Chapter 5: Heidi’s Empire: From The Peak Of The Hollywood Hills To The Pits Of Despair (1992) Heidi’s madaming business takes off and crashes

Chapter 5: Heidi’s Empire: From The Peak Of The Hollywood Hills To The Pits Of Despair (1992) Heidi’s madaming business takes off and crashes

Heidi’s empire peaks as she gets overconfident running her mouth around town. The stories of producers Don Simpson, Robert Evans and Jon Peters. The saga of JJ The Beeper King, Cookie Orgad and the LA ecstasy trade. And Heidi’s downfall at the hands of former Heidi girl Alexandra Datig and Beverly Hills cop Sammy Lee II.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:34):
I'll tell you why there was somebody police there. They
wanted to see the girls in lingerie and Bill Clint Dinner,
Michael Milkin or Arnold Schwarzenegger. They weren't there to protect
and serve the law. They were doing it out of
like Hollywood perversion. You know, it's all of jealousy. The

(00:55):
truth is, people in this town have been in this
business their entire life. And it took me one year,
and I did it. By the time I was twenty six,
I was burnt out. I won't make any both. But
LA is in a recession. I put a lot of
people through college. Maybe a lot of people got to

(01:16):
go on with their careers. A lot of girls got
to be who they really wanted to be. Heidi Flies.

Speaker 2 (01:26):
Drugs were part than parcel the life and breath of
what Heidi did. Everyone wants to make it seem so glamorous,
but it was really very sordid. Most of the time
she or her girls were so drugged that they were
barely able to make it up to the Fifth Florida Hotel.
Von Nage producer.

Speaker 3 (01:47):
Previously on Heidi World. Heidi took over the world of
high end escorting from her mentor turned rival Madame alex
and became one of the most powerful people in Los
Angeles through brokering sex for the city's most powerful men.

Speaker 4 (02:06):
Welcome to Heidie World. Chapter five.

Speaker 3 (02:16):
Heidie's Empire from the peak of the Hollywood Hills to
the pits of despair. Heidie's madaming business takes off and
crashes nineteen ninety two. Welcome back to Heidie World. I'm

(02:37):
your host, Molly Lambert. The year is nineteen ninety two.
Heidi Flice is on top of the world. She is
living quite literally, at the peak of Los Angeles in
her mansion on Tower Grove. She has five hundred Heidi
Girls working all over the world bringing back her forty
percent cut to her house. She has everything she'd ever wanted.

(03:00):
A house in the hills of La Power, respect, a
reserve table at every hot club and restaurant in the city,
and money beyond her wildest dreams. She has built her
own brand to a certain sub section of Los Angeles.
The name Heidi flies now represents glamour, sex and exclusivity.

Speaker 1 (03:25):
I learned about the intricacies of deals, the power of sex,
and how people like to be treated. I saw some
people make a lot of mistakes driven by hubris, arrogance,
bad manners are all three and I saw an opportunity,
an opportunity for me. As long as I remembered what
I had learned, success came relatively easily. But as time

(03:49):
went by, I forgot. I got caught up in the lifestyle.
I lost sight of the things that had made me successful.

Speaker 3 (04:01):
In Hollywood, glamorous facades tend to hide a darker reality.
Despite appearances, everything is not actually perfect in Heidie world.
First off, there is Heidie's.

Speaker 4 (04:12):
Own big mouth.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
She can't stop telling people who she is and what
she does. She and her toxic on and off boyfriend
Yvonne Nage have finally broken it off for good, and
Yvonne Nag has a new twenty three year old girlfriend
named Julie Connister. Yvonne and Julie are trying to move
in on Heidi's business with a competing high end escort business.

(04:37):
Heidi is so furious at Yvonne Nage that she does
the unthinkable. She makes up with Madame Alex. Together in
May nineteen ninety two, Alex and Heidi get Yvonne Nage
charged with making threatening and obscene phone calls to both
of them. The case gets all the way to jury
selection before it's dismissed. Heidi is to her men to

(05:00):
get Yvonne in trouble somehow, even though she knows that
talking to media might shine light on her own extracurriculars.
So in nineteen ninety two, Heidi flies starts talking to
a senior writer at Premier magazine named John H.

Speaker 4 (05:15):
Richardson.

Speaker 3 (05:17):
Premiere was a gossipy movie magazine that ran starky coverage
about Hollywood, the box office, and studios. Heidi gives Richardson
a huge scoop, telling him that Michael Nathanson, the president
of production at Columbia, is being supplied with drugs and
high end escorts by her ex lover, Yvonne Naj. She

(05:37):
claims that Nathan Sen has allegedly even given Yvonne Naj
a twenty five thousand dollars production deal as a cover
for drug and sex expenditures. When the journalist confronts Nathansen
point blank, he says he'd never made a deal with Naj. Now,
Nathan Sen may not have made a direct deal with Naj,

(05:58):
but he did make a deal in early nineteen ninety
two with a producer named Brad Wyman, with whom he'd
partied on a sailboat with topless girls.

Speaker 4 (06:07):
And Ivon Nage.

Speaker 3 (06:10):
Brad Wyman was a rich kid producer from bel Air
whose mom had been on La City Council, A young
playboy who came from privilege and partied with Hollywood bratpac
bad boys like Charlie Sheen and Rob Low.

Speaker 4 (06:23):
He produced the.

Speaker 3 (06:24):
Cult classic Freeway and was also a producer on Oscar
winning movie Monster. Brad Wyman had become notorious for financing
his own trip to can to raise funds for a movie,
streaking at the French airport and getting so wasted that
he crawled on the floor at the Hotel du Cap
begging rich people for change. The movie, called The Dark Backward,

(06:46):
got funded after Nathanson and Wyman made a deal. Ivon
Naje was added as a partner. The production deal was
for a company called Wyman Nase and it had a
Sony address and a Columbia Picture's phone number. The Wyman
naj Production Shingle produced only one movie, the prostitution slasher Skinner,

(07:07):
starring former underage porn star turned mainstream screen queen Tracy
Lords as a prostitute character named Heidi.

Speaker 5 (07:18):
I never got credit for producing one hundred movies, for
running Sony, for coming from the street, becoming the Chairman.
It was always negative. Hairdresser John John Peters film producer.

Speaker 3 (07:33):
Producer John Peters is another lifelong Hollywood hustler, A valley
kid from Van Nuys who was an extra in The
Ten Commandments at the age of ten, then became a
celebrity hairdresser. Peters claims that his father was a Cherokee
former marine who ran a Hollywood diner. His mother came
from an Italian American family who owned a salon in

(07:54):
Beverly Hills. When she remarried an abusive construction worker, John
Peters ran went away from home to live on the
street in New York, making a living working in a
burlesque house dyeing pubic hair wigs.

Speaker 5 (08:09):
The prostitutes had red hair, red pubic hair, and red poodles.
I made it so everything matched.

Speaker 3 (08:19):
He moved back to la where he got a job
doing hair on people's heads on Ventura Boulevard in the
San Fernando Valley. Like fellow celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, one
of the victims of the Manson family murders along with
his ex girlfriend Sharon Tate. John Peters used hairdressing to
become a well connected player with Hollywood friends, as seen

(08:41):
in Hal Ashby's film Shampoo apocryphally inspired by j Sebring
and Rodeo Drive hairdresser Gene Shackever hip La. Hairdressers like
John Peters really do know everyone in town. He started
romancing the Norwegian Olympic figure skater turned Hollywood pin up
Sonya Henny, by this point a rich older woman who

(09:03):
gave him one hundred thousand dollars with which to buy
his mom's families Beverly Hills Salon. Like many people in
Heidi world, John Peters was a born hustler. He had
a specific genius for talking other people into doing things
that would benefit him. John Peters allegedly started dating Barbara
Streisand after working as a whig master on one of

(09:25):
her movies, even though he was technically still married to
another beautiful Jewish actress named Lesliean Warren, with whom he
had a.

Speaker 5 (09:34):
Son, great ass, great tits, great body. Barbara may have
had her neuroses and insecurities, but getting men the men
every woman wanted was not one of them.

