulated. Anybody could post just about anything on the Internet with impunity, including a call girl in search of customers.
When, by coincidence, an acquaintance who built web sites for mens’ clubs asked Diana if she’d like him to build her one of her own. she did not hesitate. “Yes! Absolutely,” she cried. On December 17, 1996. after several weeks in secret development, dianaofdnilas.com debuted.
The site features spectacularly unambiguous views of Diana and her artificially enhanced 36DD.S (she’s on her third set of implants), plus a rate sheet, together with a telephone number and an e-mail address for interested parties. What you see is what you get. No coyness. Nothing cute. “No bull,” as Diana puts it. The Johns went nuts.
She instantly became, and remains, a cyberspace beacon-both to a burgeoning list of prospective clients (she received more than 400,000 hits on her web page in its first year of operation, she says) and to her legion of imitators-Brandys and Tiffanys and any number of Moniques, a self-selected army of independent freelance escorts that has sprung up around Dallas and throughout the country in Diana’s wake.
These women, like Diana, have never met a pimp or trolled the street or bars for Johns. Nor were they bothered by the police-until Doyle entered the case.
Diana’s customers differ from garden-variety Johns, too, First, they can afford her, or at least can bury her services in the T&E columns of their expense reports. Plus, they need to be minimally computer literate to communicate with her.
They range in age from 21 to their 60s, she says, and are about evenly divided between married and single men. (For S450 per hour she’ll entertain married couples. “Female must be attractive.” her rate sheet warns.)
She’s famously user-friendly.
“Enjoy Diana’s wonderful body and company,” advised one customer via an Internet chat group in February 1997. “I think you will have a terrific time with her and have some really wonderful sex.”
Her clients are loyal, too, even protective.
Recently, when a sorehead calling himself “Clint” asserted on the Decadent City web site that another escort, Stacy, “is much better” than Diana, “and tons of fun!!!”, the opprobrium fell swiftly.
“Clint, you pig, why did you tell her that?” asked one angry Diana partisan.
“Not the comment of a true gentleman,” sniffed another.
“F-Clint,” typed a third. “He’s probably just some punk kid who doesn’t know the first thing about adult entertainment.”
Diana’s cybersisters in sin are as various as the tastes to which they appeal.
There is “Caria,” a BBW (short for Big & Beautiful Woman in Internet parlance), who claims to weigh 285 pounds and looks it. There is African-American “Monique,” based near Omaha, who bills herself as “Nebraska’s #1 Escort.” The”College Coeds” of Arlington are “Champagne.” “Shea,” and “Paige,” who demurely do not show their faces on their web site. The coeds also declined comment for this story. “We like to stay kinda low-key,” they explained by e-mail.
The very popular “Chelsea” is a bawdy, self-described lesbian, and a “complete cornflake,” according to Diana. “Samantha” is a willowy blond, now 30. who says she followed Diana onto the web and soon discovered how amazingly lucrative cyberescorting can be.
Samantha’s now trying to go straight. After earning $300 an hour- up to $10.000 some weeks-she says the transition to civilian life is difficult. The money is addictive; Samantha suggests some sort of “rehab for hookers” to bring them down from their habit.
Web site escorts, Doyle would discover, also differ in significant ways from the street walkers he was accustomed to arresting, or the flashy hookers who ply Dallas’ better hotel lounges.
So far, says officer Doyle, only one of the 14 girls he’s arrested via the Internet has had a prior police record of any sort, much less previous arrests for prostitution. Several, like Diana, are wives and mothers.
Some turn to cyberescorting simply because they cannot support themselves and their children on what they can make at McDonald’s. Sometimes their husbands or boyfriends assist them.
Only one of the girls Doyle has arrested so far had a pimp.
From a customer’s standpoint, web site escorts offer the advantage of comparison shopping, and a! lows them to save time and effort by booking ahead. (Diana says that most of her clients are out-of-towners, exactly those customers she hoped to reach via her web site). Doyle points out that bar girls have been known to Mickey Finn a new friend on occasion, the sort of behavior that so far is unknown among Internet escorts.
