Lost Girls (12 page)

On her visits back to Ellenville, Shannan seemed different—less combative, more confident. Where once she would shriek at Mari about being abandoned, now she took her mother out to get her hair done. She showed up for birthdays and holidays, determined to cook for everyone and do her sisters’ makeup. She brought magazines and ordered Chinese food and handed out bootleg DVDs she had picked up in Jersey City. She’d think nothing of spending nine hundred or a thousand dollars in one weekend. “No one else could compete,” Sherre said.

Her job wasn’t a secret. Shannan made no effort to dash away from Mari when her cell buzzed. She would answer in a ridiculous code that made Mari laugh—“Hi, this is Julie Smith, is this the pizzeria?”—as the dispatcher gave Shannan the next job. She wouldn’t go into much detail about the work—“That was her business,” Sherre said—but she had no problem talking about the money. “You would not believe the clients I have,” she once told Mari. “They’re rich. I hardly have to do nothing, and I get thousands of dollars.”

To her family, not just Mari, Shannan was leading such a removed, alien existence that questioning it seemed almost beside the point. Shannan had proved she was smart by graduating early. The money showed she could take care of herself. Her old friends from Ellenville were more scandalized. On the phone one night, her old friend Anthony almost didn’t know what to say. “Does your family know?” he asked, and Shannan said, “Yeah. They’re letting me live my life.” This stopped him short. If his daughter told him she was an escort, he’d snatch her and lock her in a room until she came to her senses.

Shannan reassured him. “I’m only doing it until I’m done with school.” He thought there had to be more to it than that, some other reason why Mari and the sisters never took the extra step to make sure Shannan stopped. To Anthony, that reason was clear: She was sending a lot of money home. “The only time I ever seen Shannan and her mom on good terms was when she started in this business,” he said, “when she was bringing home money and gifts and stuff like that.”

Mari saw how the money had changed Shannan’s life and marveled at her taste. In Jersey City, Shannan filled the apartment with four-hundred-thread-count sheets, designer clothes, and a plasma TV. She would take her sisters shopping, to the mall, to the movies. Sherre’s sons got Timberlands and Akademiks jackets. For one of the boys’ first birthdays, Shannan wanted to bring over a cake from Carlo’s Bake Shop in Hoboken, featured on the
Cake Boss
reality show. Sherre was offended: She wanted to bake for her own son, and here Shannan was, swooping in with her money again. Shannan had more success shopping for her mother. If Mari even mentioned something, it was hers. “ ‘Oh, the new Stevie Nicks CD is coming out.’ ‘Okay, Mommy, I’ll get it for you,’ ” Mari remembered.

As far as Shannan was concerned, her choice was a success. The money was washing away years of estrangement. Even Sherre came around to accepting her sister. “We got closer,” she said. The plan was working. Shannan’s success drew her family—especially her mother—closer to her at last.

On June 23, 2009, Shannan and a forty-two-year-old man named Elpidio Evangelista were arrested outside a bar along Sinatra Drive, a waterfront road in Hoboken. They both were charged with promoting prostitution; conspiracy; and manufacturing, distributing, or dispensing a controlled dangerous substance. They were both released on a summons. They weren’t the ones the police were after.

Less than a week later, the police picked up the head of World Class Party Girls, Joseph Ruis. Acting on a tip, the police had spent a year tracing credit-card bills and placing undercover officers. They knew everything about the business—how they offered clients cocaine and charged up to $3,500 an hour. The prosecutor said that the escort service took in about $250,000 per month before it was shut down. The client list was never made public. The Hudson County, New Jersey, prosecutor appeared eager to exchange the johns’ anonymity for their agreement to testify against Ruis if the case ever made it to trial. The case didn’t get that far: Ruis pleaded guilty a year later to laundering over $3 million annually that he made off of prostitution and drugs.

World Class Party Girls was out of business. Overnight, Alex and Shannan lost the ability to make money. Weighing his options, Alex realized how good he’d had it. The owner had known him, and he was one of the favorites, one of their biggest moneymakers. He felt like if he went to another agency, he’d come home with two hundred dollars a day, a waste of time. Shannan tried a normal waitressing job, but she wasn’t making anything close to what she was used to. So she went looking for a new agency, which eventually brought her to Craigslist.

