Campsite Media.

So according to Paul, the divorce court freezes Larry Lynn's assets and now that Niagara falls of cash that Paul and Omar were living off of, it just stops flowing.

It felt like the end of the world, Like, come on, the party is over.

You know, you go to work one day and the place's yellow ribbon.

Yup as soon as the landlord heard that the rent wasn't coming.

Omar says that they courted the place off with yellow caution tape.

It was almost like a crime scene, and the fellas are desperate.

Paulie and I broke in.

We broke in and we said, what can we take cause we have no money.

We have no money and we have all these equipment here, so let's grab whatever we could take to a pawn shop or whatever we could get money from.

Goodbye grabbing asses, Hello seizing assets.

Then we took a pull.

Of Xerox machines or telex machines and went back to police house and figure out what are we gonna do?

And the roller coaster began.

We had a roller coaster of shenanigans.

Paul moves out of the Wellington Hotel, the one a gun of the butt fame and he moves in with Omar.

Listen, there were so many things we could do to get money.

I'll tell you an easy one for us was a model wants to get a test It was easy for us to walk into Dwayne Reed or to the market and steal four or five rolls of film and you charge your girl three on your box.

Yeah, we didn't talk about this before, but when models need test photos, they usually pay for them themselves.

It's one of those super.

Female friendly aspects of the modeling business.

Still on your box.

You just made our friend takes the pictures, and the girl got pictures, we got money.

Other schemes from Paul and Omar are more sophisticated, well not really.

We would go uptown up in Spanish Harlem and you could get these bags of weed called chicken bags.

These chicken bags were ten dollars uptown, but downtown there were.

Like forty dollars.

So we go up down and get a chicken bag for ten dollars, split it in four bags, and typical of the eighties people, you know, we are in the nightclub and somebody's, hey, you know that I could get some weed?

Okay, so they were dealing drugs.

I don't really know if you call that a drug deal.

I mean it is a drug deal, but it's like it's so innocent.

You know, so not a drug deal.

I wouldn't call that a drug deal.

I just call it like a hustle.

And now, with the Land Agency officially dead and Pollen home dead broke, the Hustle is on.

From iHeart Podcasts and Campside Media, I'm Vanessa Grigoriantis and this is Model Wars episode four.

So last time we talked about how Paul had wanted desperately to get away from Larry Land.

In his mind, Larry was holding him back.

He was sandbagging his rise to the top of the modeling industry.

But now that Larry's gone, reality comes crashing in.

Hard, literally in twenty four hours.

It's gone.

No access to the bank account, cars are gone, bodyguards are shipped back to Texas, and I don't have a penny to my name.

Paul's first instinct is to try to find a job at another agency.

He can start all over as an agent for Aileen Ford or for his hero John Casablancas at Elite.

It wasn't that they turned me down.

They laughed at me.

I mean literally laughed at me.

Paul says he didn't exactly have the best reputation at these places, what with working for the alleged mobster, poaching their agents, and doing drugs.

I had no opportunity for employment in this space that I loved.

I love the art of creating models now.

And drugs and models were linked in Paul's mind in more ways than one.

You know why people get addicted to heroin because it's that first hit.

You've never felt anything like it.

I don't care what anyone says.

It's the greatest feeling you could ever possibly imagine.

Ten times of freaking orgasm.

You've never felt anything like it in your life before, I swear to you, except sixty seconds later, you've got nails going through your fucking body, and if you don't do another hit, the nails won't go away.

Paul's analogy here is the rush that he got from creating his first star model, Tina Mason.

That was the girl he discovered and booked into a shoot with Mademoiselle.

Creating your first little star.

That was my first hit, creating a star model.

It's just so alluring.

Now, of course, the models themselves.

Do a lot of work.

They're not only themselves, of course, possessed of the body and the mind that makes a model a star.

But as Omar said, with a lot of agents, the girls themselves pay for things like test shoots.

So Paul is desperate to get back into the modeling business.

But in the meantime he just needs to eat.

