A Waste of Sin

all manner of people in the red light district. The muggers, gamblers, and dealers weren't having a good time under Christopher's watch, but the prostitutes, at least some of them had a way out. They just needed to say a name. George White. White was there get out of jail free card. The local cops knew his authority as a narcotics officer superseded their own when it came to sex workers, and so many prostitutes mentioned his name that law enforcement started referring

to them as George's girls. San Francisco Narcotics Bureau. This is White got a lady of the night here says she doesn't belong to jail, So cut her loose any special reason. Why, Let's just say that lost souls get to me. Thanks boys. Why did White care so much about getting escorts out of jail, Well, he owed them a favor. That's because George's girls had some additional responsibilities.

They were an extension of his experiments, subcontractors to one of the most powerful government agencies in the world, and not even the mayor of San Francisco had enough power or influence to keep George White from doing his patriotic duty. And in this case, George White's patriotic duty was to observe them from behind a two way mirror, watching them having sex while sitting on a portable toilet and drinking Martini's,

often recording it though they didn't know it themselves. George's Girls were the CIA's prostitutes, and they would help George White reach the most depraved heights of his career. For My Heart Radio, this is Operation Midnight Climax and I Heart original podcast, I'm Noel Brown and this is Chapter six A Waste of Sin, Part one The Wild West in nineteen fifty three, George White was like a traveling

salesman running out of new customers. He targeted and drugged his friends, friends of friends, strangers, and more than a few criminals. But things were getting dangerous in Greenwich Village. Word had spread about the man with cold blue eyes who liked to invite you home and serve lsd on the rocks. But it wasn't just the rumors that worried him.

George White was being followed. It started after White was told to close up shop at his Greenwich Village pad and take on a new assignment, this time in Houston, Texas. At the time, the police force was embroiled in a controversy involving crooked cops who were selling stolen heroin back to criminals, so White flew down. He started by interviewing a detective named Martin Bill Knitzer, but the case quickly stalled. The very next day, Bill Nitzer shot himself, well appeared

to have shot himself. White thought it was murder. It's very difficult to shoot yourself in the chest. Houston police weren't happy about an outsider sticking his nose in their business. They called his boss, Harry Annslinger, to complain that he wasn't welcome. One cop even approached White in a diner gun on his hip and told him he leaned too

hard on his friend. White shrugged it off. Then the man stepped back, eyeing White like they were in an Old West saloon, and told him they could settle things outside. George White might have wound up in a duel if cooler heads had n't prevailed, but that wasn't the end of it. Back in New York, White realized he was being tailed by Houston cops. They were hoping to find evidence he was a Communist at the time, a kiss of death that could have ruined his name and career.

Of course, they didn't understand White had been busy fighting Communism for a very long time. Still, White realized it was a good time to leave New York City. Sydney Gottlieb, White supervisor, didn't want to stop drug experiments, so he proposed that White relocate to San Francisco and resume his activities there. But there would be a twist. While White had been occupied with the roll of drugs and getting the truth, Gottlieb now wanted him to weaponize sex as well.

Spies and sex have a long tradition together. Seduction has always played a role in foreign intrigue. And espionage, especially in the movies, and the principle was similar to the one behind LSD. It was about someone letting their guard down. Sex may to subject vulnerable. Maybe Sidney Gottlieb had been looking for the weapon to win the Cold War in the wrong places all along. Maybe sex was the ultimate truth drug. In March nineteen fifty, White and Albertine packed

their things and headed to San Francisco. The couple maintained a separate residence there, but the real action would be at the l Shaped Department at two Chestnut Street and Telegraph Hill, a scenic neighborhood overlooking the San Francisco Bay, Fisherman's Wharf, and even Alcatraz, where some of the dope pushers White had long ago put away. May have been idling. Why did Godliev select San Francisco In the nineteen fifties. The city was alive with art and music. The thinking

was progressive. Like Greenwich Village, the city had embraced the Beat generation and the counterculture movement. In October d five, it hosted the famous Six Gallery Reading, where poets including Alan Ginsburg and Michael McClure read their work. It was the first time Ginsburg ever read Howell in public, and it was met with a raucous reception from drunk spectators, including Jack Kerouac. Cynically, Gottlieb targeted San Francisco because the

