The Mayor of Madison Avenue | 9

This story takes place in New York, the city I call home.

And it's about the Manhattan nightclub world in the 2000s when the scene really went to a new level, with nightlife spilling out from the clubs to the streets.

You had Wall Street bankers and party promoters alike wanting to be seen, having their pictures taken, and trying desperately to land on page six.

Just a giant stew of paparazzi and bottle service and imported cars.

All that to say, it's kind of hard for me to tell who the bad guy is in this story.

I'm told you'll be able to clearly identify him because he sort of ruined the whole thing for everyone, killed that whole scene dead.

I doubt it, but let's give him a medal for trying.

I'm Steve Bassemi, and you're listening to Big Time, an Apple original podcast from Peace of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Production.

Rajiv Gola is back to tell us the story.

It's the late 2000s in New York City, and the only people who think the economy might tank are wearing tinfoil hats.

There's more money than ever and Manhattan is the center of the universe.

The uber wealthy are living bigger than ever before, and an elite group of young, fashionable trendsetters among this already exclusive club emerge as the face of this new era.

People were flaunting their money and this group kind of seemed like they were a rarefied little circle in New York.

It was really the same 20 to 30 characters going out every single night.

Peter Davis was a journalist who covered the city's nightlife and was a staple of the scene.

People just talked about really what they were wearing and what parties they were going to, where they were off to next.

And there were a lot of parties.

Brands were spending a lot of money, fashion brands, whether it was a store party or a benefit or a big blowout being thrown by a designer every night.

There were five to eight things to go to.

And these women would go from party to party to party.

Sometimes they would just stop by, get their picture taken, jump in a car, and on to the next.

And the media, myself included, ate it up and wrote about it.

This was the new era, where what happened in the club no longer stayed in the club.

You went out to be seen.

And in New York, you could become a celebrity just by being seen.

A lot of picture-taking, Patrick McMullen.

You know, there was the saying, if Patrick didn't take your picture, it's like you weren't even there.

One of the people on the scene at the time was Mr.

Andrew Parker.

He was a flashy 40-something, always cloaked in fur coats and sunglasses, no matter the season or the time of day.

He seemed to be at every party, and depending on who you asked, he was the owner of an up-and-coming fashion boutique, a nightclub promoter, or simply an entrepreneur.

But the way his clothes hung on his shoulders, the way his voice was just a bit too affective, and the way his charms seemed just a touch too put on, well, it was all a dead giveaway.

He seemed like someone that was desperate to be a name and would do anything to be that name, and the way he spoke, as if he was you know a rockefeller

when he was um nothing fell on

i think he was trying to rise through the ranks by latchy onto the coattails he definitely jumped in photographs to get his picture taken a lot of times you can get your picture taken with someone you don't even know and i think he was pretty savvy who to stand next to and try to get into a picture shamelessly there was a trick where people would close their eyes if they were being photographed with someone they didn't want to be photographed with because Patrick McMullen wouldn't put any pictures on his website of someone's eyes were closed.

And I think that he definitely had people closing their eyes when he jumped into a picture.

As a man on the fringes of the socialite world, banging his fists on the glass to get in, Andrew was willing to do anything to see his name in page six.

Anything.

Even breaking the one rule of high rollers:

don't steal from your friends.

Later on, I figured he really was a hustler, and somehow he hustled them, and he hustled me and hustled everybody else.

This was a big scandal.

It was a big conspiracy.

Players on every level.

Andrew was a prick.

He was a criminal.

And he'll always be one.

But long before Andrew was a high roller and elite grifter, he was a middle schooler.

And back then, in the early 1980s, he still went by his birth name, Andrew Pollack.

I know Andrew 11 years old, we went to the Timothy Dwight schools.

That's Jason Ressler, one of Andrew's few friends that we were able to track down.

The inside joke in the New York private school world was that Dwight stood for dumb white idiots getting high together.

It's definitely stood for that, and it was definitely quite accurate.

It was a school for like that screw-up level or that not intellectual level or that kind of reject level.

It was sort of like just a step down from the Horace Manns and all the kind of very elite private schools.

And if you sort of couldn't get into there or got kicked out of there, you went to Dwight.

Andrew's high school was full of rich kids.

It was the perfect place to see up close how people of that social class dressed, how they spoke, and how they carried themselves.

And more than anything, how these kids acted out and got away with it.

These were the children of some of the most powerful people in the city.

People who screwed over everyone else in New York, made a killing, and never got in trouble for it.

Instead, they got their names on parks and buildings.

But Andrew wasn't in that social class.

