The Happy Hooker: My Own Story

6. SHAKEDOWN

I was still working at the United Nations mission when I discovered what a vicious racket there is in New York in blackmailing vulnerable girls and married women who might try to make a little extra money in prostitution. These blackmailers are even more dangerous to part-time hookers than the police.

I was living in my new studio apartment in the low East Fifties when the blackmailers, who had obviously been watching me for some time, paid me a call.

It was a raw, cold evening toward the end of November when I came home from the office and found an envelope stuck under my door. My first thought, when I opened the door and stooped down to pick up the envelope, was that it was a rent notice from the landlord. It was only two weeks since that hood moving man, Murray, had put my furniture in the apartment, and as yet I had not paid any rent besides the deposit.

My name was written on the envelope in very scribbly, more or less childish, uncontrolled handwriting, and with a pencil, not a pen. I opened the envelope as I walked in and took my coat off. And all of a sudden an intuitive feeling told me that this little envelope contained dangerous news for me.

Only one thing came out of the envelope – a Polaroid picture, which shocked me tremendously. Someone had put the pictures, which Mac the so-called cop, who I later learned was a phony, stole from my old apartment, into a group and took this Polaroid shot of them. There I was in one photo sucking a huge cock, and in the others, playing with myself. There was no letter with the pictures.

I was badly scared and immediately ran out of the apartment and took the elevator down to the lobby. I went up to the doorman on duty and said to him, “Listen, I’m in trouble.” I trusted this doorman. He was a kind of fatherly type, a father image to me.

He knew I was hooking, of course, but I was paying him off. I didn’t show him the picture or tell him exactly what had happened. I just said that some person came up to my apartment and put an envelope under the door which shouldn’t have been put there.

“Did you see anyone going up unannounced?” I asked.

The doorman scratched his head and finally said, “Let me think. Yes, now that you ask me, I remember seeing a young guy this afternoon. I thought he must be drunk or doped up. I don’t know what those kids take nowadays, but he couldn’t walk straight. He needed a shave, his clothes were dirty and ragged.” The doorman frowned to himself. “He, was a young punk with long stringy blond hair hanging in his face, and he said he had something to deliver to you.”

The doorman grinned now. “He mispronounced your name something awful, so I told him I’d take the message to you. But he said he wanted to deliver it himself, and he would just push it under your door. So finally I let him go up.”

I couldn’t think of anyone who answered the description, but I thanked the doorman, gave him five dollars, and went back to my apartment. I knew this was no joke, and as though to confirm this thought, the telephone rang. The voice on the other end was heavy with that low-class New York accent. It said, “Miss Xaviera?”

I knew the call was to do with the pictures. “Yes,” I whispered.

“So, Miss Xaviera, I hope you found your little letter.”

“Yes,” I said, trying to stop my voice from quivering.

“Miss Xaviera, we want you to think our proposition over seriously, and we want an answer by Wednesday. In fact, we are going to call you tomorrow night at seven.” This was already Monday. “We want you to have five thousand dollars ready for us, or else…”

Upon which I said, “What do you mean? Five thousand dollars for this little picture?”

With a sneering voice the man said, “Yeah. We know you don’t have your immigration papers. We can get your sexy little ass kicked out of the country in forty-eight hours by proving to the Immigration Department that you are posing for pornographic pictures.” He had a mean laugh.

“We can give the pictures to the people where you work, and you’ll be fired and be in big trouble with immigration. Think about it. We’ll be back to you tomorrow at seven in the evening.”

The man hung up, and in my life I never remember being so upset. I had been on my own for less than a year since Carl Cordon left. Apart from Sonia, I didn’t have any real friends because of the wild life I had been leading. I knew some lawyers and influential men who were customers, but all of a sudden I was faced with the problem of raising $5,000. I looked through my address book wondering whom I could call.

For about four months I had been “dating” a lawyer named Martin Joffrey, a very sweet, very uptight Jewish boy, whom I had met just after Carl went away. He knew what I had suffered and that I was basically a very sensitive person. Martin had seen me going the way down, as he put it, ever since I was introduced to Pearl. He hated to see this happen to a nice Jewish girl from Holland. But Martin and I had a tender, almost loving relationship. I really cared for him and knew I could call him anytime for advice.

