guest11: You should invite all your old girlfriends to spend New Years eve with you here in this here chat room, reviewing the last decade of your life with you
guest11: “An Evening with Luke” Maybe rent out a restuarant and charge people 50 dollars to attend the lecture (food and drink extra)
guest11: If you were any kind of a Jew that’s what you would do.
guest11: I don’t care what the rabbis of LA had to say, in terms of money, you are no Jew. You shame us all.
guest11: Did you read that article in the NY Post about that nice Jewish girl who whored herself out to the Sultan of Brunai?
guest11: She has still managed to find herself a guy to date, even though she admits she was in the Sultan’s harem and f**ked both him and his brother
guest11: So apparently the Sultan of Brunai does not go trolling for women on Craigslist

The New York Post says:

Jillian Lauren was frightened out of a deep sleep by a banging at her door.

“You must get ready. Five minutes,” a voice barked. She dressed and timidly entered a Merce des-Benz with tinted windows, more than 9,000 miles from her New Jersey home.

Lauren, who grew up in Livingston and studied acting at New York University, was in the last place a Jewish American princess belongs: in Brunei — a Muslim monarchy on the north coast of Borneo in Southeast Asia — and in a harem.

She waited four hours in a gold-encrusted room for the man she came to see as her “savior,” the royal around whom the harem revolved: Prince Jefri Bolkiah, the former finance minister of the oil-rich nation and the brother of one of the world’s richest people, the Sultan of Brunei.

When he arrived, reeking of Calvin Klein’s Egoiste, she breathed a sigh of relief. As he led her into the Hugh Hefner-inspired bed room, she lifted off her sun dress and had sex with him for the first time.

“I fell victim to Stockholm Syndrome,” Lauren writes in her book “Some Girls: My Life in a Harem” (Plume), out in April. “I knew I was a hooker, but somehow I felt like Cinderella.”

Lauren lifts the veil off her secret harem life, sharing vivid and explosive details of her 18 months as a hired party girl, her bizarre affair with the prince, the outrageous shopping sprees and the fighting within the international clique of 40 women who fought for the prince’s affections.

Lauren, the adopted daughter of a Jewish stockbroker and a housewife, never thought she’d end up in a Muslim’s brothel. She grew up in a town where “orthodonture was mandatory and getting a nose job as a gift for your sweet 16 was highly recommended.

Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/my_nights_at_the_harem_p8PbltXYPm7DnA5l7TDAoI#ixzz0aw0SbZIJ

Ashley Dupre, the call girl entangled in former-Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s sex scandal, lashes out at critics and the media in a new blog post on Global Grind.

Dupre writes that while she’s happy that Spitzer, who will be an adjunct professor at City College in the fall, is seemingly moving on with his life, she has been unable erase the stain of scandal from her own name.

The struggling singer claims not have "made a dime" on the affair, and takes the publishers who had offered her book deals, only to rescind them, to task:

Did this hit too close to home for you because your husband cheated on you with an escort? I will write the book regardless and do it for the right reasons.

From the New York Post:

"Let me say this — most girls, to varying degrees, of course, want to be pampered and have nice shoes, designer handbags and gorgeous clothes," Dupre, 24, writes in a blog post on hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons’ Global Grind Web site. "I know many women who target guys with money and use them to get these things. They toy with them, flirt, go on dates, have sex and then drop hints about that new dress . . . or being short on rent money — and the guys deliver it."

Then takes a poke at all the women who pass judgment on her, but are engaged in "dishonest relationships" of their own. "I see this all over New York City. Some women aren’t as vindictive, but still dive into relationships with wealthy guys who they don’t love or even find attractive, but they stay in it because they have a nice home, a car and spending money," she wrote. "They would rather stay in an unfulfilling or loveless relationship than lose that security."………..

Fred emails: Oh, the shallow, meaningless cynicism of it all…. Give me a girl who pines after true love, preferably with blond hair and big boobs.

Joe emails: What you really need to do is get a blogging relationship going with this Dupre girl. You know deep in your heart that you agree with her. Think of the possibilities, you’d give her blog-respectability (bloggerspectability?) and she’d give you, um, you know. She even kinda-looks-Jewish, so you can take her from the hovel to shul. This would be bigger than Emma, bigger than Leah Kleim (lot less blood, for sure). And perhaps you can even get her to join you at Sex, Spirit, & Shadow: The Three S’s of Dynamic and Personal Evolution with Diane Musho Hamilton, Marc Gafni, and Sofia Diaz. I think this is a big opportunity. Don’t blow it

We talk Sunday night, May 24, about his new book Breakshot.

I mumble about a woman I met who turned out to be a grad student in chemistry. "I thought she was a stripper."

Matthew: "That shows you still have room to evolve. Just because a woman is a beautiful, sexual piece of art does not mean that she uses that to make money. Still objectifying women, it’s a shame."

Luke: "When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?"

Matthew: "A writer since age eight. I wrote my first book when I was nine. I had to stop it halfway because I had killed off all the characters. I liked the power of killing off characters too much to put together a story. It was just a gruesome stunt show of these elaborate ways for me to off people."

Luke: "What did you think of the movie, The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke?"

Matthew: "Mickey Rourke and Darren Aranofsky (the director) name-dropped me in an interview. I wrote a book on pro wrestling, Ring of Hell, and they found that book intriguing.

"I thought the movie was good. I thought Mickey Rourke’s performance was incredible. It was very true-to-life from what I’ve encountered interviewing washed-up pro wrestlers.

"It captured a true segment of the pro wrestling industry. To me the more interesting story is not the down-and-out guys who end up chewed up but more how even the millionaires, the guys you see on TV, find their bodies destroyed and find themselves psychologically warped by an industry that is just unimaginably exploitative. That multi-million dollar corporate exploitation is more interesting than the flea market independent show thrown by some guy with a couple of thousand bucks to waste, which is what The Wrestler represented."

Luke: "When you were in high school, where were you in the social pecking order?"

Matthew: "I was not very high. I would’ve been a nerd if I hadn’t been so good at speaking and so better at insulting than any of the bullies were. I was a loner but not a terribly picked on loner. I felt alienated. I went to an expensive private school in suburban New Orleans (Metairie Park Country Day) and felt completely out of place. It [was home to] a lot of the rich white and Jewish people who fled New Orleans when it became increasingly black in the 1960s and 1970s."

Luke: "Do you love writing?"

Matthew: "I love writing. I keep getting myself into trouble because I will accept almost any writing assignment because I love the challenge of it. I am almost completely unemployable otherwise."

"If I had better people skills, I would be running for political office. Writing is the closest simulation of real world power that you can ever have while being a guy isolated in a room in his pajamas. Know what I mean?"

Luke: "I know exactly what you mean."

"What are your strengths and weaknesses as a writer?"

