Operator of D.C. Call-Girl Ring Is Dead in Apparent Suicide

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Police: 'Palfrey Confirmed Suicide'

Police in Tarpon Springs, Fla., held a news conference Thursday confirming that 'D.C. Madam' Deborah Jeane Palfrey committed suicide by hanging.

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ABC News reported on its Web site that Deborah Palfrey said in an interview last year that she would never return to prison.

"I sure as heck am not going to be going to federal prison for one day, let alone, you know, four to eight years," ABC quoted her as saying.

Appearing on ABC's "20/20" program a few months after her indictment, Palfrey spoke of Brandy Britton, a former college professor who hanged herself in her Howard County home in January 2007 shortly before her scheduled trial on prostitution charges. Palfrey said Britton had once worked for her.

"She couldn't take the humiliation," Palfrey said. "Her whole life was destroyed."

Moldea said Palfrey's 18-month California prison term was a terrible memory for her.

"The first time she did time, it damn near killed her, she told me," he said. "She wound up in a fairly tough prison, and the stress caused some sort of an illness that affected her eyesight. It was just a horrible, horrible period for her."

After Palfrey was released, Moldea said, "she began looking forward to what she was going to do with her future. Although she had a college degree, she viewed herself as a convicted felon who couldn't do anything else. So she came to Washington and got back into the business again."

Her business, Pamela Martin & Associates, was a "legal, high-end erotic fantasy service," Palfrey said. The mostly young women she hired as escorts were required to be college-educated, socially refined and conversant in current affairs. She dispatched them to homes and hotels in the Washington area for what she said was "quasi-sexual" game-playing with male clients, at $250 an hour.

She said she had been unaware that many of the 132 women she employed from 1993 to 2006 were engaging in sex acts with clients for money.

But a jury agreed with federal prosecutors, who argued that Palfrey knowingly ran the business as a front for prostitution.

Palfrey caused a stir in Washington after her indictment when she gave volumes of her phone records to ABC and posted them on the Internet, resulting in public identification of some prominent clients.

An IRS agent testified at the trial that the business, which Palfrey ran by phone from her Northern California home, took in about $2 million over the years.