So the first person I called was Martin and he really didn’t know what to say. The one thing he did say was, “Don’t pay them. Once you pay a blackmailer, he’s on your payroll for life.” This answer didn’t help me, and I called other people I knew, but nobody could help me.

Finally I started asking if I could borrow $5,000. “I’ll work it off, even if it means I have to leave my job and screw it off,” I begged.

Some of the men I had been dating were really rich, but now, very early in the game, it was driven home to me that a man who goes to a prostitute doesn’t want to be bothered with her private problems unless he really gets involved with her.

So I was on the phone all night, and no help was coming.

The next morning I was in almost a state of nervous collapse when I found in my pocketbook, just before leaving for the office, the piece of paper on which Murray the Mover had written his name and phone number.

I remembered how he had know instinctively I was working as a prostitute even though I had a daytime job. Murray, being a mover, wasn’t exactly a sweet pussycat, and I thought this is precisely the time to call a rough boy instead of all those nice, sophisticated jet-set people who are full of words without any action. So I called Murray just before leaving for work and explained what had happened. He said if this blackmailer was going to call me tonight at seven, he would be at my apartment at six-thirty. Murray told me not to have any dates and not to plan on going anywhere until this thing was settled. “I just want you to be with me, and that means that I will be with you, and you will do what I tell you – that’s all.”

This was an order, and right after five o’clock I went home. I had made a date for nine that night with a lawyer from Canada to go to dinner, and I had no way to reach him. He was recommended to me by my stockbroker, and when I called Wall Street, my broker didn’t know how to find the lawyer. I just had no way to cancel this nine o’clock date.

I was home before six and canceled every person I was supposed to see before nine that night, and I was so nervous I barked at the men who called me on the phone. “Leave me alone; don’t bother me for the rest of the night.”

At six-thirty sharp, Murray rang the doorbell. I had not seen him since he moved me in three weeks before. He is a very tough-looking man and has a dark, pockmarked face and bushy black hair.

Murray seemed nervous himself when he came in. He looked around my studio apartment, first into the bathroom, where I had a phone so I could call people while I was in the tub. He said this was good, and as he looked around, he was talking.

“Xaviera, I want you to do exactly what I tell you. If anything happens tonight, we will be together. Just don’t be afraid. I know what I’m doing.”

Murray told me not to be frightened, but I was frightened and trying to keep from shaking. I was not really intending to do anyone – even Mac, who stole the pictures – any harm. All I wanted was to have a man with me when I met the people who were blackmailing me, somebody powerful who would maybe smack them on the nose a little and say, “Listen, give the pictures back to the girl and stop the bullshit!”.

“Okay,” Murray said, “now remember, usually blackmailers are not there to hurt you, they just want money, that’s all. When they call at seven, you answer in the bathroom and I’ll pick up in the living room. We’ll pretend that I’m your uncle. The only living relative you have in this country. I’m representing you, see? I have a car, and if they want to meet us we’ll meet them.”

Exactly at seven o’clock the telephone rang. I answered, and it was the guy who asked me for the money the night before. Murray picked up in the living room, and with the door open I could see him from the bathroom. He is nervous, too. I told the man that my uncle was with me and would handle the matter.

Then Murray started talking. “Hello, this is Mr. Arkstein, I’m Miss Xaviera’s uncle and only living relative she’s got here. I’m representing the girl. I know it is a very bad thing you found those pictures of her. I don’t want my niece to be deported.”

Murray really sounded like a meek, worried uncle. “Tell me how much you want, and we’ll meet you,” he went on. “I want to meet you tonight and get this thing over with, because the girl didn’t sleep last night, and I don’t want her to go through any more of this aggravation.”

Finally the man said, “Okay. We want five thousand dollars. We will meet you in front of the monument entrance to the Queens cemetery at eight o’clock tonight.” It was past seven already.