Matthew: "That’s a very challenging question. My strengths? When I’m really deep into a topic, I can really delve into it in a way that’s kinda left-field and ways that people haven’t previously thought about it. I’m very good lyrically with the ways I describe things. My uses of language, I’m a very stylistic writer. My prose is very forceful. My weaknesses? I tend to go overboard. I get so passionate in the midst of writing that I say things that I am not sure even I believe. I have a very good work ethic. I’ll work harder than anyone you ever meet. But I have very poor organization. I may work 36 hours straight one day and then spend two days in a coma just staring at a computer screen not getting anything done."

Luke: "Give me the Readers Digest version of how you became a writer?"

Matthew: "I did all types of weird gigs. I got more assignments to write something and then the magazine would fall apart… I dropped out of college when I was 20 and I devoted myself full-time to becoming a writer. I had my first agent when I was 20, Jack Scovil in New York. We put together a couple of books. One of them was Breakshot. It took four or five years to get a book deal. I was supporting myself as a paralegal. Eventually I got an offer from my second agent, Andrew Lownie, a guy in London , if I wanted to write about pro wrestling. I have a lot of friends in that industry. I took that opportunity. That came out last year when I was 24. It turned into a surprising success. I got a two-book deal after that. I’m just about to announce another book deal."

"I had two novels written when I was 18 and 19, both of which I had opportunities to publish and decided not to."

Luke: "How has marriage changed you as a writer?"

Matthew: "It’s made me a lot more empathetic. It’s made me think more about how I want to approach things. I’m naturally more of a scorched-earth personality, very Napoleonic. Before I met her, my writing read like someone in the midst of a PCP fit, just this raging masculine blast of adjectives. It was unreadable except for the 5% of the populace who were angry nerds. She humanized me and helped me mature."

Luke: "How did you get mixed up with Kenny Gallo?"

Matthew: "I know a gentleman from the underworld in Providence, Rhode Island. One day I’m called. He says, I’m going to send you a ticket. I don’t want you to ask why or who you’re going to meet. I just want to introduce you to someone.

"I liked the guy and I trusted him and I was bored, so I went to where he said to meet him. I go into a hotel room and in comes Kenny. He says, Kenny, you’ve talked about writing a book. Matt, you’re a great writer. You two need to do business. I’m going to get something to eat. And he walked out of the room.

"I was only 20 when that happened. I think Kenny and I have talked every single day since then. The book turned out well. It’s a stranger than fiction story but that’s how it happened."

Luke: "How long did it take you to realize you had a book with him?"

Matthew: "Once I realized he was telling the truth… I could see he was a Japanese-American gentleman and he was in the Mafia. That’s a book right there. The notion of this well-educated wealthy kid from Orange County who reaches the inner sanctum of the New York Mafia was a book."

Luke: "Why wasn’t your stomach turned that this was a stone-cold killer and you should have nothing to do with him?"

Matthew: "I’ve known a lot of people who you could say similar things about. I’m the son of two lawyers. I could’ve become a lawyer. I chose to become a writer because I wanted to lead a more interesting life and to do that I knew I’d have to take a lot of risks… When I wrote about pro wrestling, people told me I should be worried about my safety because I took on Vince McMahon. I called him unimaginable things that he’s never been called in public and this is a bililonaire with a reputation for taking reckless vengeance.

"I made a conscious decision when I decided to devote myself to becoming a writer that I would do anything that it took to become the best writer I could and deliver stories that nobody else could do."

Luke: "Was it easy for you to like Kenji?"

Matthew: "It’s easy to like Kenji. He’s a very charismatic, he’s a very friendly person in most situations. I’m always attracted to intelligent people so that made it easy for me."

"The hardest part of writing Breakshot was writing about porn. I found it very challenging to write about porn because porn is such a salacious topic and it has so much baggage with it that I felt it would derail the entire book, that all the momentum I was building would hit this loggerjam. There are so many angles to the way that porn treats women. There are so many angles to Kenji’s complicity with the way porn treats women. There are so many people who will just gag at the thought of the grotesque sexual acts I describe. I thought it would kill the book.

"Porn is also inherently ridiculous. It’s kinda like pro wrestling in that it can be an extremely dark and exploitative industry, but it is so ridiculous in its mechanics that you can’t help but laugh at it.

"It was hard maintaining any coherence to the story while still doing an expose of the porn industry through Kenji’s eyes."

Luke: "It sounds like the exploitation of women was harder for you to deal with than the murder of men in the cocaine section?"

Matthew: "Yeah. I have a very New Orleans world viewpoint. Anyone who chooses to work in the black market, who chooses to work outside the law, who can’t rely on law or human convention or any good will from their fellow man and they end up getting killed, that’s part of their job. That’s a life they knowingly entered and they knew the risks that go into it.

"Maybe this is some kind of latent reverse sexism on my part, I couldn’t help but feel pity for a lot of the women, and even some of the men, in the porn industry because I think they might’ve been sold a bill of goods that was different from the reality. A guy who’s a coke dealer knows what a coke dealer is.

"I interviewed a lot of people in porn for this book. When they entered porn, there seemed to be this naivete that being a porn superstar was very different from the reality of being a working adult entertainment actress. There’s a certain tragedy there whereas a coke dealer getting shot or he shot other people or a mobster going to jail because he committed crimes and knowingly entered a crime family, that to me isn’t something to pity. I found a lot in the porn section of the book that I found morally troubling. There was a level of exploitation there that wasn’t on the level."

Luke: "The counter-argument is that these girls are all hookers trying to get something for the least possible effort. And this is what you get for that kind of attitude."

Matthew: "I think that’s valid as well. Unlike almost every, unlike a lot of Italians, I don’t have a madonna-whore complex where women are just perfect little petals that are getting ruined by society. I don’t believe that. I believe there are a lot of jaded hard lazy degenerate characters who are women who enter porn. At the same time, a lot of those women are doing so not out of a maliciousness in their character but out of an inherent weakness in their character.

"I felt that way when I was writing about pro wrestling and I was talking about men. These were people who on the face of it were jaded crooked characters, but at heart there was this sort of naivete, even though they could see what was the end result of their lifestyle by looking at other people, they had deluded themselves into believing it was something else.

"It is easy to dismiss people in porn as prostitutes. They’re doing a sleazy job for easy money. On its face, that’s true, but it is also an industry where some otherwise good people were used up and chewed up in a way where the karmic interplay wasn’t even. What they put in didn’t otherwise justify the response they got from society."

Luke: "Is there anything that people can do that renders them less human than to become a receptacle for a lot of sperm on camera?"

Matthew: "Is there anything that has a more symbological way of dehumanizing people?"

Luke: "I noticed around the porn industry, that once these women had done porn, they ceased to be real human beings. Almost everyone around them thought they were just porn stars, they were just cum buckets."

