A WHIRLWIND ROMANCE LEADS TO A SHORT-TERM RENTAL BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY. BUT IT’S NOT THE BUSINESS SHE BARGAINED FOR.

THAT TUESDAY, the last day of January 2017, was always going to be a busy one for Brook Bennett.

The 51-year-old Southern California native was in the process of discreetly moving herself and her daughter out of the condo she’d been sharing for the past six months with her boyfriend, Gino, a man whom she’d first found charming but now, in close quarters, had revealed himself to be unsettlingly strange.

For several weeks, the short-in-stature but big-in-personality Gino kept odd hours, coming and going late at night (or very early in the morning), arriving and leaving the Orange County condo sweaty and manic. He also spent long hours holed up in his home office, a room from which Brook and her daughter, Laci, were forbidden from entering but from which Lacie said she sometimes heard a lilting, feminine voice emanate. Laci had also spotted a briefcase full of cash. The unexplained sides of Gino had been part of his charm at first, but now it was just weird. Brook wanted out.

She’d discretely signed a lease on another condo, this one in Irvine, and the plan was to send Gino out on an errand while the movers came to the Orange County place and moved all of Brook’s possessions to Irvine. By the time Gino knew what she was up to, she’d have extracted herself and her daughter from his life — a clean break.

That morning, she was at the Irvine condo, which was to be her new home. She’d just met with the WiFi guy who had hooked up the internet, another item checked off in the master escape plan.

She took the elevator down to the building’s parking garage, which was empty save for her car and a Toyota truck. Annoyingly, the truck blocked her in. It hadn’t been there when she’d arrived just half an hour ago. Suddenly a thought struck her. Something was amiss. Could Gino have somehow caught wind?

“Brook?”

She turned, and a man grabbed her shoulder.

Brook thought she was being mugged. But the man wore a tight-fitting jacket and sported a close-cropped haircut, which seemed discordant.

“We’re here to talk to you about Fadi.”

“Who?”

“You probably know him as Gino,” the man said. He showed her his badge.

“I thought to myself, this is a mistake,” Brook recalls. “In a minute, it’ll be all cleared up and I hope nobody sees this happening right where I’m about to move.”

As soon as she finished that thought, a dozen police cars swarmed in, surrounding her. It was a misunderstanding. She was right about that. But this was going to last a lot longer than just a few minutes. And a lot of people were going to see.

It all started three years prior, the weekend after Thanksgiving 2014 when the then-51-year-old Brook was, like a lot of people in the days immediately after that holiday, resolving to spend more time at the gym. Like everything in her corporate workaholic life, she’d have to squeeze the workouts into an already-packed schedule. Brook was tall and blond. Her grit and determination and decades of hard work had catapulted her to a legitimate claim of being the best saleswoman in all of Southern California’s dental industry. A specific niche, yes, but a lucrative one. And she wasn’t one to rest on her laurels. Her constitution wouldn’t allow it. She stayed ambitious. It was no surprise that she found herself working that Sunday, stopping by a dentist’s office in Newport Beach, a sunny coastal enclave south of Los Angeles. She was putting in some facetime that was the bedrock of any business relationship. What was a surprise was that walking out of the office, she had an opening in her afternoon. Free time. The air was warm and the Southern Californian sun was bright. She noticed the 24-Hour Fitness across the street. Why not? she thought.

It was a life-changing decision.

Brook’s enthusiasm met a wall of apathy at the counter. The bro on desk duty rattled off in a dull monotone some generic information and then quoted her some prices for training and membership, prices which seemed exorbitant. This area was loaded with gyms and fitness centers. Why, she wondered, should she give her money to this one?

But, just then, as she walked to the exit, a man stopped her. He was short but his biceps and chest bulged. He came off as confident but not cocky. He had a warm, welcoming quality about him and a wide, easy smile. Crucially to Brooke, the dental sales dynamo, he had perfect teeth. He introduced himself as Gino. “I overheard what they told you. That’s way too expensive,” he said. “Why don’t you let me train you, personally?” There was something about this guy.

They made plans to meet at a different gym, one Gino recommended. Monday at 6 am, they decided. It was a date.

Gino, who like Brook was 51, was a man of contradictions. He had a high-pitched voice yet exuded masculinity. He conveyed confidence through self-deprecating humor. He didn’t come off as a braggart, yet he quickly let Brook know all about his success in life. He embraced and fully owned what others may have found unusual about him. Also, just like Brook, Gino was an enthusiastic entrepreneur–though, unlike Brook, Gino’s line of work outside his occasional sideline as a personal trainer was inscrutable. Whatever his business was, he was in no hurry to explain it.