Murray agreed, and after we hung up he said to me, “Xaviera, why don’t you get me a beer? I’ve got to make a phone call.”

I went into the kitchen and poured Murray’s beer, and came back just in time to hear the last part of the conversation, which sounded more or less in code. I heard him say, “Be ready to pick up the bag of potatoes at the monument in the cemetery in Queens at eight-fifteen.”

I didn’t know what he meant, but I was petrified with fright, because it sounded like gangster talk. Murray drank his beer, and at ten minutes after seven he said, “Okay, let’s get moving. The car’s outside.”

“What’s going to happen, Murray?” I asked. It was a horrible, cold, sleeting, and raining night. No way did I want to go out.

Murray said, “Xaviera, do what I tell you and don’t ask questions. We’ll drive out to Queens, and I’ll tell you about myself on the way. Bring your umbrella.”

I took my umbrella along; it had a long spike at the end. We left the apartment. My hands were perspiring, something that never happened to me before. I was perspiring all over, and I never in my whole life have experienced so much nervous tension as that night. Out on the street we got into this old, smashed-up car.

“Couldn’t we go in a better car, Murray?” I asked.

He told me not to worry, and we started out for Queens. It was pouring rain, and we could hardly see through the windshield. I don’t know how Murray found the way. And as we drove, Murray told me some things about himself.

“Xaviera, you should know that I’m not only a mover. I’m involved in many other things. I’m sure you’ve heard about the Mafia. Even though I’m Jewish, I work with them.”

I started to tremble when he said the word.

“What do you mean, the Mafia?” I practically shouted. “I don’t want to get involved with the Mafia.”

I had seen movies and read about the Mafia, how people get killed, and disappear from the face of the earth. And up till then I had been so careful not to get involved with the Mafia.

“I’ve done ten years in jail,” Murray went on. “I’m thirty-seven years old now. I have survived so far, and now I’m sticking my neck way out, taking a lot of risks, but I hate to see a nice little girl like you getting pushed around and in trouble.”

He turned from the windshield and looked straight at me. “I’m doing this for you, but you’ve got to do one thing for me. This is no kid’s game we’re in. This is dangerous, serious work tonight. You’ve got to do just what I say every minute, and you’ll be all right. Don’t be afraid, and do exactly as I tell you.”

I think my eyes were as wide as the ocean. “What do you mean, Murray?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you, Xaviera. Whatever you see tonight, you’ll forget. And don’t ever mention my name or tell anybody what happened.”

I looked out the car window at the wet streets and the rain, and I was cold yet perspiring at the same time.

“Murray,” I asked after a while, “why do we have to meet in front of a cemetery in Queens, of all places, which is a very scary place, especially on a gloomy night like this?”

Murray answered me as though I was a dumb child. “Xaviera,” he said, “that’s the idea. What do you think? They’re going to meet you in front of Saks Fifth Avenue, or in front of Maxwell’s Plum? They’ve got to meet us where there will be no witnesses.”

At fifteen after eight Murray stopped in front of the cemetery. There was a highway right next to us with traffic buzzing by. To our right was the monument, and beside it, with an arched roof, a little dead-end alley maybe fifteen feet long.

There was no other car to be seen when we parked. “Murray,” I said, “this is a phony-baloney deal. It’s a quarter after eight, and why aren’t they here?” I wanted to go home in the worst way before something terrible happened.

Murray looked at me fiercely. “Do as I tell you. Get in the back of the car and shut up. And for Christ’s sake, don’t shake like that, like some little bird freezing to death.”

So I took my umbrella, my weapon for the evening, and climbed over the front seat and sat in the back of the car. But nothing happened. We saw cars drive by, and nobody stopped. And the rain kept pouring down, and I was freezing. Murray smoked one cigarette after another, and I saw he was getting more and more nervous. He opened the window, and you could hardly see out.

Then slowly, from nowhere, a car pulled up behind us with its lights on. “Murray, they’re here,” I said. Looking out the back window, I could see that there were two men in the front seat of the car. “Murray, that’s unfair,” I said. “We talked to only one man.”

