The Prodigy and the Playmate

5/27/01

Any illusions that the typical Playboy Playmate is not a whore should be dispelled by the June 2001 issue of Philadelphia magazine. It appears that most of them are available for prostitution through such internet sites as Nicisgirls.com.

Benjamin Wallace writes about the adventures of stock market whiz kid Mark Yagalla. It's a far bigger and grander tale than Wayne Wang's new movie Center of the World which is based on a similar premise.

Yagalla spent millions of dollars on whores including such Playboy Playmates as Tishara Lee Cousino (Playboy's Miss May 1999) and Sandy Bentley, the girlfriend of Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner.

Yagalla graduated from high school with $125,000 in the bank. He day traded his net worth well above one million dollars and started taking on investors.

Never comfortable with women, Mark began purchasing prostitutes in high school (his first at a nursery convention in Chicago). He compulsively procured high priced escorts, bringing them with him on yachts and expensive vacations. Bored renting hookers, Yagalla made the rounds of New York strip clubs with $10,000 in his pocket. He burned through the strippers and turned to the internet in 1999 where he found NicisGirls.com. Nici pioneered internet escorting.

For $5000, folks like Yagalla could join Nici's "Millionaire's Club," a harem of porn stars, Playboy Playmates and Penthouse Pets.

Nici first set him up with a pin-up girl who came to his home and flew with him to Puerto Rico. The four day adventure cost him $28,000 plus airfare.

After that positive experience, Yagalla ordered two new Nici girls a week to his home in Wilmington, paying out $10,000 to $20,000 for their services. Soon Mark began flying regularly to Los Angeles to experience such as Nici specials as porn star Jenna Jameson (for reportedly $25,000 for two days).

Jenna Jameson told Luke that she does not escort.

Yagalla would page through issues of Playboy magazine and order the girls through Nici who had access to almost all Playmates.

Nici set Yagalla up with two Playmates of the Year as well as Tishara, who cost Mark $40,000 for the introductory weekend.

Mark bonded with Nici, the new Heidi Fleiss. They were both young, had grown up ordinary and then discovered certain lucrative skills. Both in their early 20s, they enjoyed talking about Nici's clients and how screwed up Nici's girls were.

Wallace writes: "On a Thursday afternoon that summer [1999], a chestnut-haired, gypsy-eyed, silicone-bosomed young woman named Tishara Lee Cousino...reclined on a gently rocking bed and looked expectantly at Mark Yagalla, whom she'd just met. They were in the Florida Keys, aboard a 125-foot yacht Yagalla had leased for the weekend. "Do you want to do anything with me?" she asked."

Yagalla felt put off by Cousino's bluntness. He wanted a more romantic liason. He said he only wanted her when she wanted him. He wanted her to join his program - where Mark would set her up with a car, a place to live, a credit card and an allowance in exchange for being at his beck-and-call.

Yagalla bought Tishara a black Mercedes SL 500 and a house for $450,000.

In August 1999, Tishara called him on a threeway phone call with fellow Playboy model Sandy Bentley. Sandy was half of the platinum-blond Bentley twins, who were regular girlfriends of Hefner.

On their way to a Cher concert at the MGM, the three stopped at Crazy Horse Too where Sandy used to strip. Sandy said she wished Mark would be her boyfriend too. "We'll be a happy family," Tishara said.

At the strip club, Yagalla balanced on Tishara on one knee and Sandy on the other. When the club's stripper wondered what his secret was, he replied, "I'm f---ing loaded."

The next morning Mark bought Sandy a Mercedes SL 500 for $97,000 and took them to lunch at the Venetian. He told the girls he'd give them each monthly allowances of $20,000 to $25,000 each. Tishara suggested they all get HIV tests.

Mark promised Sandy a house and she found a 6,700 square foot two-story Italian villa that cost $1.7 million.

Unlike Tishara, Sandy did not push to have the house put in her name. She even said was wanted to visit him in Delaware. Just one problem - she didn't want to fly commercial.

When Dempsey arrived in Philadelphia the next weekend, Yagalla picked her up in his red Ferrari. They went back to his home in Delaware and watched Pretty Woman on DVD.

Sandy told Mark that possessions meant nothing to her. Over the next few months, Yagalla gave her a red Ferrari FI355 Spyder, a Range Rover, a black Cadillac Escalade SUV, a pair of fur coats from Bloomingdale's, two Rolexes, a platinum-and-diamond bracelet from Fred Leighton in Vegas and $190,000 worth of jewelry from Venetzia in Vegas. Each time Mark gave her a new gift, Sandy would light up and and clap her hands with joy.

They made an odd couple. Mark stood 5'3 and flabby. He didn't smoke or drink or do drugs or even dance. Sandy was almost 5'9", with hair extensions and breast implants paid for by her pre-Hefner boyfriend, slain Vegas mabster Herbert "Fat Herbie" Blitzstein.

One night at the Mandalay Hotel in Vegas, after they'd had sex, Sandy wandered outside their room. Security eventually called Mark to say there was a naked woman outside his door. Sandy had gotten lost.

Sandy, who called herself "Princess," introduced Mark to her twin Mandy who liked to call herself "Superstar." The girls used gangster slang and called each other "nig."