What followed was a whirlwind romance. When Gino and Brook went out to dinner and took shopping trips, Gino was always happy to pick up the bill. He was always delighted for Brook’s daughter Laci to come along, too. He took a quick shine to the kid, and vice-versa.

In retrospect, he was also incredibly adroit at demurring when Brook asked him what he did for a living. He’d reply, with a heavy hint of humility in his voice, that he dabbled in several different businesses and had been blessed. He acted as if it would be gauche, braggadocious, to say too much more. He was constantly on the phone with associates and booked long hours at the office. And whatever he did, he had much to show for it. He wore nice clothes and drove a two-seater Mercedes convertible. He also seemed to have more than a passing familiarity with local politicians and business leaders.

Brook assumed that the vagueness about how he made his money came from the same core as the rest of his good nature. He was, in a word, decent.

“He was dependable,” Brook remembers. “If he said he was going to be somewhere at a certain time, he was there, on time.”

Brook put a high premium on a man who had his act together and his financial house in order. She was herself the consummate self-made woman.

Brook never went to college but despite that—or, perhaps even because of it—she’d excelled in her field. Dental sales was a billion-dollar industry in which she posted impressive numbers selling x-ray software and other office equipment. Selling dental implants–false teeth, in layman’s terms–was the niche within the niche that catapulted Brook into something like celebrity status in the industry.

Unsatisfied with only one avenue of success, Brook had more recently gotten into a new side hustle: Airbnbs. In 2014, the short-term rental service was still relatively novel, and regular people all over the country were bringing in minor windfalls leasing units in apartment buildings and condo complexes and renting the properties out on the platform. When Brook met Gino, she’d just recently signed a lease on her first such property and listed it on the popular site. Everyone seemed to be making money, and the lure of a new hustle was strong. She got into the Airbnb game while the getting was good.

It was at one of the regular workouts with Gino that Brook mentioned her new endeavor.

“He perked right up when I mentioned it,” she recalls.

He seemed to perk up even more when she mentioned the unit was in Irvine.

The two stood side-by-side on elliptical machines as Brook explained between deep cardio breaths how she technically wasn’t supposed to use the unit as a short-term rental, but the rule at the complex barring SROs wasn’t enforced. Gino nodded along, interested but—again, only in retrospect—not at all surprised. It was like he was already initiated. He knew what SRO meant, and all the other lingo too. He offered to help Brook with her burgeoning side hustle.

"Let me help you furnish it and also handle the advertising and bookings," Gino told her.

Before she knew it, Gino was handling every aspect of her unit and even helping her explore a second rental property, doing so with the seemingly boundless energy and a bottomless reserve of generosity and good cheer that he brought to everything else in his life.

It was because of those attributes that Brook overlooked some of the more confusing aspects of her new boyfriend. For instance, when they were together it was always at her place or the unit in Irvine when it wasn't rented. He never invited her over, brushing off any hints he’d do so with vague explanations about his roommate.

Gino was also quick—too quick? she sometimes wondered—to mesh his life with hers and Laci's. After only five months as a couple, Brook and Laci moved into a larger, three-bedroom apartment in Ladera Ranch, an elite community with schools, parks, shops, and dining all designed so that its residents never had to leave "the ranch." Gino moved in, too, taking over a spare bedroom to use as his office.

He put a lock on the office door, explaining that he didn't want Laci to wander in. He instructed Brook to have the cleaning lady absolutely never go in there either. When Brook let slip that all the secrecy irked her, Gino bought her a dog grooming business. A second side hustle.

Still, Brook was curious exactly where Gino's money came from. In the evenings, when she'd ask him about his day, he'd talk about "clients" who had flaked and "accounts" that were way past due. He spoke in aphoristic phrases like "success requires a certain finesse."

To quiz him further would have risked coming off as prying, or even worse, accusatory. Gino was, after all, respectful of her independence. In that respect, he was not unlike the man who had been the great love of Brook's life–and her template for what a romance should be.

"I am today, who I am, because of him," Brook says of Robert, with whom she'd spent twenty years of her life.

That relationship began in 1991 when she was 28 and he was 40. Robert ran an established dental practice in Bonita, California, a picturesque slice of suburbia south of San Diego. Brook was early in her career, not yet the sales rep superstar she'd become, when she first made a sales call at his office.

