Call Girl Confidential (18 page)

Oh, God! I had wires running up to my breasts! I had a device on! I was dead! My mind raced. Should I tell them I was having my period? That I felt the flu coming on?

“Oh, Donald, there's
nothing
I'd love to do more,” I said, reaching over and running my hand up his thigh. “But I have to go pick up Isabella early from school for her doctor's appointment.” Donald was one of the few clients who knew I had a daughter.

“Can't her nanny do that?” Anna practically spit out.

“I
always
accompany her to her pediatrician, Anna, as I'm sure you do with your children,” I said as I slowly started to rise and back out towards the door. “Let's set up a time so I can give you the proper attention you deserve.”

“It doesn't have to be a long marathon,” Donald pleaded in a last-ditch effort to get me to stay.

I unlocked the door, and they started to rise as Anna said, “Ashley, wait!”

I just yelled, “Gotta go!” from the hallway and I noticed my voice sounded unnaturally high.

All I could think about was getting to that van and getting that wire off, going downtown, being debriefed, and being taken
home. I could barely breathe. This time was different. I knew if Anna and Donald had realized what I had been doing—well, I couldn't think about what would have happened. All I knew was that no one, no matter what they said, could have gotten to me quickly enough inside that apartment.

T
he investigators offered to drive me home, but I insisted on going alone. I had to get out of there and away from them. I called my sister as soon as I turned the corner.

“Hey. It's Rebecca.”

“I know. How are you doing? How is Isabella?” she asked.

“She's fine, but I'm not doing too well. I wish I could come down there.”

Bridget was silent.

“I just want this all to end.”

“Rebecca, what did you think would happen when you got yourself wrapped up in that business?”

“I know, I know. I was just doing it for Isabella . . .”

“Remember the song, ‘It's a long old road, but I'm gonna find the end.'  ”

“I hope so, Bridget. I . . . I just wanted to hear your voice. I needed to hear it. Tell me I'm going to be OK. I'm so scared.”

“You are going to be OK. You are strong. And Isabella needs you. You told the truth, and that's all that matters. Be proud of that. OK? Keep me apprised of your situation. I need to know you are safe. Maybe we'll see you at Christmas?”

“OK. Sounds good. I love you.”

“I love you too. Give Isabella hugs and kisses.”

I
couldn't even speak with my sister about what I was going through. I had to think for myself. And I decided that I was done with this. I didn't want any part of this any longer. There had been too many close calls. The more I gave the prosecutors, the more they wanted. They did not seem to care about me at all.

One day the detectives brought me down to Corruption and into the ADA's conference room, and the ADA started to say, “OK, next we want you to . . .” There was something presumptuous about his tone. He didn't ask me. He was telling me. I had been doing this for about two years now, and I had had enough.

I said “No” before he had even finished.

“What do you mean, ‘No'?'  ” he asked, startled. The other ADA and the investigators fairly whipped their heads in his direction.

“I think I need an attorney and I need protection,” I said. “I've never been charged with anything, and you've been putting me into risky situations, including during client sessions, for too long.”

The ADA stared at me, and his face was turning red. His visions of being the golden boy who brought down Manhattan's biggest madam were evaporating because I was going to lawyer up. Perhaps he should have treated me better.

“You can hire one,” he blurted out.

“No, I have a right to a public defender,” I said, looking him right in the eye. “And you're going to get me one.”

He stormed out of the room and, for all I know, out of the Manhattan district attorney's office. I never heard from him again.

I was still working for Anna as if nothing had happened. Unless somebody suddenly wanted to give me an investment banking job, there was no way I could make that kind of money for my fight, which raged on in Family Court. I continued to have supervised visits with my daughter. I could focus on school again, and my grades were improving. I was returning to normal. I felt I had gotten my life back.

And then, eleven months later, I received a call from the new ADA on the case. They had not given up on bringing Anna down. My whole feeling of well-being instantly collapsed. Why? Why were they doing this? Weren't there terrorists and murderers and Wall Street cheats to go after? What did Anna Gristina do, really? Facilitate paid sex between consenting adults? As they say in Nevada, where prostitution is legal: “If it doesn't scare the horses, who cares?”

