The takeover

I stood on the deck of the luxury yacht with the nine other women in our bikinis, sweating. For the past week, we'd been entertaining the party of rich men on board the vessel. Being summoned to their cabins to service them when they felt like it. They were a collection of company executives and other wheeler dealers who'd met to hammer out an arms sale. Some very shady characters and not pleasant. Myself and the other whores had the bruises on our bodies from some rough fucking. Now it amused them to turn over one of us to the crew at the end of the voyage for a gang bang on the deck of the yacht. The 12 sailors could make the choice and were now leering at us hungrily.

I was a high class New York call girl who'd worked for an agency for six years and nothing like this had ever occurred. I traveled around the US and abroad to entertain the rich and sometimes famous. Very discreet and only available to those who could afford the sky-high prices of the models, actresses and other classy women. At 30 I was reaching the end of the line, although I'd kept my body in good shape. I had meant to get out of the business but three months earlier the mob moved in on our agency and took over. They ruined everything. I'll explain first how things had been before this happened.

Crime families are based in many cities and they're a presence behind some of the high-class escort agencies, which are national and international in their horizons. But the agency I started working for as a 24 year old single mother was owned and run by two retired call-girls, with the assistance of a lawyer and an accountant.

Stand accounts, credit cards and wired transfers are the required forms of payment at this level of the industry. First it goes into the agency's offshore accounts. Then, once its 20-30% cut is deducted, it moves on into the girls' offshore accounts. Neither the agency nor its girls is a blip on the US revenue's radar.

Until recently, the obvious tax advantages of such arrangements may have been negated by communications difficulties, but these days that's a thing of the past. With no need for - indeed, an active desire to avoid - public visibility, running a high-class escort business from a balmy, laid-back, tax-free Caribbean paradise makes a lot more sense than running one from Manhattan Island. After all, the phones, the fax-machines and the internet work just as well there. y.

A potential new client contacts the agency. The agency checks him out. (Nothing too heavy, but they do like to know he is who he claims to be.) One of the agency's representatives (NOT a call-girl) meets with him. She looks for further evidence that he's an okay guy, with the financial resources to be a regular customer. If she's happy, she'll show him "the book", with the girls' pictures and details. He makes his pick.

The rep and client contact the agency, the agency contacts the girl, the girl schedules a time and place - always a hotel for a first date - and the client opens his account with the agency.

The date goes ahead and, if both parties are happy, the girl will have a new "regular". If not, he can always have another look in "the book". (Though, if the first girl has found it necessary to warn the agency off him for some reason, he will not be invited back.)

And so on. Each time the guy wants a date, he rings the agency and they make the arrangements.

This modus operandi suits everyone.

For the agency, it means it gets its money offshore: tax and hassle-free. It is able to work in the discreet way its clients require.

For the girls, it means the added security of meeting pre-screened guys. Non-cash payment - yes, the agency was trustworthy - has advantages in the unlikely event of outside attention. In such circumstances, we would simply have been the client's "mistress"; and there would have been no evidence - like a roll of bills - to contradict the claim.

The clients appreciate such cover too, along with all other aspects of the agency's discretion. Apart from the vast superiority of its girls to those obtainable at one of the "yellow pages" agencies, its quiet, personal arrangements with them reassure nervous executives.

Most important of all though, it does what none of the girls could do on their own. It plugs them into the world of people willing and able to pay top-dollar for top talent. In the same way that the wealthy go to private tailors and frequent exclusive clubs, so they patronise a very few escort agencies. Word sort of passes amongst them as to which they can trust.

The iron laws of economics apply to the sexual services industry just as any other. At the bottom of the range - the street-corners - competition is a matter of price and proximity (as it is between McDonalds and Burger King). In the middle of the market - the "yellow pages" agencies - it is a matter of attaching extravagant claims to an indifferent product (as it is between Ford and GM). At the top end of the market - my former agency - things are far more a matter of quality, style and reputation (rather as they are for Ferrari and Rolls-Royce). Price is a secondary concern. It's the excellence of the product the customer is interested in.

A nympho may perform often, but that doesn't mean well; and the junkie may think she's good...but then she also may think she's a giraffe or an airplane; and the actress may...well, you've seen "When Harry Met Sally", right? Oh, and the model. The current icon of male desire. But do guys really think she'd be any good in the sack? Bottom line is that sex is an athletic activity. Do you really think one of those stick-insects could perform for more than thirty seconds at a stretch?

I'm willing to conceed the odd actress or model may have done okay in the business, but I regard them as exceptions. Aside from which, the mere mention of them again conjures up the name of Heidi Fleiss...the "How Not To" of professional escorting. In my experience, MAWs were simply not a presence. And they were certainly not what my former employers looked for.

