Less than a week later, the police picked up the head of World Class Party Girls, Joseph Ruis. Acting on a tip, the police had spent a year tracing credit-card bills and placing undercover officers. They knew everything about the business—how they offered clients cocaine and charged up to $3,500 an hour. The prosecutor said that the escort service took in about $250,000 per month before it was shut down. The client list was never made public. The Hudson County, New Jersey, prosecutor appeared eager to exchange the johns’ anonymity for their agreement to testify against Ruis if the case ever made it to trial. The case didn’t get that far: Ruis pleaded guilty a year later to laundering over $3 million annually that he made off of prostitution and drugs.
World Class Party Girls was out of business. Overnight, Alex and Shannan lost the ability to make money. Weighing his options, Alex realized how good he’d had it. The owner had known him, and he was one of the favorites, one of their biggest moneymakers. He felt like if he went to another agency, he’d come home with two hundred dollars a day, a waste of time. Shannan tried a normal waitressing job, but she wasn’t making anything close to what she was used to. So she went looking for a new agency, which eventually brought her to Craigslist.
At home, she and Alex argued more. The arguments were never directly about money; they were about the future. But any talk of the future inevitably circled back to money. “What are you gonna do?” she’d say. “You’re planning on doing nothing?” Alex, shouting now, would play the hooker card: “What about you? You gonna do this for the rest of your life?”
They both knew who was paying the bills. Alex was on unemployment, and his benefits ran out at the end of the year. Now he had no income at all. Shannan said she wanted to finish her online classes and get her degree before she quit. Meanwhile, she kept going on calls. Alex understood the life she was in—he used to be in it—but his life was changing. He wasn’t always faithful to her, either.
It was early, close to six A.M. Alex was sleeping, and Shannan came home from work drunk. She started pushing him, testing him, trash-talking him. “You ain’t trying to do nothing with your life. You’re a loser.”
“Stay quiet!” Alex said, glancing at the other bedroom. They had moved out of their apartment in downtown Jersey City and were living across town with Alex’s father.
“Fuck that! Fuck you!”
“You don’t have to stay here. Stay quiet, he’s sleeping over there!”
“You’re a daddy’s boy!”
She hit him in the chest—not too hard but hard enough for Alex to notice.
“Let’s leave,” he said.
“I’m not going nowhere!”
“Stop!”
“Oh, fuck you!”
That was when he hit her. His left hand, clenched in a fist, caught Shannan on the chin.
Shannan cried out. Then she screamed. Alex’s father woke up. Shannan wanted to call the police. Alex didn’t know what to do. She wouldn’t stop screaming. Finally, he threw up his hands. “Maybe I have to get arrested,” he said.
Shannan quieted down a little. Calling the police was never a good idea. Alex knew that. He knew she knew that, too.
She stayed. His father lectured him: “You shouldn’t have done that. You’re a guy. You don’t hit a girl.” Two days went by. Alex bought her gifts, trying to make it up to her. But Shannan couldn’t tolerate the pain. Her jaw throbbed so much that biting down sent her into hysterics.
Alex finally took her to a hospital in Newark. Her jaw was fractured. Shannan had two options: Get her jaw wired, or have a titanium plate grafted onto the bone. The plate was faster.
Shannan paid for it herself on an installment plan.
On a sunny day in September, two months after World Class Party Girls went under, Shannan was waiting on a corner in Astoria, Queens, to meet her new driver. She was starting up with an escort service out of the Bronx called Fallen Angelz. The business was changing. Shannan had learned the hard way that big agencies were easy targets for the police. Now she’d learn how hard it could be to start all over with a new one.
The driver she met that day was Michael Pak, a skinny, low-key Korean guy from Queens. Unlike Alex, who’d had one employer, Michael was a free agent, available at a moment’s notice for any number of agencies. He never went to any of their offices; he would just send the agency its cut of what the girl earned. They gave him an account number, and he would go to a Rite-Aid or any place that handled Green Dot transactions—a service not unlike PayPal on the Web, where you can securely drop off money for any account holder. Other times he sent the money by Western Union or MoneyGram.
