The Price: My Rise and Fall As Natalia, New York's #1 Escort

by Natalie McLennan

  I decided to follow up on the information and made some phone calls. Everyone confirmed that Ashley had been arrested in the typical call-girl sting—a hotel room bust where she was tricked into negotiating sex acts for amounts of money, rather than a flat rate for her time, as I had instructed her. My well-informed source within the Internet sex community sent me an email confirming her bust. Nothing happened in the industry without his knowledge, and he contacted me as soon as he found out. It read:

  Law enforcement infiltrated NY Confidential on 12/1. An undercover police officer paid $990 for a provider via credit card. They booked another girl on 12/20 for $990 on a credit card. They booked two girls on 12/31. Each time they had full service and supposedly all the sessions were taped.

  The 12/20 session was at the W hotel and was with Victoria. This session was booked with Victoria after looking at reviews of her by the TER handle “Poller.” Is this really true? If it is, I would be concerned that she is being used by LE.

  Allegedly, it all started when a client known as Big Dan found an unauthorized $28,000 charge on his credit card put there by New York Confidential. He allegedly contacted law enforcement friends, and the die was cast.

  Ashley, apparently, was never charged and went back to work at New York Confidential as if nothing had happened.

  As far as I know, the agency never found out Ashley had been taken in, and I didn’t tell Jason or Mona. Screw them, they deserved what they had coming. I was only tangentially connected to the agency at that point. I’d drop off my money from the random bookings they were still getting me and had little to no contact with anyone. I wasn’t welcome. I did tell Hulbert to watch his back, but I guess he was in too deep to get out.

  The news only confirmed what I had been feeling in my gut for more than a month: the end was nigh. I tried to put even more distance between me and Jason, and New York Confidential—but it wouldn’t matter in the end.

  * * *

  I booked a plane ticket home to Montreal for Christmas. I went all over the city trying to find the perfect presents for my family. I wandered around for hours, then days. I was so frustrated. I had a pocketbook full of cash, but I couldn’t find anything. Finally, I slumped down on the floor of Macy’s and burst into tears. The holiday hordes just walked right over me. Everything hit me at once. I didn’t know what to buy my family because I didn’t even know them anymore. I didn’t know who I was, either. I was lost.

  I finally made my way to the open market at Union Square, with its dozens of funky vendors selling Christmas-y stuff like candles, hand-knit hats and scarves. I bought everything I could carry. I thought they’d like that stuff better than shiny American store-bought things—things that represented everything they hated about my lifestyle, and why I had chosen New York over them.

  I wrapped everything as best I could and crammed it all into suitcases. I kissed Jordan goodbye. She was off to Mexico to meet her family for a week. She was freaking about the “no drug” situation, but I told her she’d be okay.

  Christmas Eve came. My car service took me to JFK, and I got in the check-in line. And waited. For hours. They finally announced they were canceling all flights that day because the airline’s radar system was messed up and gave us a number to call. I went home, in shock that my homecoming was falling apart. I sat on my bed for hours on hold, only to be told that my flight had been rescheduled for the same time the next day. I called Ron and went over to his place. We did lines and watched the De Niro/Sharon Stone flick, Casino. No one should ever watch that movie on Christmas Eve.

  On Christmas Day I made it out to the airport again, and, again, the flight was canceled. I called my mom crying. I told her what was going on, but could sense she wasn’t buying my story—she’s seen right through half of the lies I’d told her. I got defensive. I told her to call the airline herself. I could hear my family in the background, opening presents, laughing, drinking. They didn’t sound as though they missed me very much. They were celebrating as a family as they had been doing for years—without me. All of the birthdays, Mother’s Days, Thanksgivings, Christmases. This was just another one I would miss.

  I sat on my bed and did drugs alone. As I didn’t have a TV, I went online. I found nothing to distract me there—I wasn’t into chat rooms or porn (yet) and, at the time, Hollywood gossip hadn’t reached TMZ heights— and so I cried some more. I was completely alone.