Murray kept saying, “Don’t worry, don’t worry.” The car pulled up and passed us, and we could see the men looking into our car to see how many of us there were. Then the car kept going and stopped about four car lengths in front of us. The two men lit cigarettes and smoked them. Then a fellow stepped out of the car and came close to us. Under the street light I could see he was dressed in a white rain jacket and blue jeans. He had long blond stringy hair and a three- or four-day-old. beard. He was definitely a punky guy, and looked exactly like the description of the person who put the note under my door. He knocked on the window next to Murray, who cranked it down and said, “Hiya. I’m her uncle.”

The guy said, “Can I talk to you, buddy?”

Murray opened the door on the passenger side, and the messy guy walked around the car. He was talking and babbling to himself and he finally got in. Obviously he was stoned out of his head.

His eyes were sort of rolling around in his head, and he started saying things like, “We don’t mean so badly, but girls like this shouldn’t be around, dragging dirty pictures around to show everybody.”

I got aggravated and shouted, “What do you mean, show them to everybody? Those pictures were stolen out of my apartments”

“Shut up!” Murray said to me, and I shut my mouth. Then he turned to this pothead beside him. “Let’s go outside and talk. Who is the guy up front in the car?”

The doped-up hippie type said, “Yeah, I’m going to go away. We’re willing to settle for four thousand. Let’s settle right now.”

Murray shook his head. “No. I don’t think we should settle it right now. I think we should go outside and not discuss it in front of this lady.”

He gestured to me to open the window just a little so that I could hear what was happening, and in the pouring rain Murray stepped out on his side of the car, and the other guy got out of his door. I don’t think he knew if it was raining or the sun was shining, the way he was babbling.

The minute Murray left the car, the man in the car up front got out, too. He opened an umbrella and walked up to Murray and the doped-up kid. He acted like the leader, and although the light was bad, especially with the umbrella over his head, I could almost swear it was Mac. The same big fat-looking type. The three of them talked for about ten minutes, when all of a sudden two big strong headlights illuminated the scene. A big truck stopped behind us.

When the lights hit us I was more scared than ever, if that is possible. What the hell was happening? Were people trying to kill us, or what? But the truck driver just stepped out of the cab, and for the first time I saw there was a telephone booth there. The driver went to the booth and made a call. It seemed like he was in there for an hour, but in reality it was maybe two minutes.

All the time I wondered what Murray and Mac and the doped-up boy were talking about and what Murray was going to do. Finally the truck driver left the phone booth, and the truck pulled away.

Mac, holding the umbrella down over his head, went back to his car, got in, and closed the door after him. Then I saw Murray gesturing to the blond guy, and I could hear a few words he was saying. “Wait a minute. I’ll get it for you.”

Murray came back to the car and said in a loud voice, “I’m going to give him his goddamned four thousand and get your pictures back.”

Like a little idiot I said, “But, Murray, I don’t have four thousand dollars.”

In a rasping whisper he said, “Shut up.” And he reached in and took out a brown bag that looked like it was stuffed with something. He straightened up and gestured to the blond guy to go and stand inside the covered-over dead-end alley where he could count the money out of the rain and see that it was right.

I watched as Murray walked toward the alley, his back to me. The other guy stood with his face turned toward me, and I could see him through the rain, somewhat blurred. Then I saw Murray reaching into the bag as though to start giving the money to the young guy. Next thing I knew there were three very soft pops, and the young guy collapsed on the ground. Nobody but me could see into the alley, and then Murray walked back to the car at normal speed and shoved something into his pocket. He got into the car and we drove away. I was still sitting in the back seat.

“My God, Murray, what did you do?” I asked.

As usual, he just said, “Don’t worry.”

“But how can I help worrying?” I said. “Murray, you just shot a man, three times. I heard you shoot him with a silencer on your gun. Was that what you had in the bag?” I kept asking questions as we drove back toward New York.

Finally Murray said, “Kid, we don’t take halfway measures with bastards like these. What right do they have to blackmail a hard-working girl like you?”

