Call Girl Confidential

by Rebecca Kade

  The ADA told me I had to come back down to Corruption headquarters.

  “I’m not coming in,” I said, “until I have an attorney.”

  “No problem,” he said. He soon arranged for the court to assign me a lawyer named Seema Iyer. Seema called me and we met in her office, where I sat and told her my entire story. She was flabbergasted. She knew the first ADA well, and couldn’t believe how he had treated me.

  She made big trouble and said I could bring a lawsuit against the city if I wanted to.

  The new ADA said that all the work I did under the first ADA was thrown out, because it would be inadmissible in court. I was given all this information from my attorney, who had a conversation with him. I never went in to speak with him or meet him. My attorney completely shielded me from that office. It was a different experience from what I had gone through on my own prior to that. What’s more, the new ADA told me that many documents were missing, including some of mine. I would have to start all over again, he said.

  “In fact, Ms. Kade, we have evidence now to charge you on three different counts of prostitution and could do so at anytime,” the ADA said. It was blackmail. I felt like he was trying to intimidate me into going back to work for them under these threats. I stood my ground.

  “You could plead to a lesser charge,” my lawyer told me.

  “I’m not pleading to crap!” I yelled.

  I had made copies of every letter, kept the statements of every fake bank account, saved every e-mail with instructions from the DA’s office. (And still have them.) Not only that, but even as they were putting wires on me, I had been recording them. That’s right: I had recorded the proceedings of every meeting and phone call on my little recorder. My job was done: if they’d messed up, they could find a new girl to risk her life for them. I would fight them, and my attorney was ready.

  So they simply took her off my case. They assigned me a new public defender. It was all perfectly legal. And he happened to have worked in the DA’s office prior to going into private practice. He didn’t pursue any action against them, but the message had been sent. No one ever threatened me with charges again; in fact, I didn’t hear from this ADA again.

  NINETEEN

  gristina goes down

  On July 19, 2011, Anna was having lunch with a wealthy man she had recently met, along with Jaynie Mae Baker, an alluring toffee-haired thirty-year-old. Jaynie Mae had once donned a bikini and a studded stretch halter with choker collar as a World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Raw Diva Search finalist, telling judges she was a “saucy little sushi roll.” She was pretty and slender enough to work for Anna as an escort, but she didn’t, as far as I knew. I never worked with her, anyway.

  Jaynie Mae had a wealthy boyfriend, Wall Street investment banker Marcus Laun. And she had seen how much money there was to be made with a business like VIP Life, where she was the recruiting director. Like Anna, VIP Life founder Lisa Clampitt hooked up wealthy men with “beautiful and sophisticated” young women—for a hefty fee. But what Clampitt does is completely aboveboard in the eyes of the law: it’s a relationship matchmaking service, Clampitt says on her VIP Life website, between “beautiful, sophisticated women” and men “who have all achieved professional success: physicians, attorneys, CEOs, entertainment industry professionals, etc., with quality lifestyles.” Women pay nothing; men pay a large fee to date them—enough so that Clampitt allows only thirty men to be part of her service at any one time. Whether they have sex is their business; Clampitt’s already been paid just for the introduction.

  Anna wanted in on a business like this, without all the complications and risk of prostitution. Who knew how to cater to the desires of wealthy men better than she? Anna wanted to go legit, and Jaynie Mae knew the, um, ins and outs. They would be partners, and their luncheon companion was a potential investor.

  Or so they thought. Today, Jaynie Mae’s luncheon partner was interested in something else: a ménage a trois. “I’m looking for a little adventure,” he said coyly. “Please corrupt me.”

  Jaynie Mae wasn’t into that, but Anna could connect him with two young women who’d be only too happy to oblige: elegant blue-eyed brunette Catherine DeVries, and a blond design student from Birmingham, England, with a Scottish first name: Mhairiangela “Maz” Bottone. How much? Two for the price of one: $2,000 in cash for one hour. An appointment was set six days later at the apartment Anna kept for such purposes in an unassuming five-story brick building at 304 East Seventy-Eighth Street.

