The Best American Crime Writing Page 7

  The legal fees cut into M2’s profits, and that wasn’t the only drain. The company was bridging the gap between accounts payable and accounts receivable with loans that carried exorbitant interest rates—as high as 36 percent. Even with its torrential cash flow, M2 couldn’t keep up. Itzler lost the company and all his business assets, including his most prized possessions. Back when the Internet was still a gleam in Al Gore’s eye, Itzler had had his minions registering every dirty domain name they could think of. “He was a visionary in that respect,” one employee says. Now, with M2 in ruins, he had to give up the rights to blowjobs.com and pussy.com.

  In 1997, Itzler left Miami, acutely depressed. Some time later, he turned up in New York and began to ponder his next move. He’d been toying with the idea of breaking into the Internet-sex business, selling video feed to online porn sites. All you needed were naked girls, web cams, and a T1 line. And the field had its perks. While operators at 900 lines were hired for their voices, not their bodies, Internet-sex girls were hot.

  Itzler, who estimated he’d need at least $250,000 to get his cybersex company up and running, somehow persuaded his stepfather to find new investors. Ron Itzler thought of Fred Baum, a 49-year-old housing developer with a Ferrari collection and a short temper. Baum thought Jason was obnoxious as hell, possibly even a little crazy. But he was willing to make allowances because he was convinced that the young man was a computer-savvy marketing genius who was going to make him absurdly wealthy.

  Baum was so certain of this that he called his longtime friend and business partner Bruce Glasser. Glasser made a good living in textiles, but like Baum, he’d always been receptive to investment opportunities that provided an escape from his more mundane ventures. This one certainly fit the bill.

  Contracts were drawn up. For this new venture, to be called Baum Multimedia, Glasser fronted $100,000 (a loan, he says); Baum put up $150,000. Company documents indicate that each of the three men owned a third of the business. Glasser, however, now claims that he and Itzler were consultants and only owned options; Baum, he says, was the sole proprietor.

  Itzler set out to secure a suitable location. By late 2000, he’d found just the thing in a landmark cast-iron building at 415 Broadway. The third-floor space covered 7,000 square feet, featured majestic fifteen-foot ceilings, and was drenched in sunlight. (“The space gave the project instant credibility,” says Richard Renda, a stylist and video producer who worked briefly at SoHo Models. “It’s what got me and a lot of other people interested and excited.”)

  The loft was so grand that it seemed a shame to use it for nothing more than porn. A streaming-video business, after all, could get along just fine in a basement. Then Itzler had a vision. Since beautiful women draw more customers, why not create a phony modeling agency and use it to attract a superior grade of prospective talent? Glasser objected that the models would flee for their lives once they learned they were being hired to masturbate in front of a web cam. “Not if we tell them they can make $5,000 a week,” Itzler countered.

  In honor of his favorite New York neighborhood, Itzler named the ersatz agency SoHo Models Management. He began to hype it around town, handing out sleek, glossy business cards everywhere he went. The cards gave his name as Jason Sylk. He claims that the name change was prompted by a falling out with his stepfather, and besides, he says, Sylk is “a beautiful name.” Others insist his motives were simpler. “Jason’s made so many enemies and burned so many bridges that he had to change his name,” says one former M2 employee.

  Next on the agenda was to assimilate himself into the New York fashion culture. One of the first people he hooked up with was Ed Feldman. By way of introduction, Feldman mentioned that he was listed in the modeling world’s definitive Who’s Who: the index of Michael Gross’s Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women. Had Itzler checked the index and turned to page 241, he would have read that Feldman had wielded a heavy wooden mallet on an agent named Jeremy Foster-Fell in 1981, sending him to the hospital.

  “Someone once asked me to name the three most rotten bastards in the whole industry,” one grizzled fashion veteran recalls. “I said, That’s an easy list: Ed Feldman, Ed Feldman, Ed Feldman,’ Nobody else comes close.”

