Alex Diaz grew up in Jersey City in a small two-bedroom apartment near Journal Square. His father worked downtown in maintenance jobs, while his mother was a homemaker. As an only child, Alex attended Dickinson High School, a massive school perched on a hill that drivers often see while traveling the elevated highway connecting the New Jersey Turnpike to the Holland Tunnel. However, Alex never graduated. At sixteen, he was arrested for aggravated assault during a fight, and a year later, he was involved in an armed robbery with his friends, targeting bodegas along Kennedy Boulevard. Obtaining a gun in his part of Jersey City wasn’t difficult—older guys would sell them for $300 or $400. Alex hid his in his bedroom closet at his parents’ place. One night, after stealing around five hundred dollars—an amount that felt significant to them—they ran straight into the police.

Alex was sent to a juvenile facility in Secaucus and later transferred to the New Jersey Training School for Boys in Jamesburg. He spent two and a half years there, most of it in a boot camp-style environment, living in barracks with fifty other juvenile offenders, including some friends from the streets. His parents visited often, visibly upset, especially his mother, who urged him, “When you come home, try to do a better job. Try to fix up your life.”

When Alex was released, he was nearly twenty years old. He finished high school at night and enrolled in community college for a year and a half but soon lost interest. He felt directionless and considered studying criminal justice, but his gun charge barred him from ever becoming a police officer. The next best option was private security. He started working as a security guard at factories, water facilities, and the parking lot of the Prudential Center in Newark, earning about twelve dollars an hour. His childhood friends had moved on, some starting families of their own, but Alex stayed in touch with one old friend, a former accomplice in the bodega robbery. This friend introduced Alex to World Class Party Girls.

This agency was run by an entrepreneur named Joseph Ruis, whom Alex knew as the owner of a kebab house he frequented in Journal Square. Alex had no idea that Ruis was also running an escort service with dozens of girls and almost as many drivers. Through his friend, Alex quickly learned how to be a driver for the agency. The more girls he drove, the more money he could make. However, it wasn’t that simple. Not every girl charged the same rate, and Alex’s earnings depended on how much each girl made. To help drivers keep track, the agency provided a chart—similar to a tip calculator—that broke down the different possible hourly pay rates into separate shares for the agency, the driver, and the girls. Drivers usually got the smallest cut, around a quarter, while the agency and the girls split the rest evenly.

Drivers typically used their own cars, and the agency had a dispatcher in the main office who would call Alex on his cell. Initially, the dispatcher wouldn’t send Alex on the higher-paying calls. Even at the lower end of the pay scale, the hourly rate for a girl was never less than $200, of which Alex would receive $45 or $50, ending the night with $300 or $400. Working three or four nights a week could bring in around $1,000—a decent income for a twenty-one-year-old without a college degree. The more expensive the call, the larger the driver’s cut; for example, a $400-an-hour call could earn Alex up to $120 for that hour. He would drive all over Manhattan, Rutherford, the Meadowlands, and North Jersey, sometimes venturing as far south as Middlesex County. Most of the calls came from the suburbs and Westchester County. In the city, he would bring girls to places like the Marriott in Times Square and high-end hotels like The Carlyle on the Upper East Side. The rates were far higher than what street girls charged, and the clientele was different, too—travelers with plenty of money who were willing to pay for the convenience of having a girl arrive at their door. There was always pressure during these dates; the clients often wanted to make the most of their hour, but the girls aimed to finish as quickly as possible and move on to the next call. Unbeknownst to the clients, the escort service had an unspoken rule: during an hour-long call, the girls were expected to move on after forty-five minutes.

Some of the girls, including Shannan, would bring cocaine to help extend calls beyond an hour or two. If they didn’t have any, the agency would offer assistance. The dispatcher would ask the client, “You want some party material?” If the client agreed, Alex would deliver it, charging the purchase to the client’s credit card. Sometimes, Alex would buy the cocaine himself—he knew the right people in Jersey City, where he had lived all his life.