The Best American Crime Writing (6 page)

Other than J’Lisha, no one from Treva’s family tried to contact her after her arrest. Carl said he didn’t write Treva because he had dropped out of school in the sixth grade and didn’t know how to spell. He did want it known, however, that he was angry that “completely
untrue stories” about Treva and his brother had made the newspapers. Patsy said she didn’t write because she was still hurt by the way Treva had turned her back on the family. She did say that she believed that Treva hadn’t forgotten about her entirely. At the funeral of her own mother, in 1998, Patsy said there was an elderly lady sitting at the back, wearing an old faded dress. The lady brushed against her as everyone was leaving the funeral parlor. Patsy noticed she was wearing a gray wig and granny glasses, and she had loads of pancake makeup on her face. “In my heart,” she said, “I know it was Treva.”

Treva’s arrest did motivate her sisters to start talking to one another for the first time about their own feelings of shame about the past. But they didn’t write Treva either. “We thought that maybe it would be best to just let her continue pretending to believe that she was a teenager,” said Sue. “If she thought she was living in a better place, then so be it.”

The prosecutor offered Treva a plea bargain—a recommendation of two years in prison in return for her admitting who she was. She wouldn’t take the deal. She then fired her court-appointed attorneys when she learned that they were planning to argue that even though she was indeed Treva Throneberry, she had no idea she was committing a crime because she really did believe that she was Brianna Stewart. Treva told the judge that she wanted to exercise her constitutional right—which she apparently had read about in a law book at the library—to defend herself. She said she wanted to convince the jury that she truly was Brianna Stewart. “It is very important for me to clear my name,” she said at a hearing. The judge could not say no. By law, to act as her own counsel Treva only had to demonstrate that she understood the nature of the charges against her and their potential punishment. Her nemesis, prosecutor Michael Kinnie, snarled to the press that Treva was perfectly competent. “She’s graduated from high school at least twice,” he said.

When Muscatel told the judge that he could not find sufficient mental problems to prove her incompetent, the stage was set for a disaster.

Her trial began in mid-November, and each day, Treva shuffled into the courtroom, carrying a stack of law books and notebooks. Although she often kept her hair braided in her usual pigtails, she had traded her overalls for denim skirts that came down to her ankles. Before testimony began, she always smiled at Superior Court judge Robert Harris and said in her little girl’s voice, “Hi.” The esteemed judge was completely discombobulated by Treva. At one point he said, “Hello, Miss Stewart, Miss Throneberry, whatever.”

He had one of her court-appointed attorneys sit beside her to answer any questions she might have about courtroom procedure and other points of law, but Treva seemed perfectly comfortable in her role as defense attorney. “Objection, relevance,” she often called out, beaming at the judge. After several such objections, Kinnie, a serious, bearded fellow, began clenching his fists, trying to control his anger. When an investigator from the prosecutor’s office took the stand and explained the complexities of fingerprint evidence, Treva nodded thoughtfully and, in her cross-examination, asked several pointless questions about ridge patterns on particular fingers. It was as if she were back in a high school science class asking a teacher how an experiment worked. Later, when another law enforcement officer told the jury about the way Keili Smitt in Corvallis, Oregon, used numerous aliases, she seemed mystified. “Why would someone come up with so many names?” she asked. “It makes no sense.” This time, she turned and beamed at the jury. The officer just shrugged, staring at her.

Kinnie was so adamant about proving that Brianna really knew her true identity that he called to the stand a woman from a Vancouver
convenience store. She said that she had remembered Brianna once coming in with some other teenagers to buy a pack of cigarettes and that Brianna showed an identification card with the name Treva Throneberry. The Evergreen teenagers who had been close to Brianna, however, were convinced that the clerk was lying. They said that Brianna never smoked, and no one could remember going to that store with her.

To further bolster his case, Kinnie had flown in Sharon Gentry, Treva’s foster mother from fifteen years ago, to testify that she had known Treva in 1985, when she was 16 years old. Gentry’s unexpected appearance led to a moment in the trial that can only be described as heartbreaking. After she answered some perfunctory questions from Kinnie, Treva rose slowly from the defense table, approached the witness, and asked to see some photos that Gentry had brought with her. For the first time Treva seemed ill at ease. She stared at the photo of herself and Gentry on the beach at Port Aransas for spring break; then she stared at a photo of herself with the high school boyfriend from Wichita Falls who had taken her to Six Flags. After a long silence Treva said, “This Treva in these pictures. What was she like?”

