Affidavit: Client 9 and Room 871
By
ALAN FEUER and
IAN URBINA
Published: March 11, 2008
It was after 9 p.m. the night before Valentine’s Day when she arrived, a young brunette named Kristen. She was 5-foot-5, 105 pounds. Pretty and petite.
This was at the Mayflower, one of Washington’s finer hotels. Her client for the evening had booked Room 871. He was a return customer. The hundreds of dollars he had promised to pay would cover all expenses: the room, the minibar, room service should they order it, the train ticket that had brought her from New York and, naturally, Kristen’s time.
A 47-page federal affidavit from an
F.B.I. agent investigating a prostitution ring lists the man at the hotel as “Client 9,” and includes considerable details about him, the prostitutes and his methods of paying for them. A law enforcement official and another person briefed on the prostitution case have identified Client 9 as
Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New York.
Kristen, having already passed through the lobby, with its wing chairs and its gilded half-clad cherubs, arrived in a small room in a quiet corner of the “Club Floor,” a special wing for V.I.P.’s. A king-size bed commanded the carpeted floor. Two photos — of the Capitol and the Washington Monument — hung on the walls.
As soon as she came in, Kristen called her boss, Temeka Lewis, who was the booking agent for the Emperor’s Club, an online prostitution ring, the affidavit said. Ms. Lewis told her that the client had arrived. He was headed for the room. An assignation of more than an hour ensued, according to the affidavit, which was unsealed Thursday morning in Federal District Court in Manhattan.
Room 871 had been booked under the name George Fox, a pseudonym that Client 9 had been using, and one by which several people in the ring knew him, according to a law enforcement official. However, a few of the prostitutes had recently come to realize who the man really was, the official said.
The affidavit said Client 9 approached the Emperor’s Club last month, requesting an appointment on Feb. 13 at 9 or 10 p.m. The appointment was to be in Washington, and he sent along what appears to have been a deposit of cash by mail.
Apparently, it was not his first time using the service. The affidavit captures the almost mundane financial back-and-forth prior to the meeting, quoting Ms. Lewis as telling her boss, Mark Brener, the owner of the ring, that Client 9 had a $400 or $500 credit to his name and wished to use it toward his next appointment. When Ms. Lewis spoke to the client on Feb. 12, the affidavit said, she told him that his deposit had not yet arrived and asked if he had sent it to a business known as Qat.
“Yup, same as in the past,” the client said. “No question about it.”
After these initial matters were discussed, Ms. Lewis reached out to Kristen, the affidavit said, writing in a text message : “If D.C. appt. happens u will need 2 leave NYC @ 4:45 p.m.” The next day she sent along a possible itinerary:
Amtrak’s Train No. 129 departed Pennsylvania Station at 5:39 p.m. and arrived in Washington at 9. The following evening, Train No. 84 departed Washington at 8:35 p.m. and pulled into New York at 11:57.
Minutes after sending this text message, Ms. Lewis took another call from Client 9 and told him that his “package” had arrived. In a prior conversation, Client 9 had already told her that he had booked a room and had paid for it in his own name and now asked who was coming. Ms. Lewis told him it would be Kristen and, according to the affidavit, he responded: “Great, O.K., wonderful.”
Still, there were some “payment issues” to discuss. Ms. Lewis asked if he could give Kristen “extra funds” at the appointment and the client said that he would see what he could do. The agency did not like models to handle money for future meetings, Ms. Lewis said, but this time they would make an exception so they wouldn’t have to go through it again.
The papers quote Kristen and the woman who sent her on the job talking about a man believed to be Client 9, who might make requests of prostitutes “you might not think were safe.” But Kristen, according to the papers, was prepared: “I have a way of dealing with that,” she is quoted as having told the woman. “I’d be like, ‘Listen, dude, you really want the sex?’... You know what I mean.”