Speaker 3 (09:50):
Peters produced the remake of A Star Is Born, starring
Chris Christofferson and Streisand.

Speaker 4 (09:55):
Which was a huge hit.

Speaker 3 (09:56):
He got into producing by essentially schmoozing his way into
Hallllywood all the way from Van Nys by dating Barbara Streisand,
who gave him what some might call a vanity credit
as a favor, although certainly John Peters would not call
it that. Their partnership lasted twelve years, in which they
may have been allegedly open. Streisand turned down his proposals

(10:19):
of marriage.

Speaker 5 (10:22):
She was probably the love of my life. Yeah, she
was the most captivating, interesting, creative person I've ever met.
I owe her, I will always owe her for giving
me the life that I've had.

Speaker 3 (10:35):
He parlayed the huge success of A Star Is Born
into a continued career as a producer. In nineteen eighty three,
he had a hit with Flash Dance, which led to
a Warner Brothers deal that produced hits like Batman, Superman,
and Rainman. In nineteen eighty nine, John Peters and Peter
Goober were made joint heads of Sony, with Sony paying

(10:57):
half a billion dollars to get them released from their
contracts at Warner Brothers. John Peters was supposed to co
produce a Three Musketeer's remake with Wyman Nag that got
killed allegedly because Heidi blackmailed Nathanson by threatening to leak
incriminating phone calls unless Yvonne and Wyman Naj lost the
production credit, but the plausible cover story was that Disney

(11:21):
had a competing version. John Peters called Heidi and told
her to knock it off. Later, Heidi would tell Vanity
Fair that John Peters was one of her biggest spenders.

Speaker 1 (11:34):
John Peters knew Alex for years. He was a huge client.
He was the guy everyone went to when they wanted
a girl.

Speaker 3 (11:44):
John Peters once threatened to kill a producer he found out,
tried to cast and couch Barbara streisand nevertheless, he himself
was a serial sexual harasser, even if it didn't catch
up with him until recently, when he was sued for
sexual harassment in twenty eighteen, which caused the studio to
take his production credit off of Bradley Cooper's remake of

(12:04):
a Sarsborn. So back to Heidie's Big Scoop. Richardson ends
up writing the story about Nathansen and naj for Premier Magazine,
but it gets killed before publication, presumably for legal reasons
or because Premier Magazine doesn't actually want that level of
smoke from the studios, so instead, Richardson uses all the

(12:26):
material and fictionalizes the saga of Heidi and Madame Alex
in a serialized novel called The Blue Screen that runs
in Premiere instead. Meanwhile, there are also signs that Heidi's
perfectly oiled machine is malfunctioning. Some john's pose a threat
to her business, who unsafely practice kink play, like the

(12:48):
cross dressing producer who's too small lingerie almost cut off
his circulation, or one famous producer with a penchant for
extreme sexual sadism whose name we can say because he
is dead.

Speaker 6 (13:03):
You're not paying hookers to come, You're pain and believe.
Don Simpson super producer.

Speaker 3 (13:11):
Don Simpson was a producer who became known as the
face of Hollywood eighties excesses, particularly the nostril based ones.
Simpson was born in Seattle, grew up a strict Baptist
in Alaska, moved to San Francisco, where he did pr
for an erotic film festival, then came to Los Angeles
to work in film. He co wrote director Paul Bartel's

(13:34):
gumball rally movie Cannonball Exclamation Point, working his way up
from exploitation film distribution at Warner Brothers to president of
Paramount Pictures. He was fired from Paramount in nineteen eighty
two for passing out on drugs during a meeting. He
worked alongside Robert Evans, whose coc use in that period

(13:55):
was so bad that fucking Don Simpson was the voice
of reason.

Speaker 6 (14:01):
Evans believed he was a living legend. He would come
in with his sunglasses and his black clothes. He would
invite me over to his office, and he couldn't sit at
his desk for more than ten minutes without going to
his bathroom and re emerging with amount of white substance
all over him. Later on, when I got to know
him better, I'd say, Bob, you can't go out in
public with a fucking ounce of blow.

Speaker 1 (14:20):
On your chest.

Speaker 6 (14:21):
He'd sit there and basically try to bribe me. Said
if I helped him with his project, he'd get me pussy.
It drove me crazy, not that I was any paragragonic virtue,
because he was so sleazy.

Speaker 3 (14:34):
Simpson eventually linked up with producer Jerry Bruckheimer, and together
they produced the steel worker erotic dance movie Flash Dance
in nineteen eighty three, which was a huge hit, followed
by dorm cannon classics like Beverly Hills, Cop, Top Gun,
and Bad Boys, as well as flops like The ref
Which I Love Actually and Days of Thunder. Don Simpson

(14:56):
was the ultimate eighties man in Hollywood. He was famous
for his hedonistic excesses and his box office successes, and
like many Hollywood douchebags, he linked the two things in
his mind. Simpson is cited specifically in Easy Riders Raging
Bulls as a reason for the downfall of the experimental
character study bent of nineteen seventies New Hollywood in favor

(15:19):
of the big money, big swinging dick eighties. In Easy
Riders Raging Bulls, director Robert Altman recalls showing Don Simpson
a reel of Shelley Duval, who he wanted to cast
as Olive Oil in his Popeye movie.

Speaker 7 (15:36):
So after the reel finished, Simpson he stood up and
he said, well, I wouldn't want to fuck her, and
if I don't want a fuck her, she shouldn't be
in the movie. I was appalled Robert Altman director.

Speaker 3 (16:01):
Simpson got testosterone injections and spent an alleged sixty thousand
dollars a day on drugs alone. He had been an insecure,
overweight child, and he molded himself single handedly into his
own warped vision of the ultimate Hollywood alpha male, the
soulless producer who only cares about money, drugs, and his

(16:22):
own dick. Amid the conspicuous consumption of rich people in
the eighties, Don Simpson took wasting money on dumb, expensive
shit to a new level. He bought a new pair
of black Levis to wear and throw away every day.
Don Simpson had a terrifying modernist house in the hills
of Coldwater Canyon where he did a ton of coke

(16:45):
and hired a lot of sex workers. He built a
custom locker room with industrial showers, specifically for the girls
he hired. In his mid eighties to early nineties Heyday,
Don Simpson is allegedly one of Heidi's most prolific consumers
and one of the few documented on the record as abusive,
the record being the e true Hollywood story about Heidi Flace.

(17:09):
Don Simpson is into underage girls and violent sato masochistic sex,
and the younger, less experienced girls are not ready for
the brutality that he enjoys inflicting on them. One girl
is allegedly beaten so badly by Don Simpson that she
thinks she's going to die, but is luckily able to
escape the house onto the nearby street, which, by the way,

(17:31):
is Mulholland Drive, a winding mountain road so scary and
isolated there is an entire David Lynch movie about it.
So yes, Heidi could have been sending some of her
employees into a known snake pit for profit. It is
possible she was exploiting some of the girls in her
position as their employer. And even though I promised I

(17:52):
wouldn't say it, I take that back to say, this
is what a girl boss does in actuality is exploit
labor for capital, like anyone else who's a boss, but
with the pink veneer that suggests she's leading with a
softer touch and uplifting other women along the way. There
is no doubt that Heidi was a better person to
work for than a violent camp who beats you.

Speaker 4 (18:13):
But she was still a boss.

Speaker 3 (18:16):
Sex work needs to be decriminalized so that no sex
worker can be exploited by someone who takes advantage of
the fact that they are operating in a shadowy world
where their employees might not even want to admit what
they are doing. Of course, there's nothing wrong with doing
sex work as a job, and that gets muddled with
right wing rhetoric about sex trafficking, which is something else,

(18:36):
and survival sex work, which is also something else, to
paint all sex work as bad and exploitative in a
way that is somehow worse and different than every other
kind of job. I'm not trying to excuse Heidi here.

Speaker 4 (18:50):
This is all very bad.

Speaker 3 (18:52):
However, sex work itself is not in any way inherently
bad or am moral, and its critics like to hone
in on the SOB store while ignoring all the stories
of sex workers who didn't die, who didn't suffer from
transgressing women's roles, who had sex for money and merely.

