The next day, when Melissa stopped returning all calls and texts, Lynn and Jeff called off Amanda’s trip and began calling local hospitals. Melissa’s landlady got worried, too, when she heard the cats crying and scratching at the door. Lynn and Jeff tried to file a missing-persons report. But for three days, the police deflected them. They said Melissa was twenty-four years old with no history of mental illness and no psychiatric prescriptions; just because her family couldn’t find her, they said, didn’t necessarily mean she was missing. If Lynn wondered whether police weren’t interested in searching because Melissa was an escort, she didn’t have to wonder for long. The Buffalo police said as much to the family’s attorney, Steven Cohen. She’s a hooker, they told him. They weren’t going to assign a detective to something like this.
Only ten days later would the police start a missing-persons investigation. Only then would they subpoena Melissa’s phone records, canvass the neighborhood, and pull a DNA sample from her toothbrush. That was when they learned that her phone records showed access to her voice mail on the night of her disappearance, and that the calls were traced to a cell tower in Massapequa, Long Island. Only after that—nearly two weeks after she went missing—would the police visit two nearby motels, Budget Inn and Best Western, to speak to the staff and review security tapes, and find nothing.
The police might not have been stirred into action at all if, on the fourth day of Melissa’s disappearance—July 16—Amanda’s cell hadn’t rung in Buffalo. When she saw her sister’s number on the caller ID, Amanda rejoiced. “Melissa?”
Instead of her sister’s voice, she heard another: controlled, comfortable, soft-spoken. Male.
“Oh, this isn’t Melissa.”
ANGELINA
Alex had been driving for World Class Party Girls every day for months, and every day he’d meet someone new. Most of the girls, he forgot right away. But he remembered Shannan.
She stood out—the full lips, the wide eyes, the dark skin, the smile. She introduced herself as Sabrina. Later, she’d be Madison, and then Angelina. He was picking up Shannan and another girl outside the Journal Square PATH station. He assumed they were both coming in off the commuter line connecting Jersey City to Manhattan. In Alex’s Cadillac, the other girl was quiet and forgettable, at least to him. Shannan chatted nonstop, at home with herself and what she was doing. She said she was working as a receptionist, and she picked up the newspaper one day and saw an ad for the agency, and she wanted to give it a try. She called them, and they called her back and said come on in. She was hired on the spot.
Alex could see why. The other girls looked hot, but once they spoke, he understood why they were in this line of work; he could see it in their blank stares, or the way some of them would grind their jaws. Shannan was not only pretty but well spoken, intelligent, charming. As he drove Shannan to her appointments that day, he struggled to understand why she was doing this at all.
Alex Diaz was born and raised in Jersey City, in a two-bedroom apartment not far from Journal Square. His father worked downtown in maintenance jobs. His mother was a housewife. An only child, Alex went to Dickinson, the enormous high school on a hill that drivers pass along the elevated highway connecting the New Jersey Turnpike to the Holland Tunnel. Alex didn’t graduate. He was arrested at sixteen for fighting—aggravated assault—and then at seventeen for taking part in an armed robbery. He and his friends wore masks and held up the bodegas on Kennedy Boulevard. Getting a gun wasn’t difficult in his part of Jersey City—there were a few older guys who sold them, $300 or $400 for a .22 or a .45. Alex hid his in his bedroom closet at his parents’ place. One night he and his friends stole about five hundred dollars—a lot, for them—and ran right into the police.
Alex went away to a juvenile facility in Secaucus, then the New Jersey Training School for Boys in Jamesburg. He served two and a half years, most of it housed boot camp–style, in barracks with fifty other juvenile convicts. A few were friends he knew from the streets. His parents visited. They were upset, especially his mother. “When you come home,” she said, “try to do a better job. Try to fix up your life.” When he got out, Alex was almost twenty years old. He finished high school at night and enrolled in community college for a year and a half, then lost interest. He never had a major. He felt like he was wasting time.
