Free The Best American Crime Writing 2006 by Mark Bowden

lived together at Seventy-nine Worth Street, the harem stylings of which came to Jason while getting his hair cut at the Casbah-themed Warren Tricomi Salon on Fifty-seventh Street. It was just that this marriage thing was flipping her out, especially after Jason called the tabs to announce the ceremony would be held inside Rikers.
    "Every little girl's dream, to get married at Rikers Island," Natalia said to Jason. "What are they going to get us, adjoining cells?"
    But now, holding hands in the visiting room, surrounded by low-level convicts, just the sort of people who rarely appeared in either of their well-to-do childhoods or in the fantasy life of Seventy-nine Worth Street -neither of them, pimp or escort, could keep from crying.
    "Are those happy tears or sad tears?" Jason asked.
    "Just tears," answered Natalia. "Crying because your boy is in jail?" "That and…everything else."
    It was a tender moment. Except then, as he always does, Jason began talking.
    "Don't worry about this Rikers marriage," he said, back in schemer-boy genius mode. "This isn't the real marriage… When I'm out we'll have the princess marriage… the white dress, every-thing.Your mom will be there. My dad… This is just the publicity marriage.You know: getting married at Rikers-it's so…rock star!"
    Natalia looked up at Jason, makeup streaming from her face. "It's great, isn't it?" Jason enthused."A brilliant idea." "Yeah," Natalia said wearily. "Great, in theory." Almost everything Jason Itzler said was great, in theory.
     
    They call it the oldest profession, and maybe it is.The prostitute has always been part of the New York underworld. According to Timothy J. Gilfoyle's City of Eros, in 1776, Lieutenant Isaac Bangs of the Continental Army complained that half his troops were spending more time in lower-Manhattan houses of ill repute than fighting the British. In the nineteenth century, lower Broadway had become, in the words of Walt Whitman, a "nocti-vagous strumpetocracy," filled with "tawdry, foul-tongued and harsh-voiced harlots."
    By the eighties, the image of the New York prostitute encompassed both the call-girl minions of Sydney Biddle Barrows, the famous Mayflower Madam, and the hot-pants-clad hooker trying to keep warm beside a burning fifty-five-gallon drum outside the Bronx 's Hunts Point Market. On Eighth Avenue 's so-called Minnesota Strip were the runaways in the wan-eyed Jodie Foster-in-Taxi Driver mode.The nineties brought the "Natasha Trade," an influx of immigrant Russian girls and their ex-Soviet handlers who locked the women up in Brighton Beach apartments and drove them, fifteen at a time, in Ford Econoline vans to strip joints on Queens Boulevard.
    The Internet would reconfigure all that.Today, with highly ad hoc estimates of the New York "sex worker" population hovering, depending on whom you ask, anywhere from five thousand to twenty-five thousand, horny men looking for a more convivial lunch hour don't have to cruise Midtown bars or call a number scribbled on a piece of paper.All that's needed is a high-speed connection to any of the many "escort malls," such as the highly clickable CityVibe or Eros.
    The typical site includes a photo or two, a sparse bio, a schedule of when the escort is available, and a price ("donation") list. There is also the standard disclaimer, detailing how any money exchanged "is simply for time only and companionship" and that anything else "is a matter of personal preference between two or more consenting adults." For, as everyone in the escort business is quick to say, selling "companionship" is not against the law.
    The system is not without its bugs.The most common question: "Is she the girl in the picture?" Says a longtime booker, "About two-thirds of the time, when a guy calls up asking for a girl they've seen on the site, she doesn't work for us, quit six months ago, or we Photoshopped her picture from the Victoria's Secret catalogue.
    "If they ask for Nicolette, I take out the