At one point in the interview with Matt Lauer, Anna Gristina explains her innocence as such:

Gristina maintains that her matchmaking service was legal. She saw the show "The Millionaire Matchmaker" on Bravo and said a friend suggested she create something similar. Gristina's idea was to create a high-end "sugar daddy" matchmaking service for wealthy men who are married — like a married version of Match.com, she said.

The D.A. is accusing her of having run a prostitution ring for fifteen years.

The D.A.'s investigation of Gristina's ring has been going on for five years.

And for what it's worth, on an internet profile, she cited her job as an "internet marketer" (how wonderfully vague!) from 2005 to 2009.

The Millionare Matchmaker's first airing on Bravo was January 29, 2008.

• That's two to three years after the LinkedIn profile has her starting in the "marketing" business.
• That's at least eleven years after the D.A. has accused her of first running her business.
• And it's an entire year after the D.A. began its investigation of her.

Waterworks: The tears start flowing early from Gristina before the first minute, when she talks about her youngest son coming to visit her in jail, where she's been for the last four months. She tells Lauer: "He cried the whole time and begged to stay with me."

Vocals: Her voice is surprisingly sweet. She sounds like Kelly McDonald in the trailers for Brave.

Omerta: The first and most crucial point comes in around 4:43, when Gristina's vaguely-noted "loyalty" is noted by Lauer without interruption—a savvy move on his part—as he speeds on to the second half of the question: Do you feel those you've been loyal to have been loyal to you? Gristina responds that she hasn't been in contact with anyone so she wouldn't know. Oh really? In a New York Post piece in which reporter Jeanne MacIntosh disclosed her prior relationship with Gristina, she told the reporter of a conversation she had with a friend tied up in the prosecution of madam Kristen Davis' case:

Asked if she knew the conversation was being recorded, she said, "No, but apparently it was."

Gristina most certainly knows who's loyal to her these days, and who isn't. To enter the idea of loyalty into the conversation would appear to acknowledge its need, but to deny it outright would've appeared silly, too. Lauer's question was smart; Gristina's response was smarter.

Powerful Men: Lauer asks if she knew anything about the powerful men the D.A. quizzed her on during the initial interrogation. The lawyers stop her from answering that and volley with Lauer. For the entirety of that question and the lawyers' answers that followed it, Gristina's face looked like this:

She didn't say a word.

Interrogation: Gristina is asked about how she was questioned. Interestingly, she explains that

Lawyers: Definitely there, definitely making sure she wouldn't comment on the accusations. Take a look at this:

Match.com's Would-Be Competitor: Matt Lauer didn't exactly have to do hard-hitting interrogating to get the lawyers to speak up. For example, when asking of the matchmaking service Gristina contends she was running:

Matt Lauer: Would this include married man looking to have someone to have dinner with?

Anna Gristina: Very much like Match.com.

Matt Lauer: Would it also include married men looking for someone to have sex with?

Ponytailed Lawyer: I think we've answered that question. 'Very much like Match.com.'

Matt Lauer: If I say to you, 'Had you ever connected a married man—or any man, for that matter—with a woman in a matchmaking service,' have you done that?

Ponytailed Lawyer: Our response would be 'You sound like the Manhattan District Attorney's office.'

If Matt Lauer sounds like the D.A. in an interview like this, someone is doing their job incorrectly. Or correctly. At this point, it's hard to tell. Also:

Matt Lauer: So you won't say to me at all whether you have been involved in running any kind of legitimate, legal dating service in the past?

Ponytailed Lawyer: Given the state's allegations in this case, we'd be fools to answer your question.

So what did they answer? Again: It's hard to tell.

The Law Enforcement Connections: At one point Lauer asks about the wiretaps the D.A. reportedly has in their possession from the five year-long sting, wherein, Gristina is heard boasting of her connections to law enforcement. The lawyer responds that if the D.A. has them, they want to hear them (as they haven't been released to the defense lawyers as evidence), explaining that they won't "try this case by innuendo." Lauer counters that he's never been heard bragging about knowing cops in the event that he were arrested. The lawyers explain that Lauer's probably said a lot of things that could be made to sound "sinister." To which we'd counter: Maybe by Scientologists?

