The Best American Crime Writing 2006 Read online

  Still, the business charged on. It takes a singular pimp to think it is a good idea to stage a reality-TV show at his place of business, but Jason Itzler is that kind of guy. “It was incredible,” says independent producer Ron Sperling, who shot the film Inside New York Confidential. “Big-shot lawyers and Wall Street bankers flipped when they saw the cameras. Jason told them the movie was no problem. That it was a good thing. If they didn’t want to be in it, they should just walk behind the camera. That’s Jason. If he was a billionaire and no one knew about it, it wouldn’t be anything to him.”

  Despite misgivings about legalities, VH1 expressed interest in Inside New York Confidential. Arriving late, Jason swept into the meeting with several girls. Along for the ride was a young Belgian tourist whom Itzler had encountered only moments before on West Broadway. “You’re beautiful,” Jason told the young woman. “But your clothes look like shit.” Itzler bought her $2,500 worth of threads in about ten minutes, convincing her she would be great in his TV show.

  “He asked for a million dollars an episode,” says a VH1 exec. “We told him that was insane money, so he got mad and left.”

  Jason’s manic spending increased. One afternoon, splashing on Creed Gold Bottle cologne ($175 per bottle) as “kind of a nervous tic,” he bought twenty-six antique crystal chandeliers at $3,000 apiece. “We had so much furniture, there was nowhere to walk. I used to jump over the stuff for exercise,” says Natalia. “We had this room upstairs we called the Peter Beard Room. Peter likes to sit on the floor, so we got these beautiful Moroccan pillows. One day, I come home, and there’s a Playboy pinball machine there, with Hugh Hefner’s face on it. Then I knew there was no point saying anything.”

  Jason’s class insecurities also cropped up. One night, upstairs at Cipriani’s, Itzler went over to where Lizzie Grubman was sitting with Paris Hilton. He asked Grubman about representing NY Confidential. Grubman, whom Jason regarded as just another Great Neck girl with a rich dad under the glitz, supposedly sneered, “I don’t do pimps.” Returning to his table, Jason said, “I hate that bitch. She runs over sixteen people and thinks she’s better than me.”

  Jason’s Utopian house of happiness turned into a stage for an ongoing paranoid soap opera. Feeling his grip slipping, Itzler begged his former fiancée Mona to help with the day-to-day running of the place. Mona, who had helped organize things in the earliest days of NY Confidential, ran a tight ship. But there were complications. It had been only eight months since Mona had been Jason’s girlfriend, living with him in Hoboken. They broke up, leading to an enormous screaming match during which Mona called the police, claiming Itzler attacked her. Jason disputed this, allowing he “might have squeezed her hand too hard, trying to get my keys back.” Mona would drop the charges, but not before Itzler spent some time under house arrest.

  Jason says, “Maybe I’m just soft, because after Mona wrote the judge a tear-stained letter how I never beat her up and how she loved me, I forgave her.” With Jason’s parole problems increasingly keeping him in Hoboken, Mona soon filled the power vacuum at Seventy-nine Worth Street. Her key ally would be Clark Krimer, a.k.a. Clark Kent or Superman, a muscle-bound young banker hired by Itzler to manage credit-card accounts. This way, those wanting to disguise their use of NY Confidential services would appear to be spending their $1,200 or so at venues like the fictitious Gotham Steak. Clark and Mona soon became an item, consolidating their power.

  The Clark-and-Mona regime upset “the vibe” of Seventy-nine Worth Street, turning it into, in the words of one working girl, “just another whorehouse.” First to feel the fallout was Natalia. As queen of the castle, Natalia always dismissed the jealousies of the other escorts as “stupid girl stuff.” This was different. She says, “Mona was a psycho-bitch. She hated me, and now she was running the place.” When clients called, instead of Jason’s rapturous invocations of Natalia’s charms, Mona said, “I’ve got this girl, she’s six-one, a rower on an Ivy League college scull team. She’s cheaper than Natalia and way better.” Natalia’s bookings fell off.

  One November afternoon, Natalia arrived at the loft to find Mona standing in front of the door to her room—her room!— demanding she turn over her keys to the loft. “This is where I live. My home,” Natalia screamed. Eventually, however, Natalia decided to move out.