  The day after Christmas, I realized I probably could have easily fixed the whole thing. If I’d really tried, I could have found a seat on another airline or taken the train. I thought about doing it right then, but Christmas was already over. I’d missed it.

  I put my family out of my mind and for the next few months, Jordan and I lived large. We celebrated my 25th birthday for two months by going to Vegas, followed by L.A., and then we partied our heads off in New York. We did photo shoots with every photographer we knew. Peter Beard came back into my life, living in my apartment for weeks at a time. One day, we went with him to have his portrait taken by Mark Seliger. In classic Peter style, he insisted we be in the photo. We ended up in a book called In My Stairwell, alongside Paul McCartney, Susan Sarandon, Tom Wolfe and Lou Reed. Despite my drugged out state, it’s my favorite picture of me.

  * * *

  A month after Christmas, I was conveniently at the Bellagio in Vegas with a client when it all went down. I was with the only client I’d had seen in about a month. I was so fucked up and drug-sick that I’d missed my first flight out there, and the client almost canceled.

  The drug-free flight back was torturous. When I finally made it to my apartment, Hulbert sped over in a cab and shared as many of the calamitous details as he knew.

  The loft had been raided.

  The cops seized all of the computers, paperwork, credit card receipts, photos of escorts, and the $50,000 sound system. I assumed they even took the disco ball and the fog machine. But the managers were all out somehow at the time, as was Jason.

  “Whatever you do, don’t go back to the loft, ever,” Hulbert said. “You need to keep a low profile. I need to keep a low profile. We’re probably next.”

  Did I feel any guilt that I hadn’t warned them? Not really. My source had given me the info about Ashley’s bust in confidence. While in hindsight, it probably would have been in my best interest to give them a heads up, but I was too full of spite to make any effort to do anything that might help Mona, and, by extension, Jason…and me.

  Still, I needed to find him. As much as I had tried to distance myself from the agency, Hulbert was right: there was no doubt a target on my head as well. I needed more info. Everything was so vague. No one knew anything solid.

  I knew just where to look. I found Jason having a final blow-out hurrah with a bunch of new girls I’d never met in, where else, the Gansevoort Hotel.

  Looking at him, high as hell, smiling like the Cheshire cat with four semi-naked women lounging around him doing lines, I thought about how the person I had loved so much had become a complete stranger. Who is this person? I don’t know him. But you know what? I did. I knew exactly who he was. I always just saw what I wanted to see.

  I really needed to talk, in private.

  “Jason, come in the bathroom with me.”

  “Natal, I’m not going in the bathroom. Say what you want to say.”

  Why didn’t he get it? This was serious. The New York Post had run an article that day all about him, saying there was a warrant out for his arrest. It was only a matter of time before the cops found him. A suite at the Gansevoort wasn’t exactly a criminal mastermind’s safe house.

  If he didn’t want to listen to me, there was nothing I could do. I needed to get the hell out of there. I grabbed my purse, looking inside to make sure one of those dodgy girls hadn’t helped themselves to my cash or drug supply.

  “Natal, you’re leaving?” Jason was slurring a little. What was he on?

  “Yeah, I gotta go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Jason
, I just have to go.”

  How do you tell someone you’re leaving because you don’t want to be with them when the cops show up? It seemed like Jason was doing everything he could to forget that it was only a mater of time before he went down.

  Sure enough, less than forty-eight hours later, the police crashed his little party, parading him in handcuffs through the sleek hotel lobby. I thought back to the day he’d humiliated me on the roof deck in front of all those people. The cops had no idea what poetic justice their little perp-walk gave me.

  Jason was charged with various counts of criminal possession of a controlled substance, money laundering, and promoting prostitution. As New York magazine would later recount, only days before the bust, Jason, “attired in a $5,700 full-length fox coat from Jeffrey, bought himself a Mercedes S600.” But with his assets (which included my unpaid paychecks) frozen, he couldn’t make the $250,000 bail.