Speaker 4 (19:09):
Paid the bills.

Speaker 3 (19:11):
From Heidie's point of view, I'm sure she thought she
was just serving the market. If gross men wanted underage girls,
she would send them there. But she also could have
said no. There were stories too, that she was so
confident she scouted strangers in all kinds of public places,
including teenage girls at fancy boutiques. Any one of these
could have gotten her in huge trouble, but as with

(19:35):
many of her riskiest escapades or gambles, Heidi got lucky,
and she stayed lucky for a long time. But as
with any gambler's streak, it had to come to an end.
When Heidi World returns, Heidi's high end escort empire begins

(19:57):
to crumble when snitches come out of the wood work.

Speaker 4 (20:23):
Welcome back to Heidi World.

Speaker 3 (20:27):
All of Heidi's flirtations with disaster and fuck ups might
not have mattered had it not been for a few
people who decided to rat her out to the cops
for their own gain. One of them is a limo
driver turned bodyguard named Art Natoli who works for Billy Idol.

Speaker 4 (20:44):
Heidi says.

Speaker 3 (20:45):
Natoli is allegedly a scumbag who got mad because his girlfriend,
a woman named Claudia Carnecella, started working for Heidi and
lost interest in the relationship because the money was more
exciting to her. Carnecella I was pulling down eight grand
a job with Heidi and bought herself a corvette. This
makes her ex boyfriend furious, so Natoli snitches on Heidi

(21:09):
to Glenn Ackerman, the LAPD chief of Vice. But he
is not alone in snitching on Heidi.

Speaker 8 (21:18):
Meaning Heidi for me was an answer to a short
term problem, which was paying my rent and putting food
on my table. I really didn't want to be a prostitute.
That was not my plan. Alexandra Daydig.

Speaker 3 (21:33):
Alexandra Dadig was an aspiring actress who'd worked for Heidi
for a year. Like so many of the people in
Heidi World, Daydig is another child of Hollywood, a second
generation actor, but aside from one credit in a college
campus Hijink's movie from nineteen forty six called Sweetheart of
Sigma Kai, her father, Fred Daydig Junior, appears to have

(21:55):
mainly worked as a professional extra, albeit very steadily. A
real veteran. He played a long line of uncredited roles
as soldiers, bell hops, cops, and a theater usher twice
in classic musicals like The Bandwagon and Singing in the Rain.
He also wrote technical books about guns, like the Luger.

(22:16):
Alexandra Dadeg was one of the four fictionalized protagonists of
the nineteen ninety six book You'll Never Make Love in
This Town Again, whose title was a riff on Julia
phillips memoir about her coke addled rise and fall as
a Hollywood producer.

Speaker 4 (22:29):
You'll Never Eat.

Speaker 3 (22:30):
Lunch in This Town Again. You'll Never Make Love in
This Town Again is the stories of three sex workers
and an actress about Hollywood men's excesses and indignities. In
the book, a fictionalized date eg is written as an
actress named Tiffany, although she sued the book's publisher over it.
Alexandra Dadegg's IMDb roster is slim, consisting of a reporter

(22:54):
role in Pump Up the Volume and stand in work
on Naked Gun thirty three and a third the Final Insult.
Daydig was partying at the Rainbow Bar and Grill on
Sunset when a drug dealer gave her Heidi's phone number
and suggested she call. Daydig spoke to CBS News in
twenty thirteen about her year spent working for Heidi Flie.

Speaker 8 (23:17):
I was expected to have most of the time just
a straightforward sex act. I was given designer drugs. I
was given prescription drugs, a lot of cocaine. I was
paid ten thousand dollars a day, plus jewelry, plus first
class plane tickets. I was asked to go to a
hotel the client help my plane ticket and my money,
and for three days he would come and hit me
on the head and pull out my hair. When he

(23:39):
finished hitting me, he would leave the room.

Speaker 3 (23:44):
Daydek claimed she decided to drop a dime because she
felt Heidi was becoming too obsessed with her own celebrity,
but Daydig has since become a right wing celebrity in
her own right who appears regularly on talk shows and
led a failed effort to recall Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti,
who sucks, but not for the reasons that she was

(24:04):
trying to recall him. According to Daydig, Don Simpson ran
a casting couch out of his mansion where he auditioned
actresses who needed work, convinced them to have sex with
him for a role, and secretly videotaped the entire thing
without their consent. After Datig sold out Heidi, she became
an anti prostitution crusader who worked with groups that labeled

(24:28):
all sex work as trafficking. A trend in right wing
politics that has only escalated since.

Speaker 8 (24:36):
You are not allowed to have long hair, you are
not allowed to be too pretty, you are not allowed
to wear too much makeup or be too glamorous because
someone would fall in love with you and take you away,
and then she loses the business.

Speaker 3 (24:51):
So, after a year of working for Heidi, Daydig decides
to turn on her and contacts a Beverly Hills detective
named Sammy Lee the second. This obviously pleases the other Alex,
Madame Alex, who is still fuming on probation watching Heidi
run the empire that she had built. Lee starts looking
into Heidi's personal activities, and Dadegg becomes the Beverly Hills

(25:15):
Police Department's personal informant on the case. The cops start
assembling a task force across agencies to investigate Heidi. Law
enforcement starts to believe that Heidi is mocking them by
operating right under their nose. Unlike Madame Alex, who genuflected
to the cops by giving them girls on the house

(25:35):
and bribes, Heidi supposedly doesn't give the cops any kickbacks.
So Sammy Lee from the Beverly Hills PD and Glenn
Ackerman from LAPD team up and decide to make taking
down Heidi Flies a top priority.

Speaker 8 (25:53):
I provided credit card numbers, I provided information on air flights,
on phone numbers.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
Everyone knew he was a cop. At me, I'm just
the biggest sucker. I was so dumb. He said, can
I pay with pacoalolo? And I said, no, pacalolo, no yin.
That was abnormal for a legitimate business person to say,
either I had a terrible hangover that day or I
came straight from the racetrack but I wasn't too sharp.

Speaker 3 (26:23):
Beverly Hills cop Samuel Lee the second is, of course,
another second generation Los Angeles kid with a prominent parent.
His father, Samuel Lee, was a famous Olympic diver. Born
in Fresno, California, to Korean parents who ran a restaurant,
Sammy Lee the first became obsessed with the Olympics when

(26:44):
they came to nearby Los Angeles in nineteen thirty two.
When he was twelve years old, Lee's family moved to
Los Angeles to the Highland Park neighborhood, where he found
that he was only allowed to practice pole diving once
a week in Pasadena on what was called quote International Day.
This was code for segregation. International Day was the only

(27:05):
day that black, Asian and Latino residents were allowed to
use the public pool. The day before the water was replaced.
Because he had no regular access to a pool to
train in, Sammy Lee practiced diving into a pit of sand.
In nineteen forty two, Sammy Lee became the first person
of color to win the US National diving championship. At

(27:28):
the nineteen forty eight London Olympics, he won a gold
medal and a bronze, making him the first Asian American
man to win a gold medal for America. The elder
Sammy Lee then joined the Army Reserves to pay for
USC medical school, where he became an ear nosen throat doctor.
He advanced to the position of major in the US

(27:49):
Army's Medical Corps and thought he would be sent out
for Korean War service. Instead, he was utilized for American
propaganda on a larger scale and sent back to the
Olympic Games, where he was told he was expected to win.
At the nineteen fifty two Helsinki Olympics, he medled gold.
He was then sent to South Korea with the American

(28:10):
Medical Corps in nineteen fifty three for a.

Speaker 4 (28:12):
Tour of duty.

Speaker 3 (28:14):
When Lee returned home to California in nineteen fifty four,
he found that, even as a multiple Olympic gold medalist,
a doctor, and a veteran who had demonstrated his American
patriotism endless times, racist housing discrimination practices against Asians and
Asian Americans persisted, even and especially in the supposedly progressive

(28:38):
state of California. Sammy Lee tried to purchase a house
in the Orange County neighborhood of Garden Grove and was denied.
Nearby residents drew up a petition against Sammy Lee moving
into quote their neighborhood, and he moved elsewhere. He married
a woman named Rosalind Wong and they had two children.

