From the Everett Daily Herald:

Five baristas are accused of engaging in prostitution at an Everett bikini espresso stand following a two-month undercover police investigation into complaints that the women were selling more than coffee.

Detectives say the women were charging up to $80 to strip down and flash customers while fixing lattes and mochas.

Investigators saw the women expose their crotches, lick whipped cream off their co-workers' private parts and pose naked for pictures inside the Grab-n-Go Espresso stand at 8015 Broadway, according to police reports obtained by The Herald on Wednesday.

Yes, it is called Grab-n-Go Espresso. The arrests were the result of a two-month undercover investigation into complaints about prostitution at "various bikini coffee stands around the Everett area." Two things of note: 1) There are bikini coffee stands, and 2) More than one of them have generated complaints that they are actually espresso stands/whorehouses. The detectives singled out the Grab-n-Go because it had generated the most complaints, and probably because the name was just too much.

More from the Herald:

An Everett detective took a city prosecutor to the stand to witness firsthand the activities of the baristas. During that visit, two women allegedly engaged in a "whipped cream show" in which they sprayed whipped cream on each other and licked it off.

[snip]

Detectives say the women also charged customers to play "basketball" - a game in which customers were allowed to throw waded up money at the women, who caught the money in their underpants.

No word on whether the baristas' defense attorneys got their degrees from the Wal-Mart School of Law. We're gonna go grab a coffee now.

UPDATE: Apparently this is a thing. A commenter points us to a site that compiles all the "bikini baristas" coffee shops for your convenience. The latest addition: Sweet Cheeks Espresso in Des Moines, Wash.

If you ask people like Glenn Beck and his friends at Fox News, yes. That's because two Baltimore-based ACORN employees have been sacked after allegedly helping a "pimp" and a "prostitute" realize their tax-evading dreams. Beck and others do not approve, of course, and are using this incident as definitive proof that the group, officially called the "Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now," is populated by a bunch of no-good ragamuffins who want to cheat the government and turn our children into dirty whores. Oh no!

Of course, that's only part of the organization's story, for some Floridian ACORN leaders this week turned in eleven — that's a lot! — of their employees for committing voter fraud voter registration fraud, an act the organization claims only reinforces its good name.

"It shows that we take the integrity of our voter registration work with the utmost seriousness," said ACORN spokesman Brian Kettenring. "We turn in people who try to game the system."

Well, that's good. Because people who commit fraud are criminals and deserve their punishment. These two incidents, however, also show how a national organization can be defined by its actions. Many of us may wag a finger at the GOP and call them names after Joe Wilson's outburst, but isn't it also true that Democrats and other "left" leaning groups have acted inappropriately, as those two Baltimore ACORN employees have done?

It's obvious Fox and friends have seized on this whore situation to help recoup their efforts in the face of Wilson's national shaming, but let's not blame them, for the entire nation — black, white, Puerto Rican and Asian — are just as guilty. We are all political whores here. Let's just hope we can find the highest bidder. Otherwise we're just cheap. And that would be unacceptable, because we're the greatest fucking nation in the entire universe. We sell ourselves, yes, but only if the price is right.

Before we get into the reckless speculation, some background from the Rush and Malloy item detailing the tales of gubernatorial sex provided by a hooker named "Annie," who also serviced Eliot Spitzer back in the day. She says that the first time she met the mystery governor was on a date with a client named "Michael":

"We went to a restaurant where the governor was dining at another table with two or three other men. Michael said the governor was a client of his. He introduced me to him. I thought it was odd that he'd introduce someone he'd hired, but the governor was very gracious. It was a brief meeting. Later, Michael and I went to an apartment our agency kept. We had sex.

"A couple of days later, Michael booked another appointment. He was supposed to come to the same apartment. I buzzed him in. When I opened the door, it wasn't Michael. It was the governor. He was smiling. I knew what was happening. I was okay with it.

"He was a very standard client. He didn't take the full hour. There was no exchange of money. Michael handled the payment.

"I had two more dates with the governor. Never in public. Always for just an hour, around dinner time. He'd arrive at the apartment in a suit. I never had a problem with him, like I did with Spitzer. He was always nice. There wasn't a lot of conversation. It wasn't a girlfriend experience, but he was relaxed. He was very appreciative, like I was giving him a sort of affection he wasn't getting elsewhere. Later I found out he was married. His wife is quite prominent in her own right."

