Before this goes any further, it should be made clear that, despite her nickname of the Gold Coast Madam, Rose Laws never considered herself a madam, per se. She was an agent who connected call girls with clients.
Laws, who is now 78, will be at After-Words bookstore (23 E. Illinois) from 6 to 7:30 PM on Thursday to read from her new memoir. In order to capitalize on Laws’s tabloid fame—she received her nickname after an FBI raid and subsequent arrest in 2002, and served 22 months in prison—the publisher titled the book Gold Coast Madam. But Laws herself prefers Storms and Rainbows. To her mind, her story is less about sex work than about a woman who had to make her own way in the world with the tools she had: a substandard education, a head of naturally red hair, and a pair of 34DDDs.
“I don’t regret doing the business I did,” Laws says now by phone from her home in Sarasota, Florida, where she retired with her children after she got out of prison in 2005. “I tried so hard to do other businesses, but I couldn’t make them last.”