(28:58):
Their son became a detective with the Beverly Hills Police
Department named Sammy Lee the Second.

Speaker 1 (29:07):
I had a bad feeling about him, but she kept saying, no,
he's a great guy. He drives a testa rosa and everything.

Speaker 3 (29:16):
So in nineteen ninety three, Detective Sammy Lee the Second
decides to set up a sting to bust Heidi Flice's operation.
He gets a tip, probably from Alexandra Dadegg that Heidi
will be throwing a party that night at a place
called the Rangoon Racket Club, a faux British colonial themed
club in Beverly Hills that's modeled after a British tennis

(29:37):
club in Burma whose very offensive theme and overpriced bar
food lasted from the seventies to the early nineties. Heidi
is hanging out with some of her friends, including her
old pal Jen Young, at the Rangoon Club, when Sammy
Lee and another officer crash her party undercover. In character,
Sammy Lee the second poses as a Hawaii in Japanese

(30:00):
textile merchant named Nico Akai who wants to set up
himself and some Japanese businessman friends with late night entertainment
from Heidi's girls. He brings the aforementioned Ferrari Testarosa, which
is his own real personal car.

Speaker 9 (30:18):
We knew that she was having a function there and
we borrowed a Ferrari. People were having drinks and then
she was playing the hostess. There were probably six or
seven girls. I basically was able to get her phone
number that night and introduce myself as a businessman, and
I kept it very generic, said maybe we can try
to do business in the future, and that I'd like

(30:38):
to call her Detective Sammy Lee, Beverly Hills Police Department.

Speaker 3 (30:45):
Heidi takes the bait and gives Detective Lee her phone number.
He calls and they set up an appointment at the
Beverly Hilton Hotel to talk through the logistics. On June eighth,
nineteen ninety three, Heidi meets with Sammy Lee and one
other in Investigator. Lee sets up a sting with audio
and video recording equipment in a Beverly Hilton suite, then

(31:07):
gets Heidi talking about her business, which, as we all
know by now, is not very hard to do.

Speaker 1 (31:14):
In the history of this business, no one has ever
been able to do what I did. I know one
percent of the wealthiest people in the entire world. So
maybe I'll meet one hundred girls in two weeks, and
I'll only pick one. Every girl I select has some
quality or value about her that I think is different

(31:36):
from the rest, a special kind of person. I have
a fixed price, and no one is hustled, and no
one is like crude. You won't find some like drugged
out freak coming in with her fingernails all dirty. I
can't afford stuff like that because of the people I
deal with. Basically I have everything to perfection.

Speaker 9 (31:58):
You're more squared away than I am. And for fifteen hundred,
what are we talking.

Speaker 1 (32:04):
We're talking. Everybody's gonna have a good time. But like,
I'm not into this group sex and swapping and things
like that. I tell people that I think condoms. I'm
a firm believer in condoms. But what girls and guys
do when I'm not in the room, I can't oversee everything.
If you're not happy with someone in the first fifteen minutes,
if she offends you in any way, or something about

(32:24):
her strikes you as wrong, it's one hundred dollars, thank
you go.

Speaker 9 (32:28):
So the arrangement is basically straight sex, but basically nothing bizarre.
I don't want to see Allama coming through the house.

Speaker 1 (32:35):
No, no, nothing bizarre. And you know some guys like
two girls to be together.

Speaker 9 (32:42):
Yeah, can that be arranged.

Speaker 1 (32:44):
Yeah, it's a normal man thing, a boy thing.

Speaker 9 (32:47):
As far as money exchanged, cash okay.

Speaker 1 (32:51):
Cash cool? No, yen. I know people who run countries
and rule worlds, and they are so amorous leaving a
business meeting that can change the world. God that's bizarre.
Men and women must be a whole different thing, like
cats and dogs or something. Basically, that's how I see it.
I think I just learned real quick because I learned

(33:11):
it with something. You have to get right or it's
not going to work at all. I wish I had
some competition. There are people all over town, like these
two hundred or three hundred dollars madams who say they're
my competition, and they send they're made out on a
job or something. You're going to get what you pay for.
Do you have a preference in your type? Tell me

(33:33):
about your dream girl?

Speaker 9 (33:34):
Umm, probably around five foot eight, brunette, pretty slim, nice legs,
nice bot.

Speaker 1 (33:42):
Okay, no problem. What time? The people I pick, I
consider them my friends. Like we work together or we
don't work at all. We have good chemistry.

Speaker 9 (33:50):
So how would you like to work? The money?

Speaker 1 (33:53):
Just give it to the girls, straight to the girls.
I have to trust them, because if there's no trust,
it's not going to work. And if you're not happy
with something, and just call me and I'll make sure
it's all fixed.

Speaker 3 (34:05):
A date is set for a Heidi girl to come
meet Nico Akai in his room that night Heidi sends
Samantha Burdette, a beautiful girl from a rich family in
Colorado who became a model in Japan and dated head
of the elite modeling agency John Casablancas and Guns N'
Roses singer Axel Rose before she started working for Heidi.

Speaker 1 (34:28):
Samantha is beautiful, but she's a lost soul.

Speaker 3 (34:36):
Lee meets with Burdette and pays her fifteen hundred dollars.
She strips down to her underwear and according to the
police report, Lee claims he suddenly has to run. He
lets her keep the money and calls Heidi the next
night to ask for another date with way more party favors.

Speaker 1 (34:54):
The next night, he asks for three more girls and
two a balls of cocaine. Then Charlie called me and
said he wanted some coke as a favor, and another
client asked for mandrax and I got them. I threw
the mandrax in the back of my car.

Speaker 3 (35:09):
A few days later, Sammy Lee brings three other Asian
American cops, including a Japanese American detective named Stephen Takeshida,
and they all pose as Japanese businessmen with bad fake accents,
speaking gibberish. They hope the girls won't notice, isn't Japanese.
They meet with the four girls and pay fifteen hundred
dollars to each one for what they say will be

(35:32):
some oral sex followed by straight sex. Kim Birch, a
rookie on her first date, responds to one of the
undercover cops, speaking fake broken English, asking to do American thing,
special thing, by saying you mean like stand on my
head or what. The entire scenario, which is videotaped and

(35:52):
played later for jurors in court, sounds completely absurd. They
ask the girls to strip for them, and as they
get a topless, a task force persts in, placing all
four of the girls under arrest.

Speaker 9 (36:07):
We had the girls in one big room and once
they started to address then we called it and the
officers came in and arrested everyone. We arrested the girls,
and we had another team at Heidi's house waiting to
arrest her.

Speaker 1 (36:22):
That day, I went out in the sun. I was
disturbed all day.

Speaker 4 (36:26):
I was on a sobriety kick.

Speaker 1 (36:28):
I had started going to the gym. I took a soma,
a muscle relaxer, but that day I was feeling really
weird around a thirty It was one of the clearest,
most beautiful nights. They arrived twenty cops and four dogs
all at my house.

Speaker 3 (37:11):
June ninth, nineteen ninety three, eight thirty pm. Heidi is
wheeling out the trash cans to the curb in front
of her Tower Grove mansion when she is confronted by
twenty cops and four police dogs. She immediately cracks a
joke about how this must be the reason Los Angeles
is broke, since they're spending all their money on her.

Speaker 4 (37:33):
She's not wrong.

Speaker 3 (37:35):
The police sees some travelers checks signed by Charlie Sheen,
thirteen grams of cocaine, a plastic baggie of mandrax, which
is an old type of sedative like a quelude, and
the red Gucci notebooks that Heidi used in lieu.

Speaker 10 (37:48):
Of a black book.

Speaker 3 (37:51):
Beverly Hills Lieutenant Jim Smith says Heidi didn't flip out
and was remarkably calm, even jovial. Heidi is charged with felony,
him bang, pandering, and narcotics. She has released on one
hundred thousand dollars bail, which a bail bombsman puts up
because Heidi hasn't saved anything, let alone one hundred thousand dollars.

