James Keivom/New York Daily News
Rebecca Woodard says she sometimes made $ 25,000 in a single weekend, but her former ‘employer’ says she was just a ‘B-level girl.’
To the men she slept with, she was Ashley.
To the prosecutors who pressured her into wearing a wire, she was Rebecca.
And to her daughter, she was just Mom.
Former escort Rebecca Woodard described to the Daily News her struggles balancing three very different roles: working for “Soccer Mom Madam” Anna Gristina, working for the investigators bent on taking the madam down and fighting to win back custody of her daughter.
Her arrangement with the Manhattan district attorney’s office was particularly vexing, she said.
Woodard claimed prosecutors forced her to continue seeing clients while she worked as an undercover informant. But with one major catch: She had to hand over all of her earnings and gifts.
“When someone requires you to do something you don’t want to do, and then you don’t even get the benefit of that, it’s a terrible feeling,” Woodard said.
Woodard — who wrote her book “Call Girl Confidential” under the name Rebecca Kade — had been working for Gristina for just over a year before detectives tracked her down.
As far as escort services go, she claims it was the cream of the crop. Woodard’s clients were titans of finance, athletes, Middle Eastern royalty. She flew all around the world, sometimes raking in as much as $ 25,000 for a single weekend.
But Woodard wasn’t in the business for the lifestyle.
She said she was locked in a bitter custody war over her daughter, Isabella. The battle with her ex-boyfriend, Spin Doctors rocker Chris Barron, dragged on and cost thousands of dollars.
Gristina was meticulous about concealing her business, unlike “Manhattan Madam” Kristin Davis who Woodard had previously worked for.
Gristina’s website was password protected.
Her many mobile phones had Montreal area codes, where prostitution is legal.
And the computers at her upstate home contained software that could scrub her hard drive in a moment’s notice, Woodard said.
Then, in March 2008, when Woodard was taking classes at John Jay College of Criminal Justice by day and seeing clients at night, her past with Manhattan Madam Kristin Davis came back to haunt her.
Davis was arrested for running a call girl ring that allegedly counted then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer as a client.
Andrew Savulich/New York Daily News
Woodard says she bonded with her boss, ‘Soccer Mom Madam’ Anna Gristina, while recording their phone conversations.
Spitzer’s spokeswoman denied the former governor was ever a client of Davis’ or Woodard’s.
Prosecutors, after learning Woodard worked for the mysterious Gristina, told her she’d be arrested if she didn’t start working undercover for them, she said.
“I was absolutely terrified,” she said.
I kept thinking I’m not trained for what they’re asking me to do. … And … I was really, really scared that I was going to get caught.”
Going to jail — and not being there for her daughter — was not an option.
RELATED: HOOKER SAYS EX-GOV. SPITZER TRIED TO CHOKE HER, WAS ‘BEYOND SCARY’
“I need to be available to my daughter and I’m not going to let anybody or anything get in the way of that,” Woodard says.
The prosecutors likely didn’t know it at the time but they were talking to a woman who was perfectly positioned to set Gristina up, she said. Woodard and her boss had become remarkably close in recent months.
They bonded over being mothers — and Gristina seemed to admire Woodard’s determination to regain custody of her daughter.
“Being a mom, she understood what I was trying to do,” she said. “She was very sympathetic and very caring. … We were confiding in one another.”
That became abundantly clear when Woodard recorded Gristina for the first time in an April 2008 phone conversation.
Gristina spilled her guts, talking about everything from her “squeaky clean” banking records to her contacts in law enforcement and the New York Post.
“OK, one of my best friends is the chief editor there. The head editor. One of my very closest friends. You understand? I’ve never asked for a favor, other than my daughter. They were giving out student internships for the summer,” Woodard quoted Gristina saying in the book.
“That’s the only thing I’ve ever asked, and I’ve known him for fourteen years…. And, no, he’s not a client, but, yes, he knows what I used to do,” Woodard quoted Gristina saying in her book.
Woodard said she was “shocked” she was getting so much information from Gristina.
‘Okay, so that’s it. That’s all they really need me for,” she recalled. “That’s a lot of information. What else could I possibly do?’”
She soon found out the answer: a lot more.
Woodard says she was able to get Anna Gristina’s accountant to reveal her financial information and even tie the madam’s associates to money laundering, but prosecutors ultimately said the evidence was inadmissible.