The ADA told me I had to come back down to Corruption headquarters.

“I'm not coming in,” I said, “until I have an attorney.”

“No problem,” he said. He soon arranged for the court to assign me a lawyer named Seema Iyer. Seema called me and we met in her office, where I sat and told her my entire story. She was flabbergasted. She knew the first ADA well, and couldn't believe how he had treated me.

She made big trouble and said I could bring a lawsuit against the city if I wanted to.

The new ADA said that all the work I did under the first ADA was thrown out, because it would be inadmissible in court. I was given all this information from my attorney, who had a
conversation with him. I never went in to speak with him or meet him. My attorney completely shielded me from that office. It was a different experience from what I had gone through on my own prior to that. What's more, the new ADA told me that many documents were missing, including some of mine. I would have to start all over again, he said.

“In fact, Ms. Kade, we have evidence now to charge you on three different counts of prostitution and could do so at anytime,” the ADA said. It was blackmail. I felt like he was trying to intimidate me into going back to work for them under these threats. I stood my ground.

“You could plead to a lesser charge,” my lawyer told me.

“I'm not pleading to crap!” I yelled.

I had made copies of every letter, kept the statements of every fake bank account, saved every e-mail with instructions from the DA's office. (And still have them.) Not only that, but even as they were putting wires on me, I had been recording
them.
That's right: I had recorded the proceedings of every meeting and phone call on my little recorder. My job was done: if they'd messed up, they could find a new girl to risk her life for them. I would fight them, and my attorney was ready.

So they simply took her off my case. They assigned me a new public defender. It was all perfectly legal. And he happened to have worked in the DA's office prior to going into private practice. He didn't pursue any action against them, but the message had been sent. No one ever threatened me with charges again; in fact, I didn't hear from this ADA again.

O
n July 19, 2011, Anna was having lunch with a wealthy man she had recently met, along with Jaynie Mae Baker, an alluring toffee-haired thirty-year-old. Jaynie Mae had once donned a bikini and a studded stretch halter with choker collar as a World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Raw Diva Search finalist, telling judges she was a “saucy little sushi roll.” She was pretty and slender enough to work for Anna as an escort, but she didn't, as far as I knew. I never worked with her, anyway.

Jaynie Mae had a wealthy boyfriend, Wall Street investment banker Marcus Laun. And she had seen how much money there was to be made with a business like VIP Life, where she
was the recruiting director. Like Anna, VIP Life founder Lisa Clampitt hooked up wealthy men with “beautiful and sophisticated” young women—for a hefty fee. But what Clampitt does is completely aboveboard in the eyes of the law: it's a relationship matchmaking service, Clampitt says on her VIP Life website, between “beautiful, sophisticated women” and men “who have all achieved professional success: physicians, attorneys, CEOs, entertainment industry professionals, etc., with quality lifestyles.” Women pay nothing; men pay a large fee to date them—enough so that Clampitt allows only thirty men to be part of her service at any one time. Whether they have sex is their business; Clampitt's already been paid just for the introduction.

Anna wanted in on a business like this, without all the complications and risk of prostitution. Who knew how to cater to the desires of wealthy men better than she? Anna wanted to go legit, and Jaynie Mae knew the, um, ins and outs. They would be partners, and their luncheon companion was a potential investor.

Or so they thought. Today, Jaynie Mae's luncheon partner was interested in something else: a ménage a trois. “I'm looking for a little adventure,” he said coyly. “Please corrupt me.”

Jaynie Mae wasn't into that, but Anna could connect him with two young women who'd be only too happy to oblige: elegant blue-eyed brunette Catherine DeVries, and a blond design student from Birmingham, England, with a Scottish first name: Mhairiangela “Maz” Bottone. How much? Two for the price of one: $2,000 in cash for one hour. An appointment was set six days later at the apartment Anna kept for such purposes in an unassuming five-story brick building at 304 East Seventy-Eighth Street.