He thought about studying criminal justice, but his previous gun charge meant he couldn’t ever become a police officer. The next best thing was private security. He guarded factories and water facilities and the parking lot of the Prudential Center in Newark. He was making about twelve dollars an hour. All his friends from childhood had gone their own way, gotten older; some had kids. Alex had just one old friend, one of his partners in the bodega robbery. He was the one who told Alex about World Class Party Girls.
The agency was run by an entrepreneur named Joseph Ruis, whom Alex knew as the owner of a kebab house he frequented in Journal Square. Alex had no idea that Ruis was also running an escort service with dozens of girls and almost as many drivers. But Alex’s friend did, and through him, Alex learned quickly how it worked to be a driver. Simply put, the more girls he drove, the more money he’d make. But it was never that simple. Not every girl charged the same rate, and how much Alex made depended on how much each of them took home. To keep things straight, the agency gave all the drivers and girls a chart—a little like a tip calculator—with all the different possible hourly pay rates, broken down into separate shares for the agency, the driver, and the girls. The driver would always get the least, about a quarter, and the agency and the girl would get pretty much equal shares of the rest.
Drivers usually supplied their own cars. The service had a dispatcher in the main office who called Alex on his cell. At first the dispatcher wouldn’t send Alex on the expensive calls. Even at the bottom of the pay scale, the hourly rate for a girl was never lower than $200. Of that, Alex would get $45 or $50, ending the night with $300 or $400. If he worked three or four nights a week, that would bring him $1,000: not bad for a twenty-one-year-old with no college degree.
The more expensive the call, the larger the driver’s take—$400 an hour would earn him as much as $120 for that one hour. He’d go all over Manhattan, Rutherford, the Meadowlands, and North Jersey. The farthest south he’d go was central Jersey, like Middlesex County. Most of the calls came from the suburbs and Westchester County. In the city, he’d bring girls to the Marriott in Times Square as well as more expensive places, like the Carlyle on the Upper East Side. The rates were far higher than anything a girl on the street would charge, and the clientele was different, too: travelers with lots of money, willing to pay for the convenience of a girl arriving at their door. There was built-in pressure for all of these dates. The guys ordered an hour and often wanted to make the most of it, but the girls wanted to finish as fast as they could and get out. What the guys didn’t know was that the escort service had an unspoken rule: During an hour’s call, after forty-five minutes, they were supposed to be on to the next call.
Some of the girls, including Shannan, would bring coke to help extend calls past an hour or two. When they didn’t have coke, the agency would be there to help. “You want some party material?” the dispatcher would ask the john. He would say, “Yeah,” and the agency would send it over with Alex, charging it to the john’s credit card. Sometimes Alex would buy the coke himself. He’d lived in Jersey City his whole life. He knew the right people.
The money was great, but the stress was terrible. Alex would work until four or five in the morning, and then he’d turn around and start his regular job at seven. For a while he told his parents that he was going out, and then he said he had a second job driving go-go girls to parties. Keeping the secret only added to the pressure. He started losing sleep, worried that the girls had drugs on them and the police would find drugs in his car, worried that the police would look at the girls in the back and decide that he was a pimp. Sure enough, two months into the job, he got pulled over along Route 3 in L
ittle Falls, New Jersey, with a girl in the back. Alex tried giving the cop the runaround: “She’s my friend.” He got lucky.
That was too close a call. Alex walked away from the job for four years. He went back to being a security guard, making $13.50 an hour. He had a girlfriend, a normal girl with a normal job and a normal life. Then his expenses piled up. He was financing a new Cadillac CTS. After he paid off all his other bills, he never had any money for himself, for fun. The old friend who had first connected him with Joseph Ruis told him that World Class Party Girls had grown. It was big now—celebrities, lawyers, doctors. The minimum call was now $400 or $500. That got Alex’s attention.
His first night back, he made almost $1,000. He didn’t tell his girlfriend.
During his first tour of duty, Alex had never felt in control. But he was older now, more self-assured, not a kid anymore. He kept his security job until they fired him for dozing off. It hardly mattered. He went on unemployment, collecting a check from the government while getting paid handsomely by the escort service.