According to Jason, even though Andrew's father was a Wall Street banker, things never really seemed very stable at home, financially or otherwise.

Andrew was quite aspirational, let's say.

I would say he's in that middle-class part that got rich for a time and then lost it, this like up and down, kind of gambler, his father, even the Wall Street version of gambler's personality.

I definitely think that made an impact on his mind.

That stayed middle class path never really appealed to to Andrew in any case, and he sought out other role models.

We had a dress code where we had to wear a tie and jacket to school, and Andrew, he wore a three-piece suit to school.

He was reading Scarbase, the book, like at age, you know, 12 or whatever the hell it came out of.

This was the 1980s, and New York's nightlife was pulsing like never before.

generating and exporting trends that would infect the entire country.

Clubs like Danseteria and Aria became household names, and every sort of debauched indulgence you could imagine was on display.

If you were a teenager looking to make your mark in the city, looking to be somebody, there was nowhere else in the world you'd rather be.

And that's exactly where Andrew wanted to make his mark.

The first place he ever took me was Palladium.

That was the most sort of important club.

There are few clubs as legendary and institutional as Palladium.

From a gigantic, imposing mural on the facade, to the spaceship lighting on the walkway leading to the dance floor, the bass pumping through your body almost lifting you off the ground, it was impossible not to be swept up in the moment and feel like you were on top of the world.

This is where the who's who of New York's party life congregated, and Andrew was right there with them.

And he was already big in the scene.

He'd already been to Aria.

He'd already been to danceteria.

He had known everybody, every place.

Andrew knew everybody by that point.

In this crowd, it didn't matter how much cash you flash or who your parents were.

The only question was whether you were deemed cool enough to step inside.

In some ways, it was less about fitting in as much as it was about standing out.

This was the sort of equalizer Andrew needed.

And boy, did he step up.

He wore his hair like a member of Motley Crew, and his jeans looked like they'd gone through a mulching machine.

For what might have been the first time in his life, Andrew found his crowd.

And we were all VIP at 15, 16.

We all knew each other, and it wasn't just us.

It was big stars.

I mean, it wasn't like today people weren't worried about their phones.

So it was a really like anything goes, anything decadent.

You know, people could do cocaine on a table.

Everywhere else, Andrew was used to waiting his turn in line.

Behind all the kids who got picked up from school in chauffeured cars or the kids who didn't think twice about putting it on daddy's card.

But this was Andrew's world.

If he was with three people or four people, he got picked and the other three didn't.

He'd go inside a club, right?

I mean, that was his thing.

And I said to him when he started taking me out, and I'm like, don't ever pull that shit.

I mean, he never did.

Andrew had always had an entrepreneurial drive to him, too.

So he decided he'd try to get into the club business himself, which was a short-lived experiment.

Andrew and I opened an illegal after-hour roof club at 17 years old, and everybody came to it.

We were terrible businessmen.

We opened a club called Pacha.

It was so crazy because we actually had super fancy stationery because his mom did stationery.

So he had the nicest imitation in New York.

And then I remember getting into a fight with my father.

He's a criminal lawyer.

And he's realizing I'm running an illegal nightclub at 17.

What the fuck?

Andrew's born to be corrupt, but it was New York.

In the years that followed, Jason and Andrew would slowly drift their own directions.

Jason would go off to college and eventually leave the city to chase his creative ambitions.

Most of the kids they went to high school with left for prestigious universities.

By and large, they left the party life behind.

and Andrew along with it.

When you go to like a rich school, you just think everything's sort of normal and you have all this thing, you're sort of very free and you now suddenly you see the social differences.

It was a constant reminder that he wasn't one of them.

But Andrew was determined to do whatever it took to secure his place among that crowd.

He had to build himself up from nothing.

He started selling ties on the street, going to street fairs.

Andrew was just getting his feet wet.

He had a hustler spirit and an ambition to join the upper ranks of the New York elite.

It didn't matter where he started because he knew where he'd end up.

He built himself up from the streets to multiple street vendors, and he was a good hustler.

He was always a good hustler.

My name is Steve Lewis, and I'm a nerd, born and raised in nerdy Jackson Heist, Queens.

To be clear, Steve Lewis is not a nerd, and he's covered from the neck down with tattoos.

I have no clue what he meant by being a nerd, and he never really explained it either.

But what you do need to know about Steve is that he was a prominent club designer and manager for decades.

If you want to get a sense of what partying in the city was like back in the day, there's really no one better to ask.

I've done about 40, 50 places, including Goodroom, which is the top popular club in Brooklyn.

I did Marquis.

I did Red Zone.

I did

Webster Hall.