So, if the story told by Annie is true, there's another hooker-nailing governor running around out there. Even worse, he may have accepted sex with a prostitute as a gift from a lobbyist. Now, taking into consideration what we've learned from "Annie," that the mystery governor is a man who is married to a "prominent" woman, let's take a few educated guesses as to who this may be and assign some Vegas-style odds as we go.


Arnold Schwarzenegger (10-1) Knowing everything that we know, that Arnold's wife is indeed "prominent" and that he's a noted lover of ass, Arnold is an obvious front-runner in this contest. However, what he does have in potential hooker-nailing credentials he lacks in geographical proximity, otherwise he's probably be a 2-1 or 3-1 favorite, though Arnold has made trips to New York during his time as governor of California.


Ed Rendell (15-1) The thought of Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell having sex is utterly horrifying, so he's one we'd rather not even think about. However, he's only a hour or so away from New York City by train and his wife, Marjorie Rendell, is a federal judge who sits on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, so he sort of makes sense.


Jim Gibbons (25-1) The Nevada governor's wife divorced the Republican after she busted him for carrying on with the wife of a Reno doctor, which she claims was only one of many affairs he had during their marriage. A few months after the divorce, Gibbons made news for stepping out with Playboy model Leslie Durant. So yeah, outside of the geographical proximity disadvantage thing, Gibbons is an obvious candidate. But with all of that said, aren't there hookers in Nevada he could have sex with, you know, legally?


Deval Patrick (50-1) The governor of Massachusetts, whose wife is a "prominent" attorney, appears to be quite spry for a 52 year-old man. And like Rendell, he's not that far away.


Tim Pawlenty (75-1) The Minnesota governor is considered by many to be a potential candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, thus he merits consideration. Period.


Mark Sanford (100-1) Sanford, a former Wall Streeter with roots in New York, obviously loves to bone women not named Jenny Sanford, but he seems to be more of a lovey affair-haver. The fact that "Annie" said that this governor wasn't interested in talking or a "girlfriend experience" all but eliminates him. Sanford would definitely want to talk about his feelings. And cuddle.


Bobby Jindal (500-1) There's actually no way we could ever conceive of the Louisiana governor sexing with whores (We tend to think of him as an amoeba...he just splits in order to reproduce), but we had to throw him in here, just because.


Charlie Crist (1,000,000-1) There's just no way.


If there are any potential whore-mongering candidates we've missed that you feel strongly about, feel free to offer your own suggestions in the comments.

Eliot Spitzer Not My Only Governor Says Hooker Who Worked For Kristin Davis [Daily News]
pic via

''I've never paid a woman. I never understood where the satisfaction is when you're missing the pleasure of conquest,'' Berlusconi told Chi.

Well, leaving aside the fact that Berlusconi is lying, we are pretty sure the original accusation was that Silvio's friend, businessman Gianpaolo Tarantini, was the guy who paid the ladies to party. Also hasn't he bought his barely legal model girlfriend lots and lots of expensive gifts? If this counts, that counts, Silvio.

Anyways! Here is the latest: Silvio says the lady who says Tarantini paid her to party with Silvio is actually getting paid to lie about him, and now the Catholics might not support Silvio so much, and the Pope delivered a veiled insult, and Silvio is now bitching about immigrants to prop up his fascist support.

It is still really unclear whether or not any of this will actually hurt him, though, because Italians basically expect their men to be lazy, layabout skirt-chasers without a shred of moral fiber, and also the opposition is, as always, in disarray.

In China every family only wants to have boy children, thanks to communism, and now there are 32 million more marriage-aged men than there are women! So guys pay these outrageous "bride prices" of thousands of dollars to land a lady, and some enterprising ladies have learned to go "yoink!" The Chinese term for "Gold digger" is "Runaway bride."

Meanwhile in Nevada, USA, brothels are battling their slowing business by adding more male prostitutes. These guys would charge $250 an hour!