Catherine and Maz were there waiting for their gentleman
caller when he arrived on the dot. The threesome repaired to the bedroom. The girls stripped down to their lingerie, but the businessman settled into an easy chair at the foot of the bed and started telling them what to do. He just wanted to watch, he said. His requests got dirtier and dirtier, and finally the hour was up and they were finished. The voyeur handed the naked women $2,000. I don't know if his thank-you was recorded by the video camera, which caught the whole show. But his entire conversation at lunch with Anna and Jaynie Mae was. The “businessman” was a cop.

But Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. didn't have DeVries and Bottone arrested until seven months later. He didn't want to tip off Anna, who was a Scotland native with an apartment in Canada and possible millions at her disposal and therefore a flight risk. After five years he wanted the case to be rock-solid.

Vance had just taken office the year before, after DA Robert Morgenthau retired in 2009. Morgenthau had anointed Vance, the son of JFK's secretary of the Army and Jimmy Carter's secretary of state but who had established a career out of his father's shadow in Seattle, with his endorsement. Vance won in a landslide with 91 percent of the vote, and he set about doing things differently.

Vance had two new no-nonsense prosecutors on the Anna Gristina case: ADA Charles (Charlie) Linehan and ADA Elizabeth Roper. They both had reputations for being tough and following the straight and narrow. When they were brought in on the case, at some point Charlie called me and asked if I would come in so he could speak with me. I was so sad. I thought this Anna stuff was over. He promised that he only wanted to talk and
we agreed that because it was merely a conversation, a lawyer was not needed on my part. He kept his end of the deal. At least the rogue behavior of past ADAs was over. Linehan wasn't even having any of the hooker jokes one particular detective used to crack in my presence. This grinning jackass seemed to have an unlimited store of jokes with “ho” in the punch line. He tried it once, and Charlie shot him a look that ended them once and for all. Charlie seemed like he would be more protective of me than his predecessors.

Anna and Jaynie Mae went on to meet and plan their venture, unaware that they were being watched. In October they co-hosted a benefit for the Shelby Shelter, an Allen, Texas, pet-rescue outfit run by Jaynie Mae's equally pretty sister Jessica. They held it at the West Village nightclub 49 Grove, owned by lady-loving Hamptons restaurateur Aram Sabet. Whether Anna genuinely loved animals or whether she needed a “gentleman farmer” tax break, she took in rescued dogs and potbellied pigs at her two-hundred-acre spread in Monroe, New York, in upstate Orange County. This was up her alley, and she and Jaynie Mae jointly publicized it on Facebook.

Anna was becoming increasingly paranoid. I hadn't been working for her for a while, but she called me and asked me to see an old client. I agreed because I knew he was safe and I wouldn't be arrested, and also I felt it was her way of checking to see if she could trust me. My rationale was if I took the job, she would not think I had any connection to law enforcement. What's more, I was going to be with what I called a no-sex client and a big tipper, so I gave in.

Anna also asked me to check the East Seventy-Eighth Street apartment for a plumbing problem, and when I got there she
was inside. I was startled and a little nervous, wondering if it was a setup. But Anna had simply forgotten that she had asked me to check it, which wasn't like her—she was usually so on top of things. Anna looked totally freaked out. She was either wearing a wig or had gotten her hair cut short and dyed. She was in sweats and a hoodie, which she had pulled over her head even inside the apartment, and there was also a man with her I had never seen before. I think the detectives watching her knew they'd have to make their move soon, before she fled to her place in Montreal.

Meanwhile Jonas Gayer, known as “John Doe,” was talking like a tattletale. He even gave my name up. Anna, who had in the past been so careful, and Jaynie Mae had not so brilliantly friended Jonas on Facebook and Twitter. When the
New York Post
asked him about that later, Jonas was so loquacious, he volunteered that he knew Anna through “a mutual friend . . . Bruno Jamais . . . a restaurant owner.” I'm sure the famous chi-chi chef of the Restaurant Club appreciated that little advertisement.