Which prompts the question: who did my agency employ?

There was, of course, no identikit girl. But, for all our differences, it is possible, looking back, to see that in many respects we were quite a homogeneous group. And, although I doubt that any one of us would register top marks in every one of the categories I'm going to list, the following characteristics and abilities were central to what the agency was looking for in its recruits.

* Good-looks.
Okay, this is a no-brainer. But I use "good" rather than "amazing" deliberately. Model looks weren't required. Girl-next-door pretty was quite sufficient. Indeed, a fresh-faced look was preferred to the over-painted glossy-magazine one. A girl exuding youthful vitality was much preferred to anything vampish.

* Compact Physique.
Hollywood seems to think call-girls start at six foot. In my experience the opposite is true. Average, even slightly below average, heights are preferred, for the simple reason most guys like to be taller than their escort.
The popular image is on surer ground in seeing us as svelte. This is so, though we're not anorexics. The agency encouraged us to work out, though almost all of us didn't need urging; we were the sort who did so already. Consequently, though lithe and uniformly fat-free, ours was a toned, healthy, athletic look.

* Fluent English-speakers.
Most of the girls were American. There were a number of English girls, the odd Canadian or Scandinavian and one or two of the "cosmopolitan" types who seem to have roots in several countries and none. But it was fluency in English rather than this or that nationality that the agency required of its girls.
The reason was simple: not just in the countries we focused on, but others - indeed globally -, the language of the wealthy and successful - i.e. our clients - is English. Period.

* Good Background.
Another thing the movies and novels get wrong is in making the call-girl some poor lost soul from the gutter dazzled by the world of rich people. In fact, the roots of high-class escorts are not only invariably middle-class, but often towards the upper end of the middle class.
Take me: I went to a private girls' day school and grew up round country clubs. And, while I wouldn't describe my roots as wealthy, they were certainly comfortable.
This sort of background, not poverty, was the norm.

Remember: the agency needed girls at ease in the world of the wealthy. Someone like me, just a couple of notches below it, was far better equipped to blend into it than someone from a housing project and a city high school.
There was also the matter of accent. Of sounding right at the social events a client might want to take you to. Basically, you just have to sound intelligent, but two accents are definite pluses...and two clear minuses. The pluses are British English, which sounds erudite and sophisticated to American ears, and Soft Southern States, which sounds sexy; the minuses are Valley Girl (okay it's a manner as much as an accent) which marks you as a moron, and Noo Yawk...which is social death, pure and simple.

* Intelligence.
The executive who hires a top escort isn't, as a general rule, in need of an update on the daytime soaps. He's only rarely interested in which rock star has just released a new album. So, if those are your main conversational gambits, you're in trouble.
In fact, of course, if that's the limit of your conversation, the agency would never have hired you in the first place.

The clientele my former agency served consisted almost entirely of clever, successful men. And, while they may have hired us to help unwind, they were still looking to unwind in the company of someone with whom they could conduct intelligent talk.
On top of which, there was the actual escorting side of the work. Often this involved mixing socially where, again, you had to be able to impress in educated company.

So the agency usually looked for college co-eds: preferably ones on decent courses - some real academic discipline, not a joke major - and at the better schools. Of course, there are plenty of retards at the average college, so it was a rough yardstick. But in the absence of better alternatives, it was one the agency stuck with, at least as a starting-point.

* Athleticism. Who do you think is better in the sack: Kate Moss or Jackie Joyner-Kersey? It's not a hard call to make. Sex is intense physical exercise, and the best athlete is the best equipped for it. Far better, certainly, than some malnourished model.
Which is why the agency sought an athletic background in its recruits.
Some girls were gym fiends: into aerobics and workouts. Several others had been dancers or studied dance. (Indeed, a background in ballet was reckoned a BIG plus by the agency. The reason? As someone put it: ballet is "lap dancing for the rich". The tuxedo brigade fantasize about Sylvie Guillem the way they drool over Heather Locklear down at The Hard Rock Cafe.)

In most cases though, it was sports that featured on our resumes, and usually quite a lot of it. I, for instance, was a good swimmer and a more than decent tennis player but, if anything, I was towards the lower end of sporting attainment. Other girls had been nationally competitive, and the agency recruited NCAA scholarship kids like crazy. (In fact, they focused on it so much, we joked about the agency running its own "college draft".)

Not that they looked at every sport the same. Generally, they didn't recruit from things like basketball or volleyball: these tend to feature big, rangy body types, and (like I've said) that's not what the market wants. Instead, it looked at - and got - sprinters, swimmers, divers and gymnasts.