When his girlfriend asked why he was gone all night, she didn’t take the answer well. Alex was a little surprised. In his mind, she should have respected him, maybe been proud of him for taking charge and making money. She didn’t see things that way. “You might do something with one of them,” she shrieked, “and get me a disease!”
Alex gave her some money to calm down. They stayed together. He told her it wasn’t about the girls, and he meant it. Then he got to know Shannan.
About two months after their first meeting, Alex was assigned to drive Shannan again. He remembered her. He wanted to talk to her more this time. He was happy when she sat up front in the Cadillac, leaving another girl alone in the back.
She talked, and he listened. She was living upstate, taking a bus to Manhattan from Rockland County and the PATH out to New Jersey to work for the agency. Alex guessed she did that to be as far away from home as possible. Maybe she didn’t want her boyfriend or family knowing. She told Alex that she had finished high school early, skipping a grade. She brought a thick textbook in the car, and he marveled at how fast she was reading it. She told him she liked writing, too. That was something Alex hated. But Shannan wrote poetry. She said she used to write crazy stuff—sometimes sweet and cute, sometimes ugly and aggressive. She enrolled in online college classes, and she was trying to sing professionally, heading into Manhattan during the day for cattle-call auditions.
She said she wanted to be famous. It seemed to Alex that the job with the escort service scratched the same itch in a different way, bringing her attention, adoration, and money. He wasn’t interested in making that comparison directly. Instead, he told Shannan to go for it. “Maybe you can,” he told her. “Nobody’s stopping you. Nobody’s holding you back. Go.”
He was more convinced than ever that Shannan had chosen the wrong job, fallen into it accidentally. From there, it was a small step to thinking that he might be able to help her—and an even smaller one to entertaining fantasies of rescuing her.
Their third night working together—their third date, as he thought of it—they made sure to be together the whole time. It was a day shift, and there were not a lot of calls, just two or three. That night they grew even closer. The shift ended, and they kept talking. They found a place to park, and she pulled out a fifth of vodka, and they passed it back and forth. She said things to Alex about the work that he hadn’t heard from the other girls. She said that sometimes the calls would be just about the sex, and sometimes they would be about keeping someone company—a john paying someone to hear him out. She told him she liked those calls best of all.
What happened next came naturally. They had the money for a hotel, but neither wanted to wait. They had sex in the car. Shannan told him she liked it. He believed her, but only to a point. When she left his car for the PATH station, he thought that would be the last time he’d see her.
He was wrong. The next day, she called him. “I’m coming back to Jersey—do you want to meet up?”
Alex ended it with his girlfriend. He had changed too much. He used to feel like a family man. Now he was an agency man, and Shannan was the perfect girl for his new life. That life had its own rhythm, to which he and Shannan adapted quickly. Sometimes Alex would drive her and sometimes he wouldn’t, but it wouldn’t matter. On rare nights when he drove her, they would sleep together between calls. When they worked separately, they would meet up every morning and check in to one of the hotels on Tonnelle Avenue. Their favorite was the Washington Motel. The staff knew Shannan and got to know them both. In the hotel rooms, they drank and watched movies and ordered in, like going on a little vacation. Alex liked coke. An eight ball, or three and a half grams, would go for as much as two hundred dollars, but Alex and Shannan were fine with something smaller, like five twenties, or two and a half grams. They had enough money to splurge.
Shannan moved to Jersey in early 2008, both to be with Alex and to work more. They found an apartment on Columbia Avenue in Jersey City. When he stopped to think about it, their apparent domesticity seemed strange. He’d be driving girls all over the place to have sex, and Shannan would have been having sex all night, and they would meet at the end of every shift as the sun came up, and they would stay in the whole day and then go back to work.