When Michael first saw Shannan on the corner, his reaction was not unlike Alex’s: Whoa, is that her? They had said to look for a blonde. She seemed part black, though her hair was light and straightened; it might have been a wig. Shannan got into the backseat of his black Ford Explorer, and soon they got a call from the dispatcher, who instructed them to drive to a spot near the Brooklyn and Queens border and await further instructions. They complied but heard nothing for hours. Michael kept calling the agency, and finally, they were sent to a Russian neighborhood in South Brooklyn, near Coney Island. It turned out to be a bogus call. No client.
They both felt strung along. They realized they were being treated this way because they didn’t have seniority. The service trusted the older girls more, and Shannan was new. It was almost like a union rule—you needed enough hours with the company to be granted the first position. Michael thought this was especially dumb, since older girls had been in the business longer and may be more drugged up and erratic and less attractive. Right then and there, Shannan and Michael decided to go freelance. He would ferry her to calls in exchange for a third of the fee. Shannan would keep the rest. Finding johns wasn’t a problem. They’d just use the Web.
With Alex still dithering at home, Shannan and Michael made a good team. He was quiet and shy, partial to wearing sunglasses even at night. She was tiny and curvy and always in motion, a dervish, antic and erratic and fun. Most of the time, his studied nonchalance meshed well with her free-flowing energy. Shannan liked to call him her brother from another mother. Between calls, motoring around Manhattan and the boroughs, she would tell him all her war stories, like the time she got in a fight with a girl who had come to work the same party she’d been called to, or the time a driver wanted her to pay him with sex, or the many, many times she got stiffed.
Shannan never gave Michael much of a chance to tell her about his own life. She never heard how he’d grown up in Jackson Heights, the middle child in a striving Korean-American family. He never told her how, when he was nine, his father died of a stroke, and his mother supported the family by opening a supermarket and gas station on Long Island. Or how, after college at a state university, he blew the LSAT, took a job at an insurance company, got laid off, and moved back in with his mother. Or of his big screwup. As Michael told the story, a friend let him know about what seemed like a good deal, getting paid to help a rich girl from China travel to America. The job paid three thousand dollars. Michael insisted he didn’t sense at the time that it was a scam, and that the girl was coming to America illegally, and that Michael was being paid to act as a cover so she wouldn’t attract attention at customs. He flew to Sri Lanka to meet the girl, then accompanied her back to America. On May 11, 2004, he was arrested at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport and charged with conspiracy to misuse a passport.
Michael served six months in federal prison, picking up a little Spanish from his fellow inmates and playing a lot of Risk. Inmates made their own dice out of little rocks. He shared a cell with a young black guy who had Mike Tyson’s build and would kick Michael’s bed to wake him up so he could sit in audience of the black guy’s poems. His brother brought Michael back to New York after prison and found him a five-hundred-dollar-a-month SRO with a shared bathroom. He worked at a pool hall his brother owned. He’d run out of what little ambition he had, and prison had convinced him to drop any pretense
of a straight life. After a year or so, he answered an ad to be a driver for an escort service. He had always thought that would be a sweet job.
Shannan went by the name Angelina now, to emphasize her lips, and charged two hundred an hour—less than what World Class Party Girls charged, though she got more of the cut. On a good night, she made as many as seven or eight calls. She’d take the PATH train into the city, Michael would pull up to some prearranged corner, and she’d pile into the SUV with all her stuff: a tall soda from McDonald’s, often spiked with vodka; a bag with extra clothes; her purse; a book from one of her online college classes; and a netbook she’d use to post and refresh her Craigslist profile.