Matthew: "Is there anything that can do that more? That’s got to be a pretty good contender for the number one act that you can do to really promote the dehumanization and the robbing of dignity from yourself in American society. When I was in Europe, I don’t think it was that strong of a stigma. In the United States, it is a crushing thing to someone’s character if they want to live a normal life, unless they are one of those jaded characters who loves that lifestyle. I think you’re probably right, that there isn’t any one single act that destroys someone’s dignity as a human being than being sexually used up on camera, not that I argue with anyone right to do that. Everyone should have the right to do that. I don’t have a personal qualm with it, but you wish you had a counselor to really explain to them the repercussions before they did it. That’s free will, that’s the tragedy of being human."

Luke: "You talk about the porn being the toughest part of writing the book. It’s like making a feature film but with 15 minutes of close-up hardcore sex."

Matthew: "There was one part of the porn section that I really liked writing. That was the section on Buck Adams. He died the day before I was set to interview him, which just killed me. Buck was a screwed-up exemplar of the porn industry. He had a multitude of family issues. He had this glorious dream of turning porn into blockbuster mainstream entertainment. He just dumped money on porns. He had these special effects and these elaborate plots and this gripping action. It was if Independence Day with Will Smith just stopped after the first set up and just went into a 15-minute gangbang with a bunch of aliens and Will Smith and then went right back into the action. It just laid bare the absurdity of the porn industry. You had porn, snuff films and all these Hollywood pretensions of being somebody intersecting in a black comedy way.

"Kenji was just a passive observer of this one-man self-destruction machine. Almost self-destruction as a performance art. Kenji almost dies because he’s willing to go along with Buck’s bullshit and film scenes with all these elaborate special effects that Buck doesn’t know how to use and almost dies because he almost gets blown up."

Luke: "How much of this book is in Kenny’s voice and how much is this book is in your voice?"

Matthew: "I logged like 200 total days in phone time with Kenji or conversations in person. I have a good understanding of how he thinks and how he speaks. Every story in the book is adapted from an email or a story that Kenji told me. I would say that everything in the book is in his voice. Were there turns of phrase used or the sort of elevated language that Kenji wouldn’t say off the top of his head if he had written it? Of course. But on a character level, on a truth level, every word of the book can be accurately represented as Kenji’s."

Luke: "I’ve known Kenji since 2001 and I’ve not noticed him turn a phrase. So when I’d read a turn of phrase in the book, when I’d read the more philosophical parts of the book. I’ve not heard Kenji philosophizing."

Matthew: "Some of the more acrobatic turns of phrases in the book, where it looks the co-author is coming in to do a dance, to do a shuck-and-jive routine, those are word-for-word things that Kenji had told me. He’s not typically the type of guy who will do something like that. On occasions that he did, I thought it was priceless because it showed a part of his personality that he normally hides."

Luke: "Kenji spoke to me on a street level. In some ways, this book is a work of literature. The writing is not run of the mill journalism."

Matthew: "Kenji’s favorite writer is Cormac McCarthy. He is really attracted to that sort of writing. I’d probably say something like Elmore Leonard or James Ellroy. Where you have something that is honest and straight-forward and authentically street and still rewarding on a literary level. When we first talked about doing this book, he talked about something that would straddle that authenticity and stand the test of time."

Luke: "If you read Kenji’s blog before you came along, there’s rarely a sentence that’s not misspelled, that’s not doing violence to the English language."

Matthew: "Kenny, if you talk to him in conversation, is smarter than his blog is. There are people who are intelligent in a way that isn’t literary, who are intelligent in a way that has nothing to do with the mechanics of putting together a sentence. Some of the smartest people I’ve ever known couldn’t do simple addition. Trying to capture Kenny’s intelligence and personality and put it on a page in a way that he couldn’t do himself, that’s why he has a co-author.

"I didn’t make Kenji into something that he’s not. I certainly did not fluff up her personality or perform a PR job to make him a better person than he is. If anything, the book is considerably more honest, dark and grim than anything he’s written of his own volition. I didn’t want people to pick up a book and have it just be a prurient salacious register of crimes that a criminal committed. I wanted it to have social and literary value that people wouldn’t expect."

Luke: "How much did you have to work to make Kenji an appealing character that people want to read about?"

Matthew: "A lot. This is a guy who before he could legally drink, before he was 21, trafficked in hundreds of kilos of cocaine, who was arrested for the murder of his best friend, who’d intentionally run over people with cars, committed all sorts of attempted murders, this isn’t like a Henry Hill character in Goodfellas, a knock-around two-bit criminal. This is a hardened vicious predatory personality. He’s also a charismatic and likeable guy who can win over a room.

"A leader of the Vargos motorcycle gang, one of the most hardened motorcycle gangs in the United States, used the word ‘diabolical’ in an interview when he described Kenji to me. He said that out of all the people he knew, Kenji was the last one he’d want to piss off.

"I’ve read a lot of true crime books and I’ve read a lot of Mafia books and there isn’t a Mafia book about a character this predatory that’s honest. None of them own the viciousness in their character. Kenji, from the second I met him, wanted to admit that.’

Luke: "Kenji doesn’t turn into a human being until he runs into his ex Tara at a movie when he’s about to marry Tabitha Stevens. And he starts having remorse. It’s three-quarters of the way through the book."

Matthew: "His high school sweetheart, this blonde Orange County surfer girl, not terribly bright but good hearted and innocent, she looms large over his story."

Luke: "Until then, the Kenji of the book always regarded himself as so much smarter and better than everyone else."

Matthew: "I had to tone down how arrogant, anti-social and remorseless Kenji was. I have the interrogation documents from when he was arrested for his best friend’s murder, which he didn’t commit. I’ve never read a criminal being more disrespectful and more arrogant and more hostile and more taunting to police officers. This guy was 20 years old when he did this. I never saw such a vicious venemous character."

"It’s hard writing a book about a sadistic character. This is a guy who had to stuff toilet paper in his mouth before committing violent crime because otherwise he would uncontrollably giggle while inflicting pain on people… It’s like the Dennis Hopper character from Blue Velvet."

"We just got a response from a gangster in Brooklyn. He read the book and dug it, but he’s worried that he’s friends with this guy. And that unsettled him. And this is a professional criminal who realizes he let Kenji infiltrate his life in a way that makes him uncomfortable.

"My favorite response so far was from a war hero from Afghanistan who was badly wounded in action. He read Breakshot in nine hours, read it straight through. What he liked best about it was that it captured the mania of violence. The ecstasy that comes from a completely reckless violent vicious lifestyle."

Luke: "Did you and Kenji have any arguments in how to put this book together?"

Matthew: "We had two major disagreements. He won one and I won one. I wanted to make the porn section less important in the book. It was the hardest part for me to write. He was insistent that I cover porn in detail. He felt like he couldn’t honestly tell the story of his life without discussing his decade in the porn industry. He proved right in the end.