gay community was stirring there. Sex positivity was in the first lesbian rights organization, the Daughters of Belitas, had just formed in the city. If the CIA was going to study sex, it needed to be in a place where sexuality was thriving. But before White's work could begin, the Chestnut Street apartment needed a makeover. Part of it was for surveillance purposes. White hired an engineering student from cal Berkeley,

a tech whiz, to wire microphones into wall outlets. A movie camera was obscured behind a two way mirror where White could observe and record any d that unfolded. The radio antenna was intended to let agents parked outside listen to what was happening in the room. Maybe they were there to watch the door to take surveillance photographs for CIA blackmail purposes, But that audio signal is how the live sex shows wound up getting out over the airwaves

to anyone picking up the frequency. White wasn't just concerned with the technical stuff he wanted atmosphere. To find it, he looked to Hugh Hefner and tried to ape the Playboy Aesthetic record show that he expensed over a hundred items to the CIA, including drapes, a mattress, art, and a telescope. With the CIA's money, he also bought several reproductions of Henri de toluz Latrex works, the nineteenth century

artist who was fascinated by Paris's lurid underbelly. White thought the paintings, mostly of naked women kissing and embracing one another, set the mood he all so brought along some photos of women in bondage, likely supplied by his old friend, the fetish publisher John Willie. All of it gave Chestnut Street a kind of ci a Bordello aesthetic, a strange

mix of softcore porn and cheap elegance. Henri de toluz La trec was also fond of depicting prostitutes in his work, and that was another reason San Francisco was ideal for White's purposes. In order to crack the code of sex and drugs as matters of national security, he needed the sex he needed professionals, and for that the CIA would

need a pimp pert two staffing up. Normally, procuring female escorts would have fallen on Pierre Lafitte, who had been White's right hand a man back in New York City, but the FEET was still taking a vacation of sorts in St. Petersburg, Florida. That's where White had sent him to lay low following the controversial death of CIA employee Frank Olsen. He had lost his Robin, so he did the same thing Bruce Wayne once did in the comics. He got himself a new sidekick. White summoned a man

named ira Ike Feldman. Of all the characters to pass through White's life, Feldman was one of the most outrageous. He was a fellow in Narcotics Bureau agent whose exterior helped obscure a fierce intellect. A former military intelligence officer, he spoke fluent Russian and Mandarin. He was also good with the undercover work. In fact, he'd spent the past several months posing as a heroin dealer in pimp under the alias Joe Capone. The two men knew each other

by reputation. In journalist Richard Stratton tracked down Ike Feldman, and rather than being evasive or contrite about his CIA work, Feldman was all too happy to talk about it. Here's what he said about working with George White. White was the son of a bitch buddy who was a great cop. That was Feldman's way of saying he liked White, and just like White, he had taken his alter ego to extremes.

His persona of Joe Capone was flamboyant, prone to blue suede shoes, pinstriped suits, huge hats, and a massive fake diamond ring. Feldman was just five ft three, but quick with his tongue and his fists. Like White, he was from the old school of law enforcement. His preferred method of getting people to talk involved a hammer. Sometimes when people had information, it was the one way you could get it. If it was a guy, you took his God, can you hit it with, Amma, and they talked to you.

But White made an appeal to Feldman's curiosity. What if there was a good way to get people to talk without hitting their dicks with hammers? White explained the program. He would supply the drugs, typically LSD, but whatever struck his fancy, from sedatives to uppers too, experimental drugs that didn't even have a name yet. The CIA would supply the safe house, and Feldman, as the pimp, would supply the women, ladies he recruited from bars and massage parlors.

