NY- A night clerk helped turn a Queens airport motel into a brothel that catered to predatory pimps and underage hookers young enough to be his granddaughters, authorities charged yesterday. Teenage streetwalkers signed in with names like "Mary Poppins" and "Betty Boop" - and made the working-class neighborhood around the Executive Motor Inn look like a seedy red-light district.
The 44-room motel, on N. Conduit Ave. in the shadow of Kennedy Airport, was finally padlocked last week after investigators raided it and found a middle-aged man bedding a 15-year-old runaway working as a prostitute, officials said.
"The Executive Motor Inn was a motel where guests arrived without luggage and stayed for only a few hours at best," said Queens District Attorney Richard Brown, who spearheaded the multiagency investigation.
"Four or five men a night were seen coming in and out of the rooms," Brown added.
Girls as young as 13 and their pimps have been busted in and around the motel in recent months - and residents of Springfield Gardens were happy to see a court order declaring it closed taped to the front door.
"I hope they won't be back," said one 25-year resident of 136th Ave., which runs behind the motel. "This block used to be loaded with girls, young girls."
Neighbor Sadie Wilson, 24, said she was fed up with fights between prostitutes, hookers parading themselves down the street for customers in cars, and condoms littering the streets. "It was really blatant," she said.
Investigators said much of the blame rests with Erickson Bryan, 67, who manned the motel's night desk and allegedly opened the doors to the sex trade.
An undercover officer posing as a hooker rented a room from Bryan and asked him to direct one of her clients there. After a mild protest, Bryan sent the john to the right place, officials said.
Another time, a male cop posing as a john approached the clerk and told him he had a 1a.m. appointment with a "hooker" in Room 340 - and was given directions.
But Bryan - who is charged with falsifying business records and promoting prostitution - denied turning a blind eye to the sexcapades during the decade he's worked at the motel.
"They got it all wrong," said Bryan, who added he used to be a cop in the 1960s. "If there were young girls there, I chased them. If I knew they were prostitutes, they were chased. If they looked too young, I did ask for an ID."
A lawyer for the motel, John Ryan, portrayed Bryan as a mischief-maker who had been warned not to rent rooms to ladies of the night.
"If this night clerk knowingly let prostitutes in, he did so against the owners' directions. He was told never to allow it," Ryan said.
He also said most of the motel's business was legitimate and noted there were 80 guests booked there when cops in riot gear burst in and arrested a single hooker and john.
The owners plan to challenge the allegations and the padlocking of the motel as a public nuisance when they return to Queens Supreme Court on Tuesday. "We deny [the charges] and will vigorously oppose them," Ryan said.