Finally, one of her lawyers, Pete Gleason—a former NYFD fireman who took the case pro-bono, and is putting his loft up for Gristina's bail, and who contends doing so is just an act of good samaritanism—was also interviewed by Lauer. And that was a separate trip in and of itself.

Lauer's interview can be seen here:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32545640

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

New York Post

In fact, our story said no such thing. We never claimed that Mr. Allan was friends with Ms. Gristina, only that she said he was on surveillance audio. 

Our reporting indicated that multiple sources had reported the existence of a surveillance tape on which Ms. Gristina boasted about a personal relationship with Mr. Allan. We were not able to determine whether the alleged madam’s claim was true or not, and never claimed to.

Our story clearly stated: "Ms. Gristina reportedly boasted of her years-long close association with the editor, whom she referred to as a ‘very, very good friend,’ and explained that she had personally been responsible for tips leading to more than a few of the Post’s most memorable cover stories."

Mr. Allan released a statement yesterday insisting that the Observer story was "untrue." Ms. MacIntosh, the writer behind several of the Post's stories on the Gristina case, including the paper’s exclusive jailhouse interview—explained in her piece that she has used Ms. Gristina as a source for "several stories" she's written for the paper—a rare case of a journalist identifying a source.

Ms. MacIntosh paid her source another visit on Rikers Island after our story ran. During that meeting, Ms. Gristina denied any knowledge of Mr. Allan, insisting, "I don’t know who Col Allan is. I have never met him. I have never heard his name until today."

Ms. Gristina went went on to explain to Ms. MacIntosh that she had been approached in 2008 by a woman being questioned as an escort for madam Kristen Davis. The woman was concerned about appearing in the press. Ms. Gristina said her response to the woman might have  appeared on the surveillance tape. She recalled telling the woman that "I had a relationship with someone at The Post [meaning me, Jeane MacIntosh] who was a good friend, and that I had provided information to The Post in the past."

Ms. Mcintosh did not indicate whether she helped to squelch any item about Ms. Davis or the escort.

Today, attorneys for the New York Post sent The Observer a letter requesting that we report that:

"(1) Mr. Allan has never met or spoken with Ms. Gristina
(2) Mr. Allan has not had any relationship, either business or personal, with Ms. Gristina
(3) Ms. Gristina has never spoken Mr. Allan’s name
(4) The New York Observer does not have any evidence to suggest that Mr. Allan or the New York Post altered its coverage of the Gristina story,
(5) and apology to Mr. Allan for the errors in the article."

Furthermore, a letter from an attorney of Anna Gristina's to Mr. Allan noted:

"My client has specifically indicated that and has never met you nor had any relationship, either business or otherwise, with you. Indeed, she has never spoken your name. Any statement to the contrary is absolutely false."

Is it possible that Mr. Allan and Ms. Gristina are not acquainted? Of course. We never reported that they were. The piece merely notes that, according to multiple sources, the alleged madam boasted of a such a relationship on surveillance audio. Whether she was being truthful or not remains in question.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The New York Daily News, not a few years ago.

Martin Dunn was the editor of the New York Daily News for about ten nonconsecutive years: Once in the early 90s, and again from 2003 to 2010. Now in his old stead is Colin Myler, the former News of the World editor thrown under the bus by the Murdoch family. Myler's rise to the position was ostensibly going to reignite the longstanding rivalry between the New York Daily News and the Murdoch-owned New York Post. We learned that wasn't the case after the revelation that Myler held onto a story about the 'Soccer Mom Madam' Anna Gristina, bragging about her "close, close friendship" with the editor of the New York Post, Col Allan.

Col Allan happens to be the former boss of current New York Daily News editor Colin Myler. Martin Dunn has some thoughts about this.In a statement given to The Observer through a spokesperson, Col Allan denied ever meeting or having a relationship to Anna Gristina or her business. The Observer reached out to the Daily News as to why the story was held. Did it not stand up to the tabloid's threshold for killing a story? Did they simply not find it newsworthy?

