King John

There used to be a whorehouse right next to the Blue Note. A guy who knew this might find it interesting to walk past on a regular basis. Stroll by on a Thursday evening, watch some executive furtively slipping out that narrow alley doorway. It was a warm, smug feeling to know that sordid things were happening across the street from all those oblivious Japanese tourists.

Bring this up to Robert R. Richter, and feel a little less smug.

"Hey, Bob, tell me about that whorehouse right next to the Blue Note."

"Which one?"

Bob Richter does not see the streets of Manhattan as we do. He does not see apartments and businesses. He sees whorehouses past and present. As the publisher of the long-running Qlimax Times and New York 3000—along with several similar magazines and tabloids—Richter has cornered the lucrative market of running a Zagat’s guide dedicated to hookers.

Bob’s not just a publisher, either. The 63-year-old is quick to add that he walks and works the beat. He’s a sex worker’s gourmet, a connoisseur of dominatrixes, and a living history of sex-for-hire in New York City. He knows all the whorehouses over by the Blue Note, and he’ll tell you a story about the one you knew that’ll make you feel bad for not burning it down while it was still in business.

That’s Bob’s world, and he couldn’t be happier.

"This is what I’ve wanted to do ever since I knew there was such a thing as hookers. What man wouldn’t want to do what I do?"

He may have a point.

It’s been a busy few years for the king of johns. There’s been a lot to keep track of over the past decade. He shows up for lunch fresh off his drive from his Pennsylvania home to personally handle some distribution.

And, of course, to have sex with some whores.

Bob is a man who likes New York City. He likes it even more nowadays, despite the man who should have been his nemesis.

"Rudy Giuliani was the best mayor we’ve ever had in this city. Even though he hurt my business, hurt me financially—even before 9/11, I hated that I had to like Rudy so much… I remember when going on 42nd St. made me really nervous. I’d walk with a limp, muttering to myself, trying to look as crazy as everybody else."

When Rudy came to town, Bob was at ground zero for the first round of the sex wars.

"People could’ve worked with Giuliani," he recalls. "They had a chance to shut down, and then the busts started around ’93 or ’94. What happened then was that the girls from Pace and Columbia were no longer working the circuit. Those girls weren’t going to take the bust. The housewife who was maybe working to help pad the welfare check, she was gone, too.

"And a lot of other girls who were working part-time, maybe without their husbands knowing about it, to make the rent money, they were gone. That brought in a different class of girl to the houses. The girls that used to give handjobs on Roosevelt Avenue for $35 a pop. The girls who used to walk 42nd St. The girls from Russia came in.

"Ever since ’96, it’s been a different kind of business."

With a good network of nationwide contributors built up over the years, Bob’s no longer the only guy reviewing the quality of oral sex and kinky pursuits. He’s perfectly okay with that—partly because he was around for all the fun that we’ve been missing. He likes to reminisce.

"I don’t know how many times you’ve been to an Oriental place, but it used to be that you’d pay $50 to get in, you could relax, play the Joker Poker machines, kibitz with the girls, get some dim sum. The owner would be right there on premises. You’d eventually pick your girl, get a sauna, pay her about $125 and get everything you wanted. Then you’d go back and hang out again, maybe have a cigar.

"Those places survived the Giuliani years, but one of the madams—this is New York Times information, not my own—she paid [someone in the D.A.’s office] to bust the other places. Paid in drugs and girls and money. In the meantime, two guys working undercover in Chinatown were also caught taking money. Well, [Manhattan D.A. Robert] Morgenthau had to make a statement. He shut them down.

"Now the Oriental places are just like anywhere else. There’s no personality."

Others might remember news reports of Asian whorehouses being busted as part of the modern slave trade. Curb your outrage, though. There’s a case to be made for that not being an issue for today’s G.I. John:

"Guys like us don’t see the slave trade. From what I understand, that’s Oriental girls for Oriental guys. The girls we see are in a circuit. They marry a guy in the Army, they think they’re coming to the land of the big PX, they end up in Fort Dix. They don’t even drive. A madam comes along, takes her from the husband, puts her on the circuit. The girl isn’t complaining. There’s a bust in New York, everyone makes bail, and she’s on a bus to San Francisco the next day."

"Younger girls are what we all want."

  Like most johns, Bob likes the new girls. But he’s also a pretty smart guy who has high standards based on personality and intelligence.

"Eighteen to 22. The problem is, a younger girl doesn’t have much to say afterwards. She wants to talk about Metallica or something you don’t understand. There’s maybe ten words between you."

Bob isn’t out to convince anybody that sex workers are particularly bright people, and he’s not looking to con gullible media types with the respected history of the sex worker. As an educated man, he hates to perpetuate ignorance and has little patience for the myths of the industry. That includes the myth of the glamorous retired madam.

"Every girl in the business swears they went to college, but they all seem to miss Econ 101: Supply and Demand. When the supply drifted away—first, due to AIDS, and again with Giuliani—the madams all went out of business. Cops would come in, kick down the door, arrest the madams, and say they had drugs. There are drugs everywhere you go. Shake down this restaurant and you’ll find drugs. But the madam’s been pulling down a million a year; she’s ready to move back to her country and live off her savings.