  Catherine and Maz were there waiting for their gentleman caller when he arrived on the dot. The threesome repaired to the bedroom. The girls stripped down to their lingerie, but the businessman settled into an easy chair at the foot of the bed and started telling them what to do. He just wanted to watch, he said. His requests got dirtier and dirtier, and finally the hour was up and they were finished. The voyeur handed the naked women $2,000. I don’t know if his thank-you was recorded by the video camera, which caught the whole show. But his entire conversation at lunch with Anna and Jaynie Mae was. The “businessman” was a cop.

  But Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. didn’t have DeVries and Bottone arrested until seven months later. He didn’t want to tip off Anna, who was a Scotland native with an apartment in Canada and possible millions at her disposal and therefore a flight risk. After five years he wanted the case to be rock-solid.

  Vance had just taken office the year before, after DA Robert Morgenthau retired in 2009. Morgenthau had anointed Vance, the son of JFK’s secretary of the Army and Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state but who had established a career out of his father’s shadow in Seattle, with his endorsement. Vance won in a landslide with 91 percent of the vote, and he set about doing things differently.

  Vance had two new no-nonsense prosecutors on the Anna Gristina case: ADA Charles (Charlie) Linehan and ADA Elizabeth Roper. They both had reputations for being tough and following the straight and narrow. When they were brought in on the case, at some point Charlie called me and asked if I would come in so he could speak with me. I was so sad. I thought this Anna stuff was over. He promised that he only wanted to talk and we agreed that because it was merely a conversation, a lawyer was not needed on my part. He kept his end of the deal. At least the rogue behavior of past ADAs was over. Linehan wasn’t even having any of the hooker jokes one particular detective used to crack in my presence. This grinning jackass seemed to have an unlimited store of jokes with “ho” in the punch line. He tried it once, and Charlie shot him a look that ended them once and for all. Charlie seemed like he would be more protective of me than his predecessors.

  Anna and Jaynie Mae went on to meet and plan their venture, unaware that they were being watched. In October they co-hosted a benefit for the Shelby Shelter, an Allen, Texas, pet-rescue outfit run by Jaynie Mae’s equally pretty sister Jessica. They held it at the West Village nightclub 49 Grove, owned by lady-loving Hamptons restaurateur Aram Sabet. Whether Anna genuinely loved animals or whether she needed a “gentleman farmer” tax break, she took in rescued dogs and potbellied pigs at her two-hundred-acre spread in Monroe, New York, in upstate Orange County. This was up her alley, and she and Jaynie Mae jointly publicized it on Facebook.

  Anna was becoming increasingly paranoid. I hadn’t been working for her for a while, but she called me and asked me to see an old client. I agreed because I knew he was safe and I wouldn’t be arrested, and also I felt it was her way of checking to see if she could trust me. My rationale was if I took the job, she would not think I had any connection to law enforcement. What’s more, I was going to be with what I called a no-sex client and a big tipper, so I gave in.

  Anna also asked me to check the East Seventy-Eighth Street apartment for a plumbing problem, and when I got there she was inside. I was startled and a little nervous, wondering if it was a setup. But Anna had simply forgotten that she had asked me to check it, which wasn’t like her—she was usually so on top of things. Anna looked totally freaked out. She
was either wearing a wig or had gotten her hair cut short and dyed. She was in sweats and a hoodie, which she had pulled over her head even inside the apartment, and there was also a man with her I had never seen before. I think the detectives watching her knew they’d have to make their move soon, before she fled to her place in Montreal.

  Meanwhile Jonas Gayer, known as “John Doe,” was talking like a tattletale. He even gave my name up. Anna, who had in the past been so careful, and Jaynie Mae had not so brilliantly friended Jonas on Facebook and Twitter. When the New York Post asked him about that later, Jonas was so loquacious, he volunteered that he knew Anna through “a mutual friend . . . Bruno Jamais . . . a restaurant owner.” I’m sure the famous chi-chi chef of the Restaurant Club appreciated that little advertisement.

  I did testify in judge’s chambers. But I had my limits. I never named names when it came to clients. I had too many strong feelings for them, however complex. It’s a free country, and my clients have made plenty of money in it. If they wanted to spend it on sex and I was willing to give it, that was our business. I did testify that there was one client who made a request to obtain a young boy. But mostly I had given prosecutors some of the evidence they needed to bring down the “Millionaire Madam,” who at fifteen years had the longest-running high-class call-girl agency in modern New York City history. After a five-year investigation, it would be up to Linehan and Roper of the Manhattan DA’s Corruption Unit to prove it in court.