(38:11):
A seventeen year old girl found living in her house
is booked as well. The four girls who were booked
earlier that day by Sammy Lee flip on Heidi immediately
and start telling the cops everything. As soon as the
Heidi Fly's story breaks in Los Angeles, every newspaper in
town starts receiving phoned in tips claiming to know the

(38:33):
names of famous clients. The only names publicly associated with
Flice at this point are people known to be her
social friends Billy Idol, who she met at on the Rocks,
her friend Victoria Sellers, and music manager Elliot Mintz. Nobody
has been confirmed as a john or a client, but
the rumor mill continues. Columbia Pictures is alleged to have

(38:56):
diverted funds meant for a Three Stooges movie towards what
they call improper executive entertainment, and the heirs to the
Three Stooges brand are demanding an investigation, possibly related as
well to a three Stooges merchandising deal they got screwed
on by the studio.

Speaker 4 (39:15):
One name that keeps.

Speaker 3 (39:16):
Bobbing back up is Charlie Sheen, who allegedly likes his
Heidi girls to dress as cheerleaders. Aside from not being
old enough to be her father, Charlie Sheen is completely
Heidi's type, possibly her male equal. Charlie Sheen is, once again,
maybe you're getting tired of this, a second generation child

(39:37):
of Hollywood. He and Heidi are very similar. They have
addictive personalities, a history of self destructive behavior, are incredibly charismatic,
and grew up in close knit bohemian families in Los Angeles.
Charlie Sheen's father, Martin Sheen born Ramon Antonio Harado Estevez,
is an anti war leftist and a famous actor. In

(40:00):
Demi morris autobiography, she talks about spending time at the
Estevez Sheen house when she was dating Charlie's brother Emilio,
and being captivated by the warmth and intelligence of the
family in contrast to her own incredibly fucked up and
fractured family dynamic. Charlie Sheen was born Carlos Irwin Estevez

(40:20):
in New York in nineteen sixty five, and shortly thereafter
the family moved to Malibu, just like Heidi. Charlie Sheen
also made Super eight movies with his friends and family.

Speaker 1 (40:31):
As a kid.

Speaker 3 (40:33):
His friends included fellow Santa Monica High students Rob Lowe
and Sean Penn. Like Heidi, he came from an upper class,
supportive family, but was drawn into the underworld of la
Charlie Sheen was brought into the industry by his father,
Martin Sheen. His first role was an uncredited appearance in
Terrence Malick's Badland, starring Martin. Charlie Sheen was part of

(40:57):
the eighties brat pack of young actors that also included
his brother Emilio Estevez. The Brat pack included several handsome,
burgeoning leading men whose screen persona was angry young man.
Sheen's breakout role was Red Dawn, the nineteen eighties red
scare fantasy about Russian forces descending on a small American

(41:19):
town that has to fight back. From then on, he
played the archetypal nineteen eighties alpha male in a series
of hit movies.

Speaker 4 (41:28):
As we learn.

Speaker 3 (41:29):
More about the producers of the eighties, you can see
why they felt like edgy, dark haired, leonine, sexually charismatic.
Charlie Sheen was a perfect Avatar for their idea of
the ideal man. In nineteen eighty five, Charlie Sheen stars
in a Penelope Spiris movie called The Boys next Door,

(41:50):
where he and Grease two star turned Rex Manning Maxwell
Caulfield play proto red pilled spree killers who set out
on a string of racist, misogynist, and homophobic murders around
la This movie is fucking spine chilling and should be
screened for It's also hilariously a total dry run for

(42:11):
Wayne's World in that a lot of the scenes are
focused on the two guys just driving around. Charlie Sheen
then appears in Ferris Bueller's Day Off as the scariest
hottest guy you have ever seen in your life, where
he hits on Ferris's sister played by Jennifer Gray, giving
maybe a lot of Jewish girls a complex for the

(42:31):
rest of their lives. But his critical breakthrough is in
Oliver Stone's Platoon. In nineteen eighty six. Oliver Stone uses
Charlie Sheen's lineage of Vietnam movies his father starred An
Apocalypse Now to make a movie drawing on his own
experiences as a Vietnam vet. Realizing that everything he'd been
told was a lie. Like The Boys next Door, Platoon

(42:55):
uses the all American looking Sheen to critique American man
hood to show how male bravery and valiance are propaganda
used a further American empire, how men are exploited by
war and lose their souls to it, and how the
empire's coffers depend on it. This is how Charlie Sheen

(43:16):
functioned as an eighties A list movie star, as a
sort of walking commentary on masculinity. He played fucked up,
charming eighties men in Wall Street, another Oliver Stone mega
hit and major League, which showed that he could also
do comedy. But when it came to his personal life,
Charlie Sheen did not stick to the script that other
people expected from him. Like the other brat pack bad boys,

(43:40):
he was legitimately a loose cannon. The same wild energy
that made him a star also made him a liability.
Charlie's issues surface early on in his career, but he
is carried by the sheer power of being a famous
white man through one scandal after another. He impregnates his
high school friend, who gives birth to their child in

(44:02):
nineteen ninety. He's engaged to the actress Kelly Preston when
he accidentally shoots her in the arm and the engagement
is called off. Charlie Sheen seems to have been a
troubled person from the beginning, which doesn't excuse or absolve
him from exhibiting a lot of awful, violent and abusive
behavior towards women over the years. Like many players in
this story, he's haunted by the demons of addiction. However,

(44:26):
him hiring and dating sex workers is not evidence that
he's fucked up. It's actually the most charming thing about him.
Despite being one of the most famous mainstream Hollywood leading men,
she in dates some leading ladies from the other local
film industry, the one in the San Fernando Valley.

Speaker 11 (44:46):
We had this relationship. It was fabulous, It was wonderful.
The hardest part was attorneys and managers and agents and
publicists and people saying do this, don't do that. Ginger's
going to ruin your career and that's not going to
be good for you. Lynn Allen, adult film star.

Speaker 3 (45:05):
After Kelly Preston, Charlie Sheen dates Ginger. Lynn Allen, a
legendary adult star who worked behind it in front of
the camera. Allan was as famous in porn in the
early eighties as Sheen was in Hollywood. Alan starred in
the hit adult film New Wave Hookers, which became controversial
when it was revealed that one of its stars, Tracy Lords,

(45:27):
had filmed it underage. It was re edited to exclude Lords,
whose scenes jeopardized the legality and legitimacy of the adult
film industry. Lords was edited off the cover and replaced
with ginger Lynn Allen. And maybe the dating pool among
actors is just really small, but I just wanted to
point out that George Clooney also dated both Kelly Preston

(45:47):
and ginger Lynn Allen. After appearing as herself in Bachelor
Party with Tom Hanks, Allan left porn in nineteen eighty
six to try and make the jump to mainstream film.
She appears in a small part in Young Guns Too
with Sheen and Svez. In nineteen ninety, ginger Lynn Allen
and Charlie Sheen.

Speaker 4 (46:07):
Enter rehab together. He writes her love letters.

Speaker 12 (46:13):
I'm sitting in bed writing to you from my penthouse
suite at the Hotel du Camp. The view up here
is incredible. I can see the Eiffel Tower Matt Rushmore,
Niagara Files, Riverfront Stadium, and I Can See You as well,
which happens to be my favorite side of all. Charlie Sheen.

Speaker 3 (46:35):
Actor Sheen also dated adult actress Heather Hunter, an aspiring
musician from the Bronx who was dancing at a club
when porn star Hyapacia Lee aka Vicki Lynch suggested Hunter
could make a lucrative career in adult films. Heather Hunter
is mentioned in at least as many rap songs as

(46:57):
Heidi Flies. She's in the video for Tupacs how Do
You Want It with fellow porn icons Angel Kelly and
Nina Hartley, and she is absolutely legendary as well as
one of the few black women who was able to
become an a list porn star in the very racist
porn industry of the eighties and nineties. Back to Heidi.