I used to own the supermarkets and take steaks and throw them down my pants and just to get out of there, just just to have food, just to have food to eat.

So it was very, very difficult time for us.

No money, you know, nobody would hire us.

No longer on a mission to conquer the modeling and Paul and Omar are just on a mission to survive.

But as hustlers they're pretty low run.

Luckily, they have a secret weapon.

That's their friend, Billy Digiglio.

Other than my son, I don't think there's a man in the world who loves me the way Billy Digilio loves me.

He's straight, by the way, Uh, there's no one like Billy d I Billy Dejilio was the most fearless human I ever made in my life.

So Billy's actually a small time model himself.

He's got those cheekbones, he's got the tanned, sinewy body.

He can put on the poudy face that says you know you want me.

Modeling is how he became friends with Paul and Omar in the first place.

But now the legend of Billy Digiglio hustling superhero truly begins.

Billy was one of those people who just never believed in being broke, Like money was always something that Billy could get his hands on, no matter regardless of what.

He would cut a bread, any bread now, I'll be right back and it'll come.

Back with three four or five hundred thousand, and Billy was fearless.

I remember what time we were walking off Madison Avenue Billion.

I think we were on our way to see the Trugo who used to date Houston.

And we're walking on Madison Avenue and Billy goes, oh, keep walking, and the what are you doing?

He said, just keep walking, I catch up.

Fifteen seconds went by.

And I hear it, police, police, and Billy runs right past me with a big warhole painting.

He just went to the gallery.

It was on the window, took it and took off.

We tried to ask Billy if this story was true.

It seems almost impossible.

It's true since the lost Warhol painting, even in the nineteen eighties, it was worth a lot of money, but he.

Didn't let us know on that.

Still, he was now Omar and Paul's best shot at staying solvent, so they really had to stick by him.

So Omar and Paul are shit out of luck, and their best chance to make money is Billy Dijiglio.

He's the world's bravest man.

He's a magician who can make money appear out of thin air.

But those kinds of skills tend to be forged in some dark places.

In Billy's case, he was kicked out of his mother's home at a young age.

Back then, he actually went to the same high school as Paul in the San Fernando Valley.

I didn't know Paul in high school or junior high school.

He was a popular guy.

Him and his brother were the athletes.

I I didn't really know him.

I didn't know him at all.

His girlfriend was friends with my sister.

But after Billy's mom kicked him out, he went to live with his father in New York, where his dad ran a business installing fire sprinkler systems, so that means his dad would sometimes find himself in places that the average blue collar guy might not be able to access.

This intrigued Billy.

I asked my father once, I said, do you think we could go to a studio before for my birthday?

And he says, Bill, you will never see the inside of that club.

But then one day Billy was hanging out with a girl.

She said, we're going to go to studio tonights' the studio, yeah, fifty four.

I said, oh cool.

Well, around midnight, we get in a taxi cab.

We get out of the car, we come out on fifty fourth Street, and I like said, oh, whoa, the whole street was completely packed.

Well this girl she pulls.

Me through and then looks a tall bounce sister, or how you doing tonight?

He says, good, good, thank you, And I'm still facing like the wall, you know, not even the street.

Ifellas turned around and be looking at all these people, right and all of a sudden she stops like three steps in and I hear let me say, aren't you going to introduce me to your friend?

And I turn around, Jamie saying of course, Stevie.

This is Billy.

Stevie is Steve Rubel, the founder of Studio fifty four.

He's a New York kingmaker.

Who decides who's in and who's out at that velvet rope at the most coveted club in the world.

This guy grabs my hand and she says, is there's anything you need, just let me know.

And this girl says, you can start by giving them a job.

And he says, okay, you want to work here.

I said, yeah, me's it's spontaneous.

And he says, okay me and here tomorrow at twelve noon at the fifty third Street entrance.

You start tomorrow night.

Billy becomes a bus boy.

He's sort of like Omar having his coming of age here at studio.

As people called.

It, I was a bus boy.

I wore shorts and tennis shoes and that's it.

