Curtis Peeples can list the things that might have gone wrong after two women were hired to dance at a Duke University lacrosse team party this month.

Peeples should know. He once owned the largest escort service in the Triangle and boasts that none of the women who worked for him was ever injured.

Safety precautions built the reputation of his Class Act Entertainment, Peeples says, a lucrative enterprise that at its height had 60 phone lines and operated across the nation from his base in Raleigh.

"You have nothing if you can't protect them," Peeples said Tuesday. "That's why you get a cut."

In the lacrosse team incident, two women told police they thought they would be dancing at a bachelor party in Durham on March 13. When they arrived, they found more than 40 men. One of the women said three men pushed her into a bathroom and assaulted her for half an hour.

The allegations have outraged the campus and the community. But they also raise a question: Just what is an escort service -- a legitimate business or a euphemism for prostitution?

Escort company operators say that what their women offer is legal, whether it's dancing or companionship. If things go further than that, they say, it's out of the companies' hands. Some companies have had women sign agreements promising not to engage in prostitution.

Problems in policing

Prostitution is a state crime that is prosecuted sporadically by local police. In the past few years, Raleigh and Greensboro police have turned their attention to escort services and made several prostitution arrests.

In Cary, police say they have targeted escort services by posing as customers in hotels. But the cases are hard to make, Capt. Dave Wulff said.

"When we talk to them on the phone, all they're doing is saying that they offer companionship," Wulff said.

Just getting a woman to the meeting location can start at $100. Once the woman is there, that's when they start negotiating sex services, Wulff said.

There have been cases, though rare, in which a woman will go to meet one of the officers and offer only companionship. Whether that means there are companies that legitimately offer just companionship or that the escorts suspect they are in the company of police, Wulff doesn't know.

There hasn't been a major federal crackdown on escort services in North Carolina in a decade. In the last one, Peeples was caught in an Internal Revenue Service sting that snared escort companies that used a credit card service allegedly to hide the source of their income. In 1999, he pleaded guilty to money laundering and served more than three years in prison.

Now living in Mississippi, he hesitantly agreed to a phone interview Tuesday, saying he would talk in hopes of helping protect women in the escort trade.

"They have a right to say 'no' just like anybody else does," said Peeples, who is no longer in the escort business. "The vast majority of girls working with escort services are not bad people. They are people who would absolutely abhor anybody knowing that they work there."

Neither the Durham accuser nor police have disclosed the name of the agency the women worked for. It is The News & Observer's policy not to identify the victims of sex crimes.

On the business side

Look in the Yellow Pages or online and escort companies are easy to find. There are even customer reviews posted to Internet discussion groups for larger cities, including Raleigh and Durham. Typically, the long list of companies -- with names like Absolute Class and A Class Act -- come back to one or two business owners operating out of their homes.

Next page >