Clearly Chinese men need to earn money being male prostitutes for unmarried ladies, then pay the ladies that money as a bride price, then the ladies run away to hire more male prostitutes, and the cycle continues happily.
[WSJ, LAT]

Above, Shlomi in the hospital after the fight; below, a police photo of the hotel room where the fight happened. These are two of the mildest of the 15 pictures TSG posted, which include new pics of Sasha Harris, the prostitute in question, after Shlomi allegedly punched her to free himself. You can see the whole set here, but be warned that several of them look like stills from a zombie movie death scene. Not for the faint of heart.

As the weeks went on, my days got more and more frenetic. I’d fly to Florida for a four-day appointment. Then I’d come back and immediately do a ten-hour appointment, followed by another two-hour job. Sleep five hours. And start all over again.

I worked like that for a good three months straight. For most of this time my fee was $1,200 an hour. Here’s how it broke down: An average date was four hours, or $4,800. Ten percent off the top went to the booker. This left $4,320, which was split 50/50 with the agency (aka Jason). So I’d net $2,160 per date, or $540 per hour—the hourly rate for a top New York City attorney. I averaged between six and eight hours a day, one or two clients. I was making at least ten grand a week, easy.

And here's where it all went, other than up her nose:

Not that I could hold on to it. I was so new to having such ridiculous amounts of disposable cash I didn't know what to do with it... I’d take six friends out for dinner at Cipriani Downtown and not even sweat a thousand dollar check. Two thousand dollars paid off my mom’s credit card. Another stop at Western Union and she was able to go back to college.

I walked around with $1,500 in my purse at all times. I kept two eightballs (3.5 grams) of blow in my safe, at $200 each. Buying coke in bulk is like going to Costco instead of the neighborhood grocery store. It’s just economical. I restocked every week...

My new life wasn’t that expensive, considering my take-home pay. I paid $3500 per month rent. My phone bill was about $400. Manicures, pedicures, tanning, and massages cost another $500 per week. I spent about a hundred dollars a day on cabs.

San Francisco U.S. Attorney Joseph Russoniello said his office regularly sees Craigslist ads in cases it brings against human-trafficking rings that engage women in prostitution. Craigslist is "very important" to the prostitution business, he said, both for prostitutes to find clients and "for pimps to recruit new members of the stable."

As onetime Valleywag contributor Melissa Gira Grant wrote elsewhere, this will probably push some hookers into more dangerous venues, like the streets.

• 10. Prostitutes: Absolutely nothing surprising about that, since there are more tech titans of our acquaintance known to prefer quantitative intimacy to qualitative intimacy, as it's just so much more efficient.
• 9. Code words: Anyone familiar for looking for an apartment on Craigslist should know what "420 friendly" means. What's slightly surprising is that Nicholas used such common slang as "party favors" when arranging a score. Your run-of-the-mill paranoid drug dealer is more creative.
• 8. Minions: That Nicholas employed flunkies and other hangers-on to do his dirty work isn't particularly surprising, either. But that he had employees on Broadcom's payroll running errands for him certainly raises an eyebrow. And cost him $1 million in hush money.
• 7. Doctor shopping: To get the amounts of Vicoprofen (hydrocodone and ibuprofen) and Valium (diazepam) Nicholas wanted on hand, he had scripts written up for associates. With a private jet, why not just fly down to Mexico and stock up? That seems easier. One smuggling run is a lot less risky than dozens of doctor visits.
• 6. Drink spiking: While spiking another executive's drink with ecstasy would normally be pretty surprising, I'm pretty sure more than a few techies have been accidentally dosed at Burning Man. What shocks me was that it as at a Super Bowl party in New Orleans. I though techies hated team sports!
• 5. Wire transfers: For a guy who was on all sorts of stimulants, he was surprisingly blasé about being surveilled. Leaving multiple records of five-figure drug deals is the first clue that this guy felt invincible. That he broke the $10,000 rule to keep transactions under the IRS's radar is no-no No. 2.
• 4. Budgets, invoices and petty cash: Leave it to a businessman to have fellow junkies draw up a budget for a Super Bowl party, have dealers submit invoices for large orders of MDMA and direct Broadcom employees to keep $10,000 on hand at all times for Nicholas's whims.
• 3. Death threats: Even Robert Evans, when angered, probably only threw around some verbal abuse on the order of "You'll never work in this town again." But a tech geek reverting to mafia tactics? That's new.
• 2. Hotboxing a plane: By "causing marijuana smoke and fumes to enter the cockpit" of his private plane on a flight to Nevada, Nicholas may go down in history. That seems more like something the boys of Entourage would do, not something an Orange County entrepreneur would indulge in, rock star friends or no.
• 1. Woodstock '99: Even more surprising is that a guy who issued death threats would go to an anniversary of the world's most famous love-in. I mean, I knew Woodstock '99 was a corporate sham, but little did I know exactly how corporate things were when apparently a tech titan (and football fan) was slinging tablets of ecstasy to concertgoers.

