Howard Greenberg (Steven Hirsch)
PROSTI-TOUTED: Avowed prostitutes (from left to right) Danielle Geissler, Heather Keith and Desiree Ellis linger outside Manhattan Supreme Court yesterday as their pimps’ defense attorney, Howard Greenberg (inset), sings the praises of “the life” during his summation arguments. (
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Money, homes, cars, ski vacations — with perks like these, who wouldn’t want to be a hooker, a defense lawyer asked at a bizarre Manhattan sex-trafficking trial yesterday.
“I’m trying to find a job myself that pays me 10 grand a week,” defense lawyer Howard Greenberg said as summations began in the Manhattan Criminal Court trial of Vincent George Sr. and Jr., admitted father-and-son pimps.
“One wonders in this economy if a girl can make up to 10 grand a week . . . Why more women don’t do it, I don’t know,” the lawyer said, arguing that there is no proof that the Georges’ pampered staff of five hookers was forced to do anything.
The Georges admit they’re pimps. But they insist that they’re really nice pimps and that their stable of five women commuted happily, six nights a week, from their employer-provided houses in Allentown, Pa., to the bars of fancy Midtown hotels, where they’d hand out “masseuse” cards to randy male tourists.
“The girls wanted for nothing. There was maternity leave — can you imagine that?
“In short, the benefits package was great,” Greenberg said.
But in closing arguments, the DA’s lead sex-trafficking prosecutor, John Temple, blasted back, deriding the defense scenario as “The Disney World of Pimps.”
“This is not the movie ‘Pretty Woman,’ ” Temple told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Ruth Pickholz, who is presiding over the nonjury trial. “And the women in this case are not Julia Roberts.”
The women — who come from backgrounds of abuse, neglect and addiction — didn’t own their houses, didn’t have bank accounts in their names, and would lose everything if they left their pimps, the prosecutor said.
Well, maybe they’d keep their cars, if they could sneak off with them.And the pimps’ fleet of employee vehicles, including a 14-year-old Toyota Camry and an 18-year-old Nissan Pathfinder,r, and an 11-year-old Chevy Trailblazer, he said, and was “worth more as scrap metal,” Temple said.
Most compelling in the prosecution’s summations was a montage of phone recordings in which both father and son growl about snapping the women’s necks, whupping their asses and knocking out their “f–king teeth.”
In one tape, George Jr. boasts to his father about his most obedient ho: “Out of all the bitches, she is the bitch I can honestly say I only put my hand on twice in five years.”
It’s a discipline strategy he learned from his dad, who on another tape advises the son, “When they get their ass stomped, then they see the difference: This n—-r ain’t no f–king joke.”
The pimps — and their workers — counter that the threats were all words. “If those threats had been real,” noted Jr.’s lawyer, David Epstein, “there would have been medical records stacked a mile high.”
The judge said she’ll render a verdict on June 19.