For the escorts themselves, working behind a computer is obviously much simpler-and possibly safer-than hustling strangers in bars. If a girl dislikes or distrusts a potential customer on the Internet, she can just sign off, secure in the knowledge that he probably cannot physically locate her working from her URL alone.
Ironically, Doyle actually helped set the stage for Diana’s 1996 coup earlier that year when he helped shut down Watermark, the tonics! and most expensive of the pre-Internet era out-calf escort services. Prostitution, money laundering, and racketeering charges were filed against the owners, who ended up in jail.
Busting web site escorts has been much easier, at least at first. The girls weren’t thinking about the cops. The higher hurdle for Doyle to clear was to persuade them he wasn’t a kid or some nerd who’d set up a date with them and then wouldn’t show.
Last September. Doyle sat down at the B&T office Compaq, signed up for America Online, assumed PingBoy99 as his screen name, and navigated to the AOL members area, where he typed in two words: Dallas and escorts. Immediately, scores of names popped up on his screen; sellers and buyers bantering and bargaining for sex. PingBoy99 jumped right in.
Prostitution is a Class B misdemeanor in Texas, which normally punishes the guilty with a relatively light $400 fine and a potentially cataclysmic blot on their record. Being busted for prostitution can foreclose a lot of possibilities in a girl’s life.
If she does not plead out or take deferred adjudication, as almost all arrestees do. then at trial the prosecution need only convince a jury that the defendant agreed to perform a sex act for money. Nothing overt need actually happen, nor must money be exchanged. Normally, it is the vice detective’s word against the accused’s, with certain corroborative evidence often helpful in bolstering the state’s case against the escort. For example, says Doyle from his experience in court, a jury might wonder what die girl was doing in his motel room with a handful of condoms.For most of these women, arrest had been a long-shot possibility, mostly a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But there’s no foolproof way to avoid arrest.
His first arrest came on the night of September 22, 1997, at the Anatole. The alleged prostitute was Lourae Crichton, 29, a red-headed stripper who called herself Texas Topless.
He met her on AOL. At first, Texas Topless didn’t believe his story, but she did give Doyle her telephone number. When he checked into the hotel, he called her back and set up the date.
According to Doyle, Crichton agreed to a sex act-he forgets which one-for $300 and was very unhappily surprised to learn her client was a police officer.
He made his second arrest 12 days later at a La Quinta on North Central Expressway. This time the accused was 25-year-old Melinda Bradford Williams, dispatched to Doyle’s room by an Internet escort service.
Doyle’s campaign has been a hit-and-miss affair. Although assigned to police the Internet, he still has his regular shifts to pull, which usually limits him to an hour or so at the Compaq every couple nights, he says. He sends out a few messages, more or less random notes, then sees what comes back. Often, nothing does. The times he has tried to connect with Diana have yielded only silence.
He focuses exclusively on prostitutes. If the girls he reaches by e-mail and telephone do not mention “private shows” or full service, he doesn’t pursue the matter.
So far, neither does anyone else. Largely ignored by local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, the Internet trade in both soft-and hard-core adult sex products, mostly downloadable still pictures, some video, and objects such as the girls’ panties, is enormous, and apparently growing.
A few months before Diana went online in Dallas, a Louisiana law student named Michael Gardner almost absent-mindedly posted some bikini shots of his girlfriend and his dog on his web site. Gardner says he soon was deluged with e-mail. Both friends and strangers enthused, “Wow! She’s really hot!” he recalls.
Gardner quickly forgot about a law career and instead founded High Rise Entertainment, which today operates more than 300 web sites that offer dues-paying “members” the sort of fare familiar to Playboy or Penthouse readers.
A California enterprise called Danni’s Hard Drive, a sort of sexual Walmart on the Internet, now claims its site receives^ve million hits a day. By contrast, daily visits to the Dallas Cowboys’ web site peak at a mere 500,000 at the height of the team’s season.