Feldman would later argue he was only posing as a pimp. He was an undercover cop playing a role, and the role of Jo Capone called for him to take on the profile of a drug dealer and vice kingpim. But when you're recruiting actual prostitutes to have actual sex with actual customers and paying them actual money, well doesn't that make you an actual pimp too. It wasn't long before Ike Feldman CIA pimp had assembled a harem for George

White's brothel. The prostitutes probably didn't know about the CIA part. They just knew Feldman and White were paying them between fifty two a hundred dollars a night to bring John's back to the Chestnut Street apartment, where they were to serve the men drinks dosed with LSD or other drugs, and then they were supposed to indulge in whatever the John's desired. The women could keep whatever fee they normally charged for services rendered, whether Feldman took a cut of

that to keep up his pimp appearances is unknown. But the women had another far more important incentive to work with White and Feldman. White promised each one that if they were ever busted by San Francisco police for their escort work, they could call him and he would arrange for their immediate release. The more men they brought to the pad, the more favors White would owe them. Georgia's girls had virtual immunity from the local police. Why it

wasn't someone who looked down on sex workers. Long before he became an narcotics agent, White worked for the United States Border but roll and at the border he fell for one. In his autobiography, he wrote, her name was Estrellita, and it was clear that she loved me with deep passion. Otherwise would she have taken time off from her duties to lose herself in my embraces coming home? However, she subsequently fractured some of my ideals, if not my heart.

When it came time to murmur audios that night, she rubbed her fingertips together in a manner that didn't at all suggest deathless love. Money, She said, you get paid for your work. I get paid for mine. Estralita made quite an impression. Later, while working as a narcotics cop in Omaha, White made the acquaintance of another prostitute named Babe Barnes, and it might have been his first experience as a bowyer. Babe freely permitted me to use her

workshop as my observation. Most regularly. I was able to maintain a surveillance of her visitors, particularly the narcotic minded ones, from the clothes closet in her room or even from under her busy bed. Much of my knowledge of the more esoteric facts of life, not to mention, my information on the local narcotic traffic, was game in this somewhat clinical fashion. When why it was about to be transferred,

he visited Babe Barnes one last time. I paid one more visit to Babe, whom I had learned to like. She was in the Council Bluffs jail during sixty days. It was a sad sort of rainy day, and she was pretty low, having run out of money, friends, and cigarettes. I restocked her in at least one or two of these categories, and suggested that she tried some other profession when it was over, which was like trying to persuade Campbell to stop carrying soup. What's funny? I was thinking

about you and under my bed to get junkies. What's funny about that? Nothing except you're probably the first guy who ever learned my business from the ground up. So long, baby, So long, George. I'll see you again sometime now, he won't. It never happens, but good luck, and it never happened. Of course. It was the closest George White ever came to explaining why he could respect the law even though he didn't mind and even respected those who kept breaking in.

She was a lost soul. Lost Souls Get to Me m Part three Breakthrough. In the spring of nine, everything was in place for George White. He'd finally be able to find out whether a combination of sex and drugs was the key to breaking down the walls of discretion. If it worked, maybe the Cold War would swing in their favor. If it didn't, George White, renowned sexual deviant, would still get paid to watch live sex shows. The apartment on Chestnut Street was fully wired for audio and video.

White and Feldman had girls, LSD and an ample supply of subjects. White even gave his project a name, Operation Midnight Climax. The escorts would go out on the prowl and quickly and snare a man using time tested methods of seduction. You want to fuck, it's twenty dollars. White sat behind the two a mirror recording for ambience. White display his extensive collection of opium pipes collected from years

of drug busts. In front of him was a large Martini picture, which he drained over the course of an evening, peeing it out into the toilet underneath him so he wouldn't miss a minute of action. Sometimes, when he was particularly struck by an escorts beauty, he turned to his colleague and say, that's a waste of a sin. The escort and her john would step into the bedroom, clothing falling to the floor. White told the women to approach

anyone they liked, from outcasts to white collar professionals. Like any serious scientist, White wanted a cross section of subjects. The weather, it was at the bar, or in the living room, or even in the bedroom. The john's were always offered a drink, often with something in it. As the LSD worked its magic, the escorts would do what escorts do. At first, White wanted to see if they're willingness to try things sexually had any influence on whether

the man would loosen up. Positions played out like a Comma Sutra page come to life. They assumed whatever role their partner wanted. A scolding teacher, a jilted lover. A closet full of sex toys was at their disposal, everything from dildo's two paddles. After experiencing their fantasy of choice, the men would enter their refractory period, and it was here George White would lean forward, martini in hand and wait for a revelation. The escorts would poke and prod

