OH, THERE SHE IS!
‘Madam’ goes missing for hours — then is denied a lower bail
They want to break me. I am not going to be broken.
Anna Gristina
ACCUSED EAST Side madam Anna Gristina was lost in the legal system for hours Monday before a Manhattan judge shot down a bid to have her $2 million bail reduced.
The smile on Gristina’s face on seeing her husband, Kelvin Gorr, when she finally got to the courtroom — after sevenplus hours in limbo — faded fast after the judge ordered her sent back to Rikers Island.
“They want to break me,” she told her lawyer Gary Greenwald. “I am not going to be broken.”
Her prolonged jail-to-court odyssey came as new details on her mysterious sugar daddy emerged.
In court papers filed Monday, prosecutors revealed a “successful lawyer and longtime client and benefactor helped her get in the prostitution business and assisted (her) in laundering money.”
Prosecutors refused to say if the man described in court papers is veteran attorney David Jaroslawicz, whose Manhattan office was raided last month in connection with the case.
Prosecutors also disclosed for the first time that the promoting prostitution charge Gristina faces stems from phone calls and text messages she exchanged with an undercover cop to arrange a rendezvous with two prostitutes.
In “multiple recorded phone calls” and text messages and one face-to-face meeting with the undercover officer, Gristina “discussed pricing and available prostitutes,” according to court papers.
She arranged for the covert cop to meet the prostitutes at her E. 78th St. brothel, where he watched them have sex with each other, prosecutors charge.
Gristina’s roundabout route to court Monday began at 8 a.m., when she was supposed to board the prison shuttle to the Manhattan courthouse.
“I wasn’t called [by prison officials],” she told Greenwald.
When Gristina didn't turn up in Manhattan at 9:30 a.m., Greenwald said he and the judge were told by court officers she was on her way. By 12:30 p.m. she was still a noshow and her lawyer was informed to expect her by 2:30 p.m.
She was eventually located at 3:15 p.m. in a holding cell on the 12th floor of the courthouse complex.
Fifteen minutes later, Gristina appeared before Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Charles Solomon, who told her, “I’m going to deny the application.”
Gristina, 44, is accused of running a $10 million call-girl ring on the upper East Side that supplied high-class hookers to wealthy johns. Jaynie Mae Baker, 30, was her accomplice, prosecutors said.
Both women have pleaded not guilty to prostitution charges, but Baker was allowed out after posting $100,000 bail.