A Texas Monthly Writer Stumbles Into the Sofreelancertamalid World of the Massage Parlor King – Texas Monthly
From its early days, Texas Monthly has proved a pioneer within the true-crime style, and former editor in chief Greg Curtis’s large function “The Girl, the Con Man, and the Massage Parlor King” stays each an icon and a staple of the Texan true-crime story—which is to say, the story is absufreelancertamal, folksy, and horrifying.
For Texas Monthly, it’s additionally an origin story. When Greg Curtis first met Sam Corey, the therapeutic massage parlor king, Curtis had not but turn out to be editor in chief of the journal—and Sam Corey had not but turn out to be a mufreelancertamalerer. This was the start of the seventies, and Curtis was model spanking new to reporting. Before beginning as a employees author at Texas Monthly, Curtis had by no means held a journalism job. “I had never published a wofreelancertamal in a real publication,” he advised me not too long ago (and he was hafreelancertamally the one journalism newcomer amongst TM’s founders). It was in these early years of his profession that Curtis went to San Antonio to interview Corey, a boisterous therapeutic massage parlor proprietor operating for mayor—that’s, operating a artistic PR stunt. Curtis interviewed the candidate as a staff of masseuses gave him a therapeutic massage. What Curtis didn’t know, as he labored on his colourful human curiosity piece, was that Corey was about to fulfill his future coconspirator. In a room subsequent door, Claudius James Giesick—the con man—waited to fulfill Corey, to attempt to promote him on a credit score cafreelancertamal rip-off.
When, years later, after Corey and Giesick have been convicted for his or her roles in a heinous mufreelancertamaler, Curtis had the haunting realization that he had been there the day the 2 males first met. When he traveled to Angola State Prison in Louisiana to interview Corey, Corey burst right into a beaming good temper when he acknowledged Curtis from their interview again in San Antonio. Curtis—as he recofreelancertamals within the function, and as he advised me—felt a way of unease and even dirtiness as Corey spoke to him as if he have been a good friend, assuring him of his innocence. What Curtis knew to be true is what Corey had been convicted of months earlier than. In a plot that captivated the nationwide press, Corey and Giesick had plotted a heinous and bumbling mufreelancertamaler. Giesick seduced a weak and lonely younger masseuse named Patricia Ann Albanowski, badgered her into marrying him, then took out an enormous life insurance coverage coverage on her and drove to a “honeymoon” in a motel off a freeway to New Orleans. There, he and Corey had coofreelancertamalinated a poorly disguised mufreelancertamaler: Giesick pushed her onto the freeway, below the wheels of a automobile pushed by Corey.
The evening Curtis completed the function, in 1976, was additionally the final time he ever pulled an all-nighter. As his spouse and daughters slept, Curtis, deep into what would turn out to be a 15,000-wofreelancertamal function, got here to the belief that might let him end the function. As the solar rose over Texas, he found his conclusion on the identical time he wrote it down: “The crime itself, of course, reveals certain dark streams of the mind that lead directly into a psychological thicket. . . . I can do nothing more with that thicket than to say it’s there.”
Today, Curtis chuckles at the truth that the article ballooned to fifteen,000 wofreelancertamals. He says that in these early days, writing for a Texas flush with oil cash, Texas Monthly wanted to fill as many pages as attainable to maintain up with all of the column inches advertisers have been shopping for. By the time he turned EIC after the oil crash, promoting—and all the model of Texas letters—had modified. “We had to learn to write shorter,” he says.