In any case, it was through Steve's line of work as a man about town that he ran into one Mr.

Andrew Parker.

He was at least dressed right, soft-smoking, and he hung out with a lot of girls.

So what more could a a guy want?

I wanted it in my club.

Andrew had traded in his torn-up jeans for pinstriped suits.

He was no longer a bummy teenager without a college degree, who was just living at home with his mom.

He was a fashion retailer, and he reinvented his style to look the part.

You had the haircut, the long hair, which a little bit unneat, but neat.

He wore suits or ties, and he spoke very softly and correctly, and fairly intelligently.

Andrew made a good impression on Steve, which is saying something, because Steve generally didn't go for the preppy types.

It was incredible how far Andrew had come from his ratty high school days.

For someone who didn't come from fabulous wealth or pedigree, it was a real achievement to run with a crowd that he did.

Andrew finally had more than a foot in the door with the socialite elite.

Steve remembers Andrew hanging out with people like Zoe Krabitz or Noel Ashman, a prominent movie producer, or Jocelyn Wall, the daughter of a real estate mogul, and Eric Brahms, whose father Maurice had been in the nightclub business.

Most honest man I've ever met in the business.

Didn't Maurice go to jail for tax evasion?

Yes, he did.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

There has always been honor among thieves and scoundrels.

It was an unwritten rule of the higher echelons of society.

An echelon that it seemed Andrew was well on his way to joining.

By 2006, his little tie in Pockets Square street stand had become a brick-and-mortar store on one of the most desirable zip codes in the city.

Jason Ressler, Andrew's childhood friend again.

Eventually had this quite prominent store on Madison Avenue, where he was catering to Who Hoo and De Niro and all the big stars like Doc Severanson and just Johnny Carson's major, like big people coming to that store.

It was around this time that Andrew allegedly changed his name from Pollock to Parker, and it's what he decided to name his boutique, A.S.

Parker.

He sold high-end designer labels, he threw swanky parties and invited all the socialites of the moment to come be photographed in his store.

He began calling himself the mayor of Madison Avenue.

It seemed that Andrew had finally gained admittance to the Cool Kids Club.

But there was that dark streak, that old obsession with crime as a lifestyle, that Andrew never quite shook.

He never got past the point of being kind of a street salesman because maybe he was like that his whole life.

And that's when the problems started happening.

It's a New York social scene.

There are always like these talented Mr.

Ripley types, people that change their names and people who said they were from somewhere and they weren't from that place.

And New York is ripe for that type of character to kind of flourish in a way until they get found out.

You heard Peter Davis at the top of this episode.

Back in the 2000s, he was a veteran journalist who reported from the trenches of the New York social scene.

And that's how he got a tip about a colorful character named Andrew Parker.

He'd seen Andrew around town, at parties and events, but never really took him seriously.

Because Peter was a born and bred New York socialite, and he could tell what block in the Upper West Side you were from just by the way you wore a scarf.

And to him, Andrew never looked quite right.

He might have had everyone else fooled, but Peter wasn't convinced.

He didn't really look the part, though.

He tried to kid himself out and designer duds, but you know, he wears sunglasses at night and weird fur collars and coats.

And so he was trying to project the image of being a part of the scene, but he kind of stood out because he was trying so hard.

But it never seemed natural.

It always seemed put on or fake.

So when he got wind of some less than kosher business practices at Andrew's store, he decided to take a closer look and eventually wrote an article for the Daily Beast full of Andrew's alleged misdeeds.

Well, I first found out about what was going on by someone who worked in the store.

She'd worked there for a week and told me that he was getting these cheap sweaters that I guess he was paying $60 a pop for and selling them for $1,000 as cashmere.

And I thought that was kind of interesting.

And then someone else told me that he was double and triple charging people, but they didn't have a cash register at the store.

So if you bought something, he would run your card through two or three times.

And from there, kind of ballooned.

I think he just relentlessly networked and told people I had a store and people wanted to sell their clothes and get their name out there, but then he wouldn't pay people.

To Peter, it was a case study in everything that was a little seedy and skeiny about the fashion boutique industry.

The whole designer boutique market was a totally fabricated economy where you paid for a name instead of a product.

But there was something particularly interesting and unscrupulous about Andrew that set him apart from others in the industry.

Andrew was very clearly playing by his own rules.

Those vendors, those designers.

So I think it was kind of a day-to-day, hand-to-mouth existence.

But retail's a hard racket, but I think that he didn't care for him.

It was just a way to have his name on Madison Avenue.

And it was, I think, a vehicle for him to propel his own name.