  Like everyone else who met Itzler, Feldman was intrigued. This kid from Miami with a fortune to spend on a new modeling agency was almost too good to be true. Feldman began to act as Itzler’s mentor, freely sharing his Rolodex, making introductions, and advising his new protégé every step of the way. Feldman asked Joey Grill, who was overseeing operations at the Click agency, to “teach Jason the modeling business.” Grill complied, giving him a Cliffs Notes overview of the industry.

  The list of fashion victims who met with Itzler—and believed his story—goes on and on: I.D. Models owner Paolo Zampolli (“I thought the guy was loaded with millions”); Q Models owner Jeff Kolsrud (“I think that Jason does have money”); photographer Marco Glaviano (“I said, ‘Send me the girls when you open’”).

  “Everybody thought it was legit,” says Lee Kalt, Itzler’s first hire at SoHo Models. “I would see him pulling the wool over their eyes. It amazed me the way people believed Jason.”

  One of those people was the photographer Peter Beard. Itzler says he offered Beard 10 percent of the agency in exchange for his “expertise.” What he really wanted, though, was Beard’s imprimatur. Although Beard wasn’t the fashion-world force he had been when he was shooting for Vogue in the sixties, his name still opened doors. After an impromptu business meeting, Itzler invited him to inspect the 415 Broadway property. Later that evening, Itzler took Beard to the roof. Here, stoned and feeling more confident than he had since the old M2 days, Itzler had another flash of inspiration: SoHo Models would be a bona fide modeling agency.

  “I was going to do a whole different type of agency,” Itzler explains. “It was going to be hip, stylish, and trendy. One that people talk about and that had an element of European class.” Think of Elite in the early nineties, but with models who went all the way on the first booking. “In three weeks, the project went from the concept of a bait and switch to me saying, ‘Fuck that! I’m going to kick ass at this modeling agency!’”

  Itzler saw no potential conflict in having a modeling agency on the same floor as an Internet-sex service. On the contrary, he actually envisioned a synergy between them. “The models would hear how much the Internet girls were making, and they’d check out Baum,” he says. “And if the Internet girls were pretty enough, they’d be able to cross over to SoHo Models.”

  Itzler needed all the synergy he could get. Baum Multimedia had promised to provide content 24/7, which meant finding enough girls to fill the twenty booths for three eight-hour shifts each day. He composed a vague help-wanted ad that ran in The Village Voice and New York Press classified sections: “Make $3,000 a week!! + benefits & the most flexible schedule you could want.” Some ads even promised applicants that they’d be able to watch MTV while they worked.

  When respondents realized that the position entailed performing sex acts live on the Internet, many stomped off in a huff. The rest filled out applications. Models who were already working for established agencies like NMK, Next, Click, Major, and I.D. began showing up, books in hand. A surprising number of them accepted jobs. “We got a lot of innocent girls coming off the street saying, ‘Yes, I’m here for the modeling agency,’” one former Baum employee recalls. “And Jason would say, ‘Sure! Come on in.’”

  Itzler says he was conducting between sixty and seventy interviews a day, in the privacy of his on-site living quarters just a few feet from the booths. “I built a gorgeous bedroom with a marble Jacuzzi, two-head shower, and everything,” he says. “Two smoke machines, disco lights—it was a combination bedroom-disco.” In his interviews, Itzler would tell the applicants to strip and pose for Polaroids; sometimes he’d smoke pot with them. “It’s not like you’re hiring accountants. You’re hiring these crazy young girls that are doing very open-minded stuff.”
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  One stripper, who sees herself as a “Kate Moss type,” interviewed with Itzler because she thought she might be able to cross over to SoHo Models. “Once he mentioned the modeling agency, tons of thoughts and hopes were running through my head,” she says. Itzler told her that he needed to see how she would perform on camera. “He tried to have sex with me,” she says. “I kept my bottoms on at all times, but he touched me everywhere else. We started smoking pot, then he took off his clothes. When I noticed he was aroused, I told him, ‘You’re not putting that in me!’” She stops suddenly, then confesses, “I was broke. That’s why I let it progress as far as it did.”

