"Call Girls Employed In New York Big Business”

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28800, 22 January 1959, Page 11

"Call Girls Employed In New York Big Business”

(Rec. 9.30 pan.) NEW YORK, January 30. Mr Robert Warner, the Mayor of New York, said today that he would ask the police to Investigate charges made in a radio programme last night that business executives were employing call girls to promote business deals. The 55-minute broadcast,- presented by the Columbia Broadcasting System and narrated by Mr Ed Murrow. was described as “a factual examination of the extent to which prostitution has become an adjunct of doing big business in 20th Century America.” The cast of the programme included call girls, madams and procurers, all of whom remained anonymous, and who gave their views in recorded interviews. At one point Mr Murrow said: ‘‘Call girls interviewed by our reporters told them that their assignments bring them in contact with the highest levels of business." Mr Murrow said his staff was unable to discover hott many call girls were operating in the United

States, but there were perhaps as many as 30,000 in New York alone.

A spokesman for Mr Wagner said today: * ‘The Mayor will ask the Police Department to look into these charges.

“If there is any truth in the reports and this operation is going on . . . the Police Department will crack down on it fast. We will not tolerate such scandal and vice in the city.”

The programme was given an extensive coverage in New York newspapers today. Both the ‘‘New York Times” and the New York “HeraldTribune” ran news stories about a column long on inside pages, while the “Daily News” and the “Daily Mirror” gave the story prominence on their main news pages. The evening papers followed suit.

Mr John Gwynne, secretary of the New York Stase Chamber of Commerce, said: “Maybe some individual members are unhappy about it (the broadcast) and might protest on their own behalf, but frankly I do not think it is a thing we would take up officially or on which we would take action.”