"I remember thinking that he was so old," Brook recalls, laughing fondly. "But he really grew on me. On days I was going to his office, I just really looked forward to going to work."

Together she and Robert traveled the country, speaking at dental conferences, and growing their respective businesses as well as their lives. He sported a salt and pepper beard and balding head and, despite being 13 years her senior was more passionate and energetic than anyone else Brook had ever met. A shared love of their field bonded them together. He was awkward and quirky, traits that he fully owned. He knew who he was. And he was full of life. Importantly to Brook, he was enthusiastic for his work and for Brook's, too. He understood her career was important to her and gave her the space she needed to pursue it fully, never giving her a hard time if she had to go a full week or longer without seeing him. Even though he was older and more established, he never asked her to put her career second to his.

He supported her too when Brook, then in her mid-30s, decided she wanted to be a mother. They adopted a child, Laci, from Kazakhstan. Robert was hesitant at first, but the reservations melted away immediately when he held the infant Laci in his arms. Though Brook and Robert never married, Laci grew up calling him dad. Everything for Brook had fallen into place.

Life was perfect for a little while.

Then, in March of 2012, Brooke was in Alabama on a work trip when she got the call. Robert had died in his office in Bonita. A massive heart attack.

She remembers asking herself, "How am I going to live? How do I explain this to Laci? What do I do tomorrow?"

Three years later, when she was ready to date again, Brook compared all potential suitors to Robert. And in that regard, this oddly appealing man, Gino, the man from the gym who had invited himself to be Brook's trainer and had now invited himself to live with her, could seemingly hold his own.

"He had a glow about him," Brook recalls. "That was the first thing I noticed."

Much about the man who called himself Gino was fraudulent, but not his relentless positivity. He was a gentle muscular man with a puffed-out chest and persistent charm. The most favorable interpretation of his character would be to say that he saw the world with rose-tinted glasses. He was pollyannaish, refusing to see the bad in any situation or person—refusing above all to see the bad in himself and the bad in the bad situations he created. His positivity could be charming and contagious. It was also self-serving, bordering on delusional. Putting aside more or less charitable interpretations of his personality, he was, objectively speaking, a pimp.

Gino had arrived in Orange County in 2012 and right away began setting up an escort service, one that, in his own phrasing, was "the biggest and most successful upscale operation in U.S. history."

Like Brook, Gino's days started at 5:30 a.m. with an intense workout at the gym. Also like Brook, after the gym, he went to work.

His work involved screening dozens if not hundreds of calls from johns every day while managing websites featuring provocative photos of scantily clad women. He lived in Newport Beach but the base of his operation was in Irvine, a location chosen because it was replete with office buildings housing Fortune 500 companies and the white-collar workers who were his clientele. The operation ran daily, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., businessman's hours so that men could more easily cheat on their wives while pretending to be at work. In Irvine, he had leases on a dozen apartments from which the sex workers he managed plied their trade. He'd started the operation with 12 women. By the time he met Brook, business had boomed and he had as many as 70 women working in his organization at any given time.

Gino was constantly vigilant to stay ahead of the Orange County vice cops, whom he routinely spotted staking out his properties. When this happened, he'd quickly shut down operations at that apartment and sign a new lease elsewhere. This cat-and-mouse game meant he was ever on the lookout for new pieces of real estate.

For a while, things were good at their shared condo. Brook had the best of both worlds. She was an independent, successful career woman who could honestly say she was raising a daughter on her own. In Gino, she had a confidante, a helper, an adult who wasn't a co-parent but who was good with Laci and happy to help out with her when he could. They went to the gym every morning. Unfailingly he called every day when Brook was at work and asked if there was anything she needed him to do while she was away.

"He was really good to my daughter and me," says Brook. "For a really long time he was very generous."

Brook's Airbnb business was going well, too. Gino coordinated bookings and cleanings in between guests' stays. Business was booming, the place was always booked. Brook sometimes felt like she wasn't making as much as she should. She wondered how much Gino was pocketing himself. Still, she was hesitant to complain. He was doing 100% of the work.

Given the side hustle's success, it was no surprise when Gino broached the idea of Brook leasing a second unit, expanding the Airbnb business further. He explained the margins on a single unit were slim, which was why her payout was so paltry. But with a second unit, they could build an economy of scale. He promised her more money. He volunteered to furnish and manage the property. He suggested another upscale apartment building in Irvine. All she had to do was sign the lease.