  Hulbert was arrested a couple of days later, and charged with similar counts.

  No one knew what happened to Mona and Clark.

  New York Confidential set off a string of busts that shut down several of the city’s top agencies, including American Beauties, Julie’s and New York Elites, which specialized in flying porn stars around the country to service high-rolling clients. Everyone blamed Jason for the crackdown. He had become the John Gotti of the escort industry—the flashy big mouth who brought way too much unwanted attention to their underground world.

  * * *

  Instead of keeping a low profile, Jason just strapped his wings on a little tighter and made a beeline for the sun. While he was locked up at Rikers Island, he used his contacts at the Post and the Daily News to keep himself in the papers. Getting his name in the papers was the only thing that seemed to keep him afloat and give him a reason to live.

  Jason wanted me in on everything, too. I was all part of his hype-machine: how he had the number one agency with the number one girl in the city. He gave my cell number to every reporter in the city. They called me nonstop. I’d always checked my caller I.D. before answering the phone, but now I just let all my calls go to voicemail. The worst part was he was quoted as saying I made $1.5 million a year. It was almost like he was admitting his guilt for not paying me. Maybe in his mind he really believed he was going to pay me what I was owed someday. Either way, the cops and the IRS were going to wonder where all that money had gone.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  COVERGIRL

  This wasn’t happening. I sat in my apartment, getting high, not knowing what to do. I lived in fear that the cops were going to show up with a warrant for me, but that didn’t stop Jordan and I from going down to Delancey Street each day to see our dealer. We stocked up on a bit of everything: coke, heroin, pills, MDMA, crystal. Instead of crying, I nodded out, I got high, I got happy, I got sad. I did everything to block out how much I missed Jason. I missed how much we smiled together.

  The papers kept hounding me for interviews, but I just stayed inside and hid. A week later, New York magazine came knocking. One of their best writers, an old-school journalist named Mark Jacobson, somehow got my number and left a message saying he wanted to write a feature on Jason and me. I liked the sound of his voice.

  My sublet was coming to an end. I was going to have to move. I also had to get off heroin. After weeks of finally putting it off, I brought Jordan with me to see an addiction specialist. We left his office with a stack of prescriptions. The magic heroin drug, buprenorphine, saved my life. I detoxed at Ron’s house. He knew what to do with me as he’d done this for so many friends during the 70s and 80s.

  It hurt. I cried and sweated through every one of his sheets and blankets and soaked the mattress right through. I didn’t feel completely normal for a year. All of the bad things that would happen to me in the next couple of months were that much worse because my body still felt poisoned. I thought I was never going to feel good again. I’d fucked everything up. The needle and the damage done4, as another Canadian put it.

  It took me a week to get myself in shape to face a reporter. When I finally felt I could handle it, I called the New York magazine guy back. I was relieved. I liked Mark immediately. He’s like a bohemian Jimmy Breslin. He wrote the book that they based the movie American Gangster on. He hung with Blondie at CBGB’s. He holds a torch for the seedy, the forgotten, the downtrodden. Most importantly, he doesn’t judge. He’s my kind of reporter.

  But I also knew what would make the magazine bite. As with the reality show, what made Jason and I special wasn’t that we made a lot of money or that we had a huge loft and partied with the city’s elite. What made Jason and I special was what we had between us. So that’s what we gave him: a love story.

  Part of me was playing along for the sake of the story. But part of me was also really worried about Jason. He had tried to commit suicide twice before. This was the third time he’d lost everything. Who knew what was going through his head.

  Mark agreed to drive me out to Rikers to see Jason. As we were driving out to the jail, I fell asleep on his lap, and in my semi-conscious, drug-addled state, I started rubbing his leg and then moving my hand up to his crotch. I woke up as we pulled into the security gate at the bridge that takes you out to the island. He laughed and said that even in my sleep I was the ultimate sex goddess.

