The Best American Crime Writing 2006 Read online

  “Jail is terrible, really boring,” says Jason. “But it does give you plenty of time to plan your next move.”

  ON PAROLE AFTER SERVING seventeen months of his smuggling sentence, living in a funky third-floor walk-up in Hoboken per the terms of his release, Jason started NY Confidential (he would remain on parole his entire pimp career) in late 2003. Business was spotty at first but picked up dramatically in early 2004, when Natalia walked into the company’s place at Fifty-fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, an office previously occupied by the magician David Blaine.

  “It was my birthday,” Natalia remembers. “I’d just been cast as Ingrid Superstar in this play, Andy & Edie. I wanted to be Edie, but Misha Sedgwick, Edie’s niece, also wanted it, so forget that. I was eating in a restaurant with Peter Beard, the photographer. I was a kind of party girl for a while. I met Peter one night, and we hit it off. He said I should meet this guy Jason.”

  Beard, a nocturnal bon vivant known for his “discovery” of exotic models like Iman, and who had been associated with Jason during the SoHo Models episode, warned Natalia off Itzler’s new venture. Eventually, however, Natalia decided to give Jason a call. “Being an escort never crossed my mind. It wasn’t something girls like me did. I was an actress. From a very nice home. But I was involved in an abusive relationship, with this Wall Street guy,” she says. “In the beginning, all I wanted was enough money to move out.”

  Jason says, “When Natalia came over with Peter, I said, Wow, she’s so hot. She has one of the all-time great tushes. But there was this other girl there, too. Samantha. When she took off her shirt, she had these amazing breasts. So it was Natalia’s butt against Samantha’s boobies. I went with the tits. But when Natalia came back from making a movie, she moved in with us. Samantha could tell I was kind of more into Natalia. So we become boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  At the time, Jason’s top girl was Cheryl, a striking blonde ballroom dancer from Seattle who says she got into the business to buy her own horse. “I did NY Confidential’s first date,” Cheryl recalls. “I had on my little black dress and was shaking like a leaf. Jason was nervous, too. He said, ‘Just go up there and take your clothes off.’ I told him, ‘No, you’ve got to make it romantic. Special.’”

  It was Cheryl who came up with the mantra Jason would later instruct all the NY Confidential girls to repeat, “three times,” before entering a hotel room to see a client: “This is my boyfriend of six months, the man I love, I haven’t seen him for three weeks…This is my boyfriend of six months, the man I love…”

  “That’s the essence of the true GFE, the Girlfriend Experience,” says Jason. As opposed to the traditional “no kissing on the mouth” style, the GFE offers a warmer, fuzzier time. For Jason, who says he never hired anyone who’d worked as an escort before, the GFE concept was an epiphany. “Men see escorts because they want to feel happier. Yet most walk away feeling worse than they did before. They feel dirty, full of self-hatred. Buyer’s remorse big-time. GFE is about true passion, something genuine. A facsimile of love. I told guys this was a quick vacation, an investment in the future. When they got back to their desks, they’d tear the market a new asshole, make back the money they spent at NY Confidential in an hour.

  “What we’re selling is rocket fuel, rocket fuel for winners.”

  Jason decided Natalia would become his great creation, the Ultimate GFE. It mattered little that Natalia, for all her French Scottish sultriness, might strike some as a tad on the skinny side. Brown-eyed, dark-haired, olive-skinned, not to mention lactose-intolerant, she didn’t fit the usual description of a big ticket in an industry filled with PSE (Porn-Star Experience) babes with store-bought bazangas out to here. Jason took this as a challenge. If he was into Natalia, he’d make sure everyone else was, too. It was a simple matter of harnessing the available technology.

  The main vehicle was the aforementioned TheEroticReview. com, “the Consumer Reports of the escort industry,” according to the site’s founder and owner, the L.A.-based Dave Elms, a.k.a. Dave@TER. “The most important thing was to break Natalia out big,” Jason says. “To get the ball rolling with a number of fabulous reviews, I sent her to some friends, to sort of grease the wheel. I knew those 10/10s would keep coming, because no man wants to admit he got less. They’re brainwashed that way.”