  Yet on the morning of February 22, 2012, a grand jury indicted Anna on just one single felony charge of promoting prostitution, based on the undercover cop’s testimony about the girl-on-girl action the previous July. Jaynie Mae was also indicted on a felony procuring charge. Catherine DeVries and Maz Bottone were each indicted on one count of prostitution, a misdemeanor; DeVries was arrested on February 27; cops busted Bottone four days later on March 2. Both started cooperating immediately, Linehan told Judge Merchan. They were released without bail.

  Investigators knew on the day she’d been indicted that Anna was to meet with David S. Walker, a financial adviser at Morgan Stanley, to talk to him about investing in her high-end relationship service. Anna was tailed as she went up to Walker’s office for the meeting at Morgan Stanley headquarters in Times Square. When she reemerged, cops arrested her on the sidewalk. Anna thought she was being kidnapped and screamed out to passersby, “Please! Somebody! Call 911!”

  Meanwhile, Walker had some explaining to do to Morgan Stanley honchos once it broke in the press that it was he who had had the “Millionaire Madam” up to their offices. He was never charged with any crime, and he told his superiors at Morgan Stanley that he had previously met Anna socially and just wanted to hear her business plan. Nevertheless, top execs would suspend him with pay until Anna’s trial was over.

  Anna was brought to her February 23 arraignment in cuffs, where she pled not guilty to her one charge of promoting prostitution. It was the first time, after being in the sex business for fifteen years as Anna Scotland, that she had ever been charged with a crime. Yet Judge Juan Merchan set her bail at an eye-popping $2 million bond, or $1 million in cash, which Anna couldn’t—or wouldn’t—make. Charlie Linehan had argued that Anna’s wealthy clients, and perhaps Anna herself, had millions to help the U.K. citizen flee the charge, which brought a potential seven-year sentence. Anna had spoken of the real estate development she and her eye-candy husband, Kelvin Gorr, had made. Jonas had shown me her accounts—he didn’t say what country they were in—with totals of $14 million. If Anna had some of that cash lying around the pig farm, it wouldn’t be too bright to admit it. Judge Merchan, who already knew a lot more about the case than press and courtroom observers, sent her off to prison on Rikers Island.

  On March 6, her co-counsel Peter Gleason tried to get her bail reduced. Anna had been brought from Rikers Island on the prison bus and into criminal court, wearing a zigzag-print wool jacket over black pants, accessorized with silver handcuffs. Maybe it was the reading glasses at the end of her nose, but I noticed for the first time how much Anna had aged since I first started working for her. The paranoia had taken its toll.

  Gleason was a man of mystery. He had been a cop; he had been a fireman; he had run for City Council. But as a lawyer, he had never tried a felony case before. Not only that, but he offered up his TriBeCa loft as collateral for Anna’s bail, even though he barely knew her. He even said Anna and her family could live in the $3 million spread, with a Japanese soaking tub in the guest bathroom, with him for the duration. When asked why, he explained that he and Anna “had a mutual friend.”

  In the courtroom sat famous private eye Vinnie Parco—the same Vinnie Parco whom Anna had called a “motherfucker” to me over the phone. Perhaps Parco worked for the “mutual friend”? Or maybe Anna thought Parco had done such a good job finding her that she wanted the best. Who knows. But after just fifteen minutes, Judge Merchan said he would have to study the idea of a defense attorney offering up his multimillion-dollar loft for a client and set a hearing on the matter. He ordered Anna back to Rikers.

  TWENTY

  nine lawyers, two hookers, and one beauty in cabo san lucas

  Peter Gleason’s offer of his loft for bail collateral was even more mysterious because Gleason wasn’t even the chief lawyer on Anna’s case. No, the court had appointed someone else to represent her after she said she was broke: respected defense attorney Richard Siracusa, who called Gleason “nothing but a hindrance.”