"We had tons of arguments about which photos to include in the book. Kenji wanted to include a great number of famous criminals where I thought it was more important to include photos of Tara and his family and the human element of Kenji as opposed to a dictionary of mug shots. I won that battle."

"Nothing he ever told me, he told me not to put in the book. He wanted it to be as honest as possible. He said, I don’t want anyone to find a single part of the book where I held something back."

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From page 171: "I always thought the recruitment and brainwashing techniques porn uses to convince girls to do unthinkable things on camera paralleled the tactics the military uses to recruit and train people to do the unthinkable. The scam is the same: a talent scout zeroes in on a generally ill-educated civilian from a broken home; caters to their longing for stability and approval; blitzes them with a Hell Week of work to establish a brutal, unthinking routine; alienates them from reality by giving them a new identity and disassociates them from their gruesome work using jargon; and keeps them going with meaningless trophies and awards that glamorize the day-to-day realities of their profession."

This also sounds like the methods used on vulnerable girls by such as Orthodox rabbis as Abner Weiss and Yaakov "Kenny the Shark" Menken. They find vulnerable young women, separate them from friends and family, and then f— them.

From page 186 about Mafia associate, con artist and pornographer Jerry Zimmerman: "I always wondered if Jerry ingratiated himself with the Italians by playing up his Jewishness to cartoonish levels. Jerry acted like the classic stereotype of a New York Jewish racketeer: the charmer who peppers his ever sentence with Yiddish, gets a tension headache whenever he has to pay for anything, considers it an epic triumph whenever he scams his way into free merchandise or services — and, of course, dies of old age an exponentially richer and freer man than his imprisoned Italian "bosses.""

From page 196: "Since I no longer dealt with cutthroat drug dealers, Jerry painstakingly recalibrated my moral compass. "You don’t got to be like that, bubeleh," was his admonition whenever I thought with my primitive , ultraviolent mind-set. His point was not just that violence was counterproductive but also that it was morally and spiritually damaging to me.

"…The code of honor among old-school carnies, grifters, scammers, confidence men, and bunko artists was that, while it was kosher to "work" a mark out of his money, a real con should refrain from stealing his dignity."

From page 225: "That is one of the great structural evils of the porn business: girls who get used to making money and getting everything they want thanks to their looks become obsolete by the age of thirty. With no other professional skills, they turn to full-time prostitution… Those revenue streams rely on novelty and run dry quickly, usually leaving the porn girls spoiled, deepy in credit-card debt, too surgically altered to mix with normal society, and progressively reliant on alcohol and narcotics to cope."

On page 257, Kenny writes that the feds must’ve laughed when they caught Mafia capo Louie Gelfuso crying "at a tender scene in his favorite soap opera."

Kenny says he got threatening calls from some thug who threatened him if he ever referred to Peter North as anything less than entirely masculine and heterosexual.

Because they rarely killed people, the Los Angeles Mafia was known as faggy.

Kenny tells about the time he was sent to beat up the dwarf actor who played R2-DS in Star Wars.

I played an unscrupulous writer for Shawn Ricks in his 1997 movie The Trickle Effect. I made $250.

Seven years later, I dated an ex-actress Hayley Rivers who said that Shawn was her worst experience in the industry.

Kenny writes: "Shawn was completely incapable of performing without following a set diet and routine: before every scene, Shawn had to smoke a joint, drink a cap of "date-rape drug" GHB, and listen to "I’ve Got the Power" by Snap! and "Stranglehold" by Ted Nugent while shadow-boxing and psyching himself up, and then taking another hit of pot." (Pg. 269)

Kenny was a key source for me when I was writing about the role of organized crime in the sex industry.

He blogs:

Today, I am going to write about Michelle Braun, an awkward Jewish girl from Bakersfield, California who is one of the heads on my trophy wall as a rat. I took Michelle Braun, the world’s top madame, down.

Who is Michelle Braun? Why would she be written about on the BREAKSHOT Organized Crime Blog? Michelle Braun is a nobody from nowhere with no obvious talents or charms. Her looks, even after hundreds of thousands of dollars of plastic surgery, leave a lot to be desired. Her personality has always been abrasive. I never particularly liked her, and when I first met her, I had no respect at all for her intelligence, talents, or potential.

I was wrong. This plump, plain, obnoxious Jewish girl made millions of dollars as the owner of the world’s foremost international escort service and call girl ring. She revolutionized the sex business. A porno groupie and wannabe bombshell, Michelle used her brain to make the cash and connections her body never could in the shallow, merciless porn business. Michelle created a website called Nici’s Girls which deserves credit for being the innovator that took the high-class prostitution racket online. Michelle convinced her porn star friends to let her pimp them out worldwide to sheiks, billionaires, and famous actors on the web for cash that reached the tens of thousands of dollars. Many of “Nici’s Girls” were hooked up with sugar daddies who sometimes became husbands in the Pretty Woman scenario.

Eliot Spitzer was a client from 2004 to 2006. He used the name James. He said he was a lawyer. He called her at least once a week to book a trick.

Spitzer liked slender yet curvy brunettes. Who doesn’t? He preferred the All-American, college-girl type. Most high-end New York clients had these tastes while West Coasters preferred curvier bustier blondes.

Kristin got tons of complaints about "James." He was rough and aggressive. Not in any S-M way, though he did enjoy giving the girls a good spanking, but it was the matter of condoms. James did not like wearing them while all the hos insisted on them.

Spector "would be a real weasel about it. After the begging, pleading, and commanding didn’t work, James would pretend to relent, only to try another approach."

When Kristin brought these complaints up with Eliot Spitzer, he got defensive and angry. "Who? Who said that? I want to know right now, Billie. I’m appalled by that statement. Appalled! And I have no idea what you’re talking about."

Spitzer wouldn’t let the matter go. He got all legal with her. "Define ‘rough and aggressive.’ What exactly is considered rough and aggressive? Explain this."

Eliot was furious about being called on his bad behavior.

He kept insisting he was right. "This is stupid and ridiculous; you’re accsuing me, but not telling me what I have done wrong. I don’t need this. There are plenty of places like yours out there. I only gave you my business because I liked the way you operated and I liked your girls, but I obviously was very wrong about all of you. I have been a good client, but it’s apparent you don’t want my business or you would give me the opportunity to respond to what was said. If you want to keep my business, you’d better tell me what I did that was aggressive."

The madam then fired him as a client.

I saw her play the piano with her breasts at the World Pornography Conference in 1998.

She was one tough act to follow.

She too has beaten a path to Torah and enlightenment.

The San Diego Union Tribune reports:

Although Kane was raised in a nonreligious home, spirituality has always been a part of her life, she said.

“My parents were Bohemian hippies,” she said. “My childhood was quite turbulent, and so to escape the lunacy of my household, I used to go to church with the Mormon family down the street.”