  During the bus ride from the main building to Jason’s, we chatted about the barbed wire, and he told me about the restaurant he was going to take me to for lunch (some little dive in Queens that served the best Middle Eastern food in the city), and anything else irrelevant to stay out of the emotional danger zone—how I felt about Jason, about jail. I wanted to be honest with Mark, but I also didn’t want to betray Jason’s fantasy. It was all he had left.

  Jason had constructed a fantasy in his head that we were going to get married, and I wasn’t about to tell him I wasn’t with the program. We finally got into the visiting room. Jason was wearing a baggy jumpsuit. He looked small and weak. He had a black eye. When he started in about our alleged upcoming nuptials, I listened. I didn’t really have much to say, and it was all over pretty quickly.

  * * *

  The photo shoot for the New York magazine cover was at Ron’s loft on Broome Street. The photo editor was on her way with the photographer and a crack team of assistants and assorted stylistas. I’d received the call from Mark, with whom I’d spent almost every day of the last six weeks. He told me Adam Moss, the magazine’s grand poobah, had given the green light. He loved the story—loved, loved, loved it.

  I couldn’t wait to hear their concept for the shoot. It was like a dream come true. I fantasized about the clothes: Head-to-toe Chanel? Yves St. Laurent tuxedo with no shirt underneath?

  They set up the lights, did my makeup and hair, and finally the editor reluctantly came to see me. I got the feeling she wasn’t in love with me or my story, which didn’t bother me for a second. I had prepared myself for this. I knew it wasn’t going to be all sunshine and rainbows. I wasn’t deluded enough to think I’d be portrayed as America’s newest sweetheart. People were either going to love me or hate me.

  The editor asked to see my clothes. Confused, I showed her what I had hanging in Ron’s closet. I had some of my stuff there, but not nearly all my good stuff. She picked them over, making no effort to hide her lack of enthusiasm. “I don’t get it. I thought you were going to bring some wardrobe options.”

  “I thought you guys were going to dress me,” I said.

  “Well, Natalia, I heard and read so much about your elaborate wardrobe, I thought you’d be more comfortable in one of your own things.”

  WTF? I didn’t want to wear my own clothes. That’s like winning a dream vacation in your own city.

  Then she went off-topic, “So, how does your family feel about this?”

  I smiled, “Which part? The sex for money, or telling the world about it?”

  She didn’t answer. She obviously didn’t like my sense of humor.

  But she did bring up a good poin
t. My family was going to find out. At first, I thought maybe they wouldn’t, that I could somehow keep it from them. Mark even agreed to omit my last name, but things had gone way beyond that. New York’s publicity department had already lined up a segment with the hugely popular, syndicated gossip show The Insider and with Donny Deutsch on CNBC. They told me that they were working under the presumption these would just be the first of many national TV appearances and numerous follow-up interviews.

  I sat with Ron the night before and talked it all out with him. How to tell my family? We had decided that if I was going to do it, I had to tell them the whole story. I agreed, in theory, but telling my mom what I had become was a lot easier said than done.

  As I agonized over what to do, my mind kept coming back to my clothes. I still didn’t know what I was going to wear. Then I got inspired. If this cover was going to be amazing, I needed to make it happen myself. I dialed my friend Kenny, a hip jeweler who did custom work from his office in Manhattan’s Diamond District. He was my buddy. He brought me back a tee-shirt once from Aspen that read: “I like big bumps and I cannot lie.” He said he saw it in the store and thought of me. We did a lot of blow together.

  “How’s my little Natalia? Taking over New York?” he asked.

  “Well, I could be better.” I told him what was up. Five minutes later, his assistant was headed downtown with a bag full of diamonds.

  Next: I called up another old party pal, Andrew. I’d dropped six grand on a shirred, white mink jacket a few months back at his Madison Avenue boutique. I told him to send me down something special.

  I walked over to the editor and said, “I hope you don’t mind, but we can get started in about half an hour. I have some deliveries coming.”