'Oldest Profession' Is No Gold Mine In Charlotte

There are plenty of prostitutes in Charlotte.

They hang out in tiny grills and dingy hotels. Mostly, they work along - and business is not good.

They are hounded by city police. Convictions, under North Carolina law, are next to impossible, but that doesn’t keep police from raiding prostitutes over and over again.

They are rarely organized. The "house," except among Negro prostitutes, is uncommon.

Some are what city police call "casual" prostitutes - girls who drift into prostitution occasionally when they find themselves broke.

A handful - like Jeanette Lark, convicted in May in the City Recorder’s Court - are big-time prostitutes who command big sums from their customers.

"Sometimes I made way over $100 a night," Jeanette Lark testified from the witness chair. One week, she said, she made $1,000.

The pretty, married brunette said she plied her trade for almost a year at two local hotels. She gave 40 percent of he income to two bellboys, James and Will Ely, she testified. They allegedly arranged her "dates" for her.

Jeanette Lark made the headlines. James Stalling made the headlines, too. He was convicted in federal court on a white slavery count after boasting he controlled prostitution in Charlotte from two local hotels.

Two girls testified Stallings picked them up in Savannah, Ga., brought them to Charlotte with promises of "a lot of money," and helped see to it they prospered. Stallings went to prison.

Most prostitutes, however, neither get their names in the paper or go to jail - at least, not on prostitution charges. Only three girls, all white, have been convictions of prostitution in the city court this year, and only five were convicted during all of last year.

The reason, police explain, is that without admission of guilt or a witness to the act, prostitution charges won’t stand up in court.

So prostitutes are brought in on other charges whenever they apply: Eighty-seven people were convicted last year of occupying rooms for immoral purposes - like prostitution, a misdemeanor. The difference is that false registration is all that is necessary to convict on this charge.

Twenty-six people were convicted of fornication and adultery, some of them married men arrested in raids on prostitutes.

A Charlotte News reporter spent a few hours with a plain-clothesman in a police car stopping in at known bawdy houses.

At an old house on E. 4th St., a red-faced, bleary-eyed man said, "Come in, officer. Have a look around."

Two feminine "friends" sat in a back room drinking liquor. A big music system piped a Mantoyani recording through the house. Nobody was breaking any laws.

At a rambling, Negro house on S. Cedar St., two angry female "roomers" were complaining about the owner of the house.

"He’s mad at us," one said. "He’s been drinking and he says he’s gong to throw us out. You wouldn’t let him do that, would you, officer?"

The whole house reeked of liquor. A man was asleep upstairs. Nobody was breaking any laws.

In one of a row of rooms over a grocery store on E. 3rd St., a Negro man was frying fish. "Going to have some friends in tonight," he said. Three cigarettes were burning in ash trays in the sitting room and the television set was on, but nobody was around by the time the detective reached the to stair - and nobody was breaking any laws.

Why weren’t such places closed down?

"Because you have to be able to prove something," the policeman said. "The neighbors usually cover up for them. Prostitution is just about the hardest crime in the book to pin down."

The same thing goes for the shoddy hotels, Chief of Police Frank Littlejohn, says.

"There’s a big difference between a moral certainty and a legal certainty," he says. "Most of the small hotel managers are extremely cooperative with us. Every hotel can’t be a six-dollar place. There have to be low-priced hotels in town - and the police can’t go closing them up on suspicion."

All the cheap hotels in town don’t disturb Chief Littlejohn as much as one single establishment flourishing now on the city’s east side.

It operates behind a respectable business front. But it is in reality the only big-time prostitution house in the city. It caters to well-to-do, and preferably married, men. Policemen, working undercover, have actually been inside - but they still can’t gather enough evidence to crack down on the illicit trade that passes through it.

Some day, they predict, somebody on the inside will "crack," become angry and turn over that evidence.

The east side house notwithstanding, Chief Littlejohn says he has been told by FBI men and military police officials that Charlotte is "as clear of prostitution as any city in the country."

Part of the reason for that is the police setup. Any office, even a rookie policeman on a beat, can raid a house. There is no vice squad - and thus not single, little group of officers which might be "bought off," the frequent prostitute’s practice in some large cities.

The girls who roam Charlotte’s streets do so with knowledge that they are apt to be badgered to death by policeman.

There are $5-a-night girls in Charlotte - and maybe even $100-a-ngiht girls sometimes. But they live hard.

Charles Kuralt's People (Kenilworth Media, copyright 2002)
ISBN 0-9679096-1-9 | Hard cover | 384 pages with photos | $25.95

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