"The girls think they can beat the government [but] the government has ways to get that money back. The IRS shows up. They want to see this respectable businesswoman’s 1040s, her W-2s. ‘You didn’t seem to make much money. How’d you make a living last year?’ If she’s a madam, they tell her to calculate her cash receipts. It’s almost a million dollars. She’s going to jail. They’ll hold her passport for her.

"Guess who she’s going to call next? The place where she’s been stashing that money. And the government will be there waiting for her. Now she owes $15 million."

He’ll treat it like an afterthought, but Robert Richter has actually served two important roles in New York City’s sex history. He pioneered the art of honest critiques of hookers and coined plenty of terms that have entered the sexual lexijohn.

"There’s this one place I miss on 2nd Avenue," he mentions. "At first, I didn’t like them, so I named them ‘Prisoners of 2nd Avenue.’ I named ‘Blair’s Lair’ when it was on Lexington and 26th. She was a girl who didn’t listen to me. She was buying real estate in New York, and giving her girls the government 1099 forms for Miscellaneous Income. I told her, ‘Blair, you’re going to jail for that someday. Go legit or go the other way. Don’t go half-assed.’ I think they scored over $25 million when they went after her."

Bring up a famous Manhattan prostitute like Julie Diamond, and Bob’s almost forgotten that he gave her the name.

"Yeah, I made her legendary. She had incredible legs, so I named her Julie Diamond. Like ‘Legs’ Diamond. She must be almost 55 now. A tiny little girl. Really into cats. I did her back before she knew who I was, when she was on 34th."

Sadly, though, today’s johns will have to be a lot more careful when looking for the Diamond experience.

"She’s like a lot of girls who get older. They keep their old clientele, and start branching out. You call asking for the girl by name, and she asks what you’re looking for. She’s hoping you want somebody who doesn’t look like her. She’ll say, ‘I have a real busy schedule tonight, but let me tell you about my friend.’ It’s like calling IBM for a computer and then they’re shuffling you off to some subsidiary [that’s] IBM-recommended."

Besides, there aren’t that many legendary hookers left to provide legendary appointments.

"Maybe there never were any real legends," Bob suggests. "A few porn stars, maybe. Porsche Lynn’s a dominatrix and running a place in Phoenix now. Ava Taurel, Belle Du Jour, all those people back in the 80s were really just good self-promoters. If you went to Belle’s place and said you were a reporter, she let you in. Same thing with Plato’s Retreat. Anyone who went there and said they were a reporter, they got in free. Most weren’t, but they didn’t care."

Richter should be in a glass box punched full of air holes in the Museum of Sex. Give him a microphone, too. He’s got plenty of tricks for getting the most out of a hooker’s time. He’s got a pretty good sense for when a girl will turn out to be a flake who can’t keep an appointment. You can also do a lot worse when looking for someone to discuss classic literature.

But most of all, Bob knows the way things were.

"Here in New York, there were about seven, uh, storefronts, we called them. One place in particular was on 3rd and 50th, maybe 49th. It was opulent. You’d walk in and it was like Studio 54. You’d pay $65 and you could be there as long as you wanted. Girls were dancing, and there was a jacuzzi. By the way, don’t ever take a jacuzzi before you’re with a girl. You get too relaxed. Anyway, you’d have a cigar, have a drink, then a girl would come up and ask if you want sex for $175—which is kind of expensive. But they knew how to dress the girls. Four hours later, you’d come out of that place really relaxed. Maybe you spent $250 when you could have spent only $175, but it was the kind of experience that could carry you for weeks."

And what happened to that happy place?

"They got shut down on taxes. They were sending the sheets out. The feds had all those receipts and bills. Really classic."

Talk like this can make even the biggest spender pine for the days when classy hookers weren’t all saving for a semi-retirement home in Boca Raton. Time was, guys could get laid on a budget—although that came with some risks.

"There was this one place at 14th and 2nd," Bob recalls, "and you really had to have tough skin to go there. This is back in ’82 or ’84. They had the whole second floor, a lot of space. All these raggedy whores, and you picked one, went back to a makeshift space where they’d give you a handjob or blowjob for an extra $25 to $30. The whole thing would only take 15 minutes. But you’d be trying to get in and the girls would be yelling out the window down at you, ‘Are you a fucking cop?’ You’re standing right there on 2nd Avenue. That’s not good."

While a certain heyday is long gone, Bob is also proud to still be able to recommend one lady with confidence. "The best orgasm that I ever had—on a commercial level—was on West 75th Street. She doesn’t have a name. To me, she doesn’t have an age, but I’ve been stopping in every couple of years for over 27 years. She’s been at the same apartment all this time.

"This girl gives you a good therapeutic massage. She talks to you: ‘You like this? You like that?’ She has a big massage table. She touches your penis, asks if it’s okay, because some guys don’t like that. But this first time, she’s asking me if I’m liking it. I tell her, ‘Sure, as long as you put those ankles up here and I can lick your feet.’ And she puts her feet up and keeps working on me, and she works her finger up my prostate. First time that ever happened. I couldn’t walk out after that, my knees were shaking so bad."

Regular readers of Qlimax Times know that the man likes feet. They also know that he has become a really big fan of the prostate massage. A really, really big fan.

"I’ve still got her listed as ‘Rosanna,’ he notes. "She knows that the booking comes from one of my magazines when they ask for Rosanna, but she still doesn’t know me, or what I do. And I think she’s still only $130."