Or was Colin Myler just acting the way any decent human would, when handed an incendiary tabloid story about their former boss and good friend?

After all, it wasn't but five years ago that Allan and Myler are together quoted screaming at a Daily News gossip—in front of their wives, at dinner—about how awful the Post's rival tabloid truly is.

When asked about the story—or the motive behind holding it—a spokesperson for the Daily News declined to comment.

But as Martin Dunn explains in an editorial for The Guardian, none of this would've stopped either tabloid from running the story—with no shortage of glee—when he was there, less than two years ago.

Martin Dunn—who The Observer hears was spotted in plucky local upstart DNAinfo's newsroom when our story was published yesterday—runs down the various ways over the years in which Col Allan and the New York Post never wasted an opportunity to trash Dunn or the Daily News, one of which amusingly involved sending a shipment of peanuts to Dunn's office.

In the end, he concludes that the story that Colin Myler set aside would have unquestionably run in his paper, and takes a few guesses as to why his former stead didn't publish it:

Even though Col Allan has labeled the allegations "outrageous" (a complaint that somehow never seems to generate much sympathy for a butt-kickin' tabloid editor), the fact that the story was generated from law enforcement sources would normally be a green light to get ink on paper. Tabloid editors have traditionally never been able to resist a punch at a rival and still raise a glass in the bar afterwards.

Others speculate that in a climate where print products are struggling, there is a quiet understanding between News and Post owners Mort Zuckerman and Rupert Murdoch not to trash each other's organizations. Better that dirty laundry stays hidden in the closet.

Whatever the reason, both newsrooms are in a state of embarrassment – for opposite reasons.

While giving some credit to our own suggested tabloid headline—COL GIRLS—and taking an odd sideswipe at The Observer as "a publication hardly known for its fun and wit," Dunn breaks out a few suggestions of his own:

• COL ME IRRESPONSIBLE!
• DON'T COL ME, I'LL CALL YOU!
• MAY I COL YOU SWEETHEART?
• MAY I SAY WHO'S COL-LING?

 
New York's Uneasy Tabloid Truce [The Guardian]

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

FRIENDS FOREVER: New York Daily News editor Colin Myler, and his former boss, New York Post editor Col Allan.

There’s one intriguing scoop in the ongoing saga of the Soccer Mom Madam, Anna Gristina, that you’re not likely to read about in the New York Post.

According to multiple sources familiar with the situation—none of whom were willing to be identified, for fear of retribution—among the names of various powerful men found in transcripts of the surveillance audio from the five-year-long investigation is one prominent media figure: Col Allan, the editor of the New York Post. UPDATED.

More surprising, especially to newsroom sources at the Post’s bitter tabloid rival, the New York Daily News, which has been sitting on the explosive tidbit, is that the story hasn’t appeared in its pages either.

On March 8, 2012, the Daily News reported: “Upstate soccer mom Anna Gristina, in secretly recorded conversations, boasted about her insider informants throughout law enforcement: the NYPD, the DEA, the FBI and ICE,” the paper said, noting that the information came from “several conversations obtained by The News.”

Col Allan’s name, which was mentioned by Ms. Gristina in those conversations, did not appear in the story.

Ms. Gristina reportedly boasted of her years-long close association with the editor, whom she referred to as a “very, very good friend,” and explained that she had personally been responsible for tips leading to more than a few of the Post’s most memorable cover stories.

The Manhattan DA’s office would not confirm or deny Mr. Allan being named by Ms. Gristina in evidence, or whether or not Mr. Allan could be deposed for the investigation, explaining that they do not comment on ongoing cases.

Multiple sources familiar with the situation told The Observer that when presented with the information regarding Mr. Allan, newly installed New York Daily News editor Colin Myler shrugged off its importance, and tabled the item, ostensibly for more in-depth consideration in the immediate future. That didn’t happen. “Colin got whisked away to London. When he got back, the story was dead,” one source explained.

