What impels the rich and famous to risk their reputations trolling for hookers?

Billionaire businessman David Ho prowled the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for drug-addicted prostitutes.

Cinema heartthrob Hugh Grant was caught in his car with a Los Angeles streetwalker.

Pro football star Eugene Robinson was busted for attempting to buy sex from an undercover policewoman on a seedy Miami strip.

All are high-profile men with more money than they knew what to do with. If they wanted the company of prostitutes, they could afford to hire the priciest of escorts. Instead, they risked their reputations and careers trolling the slums for bargain-basement hookers.

Why?

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In 1999, U.S. National Football League safety Robinson had led the Atlanta Falcons to its first Super Bowl.

The day before the game, Robinson, nicknamed “The Prophet” for his religious fervour, had received the Bart Starr Award for high moral character. That evening, he hit up a streetwalker for oral sex in Miami, but she turned out to be a police decoy.

“Lord Jesus, what do I tell my wife and kids?” he moaned to investigating officers, according to Dade County court records. “I am a born-again Christian. I have accepted the Lord as my saviour. I didn’t mean to do it.”

In 1995, movie star Grant took prostitute Divine Brown into his BMW in Hollywood, where vice cops tipped off by his flashing brake lights found him receiving oral sex.

David Ho, 57, admitted to a Province editor that he cruised Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside trying to save prostitutes, and was twice found by police in their company.

This week, prosecutors laid against Ho a raft of charges including unlawful confinement, causing bodily harm, possession of a prohibited gun with ammunition and drug possession. The charges resulted from a 2008 incident that police say left a woman — not identified as a prostitute — with a broken ankle and other injuries.

None of the allegations in the charges against Ho have been proven.

Ho, a condo magnate and founder of failed Harmony Airways, has told Province deputy editor Fabian Dawson about an incident in which a prostitute called police saying he was holding her in his Seymour Street apartment.

He also said he’d been pulled over by officers in East Vancouver while he was in his vehicle with two well-known, drug-addicted sex workers.

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A business tycoon. A movie idol. A pro athlete. These are not the types of men usually associated with shadowy slums and low-budget sex workers. Yet they are drawn to that sordid world for the same reasons as men who lack that wealth and power, experts say.

“A large percentage of the population have this need for stimulation,” says Matt Logan, a B.C. psychologist and former RCMP staff-sergeant who does consulting work on sex offenders for law-enforcement agencies worldwide.

“They want to be on the edge — they could be caught. They’re as turned on by the adventure of being so on the edge as they are by the sexual component.”

Some men seeking stimulation can satisfy their need by skydiving or even by watching a good hockey game, says Logan, who was a Mountie for 28 years.

Another powerful force, Logan says, can drive the stimulation-seeker down a darker path: Fantasy.

“To understand a sex offender is to understand fantasy,” Logan says. “Once you understand what an individual’s fantasy is, you can understand why they do what they do.”

With regard to picking up street prostitutes, the fantasy may involve kinky sexual acts that a high-priced escort might refuse, Logan says.

“The people that we find who are deviant and sadistic are often feeding their fantasies with prostitutes who are so drug-addicted they’re willing to let them do it.”

But Ho, and people close to him, asserted to Dawson that a strong altruistic impulse motivated him to seek the company of drug-dependent streetwalkers.

“I am addicted to helping them,” he told Dawson.

In the incident in his apartment, Ho said, the woman had been seeking his aid and a safe place for the night, but a man barged in and ransacked the property.

When he was stopped with two prostitutes in his vehicle by officers in East Vancouver, he said he was intending to help one of them by paying off her pimp so she could return to her family in Kelowna.

Ho also told Dawson he’d rescued a woman from a violent pimp and arranged for her to return to Hungary, where he supports her with a monthly stipend.

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“Every once in a while, they’ll do something that will be philanthropic. They’re really feeding a fantasy,” Logan says.

A fascination with the gritty underworld of street prostitution drives some men to troll urban slums seeking women for hire, says sex expert Pepper Schwartz, a sociology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle.

“A little bit of danger excites them,” Schwartz says. “Some people want love and affection, other people want to be dominated and other people look for people who are seedy, or trampy, or dangerous.”

A short, hiked-up skirt, a rough appearance or dyed hair may be elements that attract certain men, Schwartz says.

The lack of legal consequence to previous involvements with police may give some men a sense of security, Schwartz says.

“You envision yourself in this protective bubble, and even if you get a close call, you think you’re in a ‘close-call’ category.”

A man for whom a prostitution arrest would make the front page may nevertheless allow their desire for a streetwalker to overcome any cost-benefit analysis, Schwartz says.

“He’s thinking, ‘Yummy, and I’ll think later,’” Schwartz says. “This guy doesn’t really want to be humiliated and exposed, but he really wants that excitement of a street prostitute.”

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In B.C., men caught soliciting prostitutes or police posing as prostitutes may be diverted from the justice system into a program run by the John Howard Society of the Lower Mainland. The men in the program have jobs that bring in an average of $50,000 a year, says Ian Mitchell, manager of the prostitution-offenders program.

“We have the odd one at $400,000 or more, but they’re quite rare,” Mitchell says. “We very seldom get people like David Ho, people who are high up in society, people who have a ton of money.”

Rich men are more likely to seek the more expensive services of escorts, Mitchell says.

Although he notes that Ho may in fact have been trying to help street prostitutes, Schwartz says most men he sees in the program

come in with no clue about the tormented lives of the women they hire for sex.

“It’s not something they think about,” Mitchell says. “They see these women, and it’s just a warm place to put their penis.

“The main reason they do it is: (a) because they can; and (b) because the social message that’s in the background is, ‘It’s OK, don’t hurt anybody, don’t get caught, wink, wink.’”

In our society, boys are socialized to expect sex on demand, Mitchell says.

“So a certain percentage of the population buys into that and [thinks], ‘I’m horny, I’ll go out and get a prostitute.’”

Of the men who enter his program, 60 per cent are married or in a serious relationship, Mitchell says.

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Ironically, the very stature that draws massive publicity to a high-roller’s prostitution arrest may protect them from damage, says sociologist Schwartz.

A prostitution conviction could drastically limit an ordinary man’s job possibilities, but for those already in positions of power, the effect may be mild, Schwartz says.

“They can in fact control the financial consequences,” Schwartz says. “They’re in a much more privileged situation than 99 per cent of us.”

Hugh Grant, in the wake of his 1995 arrest and $1,180 US fine, appeared on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno and accepted responsibility.

“I think you know in life what’s a good thing to do and what’s a bad thing, and I did a bad thing,” Grant told Leno.

He continued to receive leading roles in films such as Bridget Jones’ Diary, Mickey Blue Eyes, About a Boy and Love, Actually.

“He’s pretty much unscathed in the public arena,” says Schwartz.

Grant’s relationship with actress and model Elizabeth Hurley continued for five years after his arrest.

Eugene Robinson, though vilified by fans and the press for the incident that many saw as a reason for his team’s subsequent Super Bowl loss to the Denver Broncos, played another season with the Falcons, then a season with the Carolina Panthers.

In exchange for having the prostitution charge dropped, he agreed to take an AIDS test and enrol in an AIDS-education course.

Robinson is currently a radio commentator for the Panthers, and coaches football at a Christian high school.

As for David Ho, time will tell whether he takes any major hits in his personal or professional life.

“I don’t know if this guy will suffer much in his business deals,” says Schwartz. “You could ask your readers: You could have his $5-million house and be humiliated, or have a sterling reputation and not have it.

“A lot of people would say, ‘Hmm.’”

ebaron@theprovince.com