  If any hobbyist had the temerity to hand out a paltry 8/8, or even a 9/10, he would be contacted. “Don’t break my girl’s streak, this is history in the making,” Jason cajoled, offering to throw in a couple hours of free time to get the customer to do a little recalculating. If that didn’t work, good reviews could be ensured by the $5,000 everyone working at NY Confidential (except Jason) swears was FedExed to Dave@TER on the fifteenth of every month. Dave, who says he “would not argue with that” when asked if he is the single most important person in the escort business, vehemently denies any payoffs, from NY Confidential or anyone else.

  With her 10/10s piling up, Natalia’s hourly rate jumped from $800 to $1,200 with a two-hour minimum. (The split: 45 percent for the escort, 45 percent for the agency, 10 percent for the booker.) If clients haggled, they would be told to call back when they were “more successful.” Jason says, “I always ask prospective clients to give me strong points about themselves, where they went to school, if they’re good-looking. It established rapport but also put them on the defensive, let them know that I was interviewing them, to see if they were good enough to go out with our girls.”

  Jason’s hyping sometimes was faintly embarrassing. “Jason would be saying, ‘Natalia is the greatest escort in the history of the world, as good as Cleopatra or Joan of Arc,’” says Natalia, “and I’d be like, ‘Jason! Joan of Arc was not an escort, she was a religious martyr.’ Then he’d be saying I was the greatest escort since Mary Magdalene.”

  But all the hype in the world (an Asian toy manufacturer wanted to mass-produce Barbie-style Natalia dolls, complete with tiny lingerie) wouldn’t have helped if Natalia, who never imagined she’d wind up staying in “every expensive hotel in New York,” hadn’t turned out to be a natural.

  “I’m a little moneymaking machine, that’s what I am,” she says as she takes a languorous drag of her Marlboro while stretching out on her apartment couch in a shiny pink satin corset, Marlene Dietrich–style. Then she cracks up, because “you know, the whole thing is so ridiculous sometimes.”

  People wonder what it is about Natalia that made her the Perfect 10. “From the start, you know this is going to be fun,” says one client. “It is like having sex in a tree house.” Says another, “Nat isn’t this all-knowing geisha thing. But in a way, it’s deeper, because she gets to a place inside where you used to be free.” And another: “With her, there’s none of that shit like this is costing enough for a first-class ticket to London and the girl’s in the bathroom for, like, half an hour. Natalia’s this one, total this-is-all-about-you.”

  Suffice it to say, it’s in the pheromones. According to Natalia, she’s always gotten along with men. “Jason understood who I was,” she says. “Yes, he sold the shit out of me, but he sold me as myself, someone anyone can be comfortable with, someone who really likes sex. Because the truth is, I do. I loved my job, totally.”

  It is another old story, along with the heart of gold, that many “providers” actually like what they do. But even if she professes to be “horrified” by stories about sexual trafficking and “sickened” by nightmarish exploitation of the street prostitute, Natalia says, “At the level NY Confidential was at, the guys I was meeting, I would have gone out with 80 percent of them anyway. People have so many misconceptions, preconceptions, about my life. Last year, I got a call to play an escort in a Broadway play. But the part was so dark, so icky. I said no. It didn’t fit my experience at all.”

  You never knew who might be behind the hotel door. Once, she was summoned to a guy’s room, told only that he was a famous, championship athlete. “I’m not a big sports fan, but I recognized him, the quarterback. He turned out
to be very laid-back. He mostly wanted to make me happy. In the middle, he looks up and says, ‘Well, you know me, I’m more of a giver than a receiver.’”

  What no one could have predicted, least of all Natalia, was how driven she would be. “I knew she was talented,” Jason says. “But once she started going, she was unstoppable, like the Terminator.”

  A glance at Natalia’s booking sheets raises an eyebrow. Annotated with Jason’s exhortatory commentary (“Awesome guy!—$5200, wants to be a regular!” “Big Wall Street guy!” “Software king.” “Hedge fund heavy! Says he will give investment lessons!”), the records of Natalia’s bookings through June and July of 2004 reveal a workload exceeding 250 hours, or nearly a normal nine-to-five, at an average of $1,000 per hour, not counting little presents like fancy $350 underwear from La Perla.

  “Victoria’s Secret is all right,” Natalia says. “But you know you have a good client when you get La Perla.”