Although Kane’s singing was encouraged at church talent nights, she was excommunicated at age 16, when she became pregnant with her first son.

Kane converted to reform Judaism five years ago.

“I’ve always been a seeker of religious peace or spirituality, (but) Judaism spoke to me on several levels as an adult, because of, No. 1, tikkun olam, which means ‘repairing the world.’ ”

Kane said she also incorporates aspects of Buddhism into her life.

“I really had a sense – especially after fighting cancer – of the importance of being in the moment, and of kind of letting go of the outcome and letting the universe provide for me what the universe is going to provide.”

As an artist who once wrote a song titled “The Lord Was a Woman,” Kane said she was impressed that her rabbi was open to the possibility that God could be female.

“That was just a huge turning point for me in my spiritual quest.”

Although the musical is largely adult-themed, the first two performances, Thursday and Friday, will be slightly toned down, so parents can choose to bring their high-school-age teens.

Crissy blogs:

We finished the shooting of our short movie Oversold two weekends ago in Vegas. Our new the video promo is up at http://www.oversoldthemovie.com or you can check it out below!  The video on the website is much larger!  Feel free to get the one below from youtube.com ( http://youtube.com/watch?v=DAPT79j6Fow ) and post it where you like.

Oversold will Premiere October 18th in Tempe, Arizona – if you or someone you know lives in the Phoenix area and would like to get more information about the Premiere, please contact us @ info@elevationchurch.tv – we’d love to reserve a ticket for you. We’d love to have multiple showings and get as many people as possible at the Premiere. Anyone and everyone is welcome to come… but in order to know how many to expect, we will need each person attending to get a ticket…. So, if you are going to make it let’s make sure you have a ticket to get in.Thank you for all the love. support, and prayers on this project! 

Pastor Dave Cowan posts:

Hello everyone!  First, I’d like to say thank you to Crissy for letting me speak to all of you about our upcoming movie called "Oversold."

We are all very excited about this short film, and we cannot wait to release it this fall!  I realize that many of you may have some questions regarding this movie, so let me list some of the questions I’ve been asked and answer them here for you. As the release date gets closer, I might stop in again from time to time as a "guest blogger" to fill you in on the details. 

1.  What is the short film about?
This is a modern day adaptation of the story found in Hosea (from the Bible) in which a preacher/prophet marries a prostitute. However, in this story our "Gomer" character is a stripper, not a prostitute… she also gets a name change…. as does our "Hosea" character.

2. What makes this short film unique?
Oversold is a video sermon, if you will… Though actors (like Crissy) are unfolding the story as it goes along, I will be guiding it along as well by showing up from time to time to interject.  This format makes the short film unique in that it combines the indirect nature of the art of story – with the direct and straight forward message of Hosea. 

3. When and where will it be released?
Oversold will Premiere October 18th in Tempe, Arizona – if you or someone you know lives in the Phoenix area and would like to get more information about the Premiere, please contact us @ info@elevationchurch.tv – we’d love to reserve a ticket for you. We’d love to have multiple showings and get as many people as possible at the Premiere. Anyone and everyone is welcome to come… but in order to know how many to expect, we will need each person attending to get a ticket…. So, if you are going to make it let’s make sure you have a ticket to get in.

4. Anything special planned with the Premiere?
Crissy and the cast of Oversold will be present at the Premiere and will be available to sign copies of the DVD as well as take photos with people attending the event. The following Sunday (October 19th) the cast will also take part in a very special service at Elevation Church of Phoenix, AZ (elevationchurch.tv) in which the movie goers will be able to hear directly from the cast through a question and answer format which I will lead that morning. Everyone… and I mean everyone is welcome to be a part of this service with us.

If demand is strong and perhaps other cities/churches would like to Premiere Oversold, then perhaps there may be more options in the future.

5. Is there any way for us to purchase a DVD of Oversold? Especially for those of us that cannot make it to Phoenix’s Premiere?
Yes… details will be announced in the coming months on how you can purchase a DVD.

6. What can I do to help people know about Oversold?
Soon we will be giving you specific details about what you can do to help get the word out, but for now… we need prayer most of all. This movie is still in production. Pray that all goes well and we are able to get this completed on time.  Let’s also remember to pray for the lives that this movie will touch: those in the sex business, strippers, prostitutes, porn stars, etc… as well as the addicted that keep the sex business in business. Pray for them to hear from God through this story that God loves them and has a plan for their life that means freedom from all such bondage.

7. What is your intention with this movie? Why "mess" with a Bible story? Won’t the message of Hosea be lost?
The message of Hosea will not be missed, nor will it be replaced. The message of Hosea is God’s Holy Word. Our modern day adaptation is not God’s Holy Word, nor is there an attempt on our part to replace it. The idea is to introduce this story to a culture and time that needs to hear it… to present this: "what if this happened in today’s culture and time?" All of this is to get people to think about some things… to examine their own hearts and realize the extent of God’s love for the unloveable… Yes, the story of Hosea is an illustration of God’s love for Israel… so, too, this story is an illustration… a far weaker one at that. But again, the idea is not to replace, but to introduce. How many people will now pick up their Bibles and wipe the dust off and look in the index for this story… and then actually read it? I pray that it’s in the millions… because this story needs to be re-introduced to our day and age.

8. Is this story just about sex?
This story is not about sex. Not at all… to reduce it to that would be to miss the point entirely. But as it was the illustration of Gomer’s falling away, so to is it for the character in this story. This story is therefore not about sex, but love, grace, and redemption.

Will there be people that think this is all about sex? Maybe. But these would be cut from the same religious spirit that thought the same of Hosea marrying Gomer in their day… the spiritual forefathers to the Pharisees – the religious elite of Jesus’ day – who in turn fathered the same religious/works oriented "faith" demon-strated today – shrouded and made up to appear like "Christianity." And they, too, will miss the point.

Florida- Manhattan money man Jeffrey Epstein will turn himself in today to plead guilty to soliciting an underage prostitute at his Florida mansion – and immediately start serving an 18-month sentence, a source said.

The prosecutors subsequently upgraded the offense because the girls were under 18

Vanessa Grigoriadis writes:

The sex business has changed dramatically in the past decade, and no change has been bigger than the obliteration of the social taboo against escorting. "Almost every porn star is an escort now," says Luke Ford, a prominent Web journalist who covered the porn industry.

April 16 (Bloomberg) — When a male resident at Kildegaarden nursing home in Denmark made an indecent sexual proposal to a member of the staff, the home’s director, Inger Marie Kristensen, told a nurse to telephone for a prostitute.

“There was a considerable change in his demeanor after the escort girl had paid him a visit,” Kristensen said in an interview. “We do this for our clients just as we offer them other services that they need as human beings.”

Kildegaarden, located 100 miles (160 kilometers) west of Copenhagen in Skanderborg, has about 100 residents, including victims of Alzheimer’s disease and strokes. Nurses arranged visits by call girls three times in the past three years.

