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Biggest bust ever? The picture worth $1,000?
INTERNET SEX PROBE | Cops say Charlie Sunn is a Vegas call girl whose $500-an-hour fee is the most they've been charged during 2 years of stings

January 24, 2009

BY FRANK MAIN Crime Reporter/fmain@suntimes.com

She didn't charge as much as Ashley Dupre -- the call girl who cost Eliot Spitzer his job as New York governor.

But authorities say Barbara Anderson Cohen did not come cheap.

Cook County Sheriff's spokesman Steve Patterson said Cohen was busted on a prostitution charge Jan. 16 after she flew in from Las Vegas and agreed to have sex in a Loop hotel.

Her price, $1,000 for two hours, was the highest rate of any of the 120 women arrested by the sheriff's office in stings over the last two years, Patterson said.

"The significance of this is that we have been doing Internet sex stings for a few years now and this is the first one that charged us $1,000 for services," he said.

Spitzer resigned last year after it became public that he met for over two hours with a $1,000-an-hour prostitute.

Cohen allegedly solicits customers under the name Charlie Sunn, with a Web site that touts her attributes -- 34D-24-34 -- as well as the services she offers. The Saigon-born, 37-year-old woman is Vietnamese and Swedish, according to her Web site. Public records show she is a registered Republican and holds a hunting license in Nevada.

Sheriff's investigators were trolling the Internet when they found a message from Cohen saying she planned to be in Chicago in mid-January.

After some negotiation, she agreed to meet a detective posing as a customer. In the hotel room, the detective handed her an envelope stuffed with $1,000 in cash.

"He said he never spent $1,000 before and didn't know what to expect," Patterson said. "She offered him the best sex act he ever had."

But she was arrested as she started to remove her clothes, Patterson said.

Cohen has been released in lieu of $1,000 bail. Her next court date is Feb. 24.

"She said she never was arrested before and was doing this to help pay the bills at home," Patterson said.