“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.