Best American Crime Writing 2006 - Mark Bowden [27]
Desperate for money after the SoHo Models disaster, Itzler decided his best option was to go to Amsterdam to buy four thousand tabs of Ecstasy. “In retrospect, it was a totally retarded idea,” says Jason, who would leave Newark airport in handcuffs. He was sentenced to five years in the Jersey pen. The fact that his grandfather, whom he’d idolized as a gangster, stopped talking to him when he got locked up “was hard to take.”
“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