The Southern District and Showtime's “Billions”
I lived the nightmare
The following is a chapter from my unpublished book “Lifestyles of the Rich and Infamous: My Year At MCC Federal Prison With Jeffrey Epstein and Paul Manafort.”
As if it wasn’t bad enough that the Eastern District of New York was raking me over the coals, the Southern District jumped in to give me the old tag-team treatment midway through my ordeal.
This I discovered when my lawyer called to say that the Southern District was ready to prosecute me until somebody in the Brooklyn office heard about the initiative and essentially rained on their parade: “We’re already fucking this guy. You’re too late. We’re not into threesomes.” Well, of course, I’m pretty sure that’s not exactly what they said, but you get the idea.
So the DA’s from both districts set up a meeting which featured the aforementioned lawyers, two IRS agents, a female NYPD vice cop with a God-awful pasted down hair-do, and a female Korean Homeland Security employee who I instantly liked, mostly because she reminded me of all the middle-aged Korean phone girls I counted as my best friends in the escort industry.
Up until that time, the Eastern District DA’s had asked me questions about how the industry worked, which I was all-too-enthusiastic about answering. They clearly knew nothing about the escort business — and especially the Asian contingent whom they pretty much thought were all trafficked against their will. I was quick to dispel that preposterous notion.
But when the DA from the Southern District showed up to ask me specific questions about the girls who advertised on my blog, I did my best imitation of Oliver North and Ronald Reagan when interrogated about the Iran-Contra affair. It got pretty rough but fortunately, they didn’t get much — essentially because I didn’t know the real names of all the players. And just as fortunately, they didn’t bring photos of girls I would surely have denied knowing if they had and I’d recognized them even if I’m not a very good liar, believe it or not.
I survived that onslaught only to have my lawyer email me two weeks later asking if I could show at the Southern District office just an hour and a half later. They needed to talk to me. I did not speak to him on the phone and didn’t immediately respond — as it kind of pissed me off that they couldn’t give me a little notice.
Before I could even answer his email, my phone rang with a Korean phone girl I knew quite well. But she sounded really strange and not like herself at all. And then, when she asked me a question about somebody we had never discussed before, I could tell 100% that MJ was wired up. I already knew the Feds were after my customers. It all made perfect sense.
An hour and a half later, I arrived at the offices of the Southern District to be escorted upstairs for an interview with the same DA who had grilled me before, an IRS agent I’d met before and grown to seriously dislike, the Homeland Security girl once again, and two dudes from the State Department I’d never seen previously.
By this time, I’d had enough meetings with employees of various governmental agencies to know the drill. And I went in prepared for the joust. The conversation (to the best of my recollection) went like this:
State Department guy #1 introduced himself and then offered “so we finally get to meet the famous Dollar Bill. I love the stuff you write. You’re really a talented writer.” I knew exactly what this was: a tactic to soften me up so I’d fill their ears with information.
I smiled, nodded, and then responded “I get it. You don’t have to juice me up!” And then I took the offensive:
“So! Ya flipped MJ, huh?” This was my way of saying “Ok! Fellas. Let me flip the switch and watch you lie!” Which of course they did with a degree of finesse. I’ll give them that.
In their next attempt to disarm me, the duo displayed a photo of a dead Korean girl, asking me if I recognized her as an employee of one of my customers. It was a ridiculous ploy. The girl was fully dressed and lying on her stomach. She wasn’t mutilated and didn’t even look dead. Plus, I couldn’t see her face.
I looked at the picture — and then the boys — and asked “can you tell her to turn over? I can’t see her face.”
Obviously, it wasn’t working. I’d been paraded in front of and harassed by government officials too many times. Interviewing me had reached diminishing returns.
What they did get out of me was a description of how well my Korean customers ran their businesses. That the girls were thoroughly showered and antiseptic and how you could eat off the floor of the houses they were so well-tended. And finally, I offered that my Korean clients were so organized they’d tap the last four numbers of all callers’ phones into a database on their laptops to extract relevant information about that particular individual. I added that all the houses shared the database to ensure everybody’s safety as in some realms, cooperation superseded the almighty dollar.
That piece of information they produced as evidence that the girls were conspiring in a criminal enterprise. Inadvertently, I had helped them bust the 10 best Asian massage parlors in the city while ignoring the shitholes I wouldn’t let advertise on my blog because I knew they were shitholes. Silly me. At least my heart was in the right place. But in defending their honor, I’d actually incriminated them.
After a few more insignificant exchanges I can’t remember clearly, they wired me up and had me call MJ. I didn’t really see the harm. I wasn’t going to say anything revealing. And I knew MJ had been wired herself when she called me earlier that day. So what the hell. If that’s what they wanted, I didn’t see what the boys were going to gain from the exchange except for the burner phone number I was using. And I was about to dump that phone anyway before I even went down for the interview.