  Some weeks were particularly frenetic. From July 29 to August 1, she had a four-day date in the Florida Keys for which Itzler charged $29,000. The very next day was a four-hour appointment. August 3 was filled with a ten-hour appointment and another two-hour job. August 4, three hours. August 5, a three-hour followed by another four-hour. August 6, two hours. August 7, one four-hour job and a two-hour. August 8, she was off. But August 9 was another ten-hour day, followed by a pair of two-hour jobs on August 10.

  “It was like a dream,” Natalia says. “I never got tired.”

  Asked if the work affected her relationship with Itzler, Natalia says, “Sometimes he’d say, ‘Everyone gets a chance to spend time with you except me.’ I’d say, ‘You’re the one booking me.’” As for Jason, he says, “If she ever did it with anyone for free, it would have broken my heart.”

  Moving from Fifty-fourth Street following a nasty fallout with partner Bruce Glasser (each party claimed the other had taken out a contract on his life), Itzler ran NY Confidential out of his parolee apartment in Hoboken. One visitor describes the scene: “The place was full of naked women and underwear. It was a rain forest of underwear. In the middle on the couch is Jason with all these telephones, one in either ear, the other one ringing on the coffee table.”

  Seventy-nine Worth Street, with its twenty-foot ceilings and mezzanine balconies, where Jason and Natalia would move to in the summer of 2004, was a whole other thing. “Right away, we knew this was it,” says Natalia. “The loft felt like home.” As per usual, Jason would take much of the cost of the lease from Natalia’s bookings—money she would never receive. But money was never an issue with Natalia. If Cheryl, Jason’s first superstar, experienced “a rush of power when the guy handed me the envelope,” for Natalia, collecting the “donation,” while essential, had a faintly unseemly feel.

  “Maybe it sounds crazy,” she says, “but I never felt I was in it for the money.”

  For Jason, the loft was an opportunity to make real his most cherished theories of existence. “To me, the higher percentage of your life you are happy, the more successful you are,” says Jason, who came upon his philosophy while reading Ayn Rand. “I was really into the ‘Who is John Galt?’ Atlas Shrugged thing. I thought I could save the world if I could bring together the truly elite people, the most beautiful women with the most perfect bodies, best faces, and intelligence, and the elite men, the captains of industry, lawyers, and senators. This would bring about the most happiness, to the best people, who most deserved to be happy.”

  Years before, Jason wrote out the precepts of what he called “The Happiness Movement.” Assuming his findings to be big news, Itzler packed up the manifesto, a copy of his half-finished autobiography, and a naked centerfold picture of Elisa Bridges, his girlfriend at the time, and mailed it to Bob Woodward. “I stuck it in this three-thousand-dollar Bottega Veneta briefcase so he’d notice it. He said I was a nut job and to leave him alone. I was so bummed I told him to keep the stupid briefcase.”

  On Worth Street, however, Jason (who says “the best thing about bipolarity is how much you accomplish in the manic phase”) saw the chance to manifest his ideal. One of his first acts was to approach painter Hulbert Waldroup. Waldroup, a self-proclaimed “artist with attitude” who has been collected by Whoopi Goldberg and once appeared on the cover of Newsday along with his epic memorial to Amadou Diallo, was selling his work on the West Broadway sidewalk. “You’re the greatest painter I’ve ever seen,” Jason said. When Waldroup heard Itzler wanted to commission a ten-foot-by-ten-foot canvas of a “hot-looking” woman, he said the picture would never get in the door. No problem, Itzler said, Waldroup could do the painting inside the loft.

  Waldroup soon had a job working the phones. “It was like I went in there and never came out,” says Waldroup, now on Rikers Island, where he resides a couple of buildings away from Jason.

  Seventy-nine Worth Street became a well-oiled machine, with various calendars posted on the wall to keep track of appointments. The current day’s schedule was denoted on a separate chart called “the action board.” But what mattered most to Jason was “the vibe…the vibe of the NY Confidential brand” (there was franchising talk about a Philadelphia Confidential and a Vegas Confidential). To describe what he was going for, Jason quotes from a favorite book, The Art of Seduction, a creepily fascinating tome of social Machiavellianism, by Robert Greene.