“But, Murray, you still don’t have the pictures,” I pointed out.

All the way back to New York Murray didn’t say anything except, “Don’t worry, I’ll deliver the pictures tomorrow:” But in my mind I kept seeing this young boy slowly collapse and fall in the alley.

Okay, he was a head, a junkie. But I saw him lying there. It was horrible to me. He was killed to get three lousy pictures back. So I kept insisting, “Murray, please tell me what happened so far.”

Finally he said, “That jerk in the front seat didn’t see or hear me shoot the kid because I had a silencer on my gun. There’s a lot of work yet to do tonight. I’ve got to get rid of the gun.”

“But what about the guy in the front seat?” I asked. I was still worrying about getting my pictures back.

“He’ll be taken care of, too,” Murray said, staring out the windshield at the wet street.

“He’s going to he killed, too?” I tried to keep my voice low.

“That’s about it,” Murray said. “Two of my boys were hiding behind the cemetery walls.”

He laughed harshly. “Those finks couldn’t pick a sweeter place – for me. In about ten or fifteen minutes that slughead in the front seat will wonder where his hopped-up friend is, and when he goes to look for him…” Murray laughed again.

“When he sees his buddy lying in the alley, my two guys will grab him. And what happens after that, I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

At five minutes to nine Murray left me off in front of my apartment and said he would see me tomorrow. I went up to my apartment just in time to answer the bell, when this straight lawyer I had a date with came around. Here I had been going through the most scary hours of my life, and this lawyer comes in fresh and peppy and says, Hi, how are you? Nice to meet you. Regards to the stockbroker and this and that.

I could hardly talk. We went down to Chinatown to a restaurant. I dropped two plates on the floor be fore I got down half a spoon of wonton soup.

Finally I told the guy, “Listen, I’m so shook up about something I can’t tell you. Take me to a hotel. Fuck me. Do whatever you want, but don’t take me home. I don’t want to go home. I’m not even going to work tomorrow.”

I told him the story about halfway, not everything, of course. He was nice, and he took me to his room and fucked me all night and gave me a hundred dollars in the morning even though I, for the first time in my life, just lay there like an Egyptian mummy.

The next morning at eleven o’clock the lawyer dropped me off in front of my house and I was just about to walk up to my apartment building when I saw Murray in his moving van. There was a big smile on his face, and an envelope in his hands. I went over to him, and he took the pictures out, and there were all the pictures Mac had stolen that night.

“Murray,” I said, “come up and tell me what happened.” So Murray came up, and we had some coffee and he told me everything.

Right after he left me off, he had to dispose of the gun. Meanwhile the two Mafia guys at the cemetery grabbed Mac as he was leaning over the young blond guy, who was dead with three bullets from Murray’s gun with the silencer.

“Listen, buddy,” they said, “if you don’t show us the place where the pictures of the girl are, then you’ll end up like your pal here, dead. Right?”

Mac got in their car and took them to some crumby apartment in Queens. Murray’s guys found thousands of pictures of girls, different girls they had been blackmailing for the last year or two.

Murray’s guys knew what I looked like, and Mac was so scared from seeing his dopehead friend dead that he gave them my pictures immediately.

But Murray and his Mafia guys weren’t content just to get my pictures back. These blackmailers were working without what you might call a franchise from the Mafia godfather or whatever in Queens.

They made Mac tell them who was behind this whole blackmail syndicate, and he was so scared he said, “Okay, it’s a lawyer in Brooklyn.”

Mac took them to this lawyer, and then Murray’s hoods grabbed him, too, and three people were taken care of in total.

The two Mafia guys and Murray had to dispose of three bodies that same night.

This is what Murray told me, and obviously I realized that I had to compensate these guys for their services. At least it wouldn’t be $5,000.

But in the meantime, I was being so stupid and such an idiot that after Murray told me all this and showed me he had my pictures back, I said, “Murray, I don’t want those pictures in the house anymore. I don’t want them. You get rid of them for me.” So far he hadn’t asked for any money. But eventually Murray charged me two thousand dollars for services rendered.

