Cecil Suwal, the 24-year-old madam who ran the prostitution ring that brought down Eliot Spitzer, has been sentenced to six months in prison.
The college student pleaded for mercy on Thursday, saying, “It is my aim to prevent others, especially young girls, from making the kind of mistakes that I have made.”
In June, a tearful Suwal pleaded guilty to money laundering, conspiracy and conspiracy to promote prostitution.
Suwal ran the Emporerors Club VIP, a $5,500-an-hour escort service, with 63-year-old Mark Brener, where they booked call girls across the globe.
Defense attorney Alberto A. Ebanks claims Brener’s psychological domination left Suwal incapable of making independent decisions, saying she even had a tattoo on her body reading “property of Mark Brener.”
Suwal met Brener at age 18 when she answered a seemingly innocuous job posting by Brener in a weekly New York paper.
Suwal, a prep-school grad on break from studying advertising at the University of Miami at the time, began a sexual relationship with the then 57-year-old Brener, becoming “his paramour, his companion and ultimately his assistant” at the Emperors Club VIP.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Daniel Stein acknowledged that “certain aspects of the defendant’s personal history and characteristics mitigate the need for punishment in a compelling way.”
“Cecil Suwal devoted nearly four years of her life to promoting prostitution and helping herself and her co-conspirators profit from that activity,” Stein wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “During that time, Suwal did no legitimate work and supported herself entirely through crime.”
Suwal has since attended college, been involved with charity work, had steady appropriate employment and volunteered for a forensic psychological evaluation.
While the federal judge credited Suwal for going to “extraordinary lengths to put her life back on track,” he said it could not erase the fact that she played a central role in the escort service.
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