the John's about their profession, their family, their friends. Sometimes they were politicians, sometimes millionaires. Others worked for companies that demanded discretion. What would they say in George White's fantasia, a place where pleasure was always on tap. Basically, they talk about their wives, about their kids, about their bosses. Sometimes it was under the influence of LSD. Sometimes just

sex would be enough. White always learned what the men did for a living, but he was looking for more. Would an airline pilot talk about the technical issues of a passenger plane? Would a lawyer talk about a client. The CIA's theory was that men were most vulnerable as they neared orgasm. Their hormones had completely taken over by that point, and if the escort could somehow delay their climax,

they might talk. This didn't work. When the escorts tried to stall or converse, the men were virtually in a trance. Their hormones were the dominant force in their brains, so the CIA tried other things. Years later, Feldman would recall the CIA shipped a new aphrodisiac to the Pad for White and his girls to try out. Not long after, the women brought back a number of Russian sailors and served them this concoction, which CIA chemists had informally dubbed

the sextender. White wanted to know all kinds of crap, but they weren't talking, so we had the girl slip him this sex drug. These guys went crazy. White found out what he wanted to know. What Feldman was describing was something remarkably like viagra, which wouldn't go on sale for another forty years. But there was a missing piece

of the equation. White was a master interrogator, someone who could make a mime talk, but Now that the prostitutes were the public face of this experiment, they had to learn a different kind of manipulation, and so did the CIA. Remember that even though George White had been around the block, the CIA hadn't not when it came to actual coercion.

They wanted to know everything they could about the role of sex and espionage, so they constantly dispatched psychologists to interview the women, asking them about how they approached men, how they made them comfortable, what men liked, what they didn't. They didn't know what a trick was, what a john was.

It wasn't uncommon to walk into the pad and see a CIA shrink, white dress, shirt, sleeves rolled up and fogging up their eyeglasses as a prostitute told them the best ways to use sex to get what they wanted, in their case money. For the CIA, it was secrets.

Sometimes these exchanges bordered on the ridiculous. Once Feldman walked in to find CIA psychologist John Gittinger on the floor with two prostitutes using bendable pipe cleaners the kind you'd find in school art projects, as the women contorted them into human shapes to illustrate the various acrobat next their clients liked getting Jer photographed these tiny dioramas for posterity,

carrying them all back to CIA headquarters. But most of the time no psychologists or mental health professionals would be on hand to oversee the experiments. Most of the time it was just George White, inebriated, sitting on the portable toilet behind a mirror, taking notes. White was many things, a cop, a brawler, a patriot, but he wasn't a doctor. His observations were superficial in the extreme. He could only record and comment on whether a subject had spoken freely,

not about their overall mental state. From his perch, White absorbed only the most salacious elements of this grand experiment. He was a CIA sanctioned voyer, just as he had with Babe Barnes back in Omaha. White took a liking to one escorton which to kill her. Her name was Liz Evans, and she spent hours with both White and Gettinger filling them in on every possible nuance of her profession. She had no idea they were acting on behalf of the CIA. White was just a narcotics cop and Gettinger

a very curious associate. On a few occasions. White asked her to accompany foreign dignitaries to some black tie events, then retreat with them back to their hotel rooms. Was White behind a mirror in an adjacent room filming? Was he under the bed as he had been with Barnes? Evans never said, though she did have something to say to write our hp Albarelli Jr. I was paid to

practice my womanly charms. I'm sure George filmed parts of those encounters if he could have a lot of the times there were guys with George read movie cameras and sound equipment. Even more curiously, Evans recalled the whites experiments sometimes involved some very unconventional means of influence. We used to play these crazy games hypnosis and like that. Yeah, I think I was hypnotized once by a friend of George's. White peered through his looking glass for weeks and then months,

