Emperors Club VIP has now been thrust into the spotlight on account of one alleged customer in particular: a man the FBI designated as “Client 9” but who the New York Times, citing two law enforcement sources, claims is New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. On Feb. 13 Client 9 allegedly met up in Washington, D.C., with an Emperors Club employee named “Kristen,” described by her booker as “an American, petite, very pretty brunette, 5 feet 5 inches, and 105 pounds,” according to an FBI charging document. Client 9, the document alleges, agreed to pay thousands of dollars for Kristen’s time and expenses, including a room at the posh Mayflower Hotel, minibar charges, room service and a train ticket from New York. When he was informed by the booker that Kristen was on her way that evening, Client 9 supposedly replied, “Great, okay, wonderful.”
The Emperors Club apparently targeted the most elite stratum of customers. It ranked its girls on a scale ranging from three to seven diamonds, with hourly rates starting at $1,000 and daily rates ranging from $10,000 to $31,000 depending on “the individual education, sophistication, and ambiance [sic] created.” Emperors Club prostitutes sometimes traversed the globe for appointments, federal prosecutors charge, servicing customers in Miami, Los Angeles, New York, London, Paris, Vienna, and Washington, D.C. With such steep prices, Emperors Club VIP maintained selective standards. In a phone conversation described in the FBI charging document, a manager expresses doubts that the agency would be able to “market” a prostitute that in his opinion looked like a “butcher.”
The group’s high-priced hookers demanded a fair cut of the action. A prospective prostitute complained in an e-mail that a rate of 500 British pounds per hour (more than $1,000) was not enough. “This is a kind of money I make very easily in photoshoots, " she wrote. Five hundred pounds per hour “is not a price I would ever consider of doing it for.” She also wrote that she was “shock[ed]” and “confuse[d]” that another prostitute had to have sex with a john twice in an hour without even being taken to dinner first.
Emperors Club VIP required its customers to prepay for services and would accept cash, money orders, wire transfers or American Express. Payment by credit card was problematic, however. According to the charging document, two of the managers discussed the prostitutes’ not taking proper imprints of clients’ cards. One of the managers complained, “If American Express were to ask to see that, as a legitimate business, you can’t even deliver something like that.”
The charging documents contain numerous suggestions that Client 9 was a regular customer of the escort service. For instance, Client 9 reportedly sought to apply an existing balance of about $400 or $500 to his tryst with Kristen. And when he met her he handed her $4,300 “in order to avoid payment issues in the future.” Client 9 also seemed cautious about the way he arranged payment. According to the FBI he declined to send the required prepayment to Emperors Club VIP using “traditional wire transferring,” opting instead to mail payment in an envelope with no return address. The day before the Washington dalliance, when the package still had not arrived, the booker asked Client 9 if he had sent it to the right address. He answered, “Yup, same as in the past, no question about it,” according to the affidavit. (Federal authorities began wiretapping the Emperors Club phone lines after a confidential informant who had once worked there and an undercover officer established that there was enough evidence for a judge to sign off on the surveillance.)
For Spitzer, the case’s consequences could be devastating. A married father of three daughters, he admitted on Monday to acting in a way that “violates my obligations to my family and that violates my, or any, sense of right and wrong.” If he really is Client 9, though, his troubles may extend far beyond his family. Under federal law, transporting an individual across states lines for purposes of prostitution is punishable by up to 10 years in prison (though johns rarely, if ever, receive a sentence that severe). The feds allege that Client 9 made several phone calls over a two-day period to arrange his Washington rendezvous with Kristen on Feb. 13—the same day Spitzer traveled to Washington to testify before Congress on the state of the bond insurance industry. Given Spitzer’s fearsome image as a crusading reformer—and the lengthy list of enemies he built up along the way—prosecutors may not be inclined to treat him mercifully.
The charging documents also contain some humiliating tidbits about Client 9. Some girls were apparently wary of him and considered him “difficult.” Shortly after her appointment with Client 9, Kristen called the booker to discuss it. The booker said that she had been told Client 9 “would ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe.” But Kristen replied that she was unfazed: “I have a way of dealing with that … I’d be like, ‘Listen, dude, you really want the sex?’ … You know what I mean.” Who knows how many more embarrassing morsels like that remain to be disclosed.
