Of these seven hundred women, Jason has been engaged to nine, two of whom he married. "It was really only one and a half," Itzler reports, saying that while living in Miami 's South Beach he married "this hot Greek girl. She was gorgeous.The first thing I did was buy her this great boob job, which immediately transformed her from a tremendous A/B look to an out-of-sight C/D look. But her parents totally freaked out. So I got the marriage annulled."

This aside, not counting his sainted late mother, Jason says Natalia, twenty-five, about five foot three and perhaps one hundred pounds soaking wet, reigns as the love of his life.

Without Natalia, she of the smoldering brown eyes that have excited who knows how many hedge-fund managers, billionaire trust-fund babies, and NFL quarterbacks, Jason would never have been able to build NY Confidential into the sub rosa superhotness it became. It was Natalia who got top dollar, as much as $2,000 an hour, with a two-hour minimum. In the history of Internet escorting, no one ever matched Natalia's ratings on TheEroticReview. com, the Zagat's of the escort-for-hire industry. On TER, "hobbyists," as those with the "hobby" of frequenting escorts are called- men with screen names like Clint Dickwood, Smelly Smegma, and William Jefferson Clinton-can write reviews of the "providers" they see, rating them on a scale of 1 to 10 for both "appearance" and "performance."

In 2004 Natalia recorded an unprecedented seventeen straight 10/10s. On the TER ratings scale, a 10 was defined as "one in a lifetime." Natalia was the Perfect 10, the queen of the escort world.

"Yo! Pimp Juice!… that her?"

It was Psycho, a large tattooed Dominican (psycho was stenciled on his neck in Gothic lettering) who was referring to Jason by his jailhouse nickname. Itzler nodded. There was no need to gloat. Moments before, Jason scanned the grim visiting room. "Just making sure I've got the hottest chick in the room." Like it was any contest, Natalia sitting there, in her little calfskin jacket and leather miniskirt, thick auburn hair flowing over her narrow shoulders.

Besides, half of Rikers already knew about Jason and NY Confidential. They'd read, or heard about, the articles Itzler had piped to his pulp enablers at "Page Six," including how he could get "$250,000 an hour for Paris Hilton with a four-hour minimum."

But you couldn't believe everything you read in the New York Post, even at Rikers. Natalia's presence was proof. Proof that Jason, a little Jewish guy who still sported a nasty black eye from being beaten silly in his sleep by some skell inmate, wasn't full of shit when he told the homeys that he was the biggest pimp in the city, that he got all the best girls. How many other Rikers fools could get the Perfect 10 to visit them, at nine o'clock in the morning, too?

"Psycho…Natalia," Jason said. "Natalia… Psycho."

"Hey," Natalia said with an easy smile. She was, after all, a girl you could take anywhere. One minute she could be the slinkiest cat on the hot tin roof, wrapping her dancer's body (she was the tap-dance champion of Canada in 1996) around a client's body in a hotel elevator. Then, when the door slid open, she'd look classic, like a wife even, on the arm of a Wall Street CEO or Asian electronics magnate. She was an actress, had played Shakespeare and Off Broadway both. Ever the ingenue, she'd been Juliet half a dozen times. Playing opposite Jason's however-out-of-luck Romeo was no sweat, even here, in jail.

Not that Natalia had exactly been looking forward to coming to Rikers this raw late-spring morning. Riding in the bus over the bridge from East Elmhurst, freezing in her lace stockings as she sat beside a stocky black man in a Jerome Bettis jersey, she looked out the window at the looming prison and said, "Wal-Mart must have had a two-for-one on barbed wire."

It wasn't that she didn't miss Jason, or the heyday of when they lived together at Seventy-nine Worth Street, the harem stylings of which came to Jason while getting his hair cut at the Casbah-themed Warren Tricomi Salon on Fifty-seventh Street. It was just that this marriage thing was flipping her out, especially after Jason called the tabs to announce the ceremony would be held inside Rikers.

"Every little girl's dream, to get married at Rikers Island," Natalia said to Jason. "What are they going to get us, adjoining cells?"

But now, holding hands in the visiting room, surrounded by low-level convicts, just the sort of people who rarely appeared in either of their well-to-do childhoods or in the fantasy life of Seventy-nine Worth Street -neither of them, pimp or escort, could keep from crying.

"Are those happy tears or sad tears?" Jason asked.

"Just tears," answered Natalia. "Crying because your boy is in jail?" "That and…everything else."

It was a tender moment. Except then, as he always does, Jason began talking.

"Don't worry about this Rikers marriage," he said, back in schemer-boy genius mode. "This isn't the real marriage… When I'm out we'll have the princess marriage… the white dress, every-thing.Your mom will be there. My dad… This is just the publicity marriage.You know: getting married at Rikers-it's so…rock star!"

Natalia looked up at Jason, makeup streaming from her face. "It's great, isn't it?" Jason enthused."A brilliant idea." "Yeah," Natalia said wearily. "Great, in theory." Almost everything Jason Itzler said was great, in theory.

They call it the oldest profession, and maybe it is.The prostitute has always been part of the New York underworld. According to Timothy J. Gilfoyle's City of Eros, in 1776, Lieutenant Isaac Bangs of the Continental Army complained that half his troops were spending more time in lower-Manhattan houses of ill repute than fighting the British. In the nineteenth century, lower Broadway had become, in the words of Walt Whitman, a "nocti-vagous strumpetocracy," filled with "tawdry, foul-tongued and harsh-voiced harlots."

By the eighties, the image of the New York prostitute encompassed both the call-girl minions of Sydney Biddle Barrows, the famous Mayflower Madam, and the hot-pants-clad hooker trying to keep warm beside a burning fifty-five-gallon drum outside the Bronx 's Hunts Point Market. On Eighth Avenue 's so-called Minnesota Strip were the runaways in the wan-eyed Jodie Foster-in-Taxi Driver mode.The nineties brought the "Natasha Trade," an influx of immigrant Russian girls and their ex-Soviet handlers who locked the women up in Brighton Beach apartments and drove them, fifteen at a time, in Ford Econoline vans to strip joints on Queens Boulevard.

The Internet would reconfigure all that.Today, with highly ad hoc estimates of the New York "sex worker" population hovering, depending on whom you ask, anywhere from five thousand to twenty-five thousand, horny men looking for a more convivial lunch hour don't have to cruise Midtown bars or call a number scribbled on a piece of paper.All that's needed is a high-speed connection to any of the many "escort malls," such as the highly clickable CityVibe or Eros.

The typical site includes a photo or two, a sparse bio, a schedule of when the escort is available, and a price ("donation") list. There is also the standard disclaimer, detailing how any money exchanged "is simply for time only and companionship" and that anything else "is a matter of personal preference between two or more consenting adults." For, as everyone in the escort business is quick to say, selling "companionship" is not against the law.

The system is not without its bugs.The most common question: "Is she the girl in the picture?" Says a longtime booker, "About two-thirds of the time, when a guy calls up asking for a girl they've seen on the site, she doesn't work for us, quit six months ago, or we Photoshopped her picture from the Victoria's Secret catalogue.