Most migrant women, including those in the sex industry, have made a clear decision, says a new study, to leave home and take their chances abroad. They are not "passive victims" in need of "saving" or sending back by western campaigners.

It is always refreshing to read a book that turns an issue on its head. Laura María Agustín’s trenchant and controversial critique of the anti-trafficking crusade goes a step further: it lays out the matter – in this case, "human trafficking" – on the operating table, dissects it, unravels its innards, and shows the reader, in gory, sometimes eye-watering detail, why everything we think about it is Wrong with a capital W. It’s a jarring read; I imagine that those who make a living from campaigning against the scourge of human trafficking will throw it violently across the room, if not into an incinerator. Yet it may also be one of the most important books on migration published in recent years.

Most of us recognise the ideological under pinnings of old-style baiting of migrants. When newspaper hacks or populist politicians talk about evil Johnny Foreigners coming here and stealing our jobs or eating our swans, it does not take much effort to sniff out their xenophobic leanings. Agustín’s contention is that the new "discourse" on migrants (in which many of them, especially the women and children, are seen as "victims of trafficking" in need of rescue) is also built on ideological foundations. Like its demented cousin – tabloid hysteria about foreign scroungers – the trafficking scare is based on a deeply patronising view of migrants, rather than any hard statistical evidence that human trafficking is rife.

Agustín begins by challenging the idea that there is a "new slave trade" in which hundreds of thousands of women and children are sold like chattels across borders. The US state department claims that between 600,000 and 800,000 people are trafficked for forced labour or sex worldwide every year; Unicef says a million children and young people are trafficked each year. Upmarket newspapers – which have embraced the seemingly PC "trafficking discourse" with the same fervour as the tabloid newspapers screech about fence-leaping job-stealers from Sangatte – tell us that "thousands" of women and children have been trafficked into Britain and "traded for tawdry sex", and that some of them (the African ones) "live under fear of voodoo".

Agustín says the numbers are "mostly fantasies". She does not doubt that there are instances of forced migration, or that, in a world where freedom of movement is restricted by stiff laws and stringent border controls, many aspiring migrants have little choice but to seek assistance from dodgy middlemen. Yet, having researched trafficking and sex workers’ experiences for the past five years, both academically and through fieldwork in Latin America and Asia, she concludes that the figures are based on "sweeping generalisations" and frequently on "wild speculation". "Most of the writing and activism [on trafficking] does not seem to be based on empirical research, even when produced by academics," she notes. Many of the authors rely on "media reports" and "statistics published with little explanation of methodology or clarity about definitions".

Agustín points out that some anti-trafficking activists depend on numbers produced by the CIA (not normally considered a reliable or neutral font of information when it comes to inter national issues), even though the CIA refuses to "divulge its research methods". The reason why the "new slavery" statistics are so high is, in part, that the category of trafficking is promiscuously defined, sometimes disingenuously so. Some researchers automatically label migrant women who work as prostitutes "trafficked persons", basing their rationale on the notion that no woman could seriously want to work in the sex industry. The Coalition Against Trafficking in Women argues that "all children and the majority of women in the sex trade" should be considered "victims of trafficking". As Agustín says, such an approach "infantilises" migrant women, "eliminating any notion that women who sell sex can consent". Ironically, it objectifies them, treating them as unthinking things that are moved around the world against their will.

Finally, there are the "Tier 3" sex workers, who can charge in excess of $10,000 per rendezvous. They may have only four or five clients, and they typically charge their clients an additional monthly surcharge for their various needs—rent, clothing, medicine.

Both Tier 2 and Tier 3 workers can typically do more to safeguard a client’s privacy. There are no guarantees, of course, but they tend to shun contractual relationships with agencies that advertise their services. There is less of a paper trail. They typically will only take a john via a referral, and even then, they may require that the john "date" them for weeks before deciding to offer up sex. I have heard of Tier 2 and 3 sex workers who vet prospective clients for months, sometimes hiring a private detective to see if the john is stable—psychologically and financially. As a former attorney general, Spitzer must have known all this.

What high-end clients pay for may surprise you. For example, according to my ongoing interviews of several hundred sex workers, approximately 40 percent of trades in New York’s sex economy fail to include a physical act beyond light petting or kissing. No intercourse, no oral stimulation, etc. That’s one helluva conversation. But it’s what many clients want. Flush with cash, these elite men routinely turn their prostitute into a second partner or spouse. Over the course of a year, they will sometimes persuade the woman to take on a new identity, replete with a fake name, a fake job, a fake life history, and so on. They may want to have sex or they may simply want to be treated like King for a Day.

The alleged procurer in the prostitution scandal surrounding New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has an Israeli passport.

A federal magistrate in New York ordered Mark "Michael" Brener held without bail after his arrest March 6 related to allegations that he headed the Emperors VIP Club, described by police as a high-priced prostitution ring.

The Associated Press reported that $600,000 in cash and an Israeli passport were elements in denying bail to Brener, 62. Brener’s lawyer said he has been a U.S. citizen for 20 years.

I’ve made a video report using wild oats to illustrate my point.

Thank G-d I don’t have enough spare cash to get into this kind of trouble.

I find staying busy with Torah is the best prophylactic against immorality.

Pg. 30 of the sealed complaint :   TEMEKA RACHELLE LEWIS, a/k/a "Rachelle," continued that from what she had been told "he" (believed to be a reference to Client-9) "would ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe – you know – I mean that . . . very basic things. . . . "

I’m not familiar enough with hookers and unsafe sex to know what Rachelle means.

Oy, this is bad for the Jews!

Governor Spitzer took time out of his schedule to visit my chatroom:

ElliotSpitzer:  Elliot was banging girls at the Mayflower Hotel
ElliotSpitzer:  hahaaaaaa
ElliotSpitzer:  Wall Street loves this
nicolletista:  eliot, how can you afford an apartment on 5th avenue, anyway?
ElliotSpitzer:  my father was very wealthy..Luke comes from humble Jewish origons
nicolletista:  oh sure, luke’s from a shtetl
ElliotSpitzer:  that is why he resides in a Hovel and eats rolled oats from the box
ElliotSpitzer:  I must leave for awhile..have to work on taxes…E me if Amalek or Curious show up.
ClientNo9:  Damn b**ch set me up
Brad:  wots up client
ClientNo9:  You’d think that for $5,500/hour, my name would not have entered into this.
marlene:  okeydokey well cya moral leader
Brad:  bye marlene
User marlene left the room.
ClientNo9:  I’ll bet none of you has ever laid out that kind of dough for a hooker
nicolletista:  yes, eliot–you’re the VICTIM here
nicolletista:  i’m outraged for you
Brad:  was she worth it
nicolletista:  you’re damn right i haven’t
nicolletista:  impressed, though
ClientNo9:  I AM the victim, and so too are the poepole of ny state, if I resign in favor of that ignorant shvartze who I picked to be lt governor

