Back story, November 21, 20100 from www.blackbookmag.com – The steakhouse credit card scam that is in all the papers hits home hard.

I know a few of the players, and I hear from others that I know some of the others. First on the list is Martha Rubiano, a second-tier pal in my first tier of friends. Martha and I have been poking each other on Facebook for years. I asked around and found out that everyone has been avoiding her. Unemployed or unfulfilled doesn’t explain away the accusations.

In the end, she was the gift horse that many looked into the mouth. Her too-good-to-be-true “deals” on luxury goods were indeed a must to avoid because, as it turned out, she seemed to be fencing goods bought on captured American Express cards.

She hasn’t poked me in days, and I assume she is otherwise detained. I will hope that she gets out of this okay. I think there will be a lot of deals cut and she seems low on the totem pole. I adore Martha, and hope she comes through this. It goes to show you that you never know a person all that well.

Higher on that pole is Andrew Parker, a nice enough fellow until you get to know him. Peter Davis did a story for The Daily Beast on him last December, which proved to be a mere tip of the iceberg, considering the latest accusations. I totally recommend reading it.

I’ll add to Peter’s story a few anecdotes gathered by some of Andrew’s “keep my name out of it” friends. I was told, “When he was a kid at Dwight (a prep school), he was a bit of a bully. Now barely 5 foot 6, that seems impossible, but back then he was large.”

I was told “He fell out of favor and was so disliked that he was lured to an apartment of a friend where he was confronted by about 20 students and beaten up by a couple of them while the others cheered. Everyone hated him. He was and arrogant bully, not morally sound.”

When he hit the club scene, he had worked his way back into the good graces of some. He hung with a “high roller, celebrity crowd.” He even threw a few parties. He had an “after hours club called Pacha, and his mom was somehow involved.” After that foray, “He then started selling clothes at flea markets and on the street. Then mom bankrolled him in A.S. Parker, a very small closet of a store on Madison Avenue and 78th Street. Samantha Ronson deejayed at the store’s opening party.” He had changed his name from Pollack to Parker,” so he wouldn’t seem so Jewish.”

He then “went crazy, not paying for anything, like stealing fruit from supermarkets and he was stealing customer credit cards using the money to pay for his lifestyle, completely lost his mind. Paying for hookers, strip clubs, and then he dated that porn star Heather Pink.”

I asked if he was paying for the bottles I would often see at his table. “No, he always knew how to get a free bottle, who would give him one. He would show up with a crew of girls and get the bottle for free. He was sort of an unpaid promoter.” One of his friends wondered how he got out of jail so fast after the last arrests. “Maybe he was out for a reason.” There’s always a rat and according to those who know him well, he “fits the bill.”

I always got along with Andrew. I’d always say hello. I even met his mom when he was doing that Pacha thing. I commented that he never tried to screw me as far as I could tell. “He figured he shouldn’t shit where he eats, and clubs are where he lived.” I said, “It seems he always shat where he ate according to his arrest record.”

The so-called mastermind of the whole shebang is Damian Jacas, often known as DJ. People say I know him and I sort of do recognize his face from his Facebook photo. I was told that “he was someone I knew but never let into my clubs.” Years later, he latched onto a fast crowd and in the bottle service era, people like Jacas and other jackasses become V.I.Ps with the swipe of a credit card. He seemed to have lots of those. I wonder if clubs have been touched by this scandal. Many say that “he can’t be the brains behind this mess.” Then again, they really didn’t get away with it—28 of them are locked up. I bet that number grows. He was a bartender uptown or had a bar up there.

I don’t care enough to find out. Too many people’s lives have been hurt by this. Among them is my old friend Eric Brahms, who was cuffed at the hospital while his wife was in labor. She got busted as well, but is nursing their newborn and therefore not in jail. Eric used to throw parties and until recently, was dabbling with some idea of doing a joint. He recently told a friend that he was “retired from the biz.” He should get out today, and I’ll give him a call. But what can be said. I’m sorry for your troubles?

This scam will have repercussions. Clubs are very aware they are targets for phony credit cards. Disputed charges are a time-consuming part of every night life. Waitrons take photo IDs and managers background check as much as possible, but scams are more common than you might think. Now every effort will be doubled. This crime is a violation of our comfort zone. I read that all the money spent on the cards will be refunded to the unsuspecting owners, in time. What can’t be returned is the false sense of security we have when we give that smiling waiter or clerk our ID and credit card. Because of this crew, we all will be a little uneasy during this holiday shopping season. The cops and courts may quantify the crime in terms of dollars scammed, but the real loss is our trust.

from www.blackbookmag.com – The Steakhouse credit card scandal has many people still incarcerated as the holiday weekend approaches. Few will have sympathy for these devils, but I am feeling sorry for them all.

