KEY POINTS:
Heidi Fleiss always kept the names of her celebrity clients a secret. But Jody Gibson, the Hollywood madam who picked up much of Fleiss' business after she was arrested and imprisoned, is about to tell all, naming two dozen high-profile figures from the worlds of entertainment, politics, business and sport that she claims were clients of the worldwide prostitution service she called California Dreamin'.
Gibson, variously known as Babydol or Sasha, is about to publish an autobiography titled Secrets of a Hollywood SuperMadam, in which she opens her trick book wide open.
The same information has also emerged through recently unsealed files from her 2000 trial, in which she was accused and ultimately convicted of running a prostitution racket. She served 22 months of a three-year sentence before being released. Already, the denials and threats of libel suits have started flying.
"The story is a complete fabrication," said Marty Singer, one of Hollywood's toughest legal sharks speaking on behalf of his client, Bruce Willis.
"I have never heard of this woman and don't know why she would accuse me of something like this," said a lawyer for Tommy LaSorda, a legendary, teddy-bear like figure in baseball and the former manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
Chuck Philips, a veteran LA Times reporter who discovered the unsealed file in the records of the Los Angeles Superior Court, talked to several of the high-profile names and heard a variety of denials, expressions of bafflement and at least one teasingly vague semi-admission.
"It's possible," the former Sex Pistols member turned DJ, Steve Jones, told him. "I crossed paths with her back then. She was a madam, but if I remember right, she wanted to be a singer in a band." Ben Barnes, a former lieutenant governor of Texas, said he had no idea how his private cellphone number - which still works - ended up in Gibson's files and claimed he had never met her.
Steven Roth, a producer responsible for the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Last Action Hero, also had his cellphone in the trick book. Told by Philips that he was listed as a client of Gibson's, he responded, "Is that right?", and hung up.
Roth is one of two men named in the file who contributed money to the Los Angeles district attorney's re-election fund in 2000 - a fact that Gibson's lawyers tried to use at trial as a way to dismiss the entire thing.
The trial judge, however, kept proceedings on a tight leash. He withheld the "trick book" evidence from public view and refused to allow Gibson to tell the court she had had an affair with a Beverly Hills policeman who, according to her, had shielded her from prosecution for years.
And he also disallowed evidence on the undercover policeman who eventually caught her in a sting operation and had perhaps just a little too much fun doing it.
As laid out in court papers at the time, the undercover cop hired two of Gibson's girls on taxpayers' money, stripped naked on both occasions and accepted back rubs and other physical favours before making his arrests.
Gibson ran California Dreamin' from a hotel in the San Fernando Valley, the suburban sprawl north of the Hollywood Hills which is also home to America's biggest porn-film industry. She charged clients as much as US$1000 ($1428) a night, keeping 40 per cent of the proceeds for herself, according to court testimony.
She had ambitions to become a singer, as Jones correctly recalled, releasing a single at one point entitled Good Girls Go To Heaven, Bad Girls Go Anywhere. It was not a success, despite heavy promotion on Los Angeles billboards.
Her trial judge, listening to her story of trying to break into the music business, called her "tragic and pathetic". She also tried to set up a deal with a music producer called Joseph Isgro, who subsequently pleaded guilty to charges of extortion in a music-business kickback scandal involving the mafioso Gambino family.
- Independent