The bartenders were tank tops, I think maybe a bow tie around their neck.

The waiters wore tank tops, and we wore nothing like I've got jim shorts and like from a high school gym class, you know, just loose, baggy, you know, shorts.

You know, nobody said a word to me.

You know, it's like it was okay because that.

Was so beautiful and this kind of work inevitably turns into something else.

Being at Suited fifty four every night, so I worked.

I worked.

If I didn't, that was still there because it was a fun place.

And I was getting picked up at studio by these people, you know, very well off.

You know, whatever you want, how much do you want?

You know, I'll give you whatever you want to be Just come home with me tonight, I come home with us, you know that kind of thing.

But it was very It was irresistible for me at the time.

You know, the fast money and more money than I needed for anything.

Not many people in Billy's life have stepped up for him, but when Paul and Omar fall in hard times, Billy wants to be there for them.

Yeah, they were struggling.

You know, that's kind of sad think about their struggling.

And I don't like to see people struggle anyway.

So Billy earned money for himself and his friends the fastest way he knew.

How I knew I could get money by streaking.

I could go to fifty third Street between second and third.

That's like the run the street where the bars that you go in to get picked up, or if you're walking in the street, you would walk fifty third Street from third to second thing and go left and go to fifty fourth Street and come back around.

You know, you do that lap.

They get picked up, you know, and then you have to go through whatever you were going to do.

And it was usually not much.

You know, it's like I just want to suck your dick, you know, like, okay, it's just much.

One hundred dollars or one hundred and fifty or fifty dollars or whatever, depending and that was it, you know, After wherever, it was to their place or whatever.

And after this it was back to Omar and Paul's apartment get.

The money, and then go back to Palls or Omars and give them the money that they needed, or stay out and get more money.

This friendship was deeply complicated.

I always shared my money, and that's that's a problem, you know, because I've shared too much over the years.

But they all helped each other back then by sharing cash sharing moments.

I love these guys, I mean I still do, like crazy.

We used to listen to Shah Day a lot and they would sign.

He would say, is.

It a crime and I still love you?

Is it crumb?

And then he would say, Billy Digilio, I can't believe that's you're in the aim inciving me insa aim.

Billy Digilios own.

The aime, you know, Omar, you know, yeah, it was something.

All this time, Billy's working on the fringes of the modeling industry.

He's probably best described as an aspiring model.

But eventually Omar and Paul help him book some sizeable gigs.

You know, I got a couple jobs, like a big guest campaign that would say, okay, we need a guest genes, we need fifteen models for this thing.

So fourteen of us were back around, you know, and one guy was the main guy.

It sort of sounds to me like Billy may have made more turning tricks than he ever did as a model.

And stories like his are among the dirty secrets of the modeling industry.

For some desperate for money, it can be a sudden slide from selling your body to be photographed in clothes to actually selling your body.

And Paul knows this dirty secret, and certain people looking for certain things know that Paul might.

Be able to get them what they want.

I mean Larry Lynd funded an entire modeling agency just so Paul could help him sleep with women.

But there's also a more direct path to Paul's girls.

One day, Paul's in his apartment when he gets a phone call from a guy he's met before.

It's a movie producer named Robert Evans.

Evans thought the agency was still open.

He had no clue, and I wasn't about to tell him that the agency was closed down.

To call Bob Evans a movie producer is sort of like calling Studio fifty four a dance club.

Evans was one, if not the most significant producer in all of Hollywood.

He was the guy behind The Godfather, Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby.

The list just goes on and on.

So the two of them are on the phone.

And Evans said, Hey, Paul, a kid, turn on the TV set.

And I said okay, And I turned on the TV said he said, you see that guy over.

There on the TV.

Paul sees the players in the biggest news story of the time, the Iran Contra scandal, when members of the Reagan administration secretly trafficked weapons to Iran even though it was under an arms embargo.

What has been going on here is an attempt to establish whether or not laws established by Congress were violated, most notably, among other things, the Arms Export Control Act.

