The Price: My Rise and Fall As Natalia, New York's #1 Escort

by Natalie McLennan

  “Why are you under house arrest?” He sighed, as if he were expecting it, and explained that he and Mona, the head booker who had been so cold to me, had been dating. They had been together about a year, right around the time I’d met him at the 54th Street office, when things between them started to go bad. They were in the middle of their breakup when Mona dropped a bomb. She was pregnant. And he didn’t want to have the baby

  During their final argument, she made an appointment to get an abortion.

  Apparently, there was a lot of screaming and crying. He was vague on the key details. Did she want the baby, and he did not? I didn’t have the courage to ask.

  Whatever it was over exactly, it got ugly. And she called the cops. When they showed up she told them that he had thrown her down the stairs. He was already on parole for the drug conviction. She didn’t press charges, but the damage was already done. He was in violation of his parole. He was placed under house arrest for ninety days, during which he was confined to his apartment, except for three hours in the mornings—hence the ankle bracelet.

  Jason claimed that Mona had later written a letter to his parole officer saying it wasn’t true, and I believed him. I had been around Jason long enough to know he had a wicked tongue but wasn’t capable of violence. I had just left Paul, and my radar was on high alert, but Jason was different. I never felt threatened or scared, even when it all fell apart, and our worlds came crashing down around us eight months later.

  Shortly after he confided in me, Jason got his electronic dog collar removed and the terms of his probation loosened. He was no longer under house arrest, but he still had to check in with his parole officer every week and get drug tested. This meant he was finally able to get out of the purgatory that is New Jersey.

  I was so happy. I hated going out there. The fifty-dollar cab ride each way alone was bleeding into my income. And because it was so hard to recruit girls to work for the agency—no one trusts a pimp in a Hoboken walkup—I was working inhuman hours.

  He wanted to move in together, and I told him straight up that I didn’t want to. I reminded him that my motivation for becoming an escort was to become independent and have a place of my own—my own apartment, my own cell phone, my own life.

  The plan was for me to help him find a cool apartment in the city that he also could use as an office and a small, but nice, one-bedroom for me.

  I was trawling Craigslist when I came across a listing for a loft in Tribeca. It sounded just like what Jason was looking for. When we went to check it out, my jaw dropped. The shady real estate agent claimed it was ten thousand square feet. I had no idea if he was full of it or not. I’m from Canada. I’m metric. But it was the biggest apartment I had ever been in, let alone lived in.2

  I was in awe, staring up at the fifteen-foot ceilings and wandering from room to room. I went up the stairs to one of the balconies and sat down on the floor, my feet dangling off the edge between the bars of the railings.

  Jason looked around for about two minutes, then turned to the agent and asked him what he needed from us to make it ours. The agent told us he’d just need $21,000 cash for the first and last months rent plus a security deposit. On the spot. Plus a cash commission. The broker didn’t ask us what we did. He didn’t want to know, at least not exactly. He seemed to know that whatever it was, it was illicit. That was how it would be with us as the months went on. There were always certain types of people who got off just being around us. Most of them didn’t even partake in any shenanigans. They just liked the idea of being close to something so sexy and dangerous.

  Jason took me aside and asked me what I thought. I just looked at him. It was magic. I told him he should definitely take it. He shook his head and said, “No, you don’t get it. I want you to move in here with me.”

  I started to protest, then I looked around again. It was so fabulous.

  “How much were you looking to spend on an apartment?” he asked.

  I told him $1,500. I knew that was a stretch as one-bedrooms in Manhattan start at $1800 minimum, but I was hoping to get lucky.

  “Okay, you contribute $1,500 a month, I’ll cover part of it, and the agency will take care of the rest. If we break up, or you don’t want to share a bedroom with me, you can move into the second bedroom and that’s it. You can stay as long as you want. If you want to move out after a month, that’s fine.”

  How could I resist? When would I ever be able to live in a place like this and call it mine? I nodded and jumped up and hugged him.

  Our new home was on the first floor in the back of an old factory building on Worth Street in Tribeca, conveniently located (for the vice squad cops who would later move a surveillance unit into the apartment above us) seven blocks from One Police Plaza. It was all stark white with big columns placed throughout the main loft’s area with floor to ceiling windows along the back wall. From the middle of the loft to the back wall, the ceiling angled down at forty-five degrees, and the sun blazed through beautiful skylights that spanned that part of the ceiling. In the loft’s main area there was a grand piano, a large marble bar and full kitchen with a Sub-Zero fridge. There were two huge bedrooms, the larger of which became mine and Jason’s. I had a walk-in closet the size of most studio apartments with a huge mirror surrounded by lights, just like a theatrical dressing room.

  The room on the right side of the loft we decked out in a sort of Marrakesh-meets-the-Kalahari theme in homage to our friend Peter Beard, the man who introduced us. The office was on the second floor, where two-second floor mezzanines looked down on all of the action, giving the place the feeling of a very hip bordello.

  To top it all off there were twenty-six Swarovski chandeliers. Yes, twenty-six. Jason said they cost $3,000 each.

  To top it all off, being on the ground floor meant no neighbors to complain about too much traffic in the hallways at all hours.