Gentry glanced around. She wasn’t sure what to say. “She was a very polite young lady,” she finally said. “She enjoyed church. She enjoyed tennis. She had a wooden tennis racket. She was always very appropriate, very thankful. She always apologized if she hurt my feelings.”

There was another long silence. Treva stared down at her notebook, her eyes blinking. Was it possible that the past was returning—that she was remembering the girl she once was?

“Was Treva smart?” Treva asked.

“Oh, yes. She loved to read and really enjoyed school activities. She made good grades.”

Another silence. “Did she work hard?” Treva asked.

It was clear that Gentry was now struggling to control her emotions.
She would later say that she almost stood up at that moment and leaned across the witness box so that she could wrap her arms around Treva. “She worked very hard,” Gentry said. “She tried hard. Treva was a wonderful young woman.” “Oh,” said Treva. “Thank you.”

As the trial hurried to its conclusion, Treva presented little evidence to counter Kinnie’s case. She attempted to introduce a report from a therapist in Vancouver who had once guessed that Brianna Stewart was about 20 years old, but the judge ruled the report inadmissible. She called her former teachers and counselors to the stand to testify that she had only wanted a Social Security number so that she could continue her schooling. “I wanted to go to college so I could take care of myself, isn’t that right?” she asked her former Evergreen counselor, Greg Merrill. “And not have someone take care of me?”

“All of our conversations were about you being self-sufficient,” Merrill replied stiffly, obviously embarrassed that he had believed Brianna’s story for so long.

In his final argument Kinnie was merciless. He loomed over the jurors and said, “If you feel sorry for her, we don’t give a damn about your tears. That’s not why we’re here.” He then mimicked Treva’s voice, telling the jury that she just wanted to remain a “pampered child” and that she wanted a free financial ride.

For her final argument Treva stood before the jury and read a short speech that she had handwritten in one of her notebooks. “I still say I am Brianna Rebecca Stewart,” she said, polite as always. “I don’t pretend to be anyone else but me.”

It was a slam dunk of a case, of course. The jury quickly found her guilty, and the judge sentenced her to three years in prison. The attorney who had been assisting Treva, Gerry Wear, made a last-minute request for the judge to state for the record whether he thought that Treva was competent to stand trial. “There’s no question in my mind, having spent as much time with her as I have, that
she is of the opinion that she is Brianna Stewart,” Wear said. But it was too late. Judge Harris said he wished he could send her to a state hospital for treatment, but his only legal option was prison. The problem with prison in Washington State, he admitted, was that there were limited mental health services available for inmates. Nor was there any supervision for nonviolent offenders after their release. When Treva completes her sentence, she will be sent out the front door with a little money and perhaps a phone number for a women’s shelter. And without any help, she might resume her cross-country odyssey.

Treva told the judge she would immediately file an appeal. Before she walked out of the courtroom for the last time, she looked out a window. Rain was beginning to fall outside. With no wind, it came down in a sprinkling whisper, little drops flicking through the last of the maple leaves hanging on the trees. “It’s so unfair,” she said. “It’s so unfair.”

A reporter standing nearby said, “What’s unfair? Are you talking about what happened to you a long time ago?”

She looked at the reporter quizzically; then she gathered her law books and sheets of paper. “My name,” she said, “is Brianna Stewart, and I am nineteen years old.”

As bailiffs led her into an elevator, she said once again, in a much louder voice, to the crowd who had gathered to see her, “I’m nineteen! I’m not guilty of anything except being a teenager!”

In March 2001, I read a one-paragraph newspaper story about a 31-year-old woman, born in a small Texas town, who had been arrested in the state of Washington for fraud because she was pretending to be a high school student: taking classes, playing on the tennis team, and acting in school dramas. Why, I wanted to know, did a grown woman desperately want to be back in the one place
,
high school, that most teenagers wanted to escape? And thus began my year-long journey into the bewildering life of Treva Throneberry
.

Because Treva wouldn’t talk to me about many episodes in her life, I had to do far more reporting than I thought I would need. I interviewed dozens of people from around the country, filed records requests in various states to get court documents, begged social workers to let me see their files, and finally traveled to Treva’s hometown in the windswept plains of North Texas, talking to almost anyone I could find, looking for evidence of long-held secrets. But it wasn’t just the mystery of Treva’s life that absorbed me. I realized that with this story I could try something rarely seen in nonfiction. Instead of creating a traditional narrative, I kept readers jumping back and forth through most of the story between the lives of two teenage girls who seemed to have nothing to do with one another whatsoever. Then slowly and inevitably I brought those two lives together
.

