Call Girl Confidential Read online

  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.

  THIRTEEN

  my life as a confidential informant begins

  The 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.”

  Wait, I thought. Isn’t that the job of an undercover cop? Like on TV, when a beautiful young female cop only pretends to go work for an escort service? How the hell would I pull that off  ? I was terrified. They made it seem as if I had a choice. But I didn’t.

  I couldn’t fathom how a wiretap would work. First of all, there was the matter of Anna’s preference for texts over phone calls. She changed her phone numbers constantly, and if she ever did call you, it would usually be brief and to the point. But the investigators had a lot of specific questions they wanted me to ask her that would lead to her arrest and conviction. It was true that Anna had started to open up to me. She would call me from her farm upstate to book a high-level client, and we’d end up having long, friendly conversations. But how was I going to suddenly ask her Law & Order–type questions in the middle of a gal-pal chat? Not to mention that, while alone at my house, I would have to manage outdated tape recorders, the only equipment the technical department had after years of city budgetary cutbacks.

  The prosecutors wanted me to record Anna talking all about her clients, her girls, how she ran the business, the law enforcement connections she boasted about, and what she had done about the child predator’s request.

  I was scared. Anna is your best friend when you’re on her good side, but she will slit your throat if you cross her.

  What’s more, Anna had become increasingly cautious, even paranoid, ever since Andreia Schwartz had been deported. Andreia, a pretty Brazilian escort turned madam who had worked at the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. agency with Eliot Spitzer’s call girl Ashley Dupré, had been deported in March 2008 after serving eighteen months in prison. Spitzer’s use of escorts, uncovered by the FBI, had led to the sweep by the Manhattan DA that brought down Kristin. Andreia would end up serving time in a predominantly male sex offenders’ unit on Rikers Island and forfeit half a million dollars after pleading guilty to promoting prostitution, a class D felony, in October 2008. (Cecil Suwal owned Emperor’s Club V.I.P. with her boyfriend, Mark Brener, forty years her senior. It was the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. listing of my client Eliot Spitzer as their Client No. 9 that led to the New York governor’s resignation.) Anna believed that Andreia had informed on her, and now she was keeping a low profile by isolating herself on her upstate farm. It would be too suspicious for me to visit her there.

  “We’ll have to try wiretapping a phone call,” said Morgenthau’s assistant district attorney on the case (and the first of several handlers I would work with).

  They set up a wiretap on my phone, the one on which Anna always called to do business or just to chat. I would have to use every skill set I had to elicit the kind of information the ADA wanted in the middle of a girlfriend-to-girlfriend call.

  The other form of communication that Anna was using was Skype. She found it useful because it couldn’t be traced and was completely
safe—or so she thought. It would be extra tricky for me because Skype calls are video chats, so she could see everything I was doing.

  One of the first conversations I had with Anna was in early April of 2008. It was the call I was waiting for: Kristin had just been arrested, and Anna wanted to check in and make sure I was OK. I was in my bedroom doing homework in my yoga clothes when the phone rang and I saw her personal number pop up. I froze, but then sprang into action. I’d attached the wires to each connector of my cell phone and left them that way when I was at home so I would never miss a word. My heart pounding, I pushed RECORD on the equipment, put the earpiece in my ear, and laid out the ADA’s talking points in front of me. My life as a confidential informant had begun.

  FOURTEEN

  recording the “soccer mom madam”

  I was so nervous, I could barely say “Hello.”

  Anna was nervous, too, but not about talking to me. She was in freak-out mode, as all the high-level madams and pimps in town were getting busted, one by one. She was furious at the thought that someone might have turned on her. The conversation I recorded went like this:

  A: I have good news. I’m not on any “stop-and-hold” list. I’m not on any federal list or any state list. I had my friend at Customs run my name on the computer. I had them run my green card number, my passport number, and everything. That means I can come and go. But still, do you ever get the harrowing feeling something’s not right?

  I couldn’t believe she said that while I was wiretapping her. If I wasn’t so nervous, I might have burst out laughing.

  R: Right now, I get that all the time.

  A: Seriously! I woke up in the middle of the night with my heart pounding. And I don’t know why. I woke my husband up. I just get this feeling that I need to leave town and be gone for a little while. I said, “Something’s going down.” I said, “I can’t tell you how I know that.”

  That little cunt Andreia Schwartz is the reason Kristin and all these places got busted. Kristin’s name was on the list. My name, as Anna Scotland, was on the list. She didn’t have my real name.

  R: The Kristin I know?

  A: Yes. The Brazilian worked for Kristin also. Yes, she did. So her and I got into a squabble. I was at the top of her You’re-fucked list.

  Now, a good friend of mine who is at the precinct in New Jersey, the FBI holding center, where they do interrogation and federal stuff—where Schwartz was being held the last week of her stay in the U.S. . . . that friend of mine, let’s just say his brother has been on the force for thirty years and he’s one of the head guys in the FBI down in Jersey. Get my drift? He just registered “Anna Scotland,” and I had told my friend that I was in a fight with this girl, so he knew my name. He didn’t know my last name. He hired a PI called Vincent Parco, who’s a motherfucker. He tracked me down through an old medical insurance card I used to have years ago to a PO box. I don’t have one piece of mail or one bill come to my location of residence. I’ve always looked over my shoulder because I always knew. You know what I mean?

  You’re going to ask me, well, how did he get my name? Well, I’m going to tell you how he got my real name: that motherfucker attorney, Brian O’Malley,1 who represents all madams and hookers in New York. He was one of my clients in a free fucking service, and then this whole thing happened and he tried to shake me down. I said, “What were you seeing? A girl from me every week. Or every two weeks. You were there for two hours. It cost me $800. Now you want to milk me? You want $4,000 to make this thing go away? No, no, no.” I think I was right, don’t you?