For Shannan, Craigslist was a slot machine that almost always paid out. Every time she posted an ad with a photo—usually one of her leaning over from behind—her cell would ring within seconds. She’d pitch the johns over the phone, work out a price, and get an address. If she managed to make it through the night without partying away any of her share of her fees, she could get home to Alex in the morning with over half of their twelve-hundred-dollar monthly rent in her pocket. All she needed was a driver to take her around and provide some semblance of security.
Sitting so close in the car for hours, she and Michael kept the conversation light. She didn’t talk about her mother or sisters. Sometimes she would mention Alex. Once she even asked if Michael could find a customer for her on a night when Alex was going to drive her. But with Alex mostly retired, Shannan spent more nights with Michael. He knew she was argumentative—“fiery” was how he put it. She seemed ready to fight over any little thing, and she was murder on Michael’s car. She burned a polka-dot pattern into his car seat with her cigarettes. Sometimes she’d be very happy. Other times, she made no sense at all. It wasn’t really about drugs. She didn’t like cocaine, though if the customer wanted to do a line, she would. She did like ecstasy—he’d drive her to meetings with dealers—and she really liked to drink.
When Shannan wanted to work and Michael didn’t, she called another driver named Blake. Blake always posted the ads for the girls he drove, and Shannan was no different: busty blue-eyed blonde ready for you, he wrote. Her face was never in the photos, just her body. “Shannan was not photogenic,” he said. “Her smile always came out crooked.” When men called, he told them to picture Julia Roberts—those big eyes, that oversize mouth. No one ever complained, at least in person.
By winter, Shannan was a steady enough presence that at least one person commented about her on Whojustcalledhere.net, a website that lists comments on phone numbers linked to a variety of businesses, including anonymous Craigslist ads. Good body, one commenter wrote in December 2009. But her description of herself as refined and upscale is a joke. Nasty fake blonde hair.
Blake had spent a few years working for large, established escort services until Craigslist started cutting into the bottom line. Shannan had called him out of the blue. She said she got his number from a woman he spoke with just once, someone with an agency he decided not to work for because it seemed too fly-by-night. Shannan’s deal with Blake was similar to the one she had with Michael: She would come in from her place in Jersey City, and he’d pick her up at an agreed-upon corner in Manhattan.
In the car, Shannan would talk a little bit about Alex, blaming her boyfriend for how much she was working. It wasn’t clear if she meant that she felt pressure to work more because Alex wasn’t working, or if he was essentially pimping for her now, or if she was still furious about the way he had hit her. In any case, Blake came to believe that Shannan worked too much. He noticed her makeup fading over the course of a night, how she slumped in the car between calls, ragged, making no effort to freshen up. She would look better a week or two later, after she presumably took a break. When he remarked on how messed up she seemed the last time they worked together, Shannan would laugh. “Honey,” she’d say, “I couldn’t do half the things I’m supposed to do if I wasn’t.”
They didn’t always get along. Like Michael, Blake found her unpredictable. In the spring, just a couple of weeks before she disappeared, he brought her to a call not far from the Caton Avenue exit on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Hours went by, and Shannan wasn’t calling in. Finally, at the four-hour mark, she called and said she would be out in twenty minutes. She came out, got in the car, and gave Blake money for just two hours.
Blake demanded to be paid for the other two. Shannan refused. It was eight A.M. now, rush hour, and they were sitting in the car under the BQE. Blake saw a bunch of cabs zipping by. “Shannan,” he said, “either give me what you owe me, or you can take a cab home.”
Shannan got out of the car. At the time, he figured she did the math and realized the $150 she owed Blake was more than the $40 it would take to cab back to Jersey. It was the last time he would see her.
Shannan never let Alex forget about her jaw. Her family knew about it, too. It colored everything about their relationship. He couldn’t be her savior anymore.
They spent months in a holding pattern. They had stopped arguing, but she seemed to give up on the idea of college. It seemed unclear which direction she would go or how much longer she would stay with him.
