Damsels in distress have always been a part of my practice, but they didn’t start out as the fairy tale variety. Fort Jackson was established in Columbia, South Carolina by act of Congress in 1917 to train soldiers for the First World War but, the war ended a year later and the fort didn’t become a reality until 1940 when it was needed to train soldiers for the Second World War. For however long the fort has existed, working girls have plied their trade servicing the servicemen. Little did I know my first job as a lawyer was to become their protector.
Senator Isadore Lourie, who hired me fresh out of law school, had a special relationship with the bail bondsman most trusted by the ladies. They had to pay $200.00, 10% of the standard $2,000.00 bond, to get bonded out of the Columbia City jail and had to pay another $250.00 by Monday morning’s municipal court for our legal fees. Naturally, they were busiest on Saturday nights which meant I was called into action Sunday mornings.
I would walk the jail’s holding cells collecting names, information, and $200.00 so I could post pre-signed bail bonds to spring the working girls. You don’t want to know where the woman kept their bail bond money, suffice it say I carried a handkerchief to take the money. Sometimes someone wouldn’t have stashed the cash, and I was given discretion in such cases to get them out on credit if I recognized them as repeat customers. That was the hardest part of my job because the woman didn’t look the same locked up as they did on the street. The jailers took their wigs in booking eliminating wigs as obvious hiding places for their money. As I walked down the holding cells I’d be confronted by women who didn’t look anywhere near as enticing without their wigs and makeup. “Yo, lawyer, it’s me, Mustang. Don’t you member me?”
The easier part of my job came on Monday morning when the ladies had to face the consequences for their transgressions in municipal court. Every Monday morning, after I’d collected our fees, I’d sit in the courtroom surrounded by the women all dressed up in their finery and listen as the Municipal Court judge railed against the evils of prostitution and proclaimed once again the City’s intent to put a stop to it once and for all. After his fiery speech, my clients would sheepishly line up line up and all plead guilty to solicitation. Only not to the solicitation for immoral purposes statute which carried the threat of real jail time, but to solicitation like selling magazines without a permit which carried a maximum fine of only $100.00. The bail bond, lawyer’s fees, and fine were just the cost of doing business for my enterprising clients.
But my subspecialty really came to fruition when I represented one of the first and largest telephone sex companies. At one point my client had more telephone switching capacity than the entire Town of Mt. Pleasant phone company. The women could earn a couple bucks a minute talking dirty to men on the telephone all in the safety and privacy of their own homes. A couple bucks a minutes adds up quickly to $120.00 an hour. And, who were their customers? Surprisingly, their best customers were old men in nursing homes. Each month when their checks were deposited the women’s phone lines lit up like Chrisytmas trees. I picture them, with their hair up in curlers, wearing a frumpy house coat, doing the family ironing talking on the phone lifting up the iron to sound of escaping steam, psssssst, and saying, “Oh, baby, you’re so hot!” The wages the women earned were welcomed at home until, sooner or later, their husbands would get to feeling neglected for not getting what the women were describing on the phone. My client became a lucrative referral source of damsels in distress.
I am proud to have represented the working women I have represented over the course of my career. They paid their fees, appreciated my work, and often had more honesty and integrity than other clients. Best of all, they helped prepare me to represent real damsels in distress later in my career when the opportunity presented itself.
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