By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 3, 2007

A former client of the woman accused of being the D.C. madam is trying to block his name from being aired on an ABC News program about her escort business and the men who patronized it, saying publicity would amount to witness intimidation, ABC said yesterday.

In a letter to ABC, Steven Salky, the man's attorney, wrote that he has "reason to believe" that his client could be named tomorrow in a "20/20" report about an alleged prostitution ring run by Deborah Jeane Palfrey, ABC said. Salky would not identify the man.

The client expects to be a prosecution witness in Palfrey's federal trial on racketeering charges, Salky told ABC. Identifying him would violate a court order barring harassment of potential witnesses, he said.

The client is a well-to-do private citizen, according to a source familiar with the investigation who is prohibited from discussing it publicly.

The letter hinted at how nervous some men in the Washington area are ahead of the highly promoted, sweeps month broadcast of "20/20," wondering who will be the next man to be publicized. A deputy secretary of state who was asked in a phone call by ABC last week about his dealings with her agency resigned the next day.

Palfrey's clients included government officials, lobbyists, military officers and private citizens.

A partial page from Palfrey's Sprint phone bill from 1996 is posted on her Web site. A review of those records by The Washington Post shows that Palfrey often called the Pentagon and the Ritz-Carlton at Pentagon City.

Montgomery Blair Sibley, Palfrey's attorney, said the Ritz-Carlton was a regular location for escort "dates." He said Palfrey returned calls from customers, instructing them to meet the escorts in rooms at the five-star hotel near the Pentagon.

Sources familiar with the investigation into Palfrey's business said her business phone also logged numerous calls from Georgetown University Hospital, and there are notebooks she kept on her escorts, with photographs and specialties.

Palfrey turned over a sizable portion of her business phone records, covering 2002 to 2006, to ABC News before a federal judge ordered last month that she not take steps to intimidate or harass witnesses. Since then, ABC has been tracking down and making calls to men connected to numbers on Palfrey's phone list.

Yesterday, Palfrey questioned whether the former client is willingly cooperating with prosecutors.

"It is simply ludicrous to imagine such a thing," she wrote in an e-mail to The Post. "Frankly, who [in] the world voluntarily would want to be a part of this mess even before [it] morphed into its current form; a mess certainly to reach nuclear proportions in time."

For 13 years, until her arrest last year, Palfrey ran Pamela Martin and Associates, providing escorts for men around Washington. She gave ABC four years of phone records to mine for customer identities, insisting that she acted out of desperation to find defense witnesses to testify that her escorts provided only $300-an-hour massages and erotic, role-playing fantasies.

Sibley said yesterday he estimates that ABC News has identified 1,000 customers and could publicly identity five to 10 people based on how their public roles or positions conflict with the hiring of escorts.

ABC News spokesman Jeffrey W. Schneider said yesterday that such estimates are premature. Although the program is being promoted with excerpts on ABC's Web site, he said "20/20" has not finished its reporting.

"I don't think anybody can tell you what we're going to do," Schneider said. He declined to comment on how ABC will determine whom to name, but he said it typically would consider the public interest and possible hypocrisy by public officials.

Palfrey said even she does not know whom "20/20" will ultimately identify.

"Mr. Sibley, I and the rest of America will know who will be named simultaneously," she wrote in her e-mail to The Post. She suggested that there was nothing to stop her from naming Salky's client publicly.

"Since Mr. Sibley and I, along with ABC News do not know who the identities of the government's witnesses [are], we in turn cannot abide by any court order," she wrote.

Staff writer Sue Anne Pressley Montes and researchers Meg Smith and Julie Tate contributed to this report.