  Discussing “seductive place and time,” Greene notes that “certain kinds of visual stimuli signal that you are not in the real world. Avoid images that have depth, which might provoke thought, or guilt…The more artificial, the better…Luxury—the sense that money has been spent or even wasted—adds to the feeling that the real world of duty and morality has been banished. Call it the brothel effect.”

  Accentuated by the fog machine at Seventy-nine Worth Street, people seemed to come out of the shadows, float by, be gone again. “It was full of these familiar faces…like a soap-opera star, a politician you might have seen on NY1, a guy whose photo’s in the Times financial pages,” says one regular. In addition to Sinatra, music was supplied by the building’s super, a concert pianist in his native Russia, who appeared in a tuxedo to play on a rented Baldwin grand piano.

  “It was like having my own clubhouse,” says Jason now, relishing the evenings he presided as esteemed host and pleasure master. He remembers discussing what he called a “crisis in Judaism” with a top official of a leading Jewish-American lobby group. Jewish women were often thought of as dowdy, Jason said. If the American Jew was ever going to rise above the prejudice of the goyishe mainstream, creativity would be needed. A start would be to get Madonna, the Kabbalist, to become the head of Hadassah. The official said he’d look into it.

  Seventy-nine Worth Street was supposed to be Jason and Natalia’s home, where they would live happily ever after. They had their own bedroom, off-limits to everyone else. “We were actually trying to live a semi-normal life, carry on a real relationship,” says Natalia. “Jason felt abandoned after his mother died; my father left when I was very young. We sort of completed each other.”

  Natalia wrote her mom that she’d moved into a beautiful new place with a highly successful businessman. Her mom, a sweet cookie-baking lady leery of her daughter’s life in New York, wrote back that she’d like to come down to visit. Natalia was going to put her off, but Jason insisted. Looking around the loft at the naked women, Natalia asked, “How am I going to have my mom come here?” Jason said he would close the place, and take the loss, for the time Natalia’s mom was in town. Family was the most important thing, he said.

  “Well,” Natalia says, “Jason never closed the loft. My mom and I stayed in a little apartment uptown. Jason was supposed to come by to meet her, but it started getting late. Then the doorbell rings at 2:00 A.M. It’s Jason, in his knee-length coat with these two nineteen-year-old girls. I’m totally flipping out: Like, what the fuck are you doing? He looked like the pimp from Superfly. My mom is saying, ‘This is him?’ But then Jason sits down and starts telling my mom
I’m a great young actress and my career is going to take off, how living in New York is so terrific for me. He charmed her, completely. She left saying, ‘Well, your boyfriend is kind of weird. But he’s very, very nice.’

  “It was always like that.”

  FEW EXPECTED SEVENTY-NINE Worth Street to last very long. There were too many, as Natalia puts it, “variables.”

  For Jason, the main difficulty in running New York’s hottest escort agency while on parole was the curfew. Even though his lawyer on the Jersey Ecstasy case, Paul Bergrin, was eventually able to extend Jason’s lights-out time to 3:00 A.M., he still had to leave his Worth Street happiness house to sleep in his apartment in Hoboken.

  “Everyone’s partying, having the best time in the world, and the Town Car is outside to take me back to goddamn New Jersey.”

  “It was a big strain,” says Natalia. “I finally get home from my appointments. All I want to do is sleep in my own bed, and Jason is screaming about how we’ve got to go back to Hoboken. He hated to be alone out there. We had horrible fights. One night, I jumped out of the car right at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel and ran away. Broke my heel on a cobblestone.”

  The parole situation led to other traumas. Court-mandated drug tests caused Jason to alter his intake. Always “on the Cheech-and-Chong side of things,” Itzler couldn’t smoke pot, which turned up on piss tests. Instead, Jason, who never touched coke and often launched into Jimmy Swaggart–like speeches about the evils of the drug, dipped into his personal stash of ketamine, or Special K, the slightly unpredictable anesthetic developed for use by veterinarians. “They didn’t test for it,” Jason says by way of explanation. He was also drinking a $200 bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue a day. Natalia’s drug use cut into her Perfect 10 appearance. One night, she cracked her head into the six-foot-tall statue of an Indian fertility goddess Jason had purchased for their room. Knocked cold, she had to go to the emergency room.