And, of course, this morning was not the last time I was to see Murray. Just a few weeks later he came back to see me and suggested I ought to invest my money with him. By lending it, I would get back more in a couple of months.

I could see he wasn’t asking me if I wanted to make an investment, he was telling me I had to. I was making money by then, having left the UN job to go full-time into the business, so I gave Murray $2,000. He said he would put it in the street for me, shylock it. And for me, he explained, it would mean making five to ten percent interest on the money each week and of course getting it back in a short time. Naturally I let myself forget I was dealing with somebody who was involved with very many bad people and who was, even though he helped me, a pretty bad character himself.

After I gave the money to Murray I waited each week for some payment on interest, but nothing happened except that Murray kept coming around for freebies and gave me excuses why he didn’t have my money. Finally, when I started to be insistent with Murray, he said, “Look, Xaviera, don’t worry. You’ll get your money. just don’t bug me. Remember what happened to those jerks that bugged you?”

The message was very clear. Now the problem was how to stop Murray from coming around. I would gladly have given him another thousand if I never had to see him again. I was almost as worried about getting involved with Murray and his people as I was about the pictures. He even was sending friends to me and telling me to be nice to them. I would almost get sick every time he called.

And then the FBI approached me.

I was still in the same Fifty-first Street studio when the doorbell rang. The doorman called up and said the FBI wanted to see me. I was terrified, even though the murder – or maybe fake-murder – had happened three months before.

So into my apartment came this nice-looking FBI agent, Bill Tillman. He seemed to be a pleasant-type Irishman, but remembering Mac, the fake cop, I asked him if he could please identify himself. He was indeed FBI, very nice, and then he showed me a picture of Murray and asked me if I knew the person whose picture he was holding up.

I almost fainted. I really thought, Xaviera, this is it. You’re going to hang, you’re going to have the electric chair, they’ve found out you murdered this guy and are involved in a triple murder. But somehow I kept my composure.

You don’t fool around with FBI people, so I said, “Yes, I know him. He is Murray the moving man.” Then I asked this FBI man, “Why are you looking for Murray?”

Bill said they had followed his steps and found out that a couple of months ago he was at my place quite often in the afternoons.

“We’re looking for this man because he’s killed about eight people so far that we know about,” Bill told me. “He’s involved with fraud, hijacking, bootlegging, white slavery, and any other illegal thing you can imagine. What is your connection with him?”

Of course, I didn’t want to tell him what had happened and that I was a prostitute, but I was stupid enough not to take the phone off the hook, and it kept ringing, and I had to answer it, and he quickly got the idea.

“Have you had any bad experience with this man?” Bill asked.

I told him that I shylocked $2,000 with Murray and hadn’t even been paid back any interest. Bill said I could whistle for my money, and I’d better not ever see Murray again.

Just as he was leaving, the FBI man told me that he was not after prostitutes, but just don’t let him catch me fooling around with girls underage or violating the Mann Act. At that time I had been in the business only four or five months, so I didn’t know about those things. But I asked some friends, and now I’m very careful not to have a girl under eighteen working for me.

Once I took a girl friend down to Miami for convention work, but I made her buy her own ticket and we left on separate planes. That way nobody can say I’m transporting girls over state lines for immoral purposes, which is the Mann Act.

Murray called me only one more time to tell me the FBI was putting big heat on him, investigating every bar where he hung out, and he couldn’t get my money loose. I was so thankful he was going away that I didn’t care about losing the money. Then he told me something which relieved me more than anything else.

“Look, kid” – his voice was harsh in my ear – “there wasn’t any killing out there at the cemetery. I scared those bums into putting on that show for you. I figured since you ain’t gonna see me no more, you ought to know. When they found how well I was connected, they just melted away and gave me your pictures.”

I wanted to believe him, I still want to believe him, and I think I do. But I remember the FBI man telling me Murray had killed eight people, and I can still see the way the young blond guy sort of slid to the ground.

But from this experience I learned to be very careful about letting anybody get anything on me, and especially I have never let any pictures be taken of me sucking a cock or anything like that.