  Through this, people began telling Jason he’d better cool things out, not keep bringing parties of vacationing second-grade schoolteachers by the loft for fun. With guys in Con Edison vans watching the place from across the street, the least he could do was make sure the front door stayed locked.

  “What do I have to hide?” Jason scoffed. “I’m not doing anything illegal.”

  Much of this self-deluding assessment was based on the contract Jason, utilizing his best Nova U. legalese, worked up between himself and the NY Confidential escorts. The document, signed by all the girls, stated they were “specifically forbidden” to have sex with the clients. Itzler showed the contract to Mel Sachs, the floridly attired defender of Sante Kimes, Mike Tyson, and, more recently, the pint-size exhibitionist-rapper Lil’ Kim. Sachs made a couple of adjustments and said the contract passed muster, which was just what Jason wanted to hear.

  “I’m bulletproof. Rich people don’t go to jail,” Jason proclaimed. He was certain that if anything came up, Sachs and Bergrin, a former Army major, could handle it. “Mel’s my personal Winston Churchill, and Paul’s the tough Marine general,” Jason rhapsodized, either unaware or not caring that Bergrin is currently under federal investigation for his alleged part in the death of a police informer slated to testify against one of his drug-dealer clients.

  “Mel became my best friend,” says Jason, always impressed by a man in a fancy suit. “He was always in my place. We all loved Mel.” Asked about these visits, Sachs, after some deliberation, said, “Well, Jason is a personable guy. I liked talking to him. It was an interesting place, full of fascinating conversation. A lot of business people, financial people, professional people.”

  Amid this gathering train wreck, one incident in November 2004 stands out as the beginning of the end. That evening, accompanied by a mutual friend, two mobsters, members of the Genovese family, according to Jason, stopped by the loft.

  “I never did any business with them. I just thought it might open a new line of high-priced clients,” says Jason, who bought a $3,500 Dior suit for the occasion, with a matching one for his bodyguard, a former Secret Service agent. The meeting had barely begun when a girl named Genevieve burst through the door. A tall blonde, she was returning from her first NY Confidential date, reputedly stoned out of her mind, and was demanding to be paid immediately. Told to wait, Genevieve started yelling, threatening to call the police to adjudicate the matter.

  “What’s wrong with that girl?” one of the mobsters asked. Itzler asked the bodyguard to quiet Genevieve down. But as the bodyguard approached, Genevieve pulled a can of pepper spray from her handbag and blinded him. With the bodyguard writhing on the floor, Genevieve locked herself in a room and called 911. A dozen cops and an engine company of firemen arrived.

  There was some debate about whether to open the door, but the mobsters said, “It’s the cops, you got to let them in.”

  “I’m looking at the security-camera monitors,” remembers one witness. “In one is the cops, another the gangsters, the third the screaming girl, the fourth the Secret Service guy rubbing his eyes. That’s when I thought I’d take a vacation from this place.”

  The encounter would end relatively harmlessly. “It looked like one of the cops recognized one of the gangsters,” says the witness. “They started talking, everyone exchanged business cards and left.”

  After that, the cops started coming to the loft almost every day. “They’d knock on the door, come in, look around, and leave,” remembers Hulbert Waldroup. Almost always, they took a stack of Jason’s distinctive metal ROCKET FUEL FOR WINNERS business cards. The card had become something of a collector’s item at headquarters, one
cop says. “Everyone wanted one.” Rumor has it that one ended up on Mayor Bloomberg’s desk, to the mayor’s amusement.

  When the big bust inevitably came down on January 7, the loft was nearly empty. Krimer and Waldroup were at an art gallery when someone’s cell phone rang. The caller said no one was picking up at NY Confidential. That was a bad sign, Waldroup said.

  Frantically, Krimer and Waldroup attempted to connect to the Webcam security system Itzler had installed so he could watch the activities at Seventy-nine Worth Street from his Hoboken apartment. The cam was available from any wired-up computer. But no one could remember the password. “Fuck!” screamed Krimer. Eventually the connection was made.

  “The place is being raided, and we’re watching it on the Internet,” says Waldroup. “The cops were like ants, over everything, taking all the files, ledgers, computers. On the couch were these people I’d worked with for months, in handcuffs. It was very weird.”