F
rom the corner of Broadway and Canal Street, SoHo Models looked like any other boutique modeling agency: the converted loft building; the flag with the agency logo billowing in the wind; the engraved brass plaque mounted above the intercom. Seeing all this, scores of would-be models rang the bell, proceeded to the elevator, and obeyed the sign that read,
ALL MODELS PLEASE REPORT DIRECTLY TO THE THIRD FLOOR
.

But once the elevator doors opened, the meticulously crafted illusion crumbled. There were no bookers working the phones. No photographers showing portfolios. Not even a dog-eared copy of
Vogue
.

Which isn’t to say there weren’t attractive girls. There were. Their names were scrawled in grease pencil on two large schedules opposite the reception desk:
HOT LIPS, POISON IVY, CANDY ASS
.

The girls worked in cubicles in an adjoining room. The 5-by-8-foot cells were just big enough to hold a twin bed, a wall-mounted Hi-8 video camera, a flat-panel screen, a keyboard, and a mouse. Somewhere in cyberspace, a prospective customer bought a block of time with a credit card, entered a chat room, selected a mate, and typed out instructions:

The girl in the cubicle read the instructions on her screen, complied, and tapped out a response:

Although SoHo Models was clearly no ordinary modeling agency, it had the potential to be an incredibly lucrative operation, with a projected annual gross of $3 million, or even $6 million. These fantastic figures ultimately proved meaningless. By the time SoHo Models closed its doors last in December of 2001, its cash flow had slowed to a trickle. One night before the end, only three of the twenty booths were occupied. Depeche Mode played as models sprawled on cheap mattresses, staring vacantly at their flat panels. From time to time they composed offers of companionship. Finally a reply came back from the ether:

Sex scandals have always plagued the modeling business. They’re usually fairly routine stuff: Milanese playboys booking talent for orgies at Lake Como, Parisian agents deflowering underage girls from the American heartland, coke-addled photographers demanding head for head shots.

But SoHo Models was something new—a fictitious agency used to recruit attractive young women for online porn. Even hardened veterans of the business were appalled. “This is the worst possible thing, because it undermines legitimate modeling agencies,” says
Robert J. Hantman, a Manhattan lawyer whose firm specializes in fashion-industry litigation. “It’s outrageous.”

Yet the names of fashion insiders who were deceived by SoHo Models, or willing to suspend disbelief, reads like the guest list for a Bryant Park runway show. This is a testament to the persuasive powers of Jason Itzler, 35, who got his start with a phone-sex service in Miami, then took aim at New York with SoHo Models. Armed with little more than the backing of two clueless investors from New Jersey, the lease on a soaring loft space in downtown Manhattan, and a bottomless capacity for generating hype, he succeeded beyond his most overheated fantasies. “I was surprised big-time,” Itzler says from the jail in Newark, New Jersey, where he has been held since August 2001. “I thought to myself, this is a field wide open to be taken over.”

In many ways, he was right. Itzler blew into town at a time when fashion was in a slump. Budgets were being slashed; modeling agencies were downsizing. The charismatic agents who had presided during the glamour years had left the stage, replaced by joyless money managers. “There aren’t too many personalities in the business since Eileen Ford and I and a few other characters left,” laments John Casablancas, retired president of Elite. “The modeling scene is kind of dull.”

Itzler saw it the same way, and he was determined to remedy the situation.

Jason Itzler didn’t start out as a flimflam man. He didn’t even start out as Jason Itzler. He was born Jason Sylk in 1967, a nice Jewish kid from a good Philadelphia family. His mother, Ronnie Lubell, was a dark-haired beauty from Queens and “a bit of a Jewish Mafia princess,” Itzler says. He claims she gave him everything: brains, looks, charm, even his taste in women. “My mother was absolutely
gorgeous” he says. “Growing up, everybody made comments about how they wanted to sleep with her. And if your mom happens to be drop-dead gorgeous and sexy, and you get comfortable interacting with that type of woman, those are the type of people you’re comfortable with.”

