Court confiscates £2m from brothel madam

A pensioner has been ordered to hand over £2m after admitting running brothels and controlling up to 50 prostitutes.

A pensioner has been ordered to hand over £2m after admitting running brothels and controlling up to 50 prostitutes.

Wheelchair-bound Josie Daly, 64, made £1m a year employing dozens of girls for her six-days-a-week industry, run from behind the curtains of her four homes in north London.

Her rich pickings gave her a luxury seven-bedroom Victorian villa and a white chauffer-driven Rolls Royce.

London's Harrow Crown Court heard Daly, 64, ran the business, which pretended to trade as saunas, for two years, with her girls charging clients £50-a-time.

On some nights undercover police counted as many as 100 men using her addresses, which were staffed by up to 50 British, East European and Far Eastern prostitutes aged 18 to 30.

Despite the three charges Daly admitted to of controlling prostitution for gain covering a period between January 1996 and December 1997, police believe she had been involved in the racket for several years previously.

When officers finally closed down her lucrative enterprise, which even advertised in the British Transport Police magazine, they found she had at least 10 bank accounts.

One contained just £314 although others enjoyed five figure balances as high as £90,000.

A further £104,000 was found in the main bedroom of her spacious home in Hornsey, north London, known as Bunty's Corner - named after a pet dog buried in the garden.

Fining her £3,000, ordering her to pay £50,000 costs and confiscating a further £2m assets, Judge Barrington Black told the bespectacled defendant, who had been brought into court in a wheelchair, that no-one was suggesting prostitution was illegal.

"A woman can offer her body if she wants to. Prostitution as we all know, has been going on forever ... what the law cannot accept is that others, be they men or women, should profit by such an act."