  Jason wouldn’t find out about the bust until sometime later. “I was shopping for rugs with Ed Feldman, who is kind of a legend in the fashion business,” Jason says. It was Feldman who, years before, had given the young Jason Itzler a copy of Budd Schulberg’s all-time delineation of the Hebrew hustler, What Makes Sammy Run?

  “Read it,” Feldman said. “It’s you.”

  Jason says, “I immediately checked into the Gansevoort Hotel and began partying. Had a couple of girls come over because I figured I wouldn’t be doing that for a while. When the cops came, I thought, ‘Well, at least I’m wearing my twenty-eight-hundred-dollar rabbit-fur-lined sweater from Jeffrey’s, because who wants to look like a guy in a sweatshirt?’ When they snapped on the handcuffs, all I remember thinking was how I thought NY Confidential would last for twenty-five years.”

  ALMOST SIX MONTHS LATER, Jason is still in jail. In the beginning, he was confident that his lawyers, Sachs and Bergrin, after all that money and all those free drinks, would bail him out. That did not happen. With none of his regulars, the trust-fund babies and famous artists Itzler considered his friends, rushing to his aid, Jason wound up in front of Judge Budd Goodman at the One Hundred Centre Street courthouse, penniless and lawyerless, tearfully asking to defend himself, a request that was denied.

  “Ask me if I feel like a sap,” Jason says.

  Down deep, he always knew that when all was said and done, after everyone had had their fun, he’d be the one to pay for it. With the Bush administration coming down heavy on sexual trafficking—the religious right’s top human-rights issue—Robert Morgenthau’s office is not of a mind to offer deals to loudmouthed brothel owners, not this election year. As a “predicate” felon from his ill-considered Ecstasy importation, Itzler’s facing a four-and-a-half-to-nine-year sentence. Even if he beats that, there is the matter of his busted parole in New Jersey. Sitting in Rikers, playing poker for commissary food, once again Jason has a lot of time on his hands.

  One of the things to think about is what happened to all the money that was made at NY Confidential. A common theory, one Itzler advanced in a recent Post story, is that Clark Krimer, who may or may not be cooperating with the D.A., took it all.

  “He stole four hundred thousand dollars,” Jason says. “He should be in jail. If anyone laundered money, it’s him.” Asked if it was possible that he, Jason, had managed to spend a good portion of the missing money, Itzler scoffs, saying, “Who could spend all that?”

  When it comes down to it, however, Jason says he doesn’t want to think about Krimer or the fact that Waldroup remains in jail even if he only answered the phones. “I’m staying optimistic,” Jason says, free of bitterness. “It is like I told the girls, if you smile a fake smile, keep smiling it because a fake smile can become a real smile.”

  “The problem with NY Confidential was it didn’t go far enough,” Jason says now. “If you really want to put together the elite people, the best-looking women and the coolest guys, you can’t stop with a couple of hours. It has to be a lifetime commitment.” Jason has consulted his prison rabbi, who presided over the recent Passover ceremony during which Itzler got to sit with recently arrested madam Julie Moya (of Julie’s) during the asking of the Four Questions. The rabbi told Jason that as a Jewish pimp who sold women to Jewish men, he was liable for the crime of kedesha. The rabbi did not, however, think this transgression necessarily prevented Jason from becoming a shadchan, or a traditional matchmaker.

  “I’m thinking about the future, the next generations,” Jason says from his un–air-conditioned prison dorm. “I think I have a chance to do something good before I die. Who knows, the answer to the question ‘Who is John Galt?’ could be ‘Jason.’”

  As for Natalia, she is “keeping a low profile.” Last week, she went to see Jason again. Thankfully he didn’t talk too much about getting married inside the prison. Mostly they talked about the strange times they’d been through and how, even if it turned out the way it did, somehow it was worth it.

  “I was a young actress who came to New York like a lot of young actresses, and I wound up with the role of a lifetime. I was the Perfect 10. I totally was. It wasn’t the rabbit hole I expected to tumble down, but Jason and I…we were happy…for a time, really happy.”