Itzler’s father, Lenny Sylk, is the son of the founder of the Sun Ray drugstore chain. The Sylks lived outside Philadelphia in a 120-year-old mansion with an eighteen-car garage, a helicopter pad, and maids and butlers who attended to domestic chores. But Ronnie and Lenny’s marriage had unraveled by Jason’s second birthday.

After the divorce, Lenny dropped out of the picture and Ronnie got custody of Jason. She moved back to New York, where she met and married a bankruptcy lawyer named Ron Itzler. A partner in the powerful Manhattan law firm Fishbein, Badillo, Wagner & Itzler, Ron raised Jason from then on. Jason would later acknowledge this by changing his name to Itzler.

Jason Itzler was shuttled through a series of exclusive private schools. The only thing he recalls about his early academic years is his celebrity classmates: Mira Sorvino (“tall with big boobies”) and Brooke Shields (“really pretty, classy, and elegant”). Curiously, though, he left them behind and graduated instead from a public high school in Tenafly, New Jersey. “I wanted to experience the real world,” he explains.

In 1985, Itzler enrolled at George Washington University. Born a Sylk, he had inherited expensive tastes. Now, living away from home for the first time, he felt liberated to indulge them—he drove a 280 ZX, appreciated fancy restaurants. To finance his lifestyle, Itzler says, he exploited the collegiate demographic in every way he could think of. He promoted fraternity keg parties and wet-T-shirt contests. He did a brisk business in fake IDs and scalped concert tickets. (“It was a little shady,” he admits.) And he dabbled in publishing. His most memorable title was
The World’s Greatest Pick-up Line
. Advertised in the back of
Rolling Stone
for $5, the book contained
exactly one page, printed with a fill-in-the-blank exercise:

“Do you know_______? Hi, I’m _______.”

After graduation, he bowed to pressure from his parents and went to law school. During his first year at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Itzler launched 1-900-REVENGE (“Press 1 for revenge on a wife. Press 2 for revenge on a teacher …”). The take—$5,000 a month—wasn’t much by the standards of an industry then at its peak, but it did give Itzler a vision of his future life. “My whole attitude was, anything’s easier than being a lawyer,” he says.

Soon after REVENGE folded, he was approached by an investor who wanted to start a 900 number offering legal advice. Itzler’s eyes glazed over. He countered with a proposal to do a sex line, something that had been percolating in his mind for months. His money-man acquiesced. Christened Boss Entertainment, this would be Itzler’s first big score.

What set Boss Entertainment apart from the competition were the ads, which ran in
Penthouse
and
Hustler
. Instead of listing the 900 number, Itzler promised a “free live call.” Prospective customers would dial a toll-free number and talk to a woman who pretended to be in the same town. After chatting up the lovesick chump for several minutes, she’d then ask him to call her back at a 900 number, where the meter would run at $5 a minute.

It was the first time anyone had used the “free live” rubric, an angle that made Itzler’s ads “fifty times more profitable than a standard 900-number ad,” according to one industry expert. Within sixty days, Boss Entertainment was grossing $600,000 a month. Although there were many larger players in the industry, Itzler, ever the self-promoter, declared that he was the “Phone-Sex King.” But just as Boss was hitting its stride, Itzler says, he was edged out of the business by his partner.

Itzler graduated from Nova in 1993 with a 2.03 grade point average. Since he had no intention of practicing law, he bypassed the
bar exam. (Still, a remarkable number of people seem to be under the impression that Jason is a lawyer, including, at times, Jason himself.) Instead, he would ask his stepfather to help stage his triumphant return to the phone-sex business. According to Jason, Ron Itzler told one of his bankruptcy clients, Mel Roslyn, about his son the phone-sex king, and Roslyn cut a check for $100,000. M2 Communications was launched in 1993, and within three years, Jason claims, it was grossing between $1.2 and $1.4 million a month.

As the money poured in, Jason Itzler gave his college sweetheart a six-carat heart-shaped engagement ring from Harry Winston. They flew to Las Vegas and were married at the Little White Chapel, but the union would last only nine months. Lenny Sylk blames his son for the breakup. “The first thing he did was get her a nose job,” Sylk says. “The second thing he did was get her a boob job. And then he made her crazy. We just felt bad for her, because she was such a lovely, sweet girl.” He sighs. “Jason’s a sick kid.”