  At another hearing six days later, with Anna wearing the same zigzag jacket despite her extensive wardrobe, she made a legal maneuver that backfired with Judge Merchan. In a chaotic scene that the New York Daily News described as “bizarre,” Gleason brought famous ponytailed civil-rights attorney and radio personality Ron Kuby before the bench to argue for Anna’s right to jettison Siracusa and choose Gleason. Gleason stated, “It’s going to take a very special lawyer to handle this matter.”

  Judge Merchan scolded, “Your client will not get preferential treatment here!” and ordered Anna back to Rikers.

  Three days later, on March 15, it got even weirder when Anna replaced her two lawyers with two other lawyers. Not only did she get rid of Siracusa, she “fired” Gleason as well. Apparently money had been found to pay Gary Greenwald, a renowned “superlawyer” and the former mayor of Wurtsboro, New York, about half an hour away from Anna’s farm in Monroe. His co-counsel was Elise L. Rucker, who is listed as having a house in Monroe.

  Judge Merchan said that he and prosecutors had spent “hours” studying the legal and ethical issues raised by Peter Gleason offering his property as collateral while handling Anna’s defense, but now that was all moot. When Greenwald tried to get Anna’s bail reduced, Merchan refused, again pointing out that a woman with U.K. citizenship who had fled to a home she kept in Canada in 2008 was a flight risk. He set Anna’s next trial date for three months hence on June 7.

  Just two days earlier, Jaynie Mae Baker’s perp walk had been a cakewalk. After the story broke in the New York Post of her February indictment, she flew from LA to Cabo San Lucas, the exclusive Mexican resort, with her sister Jessica. She claimed she hadn’t known she was in trouble. But Jaynie Mae had one lawyer from the get-go, and he is among the crème de la crème of criminal defense attorneys: Robert Gottlieb, a former ADA under Morgenthau. Maybe Jaynie’s rich boyfriend learned about him, I don’t know; but his solid presence was in stark contrast to the courtroom circus Anna created by hiring a total of nine defense attorneys, which only seemed to annoy Judge Merchan.

  Gottlieb told the judge that Jaynie Mae had no idea there was a warrant out for her arrest until she read it on Facebook in Cabo and friends told her that reporters were outside her apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Gottlieb made arrangements for her to turn herself in, and Jaynie Mae took her time thinking about it. She finally flew back on Saturday, March 10, to give herself up, but unfortunately, Customs didn’t get the memo. Customs agents saw the warrant in her security file and detai
ned her at Newark International Airport until Gottlieb had her sprung with a 10:30 p.m. cell phone call to Linehan.

  The following Tuesday, paparazzi thronged Jaynie Mae as she was walked handcuffed into the New York State Supreme Court at 100 Centre Street, and her appearance caused one veteran cop to say, “She’s the best-looking perp we’ve ever had in this courthouse.” At the arraignment, Charlie told Judge Merchan that he had had “numerous informants over the years who have discussed Ms. Baker’s role in [Gristina’s] operation.” I was not one of them. I still believe the tailored and coiffed Jaynie Mae was only a participant in the aspirational part of Anna’s business: linking wealthy men with young, beautiful women, but in a higher-class, legally loopholed way.

  Despite Jaynie Mae’s long stay in Mexico, Gottlieb got Judge Merchan to set her bail at $100,000, which was issued by famous New York bail bondsman Ira Judelson (who helped spring rapper Lil Wayne and International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn) after Jaynie Mae’s boyfriend, Marcus Laun, put up his country house as collateral.

  On March 16, investigators seized all the files of David Jaroslawicz, who once sued quarterback Brett Favre and the New York Jets on behalf of massage therapist Christina Scavo for sexual harassment. He also sued the sultan of Brunei on behalf of former Miss U.S.A. Shannon Marketic, who claimed he’d held her against her will for thirty-two days and molested her in his 1,778-room palace. It was a story Anna had boasted to me on tape that she had given to “her friend at the New York Post.”

  Jaroslawicz was also Anna’s next-door neighbor in Monroe, New York. His law office at 225 Broadway is listed in New York City Buildings Department records as the address for the LLC that owned Anna’s brothel building. Jaroslawicz’s office is also listed for the 881 Lakes Road LLC, which owns Anna Gristina’s two-hundred-acre farm, located next to his.