American Gangster (40 page)

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. He can't shut up about anything. 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
. A meeting was set up. Arriving late, Jason swept into the TV office 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 79 Worth Street. Her key ally would be Clark Krimer, a.k.a. Clark Kent or Superman, a muscle-bound young banker Itzler met at a nearby bank and hired to manage the agency's credit-card accounts, making sure the statements of those using NY Confidential services appeared to be spending their $1,200 at fictitious firms like “Gotham Steak.” Clark and Mona soon became an item, consolidating their power.

The Clark-and-Mona regime upset “the vibe” of 79 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 other 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.

This brought up another issue: where was Natalia's money? In her however short-lived career as the Perfect 10, she'd amassed bookings worth more than a million dollars, most of which Itzler claimed to have plowed back into the business. “We used to laugh about it, how I was making all this cash and he was giving me an allowance, like I'm a kid,” Natalia said. With Mona in charge, however, she was having trouble getting any money at all. “Clark and Mona, they just wouldn't write me a check,” Natalia said.

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.

People began telling Jason he'd better cool things out. A few weeks before, in a downtown restaurant, he'd met half a dozen second-grade school teachers vacationing from Minneapolis and brought them by the loft “just to show them how we do it in the big city.” This was also around the time that ominious-looking vans began parking across Worth Street. The guys inside could only be one of two things: cops or gangsters bent on rip-off and/or extortion. In such a climate it was suggested the least Jason could do was make sure the front door stayed locked, something he was loathe to do, as not in keeping with his “happiness” mystique.

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

Much of this colossal self-delusion 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, whom Sachs somehow lawyered into an unheard-of (since reduced) thirty-year sentence for perjury. Sachs made a couple of adjustments and said Jason's contract was “brilliant,” just what Itzler 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 much uneasy 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, not their kind of business. 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.

What really finished NY Confidential were the typically cocky/cracked quotes Jason gave a
New York Post
reporter to the effect that he had nothing to fear from the NYPD. “The cops don't bother me,” Jason said. “The cops are with me. They're on my side.” After that, says a vice squad detective, “it was like he was daring us.”

When the big bust inevitably came down on January 7, 2005, 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 79 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 $2,800 rabbit-fur-lined sweater from Jeffrey's, because who wants to look like a guy in a sweatshirt when they lead you away?' 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 100 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 import scheme, 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 $400,000,” 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.