Free The Best American Crime Writing 2006 by Mark Bowden Page B

he calls "my first great chapter" as "the twenty-two-year-old phone-sex king of South Beach." Advertising a "Free Live Call" (after which a $4.98-a-minute charge set in), Itzler's company was doing $600,000 a month, hitting a million and a half within a year.
    "I had so much money," Jason recalls."I bought an Aston Martin Virage, three hundred feet of oceanfront property. Like a moron, I spent half a million decorating a one-bedroom apartment."
    Alas, it would all soon come tumbling down, owing to what Jason now calls a "kind of oversight," which left him owing $4.5 million at 36 percent interest. Forced to declare bankruptcy in 1997, he lost everything, including his visionary acquisition of one of the fledgling Internet's most valuable URLs: pussy.com .
    The demise of Itzler's phone-sex company set a pattern that would be repeated in 2000 with his next big act, the SoHo Models fiasco. With typical overreach, Jason rented an eight-thousand-square-foot space at the corner of Canal and Broadway and declared himself the new Johnny Casablancas. Unfortunately for the young models hoping to find their faces on the cover of Vogue, the true business of SoHo Models was to supply Webcam porn. For a fee, the voyeur would type in "take off blouse… insert dildo." Squabbling among gray-market partners soon ensued. Within months, Jason found himself dangling over the side of the Canal Street building, held by the ankles by a guy named Mikey P.
    Jason says he would have gotten through these setbacks more easily if his mother were still alive, but Ronnie Itzler died of cancer in 1994, "after which I went kind of a little nuts." Following the collapse of the phone-sex firm, he twice attempted suicide, once running himself through with a steak knife and on another occasion drinking "a milk shake" he claims contained "75 Valium, 75 Klonopin, and a couple bottles of Scotch." Much to his surprise, he survived both times.
    Desperate for money after the SoHo Models disaster, Itzler decided his best option was to go to Amsterdam to buy four thousand tabs of Ecstasy. "In retrospect, it was a totally retarded idea," says Jason, who would leave Newark airport in handcuffs. He was sentenced to five years in the Jersey pen.The fact that his grandfather, whom he'd idolized as a gangster, stopped talking to him when he got locked up "was hard to take."
    "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.