(47:17):
Heidi immediately denies to the La Times that she is
involved in prostitution, even though she already bragged about it
once to Sean Hubler, who didn't name her in print.
Lapd Captain Glenn Ackerman tells the press that Flice was
the target of a month's long investigation that showed she
was operating a highly sophisticated prostitution ring where a group

(47:38):
of high end call girls got paid fifteen hundred dollars
an hour in what Ackerman calls a milia of money
and well, shall we say power. One person who speaks
out immediately to deny that he has bought any sex
from Heidi is producer Robert Evans, a super producer of
the nineteen seventies behind movies like The Godfather. Evans is

(48:02):
now entering the twilight phase of his producing career.

Speaker 13 (48:07):
I'm the one guy in town who's never touched her
and never seen any of her girls, and yet I'm
the only one mentioned why. I don't know Robert Evans' producer.

Speaker 3 (48:20):
The many powerful men in Los Angeles who hired Heidi
and her girls start sweating bullets, worrying their names are
going to leak to the press. According to the book
Hit and Run, How John Peters and Peter Gouber Took
Sony for a Ride in Hollywood by Nancy Griffin and
Kim masters, yvon nauj and Heidi Flie are longtime Hollywood friends,

(48:42):
with Columbia Pictures president of Production, who is one of
the people most concerned he will get outed in the scandal.
One rumor starts circulating claiming that Steve Roth, one of
the producers of Colombia's huge recent bomb Last Action Hero,
was a friend of Heidi who hired her girls as
extras on the very overbudget film. Producer Robert Evans's name

(49:05):
also gets mentioned in connection with Heidi, which he immediately
and strenuously denies. Rumors circle that Paramount might use Heidigate
as an excuse to dump Evans, who produce seventies blockbusters
like The Godfather and The Sting before a cocaine conviction
in the nineteen eighties. Evans has been back at Paramount
for two years, but had decamped to Palm Springs to

(49:28):
work on his autobiography, The Kid Stays in the Picture,
neglecting his commitments to producing movies The Saint in the Phantom.

Speaker 13 (49:38):
Everything couldn't be on a more go level than it
is now. My relationship with Paramount has never been better.

Speaker 3 (49:47):
In addition to his possible connection with the Heidi scandal,
Evans has been connected to another scandal involving a company
called Axiom Entertainment defrauding private investors of two hundred million
dollars one point two million, of which allegedly went to Evans.
He's also already made one bomb for Paramount, the erotic

(50:07):
Thriller's Sliver, which had Basic Instincts star Sharon Stone and
screenwriter Joe ester Haass, but none of Basic Instinct's success.
Don Simpson calls Heidi and offers to pay off her
legal bills if she keeps his name out of it,
and she takes the money. In nineteen ninety three, Hollywood,
the greatest good eighties have supposedly given way to the

(50:30):
more minimalist nineties, where consumption is just as conspicuous, but
macrobiotic foods have replaced drugs. Hollywood's coke ears are supposedly waning,
as being a raging drug addict starts to be seen
as a liability, and everyone gets sober at the increasingly
upscale rehab facilities in Malibu, like promises becoming addicted to

(50:52):
expensive coffee instead of coke. But beneath the thin a
crew Linen Veneer of the early nineth vice still booms underground,
and Heidi's business hasn't slowed as the decade changed over,
not at all. Some agents even allegedly set up their
often married clients. With call girls to ensure they wouldn't

(51:16):
get caught with their pants down publicly cheating with a
random civilian fluozy who could sell her story to the tabloids.
In the early nineties, Hollywood claims to be cleaning house
of the sexism, racism, and hedonism that has plagued its
halls forever, but behind closed doors things haven't changed. Colombia

(51:36):
Pictures is still a boys club. One anonymous employee describes
it to the authors of Hit and Run like this quote.
When I think about Colombia, I think about all those
tiny little men in tiny little genes, high fiving each
other endlessly.

Speaker 4 (51:52):
I love that quote because I.

Speaker 3 (51:53):
Feel like it still applies to everything. Heidi and Evonnage
are regulars at Colombia Pictures own Michael Nathanson's holiday parties
and football game viewings at his house, where they supposedly
suck out like a sore thumb among the besuited executive
dirt bags, although that seems besides the point. This fuels
the speculation that Yvonne naj hooked Nathansen and friends up

(52:18):
with narcotics and Heidi girls to get ahead of the
Heidi Fly scandal, potentially naming him. Michael Nathanson checks into
a rehab facility in Marina del Rey, claiming he developed
an addiction to the painkiller Perkadan after a jogging accident.
But the war that Ivon Naj and Heidie Flies are
waging against each other will claim Michael Nathanson as its

(52:40):
first casualty in the press. When the Heidi Fly story
breaks in the public sphere, the first names to surface
are Nathansen and Nase, and Nathanson attempts to sue two
journalists working on the story for The Hollywood Reporter. The
New York Post runs blind items about a certain studio
being in hot water with Heidi, and the La Times

(53:01):
Prince story after story about the Heidi Fly scandal, but
no publication claims hard enough evidence to run any names.
By August, no Johns have come forward or been named,
and Heidi hasn't snitched. But this doesn't make the rich
Shawns any less paranoid.

Speaker 14 (53:20):
This rumor has gone to epic proportions, and it just
isn't true. He never had anything to do with this
woman and obviously never did anything improper at Columbia and
has no knowledge of anyone else at Columbia, who has
had any dealings with this woman? Anthony Pelicano, private investigator.

Speaker 6 (53:36):
You always want to be on the right side of
Anthony Pelicana.

Speaker 3 (53:43):
Michael Nathanson hires Anthony Pelicano, a private detective specializing in
Hollywood shakedowns.

Speaker 4 (53:50):
He hired him.

Speaker 3 (53:51):
Four months earlier, when the rumors first started circulating that
Nathanson had set up fake development deals as fronts for
buying sex and drugs. Pelicano advises Nathansen to issue a
public denial, even though his name hasn't come up in
the press. On August third, Nathansen goes on the record
through his lawyer, Howard Whitezman, saying he has no business

(54:11):
or personal relationship with Heidie Flies and has not done
anything that should cause concern on behalf of Columbia. Pictures
with his lawyer using some very unfortunate wording about putting
the rumors to bed. This brings out the Wolves to
report on his statement. This is the first concrete evidence
that some of the bigger Heidi rumors might be true,

(54:32):
and the rumor mill starts churning off the hook. Suddenly,
Nathanson's face is on the local news, associating himself and
Columbia Pictures with the Heidi Flic scandal. Anthony Pelicano is
another wild character, a scandal fixer for Hollywood people.

Speaker 4 (54:50):
He grew up with a.

Speaker 3 (54:50):
Single mom in Chicago and then came out West. Rich
people put him on retainer to run wire taps on
people they want monitored.

Speaker 4 (54:59):
Enemies, ex. Wives, etc.

Speaker 3 (55:02):
Anthony Pelicano knows everyone in Los Angeles and all of
their dirty secrets. He came to LA in the late
seventies and set up shop after helping John Dolorean, the
original seller of cars with suicide doors, fight charges of
cocaine distribution. The Nathanson story is the biggest Hollywood scandal

(55:22):
since David Begelman, who produced movies like Shampoo and Close
Encounters of the Third Kind, was discovered siphoning money from
Columbia Pictures. Flies supports Nathanson's claim that the two are
merely social friends. Now, Nathansen had not run the denial
statement by any of his studio bosses first, so while

(55:44):
Nathansen denies it vehemently, bank records show that he wrote
at least two personal checks to Yvonne nauj in nineteen
eighty and nineteen ninety, albeit for the relatively paltry amounts
of five hundred dollars and seven hundred and fifty dollars,
which just seem very low considering the rumors of Heidie's
girls commanding five thousand dollars for blow jobs at the peak.

(56:10):
When Heidie World returns the story of JJ the King
of Beavers and Cookie Orgad, the Israeli Ecstasy King Pan
of La.

Speaker 4 (56:41):
Welcome back to Heidie World.

Speaker 2 (56:48):
Hookers. They have no life. Their only friends are other hookers.
That's the club, and they live and die for the club.
But you have to accept the club for what it
is to be a hooker. You have to accept that
you're living a lie. You can only be yourself with
the other working girls. The rest, the rest is a lie.