  “Absolutely untrue,” Itzler responds. “There was only one girl that I ever touched during an interview; when she got naked for the interview, she said she had milk in her boobs because she’d had a baby recently. And I asked her if I could taste some. She said okay. So I drank out of her boob for about a minute. And I ended up dating her for a little bit. But that’s the only girl I ever touched during an interview.”

  A number of former employees of Baum Multimedia complain about Jason’s liberal interpretation of the term human resources. “I busted him the first time for having sex with one of the girls,” says Jennifer, a model who moonlighted at Baum six nights a week. (Like many of the women who worked there, she asked that her last name not be used.) “I walked in his room and saw a girl in the bed beating him with a belt.” According to Jennifer, Itzler was a masochist: “One girl that came in for an interview got so mad at him that she hit him in the face, and he asked her to do it again. She did it five or six times before she walked out of the interview. He liked it.”

  Itzler says that he’s no masochist, that no interviewee ever hit him in the face, although one did “smack me on the ass with a belt, which is no big deal.” He denies using Baum Multimedia as his personal matchmaking service, claiming that he dated only women who were no longer in Baum’s employ. “I never slept with one of the girls at the sex place while she was working with us. I slept with all the wannabe models. The girls who worked for Major Models, Elite, Click—those are the girls I slept with.” Claims to the contrary are “hearsay and rumor,” he says. “I’m so professional about this stuff. I’m a lawyer. I would never.” But in a later conversation, he recalls having sex with one of the workers in her booth while she was performing on the Internet.

  Baum Multimedia went online in May 2001. To inaugurate the new venture, Itzler threw a twenty-six-hour party featuring naked women and Grammy-nominated DJ Danny Tenaglia. The drug-fueled party provoked at least four visits from the NYPD. “Tenaglia played while girls were masturbating online in the booths,” Itzler says. “It was a very funny evening.”

  The humor escaped Fred Baum. With the festivities still in progress, he sent an enforcer to shut down the party. Baum’s messenger, whom Itzler describes as “a fat guy with a killer’s eyes,” burst in, cut the power to the 30,000-watt sound system, and locked Tenaglia in a room. Itzler says the man then hauled him up to the roof, slapped him around, dangled him over the edge of the building, and informed him that Fred Baum was, as of that moment, terminating his employment. He told Itzler to clear his belongings out of the bedroom, because he was taking it over, along with his job.

  “Jason’s a talented young man, but we had fundamental business differences,” Baum says diplomatically. “My belief is that you spend money after you make money. He wanted to spend money on crazy Tenaglia parties and make money later.”

  Despite their differences, though, Itzler and Baum reconciled only days later. The tough-love management style of Baum’s new hired hand wasn’t working out. More important, Glasser and Baum didn’t have the faintest idea how to run the business they’d bought into. For the moment, it seemed that they needed Itzler on board if they were to have any chance of recouping their investment.

  Baum Multimedia was run like a Chinatown sweatshop. Six-day workweeks were mandatory; many women worked seven days, with no lunch or coffee breaks. To increase production, they operated two keyboards at once.

  And the pay was atrocious. A handful of “top hostesses” pulled down about $200 a week, but the average weekly salary was closer to $100, and double-digit checks weren’t unusual. Cecilia Lagos, the office manager, said the hardest thing she’d ever had to do was to hand an employee a $6.50 paycheck. As if this weren’t bad enough, some checks would bounce, and others never materialized. “Sometimes we wouldn’t get paid for weeks at a time,” complains one of the women. “I only collected four checks from Baum in the two months I worked there.”

  Glasser and Baum point out that salaries were based on commission for time spent online, so if an employee’s paycheck was low, it was simply because she was a lousy salesperson. Customers would chat with a woman briefly, then had to buy more minutes to continue. According to Baum, no more than 20 percent of the women who worked for him knew how to sell themselves with the right combination of sultry looks, dirty chat, and whatever other intangibles thrill the heart of the solitary porn surfer.

  Yet the Internet connection between Baum and its customers was frequently interrupted, a common problem with the technology. In interviews, at least eight former sex workers complained that their paychecks didn’t fully credit them for the terminated calls. “For every hour online, I only got paid for 30 minutes,” says Christina Cruz, 20. Glasser maintains the charge is untrue; Baum says that such glitches were “one of the problems of the business. We were working on it.”