the film camera capturing all of the encounters. He spent his days hunting drug dealers and his nights watching naked bodies contort themselves into any and every sexual position imaginable. The results were always unpredictable. The men seemed guarded, even after drinks, even after hallucinogenic chemicals turned the pad into a world of bright colors and four breasted women uncloid. I know we're close. What was missing was something prostitutes

didn't normally offer, intimacy. White took the prostitute aside and told them to try something after sex, after climax. They would usually hurry out of bed, get dressed, and get the john out the door like a restaurant. High turnover was good for business, but White told them to linger instead, to just stay in bed and talk. The CIA had been looking at this experiment as a two sided equation between sex and drugs, but White saw a third side,

the male ego. When a prostitute began taking an interest in the man beyond there a lotted time, they were flattered, They felt special, and they wanted to reciprocate by talking, conversing, sharing themselves, just like their escorts appeared to be doing. As one CIA officer later said, to find a prostitute who is willing to stay is a hell of a shock to anyone used to prostitutes. It has a tremendous effect on the guy. It's a boost to his ego if she's telling him he was really and she wants

to stay for a few more hours. Most of the time it gets pretty vulnerable. What the hell is he going to talk about? Not the sex? So he starts talking about his business. It's at this time she can lead him gently. The simple act of human proximity and a very reduced sense of inhibition thanks to the drugs, led to the john saying things they shouldn't private, things things one wouldn't normally say to an escort. Everyone is taking kicked back to Sydney Hall. Everyone, you sure, just

tell you play the game. The prostitutes weren't there solely for the John's. When George White's boss, Sydney Gottlieb came to visit, they were there for him too, Just as he had with L. S. D. Gottlieb liked to take a hands on approach. Several times Sydney Gottlieb came out. I met Gottlieb at the pad and a White's office. White used to send me to the airport to pick up Sydney in this other wacko John getten you the psychologist. Sydney was a nice guy. He was a fucking nut.

They're all fucking nuts. Feldman claimed, Gottlie availed himself with the hired help, retreating to a private space with the prostitutes. They did it as a favorite of Feldman. This is all rather illicit, dark, even for George White, but Ike Feldman managed to bring it down to another more disturbing level. Decades later, a woman stepped forward who had been an escort working for Feldman on an narcotics case. Money and

favors weren't the only form of payment. The CIA offered, you do a good job on this and I can give you some of the best heroine you've ever had. When an escort was a drug addict. It was another way in a way to motivate this army of subcontractors. White was prepared to do anything to succeed. But here's the thing about CIA financed drug dens and brothels. Sometimes they can get too conspicuous. White had been in business for about a year in Telegraph Hill when Ike Feldman

decided to throw a party. It was a lavish affair full of attractive women, drugs, and a beautiful view of San Francisco. As Feldman mingled in his pinstriped suit, he made deals for heroin. He flashed cash, he let it be know that he was after no bigger a fish

than Ronaldo Red Ferrari, san Francisco's reigning criminal kingpin. No one knew Feldman was a cop, but they soon would, and when Feldman took the stand to testify it Ferrari's eventual trial, but San Francisco examiner made sure to explain how he pulled the fast woman Ferrari, that the spectacular parties had all been arranged, that Feldman was working undercover, and that Chestnut Street was where he had laid his trap.

George White's Utopia was no longer an anonymous broadcast, and the CIA's secret campaign to harness the power of sex and drugs was on the brink of being laid bare for the entire world to see. But George White wasn't about to lose his dream job for a second time. He wasn't going to let San Francisco become another New York. There was still too much to learn, too many secrets to uncover. He'd do anything to keep it going, even if it meant teaming up with the magician. Yeah. Operation

Midnight Climax is hosted by Noel Brown. This show's written by Jake Rosson, Editing, sound design and mixing by Ernie Indra Dat and Natasha Jacobs. Original music by Aeron Kaufman. Research and fact checking by Austin Thompson and MAURICEA. Brown Show. Logo by Lucy Quendonia. Special thanks to Enzo Salucci, Amanda Colbinson, Spencer Gibson, David crum Holtz, Vanessa crum Holtz, Vinny Massimino, and Ted Ramy. Julian Weller is our supervising producer. Our

executive producers are Jason English and mangesh Ha Ticketer. See you next week.