ClientNo9:  She was ok, thinner than Monica, but who isn’t?
Brad:  i did not have sex with that woman
ClientNo9:  If and when I leave office, my replacement will be New York Lt Governor David Paterson, who is a crazy shvarzte
ClientNo9:  Oy, this is not good for the Jews
YourMoralLeader:  Pg. 30 of the sealed complaint :   TEMEKA RACHELLE LEWIS, a/k/a "Rachelle," continued that from what she had been told "he" (believed to be a reference to Client-9) "would ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe – you know – I mean
ClientNo9:  Also, it is bad for that other shvarze, Obama.  Too many shvartzes in charge of one state is not a good thing
ClientNo9:  What was I supposed to do, answer personal ads on Craigslist?
ClientNo9:  Show me a man who does that, and I will show you a man who is beneath me
nicolletista:  cheaper, and in the end just as private
nicolletista:  for you anyway
ClientNo9:  If I had done this with another man, people would be rushing to my defense.
ClientNo9:  Moral is: no woman is worth $5,500/hour
nicolletista:  you’re quite right–you should call mcgreevey right now

From the New York Times:

ALBANY – Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, an administration official said this morning.

Mr. Spitzer, who was huddled with his top aides inside his Fifth Avenue apartment early this afternoon, had hours earlier abruptly canceled his scheduled public events for the day. He scheduled an announcement for 2:15 after inquiries from the Times.

Mr. Spitzer, a first-term Democrat who pledged to bring ethics reform and end the often seamy ways of Albany, is married with three children.

Just last week, federal prosecutors arrested four people in connection with an expensive prostitution operation. Administration officials would not say that this was the ring with which the governor had become involved.

But a person with knowledge of the governor’s role said that the person believes the governor is one of the men identified as clients in court papers.

The governor’s travel records show that he was in Washington in mid-February. One of the clients described in court papers arranged to meet with a prostitute who was part of the ring, the Emperors Club VIP on the night of Feb. 13.

Mr. Spitzer appeared on a CNBC television show at 7 a.m. the next morning. Later in the morning, he testified before a Congressional committee.

An affidavit filed in federal court in Manhattan in connection with that case lists six conversations between the man, identified as Client 9, and a booking agent for the Emperors Club.

He had a difficult first year in office, rocked by a mix of scandal and legislative setbacks. In recent weeks, however, Mr. Spitzer seemed to have rebounded, with his Democratic party poised to perhaps gain control of the state Senate for the first time in four decades.

Mr. Spitzer gained national attention when he served as attorney general with his relentless pursuit of Wall Street wrongdoing. As attorney general, he also had prosecuted at least two prostitution rings as head of the state’s organized crime task force.

In one such case in 2004, Mr. Spitzer spoke with revulsion and anger after announcing the arrest of 16 people for operating a high-end prostitution ring out of Staten Island.

“”This was a sophisticated and lucrative operation with a multitiered management structure,” Mr. Spitzer said at the time. ”It was, however, nothing more than a prostitution ring.”

From WNBC:

But last week, federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed conspiracy charges against four people accusing them of running a prostitution ring that charged wealthy clients in Europe and the U.S. thousands of dollars for prostitutes.

The Web site of the Emperors Club VIP displays photographs of the prostitutes’ bodies, with their faces hidden, along with hourly rates depending on whether the prostitutes were rated with one diamond, the lowest ranking, or seven diamonds, the highest. The most highly ranked prostitutes cost $5,500 an hour, prosecutors said. Spitzer has built his political legacy on rooting out corruption, including several headline-making battles with Wall Street while serving as attorney general. He stormed into the governor’s office in 2006 with a historic share of the vote, vowing to continue his no-nonsense approach to fixing one of the nation’s worst governments. Time magazine had named him "Crusader of the Year" when he was attorney general and the tabloids proclaimed him "Eliot Ness." But his stint as governor has been marred by several problems, including an unpopular plan to grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and a plot by his aides to smear Spitzer’s main Republican nemesis. Spitzer had been expected to testify to the state Public Integrity Commission he had created to answer for his role in the scandal, in which his aides are accused of misusing state police to compile travel records to embarrass Senate Republican leader Joseph Bruno. Spitzer had served two terms as attorney general where he pursued criminal and civil cases and cracked down on misconduct and conflicts of interests on Wall Street and in corporate America. He had previously been a prosecutor in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, handling organized crime and white-collar crime cases. His cases as state attorney general included a few criminal prosecutions of prostitution rings and into tourism involving prostitutes.

Rachel Johnson writes for the Times of London:

So, Sophie Anderton is a prostitute. Two weeks ago, the underwear model offered an undercover News of the World reporter the freedom of her body in return for £10,000. Clad only in a G-string and Christian Louboutin stilettos, she expertly negotiated the sum while hoovering up lines of coke in a London hotel. Okay, so Anderton is on the game. This is shocking news. But hold on. Didn’t we always suspect that there was a ?ne line between model and escort, escort and prostitute? The steps between each stage are alarmingly small. After all, the fashion industry is full of impoverished models who are expected to strip off and work the circuit during the day, so why not do it at night, too?

Model agencies are regularly approached to send batches of girls to parties; the girls are happy to oblige because they might get noticed. One fashion insider reports that “loads” of models are happy to provide a beautiful presence for rich men in return for hard cash. “One Saudi prince pays girls to come to his huge parties. They are booked, paid well, then come back with even more cash, and they are weighed down with jewellery like you wouldn’t believe. He always has the most beautiful girl on his arm. The girls don’t take payment for sex. They just know they’ll be sorted with diamonds.”

What Anderton did wrong was to be upfront about it. Actually, asking for money shunted her that little bit further, locating her in a marginally different category from women who sleep with men with fast cars who have just taken them to Nobu, or who attach themselves to a rich man they ?nd emetically unattractive, or social climbers who marry a house. But then, when it comes to sex, money and power, male-female relations are as grey as the winter skies.

It’s not a new story: three centuries ago, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wondered whether marriage was not, after all, a form of legalised prostitution. In many sexual relationships today, physical intimacy is often tacitly offered on the presumption that the recipient will provide a quid pro quo of some sort.

Anderton’s motive was typical of a woman desperate to upgrade her life: she was selling her body to help pay for a three-bedroom house in Notting Hill. Chelsea is full of slightly unplaceable twentysomethings who exist in the same twilight zone – models/actresses/stylists/whatevers with no discernible sources of income, who have jaw-dropping wardrobes full of £5,000 designer shoes and coats, and who can’t even afford the buckle on a Birkin bag unless they put out. They’re not naming a price, but they’re happily going on the shopping trip.