Prosecutors also had their sights set on Gristina’s accounting wizard, Jonas Gayer, Woodard said.
They wanted Woodard to pay Gayer a visit — while wearing a wire attached to her chest.
Woodard told them they were nuts. Gristina often rewarded Gayer by gifting him trysts with Woodard.
She knew from experience that the minute she walked into his office, he would start groping her.
So they outfitted a Chanel bag with a recording device and Woodard brought it along to Gayer’s office, she said.
“It was extremely nerve-racking,” she says.
Gayer, as predicted, started grabbing at Woodard’s body as soon as she walked in.
But Woodard proved to be a natural at undercover work. She persuaded Gayer to pull up all of Gristina’s accounts, which were neatly arranged in a spreadsheet.
At the bottom was the total of Gristina’s portfolio: $ 14 million.
“(I was) thinking that’s pretty incredible,” Woodard said. “It was not what I was expecting.”
The operation was a huge success, but prosecutors wanted more still, Woodard said. Specifically, they wanted to get Gayer in the act of laundering money.
RELATED: HOOKER ON ALLEGED SPITZER ENCOUNTER IN BOOK: ‘IT GOT ROUGH.’
Prosecutors filled a Louis Vuitton bookbag with $ 100,000 in cash — and Woodard soon found herself in the back of a luxury Maybach car with Gayer and a pair of Russian criminals.
“I honestly don’t know how I did that,” Woodard says. “You gotta smile and act like one of them. You can’t show fear at all.”
The men took the cash and cut her checks made out to an antiques business totaling $ 80,000. The Russians required a 20% service fee.
“As things progressed, I was asked to do more and things became extremely scary,” Woodard says. “I was putting myself in these dangerous positions every single time, and I felt like I wasn’t protected and it was really scary.”
All along, Woodard was still seeing clients. She said prosecutors told her she had to keep working because they didn’t want Gristina to think anything was up.
The one-time escort and Gristina bonded through motherhood as Woodard fought a bitter custody battle she eventually lost. Woodard used that trust to get Gristina to admit potentially damning information.
Having to turn over all her earnings was crippling.
“There was a day I had 76 dollars in my pocket. That’s it,” Woodard says.
“I didn’t know how I was going to pay for rent, how I was going to put food on the table for my daughter,” she said.
After more than two years working undercover, Woodard said she finally decided she had enough and demanded a lawyer.
The assistant district attorney flipped out on her, but she didn’t hear from the office again until 11 months later.
She said the news she finally got from prosecutors was devastating: the recordings she had obtained had to be scrapped because they would be inadmissible in court.
“You made me go through hell and back 28,000 times and that’s it,” she said she told the assistant district attorney.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office defended the prosecutor’s actions.
“The allegations reported against former ADA Mark Crooks find no support in information known to the Manhattan district attorney’s office,” said Diem Tran, deputy press secretary. “ADA Crooks, now an assistant U.S. attorney, is and has been a well-regarded public servant.”
“It wasn’t about Anna being in trouble,” she says. “It was about that’s what you produced through all this time. I felt so used — used and thrown away. I didn’t matter. I did it all for nothing.”
Gristina ended up getting busted on a single count of promoting prostitution — a charge that came from an encounter Woodard had nothing to do with.
Woodard turned her last trick for Gristina in January 2012, about a month before the madam was arrested. She also lost the custody battle for her now 15-year-old daughter, who she still sees regularly.
Asked about Woodard’s claims, Gristina told The Daily News she was a “B-level girl” in a stable filled with far more glamorous prostitutes and that she wasn’t charging clients $ 1,500-an-hour for her services.
“When she came in to interview with me, I saw potential,” said Gristina. But “I specialized in California model types. She didn’t have the boobs, as sad and shallow as it sounds.”
Gristina also called Woodard’s story that Spitzer choked her during a violent role-playing fantasy “a blatant lie.”
Gristina told The News she did not blame Woodard for betraying her, adding, “I have nothing bad to say about her.”
“OK, she was a confidential informant,” she said. “But you know, she was doing it for her child. Can I hate her? No.”
With Shayna Jacobs
http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info/?p=19892
via Great Local News: New York http://newyork.greatlocalnews.info
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