At home, she and Alex argued more. The arguments were never directly about money; they were about the future. But any talk of the future inevitably circled back to money. “What are you gonna do?” she’d say. “You’re planning on doing nothing?” Alex, shouting now, would play the hooker card: “What about
you
? You gonna do
this
for the rest of your life?”

They both knew who was paying the bills. Alex was on unemployment, and his benefits ran out at the end of the year. Now he had no income at all. Shannan said she wanted to finish her online classes and get her degree before she quit. Meanwhile, she kept going on calls. Alex understood the life she was in—he used to be in it—but his life was changing. He wasn’t always faithful to her, either.

It was early, close to six
A.M.
Alex was sleeping, and Shannan came home from work drunk. She started pushing him, testing him, trash-talking him. “You ain’t trying to do nothing with your life. You’re a loser.”

“Stay quiet!” Alex said, glancing at the other bedroom. They had moved out of their apartment in downtown Jersey City and were living across town with Alex’s father.

“Fuck that! Fuck you!”

“You don’t have to stay here. Stay quiet, he’s sleeping over there!”

“You’re a daddy’s boy!”

She hit him in the chest—not too hard but hard enough for Alex to notice.

“Let’s leave,” he said.

“I’m not going nowhere!”

“Stop!”

“Oh, fuck you!”

That was when he hit her. His left hand, clenched in a fist, caught Shannan on the chin.

Shannan cried out. Then she screamed. Alex’s father woke up. Shannan wanted to call the police. Alex didn’t know what to do. She wouldn’t stop screaming. Finally, he threw up his hands. “Maybe I have to get arrested,” he said.

Shannan quieted down a little. Calling the police was never a good idea. Alex knew that. He knew she knew that, too.

She stayed. His father lectured him: “You shouldn’t have done that. You’re a guy. You don’t hit a girl.” Two days went by. Alex bought her gifts, trying to make it up to her. But Shannan couldn’t tolerate the pain. Her jaw throbbed so much that biting down sent her into hysterics.

Alex finally took her to a hospital in Newark. Her jaw was fractured. Shannan had two options: Get her jaw wired, or have a titanium plate grafted onto the bone. The plate was faster.

Shannan paid for it herself on an installment plan.

On a sunny day in September, two months after World Class Party Girls went under, Shannan was waiting on a corner in Astoria, Queens, to meet her new driver. She was starting up with an escort service out of the Bronx called Fallen Angelz. The business was changing. Shannan had learned the hard way that big agencies were easy targets for the police. Now she’d learn how hard it could be to start all over with a new one.

The driver she met that day was Michael Pak, a skinny, low-key Korean guy from Queens. Unlike Alex, who’d had one employer, Michael was a free agent, available at a moment’s notice for any number of agencies. He never went to any of their offices; he would just send the agency its cut of what the girl earned. They gave him an account number, and he would go to a Rite-Aid or any place that handled Green Dot transactions—a service not unlike PayPal on the Web, where you can securely drop off money for any account holder. Other times he sent the money by Western Union or MoneyGram.

When Michael first saw Shannan on the corner, his reaction was not unlike Alex’s:
Whoa, is that her?
They had said to look for a blonde. She seemed part black, though her hair was light and straightened; it might have been a wig. Shannan got into the backseat of his black Ford Explorer, and soon they got a call from the dispatcher, who instructed them to drive to a spot near the Brooklyn and Queens border and await further instructions. They complied but heard nothing for hours. Michael kept calling the agency, and finally, they were sent to a Russian neighborhood in South Brooklyn, near Coney Island. It turned out to be a bogus call. No client.

They both felt strung along. They realized they were being treated this way because they didn’t have seniority. The service trusted the older girls more, and Shannan was new. It was almost like a union rule—you needed enough hours with the company to be granted the first position. Michael thought this was especially dumb, since older girls had been in the business longer and may be more drugged up and erratic and less attractive. Right then and there, Shannan and Michael decided to go freelance. He would ferry her to calls in exchange for a third of the fee. Shannan would keep the rest. Finding johns wasn’t a problem. They’d just use the Web.