MJ did not answer the call. The ring went to voice mail. I reported this to the Homeland Security woman as if the matter had been settled.
“Hold on! Try again, she cautioned. “Maybe she’ll answer.”
It was all I could do to not laugh in her face. As in “yeah, sister! Something tells me MJ’s gonna answer this time.”
Sure enough, MJ responded, and I flew into some meaningless gossip about nothing — which apparently impressed the State Department guy because after I hung up, he looked at the Homeland Security girl and said “this guy’s got the gift of gab.”
And that was about it. Before I was escorted downstairs, my “favorite” IRS agent showed me a photo of a porgy he’d caught fishing in Long Island Sound. On what planet did this dude think that I cared about some fish he’d caught. Talk about clueless.
The first State Department guy escorted me downstairs as we talked about biking and hiking in the Hudson Valley, an area to which I often commuted to enjoy nature — and he actually lived. So involved in the conversation was he that the man made a really serious and almost comical mistake.
When a visitor comes to the offices of any district, he’s given a visitor sticker to wear upstairs — and then has it removed when he leaves. My guy was so concentrated on our conversation, he forgot to remove the telltale sticker. And I, who was wearing a t-shirt with an elaborate print, didn’t notice myself.
I got on my bicycle, rode home, ate lunch, and then took a nap. An hour later, I hopped back on the bike to visit an advertiser who owed me her monthly payment.
Jisu and I spent the better part of an hour gossiping about Korean girls we knew — and eating lunch (which she always fed me because Jisu was genuinely a nice person).
When I got up to leave, my friend eased up to me and gently peeled the Southern District visitor sticker off my shirt. I almost took a shit. I really didn’t know it was there until that moment. But because Jisu’s English was really poor, I don’t think she knew what it was. Yikes!
In the meantime, I was simply “through” with all the government bullies. The Eastern District had already offered me a plea deal before their southern counterpart had stepped in to grind me for more information and cost me thousands more in legal fees.
Nobody was about to pay those legal fees nor offer me a better plea bargain in exchange for the added proffers. They were just humping me for freebies like Harvey Weinstein was doing to all those actresses.
I called my lawyer to say I’d had enough. Unless somebody was going to sweeten the plea pie, I was through answering questions. And that was it. He told them my asshole was blown out. I could take no more.
But that isn’t quite the end of the Southern District story. A year or two later, Showtime released a series loosely based on reality called “Billions,” which featured a storyline about the Southern District prosecuting a dirty hedge fund operator by flipping his employee, a guy named Dollar Bill.
The show itself was fascinating because it gave me some really good insight as to what was going on behind the scenes when I’d been run through the mill.
The Dollar Bill thing only whispered to me. I’m just not that full of myself to think it was a reference to me and my case. But the episode in which my namesake gets arrested and screams “lawyer” as they try to get him to incriminate himself sent chills down my spine. If only I had done that, I’d be a lot richer!
That chilled feeling turned to outright anger when in the following episode, Dollar is brought into a proffer and told they know about the home address of his second family. He lives on Tanbark Street.
This sent me into orbit. On my blog, I had written a few entries about hiking the single most obscure trail in all of the Catskill Mountains. And Tanbark was the name of the trail! The Tanbark Trail!
I was no longer imagining things. This was no coincidence. I felt like the Southern District had told Aaron Sorkin my story — and laughed at me while they were telling it.
After doing a little research, I did discover that Sorkin and Phreet Barrara had done lunch together during the production of the show. Did they talk about me? I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Was somebody reading my blog? One hundred percent. No doubt about it.
The story doesn’t end there. Maybe two months later, I received an email from one of my blog readers who had been writing to me periodically for a few years — asking questions and seeking advice. That’s not uncommon when you have a blog that at least some people read.
But in this email, the sender revealed that he was actually the actor who was playing Dollar Bill on “Billions.” WTF?!?! Occasionally, guys would write in and offer to buy me a beer. But mostly, I declined. Only occasionally, did I meet up with one of my blog readers. And then usually with a reference from one of the girls who knew him and said he wasn’t a maniac or cop.
But Kelly (the real name of the actor who plays Dollar Bill)? This guy I had to meet. So he showed up in the East Village and sure enough, it was the actor who played Dollar Bill. He knew nothing about the entire Tanbark “coincidence.”
And he was in a state of shock when I told him I was being dry-humped to a severely chafed state in the process of negotiating a plea deal with the federal government — all while doing proffers for both the Eastern and Southern Districts. Where he’d been playing a role, I’d been to in real life.
I called my presentencing interviewer to tell her this tale to which she responded “there’s no way the Southern District would discuss you with a tv producer. It would never happen.” But what I know and she doesn’t is that fame and Hollywood lights seduce everybody. I didn’t know exactly who or what this crazy shit was all about. I just knew it was no coincidence.
More from the book: