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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Under its new ownership, Aimes’ business was booming. By Kelli LaRue’s estimate, the phone at Bunch’s residence rang anywhere from fifty to one hundred times daily, out of which ten to twenty service calls were consummated. Assuming each service averaged one hour, Bunch was pocketing from $500 to $1,000 a day, while his girls netted double that amount. Bunch employed up to twenty prostitutes at any one time, including one male model to accommodate female clients. (During Bunch’s four-month ownership of Aimes, the number of female callers wanting either a man or a woman was probably less than twenty, according to Kelli LaRue. The escort service did not cater to male homosexuals.) The client list, maintained on index cards, exceeded three hundred. Bunch aggressively pursued the market. He answered inquiries to his escort service ads in the Austin Chronicle with letters offering everything from lingerie modeling and photo sessions to “erotic correspondence,” “sexy wake-up calls,” “fantasy role-playing,” “threesomes and moresomes,” and “maid service in the nude.” The list of people receiving these letters included attorneys, health care professionals, engineers, and professors. Another Bunch advertisement solicited participants in “house parties for swingers,” for which Bunch charged couples $100 and single males $250 to congregate at a Howard Johnson hotel suite and engage in group sex. Other follow-up letters promised monthly “singles” and “couples-only” parties, and a possible “ladies-only” party “for our Bi ladies.”
There was money to be made in the sex business, and Jim Bunch seemingly wanted all of it. He continued to take in wayward prostitutes and scatter his money around, but he also demanded that his girls work longer hours and ranted continuously that they were cutting him out of some of their tricks—which, of course, they were. “Jim got really greedy,” says Kelli LaRue, “and the greedier he got, the more careless he got.” To keep the business going at all hours, he allowed “real fruitcakes who didn’t know anything about the business end” to answer the phones, she says. He added to the staff directory a few questionable prostitutes, including a trio from Minneapolis who were accomplished thieves. Worse still, Bunch put to work a seventeen-year-old girl who had moved into his house, and who in turn—unbeknownst to him—brought a fifteen-year-old friend into the fold, which meant that Aimes Escorts was now committing the second-degree felony of employing minors as prostitutes.
Though Bunch did not do drugs, he began to sell cocaine to his clients. This was an outrageous flouting of escort-service etiquette, as drug peddling gives law enforcement agents an easy opportunity to shut down an otherwise discreet operation. “I had a lot to say about that,’ says Kelli LaRue, whose vices do not include either cocaine or alcohol. “But Jim didn’t care about the danger. He couldn’t see past the money.”
One of the customers who paid Bunch for his girls and his drugs is an Austin professional who shall be knows as Christopher. Wealthy and urbane but traumatized by a divorce, Christopher began to pay for sex. “Some of the girls I met recommended Aimes to me,” he says. “You know, there’s a lot of prostitutes out there who are really hard core: hard to look at, hard to talk to hard to trust. Bunch had the girl-next-door types.”
Christopher became an Aimes regular. When Bunch answered the phone, Christopher would ask, “Who’s around?” (“The object,” he says, “was to have this constant spin cycle, one ingénue after the next. I mean, obviously I wasn’t looking to have someone move in. I was hiring them so I could move them out. The game was variety.”) Bunch would reply, “I’ve got this new girl you’d really like.” Then he would ask, “Are you interested in some pool?” If Christopher said yes, that meant he wanted Bunch to deliver an “eight ball” of coke (two and a half grams) to his house, followed by a prostitute who would do the drugs with him.
Sometimes Christopher invited his friends over and entertained them with Aimes prostitutes and coke. Sometimes he hired several and kept them to himself. Sometimes he enlisted a prostitute just to sit around with him and do drugs. “Except for Kelli, they were all doing drugs,” he says. “They were addicted to the money, the attention, and the cocaine. It was a trap for all of us.” More and more, Christopher found himself staying up all night with Bunch’s girls. “We were binging on sex, alcohol, and drugs,” he says, “and it was this wretched downward spiral we couldn’t figure out how to stop. There would come a certain point when the meter would cut off, so to speak. But they’d stay over anyway. It was safe, and they didn’t want to come down alone. They’d talk about the depravity of it all, and they’d start crying, and I couldn’t see having sex with them again because, through the pain, we had gotten too close.”
Christopher stopped calling Bunch’s number and went into drug and alcohol treatment. But Bunch would not let one of his most lucrative clients off that easily. He began to phone Christopher at his office. He sent him letters that described the beautiful new prostitute he had enlisted recently. When all that failed, Bunch began to drop packets of free cocaine through Christopher’s mail slot.
By January 1994, Christopher was back on the active client list.
Throughout his management of Aimes Escorts, Jim Bunch continued to perform his work at the Department of Human Services with his customary efficiency and attention to detail. But Bunch crossed the line he had drawn between his two lives, and that would prove to be fatal.
Though he had told no one at Aimes, Bunch kept client and staff lists on his office computer. He made frequent calls to his girls and customers from his DHS cubicle. “He was outrageously open,” says one of Bunch’s friends. “People could walk right by, see him counting money, and hear him talking about prostitutes over the phone.”
Perhaps the dual pressures of trying to increase profits at Aimes and maintaining a double life were getting to Bunch. Though he hid his moodiness from his family, he was showing signs of chronic depression. He spent much of his free time in bed, in the dark, eating chocolate bars while watching two television screens. He hit on the girls frequently, as male escort-service owners often do, but the prostitutes could see that he was not so much sexually driven as lonely. As he had written, sex did make the world go around, but perhaps Jim Bunch was tiring of a hollow world that spun endlessly.
At the beginning of February, Bunch decided to sell the business. He had received an offer of $25,000 from a former professional football player but decided instead to give the list to one of his girls. Bunch visited an accounting firm in order to assess to escort service’s tax situation. He then asked the girl he had selected as his successor to sign a letter that he would forward to the phone company, verifying the transfer of the Aimes Escorts phone line. That letter was faxed to Bunch’s office on February 14, 1994.
Bunch did not know that the fax was intercepted by DHS investigators, who had been monitoring him for several weeks. He did not know that one of his co-workers, apparently disturbed by his arrogant flaunting of his moonlighting job, had reported him to the investigators. Nor did Bunch know that two computer diskettes on his desk, containing staff directories, client lists, advertising follow-up letters, and erotic correspondence, had been copied and thoroughly perused by state officials. All of this explains why Jim Bunch looked bewildered when vice squad officers dragged him out of bed on the morning of February 15, searched his house, confiscated numerous boxes of evidence, and led him away handcuffed and shirtless to the police station, where waiting DHS officials informed him that his 23-year career was being terminated on the grounds of official misconduct.
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