In 1936, as part of the War on Crime, the FBI targeted elite prostitution in New York City, accusing several ‘Vice Queens’ of trafficking young women into their luxurious Upper East Side brothels. This article traces how J. Edgar Hoover’s Federal Bureau of Investigation used cases against vice to gain publicity for the FBI and to re-introduce older tropes of white slavery. The cases against the Vice Queens centered on the trope of venal madams whose duplicitous nature cheated customers and whose facilitation of sexual deviancy undermined notions of morality and good taste. By profiting from vice, and the sexual labor of young women, these women lived in extreme wealth while the rest of the country suffered from the deprivation of the Great Depression
