Montreal's skin trade martyrs

   The last time Montreal really hammered the local skin trade started with what might’ve seemed a nothing announcement by provincial Justice Minister Jean-Jacques Bedard on January 24, 1967. He promised to appoint a board of inquiry on the administration of justice in the province. This eventually became the massive Crime Commission, which cost a bundle. There were loads of cops in deep cover, running up all sorts of overtime.
   Mayor Drapeau had lobbied for this, as he believed his earlier work busting up the city’s underbelly was threatened with reversal.
   Since then those working in the sexual pleasure industry have largely gone unharrassed, occasional bust of street crazies and the odd tragic murder aside. Massage girls and strippers routinely double dip welfare and massive wads of cash, none of it going to taxes. But occasionally one or two get nailed to the cross of sex.
   Here are three notable local martyrs of police crackdowns on the jerk’n’spurt industry.

Richard Siegfried Wiseman, commonly known as Ziggy, was a bald father of two with a bum ticker. He was a hustler with a taste for Cadillacs and did the occasional bit of business with gangsters like Willie Obront and Frank Cotroni. Ziggy managed such French rock acts as Jenny Rock and in 1969 set up Quebec’s answer to Woodstock, which was the Manseau Pop Festival. Acts failed to show up, the rain fell, cops moved in. Fiasco City. Ziggy Wiseman bounced back by opening a chain of 17 massage parlours throughout the city. He had about 60 female employees – mostly aging strippers - on staff and a half dozen guys to manage the places. On average 300 men would drop in each day and spend no less than $35 for a massage with extras that could get up to $125. The massage girls could make up to $100,000 a year – not bad cheese for the mid 70s – and Ziggy’s take was estimated to be a staggering $8 million per year. But he wants more and bribes a Morality Squad member nicknamed Colombo to bust his competitors and leave him untouched. Ziggy gives a list of his own joints and the next day at 7 a.m. 120 cops bust his establishments. In August 1977, Ziggy Wiseman is sentenced four and a half years for trying to bribe a police officer and living off the avails of prostitution. In December 1978, Ziggy gets a few days out of prison and writes a two page letter to his wife. He then takes an intentional overdose of barbiturates. Thirty showed up at his funeral.

Martha Adams. In the fall of 1971 Martha Adams was accused of running a house of prostitution, a considerable rarity for a woman at the time. In March 1972 she was found not guilty. This gives that loveable extrovert a stage for more shenanigans. She turns out to be a bit of an extrovert. Our own Heidi Fleiss. She pens her memoirs and then runs for the federal seat in St. Hyacinthe against Claude Wagner, who was an intense defender of law and order. She sets up her campaign office across from his on Market Street. She gets a few hundred votes. At the end of the year she faces another charge of pimping and is found guilty. Five years later on Quebec TV she claims that she only ran against Wagner because she was promised that her sentence would be one year, instead of five is she ran against him. She was was last heard from a decade ago, then aged 66, still arguing that brothels should be legal.

Erna Dietrich was a Montreal prostitute who was caught by Revenue Canada big time. In December 1985, she was found guilty of tax avoidance and sentenced to 60 days in prison and $100,000 in fines. She had failed to declare incomes between 1974 and 1980 of $792,490, therefore she owed $239,251 in taxes. She claimed that she started as a hooker in 1972 due to having no other means of making a living and that she failed to declare her income because it was from an illegal source. Among the evidence of her wealth was a term deposit of $36,000 in 1974 and $12,000 in Canada Savings bonds. She had also put in $160,000 in Swiss Bank accounts.