Yagalla and Sandy talked about marriage and having kids. To mollify Tishara, Mark bought her a new house for $850,000. They never ended up having sex.

Mark got new investors from Florida madam Rita Johnson. Sandy undertook a $1.3 million renovation of her $1.7 million house.

Yagalla and Sandy took a vacation to Cancun with Sandy's friends - future Playboy Playmate Brande Roderick and Chicago Bears quarterback Cade McNown. Mandy and Sandy had to call Hefner every day to check in.

Hefner paid Sandy and Mandy $100,000 each - $80,000 more than the going rate - for their nude layout in the May 2000 issue of Playboy. In April 2000, the twins and Hefner appeared throughout the media, from The Daily Show to Late Night With Conan O'Brien.

Wallace writes: "Flanked by the twins in matching hot-pink cowboy hats, Hefner swaggeringly maintained the facade of a relationship, gushing about the power of Viagra. (The heterosexual icon, Sandy had told Yagalla, had trouble finding satisfaction through intercourse; instead, he liked the girls to pleasure each other while he masturbated and watched gay porn.)"

Late in the year 2000, Yagalla's financial empire crashed, he was charged with fraud, and the girls left him.

Nici from Nicisgirls.com kept emailing him until April, 2001, telling him about her latest hot girls. Finally Mark told her he wanted nothing more to do with her "harem of whores."

From PageSix.com: Hefner, who insists he enjoyed four-in-a-bed romps with Sandy, her twin sister Mandy, Jessica Paisley and Brande Roderick for two years, blasted the tale as "pure fantasy." He told PAGE SIX: "The notion that Sandy and I were not having sex is ridiculous. That's either Yagalla's fantasy or her telling him something that isn't true. We had normal sexual relations for two years.

"I realize my life is unique and some people think it's a publicity stunt," said Hefner, 75. "Well, it isn't. The relationship with Sandy, Mandy, Jessica and Brande was a normal one - except it involved five people. They were my girlfriends and I was sleeping with all of them." As for his pornographic preferences, Hefner assured us, "It certainly wasn't gay porn."

Here are some excerpts from a 10/10/99 Washington Post article on Playboy publisher Hugh Hefner:

"They're not faithful and committed to their girls. It's so fake and phony, I won't have anything to do with it," says Doria Rhone, who for three years hosted--and performed on--the phone-in sex show "Nightcalls" when it was the top-rated program on cable television's Playboy Channel. She left the show in 1998, she says, because its producer wanted her to move toward more hard-core porn.

"It's unfortunate, because I had a great time working for them. They treated me like a star on a Christmas tree--bodyguards, everything. The minute I stopped working for them, they could care less if I was dead or alive."

[Carrie] Leigh says Hefner would play tapes of him with his old girlfriends on two large-screen TVs while he and Leigh made love. She told him it hurt her feelings. She said he responded that her feelings of jealousy were outdated. Eventually, Leigh says, she begged Hefner to destroy the tapes that included her. "By my last year with him, there were no other people having sex with us for a couple of years. I said, 'We might break up, I might go on and have children, and I can't have you having these tapes--someone else might get a hold of them.' "

From the 10/06/99 USA Today:

Playboy is looking to grow in cyberspace, as it has in cable TV, in part because the men's magazine market has exploded. Added to longtime rivals for male readers such as Penthouse, GQ and Esquire, has been a flood of new ones such as Men's Health, Maxim and Details. Since 1997, some 20 men's magazines have emerged, most targeting specific interests such as sports, finances, health, fashion and women. While most don't have the nudity, many feature women in sexy photographs.

"Playboy is no longer unique. Each one of these magazines has taken on a part of Playboy 's niche. It had to find a way to grow," says magazine industry analyst Samir Husni of the University of Mississippi.

Hefner wants her company to have a $1 billion market capitalization by 2003, up from its current $552 million. She sees creating a separate, public on-line company as one way to energize growth. "I believe on line will be a significant contributor to our market-cap plans."

5/22/01

Playboy Finds Its Not Easy To Be Hardcore

From Inside.com:

Playboy Enterprise's latest cable offerings may be too sexy for their own good. Cable operators are shunning Playboy's Spice Platinum, a new group of channels with graphic fare. And satellite providers are unlikely to pick up the channels, either, since they already provide racy adult content from Playboy's former subsidiaries, Hot Network and Hot Zone.

Playboy -- which once decided it would get out of the business of airing hard-core movies on cable -- announced last year that it would roll out Spice Platinum with porn movies depicting actual penetration rather than just soft-core sex scenes. Likely suppliers include such porn-industry stalwarts as VCA and Wicked Pictures, which already provide content for Playboy's video-on-demand offerings.

The move was crucial for the Chicago-based company, which has noticed that hard-core porn can generate strong revenues on pay-per-view. Revenues from adult pay-per-view movies rocketed to $465 million last year from $369 million in 1999, partly due to demand for more explicit fare, according to Kagan World Media, the media industry newsletter and data book publisher that, like Cable World and Inside.com, is a subsidiary of Media Central. Officials announced earlier this month that the channels would be delayed till the summer due to technical difficulties. But some observers wonder if the tepid response from operators may have influenced the delay.