A High Price to Pay

These days Heidi Fleiss greets her paying customers with a chirpy "Hi, can I help you?" Typically the first response is a double take as customers grasp that it's really her -- the notorious Hollywood Madam -- there among the boxer shorts and athletic gear at the Heidi Wear shop in Pasadena, California. The second response is to ask Fleiss to autograph their purchases, then to cluck sympathetically about her recent conviction on three counts of pandering and denounce her mandatory sentence of three years as a waste of taxpayer money. Fleiss has heard it all. But last week it was her turn to do a double take when a uniformed policewoman entered the shop to buy a sweatshirt. "Listen, I think it's terrible what they're doing to you," the cop said. "I just wanted to tell you."

So, apparently, do a lot of other people. Fleiss's conviction for providing three undercover cops with high-price prostitutes has spawned angry op-ed pieces, talk-radio rantings and feminist denunciations. The standard complaint is one of fairness: of the several parties to any act of pandering, only Fleiss was singled out for prosecution. But what seems to incense Fleiss sympathizers most is the severity of the penalty, which they say dramatizes the problems of mandatory sentencing. "It reflects the worst sense of priorities of our criminal-justice system," says Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, whom Fleiss has asked to handle her appeal. "The idea that a jail cell will be taken up by Heidi Fleiss is outrageous."

No one is more outraged than Fleiss, who says she would "rather die" than go to jail. "I am going to prison, and for what? Sex. That's it," she says. "I would never hurt another human being. I'm a vegetarian because I can't even think of hurting animals." Fleiss is furious that while she faces time, not one of the men listed in her appointment books -- which were confiscated by authorities -- is being prosecuted. "The police, the FBI, nobody cares about the men," she says. "They're not even being investigated."

Feminist lawyer Gloria Allred shares Fleiss's anger. "To single out a woman for prosecution while a male customer is free to continue to act with impunity is a classic case of gender bias," she argues. Los Angeles attorney Shelly Mandell notes that California's 1983 pandering law was crafted with male pimps in mind, then asks, "How many men have been convicted of pandering in Los Angeles and are serving mandatory prison time?" Suzanne Childs, speaking for the L.A. district attorney's office, says such statistics are not readily available. Offhand, she recalls only one man doing time for pandering.

Unexpectedly, the woman who is proving Fleiss's greatest defender is the same one who delivered Fleiss's verdict: jury foreman Sheila Mitrowski. Persuaded by the defense argument that Fleiss had been entrapped when a police detective posing as a Japanese businessman asked her to provide call girls for himself and his pals, Mitrowski, 48, had wanted to acquit Fleiss. Her view never wavered through four days of a debate that grew so rancorous she sometimes had to blow a whistle to silence the bickering. But with the weekend approaching and the jurors tiring, Mitrowski agreed to a compromise with the three male jurors determined to convict: a drug count would be dropped in exchange for accepting three of five pandering charges.