Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, who for three years supplied call girls to some of the world's richest men, was convicted Thursday of conspiracy, tax evasion and money laundering in a federal case that, finally, named the names of her clientele.
The 29-year-old madam, dressed in a tan business suit, buried her head in her hands and wept as the nine-woman, three-man jury announced the verdict. The conviction was her second in less than a year, and could tack five years or more onto the three-year pandering sentence she received earlier this year in state court.
U.S. District Judge Consuelo B. Marshall scheduled sentencing for Nov. 13.
"The last two years have been a tremendous amount of pressure for me," the Los Feliz pediatrician's daughter stammered haltingly as paparazzi and TV camera crews jostled before her on the marble courthouse steps.
"It's been a nightmare, and I've just tried to keep a little bit of dignity and get through it the best I can." But Fleiss stopped in mid-thought as her voice caught, and she burst into tears.
As she turned to walk to the curb, where her teen-age brother was picking her up in a maroon Jeep Cherokee, a pickup truck rolled by and its driver leaned out the window, catcalling, "Hey! Heiii-deee!" The brother, Jesse Fleiss, who had sobbed when the verdict was announced, roared away wordlessly with his stricken sister in the back seat.
It was a rare breakdown of bravado for Fleiss, whose arrest in an elaborate 1993 vice sting sent shock waves through the studio corridors and power-breakfast nooks of Hollywood. Since then, she has railed at the authorities--and the johns who went unpunished by them--even as her legal proceedings rekindled the timeworn debate over whether prostitution should be considered a crime.
Fleiss, who was convicted in December on three counts of felony pandering, was appealing that conviction as federal authorities brought her to trial this year.
Specifically, the government asserted that the madam avoided taxes on hundreds of thousands of dollars of ill-gotten gains by funneling her cash into relatives' savings accounts and into a Benedict Canyon house that had been bought in her father's name.
Her father, Dr. Paul Fleiss, already has pleaded guilty to conspiring with Heidi to conceal her income, and to making false statements on loan documents for the $1.6-million house. Prosecutors say he probably will receive a penalty of four to 10 months in prison and a fine of $50,000 when he is sentenced this fall.
Heidi Fleiss, however, refused a plea bargain offer and pleaded not guilty, forcing a trial that not only offered a rare window into the world of high-priced prostitution, L.A.-style, but also unmasked the men she served.
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In order to prove that Fleiss was laundering ill-gotten gains, prosecutors had to prove that the income that paid the mortgage on her house had come from men who paid for prostitutes. To do this, they called three prostitutes to the stand, produced the checks with which they were paid, and then got testimony from the men who wrote the checks. All the prostitutes and all the johns were allowed to testify under a grant of limited immunity.
Actor Charlie Sheen, the star of "Platoon" and "The Three Musketeers," testified that he had spent more than $50,000 on "sexual services" from so-called Heidi Girls. Real estate developer Sidney Shlenker, who once owned the Denver Nuggets professional basketball team, admitted that at least $10,000 in checks he had given Fleiss was for prostitutes. Mexican businessman Manuel Santos said he went through Fleiss whether he wanted women for simple companionship or for sex.
For their part, three call girls testified to a high-rolling life of $10,000 junkets and trips to Paris and Greece, with Fleiss taking 40% of the proceeds.
Kristina Wotkyns, a young bit actress from the San Fernando Valley, said there also had been a Washington, D.C., client, whose name she could not recall, who flew her to the nation's capital for two days. Judy Geller, the daughter of a San Francisco lawyer, said her parents had no idea until she was called to testify that she had been a prostitute. Samantha Burdette, a Colorado model, said her first client paid her $7,000. Once, she said, she heard Heidi refer to another prostitute as a "cash cow."
Meanwhile, Assistant U.S. Attys. Mark Holscher and Alejandro Mayorkas laid out the trail through which Fleiss allegedly laundered her money--a scheme in which sacks full of cash and tens of thousands of dollars in checks were dumped into savings accounts in the name of her father and her sister Shana Fleiss.
