Here’s a modern Robin Hood story for you: a few strippers who stole from (mostly) rich, (usually) disgusting, (in their minds) pathetic men and gave to, well, themselves
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This was back in the early aughts, when the industry was enjoying a cultural moment. Improbably, the values of third-wave feminism had aligned with those of Howard Stern, ushering in an era in which taking off one’s clothes in front of an audience was no longer degrading but sexually liberating and financially empowering.
@media { .ad.vp-1024-plus { display: block; } } Samantha took Rosie under her wing, introducing her, in her throaty, Mae West voice, to some of her regular customers. “Mostly Wall Street guys,” Samantha told me, in a tone that suggested a more populist outlook than I had anticipated, “who want to have fun and get drunk and party with girls.”
In the beginning, after work, Rosie would pick fights with her boyfriend, accusing him of cheating. “It fucked me up in the head a little,” she said of the window her job gave her into the male psyche. “The girls develop a terrible contempt,” one former Scores manager told me. “They stop believing men are real. They think: They are there for me to manipulate and take money from.”
@media { .ad.vp-1024-plus { display: block; } } A lot of girls claimed to be students, but Rosie really was taking classes, at Berkeley College in New Jersey. With the help of Introduction to Psychology, she’d studied the dynamics of the club and found its long-term prospects unappealing. “The reason why Wall Street guys party so hard is because they’re not happy with their jobs,” she explained to me.
“I could hear a baby crying in the background,” Brian told me. “She was like, ‘It’s my friend’s, I’m watching it.’ ”In reality, she had never left New York. She’d gotten pregnant with and engaged to her on-again-off-again boyfriend. But the couple had hit a rough patch, and Rosie was looking to assert financial independence for herself and her newborn daughter. She had started by calling the names on what she called her “Get Money” list.
@media { .ad.vp-1024-plus { display: block; } } Whenever the door to the rooms opened, Rosie would peer in, trying to figure out what they were up to. It didn’t take her long to figure out what was going on. “Like I said, I’m smart,” she said. “I would see the guy laid out, chillin’, and I would be like, Hmmm.”
Truth be told, Samantha didn’t always send her own picture. Recognizing that she may have crossed a plastic-surgery Rubicon and could scare off those unaccustomed to creatures of the night, she sometimes sent a picture of one of the girls in her crew. Like Karina Pascucci, the sister of one of her dancer friends.
@media { .ad.vp-1024-plus { display: block; } } The guys they were targeting were wealthy, she pointed out. “What’s an extra $20,000 to them?” And they weren’t exactly upstanding citizens. “It wasn’t like we pulled them off the street,” she said. “They had history. They’d been to Hustler, they’d been to Rick’s, they’d been to Scores. They all walked in ready to party. And yeah, we slipped an extra one that they didn’t know about. But all of it goes hand in hand — sex, drugs, and rock and roll.
She introduced the other girls to Carmine Vitolo, a former bartender from Lace who managed the Roadhouse, a strip club in Queens. And she urged them to cultivate a higher level of clientele. Before, whenever Samantha or Karina or Marsi had gone out fishing, they’d targeted bars like TGI Friday’s in the Financial District. Rosie preferred upscale places, the kind frequented by rich guys with everything to lose.
Then, while they took care of their business, she took care of hers. “I was on the phone with American Express half the time verifying his last four digits of Social, his mother’s maiden name, his last purchases, and their name, and their location, and how much was being charged,” she said. Getting this kind of information from a guy high off his face with a prostitute draped over his legs wasn’t very difficult. “I did it right in front of them,” she said.
@media and { .ad.vp-0-600 { display: block; } } @media and { .ad.vp-600-1024 { display: block; } } With Rosie’s business savvy and Samantha’s people skills, business boomed. That first Christmas, they bought their favorite prostitute her first pair of Louboutins. “We were like Kobe and Shaq,” said Rosie. “That’s what I always said to Samantha. We were untouchable.”Rosie looked over at Samantha, whose face was illuminated by the iPad she was using to look at a pair of shoes on Gucci.com.
In retrospect, Rosie recognizes this was the moment when she felt things were getting out of control. Running a team of hookers, strippers, and thieves was complicated. The prostitutes were unreliable. “They wouldn’t show up for work, they would be intoxicated, they would get beat up by their boyfriends and had to be in the hospital or had asthma,” Rosie said. And her attempts at being a den mother had been met with indifference. “You have opportunities,” she’d told one girl in frustration.
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@media and { .ad.vp-0-600 { display: block; } } @media and { .ad.vp-600-1024 { display: block; } } Rosie got him a drink from the bar. “He talked about how his wife left; I don’t think she could handle it, because having an autistic child is a lot of work,” she said. She talked to him about her daughter. “We had like regular human conversations. Like a heart-to-heart.”
If the guy at the precinct who answered the phone had a dollar for every time he’d heard a caller say he’d been drugged and his credit card run up at a strip club, he’d be retired already. Over the years, the New York City Police Department has received countless versions of those calls, and their unofficial position has always been that the callers are full of shit. So when this particular caller said he had evidence, they were skeptical.
The DEA did not confirm or deny having run a failed sting operation, but it’s true that at that point, they weren’t having a lot of luck getting the victims they found to press charges. “The amount of people willing to talk to us was so small it was absurd,” one of the cops said bluntly. “Men don’t want to admit to being victimized by women.”
Younan told the cops he’d met Karina Pascucci at a restaurant on Park Avenue. She said she was a nursing student and introduced him to her relatives, Samantha and Marsi. Their dates had ended a little fuzzily, he said, but it wasn’t until he got a phone call from American Express alerting him to $135,000 in charges made at Scores that he realized something was seriously wrong. After the story broke, one of the cops who’d interviewed him ran into a colleague.“No,” protested the cop.
Rosie was last. In the car on the way to central booking, she and the cop bantered. “He was basically like, ‘How did you get wrapped up in this?’ ” Rosie told me. “ ‘You’re smart, you’re pretty.’ ” @media { .ad.vp-1024-plus { display: block; } } If they’d done anything wrong — and she didn’t think they had — it was nothing compared to the stuff men got away with on a regular basis. And yet they were looking at three years in jail? It was outrageous. “What about the things the guys did?” Samantha fumed. “What about Bill Cosby?”
Rosie looked at Samantha, who resembled a deranged Rosie the Riveter in the leopard hair wrap she was arrested in. “I’m thinking in my head, This is dumb,” she told me. “I said, ‘Yeah, we’re innocent. We’re all fuckin’ angels. You are delusional. Like, come on! Everything has already unraveled! Put your big-girl panties on. Just be truthful for one thing in life.’ ”The correction officers eyed them with amusement.
Over the next year, I talked to Rosie many times. At first they were proper interviews, but then she’d call at random and we would just talk. She’d want to complain about Samantha and how she’d “fucked up my aspirations.” Or she’d return to her goals for the future and her struggles with anger and depression. “I know why we did it,” she told me at one point. “Hurt people hurt people.” Despite her obvious flaws, it was easy to understand why clients found her charming.
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