With Alex still dithering at home, Shannan and Michael made a good team. He was quiet and shy, partial to wearing sunglasses even at night. She was tiny and curvy and always in motion, a dervish, antic and erratic and fun. Most of the time, his studied nonchalance meshed well with her free-flowing energy. Shannan liked to call him her brother from another mother. Between calls, motoring around Manhattan and the boroughs, she would tell him all her war stories, like the time she got in a fight with a girl who had come to work the same party she’d been called to, or the time a driver wanted her to pay him with sex, or the many, many times she got stiffed.

Shannan never gave Michael much of a chance to tell her about his own life. She never heard how he’d grown up in Jackson Heights, the middle child in a striving Korean-American family. He never told her how, when he was nine, his father died of a stroke, and his mother supported the family by opening a supermarket and gas station on Long Island. Or how, after college at a state university, he blew the LSAT, took a job at an insurance company, got laid off, and moved back in with his mother. Or of his big screwup. As Michael told the story, a friend let him know about what seemed like a good deal, getting paid to help a rich girl from China travel to America. The job paid three thousand dollars. Michael insisted he didn’t sense at the time that it was a scam, and that the girl was coming to America illegally, and that Michael was being paid to act as a cover so she wouldn’t attract attention at customs. He flew to Sri Lanka to meet the girl, then accompanied her back to America. On May 11, 2004, he was arrested at the Dallas/Fort Worth airport and charged with conspiracy to misuse a passport.

Michael served six months in federal prison, picking up a little Spanish from his fellow inmates and playing a lot of Risk. Inmates made their own dice out of little rocks. He shared a cell with a young black guy who had Mike Tyson’s build and would kick Michael’s bed to wake him up so he could sit in audience of the black guy’s poems. His brother brought Michael back to New York after prison and found him a five-hundred-dollar-a-month SRO with a shared bathroom. He worked at a pool hall his brother owned. He’d run out of what little ambition he had, and prison had convinced him to drop any pretense of a straight life. After a year or so, he answered an ad to be a driver for an escort service. He had always thought that would be a sweet job.

Shannan went by the name Angelina now, to emphasize her lips, and charged two hundred an hour—less than what World Class Party Girls charged, though she got more of the cut. On a good night, she made as many as seven or eight calls. She’d take the PATH train into the city, Michael would pull up to some prearranged corner, and she’d pile into the SUV with all her stuff: a tall soda from McDonald’s, often spiked with vodka; a bag with extra clothes; her purse; a book from one of her online college classes; and a netbook she’d use to post and refresh her Craigslist profile.

For Shannan, Craigslist was a slot machine that almost always paid out. Every time she posted an ad with a photo—usually one of her leaning over from behind—her cell would ring within seconds. She’d pitch the johns over the phone, work out a price, and get an address. If she managed to make it through the night without partying away any of her share of her fees, she could get home to Alex in the morning with over half of their twelve-hundred-dollar monthly rent in her pocket. All she needed was a driver to take her around and provide some semblance of security.

Sitting so close in the car for hours, she and Michael kept the conversation light. She didn’t talk about her mother or sisters. Sometimes she would mention Alex. Once she even asked if Michael could find a customer for her on a night when Alex was going to drive her. But with Alex mostly retired, Shannan spent more nights with Michael. He knew she was argumentative—“fiery” was how he put it. She seemed ready to fight over any little thing, and she was murder on Michael’s car. She burned a polka-dot pattern into his car seat with her cigarettes. Sometimes she’d be very happy. Other times, she made no sense at all. It wasn’t really about drugs. She didn’t like cocaine, though if the customer wanted to do a line, she would. She did like ecstasy—he’d drive her to meetings with dealers—and she really liked to drink.

When Shannan wanted to work and Michael didn’t, she called another driver named Blake. Blake always posted the ads for the girls he drove, and Shannan was no different:
busty blue-eyed blonde ready for you,
he wrote. Her face was never in the photos, just her body. “Shannan was not photogenic,” he said. “Her smile always came out crooked.” When men called, he told them to picture Julia Roberts—those big eyes, that oversize mouth. No one ever complained, at least in person.