The notorious madam bragging of a bond with Col Allan is exactly the kind of story that one could reasonably expect to land on the front cover of the Daily News, replete with a glorious, wordplay-driven headline—COL GIRL, perhaps.

The idea of an editor of the News protecting his bitter opponent might seem odd to readers who have followed the papers’ longtime war. Indeed, many speculated after Mr. Myler was hired by New York Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman in January that the competition was about to heat up. For instance, Lloyd Grove at The Daily Beast called it ”[New York Daily News owner Mort] Zuckerman’s declaration of war on Murdoch’s News Corp.”

And Mr. Myler has some reasons to go after News Corp. His last job was as the editor of the recently-deceased News of the World, Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid that was one of the biggest casualties phone-hacking scandal. After Rupert and James Murdoch testified that they had no knowledge of the phone hacking going on at News of the World, and furthermore, that the Murdoch family had been let down by the paper’s brass, Mr. Myler asserted otherwise.

So what possible reason could Myler have to hold fire on such a potentially incendiary, classic tabloid cover story?

“Why do you think it didn’t run?” one former Post reported laughed. “Colin was a former right-hand to Col.”  The source was referring to a period before Mr. Myler’s News of the World tenure, when he served as Mr. Allan’s top deputy at the Post from 2003 to 2007. A call to Mr. Myler was not returned, and a spokesperson for the Daily News declined comment on the story on behalf of the paper; repeated requests for comment from Col Allan and a New York Post spokesperson were not returned. [UPDATED: Mr. Allan has since denied ever meeting Ms. Gristina, having any connection to her, or having any connection to her business. More below.] When reached by phone, Joanna Molloy—the lead writer on the Daily News' filings about the surveillance audio—declined to comment. Janon Fisher—another one of the writers on the story—referred us to the piece's editor James Fanelli; a request for comment from Mr. Fanelli was not returned.

Interestingly, the Post has been slow off the mark on the Anna Gristina story from the beginning. It was broken by hyperlocal journalism startup DNAinfo, in particular plucky Columbia Journalism grad Shayna Jacobs and crack investigative reporter Murray Weiss (formerly of the Post). The day after DNAinfo broke the story, the Daily News put it on page one. The Post ran a short item on page 5.

The story did eventually land on the Post’s cover—with a shot of Ms. Gristina in a sensationally sexy pose and an exclusive interview with the alleged madam, from Rikers Island. Coverage of the Gristina case by the Post has been noted by others as "[seemingly] sympathetic" and "nice".

Sources tell The Observer that since breaking the Anna Gristina story for DNAinfo, Shayna Jacobs has been hired by the New York Daily News. Ms. Jacobs declined to comment for the Observer. 

At least one onlooker has noted the many, many favorable items about Ms. Gristina’s suspiciously Pro-Bono lawyer, Pete Gleason—who once represented a former Post writer in court as the plaintiff in a civil suit against ConEd, and who the Post called in a print headline a “Lawyer With a Heart of Gold”—that have appeared in the Page Six column and paper over the years.

What’s not yet known is how close Mr. Allan and Ms. Gristina were or what other boldfaced names her operation was reportedly intimately familiar with, beyond John Edwards.

Know anything more? Drop us a line.

UPDATE: A spokesperson for the New York Post emails in a response on behalf of Col Allan. The comment:

"This story is outrageous. I have never met Anna Gristina, I have no relationship with her and I have no relationship with her business. Had the reporter from the NY Observer spoken to me, I would have told him as much."

As previously mentioned, The Observer reached out to Mr. Allan prior to publication for this story, as well as representatives for the Post.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

(Illo: Fred Harper)

Just before Christmas last year, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly hosted a small, cosmopolitan group of pretty young women in his office at 1 Police Plaza. Most were immigrants to the city, having come from Asia, Central America, Eastern Europe and around the United States. Because of the sensitive nature of what they would discuss, only two other officials were present—the NYPD’s chief counsel and the commanding officer in charge of vice.

The women spoke different languages but had at least one thing in common: they had all been brought to the city to labor in the sex industry. The non-natives’ first English words were “blow job” and “fuck.”