  R: Absolutely!

  A: So, guess what? That motherfucker turned in my name and telephone number. And they tracked it to my billing address. That’s how they got my PO box. Then they had my real name. They were able to track my Social Security number through my medical insurance.

  R: You’re a citizen?

  A: Yeah, I’m legal here. I’m American and British, honey. I’ve got two passports. I’ve always had that. I’m 100 percent legal. I pay taxes. I do the whole thing.

  Anyway, the reason I knew it was Brian O’Malley is because I found out through a friend of mine who works at the New York Post that Brian O’Malley was representing this girl called Julia, and Julia was part of the case with Andreia Schwartz. I put one and one together and got two. Parco has the spelling of my name wrong, but he knows where my PO box is. That’s the only information Brian had. And the way that Brian has continued to spell my name wrong was the way Parco spelled it when he sent a [false] letter. You know what I mean? You know when you just get a feeling?

  I managed to blurt out “Uh-huh!” Anna’s instincts were better than good—she didn’t know how good.

  What became interesting to me later was that Anna hired Vincent Parco—the private eye she had called a “motherfucker” in this phone call—to help her during her own trial in 2012. Maybe she thought Parco had just been doing his job—and a good one at that. She was more furious with her lawyer, an apparent sex-business litigator who felt he could improve his expertise with in-depth research in the field. But in the rest of the call, she revealed the tough side of herself that hardly jibes with the warm-and-fuzzy soccer mom image she projected during her trial:

  A: This Brian O’Malley is going to get so fucked. I’ve got credit cards, the receipts that link him to Las Vegas. I’ve got girls who I know for a fact would come forward. At least three girls from Vegas who would say, “That motherfucker, this is what he did.” I just don’t want to make enemies. But I know that it’s because of [him]. He represents anything hooker related: massage parlors, escorts, hookers on the street, anything to do with girls in the industry. He was with Julia’s case, and that was tied to Andreia Schwartz. And all of a sudden Vincent Parco has my address. Isn’t that just convenient?

  Anna was implying here that her lawyer had given prosecutors her name in exchange for leniency for his client, Julia, after Anna balked at his bill after years of providing him with hooker services for free.

  I couldn’t believe she was chatting on about all this as the tape rolled. I felt a twinge of guilt, but I struggled to keep my focus.

  A: That’s OK. You know what I did? I sicced the media on him. [Laughs.] A reporter showed up at his office and said, “I hear that you are actually a client and you’re a ‘friend with benefits’ with many of the madams.” He denied it.

  But I will get him for this. Revenge is a dish best served cold. This Brazilian girl has made a big hassle in my life. But I understand she really thought I had something to do with [her arrest]. I probably would have done the same thing if I were her. I feel bad for her, to be honest. I don’t even dislike her. I hope she moves on with her life and learns from this.

  But Brian O’Malley? He was my attorney. I paid him great money. He saw girls through me at no cost, out of my pocket. Then the motherfucker handed my name over to a private investigator on another case he was working on? Is that ethical?

  R: How could he do that?

  A: Because he was making money from the other case.

  R: That was really dumb on his part.

  A: It was never enough for Brian. I paid for his air ticket. He got a VIP suite in the Harrah’s hotel [in Las Vegas], all on my credit card. He’s forgetting that. It will come back. You just have to trust me. Things always come back. I don’t even really care. I just want to have a peaceful life. I’m out of it now.

  Brian O’Malley knew [my name and address]. He met my husband ’cause he did some work for my husband. Incorporation papers and stuff. ’Cause my husband had his own business. He went to lunch with my husband. My husband made the mistake of saying, “My brother is high up in law enforcement.” He is . . . He’s one of the head investigators. Get my drift? [Brian] told that to Parco; Parco told it to the FBI months ago when that cunt [Andreia Schwartz] was giving out names. My name came up.

  The FBI agent told my guy, “You need to tell your Scottish friend she needs to leave town for quite a while.” Get my drift? T
he next day my brother-in-law called my husband from a pay phone. He said, “I was watching the news the other night and a lot of things are going on in the industry. Your wife’s out of town, right?” Get my drift? He [Anna’s husband, Kelvin Gorr] goes, “Yeah, the strangest thing, there’s been a Crown Victoria car that’s been sitting at the end of my road for the last day and a half. It’s got New Jersey plates. The plates have a funny bogus name that’s federal. That’s how they do it, right?”

  My husband’s other brother has been in the sheriff’s department for, like, fourteen years. He’s the captain. He doesn’t even know what I do for a living. Nothing. My two brothers-in-law were speaking. One says, “I have this Crown Victoria.” He says, “That’s funny, I have one too.” That’s when we ran the plates [of the car in her driveway] and discovered they were federal, [headquartered] out of New Jersey. It was registered to the bogus company that the feds register cars to. My brother-in-law—the one that knows a little bit about what I do—was perplexed. He says to my husband, “You know, it’s a good time to migrate. I hear the birds are flying, because there’s going to be singing soon. Spring is coming.” You get my drift? You get the conversation, right? The next thing you know, my husband came home with a note. He didn’t even talk. He said, “Time to go. Now.” I had had that feeling the night before. My husband had said it was crazy. Now I had fifteen minutes to pack my bags, grab my dog, and get the fuck out of the house. I didn’t even have contact lenses with me. I had four pairs of underwear that my dog shredded. Every time I jump in the shower—I do it every time—don’t you leave your underwear on the bathroom floor and pick them up when you come out? Well, my dog shreds them. You can use them as dental floss.

  So I get up [to Montreal]. My husband, I call him a couple of days later. He says, “How are you enjoying where you are?” I said, “Uh, I’m not.” He says, “Well, you’d better start to like it.”