  * * *

  The Cipriani Downtown is one of those chic eateries that’s so not about eating. It’s always filled with the jet set crowd talking loudly about their jet-set lifestyles so everyone on the sidewalk knows they summer in Monaco, winter in Gstaad, and party on Puffy’s yacht. The owner, Giuseppe Cipriani, is a racecar-driving playboy who always seems to be embroiled in some scandal involving the unions and the mob.

  In other words, it was Jason’s kind of place.

  Jason and I were more or less inseparable unless I was out on an appointment. When my first review hit TER, the phone didn’t stop ringing, literally. Everyone wanted to meet the new girl, Jason’s next superstar. I was booked solid: at least one appointment every afternoon, usually with a married guy, always at a hotel; two appointments every night; and often a late-night appointment, starting at two or three in the morning and lasting a few hours. It was my new life. I was well on my way to achieving my goal: to save enough money to get out and have my own apartment.

  We were drinking Cipriani’s famous Bellinis with the beautiful people, including one of the city’s biggest club promoters—the kind of guy Jason loved to impress by picking up the check for a table full of near-strangers. The promoter casually asked, “Hey, Jason, what is it exactly you’re doing these days?”

  Without missing a beat, Jason nonchalantly answered, “I’m the number-one pimp in New York.”

  My face flushed. The rest of the table, an assortment of models and financier types, people I’d heard of but never met, snapped their heads in attention. The air went dead. Did he really mean “pimp,” or was that some sort of white boy, hip-hop reference?

  Jason clarified, “My agency has the best girls in the city.”

  A few people still thought he was joking and laughed. The rest literally turned up their noses while still leaning in to hear what came next. The promoter guy, a consummate social climber, jumped in, itching to crush Jason.

  “Everyone, this is Jason Sylk. Or is it Lubell?”

  Lubell was Jason’s mother’s maiden name.

  “Itzler, actually.” Jason answered.


  “Well, Jason Itzler, this isn’t another SoHo Models is it?”

  “SoHo Models?” one of the models asked.

  She was obviously new to the city.

  The promoter continued, ‘Yeah, Jason forced otherwise nice models to get naked on web-cams, totally fucking their chances of ever succeeding in the business.”

  I had heard of SoHo Models back in the day and narrowly missed hanging out there one night with some friends. I was going away on a month-long yoga retreat the next morning and wisely, for once in my life, went home early. By the time I got back to the city, Jason and SoHo Models had disappeared. Jason had shown me a Details magazine exposé about the whole affair. The article claimed that he had lured young model-wannabes to sign up with a legit-sounding modeling agency using the promise of photo shoots with famous photographers he’d met in the nightlife world, like Peter Beard. Once they were on the roster but weren’t making any money (because Jason had no real connections in the modeling world), he’d open the office’s secret back door to a series of stalls. He’d explain to the girls they could earn some extra cash by doing live web-cam chats (a.k.a. sex shows) with horny guys in Utah or the Ukraine—no one they’d ever meet, and it wasn’t recorded so they didn’t have to worry about their parents or friends seeing it.

  The girls made a couple of hundred dollars, no one had to know, and everyone was happy, right? Wrong, at least according to Details. The girls told the magazine they were hoodwinked into working in what they called a sex-cam sweatshop. After the article came out, the business tanked, and Jason soon found himself dangling over the side of a six-story building on Canal Street held by the ankles by a guy who worked for a guy whose last name ended in a vowel whom Jason owed money. Apparently, that just doesn’t happen in the movies or to Vanilla Ice.

  Jason told me that the article was bullshit—the girls wanted to do the web-cams—and I believed him. No one was forcing them to sit in front of those computers, he said. Either way, he told me that he’d learned his lesson. He was not trying to disguise New York Confidential as anything other than what it was. In fact, he was doing the exact opposite.

  “Here’s my card,” Jason said with a friendly smile, handing the promoter one of his newly minted business cards. It was razor-thin metal, engraved with our name, number and motto: “Rocket Fuel for Winners.”

  The promoter examined it, smirking, but clearly impressed.

  It was like the moment in American Psycho when the bankers sit around comparing fonts and card stock.

  “Those cards are great,” I said. “If you get too high to call an escort and actually have sex, you can just cut more coke with them.”

  The entire table looked at me, and a roar of laughter went up.

  I felt like the sharp-tongued minx in a table of wolves.

  Then Jason opened his big mouth again.

  “Everyone, this is Natalia, the city’s top escort.”

  I wanted to disappear. I had just won these snobs over. And now Jason had to call me out. I fumed the rest of the night.

  But the truth is part of me got off on it. I liked being part of his renegade operation. We were like Bonnie and Clyde in Dolce & Gabbana.

  I’ve always been drawn to the extreme, especially when it comes to guys. It may be partly because I’m an artist and thrive on the edge, but I think it goes deeper than that. I was never rich or pretty enough to be one of the cool kids, and I’ve always felt rejected by the “in” crowd. I don’t resent people born to privilege, but I’ve always felt like there was something boring about having it easy. I like guys who don’t fit in. I get turned on by the self-made man.

  And Jason was the ultimate self-made, if not completely delusional, man.