"We furnished it together," Brook says. "It was fun."

In no time at all, Gino had the bookings humming just like he did with the first property.

"He was making really good money," Brook says.

The two had a normal life. In the morning they'd go to the gym across the street, work out, and then come home and get ready for their days.

"I head out for work, " Brook says. "And he'd go do his thing.”

But "his thing" was increasingly unusual.

Gino worked out a deal with Brook that they would keep his bedroom office locked and only he would have the key. One day Laci told her mom she had heard an unfamiliar voice on the other side of the door, as if someone else were in the room with Gino, a woman. However, Laci said that she didn't see anyone else enter or leave the office. The condo was not the sort of place you could sneak someone into.

Then one evening, Laci and Brook were eating dinner without Gino when Laci, seemingly apropos of nothing, asked, "Does Gino work at the phone company."

Brook laughed nervously. "No. Why?"

"His door was open, just a crack," Laci said. "I walked by and saw phones. A lot of them all over the table in his office."

Brook played it off, explaining that business people sometimes had to have multiple phones for different businesses they were involved in. Her own words made no sense to her as she said them. She asked Laci if she'd ever seen anything else she wanted to ask about. Her daughter said that at one point she'd spotted a briefcase full of cash.

Brook had to admit she'd noticed some unusual things herself. Gino was growing erratic. He'd begun emerging from the home office with wild looks in his eyes, then he would disappear out into the night, not returning until early in the morning. He often came home with an unnatural level of manic energy, carrying a strange, perfumed smell. She'd ask him where he'd been.

"The casino," he'd say.

Making things even stranger were the mysterious, irate letters Brook got in the mail from the apartment complexes where she was renting the Airbnbs. The buildings had gotten wise to her Airbnb hustle.

"I did feel like he was cheating on me, completely. I wasn't going to live like that," she says.

Something wasn't right. Reasonably, Brook assumed it was an affair.

"That was my motivation for what I did next."

The lease on the apartment in Laredo where Brook, Gino, and Laci all lived was up in February. The same day, Brook was set to lose her lease on one of her Airbnbs in Irvine for violating the short-term rental provision of her lease. She and Gino had already hired movers to move all her furniture out of that unit. Now, Brook asked Gino to supervise that move. He agreed with his usual gusto.

What she didn't tell Gino was that she'd also hired a second set of movers to move her and Laci out of the Laredo condo. She hoped Gino would be distracted just long enough for her and her daughter to get all their things—and themselves—out.

"I had five or six movers coming, enough guys to do it all in one swoop," she says.

On Tuesday, January 27, four days before the big day, the plan seemed like it was set to go off without a hitch. She met the guy who worked for the Internet company over at the new place. She had just wrapped up with him when, in the parking garage, a detective blocked her in and told her they needed to talk about Fadi Chaiban, the man Brook knew as Gino.

Chaiban was the son of a Lebanese contractor and a stay-at-home Armenian mother. He was born in Kuwait and moved to Boston when he was three.

Chaiban's father was an abusive alcoholic and as soon as Chaiban was old enough to fight back it became clear that either the old man had to go or Chaiban did. When Chaiban was in his late teens, he moved to San Diego.

There, he became part owner of a nightclub where the waitresses and bartenders tended to be scantily clad, good-looking women. In what turned out to be a theme for Chaiban's professional life, a couple of times every week men still hanging around the club late at night as Chaiban closed up shop would ask him if they could date this or that server or waitress. Chaiban always just shrugged. "You'd have to ask them," he replied.

He later opened his club and the same dynamic played out. Chaiban again gave shrugs to over-eager men. He moved to Las Vegas and started a limousine company and there, once again, a significant chunk of the clientele seemed more interested in asking Chaiban where to find girls than in the limousines they purportedly were paying him for. Maybe he just had that sort of look about him. Eventually, he embraced it.

In Vegas, he connected with a former Playboy playmate who was already making good money as a sex worker and madam, hooking up men she'd vetted to other working girls. Chaiban built her a website and hired people to answer the phones. He scaled her operation to two hundred women.

But soon the feds took notice.