They told harrowing stories of being kidnapped, imprisoned and forced to sell their bodies. One immigrant without legal status in the U.S. described being shuttled around in a livery car, the driver delivering her to various “customers” one after another. “She was basically a prisoner,” said one participant at the meeting.

Mr. Kelly spent two hours with the women, an unusual investment of time for the commissioner. “He has a lot on his plate,” NYPD counsel Katherine Lemire told The Observer. “It was very, very moving. You could tell these women have been through a lot, and for them to come in to the NYPD and have them tell their stories was intimidating for them. That’s why the Commissioner kept the attendance on our side pretty low.”

Shortly after that meeting, which antiprostitution advocates had long been requesting, Mr. Kelly created a new antitrafficking squad, believed to be the first of its kind in an American city. And in the next two months, the NYPD shifted its focus for the first time to arresting johns rather than prostitutes. In two sweeps, one in January and one in February, 386 men were arrested. Many have since been arraigned, and fined between $150 and $250. Some are completing community service and have had their cars impounded. In exchange for leniency, the DA’s office has interviewed many of them, seeking information about trafficked women.

Deputy NYPD Commissioner Paul Browne told The Observer that Mr. Kelly has now “directed commands citywide to respond to complaints about prostitution by identifying locations and then arresting the johns through the use of officer decoys and their back-up teams.”

“We are very much in agreement with how the NYPD is handling these cases, in terms of their stepped-up efforts in johns cases,” executive assistant DA Karen Friedman Agnifilo, chief of the trial division, told The Observer. The DA’s office has a number of human trafficking cases in the works, she said, including one against a New York City pimp who has “branded” his girls with tattoos.

The new law enforcement emphasis on the demand side was not apparent last week, as Anna Gristina, the “soccer mom madam,” was carted off to Rikers Island, where she remains, unable to cover a $2 million bond (despite being charged with only one count of promoting prostitution). Instantly, the mother of four became a tabloid cover girl, as law enforcement sources dangled leaks about her business. Ms. Gristina was sitting on a fortune, sources said. Her clients were rich and powerful. City officials had made it known that they had her on tape bragging about her well-heeled customer base. The Daily News, hard out of the gate on the story until it got beat on the first jailhouse interview, characterized the johns as “a roster of bold-faced names including royalty, state politicians, CEOs, club owners and members of the boards of city hospitals and art institutions.”

Clearly the authorities know who many of those johns are. No names have been forthcoming, however. Rather the “curvy strawberry blonde,” who had a soft heart for orphaned pot-bellied pigs, used the New York Post to assure her regular patrons that her incarceration wouldn’t alter the discretion for which some had paid the equivalent of the median American annual income.

“I’d bite my tongue off before I’d tell them anything,” she declared, in her Scottish brogue.

If history is prologue, the men have little to worry about. Like 90 percent of the johns in the United States, New York’s most famous prostitution customer, the notorious Client Nine, was never charged with a crime. Client Nine’s favorite rental girl, Ashley Dupré, was never aware that the square-jawed, important-seeming guy who fucked her bareback without ever removing his black socks was the governor of the state of New York, or that he helped write and then signed into law the nation’s toughest anti-human trafficking statute.

In New York State, patronizing a prostitute is a Class A misdemeanor. Theoretically, offenders can get up to a year in jail, but most are issued a desk ticket and walk away with a small fine and maybe some community service. (The crime becomes a felony only if the prostitute is under 14.)

Among Eliot Spitzer’s one-time comrades in the effort to shut down human trafficking is Norma Ramos of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women. Ms. Ramos, who works out of a serene, unmarked office not far from the Korean brothels in the 30s, is a self-described “product of the New York City foster care system” who equates prostitution with slavery and calls herself an “abolitionist.”

Ms. Ramos was one of the advocates who arranged for Mr. Kelly to meet with what they call “prostituted women”—placing the responsibility on the traffickers and customers, a distinction that has rankled advocates for the rights of “sex workers.”

