Call Girl Confidential (11 page)

Once, Edward was on his way to Japan from London for a meeting and had his assistant book me at the Conrad in Tokyo for two nights. He said he'd be very busy during the day and that I could do whatever I wanted.

The only expectation was that I'd be available for a certain period of time in the evening for an hour or two, maximum. We set up an approved time.

I had a suite. The view of Tokyo was spectacular. The
bathroom floor was heated. I waited there, and he finally called in the wee hours. I said, “Too bad, you missed your window.” I was in charge in this particular relationship, and that's what he paid for. He had to obey. Don't be surprised. I've found that guys who have a lot of power they feel they don't deserve often want to be dominated. Sometimes he'd get scared about what he asked for. He was a very tormented guy. He apologized profusely and said he'd see me the next night.

I woke up early in the morning and took one of those silly bus tours. I hooked up with a group from Wisconsin. But I jumped off at Takeshita-dori, the home of teenage Harajuku fashion, to pick up some things for Isabella. Edward always said that anytime I went somewhere as his guest I could go shopping and get anything I wanted and just give him the receipts. So I headed to Omotesando, Tokyo's Fifth Avenue, and bought myself a peacock-colored pearl necklace scattered with diamonds. Why not?

I went back to the hotel, and he did come over that evening. I had packed certain sex toys that he had asked me to purchase. I followed his instructions for our Tokyo encounter. One of the first things I did was tie his wrists to the headboard. Then I put tiny clothespins around the rim of his penis. The more aroused he got, the more I punished him. That's what he liked. That's what he paid me $25,000 for.

But then, after two years of sessions like this, during which I never balked at his stranger and stranger requests, he asked me something that turned my stomach. “Ashley,” he said, “would you be able to get me a young boy?”

“
What?
” I cried. “Absolutely not! You disgust me!” I grabbed my things to leave. “And you can forget about seeing me ever again!”

“Ashley, wait!” he said, and started to cry like a baby.

“Get the hell away from me and get yourself some help,” I said as I ran out, checked out, and headed to the airport. It took me the whole flight back to recover. I worried: Would Anna acquiesce to his request?

A
little over a year went by and I still had not won custody of Isabella. The case dragged on. I could tell during court appearances that Mike was tiring of the battle—or, more likely, the expense of the battle. We were both paying thousands of dollars a month in legal bills.

Just as I began to get more unsupervised time with Isabella in my custody fight, just as I was carving out an identity as a PTA leader, my world came crashing down. The investigators for then Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau found me as soon as Kristin was busted. They didn't arrest me, but I was called in for questioning to One Hogan Place, the DA's
headquarters at the state criminal courthouse. Nobody told me to bring a lawyer. I took the subway downtown and had plenty of time on the journey to contemplate my imminent loss of freedom and, worse, my daughter. I was a nervous wreck when I arrived. Would I be arrested now? Prostitution is a class B misdemeanor in New York State: I could get three months in jail! My custody battle for Isabella would be lost.

I went through the metal detectors and up to a dreary floor lined with green and gray metal filing cabinets right out of a forties noir film. It looked as if they hadn't bought a new desk in decades. I was led into a room with a plain gray metal table, a few raggedy chairs, and a horrific fluorescent light overhead.

Two men came in, and one sat at the table in front of me. “Miss Kade,” said one. “I am Assistant District Attorney Artie McConnell, and this is . . .” My mind went on overbuzz at the words “assistant district attorney” and I didn't even catch the other man's name. He looked like he'd graduated law school the week before and appeared to be less important, as he sat on the side of the room and not at the table where Mr. McConnell and I were sitting facing one another.

“Ms. Kade, we have asked you to come in today because we would like to discuss a few things with you regarding your relationship with Kristin Davis. As you are probably aware, she was arrested recently, and we are prosecuting her on several charges and talking to people who knew her. Your name has come up, but we anticipate this to be a relatively short interview. I have a document here for you to sign. It is a debriefing agreement, and it merely states that you are free to leave at any time and that statements you make during this interview could be used in a future prosecution. However, any statement you make today cannot
be used to prosecute you in the future.” I signed the document, but to be honest, I didn't have a clue what he had just said or what that document was supposed to mean to me. I just heard my sister's voice saying
Tell the truth,
and that was what I was going to do.

Mr. McConnell and his assistant started interrogating me.

Had I worked as an escort for Kristin Davis?

“Yes.” They obviously knew I had or I wouldn't be there.

“Have you worked for anyone else, and if so, who?” McConnell asked.

“Ummm, a company called Classic Affairs,” I answered hesitantly.

“God, these names are so clichéd. Who runs it?”

I stalled. “A woman . . . named Anna.” I did not want to answer that question. I thought this was going to be purely about Kristin! Now I would be implicating myself with another madam? He put his pen down, and he and the other man looked at each other and nodded.

“Will you excuse us for a minute?” McConnell said, and they both walked out of the room and shut the door. That was it? They had only asked me a couple of questions, and the tone in the room had completely changed. After a few minutes they came back in. “We're going to have to transfer you to another location, Ms. Kade,” said McConnell.

“You can't be here anymore,” he said sternly as he shut the door behind him so no one could see inside the room.

“Why?” I asked.

“We'll have to explain that to you later,” he said. “We're going to have some people escort you out of the building to an unmarked car. We will make sure you will be covered so no
one can see you leaving the building. We're taking you to a safer location.”

“
What? Why?
” I sputtered.

“They'll explain it when you get there. Come on,” he said, taking my arm.

“No!” I said, pulling back. “I'm not going anywhere until I know what's going on and someone in my family knows where I'm going.”

