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Posted
July 31, 2001
Thoroughly Modern Madam By DAN
FESPERMAN It was December 1995 when Angelika Potter broke the news to her parents: She was starting her own escort service, offering attractive young females to the men of Frederick for $250 an hour. Her dad absorbed the blow, then slowly shook his head. "I knew that you'd end up somehow in the porn industry," he said. "I always knew that." Then he sat down to help write the business plan.
Thus did Potter set herself on a collision course with notoriety. Now, nearly two years after a police raid put her escort service out of business, she is aswirl in a spicy small-town brew of gossip and lawsuits. Attorneys, reporters and local gadflies are fighting to get their hands on her "little black book" -- a computerized list of her clients, great and small -- while callers besiege her with death threats and offers to save her soul. Potter, 39, is of two minds on this long-running game of nudge and wink. Her sex-trade alter ego, Steffie, is laughing all the way to the bank. Salacious local headlines have attracted the attention of news media, from Hustler magazine to the BBC, bringing fan mail from overseas and boosting hit counts on her X-rated website, where no subject seems off limits to any adult with a valid credit card. For the lively Steffie, whose business card proclaims her to be an "exhibitionist-slut," the uproar is a noisy validation of her credo that "marketing is everything," a slogan she has lived by whether selling used cars in Gaithersburg or stripping for GIs at a Playboy Club in Germany. Potter's private self, on the other hand, seems to have her doubts about this mess, wishing that it would all go away. This is the Potter who arrives at her door for an interview in denim overalls and no makeup, warily on the lookout for nuts and cranks; the one who pays a mortgage, raises a family and is pre-occupied with life's more pedestrian bumps and grinds. She can sound beaten down as the lawsuits come and go, chattering with just enough of an accent to hint at her childhood in Bamberg, one of those picturesque German towns with cobbled streets, ornate clock towers and timbered medieval homes. Plenty of subjects are off limits for the private Potter - her children, for starters. And her husband, who goes along with this regime by introducing himself as Julian Kay. It turns out to be a pseudonym, albeit with a clever twist: Julian Kay was the title role in the film American Gigolo. Also off limits is whose names are listed in the purported "black book." One reason is that, besides clients, the computer records also list her plumber, her veterinarian and her babysitter, who happens to be married to a policeman. Nor were all of her clients simply "johns." There was the prominent local female activist, for example, who hired a dancer as a gag for her husband's retirement party. Some of the guys were just hiring dancers for bachelor parties. Add up the two sides and you end up with a question: How did a friendly, chatty, well-educated product of the German middle class become the so-called "Madam of Frederick," the most notorious woman for miles around in a town better known for its skyline of steeples. You can begin looking for answers in the red light district of her old hometown, back when she was still a high school kid named Angelika Kurz. German roots About all a tourist sees of Bamberg are such sites as the majestic old Rathaus, or the 500-year old Schlenkerla pub specializing in a smoke-flavored brew called Rauchbier. The town's blend of gothic, renaissance and baroque architecture is so well preserved that it's on a United Nations list of world cultural landmarks. You notice a bit more when you grow up there. "I went to school every morning on the train, and right beside the train station was a big X-rated cinema, with all the posters outside ... and we were like, 'Ah, she's nice,' and after a while you just don't even look anymore," Potter said. "The red light district was a few blocks around the corner." She began cutting classes to hang out in grunge bars or wheel around on friends' Harleys. "My parents would turn over every time they thought of this, because they raised me to be this moral upstanding citizen ... and here I liked hanging out with motorcycle gangs and in raunchy bars. I think it was such an attraction because my parents were middle class. We had good education, nice clothes, manners. I went to boarding school in Switzerland for a while. So it was not like I [lacked for] anything." Her parents were entrepreneurs, often preoccupied with minding the store, a boat dealership. Potter's generation came of age during West Germany's postwar "economic miracle," a society that kept one eye on the balance sheet and another warily on the East Germans and Russians lurking behind the Iron Curtain. By age 17, she'd met a 32-year-old stripper named Jeannie, who worked at the Playboy Club in nearby Bayreuth. "She told me, all you have to do is go there, look pretty and smile, and men will throw money at you. I'm like, yeah, right." But Angelika decided to lie about her age and give stripping a try, finding to her surprise that Jeannie was right. Wide-eyed young men, many of them American soldiers, cheered her every move, and she liked it. And if her parents would have been appalled, she at least was finally putting some of their lessons to good use, in this environment where your pay depended partly on how much overpriced champagne you could peddle to the leering clientele. "I always had my parents' sales agenda, that I could sell anybody anything. So I guess I was pretty popular, and my confidence started getting bigger and bigger ... It was kind of cool." She eventually discovered other ways to make money at the club, once she realized what the older women were doing when they disappeared into back rooms with the clientele. But the fun ended when the club found out she was underage. After graduating from high school, she studied accounting for four years, acquiring the knowledge that would leave her books in such good order years later in Frederick that even an IRS audit gave them a clean bill of health. She applied for an accounting job at a U.S. military base, but those positions were full, so she took an opening as an interpreter for the Military Police. It was another walk on the wild side, with drunks and wailing German women, crying as their soldier boys got tossed into the pokey. She met a guy, an American named Paul Potter. They got hitched, and in 1985 they moved to the states after he left the military. It was time to settle down, raise a family. But she found herself in the middle of nowhere, a place called Harrison Valley, Pa. "It's known for its big hunting seasons, year round," she said. "You've got about 10 people on 40 miles, and 6,000 deer. And I managed to make it like this for two months. I went insane. I mean, to this day I only have one pair of sneakers, and they have heels on them, OK? I said I couldn't live like that. And off I went." First stop, New York. Second stop, Washington. "For the next few years, I did everything from driving a cab to being a waitress, working as a receptionist, working as