The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld

The Last Madam: A Life in the New Orleans Underworld by Chris Wiltz Page B

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Authors: Chris Wiltz
Tags: Historical, nonfiction, Biography & Autobiography, Retail
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mess he was mired in and that he was nothing but a figurehead, a pawn in the whole deal, a scapegoat. Ultimately, he would quit.” And the status quo was maintained.
    In the late 1920s, when Captain Ray was helping to change the Tango Belt irrevocably, T. Semmes Walmsley was the commissioner of finance. Walmsley was part of the Uptown social elite, a member of the Boston Club; his father had been Rex, King of Carnival, in 1890. When Mayor Arthur O’Keefe became ill and was forced to leave office in 1928, Walmsley became acting mayor. He had been Ray’s biggest supporter in the cleanup of the Tango Belt. Now he appointed Ray to head the police department.
    But he promoted Theodore Ray right out of the precinct where he’d been so effective. Ray held his new post for less than a year before he resigned from the police force. No reason was given.
    At the time Norma had two good policemen on the beat patrolling Dauphine Street. She left the gate to her alley at the side of thehouse unlocked. Whenever the cops got tired, they’d come in through the alley, go upstairs, take one of the rooms, and go to sleep, leaving Norma’s phone number with the precinct in case a crime was committed.
    In 1928 Huey Long was elected governor of Louisiana. Known as the People’s Governor, Long had a solid base everywhere in the state except New Orleans. He planned to rectify this problem by getting control of the Old Regulars, a New Orleans political machine with powerful leverage in the state legislature.
    Then, in 1929, while the country sang along with popular songs like “I’m Sitting on Top of the World” and “Happy Days Are Here Again,” the stock market crashed. Walmsley found himself mayor of a city with a crumbling infrastructure, where teachers, police, and firemen were poorly paid and poorly equipped, and there was no money in sight.
    Officially elected mayor in 1930, Walmsley became the head of the Old Regulars, which put him in direct opposition to Long. In declaring war on New Orleans, Huey Long hung a demoralizing moniker on the tall, bony-faced Walmsley. He referred to him relentlessly as Turkey Head while he starved the city into submission by preventing banks from lending it any money and, later, burying it in trash by not releasing money to pay the garbage collectors and forcing a strike during a record-breaking heat wave.
    At one point Long threatened to put New Orleans under military rule. He specifically ordered the militiamen he’d dispatched to search out prostitution in the “cesspool of iniquity” he claimed the city had become under old Turkey Head. Norma’s police friends told her to close her house for a while. “Here I had this beautiful house, and suddenly we needed a new place to hustle,” she said.
    Jackie, her housekeeper who answered the phones and made appointments, knew of an apartment on Chartres Street. The place was gloomy and overdone, with drapes made of a heavy damask and matching couches and bed canopy. But it had a phone.
    Norma stationed three or four girls in the apartment. That same evening she brought a few dates over in her car. “These were GoodMen,” she said, “a few Good Men worth the risk.” Since the crash Norma wasn’t getting so many Good Men.
    As soon as the men left, one of the girls called her. “I don’t feel right in this place, Norma,” she said. “There’s something spooky here. It’s just not normal. Maybe you’d better come over.”
    When Norma got there another girl said she had something to show her. “We didn’t have enough bedrooms with three men here,” she said. She opened the closet and pointed. “So, look, I turned a trick on the ironing board.”
    “That’s no ironing board,” Norma told her, “that’s one of those boards they lay you out on when you’re dead.”
    The apartment, it turned out, belonged to an undertaker. “You should have seen those whores running out of that building, down to Chartres Street,” Norma said. “They

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