I called my sister and gave her a quick rundown of where I was and that I was going to another location. I told her I had a signed document giving me rights that I would mail to her as we were leaving the building. I didn't trust these guys, and I felt uncomfortable having paperwork like that in my apartment. She instructed me again to tell the truth.

After a few minutes, three big guys with gold detectives' badges on thin metal chains hanging around their necks came in and said my time was up on the phone.

“OK, Bridget, I have to go,” I said. “You should hear from me tonight. If you don't, you know something went wrong.” I was thinking,
This is ridiculous. What is going on? Why are they being so dramatic?
I felt as if I were being pulled into a movie.

“You have to come with us now,” said the biggest of the cops. They slipped a lanyard with an orange ID card on it around my neck. Then they threw my coat over my head and led me past the old green metal filing cabinets down a dingy hallway to an elevator bank, then down and out the side door of the courthouse. They had me surrounded, my coat still over my head. They put me in the back of a car, one cop on either side, and we sped off. I was terrified.

In the unmarked car, they took my coat off my head. I wasn't
handcuffed. I asked right then and there, “Am I being arrested?” They assured me that I was not—in fact, far from it. They said that I wasn't safe in that building. They said it was very possible that I had important information they had been looking for in an investigation, and that there were concerns that there might be a leak or mole in their own office. They wanted to get me out before anyone knew I was there. I never saw ADA McConnell again.

It's very possible that someone in the district attorney's office had been warning Anna as they cracked down on other madams and pimps. Maybe someone there was a client. I don't know what the explanation was, but somehow Anna had gone unscathed.

I was more confused than ever. What the hell did I know that was so damn important that they had to cover my head with my coat, throw me in the back of a car, and speed off from the Manhattan district attorney's office to some secret location?
This has to be a joke,
I thought. The only problem was, I didn't know any of these people, so why would they want to play a joke on me? The driver cruised past the Metropolitan Correctional Center and then we were navigating the streets of Chinatown, past barkers on Canal Street who were openly bringing tourists into rooms behind false walls in their shops to buy counterfeit watches and purses as the cops cruised by. The vegetable stands disappeared, and soon we passed luxury leather goods boutiques and galleries as we drove farther down the cobblestone streets of SoHo. Were we headed to another precinct? Suddenly, in the middle of SoHo, we stopped in front of an old converted warehouse, got out, and took the renovated elevator upstairs into a gigantic, light-filled loft. No old metal filing cabinets there. I learned later that it had
been seized from a drug dealer and was now a secret special investigations headquarters.

“Where am I?” I demanded after they took me into a cramped office.

“You are in the Official Corruption Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney's Office,” said one investigator. “You mentioned a person who we have been investigating for quite some time: Anna. Can you tell us anything about her?”

I knew I had valuable information. I was one of the few girls Anna had allowed to get close to her. But I didn't want to talk about her, and I certainly wasn't about to name clients. Not only had these men kept me afloat, but I was terrified that Anna would find out and come after me. As scared as I was of being arrested, tried, and jailed, I still was not prepared to give them clients' names.

The investigators asked me questions about the business. How was I paid? Did I work over state lines? Did I work internationally? Was drug dealing involved?

“Why should I tell you anything?” I demanded. “She's your best friend if you're nice to her, but if you cross her, she's a killer. Just ask Jason Itzler.”

Itzler was the self-styled “King of All Pimps,” who once had Ashley Alexandra Dupré, the girl who brought down Eliot Spitzer, working at his agency, New York Confidential. Itzler claimed that Gristina had sent three thugs, one of them armed, to threaten him and scare girls out of working for him instead of her. Itzler would later tell a New York tabloid, “She's the most vindictive bitch in the escorting game. Dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.”

“Well, Ms. Kade, we already have evidence that you worked
as a prostitute through your connection with Kristin Davis. If we prosecute you and you are convicted, you could get a jail sentence.”

I'd never get Isabella back if that happened. So I made my decision—one that would determine the next four years of my life.

T
he Manhattan district attorney's investigators already knew that Anna regularly boasted that she had law enforcement connections. Sultry Irma Nici, who claimed to have had sex with David Beckham and who'd worked for Anna for six months, had already told prosecutors as much.

That's part of what kept Anna in business so long, some surmised, and that's why the Official Corruption Unit, rather than the Sex Crimes Unit—the one once headed by the famous prosecutor turned mystery writer Linda Fairstein—was in charge of the investigation.

The investigators asked me more questions that day, and the
next. They showed me a lot of surveillance photos to see if I could ID anyone. This went on for days, then weeks. They would drive me home at the end of the day, then pick me up first thing the next morning to be interrogated again.

I was missing so much school that they had to write me an excuse, like in high school: “Miss Kade was witness to a serious crime in the recent past,” they wrote. “She [has had to] report to our office. . . . These duties consumed a great deal of Ms. Kade's time.”

I was missing school by day, but by night I was still working for Anna. I was still working as an escort, and the prosecutors knew it.

“What is Anna's last name?” the ADA grilled me.

“Who knows what her real name is?” I answered. “She's gone by Anna Tennant,
Anna Gristina, Anna Scotland. She was born in Scotland; I doubt that name's real.”

It was clear to me that the investigators had very little information on Anna, and they pumped me for as much as they could. I told them what I knew about the business, the key players, but I did not give up clients' names. They pressured me with photo lineups, and it was when I saw the photo of Edward—my pedophile client—that I had a breakdown in their office. Just seeing his face caught me off guard, and I cried hysterically. Feeling somewhat relieved, I revealed the truth about him.

“Ms. Kade, we want you to do something for us,” one of the prosecutors told me after weeks of questioning.

“What more do you want?” I practically cried in exasperation.

“We want you to start recording your conversations with Anna Gristina,” he said. “We want you to gather some evidence for us.”