an accountant, working in sales." She applied for a job selling cars. The manager was skeptical. "And I said, listen, I am my father's daughter, and I can (expletive] anybody out of anything. And he pointed me out some guy and said, try and sell him a car. It was one of his salespeople." Her pitch impressed him. "So that's how I got into the car industry," she said. The art of persuasion Her biggest success was selling used cars in Rockville, where the way of doing business seemed strikingly similar to that of the world's oldest profession. "We shoved people into cars and said, 'Hope it doesn't fall apart!' ... Then the interest rate dropped and people were standing in line to buy cars, so we jacked the price up. And people laid down. I was amazed. I loved it ... Then you have the big breasted girls come in and try to sell you $5,000 worth of rust protection, which they always got, and usually a date on top of that. She wanted to buy a house, but prices for those were high as well. So she moved up the interstate to Walkersville, just outside Frederick, buying a condo for $100,000. But she wanted to go into business for herself, and saw her chance in the classifieds of the Frederick News Post: A used clothing store was for sale downtown. She bought it in 1993, re-opening as Quality Consignment. "And I marketed. I had midnight madness specials, 50 percent off from midnight to 2 a.m. I took half-page ads in the News Post. Hey, marketing is everything. I printed 5,000 fliers and gave kids in the neighborhood money to give out fliers in every mailbox they could get their hands on. And I was open seven days a week." The hard work paid off, but not enough. She needed quicker-moving items with steeper markups. Sexy lingerie was the answer. "And I thought, where do I get this used lingerie, because I always go to yard sales. And, honey, what you find at Frederick County yard sales - I pity the men. Because you've got granny undies, you do not find lingerie in Frederick ... So I said, where can I find used cool lingerie? Strip clubs!" The clubs were right down the road in West Virginia, and the items attracted a whole new clientele. Transvestites, for one, who also favored used prom dresses and bridesmaid gowns. Hookers, for another. Downtown church-lady types began to complain, but a new opportunity dawned before they could work up a head of steam. A customer who worked for a local escort agency, the French Connection, poured out her woes to Potter over lunch one day, griping about her boss. Potter pondered the matter, then suggested the perfect solution: Why not team up to start their own escort service? Finding their niche It was 1995, and Corporate Affair was born. She told her parents over Christmas, during a visit to Germany, and while dear old dad was far from thrilled, his business instincts soon took over. "You need an accountant," he told her. "You need an attorney, a bail bondsman." And so on. But mostly what she needed was customers. So she and her partner raided the opposition, printing business cards and handing them out every evening outside the French Connection. "Every time a guy would come out we'd say, by the way, we're a new service here in town. We only have the youngest girls in the city, the most beautiful girls. None is over the age of 25, and we are a lot more expensive, but we are worth it. Grin, grin. Wink, wink ... Business starts booming. And we start advertising." Police later threw her ads back in her face, saying they showed she'd been in the business for ages. "I said, 'Duh. It's called marketing.' You think I'm going to go into the paper and say, 'Brand new escort service, we're all idiots, give us a try?' No. We have to put out, 'Experienced, European, classy ladies just relocated to beautiful downtown Frederick.'" By then she'd met her second husband, and in 1996 they discovered the Internet. "I learned in a hurry everything there was about computers. We needed new markets. Frederick was tapped out. I mean, every day we'd see the same ... people. We started with a basement URL, one came free with your MSN account. Then we bought a domain." They chatted up techies, pumping them for information, and soon www.steffiecam.com was born, eventually offering not only live video but hundreds of stills of just about anything you could imagine Steffie doing. To get access to the most revealing stuff you have to pay with your credit card. The venture was so lucrative that Potter began winding down the escort trade, announcing on her site that Corporate Affair would close when its lease ran out in September 1999. But Frederick police had been staking out the place for months, and the bust came that July. Police raided Potter's home, too, seizing computers and other equipment. It was soon apparent to prosecutors that there were problems with the case. A Potter employee turned out to be a stepdaughter of one of the Frederick County state's attorney's investigators, so a Montgomery County prosecutor had to take over. In addition, one of the star witnesses, a disgruntled employee, stated that Potter only arranged the liaisons, telling her workers that what they did with the clients was strictly up to them. Potter pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor crime of maintaining a "place of assignation," which could mean either a bawdy house or a trysting place for lovers. She paid a $100 fine and received probation before judgment. The police returned her computers and business records, keeping a copy for themselves. And that likely would have been that, if someone hadn't then made an anonymous phone call to Charlene Edmonds, president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Controversy lingers The caller accused the police of using their copy of Potter's client list to blackmail various local officials. Frederick police had already been caught spying on Edmonds earlier in the year, resulting in a two-week suspension of Police Chief Regis R. Raffensberger. The unveiling of that fiasco had also begun with an anonymous phone call to Edmonds. So, when Edmonds repeated the "black book" charge at a local meeting late last year, all hell broke loose, and it has yet to stop. The News Post and the Associated Press sued to get Potter's list. Friday, the NAACP called for a grand jury investigation of the police and mayor's handling of the matter. While Potter has the original records back in her computer, the copy remains in a safe at the Frederick County courthouse. "People call me and say I will burn in hell," Potter said. "They say, 'We will be watching you.'" And they may well be. Even as she conducts an interview in her home office, she continues to do business. There is a video camera in the room, she said, poking a few papers aside to reveal a tiny camera perched on her desk. She then clicks a few times on the computer behind her to prove the point, arriving at the "office cam" site on her Web page. Sure enough, there she is, chatting away, mouse in hand. Video cameras, in fact, are up and running at several locations in her house. "Hey," Potter said, flashing her Steffie smile. "Marketing is everything." Reprinted with permission from the Baltimore Sun.
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