  He had huge plans for New York Confidential. He wanted to create a Playboy -style empire of high-end escort agencies, starting with Vegas Confidential and Miami Confidential and then spreading across the country. He didn’t seem to stop for a second to think about the fact that the authorities might look a little differently at someone who sold women by the hour than it did at someone who slipped gauzy photos of them in between hi-fi reviews.

  But you had to hand it to him. Jason appeared to literally will things into existence. He told everyone from tables full of strangers in the city’s hottest restaurants to his own family that he owned the best, most exclusive escort agency in New York City. And in a matter of weeks, he did.

  * * *

  Everything was shaping up perfectly, when out of the blue, Mona called. She and Jason started chatting like nothing had ever happened.

  I didn’t believe it.

  If someone in my life had been responsible for locking me in my house for three months, I would never speak to him or her again. But Jason said that while he thought that what she did was wrong, she was in such a fragile state at the time, he didn’t hold a grudge.

  I wasn’t buying it. Was she trying to find a way to hurt him? I told him not to tell her where we lived.

  “Chill out, Natal,” he said. “She said she wanted to apologize.”

  I said fine, but don’t bring her to our house.

  He met her at Cipriani Downtown while I went off shopping. And when I say shopping, I mean a major retail-therapy binge: dresses at D&G, leopard-print undies and bras at Patricia Field’s Hotel Venus. Oh, and some shiny things: a Tiffany-style chunky silver chain bracelet with a deep magenta crystal heart hanging off it, earrings and a necklace to match and some giant white gold hoops.

  After a few hours, I figured he’d be ready to give me a full report about what exactly Mona wanted.

  I walked into the loft, fumbling with my multiple shopping bags. As I walked into the main area, I could hear what I figured was a porno playing on the TV. But there, on the massage table in the middle of the room, was Mona. And there was Jason—on top of her.

  I guess she found out where we lived.

  It wasn’t just some girl he was randomly having sex with, which I’d seen before. This was something else. But I didn’t say anything; I just walked into the other room.

  They stopped, walked in and said “hi,” and we all acted like nothing had happened.

  * * *

  Over the next two weeks, she’d stop by, and believe it or not, we’d hang out. I told her what was happening with the agency, and she actually seemed impressed.

  Every time Jason asked if she wanted to come back, she’d say no. But I could see she was caving. She couldn’t stay away.

  “How could you trust this person to bring her back into your life?” I would ask him. It was like he was deaf. He was desperate for an operations manager. He couldn’t handle the logistics of our rapidly expanding business. His hands were full recruiting and closing appointments. Where do you recruit for someone to run an escort agency? There wasn’t a big labor pool to draw on.

  Finally, the inevitable happened, and the bitch who had falsely accused her ex-boyfriend of throwing her down a flight of stairs, was back—running his business. She came in like a tornado in reverse, creating a whole new organizational flow chart and booking-sheet system, putting up whiteboards and pictures of girls on the walls and setting about undermining everything I had built up.

  If you think your office is a sexual battlefield, ours was Fallujah.

  Being top girl was like being the most popular girl in school. I had the money, the clothes, the $1,000 handbags. I lived in the loft’s master suite. I had a fulltime maid who made me breakfast, washed and ironed my clothes, and even organized my drugs for me.

  Below me were some of the hottest women I had ever seen. Most of them were like me: innocent-looking, North American, young, fresh and enthralled with their newfound career. At least seventy-five percent of them had better bodies than I did. Some were taller, or had bigger tits, or faces worthy of the cover of Maxim. But a lot of them had worked as strippers before. They had that stripper gaze that looked right through guys. I was different. I hadn’t been damaged. Yet.

  Mona didn’t care about an
y of that. New York Confidential made its name on new, fresh girls. When Mona’s New Order began, she started hiring girls who’d obviously been strippers before. She didn’t get, or didn’t care, about the ethos of the brand Jason and I believed in so strongly.

  Before she arrived, if a big client called, I was the one who got booked, unless they wanted an Asian or a blonde. I had earned it. I had gotten Jason out of Jersey and helped him set up this new fabulous life. I actually overheard her telling a new booker, “I don’t even think Natalia is that pretty. I have girls who look like models.”

  Another time, I heard her calling a girl a lying, stealing bitch. The girl had finished a booking at 4:00 a.m. and had gone home rather than to the office to hand in her money. She was calling to apologize and let Mona know she’d be there before noon. Mona said, “You’d better be or you won’t ever get another booking here or with any other agency in the city.”

  I thought that we were doing something unique. There was this sense of good karma. People walked away feeling happy, not depressed and guilty. We genuinely believed we were changing the industry

  But Mona was a ball of toxic negativity.

  I found out later Jason offered her a bigger commission, which of course meant a smaller cut for the girls, but not for him.

  That said, she knew how to run an office. Thanks to her, we had multiple phone lines, a streamlined booking system, a super-talented web guy who updated our site daily with photos and profiles of new girls and a payroll system that appeared to be actually paying girls what they were owed. Because we only accepted cash, at the end of each night stacks of bills would be doled out proportionally like at the end of a high-stakes poker game.