He's one of those people people that wanted to be famous by any means necessary.

Andrew's store took off despite the rumors of fraud that were beginning to brew.

And now that he was in, he turned the dial up to 10.

He started frequenting parties at the home of Ivan Wilzig, a millionaire banker musician who makes some of the most dog shit electronic songs I've ever heard.

No offense.

His medieval castle-themed home was known as the Playboy Mansion of the Hamptons and hosted some of the most legendary parties of the era.

Andrew also started dating a retired porn star and he tried his hand in that business too.

I guess the whole porn star, you know, he tried to produce or he produced a movie called Trust Fund Sluts, which is actually maybe the most amusing thing he did because it was kind of like riffing and making fun of the world that he was trying to be so much a part of, the Trust Fund Talks of New York, and he wasn't one.

And if anything, that's probably the smartest thing he ever did, even though the movie never came through.

But it was in these later years, the tail end of the glory days edging up to the 2008 economic meltdown, that Andrew's fortunes began to turn as well.

His bad behavior was finally catching up to him.

A fur company that Andrew had fleeced for 20 grand had come calling, and a cascade of phony credit cards and unpaid bills followed suit.

Eventually, he was arrested and pled guilty to identity theft, beginning a string of arrests that would define the next few years of his life.

If you look at his arrest record, it was like six months probation and then, you know, a couple months in jail.

And he kept going back to jail for the same crimes in the same way.

And that's its own kind of sickness.

It's not like he went back to the streets drug dealing in this game or something and figured out a new way and avoided the cops.

No, it's like he wanted to get caught.

Maybe Andrew lived by the old P.R.

canard that any press is good press, that being infamous was just as good as being famous.

Almost immediately after those initial arrests, Peter Davis reported that Andrew hit the clubs.

He quoted a friend of Andrew's who said, Andrew thinks he's a celebrity now.

He's enjoying all of this.

They think he denied the reality of the situation, and he thought that if you looked a certain way and dressed a certain way and maybe spoke a certain way and were photographed with the right people, then everything was okay.

But in reality, a photograph means nothing.

A photograph on a Patrick McCollins website's not going to get you out of jail.

For Andrew, small stints in jail or probation orders couldn't slow him down.

He was just getting started.

He was hell-bent on making his mark and getting his name in the papers.

Those small scams and schemes weren't the big ticket.

Andrew was going to aim higher.

His next scheme was the most complex, high-stakes operation he'd ever had a hand

It was hard to watch, and I was probably the only one who had a hard time watching.

I thought he was above the law in his mind.

Club promoter Steve Lewis again.

When he got busted, I wasn't surprised.

Andrew had started hanging around a guy named Louis Dummy and Jakas, or DJ, as he was known better.

DJ was another guy on the fringe of the socialite scene, and Steve never liked the way he smelled.

I knew him, but I didn't know him.

I mean, he never talked to me.

I would never let him into clubs.

I mean, he's not my style.

DJ, he's a thug.

He's got no class.

According to statements from the cops, DJ was also a master at organizing and operating a vast criminal enterprise.

And he was pretty talented at replicating fake credit cards, some of the best the agents had ever seen.

DJ had been engineering a massive credit card skimming operation that was aimed at some of New York's biggest spenders.

And it was a good scheme.

The whole operation relied on waiters and bartenders that DJ had recruited at high-end steakhouses across the city.

He gave those waiters handheld card skimmers and told them to be on the lookout for high rollers with premium cards, people who wouldn't notice if a few hundred or thousand dollars were missing.

With that information, DJ would emboss blank credit cards with the information and create perfect replicas and hand those out to his shoppers.

Those shoppers would go to high-end retail stores and buy Rolexes, Birkenbags, and fine wines.

The shoppers would hand those goods to their managers, and the managers would pass them off to fences, who would resell them for cash.

On different occasions, Andrew had served both as shopper and manager in the scheme.

The operation may have been large, but the scam was simple.

Almost too simple.

Nevertheless, they managed to get away with it for more than a year.

And maybe it's because the scam preyed on the belief that people at the top don't steal from other people at the top.

Andrew felt that people would never complain because they were spending so much money in so many places that a Chanel bath store bag could get lost.

And among the other Chanel bags that they bought or the dresses they bought, it was all lost.

And that's why it took a long time.

And that's why all these people got involved.

That's why it grew so big, became so many people.

But in 2011, the scheme got too big, too sloppy, and eventually started caving in.

The New York District Office, NYPD, and Secret Service came together in an 18-month investigation.

This group was certainly well organized and very selective.