To fill the void in his life, Itzler dated strippers, leased exotic sports cars (including a $400,000 Aston Martin Virage), gambled (blackjack at the Hard Rock Casino), shopped for real estate (a luxury high-rise apartment in the Oceania on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach). He says he was making $2 million to $3 million a year and spending half of it on “lifestyle.”

All true, says a former M2 employee: “Jason spent 80 to 100 grand a month on his Platinum Amex card alone. The kid would go into the Disney store and spend $13,000 on ceramic statues of the Seven Dwarfs. He’d spend $1,000 a night in strip clubs. His place in the Oceania was decorated with a waterfall and a smoke machine. It was like a Vegas show.” One friend who visited Itzler at the Oceania describes the decor as “early-nineties Miami coke den. There were low-rent models and blow everywhere.”

Women were a significant expense. For Itzler, there was no such thing as a cheap date. He showered them with gifts: Cristal champagne. Chanel frocks. Bulgari jewelry. Breasts. By one ex-girlfriend’s
estimate, Itzler referred at least ten girls a year to Lenny Roudner, a local plastic surgeon whose flair for breast implants has earned him the nickname “Dr. Boobner.” Itzler praises Roudner as an “amazing artist;” Roudner, returning the compliment, billed Itzler the preferred-customer rate, $3,500 a set.

During Itzler’s shopping spree, Mel Roslyn was told M2 hadn’t turned a profit yet. He was starting to wonder whether he would ever see a return on his $100,000 investment, so he did some investigating and discovered that M2 was a raging success. The silent partner suddenly became very vocal. He sued not only Ron Itzler but his law firm as well. Needless to say, the firm was not pleased that one of its partners was involved in a phone-sex service with a client, and Ron resigned.

The legal fees cut into M2’s profits, and that wasn’t the only drain. The company was bridging the gap between accounts payable and accounts receivable with loans that carried exorbitant interest rates—as high as 36 percent. Even with its torrential cash flow, M2 couldn’t keep up. Itzler lost the company and all his business assets, including his most prized possessions. Back when the Internet was still a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, Itzler had had his minions registering every dirty domain name they could think of. “He was a visionary in that respect,” one employee says. Now, with M2 in ruins, he had to give up the rights to
blowjobs.com
and
pussy.com
.

In 1997, Itzler left Miami, acutely depressed. Some time later, he turned up in New York and began to ponder his next move. He’d been toying with the idea of breaking into the Internet-sex business, selling video feed to online porn sites. All you needed were naked girls, web cams, and a T1 line. And the field had its perks. While
operators at 900 lines were hired for their voices, not their bodies, Internet-sex girls were hot.

Itzler, who estimated he’d need at least $250,000 to get his cybersex company up and running, somehow persuaded his stepfather to find new investors. Ron Itzler thought of Fred Baum, a 49-year-old housing developer with a Ferrari collection and a short temper. Baum thought Jason was obnoxious as hell, possibly even a little crazy. But he was willing to make allowances because he was convinced that the young man was a computer-savvy marketing genius who was going to make him absurdly wealthy.

Baum was so certain of this that he called his longtime friend and business partner Bruce Glasser. Glasser made a good living in textiles, but like Baum, he’d always been receptive to investment opportunities that provided an escape from his more mundane ventures. This one certainly fit the bill.

Contracts were drawn up. For this new venture, to be called Baum Multimedia, Glasser fronted $100,000 (a loan, he says); Baum put up $150,000. Company documents indicate that each of the three men owned a third of the business. Glasser, however, now claims that he and Itzler were consultants and only owned options; Baum, he says, was the sole proprietor.

Itzler set out to secure a suitable location. By late 2000, he’d found just the thing in a landmark cast-iron building at 415 Broadway. The third-floor space covered 7,000 square feet, featured majestic fifteen-foot ceilings, and was drenched in sunlight. (“The space gave the project instant credibility,” says Richard Renda, a stylist and video producer who worked briefly at SoHo Models. “It’s what got me and a lot of other people interested and excited.”)

The loft was so grand that it seemed a shame to use it for nothing more than porn. A streaming-video business, after all, could get along just fine in a basement. Then Itzler had a vision. Since beautiful
women draw more customers, why not create a phony modeling agency and use it to attract a superior grade of prospective talent? Glasser objected that the models would flee for their lives once they learned they were being hired to masturbate in front of a web cam. “Not if we tell them they can make $5,000 a week,” Itzler countered.