In March 2006, Federal authorities indicted Chaiban on tax evasion and money laundering charges, as well as for violating the Mann Act, the 1910 law criminalizing the "transport [of] women for immoral purposes." The feds took him into custody and Chaiban languished in the Las Vegas County jail as he waited his day in court. After more than two and a half years, Federal prosecutors decided they couldn't make the case against him, dropping the charges. Leaving jail he was nearly broke, he headed west, to Orange County, to try to make in the illicit business of peddling flesh once again. He had $3000 to his name.

In Southern California, he started by hosting what he called "Yummy parties," events that featured strippers and other erotic entertainment that men paid $500 to get into. He rented out mansions for the event and hired sex workers, partnering with a new madam to sort out side deals with the male partygoers turned johns. The Yummy events were a hit, so much so that Chaiban worried about the attention causing a repeat of the fate that had befallen him in Vegas.

So he switched his escort business to one that operated out of Airbnbs. And then, as luck would have it, he was hanging out at a 24 Hour Fitness when he met Brook.

The cops kept Brook on-site at the condo complex, commandeering a sparse office area used by the building's maintenance staff as a makeshift interrogation room. There were no chairs, so everyone sat on the floor. Brook immediately felt under-dressed in her spandex workout pants, tank top, and little white jacket.

Seated on the dusty floor and under the bare light bulb of the makeshift interrogation room, detectives showed Brook the website Chaiban had been running. Its landing page featured rows and rows of women's photos, many with a green light beneath them indicating the lady above was working that day. Many of them were posing suggestively in the bed in Brook's Irvine Airbnb.

"What the hell is this?" Brook asked.

"Don't play dumb," the detective said.

"A lady pimp," one of the cops chuckled under his breath.

It suddenly all snapped into focus for Brook. The dozen phones in Gino's office. The Airbnb that was always booked. The website with scores of scantily clad women, many listed as "available."

"Tell us about your involvement," the detective said.

It dawned on Brook that the situation had taken on a new dimension of bad. She said she wanted to call a lawyer. The detective said she could do so from jail, and then placed her under arrest.

For two weeks they kept her in the intake cell, bigger than the typical jail cell but hardly big enough for the 50-plus women occupying it at any given time. Brook, still in her workout clothes, shivered on the cement. Every hour or so a new group of women came in, most of whom either seemed to be homeless or women who worked the street. Many of them were drug addicts who began to detox, got sick, and vomited. The toilet broke. The stench and the sweat and the close quarters were too much to bear. Brook was given no change of clothes. No toothbrush.

It would be a terrible time for anyone. But it was absolute hell for a woman who had worked her life to be independent, her own boss, free.

For a lawyer, Brook hired Kate Corrigan, a high-powered no bullshit criminal defense attorney who had formerly been a prosecutor before throwing her lot in with the accused. She was around Brook's age and had a tough look about her, even when she smiled. She had a stern, deliberate manner in which every word seemed sharp and perfectly chosen. It wasn't hard to imagine her making mincemeat of someone like Gino in front of a jury if it came to that. In the meantime, Corrigan counseled Brook to be patient, that the prosecutors were intentionally putting her through a protracted hell.

Patience didn't come easy.

In Kate's office, Brook was given a dossier outlining the full extent of the evidence in the hands of the prosecutors. It included a detailed report on the escort ring Chaiban ran out of the Airbnb. Brook's stomach sank as she read through the description of Chaiban's scheme, how he spent all day working the phones talking to area businessmen who were his clients, coordinating between them and working girls, arranging them to meet at various Airbnbs, including the one owned by Brook. Her throat clenched. The Irvine address, so familiar to her, looked menacing in the context of a police report.

Then it all got way worse. What Brook saw next she could only describe as "unreal."

Cruelest of all, as Brook thumbed through the material, she realized that the women's profiles on Fadi's website let potential Johns see the women having sex–with Fadi. Much of the prosecutor's dossier consisted of stills from videos Chaiban had himself posted to the escort website, videos of himself having sex with the escorts in Brook's Airbnb as a way to advertise their services. The prosecutors had compiled stills of these videos at their most pornographic, as if to inflict on Brook maximum embarrassment and psychic pain.

"I was reading and reading, sobbing and sobbing, reading and sobbing," she recalls. "This is how I found out. This is how I found out the extent to which the man I'd lived with had lied to me."

With the help of Brook's properties, Fadi's operation had swelled to a point when he had more than 200 women working for him. Fadi himself had had sex with almost all of these women, most of the liaisons occurring in Brook's Airbnb, the very place where Gino and Brook themselves had had many date nights. Fadi would later justify this by saying that he couldn't recommend a woman to a client if he hadn't been with her himself. The man Brook thought she might have loved had filmed himself having sex with hundreds of women.

