Washington, D.C. (rightcommentary): Florida police say a woman believed to be the one convicted of running a high-end prostitution ring in Washington has been found dead of an apparent suicide in a Florida Gulf Coast town.

Tarpon Springs police say a body they believed to be 52-year-old Deborah Jeane Palfrey was found in a shed near her mother’s mobile home Thursday morning. She left a suicide note, but police did not disclose its contents.

A federal jury convicted Deborah Jeane Palfrey last April of running a Washington-area call-girl ring in the guise of “a high-end erotic fantasy service,” rejecting her argument that she was unaware for 13 years that female escorts she employed were performing sex acts with clients for money.

Palfrey, dubbed the “D.C. Madam” after a grand jury in Washington indicted her on prostitution-related racketeering charges 13 months ago, has said she hired socially polished, college-educated women to indulge her customers’ fantasies through “quasi-sexual” game-playing only.

Palfrey ran her business, Pamela Martin & Associates, by telephone from her California home, and authorities said she grossed about $2 million from 1993 to 2006, splitting the money about evenly with her escorts. They said she employed at least 132 women over the years, dispatching them nightly to clients in homes and hotel rooms in the Washington area.

At issue in the trial was what the women did when they arrived. Thirteen former call girls, appearing in court under prosecution subpoena, testified in often graphic detail about their sexual encounters with the men. Although most said Palfrey discussed prostitution with them only in vague terms, they said they had no doubts that their employment depended on their willingness to have sex for money.

The women said they and Palfrey often spoke in euphemisms. After talking on the phone with Palfrey about becoming a call girl, for example, one future escort followed up with a letter: “This is in response to your acknowledgment of an opening in the Field Support Team of Pamela Martin & Associates.”

After Palfrey turned over thousands of her former clients’ phone numbers to ABC News last year and later posted them on the Web, a deputy secretary of state, Randall L. Tobias, resigned, acknowledging that he had used Palfrey’s service for massages. Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), also linked to Palfrey through phone records, apologized to constituents for a “very serious sin,” without saying what sin he had committed.

ABC said it found numbers linked to corporate CEOs, military officers, lobbyists and officials of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and NASA. In a court filing, Palfrey named Harlan K. Ullman, a think tank military strategist, as “a regular customer.”

She was to be sentenced at a later time and was facing up to a maximum of 55 years in prison.