The TV has pictures up of Senator Oliver North, and then there's also a non Koshogi.

He's a mustachioed arms dealer and a supervillain.

Adnan Kashogi.

A lifestyle of heroic excess is matched only by the zeal of the global press to explain this mysterious mogul, whose name and face appear in headlines across the world, scene with barad Orliza or Frank Sinatra, and pictured in the tabloids with Jackie O and John College.

Now, Kashogi was known to be one of the world's biggest spenders.

He traveled with a massuse and a chiropractor.

He had a super yacht in the nineteen eighties when few other rich guys had them.

Time magazine once wrote that Koushogi's unrivaled profligacy guilds his self image as a grand merchant statesman.

In other words, it sort of covered up the whole illegal weapons part.

Additionally, Kashogi was described in nineteen eighty nine's Vanity Fair magazine as one of the greatest hormongers in the world.

See the guy in the right add on Kosho.

He says, you want to make five grand?

I said five grand.

I'll do anything for five grand.

Anything for five grand.

He says, Okay, here's what you gotta do.

You got to bring three of your models over to Kashogi.

He's going to pay you five grand.

I said, I'm in.

He says, here's a phone number, calls assistant, make a time.

I've told them all about you, and all you got to do is introduce him to three of your girls.

He's going to have sex with the three girls and and that's as simple as that.

He's going to pay you five grand.

I'm like, shit, I'm in.

Okay, gross, but Paul's quote unquote girls are models, they're not sex workers.

I do remember the day he left to meet this guy.

We were all in the apartment.

We were like four of us in the Impulse apartment.

And these are the days that you couldn't evict people.

You couldn't evict people if they're inside their house.

I don't know if that still happens in the back in those days.

To evict someone, they got to be out of the apartment, and Paulie said, yeah, I'm gonna go meet this guy.

And he has a portfolio with like two hundred girls.

Paul's at the door.

He says, to meet Kashoggi at his suite at the Helmsley Palace hotel.

Now it's pissing rain and I think the Helmsey Palace is like on the fortieth or fiftieth Street something like that.

I'm walking in the freaking rain.

There's a book of my models underneath my arm.

I get to the Helmsey Palace and there's these two people, Kevin and this woman who's like some important producer woman.

They come out, they greet me and they say, how are you doing.

Nice to meet you.

They start looking through my book of girls and they say, we'll take these three.

And I said, yeah, I got to meet the man.

And they said, oh no, he doesn't meet anybody.

I said, I got to meet the man and they said, oh, oh no, he doesn't meet anybody.

I said, Robert Evans introduced us.

I got to meet the man because in the back of my mind, I'm thinking I'm about to meet one of the richest guys on the planet.

Maybe he'll finance an agency for me.

I mean, if you lose your alleged mobster funding, why not upgrade to a legal arms.

Dealer sales technique one oh one, turn your back on the order.

So they say, okay, wait, wait, wait, wait a second.

They go into another room.

They come back.

They said, okay, mister k is going to meet you.

Mister Koshogi comes out.

He's this little Persian dude.

We're in a white calf can.

He looks at my book of models and he picks out three models, totally different models than his assistants picked out.

We're fucking rich.

This is amazing.

Back at the apartment, Omar and the guys are hanging out keeping their anti eviction vigil.

So here we are sitting at the apartment broke as hell, and Paulie shows up like here was the old trick again, knock on the door and start throwing hundreds under the door.

We're like, oh, we're rich.

One hundred dollars bills are just floating into the apartment.

But now what.

Okay, well, now we had to find girls for these guys.

Paul never had any intention of introducing Kush to actual models.

I have no contact information on these models.

That are inside this book.

Nor would I ever introduce this arms dealer to these girls, even if I did have the contact information.

But facilitating some current sex workers into meeting Koshogi, that's a different story.

I picked up this porn magazine at the time called Screw Magazine, and I interviewed twenty to thirty girls that looked like those girls that he picked out.

So I didn't like him.

I give him thirty forty bucks for their taxi cab money, saying no, sorry, not interested, thank you very much, go home.