As the facts unfold, it seems impossible that they ever thought they could get away with it. At the center of it all is old pal Andrew Parker, or Pollack, as he was once known before he chose a life of pretending to be anything but what he was. He seemed to have scammed hundreds, and accumulated multiple arrests for credit card fraud and other bad behavior.

This latest bust surely paints him as a career grifter. Growing up surrounded by the privileged, he must have felt slighted and at one point found it easier to scam to obtain a life of luxury rather than work for it, and exist in his own skin. Along the way, he collected watches and fine clothes and, even a porn star girlfriend to satisfy his need to belong, to prove himself. This picture I have painted is based on numerous
conversations I’ve had with old acquaintances of his and my own relationship with him. I caught up with Heather Pink, his so called porn star ex-girlfriend, and asked her about her time spent with Andrew.

Q: How did you meet Andrew?

Pink: I met Andrew New Year,’s morning 2005. My friend had a party at their loft in Tribeca the night before. It ran late, and I didn’t feel like going back uptown. At the time, I was living in Boca Raton, FL, but kept an apartment in Midtown. I literally rolled out of bed the next morning and met him. First thing he said to me was that he was hungover and wanted to get a Bloody Mary. I thought he was cute, boyish. I let him give me a massage, we had a drink, and I went home. I was in town for a few days after that, and we were together every day during that time. When I flew home, he would call me several times a day wanting to know what I was doing. Telling me he wanted to come visit, and asking me when I was coming back. I agreed to come back January 15 for my birthday, and he would arrange to have a party for me. It was at 58 where he had been promoting forever. I was supposed to be in town for 3 days, but I ended up moving in instead.

Q: Who did you think he was? How did he represent himself? What exactly was your relationship like? And there was a film made. How did that happen?

Pink: In spite of his party boy reputation, we settled in and had a relatively domesticated life. He went to work at the store 6 days a week. I took a sales job there, and helped him run things. I did well with sales, but he really wasn’t paying me much at all. He would talk to a girl he had previously dated, who was a pornstar, and she would go out with Andrew and spend all this money. I had some connections for porn that I knew from Florida, and had even tried to perform, but decided I didn’t like it. He said if I got in he could almost guarantee I would become well known and make a lot of money. There was a tone of resentment in him also that it was costing him money to have me at the store. I doubted him, but I agreed to go to prove that there was no money to be made in porn, then maybe he’d leave me alone about it.

Q: So where did it go?

Pink: Turned out that there was money to be made in porn at that time. I started dividing my time between both jobs. 2 weeks a month I’d be at the store, and the other 2 weeks I would be in Los Angeles for shoots. One night, I was at a New York Society event with Andrew and his publicist, when reporters from page 6 approached them and said they recognized me from porn. I was embarrassed. They thought it was great. They ran a couple of publicly pieces about my working at the store. In order to advance my career, it was decided that I should get into directing. Andrew and I found investors to fund the production company, and I found a distributor when we were at the AVN convention in Vegas together.

That was pretty much the beginning of the end of our relationship. There is a certain protocol that needs to be followed in order to run any type of adult production to protect you from getting into serious trouble. Legal paperwork needs to be filled out. Sets are closed to bystanders. Andrew thought it would be along the line of a glorified swingers party. He showed up to the sets every day, drunk. He harassed the girls, followed them around, followed them in the bathroom, invited friends to have parties on the set. I managed to get most of the shooting done in about 10 days, then returned to LA for 3 weeks for other projects.

Q: When did you suspect things weren’t what they seemed?

Pink: Around that same time, Andrew hired a woman named Joselyn Wohl to work at the store. He said she was weird and ugly but she could bring the right people into the store. I agreed, and didn’t think much of it. My last week in LA I called Andrew’s phone. Andrew didn’t answer, but his friend DJ did, called me a whore, and hung up. I called back twice with the same results.

I left a message with Andrew’s mom on her voicemail for him to call me. He called back about 10 minutes later yelling at me for calling his mom. Then he told me his mom saw things on her Amex bill and left notes with his building not to let me in. And if I was ever seen with Andrew, she would cut him off. DJ and the woman that I now understand to be Joselyn Wohl were laughing in the background during this conversation.

Q: And how did it end?

Pink: Joselyn and Andrew were dating by then. She acted surprised in the Peter Davis article that he treated her like crap when she watched this first hand. When I returned to NYC, Andrew tried to take money from me and threatened not to give me my things back unless I gave it to him. Also, he never returned my dog and I’ve heard from people he put him in the pound before I even returned to New York.

Q: Did you know Damian Jacas?

Pink: I knew DJ obviously, and never liked him. I thought he was crude and needy. I didn’t know why Andrew kept him around when he had very good people available to him as friends. He was involved with stolen cards even back then, and Andrew would talk about how stupid he thought it was.

Q: Who would you want to play you when they make this a movie?

Pink: Are there any actresses that are skinny with red hair and big fake boobs? It’s not even so much playing a pornstar that would hurt their career as much as playing Andrew Parker’s girlfriend would.