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 fiancee 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 Seventy-nine 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 Seventy-nine 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.
"What do I have to hide?" Jason scoffed. "I'm not doing anything illegal."
Much of this self-deluding assessment was based on the contract Jason, utilizing his best Nova U. legalese, worked up between himself and the NY Confidential escorts.The document, signed by all the girls, stated they were "specifically forbidden" to have sex with the clients. Itzler showed the contract to Mel Sachs, the floridly attired defender of Sante Kimes, Mike Tyson, and, more recently, the pint-size exhibitionist-rapper Lil' Kim. Sachs made a couple of adjustments and said the contract passed muster, which was just what Jason wanted to hear.
"I'm bulletproof. Rich people don't go to jail," Jason proclaimed. He was certain that if anything came up, Sachs and Bergrin, a former Army major, could handle it."Mel's my personal Winston Churchill, and Paul's the tough Marine general," Jason rhapsodized, either unaware or not caring that Bergrin is currently under federal investigation for his alleged part in the death of a police informer slated to testify against one of his drug-dealer clients.
"Mel became my best friend," says Jason, always impressed by a man in a fancy suit."He was always in my place.We all loved Mel." Asked about these visits, Sachs, after some deliberation, said, "Well, Jason is a personable guy. I liked talking to him. It was an interesting place, full of fascinating conversation. A lot of business people, financial people, professional people."
Amid this gathering train wreck, one incident in November 2004 stands out as the beginning of the end. That evening, accompanied by a mutual friend, two mobsters, members of the Genovese family, according to Jason, stopped by the loft.
"I never did any business with them. I just thought it might open a new line of high-priced clients," says Jason, who bought a $3,500 Dior suit for the occasion, with a matching one for his bodyguard, a former Secret Service agent. The meeting had barely begun when a girl named Genevieve burst through the door. A tall blonde, she was returning from her first NY Confidential date, reputedly stoned out of her mind, and was demanding to be paid immediately. Told to wait, Genevieve started yelling, threatening to call the police to adjudicate the matter.
"What's wrong with that girl?" one of the mobsters asked. Itzler asked the bodyguard to quiet Genevieve down. But as the bodyguard approached, Genevieve pulled a can of pepper spray from her handbag and blinded him. With the bodyguard writhing on the floor, Genevieve locked herself in a room and called 911. A dozen cops and an engine company of firemen arrived.
There was some debate about whether to open the door, but the mobsters said,"It's the cops, you got to let them in."
"I'm looking at the security-camera monitors," remembers one witness. "In one is the cops, another the gangsters, the third the screaming girl, the fourth the Secret Service guy rubbing his eyes. That's when I thought I'd take a vacation from this place."
The encounter would end relatively harmlessly. "It looked like one of the cops recognized one of the gangsters," says the witness. "They started talking, everyone exchanged business cards and left."
After that, the cops started coming to the loft almost every day.
"They'd knock on the door, come in, look around, and leave," remembers Hulbert Waldroup. Almost always, they took a stack of Jason's distinctive metal rocket fuel for winners business cards. The card had become something of a collector's item at headquarters, one cop says. "Everyone wanted one." Rumor has it that one ended up on Mayor Bloomberg's desk, to the mayor's amusement.
When the big bust inevitably came down on January 7, the loft was nearly empty. Krimer and Waldroup were at an art gallery when someone's cell phone rang. The caller said no one was picking up at NY Confidential.That was a bad sign,Waldroup said.
Frantically, Krimer and Waldroup attempted to connect to the Webcam security system Itzler had installed so he could watch the activities at Seventy-nine Worth Street from his Hoboken apartment. The cam was available from any wired-up computer. But no one could remember the password. "Fuck!" screamed Krimer. Eventually the connection was made.
"The place is being raided, and we're watching it on the Internet," says Waldroup."The cops were like ants, over everything, taking all the files, ledgers, computers. On the couch were these people I'd worked with for months, in handcuffs. It was very weird."
Jason wouldn't find out about the bust until sometime later. "I was shopping for rugs with Ed Feldman, who is kind of a legend in the fashion business," Jason says. It was Feldman who, years before, had given the young Jason Itzler a copy of Budd Schulberg's all-time delineation of the Hebrew hustler, What Makes Sammy Run?
"Read it," Feldman said. "It's you."
Jason says, "I immediately checked into the Gansevoort Hotel and began partying. Had a couple of girls come over because I figured I wouldn't be doing that for a while. When the cops came, I thought, 'Well, at least I'm wearing my twenty-eight-hundred-dollar rabbit-fur-lined sweater from Jeffrey's, because who wants to look like a guy in a sweatshirt?'When they snapped on the handcuffs, all I remember thinking was how I thought NY Confidential would last for twenty-five years."