But the three that looked like him, I said, hey, listen, I got to tell you something.

How would you like to meet one of the richest cats in the you know, on the planet, and he'll pay you thousands of dollars?

You got to go sleep with them?

They were into it.

So what did I do.

I took those three girls.

I walked across the street to the gap.

I bought them all kinds of clothes that made them look like models, with black leggings, t shirts, et cetera, et cetera.

So they'd walk in with very little makeup, very little hair, looking like freaking models.

And then I sent them over to mister Shogi.

According to Paul, Kashoki was just fine with this arrangement.

He didn't even care.

He never questioned it, and he paid the money.

The funny part is that the money that he paid us, Yeah, we are broke as hell.

We haven't that money in a minute, and you get that money and we blew it in like forty eight hours.

Forty eight hours that money was gone.

Then we went to like Atlantic Citio, got a big hotel, limousines and we lived.

Up the lighte for like forty eight hours and get back to the city broke.

You know, the Kashogi experience was pretty intense, pretty pretty intense.

A week later, Paul claims, movie producer Bob Evans called him to.

Check in and he said, kid, there's some guys in Brazil that need your skill set.

I'm like, okay, what's my skill set?

You're really good with girls.

I said, okay.

They're opening up like a club meb for singles.

You want to go make twenty five K.

I'm like, Bobby, I'm straight, I'll blow you for twenty five K.

And I'm straight.

Brother.

I said, yeah, of course I'll go, but I'm only on one condition.

I want my partner Omar to come with me.

He speaks Portuguese.

I want to bring home me with me.

So these guys hired us to go to Brazil, meet girls, talk to these girls about being escorts for these guys.

These guys get to pick a girl every night.

Now, these are the days that a street walker in Brazil was probably getting like forty dollars.

So when you tell a girl in Brazil, hey, you could get three hundred and fifty bucks one person.

That's it.

Don't have to go out and be with twenty men in one day or ten men in one day.

So Paulie would would He got the eye and I speak Portuguese, so I'm like, all right.

Let's do this.

This is kind of cool.

Let's go to Brazil.

So I told my brother about it, and my brother is like, hell no, you're not going.

So these guys already gave us like an advance at twenty five grand and I'm like, yeah.

It's all this good, all is good.

But I didn't I never told Paulie that I didn't have my passport.

My brother had my passport, and my brothers you know, I'm trying to get my brother give me my.

Passport and he and I are going at it.

We're going, we're going, We're going.

And the day we're leaving, I still don't have my passport.

So they come to pick us up.

I'm in my apartment downtown.

Pauli is uptown.

They go in the limo to pick him up, and then they come down to my apartment to.

Pick me up, and they're downstairs honking.

I don't open the door, I don't pick up the phone, nothing.

I just miss in action.

So Paulie goes, he has to go.

I mean, he's with these real the real deal.

You know, these guys could just put him out and throw him in the East River.

I'm like, oh my god, I just said no to the mafia.

And Paulie left.

I go to the airport.

I get on the plane.

I end up at the Copacabana in Brazil, in Rio, and they I get the phone.

Phone call comes in.

They say, hey, the guys want to meet you.

Come on down to their suite.

So I said, that's fantastic.

Let me go meet these guys.

So they open up the door.

I walk in to a freaking like a military operation.

I'm looking at uzzies and guns and shotguns and the biggest, baddest, freaking tattooed Brazilian animals.

Animals.

I'm like, hey, guys, how are we doing here?

Oh yeah, we're just we're the security.

We're here to protect everybody to you know.

And the one of the head guy comes out.

I'm like in a freaking movie.

I just say, Hey, this is such a pleasure to meet you.

It's great to meet you guys.

You guys are great, fantastic.

You know.

I'm gonna go back to my room and crash.

I flew for a bunch of hours.

Let me go, I pack up my shit.

I go straight to the airport.

I get there at like one o'clock in the morning, twelve o'clock at night whenever.

The next flight leaves at seven in the morning back to New York City.