The whole illicit business had been run out of the spare bedroom in the condo with Laci and Brook only feet away. The eight phones were to handle all the men calling the website looking for sex. The mysterious woman's voice was "Suzanne," Chaiban raising his already high voice even higher. He thought Johns would rather arrange their assignations with a woman operator.

This also explained Fadi's manic phases. At one point, overwhelmed by the money he was bringing in, he'd resorted to casinos as a way to convert the bulky tens and twenties his clients paid with into more manageable hundred dollar bills. The money-washing scheme worked well enough until a severe gambling addiction that Fadi had kept at bay since his days in Vegas again reared its head. He'd walk into the casino swearing to himself he'd only stay long enough to lose a little, then cash out. But more often than not he'd stay until it was time to go to the gym.

There was one more awful revelation for Brook that day in Kate's office.

Worst of all, Kate explained, prosecutors seemed dead set on ignoring everything about the story that painted Brook in an innocent light. It was her apartment. Money made from the apartment went to her bank account. She was in a relationship with the ringleader. The operation was run from her condo.

They were coming after her.

As relieved as Brook was to be out of jail, the one blessing of being locked up was that she had no access to television or newspapers.

After two weeks, Brook had gotten out of Los Angeles County lockup to find her name had been plastered all over the news. "Orange County couple accused of operating high-end brothel," read the headline of her local paper. Her and Fadi's mugshots had even made the national news. She could barely eat. She could barely sleep. Every time she braved the outside she worried someone would recognize her thanks to her newfound infamy.

She donned ball caps and sunglasses every time she went out. She suspected that Laci was getting uncomfortable questions from her classmates at school. The two of them never ate at restaurants, instead always ordering food to go, using a pseudonym as Brook was afraid to tell others even her first name. She still went out to make sales, girding herself at every office she called on. She needed to make money, now more than ever to fund her legal defense.

Curiously, Brook began to feel there was only one person who understood what she was going through: Fadi. Gino.

He was still in jail awaiting trial. He sent her a letter while locked up expressing how sorry he was for what he'd done to her and Laci. He had his mother call Brook, apologizing on her son's behalf and asking if she'd speak to him. Brook agreed. Soon, they were talking on the phone regularly. He said he understood what she was going through. She believed him. In a sense, he was the only person who could.

That was probably why when Chaiban called her after he got out of jail, asking her for coffee, she said yes.

They met late at night at a diner on the outskirts of Laredo. Brook wore nondescript workout clothes, a scarf, and a ball cap pulled low on her forehead. She found Gino seated in a booth wearing a button-down shirt unbuttoned to the middle of his chest. His features in his usual wide, easy smile. He wore their newfound infamy much lighter than her.

Gino explained everything about the escort service, that he'd gotten connected to the wealthy owner of a Mercedes dealership who introduced him to other wealthy men looking for girls and things had gotten out of control from there. He said that he'd run escort services in other cities before, but never with such high-class clientele, never to earn such sums of money—much of it, he added, he'd spent on Brook. From his perspective, he'd walked by accident backward into the highly lucrative operation that just happened to have the liability of being highly illegal. And once it got going, he had no choice but to keep it up so that he could keep Brook and Laci in the lifestyle they'd grown accustomed to. And, he was quick to point out, his client list included dozens of high-profile powerful people around southern California, including elected officials. Wasn't the real crime that those men weren't being punished? Brook found herself again thinking of him as Gino. "Why are we the ones being scapegoated?" he said.

Despite herself, she felt again the same strange spark of attraction she'd felt in the gym all those years ago. It seemed like it was her and Gino against the world. The feeling was strong. But fleeting.

They met again and again. At diners. At Gino's temporary accommodations. They had once gone to the gym together every morning. Now, they talked for hours on the phone late into every night.

"You can trust me," Chaiban told her.

"I know," said Brook.

When Brook told Kate about these late-night phone calls and undercover rendezvous, the attorney was livid.

"Don't you know he's using you again?!" she yelled. The two women were in Kate's office, seated across Kate's wide wooden desk from each other.

"I told you to just wait it out!" Kate yelled. "All you had to do was do nothing. But you're going over to his place? You're getting coffee? You're talking to him at all hours of the night? You did the opposite of nothing!"

Brook sat back in her chair. She smirked. 