The transaction may appear below the line, but generally, a deal is being done, and it is one in which both parties know the rate of exchange. Only Anderton’s blunt manner – her tendency to cut the crap and ask for the goods – sets her apart from women who party, put out and run off with the diamonds. Her tale of woe simply lays bare the fact that most of us, at some point and in some way, on whatever scale, are selling ourselves. Maybe not sex for £10,000, but there are plenty of women who have agonised over whether they should snog a guy simply because he paid for dinner. One especially solvent man of my acquaintance says of his girlfriend: “She wakes up the next morning and tells me her washing machine is broken. It’s no big deal to give her £500. The following week, I take her out for dinner, and she stays the night. It’s no big deal to spend some time and money shopping the next day.”

Indeed not. No big deal to him, and possibly quite fun for her. But where do you draw the line? When drugs and power are involved, you would be surprised how far seemingly normal girls are prepared to go. One woman recalls how, as a student, she used to visit a Greek shipping tycoon in Chester Square, Belgravia. She would strip to her undies and play with herself, and leave with £150. Now in her thirties, she looks back on it without pride.

“I was abused as a child, and I think that low self-esteem and a desperate need for attention led me to do it, because abuse makes you think that your only utility is as a sexual object,” she says. “I used to work in a casino and a guy offered me £10,000 if I’d go on a dirty weekend with him. I thought, a weekend will be over quickly, but the fact that I’d prostituted myself will mentally last a lifetime.”

Has she been tempted to offer sex for money since? “I need an operation that I can’t get on the NHS, and I’m in the early stages of a relationship with a Muslim guy. He’s offered to pay, and I know it’s because he wants to spend time with me,” she admits. “It’s hard to judge people who are desperate, but I think that these girls are essentially greedy. Like Anderton, who wants to pay for a house she can’t afford, they are just lost souls. They think that the trinket or the holiday or the car is worth more than their own self-respect, but it never is.”

Gary Smith emailed me last week from Texas. He told me that Nena was dead.

Her real name was Dawn Marie Anderson.

I call Gary and ask him how he knew Nena.

Gary: "I met her at a little club I frequented. She was a bartender. It had to have been 1998.

"She had a couple of websites here in Houston. She’d either come to your place or you could go to hers. For about a year, I was a bodyguard for her. I went to various places with her to keep her out of trouble.

"I lost track of her for six months. Then she showed up at my door and stayed here for a few days. She had a boyfriend who lived round the corner. He used to beat the hell out of her.

"Then I lost track of her again for a while. She came back. She stayed for a few more days. She went to work at a couple of bars. She got real sick. In 2005, she died of AIDS."

Luke: "When did you find out she had AIDS?"

Gary: "About six months after I met her. It was in general conversation. I was at her place having a beer, doing some things for her, and she told me."

Luke: "How did you feel about her working as an escort while she had AIDS?"

Gary: "While I was with her, she never had any sexual contact or even touching them… It was a strictly a visual thing."

Luke: "Are you sure?"

Gary: "Oh yeah. I was there three nights a week for a year."

Luke: "In the room with her and the client?"

Gary: "Just outside the room."

Luke: "How sick was she in her final years?"

Gary: "She got real sick. She got down to skin and bones. She looked very old. She did the best she could. I was not around when she died. I didn’t find out for several months. She did one of her disappearing acts. She was a very pleasant woman to be around. She never asked for anything…

"She claimed people were after her trying to kill her. I never knew that. She hung around bikers…

"I met her husband once or twice at the club. Nice guy. Well dressed."

Luke: "When was the last time you saw her?"

Gary: "It was 2004. Her boyfriend had beat the hell out of her and she’d come over here to talk to me. She called him and he came over. They had it out right here and got back together and left. That was the last time I saw her."

"I asked her why she didn’t leave him and she said she was afraid to."

"She tended to clam up if you asked her too many questions."

"She was in good shape then. When she started going down, she went down fast.

"She didn’t look bad. She talked about getting another breast enlargement. She looked real healthy. She looked tired."

"I read about drugs but the only thing I saw her take was SOMA, a muscle relaxer."

"She was an alcoholic. She had one of those breathalizer things hooked to her truck. Most of the time she’d get someone to blow into it. She was always drinking. When she got to drinking, she could be vicious with her mouth. That probably got her into a lot of trouble with the guys. Even her boyfriend knew that she had AIDS. They sat right here and discussed it."

"A few weeks ago, I asked somebody who knew her as well as I did and they said, ‘Oh, Dawn died a couple of years ago.’"

Another dispatch on the Freakonomics effect: University of Chicago economist Steven Levitt (Mr. Freakonomics himself) and his collaborator Sudhir Venkatesh, a Columbia University sociologist who previously worked with Levitt to measure the average wages of street-level drug dealers (pdf), have teamed up to study the economics of street prostitutes in Chicago.

Their recent working paper (pdf), which they presented at this weekend’s ASSA conference (the yearly get-together where social scientists from around the world preview their research) in New Orleans, is based on surveys conducted with prostitutes and pimps in Chicago neighborhoods and incident data from the Chicago Police Department. The findings? Street prostitution yields an average wage of $27 an hour, hardly worth it considering the extraordinary occupational hazards.

What’s particularly interesting is the authors’ section on bargaining and the law. They estimate that roughly 3 percent of all tricks performed by prostitutes who aren’t working with pimps are freebies given to police to avoid arrest. In fact, prostitutes get officially arrested only once per 450 tricks or so, leading the authors to conclude that "a prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one." When freebies given to gang members are factored in, about one in 20 tricks go solely for protection and the "privilege" of plying their trade. 

The most depressing news is the woeful lack of condom use. Just as with recent studies of Mexican and Indian prostitutes, Levitt and Venkatesh find that payments go up substantially when condoms aren’t used. And plenty of johns are apparently happy to pay the premium: Condoms only get used about 20 percent of the time, the authors estimate. Some protection, it seems, is worth a freebie; others go out the window for a few extra dollars.

November 7, 2007 — Lonely hearts around town won’t be able to find rent-a-dates in the back pages of New York magazine anymore.

The popular weekly announced yesterday it will stop accepting sex ads in the wake of protest threats by the local chapter of the National Organization for Women.

The feminist group called the magazine the "marketing arm of the organized-crime world of prostitution and human trafficking" because of ads touting "Asians Gone Wild," "Asian Bliss" or "Hot Latinas."

"We worked to educate them on the connections trafficking and the existing sex industry," said Sonia Ossorio, president of NOW-NYC. "Numerous publications have come to the conclusion that it’s not a business they really want to be in."

New York magazine became the 15th publication this year, including Time Out New York and the New York Press, that agreed to end the "escort" and "model" ads that are often codes for prostitution.

"New York has been trying to eliminate this section for years. The business is prospering at this magazine and it was high time to get out of a business we were never comfortable being in," said magazine spokeswoman Serena Torrey.