"Jail is terrible, really boring," says Jason. "But it does give you plenty of time to plan your next move."
on parole after serving seventeen months of his smuggling sentence, living in a funky third-floor walk-up in Hoboken per the terms of his release, Jason started NY Confidential (he would remain on parole his entire pimp career) in late 2003. Business was spotty at first but picked up dramatically in early 2004, when Natalia walked into the company's place at Fifty-fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, an office previously occupied by the magician David Blaine.
"It was my birthday," Natalia remembers. "I'd just been cast as Ingrid Superstar in this play, Andy & Edie. I wanted to be Edie, but Misha Sedgwick, Edie's niece, also wanted it, so forget that. I was eating in a restaurant with Peter Beard, the photographer. I was a kind of party girl for a while. I met Peter one night, and we hit it off. He said I should meet this guy Jason."
Beard, a nocturnal bon vivant known for his "discovery" of exotic models like Iman, and who had been associated with Jason during the SoHo Models episode, warned Natalia off Itzler's new venture. Eventually, however, Natalia decided to give Jason a call. "Being an escort never crossed my mind. It wasn't something girls like me did. I was an actress. From a very nice home. But I was involved in an abusive relationship, with this Wall Street guy," she says. "In the beginning, all I wanted was enough money to move out."
Jason says,"When Natalia came over with Peter, I said, Wow, she's so hot. She has one of the all-time great tushes. But there was this other girl there, too. Samantha.When she took off her shirt, she had these amazing breasts. So it was Natalia's butt against Samantha's boobies.
1 went with the tits. But when Natalia came back from making a movie, she moved in with us. Samantha could tell I was kind of more into Natalia. So we become boyfriend and girlfriend."
At the time, Jason's top girl was Cheryl, a striking blonde ballroom dancer from Seattle who says she got into the business to buy her own horse. "I did NY Confidential's first date," Cheryl recalls. "I had on my little black dress and was shaking like a leaf. Jason was nervous, too. He said, 'Just go up there and take your clothes off.' I told him,'No, you've got to make it romantic. Special.' "
It was Cheryl who came up with the mantra Jason would later instruct all the NY Confidential girls to repeat, "three times," before entering a hotel room to see a client: "This is my boyfriend of six months, the man I love, I haven't seen him for three weeks… This is my boyfriend of six months, the man I love…"
"That's the essence of the true GFE, the Girlfriend Experience," says Jason.As opposed to the traditional "no kissing on the mouth" style, the GFE offers a warmer, fuzzier time. For Jason, who says he never hired anyone who'd worked as an escort before, the GFE concept was an epiphany. "Men see escorts because they want to feel happier. Yet most walk away feeling worse than they did before.They feel dirty, full of self-hatred. Buyer's remorse big-time. GFE is about true passion, something genuine.A facsimile of love. I told guys this was a quick vacation, an investment in the future. When they got back to their desks, they'd tear the market a new asshole, make back the money they spent at NY Confidential in an hour.
"What we're selling is rocket fuel, rocket fuel for winners."
Jason decided Natalia would become his great creation, the Ultimate GFE. It mattered little that Natalia, for all her French Scottish sultriness, might strike some as a tad on the skinny side. Brown-eyed, dark-haired, olive-skinned, not to mention lactose-intolerant, she didn't fit the usual description of a big ticket in an industry filled with PSE (Porn-Star Experience) babes with store-bought bazangas out to here. Jason took this as a challenge. If he was into Natalia, he'd make sure everyone else was, too. It was a simple matter of harnessing the available technology.
The main vehicle was the aforementioned TheEroticReview. com,"the Consumer Reports of the escort industry," according to the site's founder and owner, the L.A.-based Dave Elms, a.k.a. Dave@TER. "The most important thing was to break Natalia out big," Jason says. "To get the ball rolling with a number of fabulous reviews, I sent her to some friends, to sort of grease the wheel. I knew those 10/10s would keep coming, because no man wants to admit he got less.They're brainwashed that way."
If any hobbyist had the temerity to hand out a paltry 8/8, or even a 9/10, he would be contacted. "Don't break my girl's streak, this is history in the making," Jason cajoled, offering to throw in a couple hours of free time to get the customer to do a little recalculating. If that didn't work, good reviews could be ensured by the $5,000 everyone working at NY Confidential (except Jason) swears was FedExed to Dave@TER on the fifteenth of every month. Dave, who says he "would not argue with that" when asked if he is the single most important person in the escort business, vehemently denies any payoffs, from NY Confidential or anyone else.
With her 10/10s piling up, Natalia's hourly rate jumped from $800 to $1,200 with a two-hour minimum. (The split: 45 percent for the escort, 45 percent for the agency, 10 percent for the booker.) If clients haggled, they would be told to call back when they were "more successful." Jason says, "I always ask prospective clients to give me strong points about themselves, where they went to school, if they're good-looking. It established rapport but also put them on the defensive, let them know that I was interviewing them, to see if they were good enough to go out with our girls."
Jason's hyping sometimes was faintly embarrassing. "Jason would be saying, 'Natalia is the greatest escort in the history of the world, as good as Cleopatra or Joan of Arc,' " says Natalia,"and I'd be like, 'Jason! Joan of Arc was not an escort, she was a religious martyr.' Then he'd be saying I was the greatest escort since Mary Magdalene."
But all the hype in the world (an Asian toy manufacturer wanted to mass-produce Barbie-style Natalia dolls, complete with tiny lingerie) wouldn't have helped if Natalia, who never imagined she'd wind up staying in "every expensive hotel in New York," hadn't turned out to be a natural.
"I'm a little moneymaking machine, that's what I am," she says as she takes a languorous drag of her Marlboro while stretching out on her apartment couch in a shiny pink satin corset, Marlene Dietrich-style. Then she cracks up, because "you know, the whole thing is so ridiculous sometimes."
People wonder what it is about Natalia that made her the Perfect 10. "From the start, you know this is going to be fun," says one client."It is like having sex in a tree house." Says another,"Nat isn't this all-knowing geisha thing. But in a way, it's deeper, because she gets to a place inside where you used to be free." And another: "With her, there's none of that shit like this is costing enough for a first-class ticket to London and the girl's in the bathroom for, like, half an hour. Natalia's this one, total this-is-all-about-you."
Suffice it to say, it's in the pheromones. According to Natalia, she's always gotten along with men."Jason understood who I was," she says. "Yes, he sold the shit out of me, but he sold me as myself, someone anyone can be comfortable with, someone who really likes sex. Because the truth is, I do. I loved my job, totally."
It is another old story, along with the heart of gold, that many "providers" actually like what they do. But even if she professes to be "horrified" by stories about sexual trafficking and "sickened" by nightmarish exploitation of the street prostitute, Natalia says, "At the level NY Confidential was at, the guys I was meeting, I would have gone out with 80 percent of them anyway. People have so many misconceptions, preconceptions, about my life. Last year, I got a call to play an escort in a Broadway play. But the part was so dark, so icky. I said no. It didn't fit my experience at all."