The waiting game wouldn't work for her. She was an independent, self-made woman who had decided that if she was going to beat this she had to make her own luck. She had been meeting for coffee. She had been spending the night at his place. She'd also been pumping Chaiban for information all the while.

Brook had recorded many of their late-night phone calls, conversations in which Fadi had disclosed the entire breadth of how his operation had worked.

"How did you manage to get so many clients? How did you bring in so much money without raising red flags?" Brook had asked.

She'd then feign being impressed as Fadi explained the word-of-mouth advertising and his way of vetting potential johns. He said that the income from the prostitution scheme had been listed on tax returns and other documents as short-term rental income, both from the Irvine property as well as other addresses Fadi had leased.

"How did you keep track of all those clients?"

It was then Fadi revealed the master list. He explained it was a database of all the people who had patronized his business, including the movers, shakers, and city elected leaders. He told Brook it was their ticket to freedom. If they went down, so did all the bigwigs.

"It's amazing you kept all this organized," Brook said, a bit breathlessly to boost Fadi's ego.

One night at his apartment, she'd again asked about this list and, on his laptop, Fadi opened a calendar and scrolled back to November 2016, when the ring's operation would have been at its height. Its boxes were filled with color-coded notations, numbers indicating clients, pseudonyms for the woman they were meeting, and dollar amounts recording the amount of money changing hands.

Brook did some quick mental math.

"You were making even more than the police think," Brook said. "Way more."

"I told you," Fadi said, pulling her close. "So long as you stick with me we'll be fine."

Brook didn't know about that. But she did know the iPhone recording a voice memo in her handbag was her way out of the mess.

"I didn't want to turn on him," Brooke recalls. "Because I was worried the police would use him against me. But once I had him on tape talking about the whole operation, explaining it to me–I knew there was no way they could paint me as the ringleader."

She hadn't been able to get him to give up the client list, but on the occasions when she'd gotten up the will to see him in person, she had glimpsed it several times. She memorized a dozen of the names.

In the attorney's office, Kate gave Brook a frustrated look as Brook explained all this. Kate hated that her client had defied her orders. Though she couldn't help letting slip a smirk.

"Can't we offer that up to the cops?" Brook asked Kate.

Kate had to admit this was something she could work with.

With the new facts in hand, Kate arranged a meeting between Brook and the detectives and prosecutors working on Chaiban's case.

They met in the police station, the same bright hot room where detectives had shown Brook the awful website. Sitting across from her were the detective who had approached her outside her house, the man she'd thought was going to mug her, and the prosecutor who before had been so unwilling to hear anything exculpatory for Brook. It didn't feel particularly good to work with these men who up until right then had seemed intent on ruining her life. But it did feel good to work with them against Chaiban.

"Ok," the detective said. "What do you know?"

As she spoke, she watched the detective's expression turn from incredulous to interested to wide-eyed as he began feverishly scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad.

"Ok. Thank you," the prosecutor said, clicking his pen and closing his notepad. Then along with the detective, he got up and left.

Several weeks later, the prosecutor proved true to his word. He dropped the case against Brook and threw the book at Chaiban, who ended up pleading guilty in the face of all the evidence against him. He was sentenced to ten years in prison.

Chaiban has since completed his sentence. True form, still boastful and optimistic, he has written two books about his days in the escort trade under the pen name Suzanne. He has also attempted to rebrand himself as an entrepreneur and life coach. Curiously, one of the books is a mea culpa and the other is an escort business "How To" instructing readers on how to make money the way that got Chaiban sent to prison.

Brook, who has reclaimed her life and her life, her career, and her relationship with her daughter, is only vaguely aware of any of it. The last time she thought of Chaiban was when she found an old phone tucked into the corner of a desk drawer in her home office. In a moment of curiosity, she looked to see what was stored in it. She found photos of the man she knew as Gino, seemingly having fun with her and Laci. There was one photo of them at a restaurant, his big arm around her, Laci leaning into his other side. She thought for a moment about how, at that moment, that version of Brook had no idea what lay ahead. She shut the phone off and tossed it back into the bottom of the drawer.

Her actual phone was ringing. She needed to get back to work.

RYAN KRULL is a staff writer at the Riverfront Times, St. Louis’ alt-weekly. His journalism has appeared in The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, the Columbia Journalism Review, Bloomberg CityLab, and many other outlets. He is also an adjunct professor of Communication at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

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