Speaker 3 (57:13):
Heidi talks to attorney Robert Shapiro, soon to become famous
himself as a key player on OJ Simpson's defense team.
He tells Heidi that he heard Yvonne Naj is going down next.

Speaker 1 (57:28):
You're going to jail, you motherfucker.

Speaker 3 (57:33):
In nineteen ninety three, as the scandal was breaking, Naj
was trying to release Skinner, his low budget horror movie
that he directed about a serial killer named Dennis Skinner
who prays on skid Row Prostitutes starring Ted Raimi in
the title role. On August fourth, Yvonne naj and Julie
Connister get busted. Not only has Ivon Nage been running

(57:54):
his own escort ring with Connisseur, he's been taking a
percentage from every other working madam in town, Madame Alex
as she calls him, mister twenty percent for his cut
taking tendencies. Yvonne naj is parking his white Mercedes Benz
outside a cafe on Los Sienaga when the cops arrived
for him with his own pandering charges. Heidi is absolutely thrilled.

Speaker 1 (58:19):
I don't care what kind of drup on i'mon. I'm
going out tonight.

Speaker 10 (58:25):
The dynamic between Alex, Yvonne and Heidi is hard to describe.
They're like a bunch of jackals, all feeding off the
same carcass. Fred Klapp Lapd Detective.

Speaker 3 (58:39):
Yvonne Naje and Julie Connister were probably busted because of
a wire tap tape where they discussed specifics of their
plan to run an escort service and cut out Heidi.
That tape was provided to Heidi by an ex associate
of Yvonne naj An Israeli drug dealer named Jacob Orgad
who goes by the nickname Cookie. Allegedly Heidi may have

(59:00):
leaked it to the police in order to help pin
yvon Naje with a pandering charge. Jacob Cookie Orgad becomes
part of the public story in August when he's linked
to the death of a twenty two year old girl
named Lorie Dolan earlier that year in March, Lorie Dolan
died of an overdose of cocaine, morphine and codine at

(59:20):
Cookie's West Hollywood condo. Because he has a known connection
to Heidi, the press start speculating that Lorie Dolan was
one of Heidi's girls. Cookie Orgad is an Israeli ecstasy
kingpin who allegedly employs Hasidic Jewish teenagers as drug mules
and couriers. He also was part of an electronics store

(59:42):
called Jay and Jay Imports with a guy named Judah Alza.
Alza and Orgad dissolved the partnership, and Alza went on
to run a successful pager and electronics store called Jay
and Jay Beeper, whose billboards show him wearing a king's crown.
And robe surrounded by bikini girls. In one a lingerie

(01:00:03):
clad girl straddles a giant beeper.

Speaker 7 (01:00:07):
I'm JJ and I'm the King of Beepers JJ King
of Beepers aka Judah Alceat.

Speaker 3 (01:00:15):
Cookie Orgad was supposedly just a small time coke dealer
until Heidi Flies came in to buy a big screen
TV from him. One day, Cookie brought the TV to
Heidie's Tower Grove estate and from there he became part
of the operation, working as Heidi's new enforcer. Heidie told
everybody that Cookie was in masade, which he wasn't, but

(01:00:35):
it scared people into complying. Cookie also became Heidie's main
recruiter of new talent. He made himself useful and got
a kickback for recruits. Cookie Orgad moved up the ranks
of drug dealing as well, becoming a major player in
the burgeoning ecstasy trade. He moved out of his shitty
apartment into a swanky twelfth floor high rise in West Hollywood.

(01:01:00):
While Cookie or God might not have been Mosad, he
was looped in with some Israeli mob families who were
smuggling MDMA tablets from labs in the Netherlands. In Belgium
to Los Angeles, using a pre existing model they'd set
up to smuggle diamonds. This way, ecstasy tablets were sewn
into the shoulder pads of women's jackets and shipped overseas.

(01:01:23):
Hi Walk nine, an Israeli American racketeer from Van Nys,
and Cookie Orgad were both getting the ecstasy from the
same supplier, an Israeli mob boss known as ITSUK Big
Friend Abergil, sometimes called the Man from the South.

Speaker 1 (01:01:40):
I had a lot of enemies. Sometimes I needed to
find out something about a girl, and he'd helped me.

Speaker 3 (01:01:47):
Lorie Dolan was a young party girl from the San
Fernando Valley in many ways a carbon copy of Heidi
from a.

Speaker 4 (01:01:54):
Few years prior.

Speaker 3 (01:01:55):
Dolan waitressed at the Sagebrush canteena in Calabasas and started
running with a fast crowd that liked to go clubbing
and do hard drugs. On the night of her death,
Dolan went to a club that Heidi also frequented, called
Tattoo and called her dad, whose name is coincidentally the same.

Speaker 4 (01:02:11):
As Heidi's dad, Paul. She told Paul.

Speaker 3 (01:02:14):
Dolan she was going out late with friends, but would
be fine they went to Bar One next, which Cookie
co owned, and Cookie showered his guests with buckets of
expensive champagne. Then everyone went back to Cookie's place in
West Hollywood, where Lorie Dolan did the fatal cocaine cut
with heroin. Her so called friends freaked out when everyone

(01:02:35):
woke up hungover the next morning, except Lori, who didn't
wake up so they didn't take her to the er
until five pm that day, where she was pronounced brain Dad.
Three days later, her family took her off life support.
Then the connection between Cookie, Yvonne Naj and Heidi Flies
was reported, and suddenly Lorie Dolan was being dragged into

(01:02:56):
the Heidi scandal as well. The media loved this angle
because it played into their narrative that sex work led
to automatic ruin for anyone who so much as dabbles.
The LAPD even declared that the investigation would now look
into whether Lorie Dolan was a Heidi associate. The problem

(01:03:16):
was that it wasn't true. The only clear connection between
Heidi and Lourie Dolan was that they ran in overlapping circles,
frequented the same clubs, and bought drugs from the same dealer.
But the news cycle ran with the story anyway, because
everyone was now waiting with baited breath for more salacious
news to emerge from the Heidi news cyclone. Whether Lorie

(01:03:39):
Dolan was or wasn't a Heidi girl hardly mattered to
the La Times. They had already written the copy high
school girl gone bad, sucked into a world of drugs
and prostitution, leading right to death. Cookie bales town after
the story breaks, and JJ the Beeper King takes his
Beeper Empire to Las Vegas. After busting Yvonne and Julie Connister,

(01:04:03):
the cops also bust another westside escort service run by
two women named Thomasina Asformis and Alisha Radkey, in an
attempt to make a big show force of cracking down
on vice, particularly prostitution. After the embarrassment of Heidiflis running
her empire right under their complicit noses was made public,
LAPD's administrative vice Captain Glenn Ackerman says they are waging

(01:04:27):
a full scale war on organized commercial prostitution on LA's
West Side, adding there will be further shoes to fall,
a warning to some of the big money rustlers whose
names had not come out. Von Naj out on bail
for his own pandering charges, retaliates against Heidi by leaking
what he alleges is a stolen page from the Black

(01:04:48):
Book to the New York Post. It runs on August
sixth and introduces a couple of new names to the public.
It quote Barry with a phone number that leads to
producer Barry Josephson's off and a Canton, which is allegedly
probably Mark Canton, who did Last Action Hero. As head
of Columbia, Heidi tells the press that the page was

(01:05:10):
stolen from her against her will and doctored before going
to print. It's just an old calendar, she says.

Speaker 1 (01:05:18):
My battle isn't going to be in the media. My
battle is going to be in court.

Speaker 3 (01:05:25):
Columbia Pictures parent company Sony, gets dragged into the scandal.
Sony higher up, Michael Mickey Schulhoff, rounds up everyone powerful
at the company in his office one at a time
and tells them they'll be protected if they confess or
destroyed if they try to keep any information they have
about Heidifls and Colombia from him. Sony Columbia make no

(01:05:46):
public statement, but the story spreads through legitimate magazines as
well as tabloids like Wildfire. While the tabloids and newspapers
openly name Sony and Colombia Pictures as the center of
the Heidi Fly sex scandal stom the studio decides they
will attempt to just wait it out. Peter Goober, who

(01:06:06):
runs Sony, demands Nathanson's head on a platter. A previously
planned corporate retreat becomes a Sony brand strategizing session where
the decision comes down that they will demote Nathanson to
the do nothing job of vice president and appoint Lisa Henson,
a thirty three year old Warner Brothers executive who is
the daughter of legendary puppeteer Jim Henson, as the new

(01:06:28):
head of production at Columbia. This decision had supposedly been
in the works pre scandal, but the optics were clear.
Nathansen would be punished for sullying the studio's name and reputation,
and he would be replaced with a woman with clear
ties to a clean cut, family oriented brand, Jim Henson's muppets.