  Since she received hardly any of her booking money and is pretty broke these days, people ask Natalia if she’s planning on coming back to “work.” The other night, a well-known provider, who said she used to hate Natalia when she was getting those 10/10s, offered to “pimp her out.”

  “That would be a feather in my cap,” said the escort. “To be the one who brought back the famous Natalia.”

  “No, thanks,” said Natalia, which is what she tells her old clients who call from time to time. “I say I’m retired, in repose. They say, ‘Come on, let me buy you a drink. I’ll be good.’ I tell them, ‘Look, we had fun and I love you. But that is over.’ Mostly, they understand. Some are willing to stay friends, some can’t wait to get off the phone. They’ve got other numbers in their book.”

  That doesn’t mean a girl has to stay home at night. New York, after all, is a big place, full of opportunity. In a way, things have gone back to the way they were before she met Jason. “Wiser, but not necessarily sadder,” Natalia says. Tonight she’s going downtown. It is always good to look good, so Natalia goes through what was a familiar ritual back in the days when she was the Perfect 10—getting her nails done at the Koreans’ on Twenty-ninth Street, combing out her wavy hair. For old times’ sake, she’s got on what she used to call her “money dress,” a short satin pink number with gray jersey inserts, with the shoes to match. About ten, she’s ready. She goes out into the street, lifts her arm, gets into a cab, and disappears into the night.

  MARK JACOBSON is the author of several books including the novels Gojiro and Everyone and No One. His nonfiction books include 12,000 Miles in the Nick of Time: A Semi-Dysfunctional Family Circumnavigates the Globe, and the recent Teenage Hipster in the Modern World. He has been a contributing editor at Esquire, Rolling Stone, Natural History, the Village Voice, and works for New York magazine. He was born and lives in New York City.

  Coda

  The article that wound up getting called “The $2,000-an-Hour Woman” (my original title was “Rocket Fuel for Winners,” after the rubric pimpmeister Jason Itzler had engraved on his metal business cards) wasn’t easy to find. But once it got going it didn’t let up. Partially this was due to the ever-fecund life story of Mr. Itzler, much of which actually appears to be true. Jason is one of those perfect journalistic subjects: a guy with a lot to say who can’t wait to say it. In me he had a proper foil because, to reference Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, I like listening to a man who likes to talk. As long as that talk stays interesting. Itzler did, even if he did—and continues to—call me at least five or six times a day from his current residence at Rikers Island. That’s the real torture for the Sammy Glicks of the world, getting locked up with a bunch of people who simply don’t care what he has to say.

&nb
sp; The piece’s other leading figure, Natalia McLennan, would also wind up in Rikers sometime after the appearance of the story. This was too bad, since as the 1996 tap-dance champion of Canada and former Shakespearean actress (several productions as Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, also as Flute in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) she is definitely not the Rikers type. Luckily, though, she was sprung after a month or so, although not before making the papers back in her Montreal hometown. Natalia, who does indeed have the proverbial heart of gold, did not hold me responsible for this unfortunate period of incarceration since, as she put it, “It wasn’t exactly like I didn’t expect something to happen after they put me on the cover of New York magazine without my clothes on.” All told, I would say I met a better, more amusing, not to mention honest, class of people associated with New York Confidential than on my more usual beats, like state and national politics.

  Skip Hollandsworth

  THE LAST RIDE OF COWBOY BOB

  FROM Texas Monthly

  PEGGY JO TALLAS WAS, BY ALL ACCOUNTS, the classic good-hearted Texas woman. For much of her adult life, she lived with her ailing mother in a small apartment in the Dallas suburbs. Every morning, after waking up and making her bed, always taking the time to smooth out all the wrinkles in the sheets with her hands, she’d walk into her mother’s bedroom. She’d wrap a robe around her mother’s shoulders, lead her to the kitchen, fix her cereal, and lay out her pills. For a few minutes, the two of them would sit at the table, making small talk. Peggy Jo, who didn’t like to eat until later in the day, would often smoke a cigarette and drink Pepsi out of a coffee cup. Then, after her mother was finished eating, Peggy Jo would gently guide her back to her bedroom, prop a pillow behind her head, set a glass of tap water and her romance novel on the side table, and walk back into her own room to get dressed.