Plea nets 54 months in Henrico vice case

Timothy L. Cole didn't work for chump change.

He told one associate he wouldn't be in the escort business if it didn't generate a six-figure income for him.

For most of its existence -- from 2004 until Cole's arrest last year -- Rose's Bad Girls lived up to Cole's expectations.

A front for a prostitution business that used up to 25 women housed in western Henrico County hotels along West Broad Street, Rose's easily generated more than $200,000 a year -- more than half of which went into Cole's pocket, Henrico prosecutors said yesterday.

He also sampled his employees' talents and gave friends free sessions, prosecutors said.

Cole, 38, of Chesterfield County, ended months of resistance yesterday and accepted a plea agreement that will send him to prison for four years and six months.

Prosecutors dropped some charges against him and agreed that if Cole cooperates with ongoing investigations into violent crime in the Richmond area, they will consider reducing the sentence by six months.

Cole pleaded yesterday to eight felony pandering charges, each carrying up to 10 years in prison, and to a single racketeering count that could have brought him 40 years.

Dressed in jail garb and sitting in a courtroom empty of the perfumed admirers who blew him kisses at earlier proceedings, Cole told Henrico Circuit Judge L.A. Harris Jr. that there was sufficient evidence to convict him.

Harris accepted the Alford plea agreement and fined Cole $65,000.

An Alford plea is when a defendant doesn't admit guilt but acknowledges that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict them.

Paul Ronson, the Henrico investigator who spent more than a year unraveling Cole's operation, said yesterday that Cole headed the largest prostitution business in the Richmond area in recent years.

"He was the consummate businessman," added Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Heidi S. Barshinger. Cole used embossed business cards and stationery and was bold enough to list his own name and telephone number in escort ads.

He kept meticulous records.

Cole steered customers to selected employees, controlled payouts and collected his own take at a West Broad Street gasoline station, according to court testimony and prosecutors.

Cole lived with his wife and a young child in the 15600 block of Winding Ash Drive in a home assessed at $216,000, according to county records and prosecutors.

He wore fine clothes and had an affinity for Chrysler products, prosecutors said.

And in Dinwiddie County, Cole carried a respected reputation as a mentor and coach in a youth football league, where a son from a previous relationship played, Barshinger said.

Prosecutors said nearly a dozen women were ready to testify about Cole's business dealings, payment system and drug use.
Contact Bill McKelway at (804) 649-6601 or .