The shock and awe of Madam Julia
Irish Independent
She looks the picture of a demure businesswoman, with her dark hair, navy suit and horn-rimmed glasses. But Deborah Palfrey's business involved sexual favours - and now she's ready to kiss and tell. RUPERT CORNWELL reports
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Irish Independent
In Washington they call it 'taking out the trash' time - the dead hours of late Friday afternoon when a government department dumps an embarrassing piece of news, hopeful it will be overlooked by the papers and otherwise lost and forgotten amid the pleasures of the weekend. Last Friday provided a classic of the genre.

At 5.30pm the surprise news came over the wires: Randall Tobias, 65, a Deputy Secretary of State in charge of US foreign aid programmes and a former chairman of the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical company, had resigned "for personal reasons", effective immediately. The ritual tributes flowed in.

"A rich legacy on which he can look back with justifiable pride," declared Sean McCormack, spokesman for Condoleezza Rice. A couple of hours later the sensational truth emerged.

Mr Tobias, by all accounts a much-liked figure, had quit because his name was about to surface in a long-simmering scandal about a high-class prostitution business in Washington DC, run by a woman based in California, whose clients may have included some of the biggest names in town.

The affair of the 'Washington madam' first became public knowledge earlier this year. Few details emerged - with one irresistibly titillating exception. The lady in question, who used the pseudonym 'Miz Julia', had an exhaustive list of names and phone numbers of those who had sought her business.

When this other shoe would drop was merely a matter of time. Now it is about to, and the hapless Mr Tobias promises to be just the start of it.

In one of the more remarkable public appearances here in a long while, a middle-aged lady, demure in a navy-blue suit, long dark hair and large horn-rimmed glasses on Monday appeared on the steps of the venerable DC district courthouse to read a statement to reporters.

Her name is Deborah Jeane Palfrey. For 13 years, according to court papers, she ran a firm called Pamela Martin & Associates.

She maintains this was an above-board enterprise, "a high-end adult fantasy firm which offered legal sexual and erotic services across the spectrum of adult sexual behaviour".

If some of her girls over-stepped the mark, Ms Palfrey contends, that was their fault, not hers. For prosecutors, however, it was a call girl ring, featuring college-educated young ladies, for whose attentions the going rate was $300 an hour.

Whatever the truth of the matter, one thing is already clear. Hell hath no fury like a madam scorned.

Ms Palfrey considers herself a victim, placed in an impossible position when the IRS tax authorities last October froze her assets and entire life savings, thus rendering her unable to hire lawyers to defend herself against such baseless allegations.

So what is a lady to do in these circumstances? She must make the best of the one asset she does have left: in this case, those names and numbers. Initially, she told reporters in a fine imitation of a damsel in distress, she considered selling the phone records.

Quickly however she thought better of the idea, for fear the documents "might end up in the possession of an unscrupulous person or persons". Perish the thought.

Her decision moreover had nothing to do with the fact that a court had issued an order barring her from doing so. It was "an ethically conscientious choice", taken by herself and Montgomery Blair Sibley, a flamboyant lawyer whom Ms Palfrey does seem to have found, despite her advertised impecunity.

In the end the pair decided to hand over - for free, of course - a sampling of 46lb of phone invoices and bills to "a responsible news outlet" - in this case ABC News.

And she added, sweetly venomous, although ABC News was under "no obligation whatsoever to me", she did expect its reporting "to help identify other potential witnesses for my defence".

All will be revealed on Friday on the ABC programme 20/20, in which Mr Tobias is expected to appear. In the meantime Brian Ross, the ABC reporter on the story, claimed he had been told by Mr Tobias that "he had had gals come over to the condo to give me a massage". But he maintained, there had been "no sex".

Thus far the only public figure of note to surface in the affair is Harlan Ullman, a former naval officer who helped devise the military doctrine of 'Shock and Awe' - the use of dominant force and spectacular displays of power to overwhelm an opponent, that featured in the initial attack on Iraq in March 2003.

"The allegations do not dignify a response," was his terse comment after his name was contained in documents filed in court last month.

In Washington sex scandals cross party lines. The biggest of them all involved a certain Democratic president and a White House intern named Monica.

Before that, however, there were the entertaining cavortings of Dick Morris, the Republican-turned-Democrat political consultant who dispensed political advice down the phone to Bill Clinton from his bed at the Jefferson Hotel, while being entertained by a call girl.

On the other side of the aisle, the Florida Republican Mark Foley, who had made much of his zeal in campaigning against child sex abuse, was revealed last autumn to have been a serial pursuer of young male pages at the Capitol - a scandal that helped the Republicans lose control of Congress in November's mid-term elections.

For connoisseurs of these matters however, nothing beats the Wilbur Mills affair, that in late 1974 provided some sorely needed light relief after the trauma of Watergate.

The car in which Mills, chairman of the House Ways and Means committee and one of the most powerful men in Washington, was travelling late one October night was stopped by US Park Police.

He was found inside, scratched and the worse to wear for booze. His companion, an Argentine-born stripper who worked under the name of Fanny Foxe, tried to flee by jumping into the tidal basin. After a repeat incident a few weeks later in Boston, where Mills jumped on to a stage where Ms Foxe was performing, he was forced to resign.

Whether this latest scandal will claim scalps of similar eminence is impossible to say. Suffice it to note Mr Sibley's claim that half a dozen hot-shot Washington lawyers have contacted him, asking whether any of their clients might feature in the affair.

No less pertinent, however, who exactly is this woman with the potential to keep the Capitol's gossip mills running for months? Deborah Jeane Palfrey is 51 years old and brought up in Pennsylvania, where she was a "bright, attractive girl" who was a cheerleader at high school.

She attended law school first in Florida and then San Diego - at which point her career seems to have taken a new direction.

She got into the escort business in San Diego, the Washington Post has reported, because she "was appalled and disgusted by how seedy, lazy and incompetent" most such agencies were.

A teetotaller, she was also apparently offended by the drugs and booze atmosphere of other escort businesses. So she set up in her own right, at first with two or three girls, then as many as 12. By 1990, she was making around $100,000 a year.

Eventually she was arrested, charged, and ultimately served 18 months in a California state prison. Her ambition upon release, according to the Post, was to become "an exporter of Western and Indian art to Britain". Instead, she seems to have slipped back into her old ways.

Palfrey was still on probation when she started Pamela Martin & Associates in 1993, which would advertise itself as "undoubtedly the best adult agency around".

Once again the company prospered, but not excessively so, even though upwards of 130 women may have worked for it over the years. Prosecutors believe that over the period between 1993 and 2006, she netted some $2m.

She is said to own a couple of homes in California worth $1m between them - comparative chicken-feed by the bloated standards of the Golden State's real estate market.

As so often in such cases, her downfall was brought about not by police, but by an IRS probe of Pamela Martin's tax affairs. She was apparently paid by her "subcontractors" on the East Coast in the form of money orders discreetly mailed to a post office box in California.

Now Deborah Jeane Palfrey's age of discretion is over and she gives every sign of relishing her current notoriety. "I abhor injustice on any level and in any forum," she said. "I frankly persist despite life's barriers. I am not a quitter."

Forget Iraq, and the professional travails of the World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz and the attorney general Alberto Gonzales. The real question is: just how many esteemed and famous persons in the capital of the Free World are anxiously wondering whether their off-duty dalliances with Pamela Martin & Associates will be part of the trash on a future Friday evening?