The more time they spent together, the more Alex got to see Shannan’s mood swings—cheerful one minute, beside herself the next. She was at her saddest when she talked about her childhood. She told him that she was a foster-care child and her other sisters got to grow up at home. She said she felt like a nomad, always roaming around and never where she wanted to be. When he asked her why, she said she couldn’t talk about it. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe because I was a wild kid, they couldn’t take care of me.” Alex didn’t believe that, and he never learned another reason, but he did learn that there were triggers—she’d explode if she thought somebody had lied to her, or if she felt like she was running low on money, or if she was having a conflict with her mother or sisters. Sometimes all it took was for Mari or Sherre not to answer the phone for Shannan to feel rejected—the black sheep all over again. Arguments with her mother and sisters ended with her in tears. Alex would try to come to her aid: “Fuck your sisters!” To his surprise, that sometimes worked. In an instant, she’d brighten, as if the storm had never happened, and they would go watch a movie.
Alex never considered how hard it might have been on Mari and the sisters, dealing with someone so volatile. He was too busy fantasizing about helping Shannan. He started to think that their home together could be the first real home that Shannan ever had.
On her visits back to Ellenville, Shannan seemed different—less combative, more confident. Where once she would shriek at Mari about being abandoned, now she took her mother out to get her hair done. She showed up for birthdays and holidays, determined to cook for everyone and do her sisters’ makeup. She brought magazines and ordered Chinese food and handed out bootleg DVDs she had picked up in Jersey City. She’d think nothing of spending nine hundred or a thousand dollars in one weekend. “No one else could compete,” Sherre said.
Her job wasn’t a secret. Shannan made no effort to dash away from Mari when her cell buzzed. She would answer in a ridiculous code that made Mari laugh—“Hi, this is Julie Smith, is this the pizzeria?”—as the dispatcher gave Shannan the next job. She wouldn’t go into much detail about the work—“That was her business,” Sherre said—but she had no problem talking about the money. “You would not believe the clients I have,” she once told Mari. “They’re rich. I hardly have to do nothing, and I get thousands of dollars.”
To her family, not just Mari, Shannan was leading such a removed, alien existence that questioning it seemed almost beside the point. Shannan had proved she was smart by graduating early. The money showed she could take care of herself. Her old friends from Ellenville were more scandalized. On the phone one night, her old friend Anthony almost didn’t know what to say. “
Does your family know?” he asked, and Shannan said, “Yeah. They’re letting me live my life.” This stopped him short. If his daughter told him she was an escort, he’d snatch her and lock her in a room until she came to her senses.
Shannan reassured him. “I’m only doing it until I’m done with school.” He thought there had to be more to it than that, some other reason why Mari and the sisters never took the extra step to make sure Shannan stopped. To Anthony, that reason was clear: She was sending a lot of money home. “The only time I ever seen Shannan and her mom on good terms was when she started in this business,” he said, “when she was bringing home money and gifts and stuff like that.”
Mari saw how the money had changed Shannan’s life and marveled at her taste. In Jersey City, Shannan filled the apartment with four-hundred-thread-count sheets, designer clothes, and a plasma TV. She would take her sisters shopping, to the mall, to the movies. Sherre’s sons got Timberlands and Akademiks jackets. For one of the boys’ first birthdays, Shannan wanted to bring over a cake from Carlo’s Bake Shop in Hoboken, featured on the Cake Boss reality show. Sherre was offended: She wanted to bake for her own son, and here Shannan was, swooping in with her money again. Shannan had more success shopping for her mother. If Mari even mentioned something, it was hers. “ ‘Oh, the new Stevie Nicks CD is coming out.’ ‘Okay, Mommy, I’ll get it for you,’ ” Mari remembered.
As far as Shannan was concerned, her choice was a success. The money was washing away years of estrangement. Even Sherre came around to accepting her sister. “We got closer,” she said. The plan was working. Shannan’s success drew her family—especially her mother—closer to her at last.
On June 23, 2009, Shannan and a forty-two-year-old man named Elpidio Evangelista were arrested outside a bar along Sinatra Drive, a waterfront road in Hoboken. They both were charged with promoting prostitution; conspiracy; and manufacturing, distributing, or dispensing a controlled dangerous substance. They were both released on a summons. They weren’t the ones the police were after.
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