The $2,000 an-Hour Woman: part three

Yes, he sold the shit out of me, but he sold me as myself, someone who really likes sex. Because the truth is, I do. I loved my job, totally.

Suffice it to say, it’s in the pheromones. According to Natalia, she’s always gotten along with men. “Jason understood who I was,” she says. “Yes, he sold the shit out of me, but he sold me as myself, someone anyone can be comfortable with, someone who really likes sex. Because the truth is, I do. I loved my job, totally.” It is another old story, along with the heart of gold, that many “providers” actually like what they do. But even if she professes to be “horrified” by stories about sexual trafficking and “sickened” by nightmarish exploitation of the street prostitute, Natalia says, “At the level NY Confidential was at, the guys I was meeting, I would have gone out with 80 percent of them anyway. People have so many misconceptions, preconceptions, about my life. Last year, I got a call to play an escort in a Broadway play. But the part was so dark, so icky. I said no. It didn’t fit my experience at all.”
You never knew who might be behind the hotel door. Once, she was summoned to a guy’s room, told only that he was a famous, championship athlete. “I’m not a big sports fan, but I recognized him, the quarterback. He turned out to be very laid-back. He mostly wanted to make me happy. In the middle, he looks up and says, ‘Well, you know me, I’m more of a giver than a receiver.’ ”
What no one could have predicted, least of all Natalia, was how driven she would be. “I knew she was talented,” Jason says. “But once she started going, she was unstoppable, like the Terminator.”

A glance at Natalia’s booking sheets raises an eyebrow. Annotated with Jason’s exhortatory commentary (“Awesome guy!—$5200, wants to be a regular!” “Big Wall Street guy!” “Software king.” “Hedge fund heavy! Says he will give investment lessons!”), the records of Natalia’s bookings through June and July of 2004 reveal a workload exceeding 250 hours, or nearly a normal nine-to-five, at an average of $1,000 per hour, not counting little presents like fancy $350 underwear from La Perla.
“Victoria’s Secret is all right,” Natalia says. “But you know you have a good client when you get La Perla.”
Some weeks were particularly frenetic. From July 29 to August 1, she had a four-day date in the Florida Keys for which Itzler charged $29,000. The very next day was a four-hour appointment. August 3 was filled with a ten-hour appointment and another two-hour job. August 4, three hours. August 5, a three-hour followed by another four-hour. August 6, two hours. August 7, one four-hour job and a two-hour. August 8, she was off. But the 9th was another ten-hour day, followed by a pair of two-hour jobs on August 10.
“It was like a dream,” Natalia says. “I never got tired.”
Asked if the work affected her relationship with Itzler, Natalia says, “Sometimes he’d say, ‘Everyone gets a chance to spend time with you except me.’ I’d say, ‘You’re the one booking me.’ ” As for Jason, he says, “If she ever did it with anyone for free, it would have broken my heart.”
Moving from 54th Street following a nasty fallout with partner Bruce Glasser (each party claimed the other had taken out a contract on his life), Itzler ran NY Confidential out of his parolee apartment in Hoboken. One visitor describes the scene: “The place was full of naked women and underwear. It was a rain forest of underwear. In the middle on the couch is Jason with all these telephones, one in either ear, the other one ringing on the coffee table.”

Seventy-nine Worth Street, with its twenty-foot ceilings and mezzanine balconies, where Jason and Natalia would move to in the summer of 2004, was a whole other thing. “Right away, we knew this was it,” says Natalia. “The loft felt like home.” As per usual, Jason would take much of the cost of the lease from Natalia’s bookings—money she would never receive. But money was never an issue with Natalia. If Cheryl, Jason’s first superstar, experienced “a rush of power when the guy handed me the envelope,” for Natalia, collecting the “donation,” while essential, had a faintly unseemly feel.
“Maybe it sounds crazy,” she says, “but I never felt I was in it for the money.”
For Jason, the loft was an opportunity to make real his most cherished theories of existence. “To me, the higher percentage of your life you are happy, the more successful you are,” says Jason, who came upon his philosophy while reading Ayn Rand. “I was really into the ‘Who is John Galt?’ Atlas Shrugged thing. I thought I could save the world if I could bring together the truly elite people, the most beautiful women with the most perfect bodies, best faces, and intelligence, and the elite men, the captains of industry, lawyers, and senators. This would bring about the most happiness, to the best people, who most deserved to be happy.”

Years before, Jason wrote out the precepts of what he called “The Happiness Movement.” Assuming his findings to be big news, Itzler packed up the manifesto, a copy of his half-finished autobiography, and a naked centerfold picture of Elisa Bridges, his girlfriend at the time, and mailed it to Bob Woodward. “I stuck it in this $3,000 Bottega Veneta briefcase so he’d notice it. He said I was a nut job and to leave him alone. I was so bummed I told him to keep the stupid briefcase.”
On Worth Street, however, Jason (who says “the best thing about bipolarity is how much you accomplish in the manic phase”) saw the chance to manifest his ideal. One of his first acts was to approach painter Hulbert Waldroup. Waldroup, a self-proclaimed “artist with attitude” who has been collected by Whoopi Goldberg and once appeared on the cover of Newsday along with his epic memorial to Amadou Diallo, was selling his work on the West Broadway sidewalk. “You’re the greatest painter I’ve ever seen,” Jason said. When Waldroup heard Itzler wanted to commission a ten-foot-by-ten-foot canvas of a “hot-looking” woman, he said the picture would never get in the door. No problem, Itzler said, Waldroup could do the painting inside the loft.
Waldroup soon had a job working the phones. “It was like I went in there and never came out,” says Waldroup, now on Rikers Island, where he resides a couple of buildings away from Jason.
Seventy-nine Worth Street became a well-oiled machine, with various calendars posted on the wall to keep track of appointments. The current day’s schedule was denoted on a separate chart called “the action board.” But what mattered most to Jason was “the vibe . . . the vibe of the NY Confidential brand” (there was franchising talk about a Philadelphia Confidential and a Vegas Confidential). To describe what he was going for, Jason quotes from a favorite book, The Art of Seduction, a creepily fascinating tome of social Machiavellianism, by Robert Greene.

