Chapter 10: The story of the Ponderosa
The establishment in which Julie Jasper found herself ensnared was the brainchild of a bored doctor with a large and kinky sex drive. Michael Jalinsky had been a successful sexual psychiatrist in Dallas in the mid-1980s. He had gotten rich treating the sexual peccadilloes of the rich and famous in north Texas, but it had begun to leave him unsatisfied. He and his first wife, his beloved Sandy, had chased one sexual high after another, when Sandy came up with the outline for a way they could merge their voracious sexual appetites with Michaelās professional ambitions and make a ton of money in the process.
The more they discussed it, the better they liked the idea, especially the part about snatching unsuspecting persons off the street and turning them into willing sex toys. As a psychiatrist, Michael knew all the tricks of mind control and mental programming. As a doctor, he was up on the latest drugs and their properties. All of that, plus his voluminous understanding of human sexuality, led him to believe he could create the perfect whorehouse.
It had taken them a year to find just the right place for a front operation. They wanted someplace fairly remote, but not inaccessible. It had to be located in an area where local law enforcement could be persuaded to look the other way, and it had to be located someplace with fairly liberal liquor laws.
It was Sandy who discovered the truck stop. She had been combing through trade papers when she saw an advertisement for an auction at a truck stop that had been closed in southern Oklahoma. As soon as they saw it, they knew the place was perfect, and they immediately swooped in and bought the place, everything in it, plus the adjacent property to the south. It had taken them another 18 months and over $1 million to refurbish the truck stop, grease the proper palms, and construct the building that would contain his whorehouse, put up fencing and a screen of cedars. Toward the end of the project, Michael decided to build a nightclub as an added way of feeding customers into his brothel. Finally, in the spring of 1989, he was open for business.
Needless to say, the Ponderosa was an immediate success. There werenāt any high-class brothels in this neck of the woods, and word soon spread that the Ponderosa was a class joint, with the best-looking hookers in the entire area, maybe even in the entire state. Michael had spent a lot of time in Nevada prior to opening, getting tips and ideas from that stateās legal brothels. He spared no expense where security was concerned, his fees were reasonable, he paid his hookers generously and he ran a clean establishment. Well, not clean in the sexual sense. No, Michael wanted his whorehouse to offer things you just couldnāt find elsewhere, like the housewife hookers, the gangbang girls that soon became one of the placeās most popular features. Although the facility was devoted to pleasure, as far as its operation went, the Ponderosa was all business.
It hadnāt taken the couple long to figure out that what they really needed out front was not a tavern, but a strip joint. Watching strippers do their work would arouse the male clientele and make them more susceptible to a come-on from a whore. It had taken about a year to get through the legal machinations, but finally, in the fall of 1990, the Ponderosa had begun offering strippers. Of course, strippers also made excellent whores, and many of Michaelās girls doubled as strippers. Some also doubled as waitresses and convenience store workers, all the better to maintain the public front. In fact, Phil wanted to make sure the legitimate business also thrived.
A few years later, Sandy, now dying of breast cancer, made one last suggestion that had proven to be a pot of gold. They had video monitors in every room, including the special rooms downstairs, she told Phil. So why not take those tapes and make full-length porn features out of them? A perusal of the back pages of sex magazines found them a video manufacturer and that led to a distributor. Now, every week, a box of raw footage left the Ponderosa in the back of a customerās semi for the West Coast and was edited into video features. Sandy had died not long after that, in 1995, but Michael had reconciled himself to her loss.
By 1997, the Ponderosa was a well-oiled machine. Discreet ads in sex magazines and on the Internet directed potential customers to the site. Michael had plenty of contacts in the Metroplex, many in prominent, professional positions, and many came up from the area to sample the exotic wares at the Ponderosa. Word of mouth along the truckerās pipeline spread the word, and, of course, the locals came in droves. One could come to the Ponderosa two ways: through the truck stop or through the club. First-timers were screened to prevent undercover cops from entering, but regulars could get in pretty easily. Customers entered from the back of the club or through the back of the diner and walked around to the front of the back building.
Once inside, they would find themselves in a lobby, with an office to their right, a door leading to a dressing room to the left and a locked security door in front of them. A video monitor hung overhead in one corner that allowed customers to look over the available workers and make their selection. Once they had picked their partner and paid their fee, they were ushered into the dressing room, which contained lockers for customerās clothes, plus a bathroom and communal shower room. No one except workers were allowed past the security door with clothes on, a rule Michael had imposed after one rowdy had tried to slash one of his girls with a knife.
That had been one of the few times a customer gotten out of hand at the Ponderosa. Michael took no crap where security was concerned. He hired the biggest, meanest-looking bouncers he could find, including a few steroid-crazed former OU football players, and he armed them with pistols and nightsticks. Their attempted slasher was taken down before he could hurt anyone and was beaten within an inch of his life, then sent to the county jail for a year at hard labor, without a trial. That and a few other examples were about all it took to keep customers in line.