Police raided a storage unit in Manhattan where they found $1.2 million in cash and more than a million dollars worth of goods, including 35 cases of wine.

They also began seizing cash from other big players in the scheme, including 300,000 from DJ, and all told, more than 900,000 from the other characters involved.

All in all, 28 people were arrested, including Andrew.

For his part, Andrew pled guilty to enterprise corruption, grand larceny, and a few charges of possession of a forged instrument for his involvement with the identity thefts.

At that time, Andrew was already on probation in Connecticut and Pennsylvania already for larceny and identity theft.

His enterprise corruption charge would add a sentence of up to nine years' imprisonment on his rap sheet.

If people weren't paying attention to Andrew, they were now.

His ex-girlfriend cheerfully posted about his misfortunes on her blog, noting when he was in and out of prison for his various charges.

In the comments, readers shared any Andrew sightings they saw around town.

And according to Steve, folks in the club business were shaken by the scheme.

These were names they knew, people they'd partied with for years.

Everybody was affected.

Affected because they really couldn't trust anybody.

Your waitress could be stealing your card.

You know, your bartender, you couldn't buy anything on the street or if you know the person personally man when the hit the fan i remember i had to recheck everything make sure they weren't stealing credit cards

steve spoke to some of the folks who knew andrew on the condition of anonymity and put out an article on his nightlife blog trying to get a better sense of the guy and this is what steve wrote quote after andrew changed his name he 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.

Unquote.

To be clear, we weren't able to independently verify any of this.

But this is what Steve Lewis wrote back in 2010.

And that blog post quickly made the rounds among the social aid class.

Stephen Lewis, when he ripped Andrew in that article, I said, fuck.

I know a different Andrew, and I know that Andrew he's talking about, and I know exactly why he thinks he's that guy.

Andrew's old schoolmate, Jason Wrestler, again.

I was always his friend.

I've never abandoned a friend in my life who didn't really deserve it.

Andrew never broke what we were at 11 or 12 years old.

There's never been a time I couldn't call Andrew and he wouldn't drop things.

He had a lot of selfish aspects.

And I don't think there's anybody who's going to talk as sweetly about Andrew as I will.

Whatever bad stuff they say to that, I can't say they're wrong.

For me, it meant that it's like your cat scratches you for the first time hard.

Before that, I trusted everybody.

But after that, after a while,

you don't trust anybody.

You're always looking over your shoulder or past the person you're talking to for somebody to come out and try to whack you.

They were good times.

They were times that really can't be forgotten and Andrew did a great deal in making people forget how good it was.

We did our best to reach out to Andrew and hear his side of the story ourselves.

We called nearly a dozen phone numbers that were associated with him and reached out to him in all the social media profiles we could and heard nothing.

We managed to speak to his mother who only told us that this was a long time ago and to leave her alone.

Jason, one of Andrew's few lifelong friends, lost touch with him a few years back.

He had destroyed everybody.

And I think now he was doing business in Miami for years now, and it seems to be the last I heard, he was like, you know, being real legit, you know?

The last we found, he'd taken on yet another new name, Andy Z, and opened a small fashion boutique with his new life in Las Vegas.

We also tried reaching out to her, but never heard back.

So what, if any, is the moral of his story?

Oh gosh, the moral of the story of Andrew Parker is

don't trust anyone who wears sunglasses at night and any man in a fur jacket and

only use your own credit card.

Andrew spent what seems like his whole life trying to become part of the in crowd, and he showed over and over again that he'd do whatever it took to do that.

There was nothing too seedy, no price too high.

So when Andrew finally saw himself in the hallowed pages of the New York Post, The Daily Beast, and his Holy Grail, page 6, it was as sweet as success by any other name.

Sure, the headlines read Eastside Boutique King Busted and Party Boy King Shoplift Spree,

but they called him King, didn't they?

I'm sure he's even, if he listened to this podcast, he'd probably go out and celebrate because he'd find himself famous again.

One of those people that likes to be talked about.

Next week on big time,

they put a shark where

This has been Big Time, an Apple original podcast produced by Peace of Work Entertainment and Campside Media in association with Olive Productions.

It's hosted by me, Steve Bussemi.

This episode was reported and produced by Rajiv Gola and Morgan Chaffee.

Our story editor is Audrey Quinn.

Lane Rose is our showrunner and managing producer.

Our production team includes Amy Padula and associate producer Dania Abdelhamid.

Fact-Checking by Mary Mathis.

Sound design and mixing by Shawnee Aviron.

Our theme was written by Nicholas Principe and Peter Silberman of Spatial Relations.

Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriatis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scheer.

Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

Thanks for listening.