Discussing “seductive place and time,” Greene notes that “certain kinds of visual stimuli signal that you are not in the real world. Avoid images that have depth, which might provoke thought, or guilt . . . The more artificial, the better . . . Luxury—the sense that money has been spent or even wasted—adds to the feeling that the real world of duty and morality has been banished. Call it the brothel effect.”
Accentuated by the fog machine at 79 Worth Street, people seemed to come out of the shadows, float by, be gone again. “It was full of these familiar faces . . . like a soap-opera star, a politician you might have seen on NY1, a guy whose photo’s in the Times financial pages,” says one regular. In addition to Sinatra, music was supplied by the building’s super, a concert pianist in his native Russia, who appeared in a tuxedo to play on a rented Baldwin grand piano.

“It was like having my own clubhouse,” says Jason now, relishing the evenings he presided as esteemed host and pleasure master. He remembers discussing what he called a “crisis in Judaism” with a top official of a leading Jewish-American lobby group. Jewish women were often thought of as dowdy, Jason said. If the American Jew was ever going to rise above the prejudice of the goyishe mainstream, creativity would be needed. A start would be to get Madonna, the Kabbalist, to become the head of Hadassah. The official said he’d look into it.
Seventy-nine Worth Street was supposed to be Jason and Natalia’s home, where they would live happily ever after. They had their own bedroom, off-limits to everyone else. “We were actually trying to live a semi-normal life, carry on a real relationship,” says Natalia. “Jason felt abandoned after his mother died; my father left when I was very young. We sort of completed each other.”

Natalia wrote her mom that she’d moved into a beautiful new place with a highly successful businessman. Her mom, a sweet cookie-baking lady leery of her daughter’s life in New York, wrote back that she’d like to come down to visit. Natalia was going to put her off, but Jason insisted. Looking around the loft at the naked women, Natalia asked, “How am I going to have my mom come here?” Jason said he would close the place, and take the loss, for the time Natalia’s mom was in town. Family was the most important thing, he said.
“Well,” Natalia says, “Jason never closed the loft. My mom and I stayed in a little apartment uptown. Jason was supposed to come by to meet her, but it started getting late. Then the doorbell rings at 2 a.m. It’s Jason, in his knee-length coat with these two 19-year-old girls. I’m totally flipping out: Like, what the fuck are you doing? He looked like the pimp from Superfly. My mom is saying, ‘This is him?’ But then Jason sits down and starts telling my mom I’m a great young actress and my career is going to take off, how living in New York is so terrific for me. He charmed her, completely. She left saying, ‘Well, your boyfriend is kind of weird. But he’s very, very nice.’
“It was always like that.”
Few expected 79 Worth Street to last very long. There were too many, as Natalia puts it, “variables.”
For Jason, the main difficulty in running New York’s hottest escort agency while on parole was the curfew. Even though his lawyer on the Jersey Ecstasy case, Paul Bergrin, was eventually able to extend Jason’s lights-out time to 3 a.m., he still had to leave his Worth Street happiness house to sleep in his apartment in Hoboken.
“Everyone’s partying, having the best time in the world, and the Town Car is outside to take me back to goddamn New Jersey.”
“It was a big strain,” says Natalia. “I finally get home from my appointments. All I want to do is sleep in my own bed, and Jason is screaming about how we’ve got to go back to Hoboken. He hated to be alone out there. We had horrible fights. One night, I jumped out of the car right at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel and ran away. Broke my heel on a cobblestone.”

The parole situation led to other traumas. Court-mandated drug tests caused Jason to alter his intake. Always “on the Cheech-and-Chong side of things,” Itzler couldn’t smoke pot, which turned up on piss tests. Instead, Jason, who never touched coke and often launched into Jimmy Swaggart–like speeches about the evils of the drug, dipped into his personal stash of ketamine, or Special K, the slightly unpredictable anesthetic developed for use by veterinarians. “They didn’t test for it,” Jason says by way of explanation. He was also drinking a $200 bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue a day. Natalia’s drug use cut into her Perfect 10 appearance. One night, she cracked her head into the six-foot-tall statue of an Indian fertility goddess Jason had purchased for their room. Knocked cold, she had to go to the emergency room.

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. 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. Arriving late, Jason swept into the meeting 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 26 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 hired by Itzler to manage credit-card accounts. This way, those wanting to disguise their use of NY Confidential services would appear to be spending their $1,200 or so at venues like the fictitious 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 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.

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.

Through this, people began telling Jason he’d better cool things out, not keep bringing parties of vacationing second-grade schoolteachers by the loft for fun. With guys in Con Edison vans watching the place from across the street, the least he could do was make sure the front door stayed locked.

Article written by: Mark Jacobson on
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