“Angel Darlin,” a 20-year-old redhead with a country accent who lives near Houston, inaugurated her photo site last autumn. She now claims to have attracted a thousand members, who pay up to $ 14.95 a month for the privilege of seeing, and retrieving, the mostly softcore photos Angel’s boyfriend takes of her. Angel quit her job as a convenience store clerk last November. She now stays home, posing for her boyfriend’s camera for about an hour each week, and busying herself replying to the 75 to 100 e-mails she receives each day from members and other admirers.
in Dallas three young women who recently began posing nude, incognito, on their web sites already gross about $20,000 a month for their pictures, according to “Ned,” their web designer. One of the three actually has two sites. She appears as a blonde in one, and a brunette in the other.
Ned says that one of the three is working on a master’s degree, the second is a teacher, and the third a college cheerleader. So secretive are they, he reports, that not even their boyfriends know what they are doing.
Doyle arrested a third working girl in October of last year, and then two more in November-or rather, one more girl, and then “Ginger,” who turned out to be a guy. Ginger made a stab at appearing feminine, but one look at his heft and gait convinced the vice cop otherwise.
“1 kept my distance,” he says.
The first of the month, the end of the month, and all of December are slow times in the skin trade as the Johns have to meet their mortgages and car payments, or reallocate disposable income to their families, So it was that Doyle did not make another arrest until January 5, when he collared “Sexy Micah”-Michelle Crain, age 25-at the Terra Cotta Inn on LBJ. Sexy Micah actually is based in Kansas. Doyle says she told him she books customers around Dallas because she doesn’t want to work where she lives.
By springtime, news of the continuing Dallas arrests had spread to various Internet newsgroups and forums frequented by call girls and their customers. No one knew exactly what was going on, whether one or more cops were out busting hookers, or what to look out for. Though Doyle had made most of the dates himself, none of the arrested girls saw fit to describe him in order to help out their colleagues. Hooking is also a competitive racket.
Alarmed to think that any new client they saw might be a cop, die escorts grew cautious, often questioning Doyle much more closely before agreeing to dates, sometimes flatly refusing even to discuss business, saying they were restricting their working hours to their steady customers.
Some clients professed outrage. “I think it is lime for us, as Internet users, to start trying to catch these internet Cops* at their own game,” wrote one anonymous newsgroup participant. “Let’s try to set up some bogus meetings.”
Doyle was amused. How, he wondered, could these self-appointed avenging angels figure out who he was when the girls themselves couldn’t?
several more arrests followed, including those of two marquee names. First there was “Chelsea -28-year-old Rebecca Marie Fortner of Rockwall-who incautiously met with Doyle at the Terra Cotta on the afternoon of March 30. Two weeks later, it wis Cathleen Young, 39, “Aria” to her customers, who allegedly agreed to entertain the cop at the suburban house she shares with three daughters.
For most of these women, arrest had b^en a long-shot possibility, mostly a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In truth, the chances that Doyle would be among the hundreds of men who e-mailed and telephoned each of them daily were quite slim. The possibility they would choose to return his message was likewise fairly remote.
One of the girls Doyle arrested hadn’t responded to an earlier message one of the other officers sent her. When Doyle asked her why she replied to his instead, she told him that she just felt like it. He guesses Internet escorts ignore up to 70 percent of the messages they receive.
So far, Diana hasn’t responded to any of Doyle’s Internet billets-doux, either. Although she regards herself as more careful, and smarter, than most, Diana does not discount the possibility that her next client could be a police officer.
There’s no foolproof way of not getting arrested, she concedes.
But she is undeterred by the unknowable and unavoidable. This spring, Diana began announcing that she will make tours to distant venues, including New York City, Chicago, Houston, and her native Virginia Beach. Her plan is to service her homebound Internet admirers in these cities-at a premium. According to one of her iron-clad business rules, all money is paid up front as well.
Unlike most other escorts, she is not shy about venturing out from behind her computer in her professional persona. Earlier this summer, Diana visited sports disc jockey Rocco Pendola on KTCK 1310-AM, where she discussed one of her passions, the Dallas Stars hockey team. She also took the opportunity to announce her new pricing policy for multi-hour dates.
Doyle chuckles at Diana’s exploits. “I’m looking forward to meeting her,” he says, turning back once again to his computer. -3felILoave a lot to discuss.”
