The Capital Call Girls
Jim Bunch got mixed up with Austin escorts—first for sex, then for money. When the police closed in, the career state bureaucrat felt he had nothing left to live for.
Cindy says: I know this was a long time ago, but wow TM, very intriguing story! (June 25th, 2010 at 1:30pm)
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Are those the makings of tears in her eyes? She takes another drag and seems restored. Heavy metal blares from the stereo and incense fumes drift out of the living room, but otherwise her residence is orderly and distinctly middle class, replete with paintings and knickknacks of fish that match a tattoo on her ankle. (“Do you think you’re a fish or something?” a vice squad investigator sneeringly asked her recently, prompting the reply, “yeah, I do. Fish are real easygoing until something pisses them off. Then they bite.”)
Like many fathers, Jim Bunch enjoyed reminding his “daughter” who controlled the purse strings. Kelli had wanted to buy a house, but she had bad credit; she had to threaten Bunch with leaving town before he would put the house in his name. Similarly, he balked when she asked for a loan so that she could buy a particular bedroom set, even going so far as to say that he just might buy the set for himself. But today Kelli has the bedroom set, Bunch’s old ranger truck, and a debt to him hovering around $3, 500.
Kelli LaRue spends her days and nights here in a casual state of numbness—smoking pot, watching television, listening to the stereo. Her husband is on the lam, as there is a warrant out for his arrest on marijuana charges. Since she is awaiting trial for aggravated promotion of prostitution in the wake of the Bunch scandal, she is not accepting business calls. Yet Kelli neither repudiates her profession nor gives a damn what anyone thinks about her. With a total absence of self-pity, she recites her history in a wry singsong, the formative calamities reduced to throwaway anecdotes. A wild child in a gossipy small town. Living with a 35-year-old shrimper in Port O’Connor by the age of 14. Pregnant for the third time at 15, this time by the shrimper’s nephew. Her infant son taken from her by Child Protective Services the next year, following an incident in which the child fell from her lap and cut his head on the floor. Her mother’s surrender to pancreatic cancer just before Kelli’s fifteenth birthday. And fights with her father—all of which led to her flight from the Gulf Coast. And thereafter, a dark mosaic of characters and places, By 1992, Kelli LaRue was 22, unemployed, living with her 4-year-old daughter, and, as she puts it, “in a desperate situation.” She noticed an Aimes Escorts advertisement in the back pages of the Austin Chronicle and dialed the number. Sherry Beard offered her a job.
“I told myself I’d only do it for a month,” she says, laughing, conscious that this is a familiar refrain. “Then, only for a year.” But the money was too good. For each hour’s work, Sherry retained an escort service fee of $50 and Kelli got the rest, which began at a base of $100. Even on slow weeks, Sherry’s girls could earn $1,000, while a busy evenings work could net as much as $600, and $1,000 for an all-nighter. Certainly the vocation had its inglorious moments—clients gone crazy on cocaine, wanting to be verbally humiliated, to be whipped—but for the most part the men were well behaved. “I put up with a hell of a lot worse as a cocktail waitress,” Kelly says, “and all for a one-dollar tip.”
By the time she met Jim Bunch in November 1992, the DHS quality-control coordinator had become interested in the financial possibilities of the sex racket. He and Natalie were placing ads in swingers’ magazines, through which they made more than $1,000 selling nude photographs and suggestive letters. In a letter to a prostitute he hoped to lure into the magazine market, Bunch wrote, “I hope I don’t seem like a pervert to you but I have come to the conclusion that sex makes the world go around and there is a ton of money out there to be made if you don’t rip people off.”
Natalie’s death left Bunch emotionally reeling. For companionship, he leaned heavily on Kelli, who often spent evenings at his house answering the escort service’s line, listening alternately to sex-crazed customers and the heart-sick bureaucrat. Though there was nothing physical between them, Kelly became Jim Bunch’s closest friend in his shadow life. He took her shopping, baby-sat her daughter, and finally persuaded her to join him in sex-oriented entrepreneurial schemes. In the summer of 1993, Kelli and Jim began placing women-seeking-men ads in the Austin Chronicle. “Sweet young thing seeks generous man for fun and support,” The ads were wildly successful, even if most of the respondents were initially surprised to learn that this mildly seductive campaign was nothing more than a solicitation by a $150-an-hour prostitute.
As fate would have it, Bunch’s capitalist urgings coincided with the vice squad’s renewed interest in Sherry Beard. Word on the street was that a bust was imminent. Sherry needed to bail out in a hurry. Knowing this, Bunch told her that he would like to take over the business. In October 1993 Sherry Beard sold the Aimes Escorts client list to Jim Bunch in exchange for an automobile down payment he had made for her in the past. Before fleeing Texas, Sherry took Kelli LaRue aside. She advised Kelli to copy the client list in case Bunch went down. “You be careful.” She told her. “Jim is going to get arrested. He’s not street-smart.”
The escort-service game in Austin is so well understood by its players as to be farcical. On one side of the playing field are the 37 escort services listed in the Austin Yellow Pages, each of which is suspected by the Austin Police Department (APD) of engaging in the state offense of selling sex. Another dozen or so prostitution fronts appear in the guise of Austin Chronicle personal ads under the headings “Women Seek Men,” “Variations,” and “Adult Services.” On the other side of the playing field are Richard McFadin and Rudy Vasquez, the two vice squad officers assigned to the escort-service beat. The numbers do not favor the officers, and the most discreet services manage to stay in operation for years by going about their business quietly and occasionally snitching on their competitors. One of the most well-established operations in town is owned by a resident of Baltimore, Maryland. Another veteran owner is widely believed to be providing information to the Austin police. She declined an interview for this article, coolly saying, “I’m a very private person.”
“The typical escort-service owner is a sleazebag, but he’s a cut above street pimps, especially when it comes to business sense,” says former vice squad commander Gene Freudenberg, who is now a private detective in Round Rock. Under Freudenberg—known as Friggenberg by his adversaries on the street—in 1986 the APD vice squad busted the notorious Tony Brubaker, who kept 1,500 square feet of office space and racked up an estimated $600,000 in escort-service profits. That same year, a credit card sting operation managed to put 33 prostitution-related Austin operations out of business. “We expect business to decline drastically,” proclaimed a police department spokesman, but it was a naïve prediction. The remaining escort services continued to do good business, and soon other opportunists rushed in to command a slice of the prostitution pie. One of these was a captain stationed at Bergstrom Air Force Base who was found to be a partner in Austin Escorts and was given a ten-year sentence in August of last year, two months before James Bunch took over Aimes Escorts.
Bunch knew enough about the risks to avoid the most obvious police stings. Sex could not be discussed over the phone, and callers were required to five their names and addresses and have listed telephone numbers. To keep tabs on his girls, Bunch initiated a staff directory. Each girl filled out a form giving her name, address, phone number, age, measurements, and schedule. The form was similar to those used by other escort services, but Bunch added a line marked “Limitations.” This gave his prostitutes the option to list calls they would refuse. Among the responses the Aimes employees gave on the limitations line were “no blacks,” “not submissive,” and “none really.”
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