Call Girl Confidential (19 page)

I did testify in judge's chambers. But I had my limits. I never named names when it came to clients. I had too many strong feelings for them, however complex. It's a free country, and my clients have made plenty of money in it. If they wanted to spend it on sex and I was willing to give it, that was our business. I did testify that there was one client who made a request to obtain a young boy. But mostly I had given prosecutors some of the evidence they needed to bring down the “Millionaire Madam,” who at fifteen years had the longest-running high-class call-girl agency in modern New York City history. After a five-year investigation, it would be up to Linehan and Roper of the Manhattan DA's Corruption Unit to prove it in court.

Yet on the morning of February 22, 2012, a grand jury
indicted Anna on just one single felony charge of promoting prostitution, based on the undercover cop's testimony about the girl-on-girl action the previous July. Jaynie Mae was also indicted on a felony procuring charge. Catherine DeVries and Maz Bottone were each indicted on one count of prostitution, a misdemeanor; DeVries was arrested on February 27; cops busted Bottone four days later on March 2. Both started cooperating immediately, Linehan told Judge Merchan. They were released without bail.

Investigators knew on the day she'd been indicted that Anna was to meet with David S. Walker, a financial adviser at Morgan Stanley, to talk to him about investing in her high-end relationship service. Anna was tailed as she went up to Walker's office for the meeting at Morgan Stanley headquarters in Times Square. When she reemerged, cops arrested her on the sidewalk. Anna thought she was being kidnapped and screamed out to passersby, “Please! Somebody! Call 911!”

Meanwhile, Walker had some explaining to do to Morgan Stanley honchos once it broke in the press that it was he who had had the “Millionaire Madam” up to their offices. He was never charged with any crime, and he told his superiors at Morgan Stanley that he had previously met Anna socially and just wanted to hear her business plan. Nevertheless, top execs would suspend him with pay until Anna's trial was over.

Anna was brought to her February 23 arraignment in cuffs, where she pled not guilty to her one charge of promoting prostitution. It was the first time, after being in the sex business for fifteen years as Anna Scotland, that she had ever been charged with a crime. Yet Judge Juan Merchan set her bail at an eye-popping $2 million bond, or $1 million in cash, which Anna
couldn't—or wouldn't—make. Charlie Linehan had argued that Anna's wealthy clients, and perhaps Anna herself, had millions to help the U.K. citizen flee the charge, which brought a potential seven-year sentence. Anna had spoken of the real estate development she and her eye-candy husband, Kelvin Gorr, had made. Jonas had shown me her accounts—he didn't say what country they were in—with totals of $14 million. If Anna had some of that cash lying around the pig farm, it wouldn't be too bright to admit it. Judge Merchan, who already knew a lot more about the case than press and courtroom observers, sent her off to prison on Rikers Island.

On March 6, her co-counsel Peter Gleason tried to get her bail reduced. Anna had been brought from Rikers Island on the prison bus and into criminal court, wearing a zigzag-print wool jacket over black pants, accessorized with silver handcuffs. Maybe it was the reading glasses at the end of her nose, but I noticed for the first time how much Anna had aged since I first started working for her. The paranoia had taken its toll.

Gleason was a man of mystery. He had been a cop; he had been a fireman; he had run for City Council. But as a lawyer, he had never tried a felony case before. Not only that, but he offered up his TriBeCa loft as collateral for Anna's bail, even though he barely knew her. He even said Anna and her family could live in the $3 million spread, with a Japanese soaking tub in the guest bathroom, with him for the duration. When asked why, he explained that he and Anna “had a mutual friend.”

In the courtroom sat famous private eye Vinnie Parco—the same Vinnie Parco whom Anna had called a “motherfucker” to me over the phone. Perhaps Parco worked for the “mutual friend”? Or maybe Anna thought Parco had done such a good job
finding her that she wanted the best. Who knows. But after just fifteen minutes, Judge Merchan said he would have to study the idea of a defense attorney offering up his multimillion-dollar loft for a client and set a hearing on the matter. He ordered Anna back to Rikers.

P
eter Gleason's offer of his loft for bail collateral was even more mysterious because Gleason wasn't even the chief lawyer on Anna's case. No, the court had appointed someone else to represent her after she said she was broke: respected defense attorney Richard Siracusa, who called Gleason “nothing but a hindrance.”