“I say to them, ‘Why should anyone have to give a blow job to eat a sandwich?’” Ms. Ramos said. “They stopped inviting me to debates, because they can’t answer how that is empowering.”

For their part, supporters of sex workers, like the writer Melissa Gira Grant, assail the new abolitionists as prudish “moralists” who don’t get that sex work is just another part of the service industry. “There’s nothing feminist or new in the current wave of antiprostitution reformers who say … that all sex work is ‘sexual enslavement,’” she wrote last year in The Guardian.

Ms. Ramos and her fellow abolitionists frame prostitution as a gender-bias issue. “We live in a world where the whole enforcement apparatus around prostitution is constructed in a hugely, chokingly gender-biased manner,” she said. “Those who are sold are overwhelmingly female. And the buyers and sellers are overwhelmingly male. And resources always go toward arresting the victims. But if we stand a chance of putting the trafficking industry out of business we have to end the demand.”

Melissa Farley, director of Prostitution Research and Education in San Francisco, produced a 2003 study based on interviews with 854 prostituted women around the world. She found that 68 percent of them met the criteria for PTSD. “The most severe damage of prostitution is not physical, it’s psychological,” she said. “The rates of PTSD are among the highest of any group ever studied.”

Prostitution, Ms. Ramos argued, has created “a class of human beings that are not allowed to say no.”

Former diplomat and Texas oil heiress Swanee Hunt has poured millions into the antitrafficking movement. Her Demand Abolition project surveyed 202 johns in Boston and found some disturbing attitudes. “I’ve never had emotional encounters with a prostitute,” said one unnamed survey respondent. “You tell a girl, like, can I put it in your ass and she’s like, ‘Oohh, I really like that.’ That has a good physiological effect.” More crucially, the survey found twice the level of criminality among the sex buyers it interviewed as among the nonbuyers.

The study recommended that police departments like Dallas, which have started to take DNA swabs of prostitutes they arrest—claiming that such women are more likely to be the victims of homicide—should start swabbing johns instead, since they are more likely to be involved in criminal behavior.

The “50 beauties” employed by Ms. Gristina, as the New York Post put it, were said to be a different type than the women enslaved by sex traffickers. They weren’t hookers, they were “escorts,” who come at a higher price and provide services that go beyond sex. Chief among such premium services is what Canadian journalist Victor Malarek, who has written a book on the john culture, calls the “Girlfriend Experience” or GFE (the basis for the Sasha Grey movie).

As one john explained to Mr. Malarek: “The GFE means that for the duration of the encounter, the provider does not make you feel like you are participating in a business transaction.”

Some of Ms. Gristina’s clients are said to have paid $25,000 for weekends in Europe, or $800 an hour. One of her employees, “Lizzie,” told the Daily News that she was flown on a private jet to Europe to help a john shop for a mansion. “I’m not a typical escort,” she said in a wide-ranging sit-down with reporters. “I don’t have big implants, I don’t dress [like a prostitute]. I don’t do drugs. I don’t even smoke … Did I travel first-class? You don’t understand. These are men who have their own jets. They have collections of cars.”

She thought of herself as a kind of well-paid surrogate. “I’m the companion, the therapist,” she said. “I can hold a conversation. I’m the person to whom they go when they need a retreat, when they want to get away from their wife.”

Reading those words, Ms. Ramos scoffed: “What I would ask Lizzie is, how did you get started in this business?”

Abolitionists advocating the prosecution of buyers point to the success of what is called “the Swedish model.” Since Jan. 1, 1999, it has been illegal in Sweden to purchase or attempt to purchase sexual services, punishable with fines or up to six months of imprisonment. Those who are prostituted risk no legal repercussions.

By 2004, the number of prostitutes in Sweden dropped 40 percent, and by 2007 the nation was estimated to have the lowest number of victims of human trafficking in Europe. At the time of the change in legislation in 1999, it is estimated that one in eight men bought sex. In 2009, it was down to one in 14. The numbers aren’t particularly surprising: Johns tend to have more at risk—their reputations, careers, families. The surprise, perhaps, is that they’ve been protected for so long.