  As the $30 paychecks continued to bounce, girls began to exit en masse. “Some girls worked three weeks without a check,” Christina Cruz recalls. “It was like they were working for free. These financial problems, combined with self-esteem problems, reduced a lot of the girls to tears.” Adding to the humiliation, the Baum girls were put on display in a kind of porno petting zoo. In the evenings, Itzler would bring men to Baum Multimedia to party, and they would invariably end up prowling around the space in an altered state. “It was horrific going into that chat room,” Cruz says. “Every guy there wanted you to do something or show them something.”

  Fred Baum insists that Baum Multimedia was a desirable place to work. “I have a number of girls who say it’s the best job they’ve ever had,” he says. “Because they really don’t have to do anything. They just sit down and chitchat. Then for thirty minutes they get to play with themselves and make money.”

  One would think that with its low payroll, Baum Multimedia would have turned a handsome profit. But it was hemorrhaging money. Fred Baum says that the company received an infusion of capital from a new source. “The Mob had about fifty, sixty grand into it,” he says. “Absolutely not true,” Glasser responds. “Fred Baum is out of his mind.”

  Hoping that some fresh hype would help business, Itzler pitched his story to the New York Post’s Page Six. The item ran on May 31, 2001, under the headline MODELS ATOP A PORNO PARLOR. It reported that Jason Sylk (“a lawyer by trade”) and photographer Peter Beard had teamed up in a new venture called SoHo Models. The kicker was that the agency would share office space with an interactive online sex service. Nobody took the piece seriously except Bruce Glasser and Fred Baum, who weren’t keen on the extra attention.

  Itzler’s short but fulfilling career at Baum Multimedia was over for good this time. His erratic behavior had become intolerable. “It was quite apparent that if Jason Itzler wasn’t removed permanently, all the employees were going to quit,” Glasser says.

  Itzler negotiated a settlement that required him to relinquish his interest in Baum Multimedia, hardly a significant concession considering the state of the business. He would retain the SoHo Models name and receive a $50,000 buyout. (Itzler ultimately received only a fraction of that amount.)

  Then, in July, someone began calling Baum employees at home. Almost all the women were working secretly; many were young and lived with their families or with boyfriends. The phone calls, by turns obscene, threatening, and more than a little psychotic, caused many of the
girls to quit. Jason is convinced that Glasser and Baum suspected him.

  On July 27, Itzler received a voice-mail message on his cell phone accusing him of “corporate espionage.” “I think you better turn yourself in to the police,” the message said. “Freddie has new partners. They’re very, very serious people. They’re coming after you, Jason. You better get out of the city and the state of New York. You’re in a lot of trouble, kid.”

  Itzler wasn’t buying it. He’d been threatened before, and he was still standing. But the next day, he got a second message, and this time he began to think the threat was real. “Jason, we know it’s you,” the voice said. “You’re going to have the shit …. You’re going to be in bad shape. You’re an asshole.”

  Prudently, Itzler decided to leave New York. He flew to Amsterdam and spent his money getting high in the tourist cafes and getting laid in the red-light district. While he was getting stoned one day, he had what passed for a moment of clarity: Running away was crazy. Threats or no threats, he would return to the States and open an Internet-sex service in Miami. Now that he had learned how not to run one, it would be easy. Then he’d take the profits, return to New York, hire the best booker in town, and relaunch SoHo Models.

  With his remaining $3,000, Itzler bought around 4,000 ecstasy tablets. By the time he was ready to go home, several days later, he says, he had 3,869 left, which had a street value back in New York of more than $116,000. He put the pills in a plastic bag, strapped the bag to his body, and boarded a flight bound for Newark International Airport. When he landed in Newark on August 1, Itzler was fidgeting and sweating profusely. Drug-sniffing dogs and steely-eyed Customs police were everywhere. Itzler was arrested during a routine search. “I must have looked nervous,” he says.