At another hearing six days later, with Anna wearing the same zigzag jacket despite her extensive wardrobe, she made a legal maneuver that backfired with Judge Merchan. In a chaotic scene that the
New York Daily News
described as “bizarre,” Gleason brought famous ponytailed civil-rights attorney and radio
personality Ron Kuby before the bench to argue for Anna's right to jettison Siracusa and choose Gleason. Gleason stated, “It's going to take a very special lawyer to handle this matter.”

Judge Merchan scolded, “Your client will not get preferential treatment here!” and ordered Anna back to Rikers.

Three days later, on March 15, it got even weirder when Anna replaced her two lawyers with two other lawyers. Not only did she get rid of Siracusa, she “fired” Gleason as well. Apparently money had been found to pay Gary Greenwald, a renowned “superlawyer” and the former mayor of Wurtsboro, New York, about half an hour away from Anna's farm in Monroe. His co-counsel was Elise L. Rucker, who is listed as having a house in Monroe.

Judge Merchan said that he and prosecutors had spent “hours” studying the legal and ethical issues raised by Peter Gleason offering his property as collateral while handling Anna's defense, but now that was all moot. When Greenwald tried to get Anna's bail reduced, Merchan refused, again pointing out that a woman with U.K. citizenship who had fled to a home she kept in Canada in 2008 was a flight risk. He set Anna's next trial date for three months hence on June 7.

Just two days earlier, Jaynie Mae Baker's perp walk had been a cakewalk. After the story broke in the
New York Post
of her February indictment, she flew from LA to Cabo San Lucas, the exclusive Mexican resort, with her sister Jessica. She claimed she hadn't known she was in trouble. But Jaynie Mae had one lawyer from the get-go, and he is among the crème de la crème of criminal defense attorneys: Robert Gottlieb, a former ADA under Morgenthau. Maybe Jaynie's rich boyfriend learned about him, I don't know; but his solid presence was in stark contrast to the
courtroom circus Anna created by hiring a total of nine defense attorneys, which only seemed to annoy Judge Merchan.

Gottlieb told the judge that Jaynie Mae had no idea there was a warrant out for her arrest until she read it on Facebook in Cabo and friends told her that reporters were outside her apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Gottlieb made arrangements for her to turn herself in, and Jaynie Mae took her time thinking about it. She finally flew back on Saturday, March 10, to give herself up, but unfortunately, Customs didn't get the memo. Customs agents saw the warrant in her security file and detained her at Newark International Airport until Gottlieb had her sprung with a 10:30 p.m. cell phone call to Linehan.

The following Tuesday, paparazzi thronged Jaynie Mae as she was walked handcuffed into the New York State Supreme Court at 100 Centre Street, and her appearance caused one veteran cop to say, “She's the best-looking perp we've ever had in this courthouse.” At the arraignment, Charlie told Judge Merchan that he had had “numerous informants over the years who have discussed Ms. Baker's role in [Gristina's] operation.” I was not one of them. I still believe the tailored and coiffed Jaynie Mae was only a participant in the aspirational part of Anna's business: linking wealthy men with young, beautiful women, but in a higher-class, legally loopholed way.

Despite Jaynie Mae's long stay in Mexico, Gottlieb got Judge Merchan to set her bail at $100,000, which was issued by famous New York bail bondsman Ira Judelson (who helped spring rapper Lil Wayne and International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn) after Jaynie Mae's boyfriend, Marcus Laun, put up his country house as collateral.

On March 16, investigators seized all the files of David
Jaroslawicz, who once sued quarterback Brett Favre and the New York Jets on behalf of massage therapist Christina Scavo for sexual harassment. He also sued the sultan of Brunei on behalf of former Miss U.S.A. Shannon Marketic, who claimed he'd held her against her will for thirty-two days and molested her in his 1,778-room palace. It was a story Anna had boasted to me on tape that she had given to “her friend at the
New York Post
.”

Jaroslawicz was also Anna's next-door neighbor in Monroe, New York. His law office at 225 Broadway is listed in New York City Buildings Department records as the address for the LLC that owned Anna's brothel building. Jaroslawicz's office is also listed for the 881 Lakes Road LLC, which owns Anna Gristina's two-hundred-acre farm, located next to his.