But on the last night of April 2010, Alex and Shannan went out on a date, and they were actually having a good time. They went to the Hudson Mall on Route 440 together and sneaked some Taco Bell into the new Freddy Krueger movie. Alex thought it felt like a real relationship at last, and that maybe she was going to change very soon. Maybe she’d finish college and try to live a normal life. He knew at least part of her really wanted that.
She told Alex she had to meet up with Michael afterward. After the movie, she got on the PATH. She texted him later, around one A.M.: I’m about to go in for a call, I’ll call you right back. Maybe it ended with I love you. Alex can’t remember.
Oak Beach. May 1, 2010.
Just before five A.M., the john tapped on the window of Michael Pak’s Explorer.
“Can you get her out?”
“What?”
“She won’t leave.”
The john, Joe Brewer, didn’t seem angry or scared—just polite, if a little impatient.
Michael and Shannan had done a few Long Island calls, but not Oak Beach. The appointment was for two hours, which made it worth their while. Even if they missed calls while they were out there, it made sense to go to Long Island for three hundred dollars—or more, if she could extend the date.
And Shannan did. They were in their third hour when Brewer came out to get Michael. Until that moment, Michael hadn’t ever spoken to a john. The protocol was for drivers to wait outside; usually, the men didn’t want anything to do with anyone besides the girls. But Brewer seemed pretty relaxed about it. Michael guessed that he had done this a lot. A first-timer would be more nervous. Brewer was game. Michael had gotten a glimpse of him earlier, when he’d come out to open the gate, and about twenty minutes after that, when Brewer and Shannan left the house in his car to run an errand. Shannan had cleared it with Michael beforehand; he assumed it was to buy drugs.
Shannan called Michael after she and Brewer returned. She wanted him to go to a pharmacy for baby oil, K-Y jelly, and playing cards, all typical tools of the trade that helped an escort draw out the length of a date; when you’re on coke, playing cards makes the time fly by. Michael didn’t want to do it. The CVS was too far away, all the way across Great South Bay. Shannan snapped, “I’ll find my own way home!” and hung up.
Now this. Michael got out of the Explorer and followed Brewer inside. The house was small, more like a cottage, raised on stilts to protect it from flooding. Michael followed him up the patio steps and through the door. It was the first time he had ever been in a client’s house. Brewer seemed like a hoarder, or at least a slob. Michael couldn’t see the floor, and he felt he had to watch his step. The front door opened into the dining area. The dining table was full of knickknacks and half-eaten food. Beyond the dining area was the living room. Shannan was standing ne
ar the doorway to the kitchen. She looked the same: chestnut-brown wig with blond streaks, a pair of dangly hoop earrings, a brown leather jacket, jeans.
“Shannan,” he said, “let’s go home.”
“You guys are trying to kill me.”
Michael wanted to laugh. But Shannan seemed so serious—scared, though not quite panicking. He thought maybe she was acting, or high, or both. He decided to treat her gently, to try to calm her down. “Come on, do you want to go home? Let’s go home.” He turned to Brewer. “How come she won’t leave?”
But Brewer had lost his patience. He was approaching Shannan from behind, and when he got close enough, he put his arms around her. She shrieked, and Brewer let go. “Fuck this!” he said, and left the room.
The message was clear enough. Shannan was Michael’s problem now.
“Shannan, do you wanna go?” Michael said.
“I’ll find my own way home!”
She crawled behind the couch. Michael was still near the front door. He decided to take her at her word. He turned and opened the door.
“Mike, where are you going?” she said.
“Huh? You wanna go?”
She didn’t answer. He didn’t know what to do, so he sat down in a chair at the dining room table.
“Why are you sitting?” Shannan asked.
That really confused him. After watching what had happened when Brewer approached her, Michael didn’t want to go anywhere near her. Then something weird came to him. Looking at her there behind the couch, he thought about a scene in the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas that he and Shannan liked a lot—Johnny Depp, playing a drug-addled Hunter S. Thompson, had done the same thing, crouching behind a couch, fearing for his life.
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