Back story: www.adultfyi.com/read.php?ID=45398
Michigan- from www.mlive.com - Federal prosecutors who've brought charges against high-priced escort ring Miami Companions — which included metro Detroit among its most lucrative whistle stops — apparently are more willing to give cover to the service's Oakland County customers than to its Detroit clients.
Dec. 27, Detroit News: Paul DeCailly, the attorney for Miami Companions co-owner Greg Carr, flew to Detroit last week to review the black book. He wanted to see the names of clients from Michigan and Ohio, but the U.S. Attorney's Office said he could see only the names from the 313 and 734 area codes, he said.
"There must be something there they don't want anybody to see," DeCailly said Tuesday. "In the 248 area code, a lot of influential people live there: musicians, Detroit's sports elite, politicians. ... It's the center of a lot of activity in the business community."
DeCailly filed a motion Tuesday to compel the government to turn over the entire black book and other records.
I've already written about how I think prostitution among consenting adults should be legal — so obviously I'm not really thrilled about most of the charges in the case anyway.
But the latest report goes to the heart of an even larger issue that's been hot on folks' minds around Detroit lately: How the instruments of "justice" determine whom to hang out to dry and whom to safeguard.
Pig-greedy politicians or the big-money corporations that bribe them? Nickel-slick bagmen or the lawyered-up titans of industry for whom they run interference? Escort-service clients in the nation's poorest big city or the high-powered, connected johns who reside only miles away in one of the nation's richest counties?
In the Kilpatrick case, for instance, the argument goes that prosecutors need the contractors to make their case against the "Kilpatrick Enterprise" so the feds are portraying powerful, long-standing businesses as "victims" of the ex-mayor's schemes rather than as what they really were: enablers.
But OK, that's a high-profile corruption case. I may not like watching Kilpatrick's dance partners in the bribery ballet walk away mostly unscathed, but I can at least understand some of the logic.
What possible reason could federal prosecutors have for refusing to identify the escort service's Oakland County clients, though, other than to keep someone's name out of the papers?
I have a very difficult time believing that the city proper, filled with so many lower-middle-class and outright poor men, supplied the bulk of the cash that Miami Companions raked in from around this area. (This isn't to say hooking isn't big in Detroit. Oh, it is. But believe me when I tell you that there are far more "cost-effective" options in the city for guys who can't pay the $500-an-hour rates that Carr's workers were charging.)
Of course, Detroit does boast its own passel of powerbrokers, lawyers, doctors, politicians, engineers, businesspeople. And any one of them could have his (or her) name in that black book, too. So why the seeming willingness by federal prosecutors to publicly scandalize these people and not anyone from the 248?
And how does such a patently unfair tactic amount in any way to a pursuit of real "justice?"
Criminalizing prostitution among consenting adults is, to me, stupid, prudish and wrong. But prosecutors' apparent willingness to subject one group of suspected clients to humiliation while covering for another group accused of doing the exact same thing? Because of where each group lives?
That's about as unjust as it gets.