“I think they're investigating whether there is some financial relationship,” Jaroslawicz's lawyer Marc Agnifilo told Shayna Jacobs of DNAinfo.com, adding helpfully that the records documented Jaroslawicz's upstate real estate holdings. Since Anna and her husband, Kelvin, were also involved in real estate dealings, perhaps the records would show where Anna's money was figuratively “buried.”

“I don't think at the end of the day that any of that's going to be criminal,” Agnifilo told the website. Perhaps Jaroslawicz was just being neighborly. He was never charged.

Arrests had been made, potential evidence seized. Anna was locked up, and her trial wouldn't begin until October.

W
hile at Rikers, Anna had an interesting inhouse neighbor: her former nemesis, Jason Itzler, the “King of All Pimps.” Calling from a jailhouse pay phone with extra minutes he'd traded for
cigarettes, the man who had once employed Ashley Dupré told Rocco Parascandola and Larry McShane of the
New York Daily News
that he believed Anna's law enforcement connections led to his arrest and to his escort service, New York Confidential, being shut down.

“When you control the hottest girls in the world, people kiss your ass,” Itzler observed.

Itzler told the reporters that Anna was “dangerous, dangerous, dangerous . . . She sent three linebacker-sized guys to my office at New York Confidential. One had a gun. . . . This woman plays hardball. She's the most vindictive bitch ever in the escorting game.”

Anna had told me in a call I recorded, “My guy sent two guys down to [Jason's] office to make it very clear to him.” At every court appearance, Anna's husband, Kelvin Gorr, was bookended by two guys who looked like linebackers. They're the nattily dressed white men in the photos getting into an expensive SUV with him outside 100 Centre Street. You had to wonder if they were the ones who paid Jason the visit.

Anna could be sweet as Tupelo honey, but if you crossed her, she sounded like Scarface. This came out in a scoop by
New York Post
star reporters Laura Italiano and Jeane MacIntosh, who said that the DA's office had been investigating Anna ever since she had been arrested in 2004 for violent threats she made against one of the girls.

Anna had lost her temper with Jennifer Billo, a platinum-haired girl in her early twenties who was fighting with other girls over use of the East Seventy-Eighth Street place. Anna called her up and yelled, “I'm going down to the city, and I'm going to beat your head in with a baseball bat! I'm going to send someone
right now! Right now, they are coming to your apartment! You'd better watch your back. You don't know who I know! I own New York!” Billo quickly reported Anna to police at the Upper East Side's Nineteenth Precinct. Anna then counter-reported Billo to cops for threatening to “put a bullet” in her head and those of her kids. Both ladies were arrested that summer, but then both dropped the charges. No matter: Anna had now put herself on the law enforcement radar. They soon found her connection to Jonas, and he was arrested in 2005 and released yet again.

Such stories during Anna's court case were rare. It seemed that most members of the New York media collectively seemed to feel that Anna's case was much ado about an activity that should be legalized anyway. As she languished in jail, emerging from time to time in court looking increasingly depressed, Anna became a media darling. Most of the newspapers, websites, and TV and radio news shows covering the case kept her in soft focus, talking about her four children, including a nine-year-old at home who was in the sole care of Anna's younger husband, Kelvin Gorr. Headlines went from calling Anna the “Millionaire Madam” to the “Soccer Mom Madam” and the “Hockey Mom Madam.” Reporters and pundits talked about her being a mother of four and about her animal-rescue work on her farm. They lauded her loyalty for not naming her clients. They said DA Cyrus Vance and Judge Merchan should be ashamed for insisting upon and then setting such a high bail.

On April 27, soon after Anna had marked her two-month anniversary in jail, Kelvin and Anna's college-age daughters launched a website to try to raise her million-dollar bail: HelpAnna.org. Most of the press covered it sympathetically. “Perhaps it's time to rescue the rescuer,” heralded the site. “Anna
Gristina-Gorr and her little son have dedicated their time to saving the lives of animals. . . . Anna provided a foster home for the Pig Placement Network. . . . The Pig Placement Network rescues pigs that are homeless or about to be slaughtered. Without the help of Anna, many animals would be left out in the cold.