Norway, Iceland and Finland have copied the approach and it is under consideration in Israel. Even free-wheeling Amsterdam has begun to crack down. In 2008 the mayor started a campaign to close the brothels in the red-light district, contending that the workers in it were trafficked. The city set up a hotline for buyers to call to verify whether an independent prostitute (a prostitute who does not work in a licensed brothel) is legal.

The NYPD’s new human trafficking squad consists of eight experienced investigators and a sergeant supervisor, all handpicked by Mr. Kelly with the involvement of antiprostitution coalition members.

Since the beginning of 2012, NYPD has run two citywide stings, one in January and one in February, dubbed “Operation Losing Proposition”—in which a total of 360 johns were arrested and 102 vehicles were seized. Mr. Browne said the new focus on the johns will continue. “While we have had Losing Proposition arrests in the past, they have been small in scope, not citywide like these,” he explained. “It’s a new policy in that the focus has switched to johns.”

In a statement to The Observer, Commissioner Kelly noted that “women are victimized by prostitution, often forced into it by intimidation and other forms of exploitation. It makes sense to focus on those who are creating the demand, and for them to realize that they face being arrested and having their cars seized.”

Mr. Ramos welcomes the developments as evidence that she and her cohorts have made a dent in police culture that generally abides the trade, or even participates in it. “These girls often say they know cops from the waist down,” she said.

The fact that Mr. Spitzer was never prosecuted not only reinforced the notion that the law enforcement apparatus in New York is not just casting a benign eye on the trade, but partaking of it as well, Ms. Ramos added. “You know, Spitzer apologized to a lot of people, to his family, his wife, the people of New York, but he has to this day withheld the one apology that would get him redemption. He has yet to apologize to the decade of women he bought, for using them as disposable things. He should have been prosecuted and the first one charged under the bill he signed.”

The NYPD’s new focus on johns began long after the five-year investigation that netted Ms. Gristina was initiated. The only male names that have turned up so far are those of two cops and a banker. Sergeant Richard Wall was seen entering and leaving the brothel building, and NYPD has asked for his log book, which presumably will explain the frequency of his visits. A former cop who worked in the Manhattan DA’s office, Sly Francis, was outed in the press as one of Ms. Gristina’s personal bodyguards. And a Morgan Stanley banker, David S. Walker, was meeting with Ms. Gristina in his office when she was arrested. He was reportedly discussing financing her planned expansion into online dating. Mr. Walker denied wrongdoing, but has been placed on leave.

The NYPD has run only two citywide john stings, and Ms. Ramos believes the police may be reluctant to continue because of tepid public support, especially from The New York Times, which covered the stings with critical comment from pro-sex worker advocates. “It is not a sound policy,” Audacia Ray of the Red Umbrella Project told The Times. “I don’t think we’ll see a big drop in prostitution because of these arrests.”

Ms. Ramos disagrees. “You don’t need to arrest them all,” she said. “But you need to arrest enough so you change the cultural and community standards and people realize that it’s not O.K. to buy sex and if you do this there will be consequences to the victimizer.”

Ms. Ramos plans to bring feminist icon Gloria Steinem with her to a meeting with the editorial board of The Times to discuss its coverage of prostitution. “Two men reported on the change in police policy, and quoted only the sex workers project,” she pointed out. “There is a huge problem at The New York Times.”

Besides The Times, the media response to sensational arrests like Ms. Gristina’s tends to be more winking than thoughtful. The tabloids kept the story on page one for three days, teasing out sensational tidbits. Ms. Gristina and her employees were variously described “mantraps” and “high-class hookers” satisfying “the sexual appetites of high-flying clientele” in “an uncut, XXX version of Lifestyles of the Rich and Amorous.” Even the Daily Beast, run by women’s empowerment maven Tina Brown, advertised the story with the headline “The Best Little Whorehouse in New York.”

Now sitting behind bars while her well-heeled johns go about their usual business, the “McMadam” appears determined to protect her clients. Whether prosecutors will do the same remains to be seen.

editorial@observer.com