A few sentence fragments from her note:

“I have to say that it wasn’t a complete surprise…“

“But I was in a state of denial…“

“…it explains a lot about many things…“

“I listened to what you had to say in the interview and I expect you feel you have thought all of this through.“

A friend told Debauchette she was "identifiable by the way I used the word ‘yeah’ and the way I touched my hair." Another didn't think she was recognizable at all.

The blogger has not responded to her mom's email.

I’m stunned, but I’m not ashamed of what I do or what I’ve done. I feel exposed but I don’t feel apologetic. I should feel mortified, but I don’t. Instead, I feel like a very private part of my life has been exposed, like they’ve just caught me in the middle of some sex act. So I suppose I feel awkward.

Debauchette said she appeared on ABC to counter "the old Victorian trope of the broken, dysfunctional, fallen prostitute, incapable of forming her own opinions or making her own decisions." She told Sawyer she has about seven regular clients, mostly married, and that she was once offered $2.9 million to be with a client "exclusively" for a year.

In the video below, excerpted from a longer video posted to Boinkology by Gawker video maven Richard Blakeley, Dabauchette talks about the lover who got her into prostitution, and Sawyer presses her on whether she is truly happy with her work.

Already under fire for its handling of the last Democratic presidential debate, in Pennsylvania, ABC News may very well catch some flack over this incident. But Debauchette does not sound, in her post, like an angry or burned source, and she even speculates her identity may have been compromised not by ABC's cameras or microphones but by her own speech patterns. She casts her appearance as a victory for a "pro-slut" view of sex, and, although she wrote "Hi mom" earlier in the post, ends with this anecdote about sex with a guy she calls "Gabriel:"

He fucked me over his sofa, the flat of his hand pressing down into my back. I felt him take my hair in his hand before he pulled out to come across my lower back, which splattered in a thick, swerving pattern. After, he took a snapshot of his come against my winter-pale skin. Once he toweled my back down and we both dressed, I took a look. It was a beautiful shot.

[Boinkology, Debauchette]

Yet, one can't deny how upset she appeared at the press conference acknowledging the scandal; New York magazine wrote that it was delayed for an hour while Spitzer waited for Silda to "compose herself." (Maybe she wasn't crying about the knowledge of the prostitutes per se, but the amount of money spent on them?)

5. Taxi Driver: As much as we wanted Iris to get out of the game, we kinda loved imagining New York as a place where you could wander downtown and see girls wearing neon short shorts and big straw hats who looked like Jodie. And, as we all know by now, Spitzer likes 'em young.
4. Monster: No, she wasn't pretty. But she had a fondness for shooting pervs, something we might have considered had they come in the form of her johns. Strictly a cautionary tale for the former governor.
3. Indecent Proposal: We still can't figure out what was so sad about having Woody Harrelson for a husband, Robert Redford as a one-night fling, and $1 mil in the bank. All that time Demi spent crying would have better spent in the sack with either guy. She might be too pricey for Spitzer, though.

2. American Gigolo: With politics no longer looking like a viable career option, we think that Spitzer could learn a thing or two from the way that Julian sauntered through LA as though he owned it. Not only did he make the whole male escort thing look fun, he had the best wardrobe in the city.

1. Pretty Woman: The Porsche that Julia Roberts drove wasn't the only thing that cornered on rails. Go west, young governor, go west!

[Photo Credits: Love To Know, Wild About Movies, EZ Entertainment, Moldy Doily, Taittinger]

• STARS CAUGHT WITH HOOKERS [Us]