By Hal Collier
The following stories are true and are my recollections and certainly don’t reflect the views or opinions of the LAPD. Those of you have followed my stories must have known that I would eventually write about prostitutes. How could you write about Hollywood without bringing up the subject of prostitution? Hollywood is the prostitution capital of the world. Just about every city has prostitutes and an area, kind of like an auto mart, where you can go and pick out the model of your choice. Hollywood is synonymous with prostitution, the world’s oldest profession.
I’m not an expert on prostitutes. I never worked vice, or (PED) Prostitution Enforcement Detail, but you can’t work Hollywood patrol for thirty-three years without some contact and stories. Prostitutes can be broken down into numerous categories: Men seeking women, men seeking men, men seeking men dressed as women, men who claim they didn’t know it was a man, yea right, AKA Drag Queens, and women seeking women. I’m not even going touch the different fetishes that are out there, or hotel, or outcall prostitutes.
Well, okay, just one fetish. I saw this trick circling the block looking at all the female prostitutes. There was this one girl that was quite good looking. This trick drove right by her and picked up a rather heavy set girl that was testing the strength of her spandex wardrobe. Some guys just like “a little junk in the trunk.”
In the early days, most of the prostitutes knew that blue suit cops couldn’t arrest them for prostitution. Oh sure, we could write them tickets for standing in the roadway and book them for any unpaid tickets, but who wanted to spend the next three hours booking a female at Van Nuys or Sybil Brand Institute? Our Vice Unit, the largest in the city, could only arrest so many prostitutes a night and those they did arrest were soon bailed out by their pimps. The prostitutes also knew that vice officers had Sundays and Mondays off. Some of the prostitutes who actually graduated high school would call the vice office and if no one answered they would go to work without fear of being arrested.
I remember the prostitutes used to stand on the boundary line between the city and county, in front of Bullwinkle on Sunset. If they saw a Hollywood police car they would move to the county side, if it was a sheriff’s car, they would move to the city side. I notice that they preferred the city side, so I asked one girl why. She told me that LAPD writes us tickets and books us on our warrants but the sheriffs make us put our hands on their car window ledge and they hit our fingers with their metal flashlights. Bet you never heard that on ABC News.
We had a new captain who wanted to know just how bad the problem was. He wouldn’t come out at night and see for himself so he sent a sergeant out to do a whore count. The sergeant made a drive on Sunset Boulevard from the county line, where Bullwinkle stands, to Normandie, Hollywood’s eastern boundary. He counted over three hundred girls. If you figure in the ones that were already on a date in a motel or on car date, the number is higher. Tax them and reduce the deficit in six months.
The problem was so bad at one time, that I was enroute to a high priority radio call. I was driving westbound Sunset Boulevard at Vista. I look over at the Denny’s and see a prostitute leaning into a car stopped at the stop sign. She is performing the kind of sex that Clinton denied getting in the Oval Office. Think about it: you go to the theater, tickets $90, night club & drinks, $100, late meal at Denny’s $40. Watching a prostitute give some motorist oral sex right outside your booth, priceless.
A lot of non-police think prostitutes look like Julia Roberts in Pretty Women, or Melanie Griffith in Body Double. Quite the opposite, even the whores classified themselves. The west end prostitutes were usually a better looking, better dressed and of course more expensive dates. The east end whores were referred to as “Mud Ducks.” They were the Wal-Mart variety, little quality, but a lot cheaper than Saks 5th Avenue. They seldom bathed, or put on clean clothes and usually were supporting a drug habit. I suspect that most had STD’s. Mud Ducks were not allowed to work the West end.
Next, I’ll talk about some of the great stories I heard from tricks when they want to make a crime report about how they lost their wallet.
Stay tuned.