I am now, I'm like, I'm scared out of my freaking mind.

I just left.

I didn't talk to anybody and to tell anybody I'm leaving.

I looked at those cats and it was like, WHOA, I cannot be involved in this freaking world.

And I sat there in those six hours at the airport, waiting for that freaking flight, and I'm looking behind me.

Every ten seconds I get back to New York, Evans calls me, says, what hap happened?

They went everywhere looking for you, And I just said, Bobby, I can't play this game anymore.

I'm done.

Brother.

You could yeah, I'm done.

I'm finished.

Yeah.

A real low point.

And Paul's mom, Monica, she's really worried about him.

I could tell things weren't good.

And I talked to him, I want you to come home.

I want you to come home.

I don't have the money to come home.

He was stuck there and not doing well, no money and to be stuck in New York.

And I said to him, I'll send you a ticket.

Because I was always giving him money at the time.

I was always sending him one hundred dollars here, two hundred dollars there.

You know, you could eat for a few days in New York and two hundred dollars.

We want wealthy people, but I would without telling my husband, I would send him money.

So Monica is having to keep these payments that she's sending to Paul a secret from Paul's father.

But then one night something happens.

My husband was a liquor salesman and he used to sell.

He went for Big liqu tributor, and he had some beautiful you know, anytime a nice restaurant opened or a nice bar or something, you know, he'd have to go down there and you know, have dinner or have a drink or whatever with a client.

But there was this restaurant that he had that everybody and Ellie was talking about at the time.

It was his account, and they invited him to come down with your wife and have dinner.

And we were going out that night to go down there and have dinner.

And then just before we were leaving, I get a phone call and it was Paul and he said, Mom.

He said, I need you to send me money.

I'm flat broke and I'm hungry.

And I took a deep breath that I said, I'm not sending you any more money.

He said, one hundred dollars.

At least it'll give me food for a few days.

I said, I'm not sending one hundred dollars.

I'm not sending you fifty dollars.

And then he went down to twenty five and I said, I'm not sending you a dime.

I'll send you a ticket to come home, but I'm not sending a dime, and that was probably the hardest thing with him that I had ever done.

And I hung up.

And then we go to this dinner and we have this fancy dinner that I had no appetite for.

I picked at this and I picked it that I couldn't tell my husband.

But when we left, we walked down and we were popped.

We had to go through an alleyway in downtown LA that was starting to get a lot of homeless at the time, and there was a man drinking water from a hose, a homeless man, and he looked at me as I walked by, and I thought, oh my god, that could be my son.

That could be my son.

I was sick to my stomach.

But I did not send him money.

But the next day I sent him a ticket to come home.

He called me and said, send me a ticket.

I need to come home.

That was it.

But of course that wasn't it not for Paul.

The other agents in the office basically took one look at him and said, look, if you hire this maniac, we.

Out of here.

I'm going to have my friend shave your head.

You're going to take off all that makeup.

I'm gonna make you look like a little boy.

My head was trippin', you know, like who am I like?

And they told me I was only as good as my next job cover campaign, So I'm like, am I worth anything?

That's all next?

On Model Wars.

Model Wars was a production of iHeart Podcasts and Campside Media.

Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Model Wars was executive produced and hosted by Vanessa Gregoriotis.

Our senior writer was Michael kanyon Meyer.

Julia K.

S Levine was our producer and reporter.

Our senior producer was Lily Houston Smith, and our assistant editor was Emma Simonoff.

We had story and production help from Shoshi Schmulowitz, Ali.

Haney, and Blake Rook.

Our production manager was Ashley Warren and our studio recordist was Ewan Lei Tremuen.

Sound design, mix and engineering by Mark McCadam.

iHeart Podcasts executive producers were Jennifer Bassett and Katrina Norbel.

The show was also executive produced by Rachel win her In.

Campside Media is Josh Deen, Adam Hoff and Matt Share.

If you'd like to access behind the scenes content from Model Wars and Campside Media.

Please go to join campside dot com.

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Thanks so much for listening.