Sunday, June 08, 2008
News, In this Issue...

The mansion revisited

Gwinnett’s district attorney plans to pursue the final charges in the Mansion Madam case against an Emory urologist

Part One: The mansion revisited

By Stephanie Ramage and Chuck Stanley

Last week, Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter informed The Sunday Paper that he will pursue charges against a urologist on faculty at Emory University Medical School in connection with the prostitution case against the “Mansion Madam.”

Porter plans to bring pandering charges against James “Jay” O. Morgan III. He expects these to be the last charges in the case.

It has been well over a year since Porter initiated the investigation into the goings-on at 2800 Sugarloaf Club Drive, the address of the aforementioned madam’s “mansion,” resulting in the arrests of two women (on charges of prostitution) and five men—three on charges of pandering and two others on drug charges.

Lisa Ann Taylor, who worked under the name Melissa Wolf and who came to be known as the “Mansion Madam,” pled guilty last October to charges of prostitution, keeping a house of prostitution, and cocaine possession. Prostitution is a misdemeanor; more serious charges of racketeering were dropped. Taylor was sentenced to seven years probation, ordered to pay a $150,000 fine and undergo treatment for drug and alcohol abuse. 

All charges against the other woman who was arrested, Nicole Alaine Probert, who was charged with prostitution, and one of the men, Daniel Marfione, who had been charged with pandering, were dropped in exchange for their cooperation with law enforcement in the investigation.
Kerry Kruzel, a chiropractor whose home address is listed in Cumming, and Alexander “Billy” Rider, whom court documents identify as a member of the sales team at Bill Heard Chevrolet at the time, were also charged with pandering—that is, being prostitution customers, or “johns,” a misdemeanor—based on evidence gathered through surveillance, bank records and witness testimony, all of which was corroborated by information gleaned from wiretaps. Last December, both were sentenced to 12 months probation and required to pay a $1,000 fine. Porter informed The Sunday Paper on June 3 of his plans to pursue charges against Morgan in connection with the case, now, more than six months after Kruzel and Rider were sentenced.

“Really it was an oversight,” Porter says of the delay in bringing charges against Morgan. “But I can’t just leave that hanging out there.”

The rate of the case’s disposal illustrates how hard it can be to prosecute in the realm of high-dollar prostitution. Porter doggedly pursued his suspects even as the IRS and the FBI showed no interest in delving into substantial evidence regarding income-tax evasion and prostitution across state lines.

Would-be clients name their employers

“Lisa Ann Taylor has Barton Corbin to thank for her arrest,” says Porter, wearing a purple T-shirt, tan cargo pants and sneakers one recent afternoon in his office at the Gwinnett County Justice Center. “There was a delay of about nine weeks during the Barton Corbin case, and I am a poster boy for the phrase about idle hands being the devil’s workshop. So an anonymous person had sent a letter to an editor over at the Gwinnett Daily Post, and the editor had forwarded that on to me.”

Porter, whose voice sounds like a four-wheel-drive’s tires rolling over gravel, relates how, during the caesura in the case of now-imprisoned wife murderer Corbin, he decided to while away the time doing some Internet research on Taylor, a 43-year-old former Penthouse “pet” who used the pseudonym “Melissa Wolf.”

“Within a matter of a couple of days, I went to the investigators and told them that we probably had enough information to pursue a racketeering case against Taylor,” he says.

Taylor and Probert were busted in January 2007 when Gwinnett County police officers executed search warrants at Probert’s residence in the Edgewater subdivision and at Taylor’s Sugarloaf Country Club residence.

Taylor protested to officers that she’d “rather have a Xanax and a cocktail” when they asked her to come with them, but was eventually hustled into handcuffs and hauled off to the Gwinnett County Detention Center. A search of Taylor’s home turned up two boxes of tax records, as well as two years of appointment records listing monetary amounts earned for services rendered, which never showed up in Taylor’s taxes. Porter did the math and determined that Taylor’s prostitution had pulled in about $150,000 in unreported income. So, he called the IRS.
“They came out, looked through her records, and I never heard anything else about it,” says Porter. He doesn’t know why the IRS didn’t pursue the issue further. Former Atlanta Mayor Bill Campbell, after all, went to prison for not reporting a little more than $160,000 in income. Normally, tax evasion gets the IRS’ attention.

Citing the service’s policy of not commenting on private individuals’ tax records, IRS Spokesman Mark Greene declined to comment for this story. 

Taylor kept meticulous “client information sheets.” In order to get an appointment with her, would-be clients submitted an information sheet via her Web site, which listed naughty phone calls and other services. The information sheets included the client’s full name, his place of employment, phone numbers, home address, references from other prostitutes or escort agencies, and his preferences. Among them, a couple of prospective customers listed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce as their employers.

Some commented on the form that they had met with “Melissa Wolf” before, and in some cases previously had seen “Melissa Wolf” and a woman who worked under the name Amanda Foxx or Amanda Foxxx. One prospective customer wrote that he wanted a “One hour incall with you and Amanda but will see either if both not available. I have seen Amanda before.” Another who listed a brokerage firm as his employer commented, “Since I have already seen Amanda, I would like to see you first then, if things go well I would like to schedule the two of you together.”