Speaker 4 (01:06:49):
The studio orders.

Speaker 3 (01:06:50):
An internal investigation to cut all the scandal tainted weight
dropping and blacklisting. Yvonne Naj just as Heidi had hoped
they would, even though his pandering charges actually stick. They
do a budget audit of recent films like Last Action Hero,
looking for suspicious expenditures. The public announcement is made that
Lisa Henson will replace Nathan Sen. According to Heidi, Barry, Josephson,

(01:07:15):
and Michael Nathansen were not the biggest culprits by any means.
They were punished to protect other people higher up at
Sony who were involved with Heidi. People like allegedly John Peters.

Speaker 1 (01:07:30):
Barry and Michael were fall guys big time. They were
both innocent, but they were practically the only ones who were,
and not just a Columbia at every studio.

Speaker 3 (01:07:40):
Heidi is out on bail awaiting her court hearing Monday.
She hires a lawyer named Anthony Brookleier More on him. Later,
her lawyer says Heidi has been flooded with offers for
book and screenplay deals while she awaits her first hearing,
there's a rumor that a rich Italian man wants to
buy Heidie's house from her. Newspapers make reference to leaked

(01:08:01):
recordings that have two high profile producers offering to pay
for Heidi's legal bills, but they never name the producers
in question. Heidi tells a reporter she'll sell her story
to Hollywood for a cool million. Anthony Pelicano continues to
deny that Nathanson paid flights for call girls, but admits
that Ivon Naje did once have a deal in nineteen

(01:08:23):
ninety two with Columbia for a movie with Brad Wyman
producing called Twice Seduced. Pelicano claims the development deal had
been cabashed and the movie put in turnaround. This would
mean that von Naje never received any money from the
studio at all, let alone money that would have been
in compensation for drugs and escort services.

Speaker 2 (01:08:45):
I have no involvement in any escort services, no gambling.
It's another out lie. These are vicious, vindictive people.

Speaker 3 (01:08:57):
Naj Is let out on a twenty five thousand dollars
bail and claims complete innocence. He says, other than a
nineteen ninety one book making charge, he pled no contests to.
He has a perfect angel who has never so much
as set foot outside the law. Heidi Flie is just
trying to drag him into her own dirty laundry. Madame

(01:09:17):
alex Is overjoyed that Heidi is suffering consequences and offers
to help the police.

Speaker 4 (01:09:24):
The tapes are going to be important. Anthony Brooklaer, attorney.

Speaker 3 (01:09:29):
In law, a private investigator, an FBI informant named Dan
Hanks has mysterious access to a tape of calls wiretapped
directly from Heidi's phone. Hanks says he thought he could
catch Heidi with someone famous and sell photos to one
of the tabloid news magazine shows like a Current Affair. Instead,

(01:09:51):
he ends up with these Heidi tapes of unknown origin.
Hanks claims that he didn't tap the calls himself, but
that they mentioned some prominent names. Some reporters here the tape,
but no one has the kahonas to actually publish the contents,
which may have been obtained extra legally. Heidi buys the
tape herself to use as part of her defense.

Speaker 1 (01:10:14):
There are some.

Speaker 3 (01:10:14):
Tidbits about these phantom tapes in a two thousand and
four book written by Andrew Whitebert called Insanity Chic in Babylon,
The Case against Celebrity. Now look the margins between like
TMZ and the far right are razor. Then I do
not vouch for anything Andrew Brhitbert says ever obviously, but

(01:10:37):
in this book, he claims that a tape existed of
Robert Evans and Heidi Flice talking about an underage girl
who Evans wanted to order from. Heidi, referred to in
the alleged recordings as.

Speaker 4 (01:10:48):
Quote the little Girl you.

Speaker 3 (01:10:51):
The book claims that Hanks bugged the recordings to sell
them to a tabloid, but then sold them to Heidi instead.
Some people think the cops bugging Heidi themselves, and that
Hanks was working with them or just hacked the feed.
It's obviously possible that Heidi was also bugging her own
clients in case she needed blackmail. The cops didn't find

(01:11:13):
the tape at Heidi's house during their police sting because
Heidi had cleverly hidden it in a VHS box for
Shirley Temple's nineteen thirty seven movie Heidi Well. Her famous
clients are eager to run away from her in public,
they all reach out to her behind the scenes. Heidi
hears from a laundry list of former clients, rock impresarios, financiers,

(01:11:36):
a list actors, producers, directors, and real estate heirs, all
of whom are eager to express feelty and frustration over
Heidie's turn in fortunes. All of them are trying their
hardest to stay on Heidi Flic's good side. Should she
be tempted to start rating out her powerful client, tele.

Speaker 15 (01:11:58):
I have warned her, you cannot mention John's, not even privately.
It ruins careers. Alex Fleming, Madam.

Speaker 3 (01:12:10):
A Heidie girl using a pseudonym, tells the La Times
she was recruited outside a check cashing office on Hollywood
Boulevard by a man claiming to be a photographer who
is actually a talent scout for Heidi. A year later,
the girl who goes by Karen in the story was
desperate to move out of her mom's apartment and called Heidi,
who sent her to London on assignment. Karen tells of

(01:12:33):
middle aged men and elderly chikhs who pay for her
company at fight nights in Vegas and steak dinners at Morton's.
She recalls being gifted to a famous young actor at
his birthday party whose name might rhyme with barley Bean.
Then she quits, But that doesn't fit the LAPDS narrative,
where prostitution is always dehumanizing and always life ruining. Another

(01:12:57):
name comes out of one of the girls who was
part of the Beverly Hilton bust, Brandy McClain. Brandy starts
talking to the press.

Speaker 1 (01:13:04):
Immediately.

Speaker 3 (01:13:07):
I realized it was illegal, but I never thought anything
could happen to me.

Speaker 4 (01:13:12):
Brandy McClain.

Speaker 3 (01:13:17):
Heidie's habit of spending more than she makes finally comes
around to get her, as she has no real assets
when she's arrested. Besides the house, most of the money
has seemingly gone towards drugs, clothes, and lavish partying at
the mansion where the rest of the money went. Also,
the Tower Grove mansion is technically owned by her father,
Paul Flice, who co signed. This brings Paul Flice, the

(01:13:42):
mild mannered pediatrician, into a burgeoning IRS investigation into Heidie's finances.

Speaker 1 (01:13:51):
My parents were very supportive and left real nice messages
on my answering machine, but I just told.

Speaker 5 (01:13:56):
Them to stay away.

Speaker 3 (01:14:00):
Stress of getting her father involved, letting down the girls
who trusted her, and the realization that she might really
be in big fucking trouble now causes Heidi to feel crushing, intense,
all encompassing guilt, but also anger at those who betrayed
her and fear at what might happen. Heidi has talked

(01:14:21):
her way all to the top, only to hit a
brick wall that she probably cannot talk her way out of.

Speaker 1 (01:14:30):
I've been bankrupted, I have no money none.

Speaker 3 (01:14:37):
Heidie's streams of income have been cut off at the
moment that she suddenly needs a robust amount of savings
to pay for lawyers. But Heidie Flis's name and brand
have become cultural currency. Her name now more than ever,
carries cachet, but her life is hell. Four of her

(01:14:57):
employees have flipped on her after the bust, ratting her.

Speaker 4 (01:15:00):
Out to the cops.

Speaker 3 (01:15:02):
Late night hosts and magazine headlines make every conceivable. Heidie
pun Heidi Hoe jokes about Wendy Washerstein's play The Heidi Chronicles,
which was coincidentally running in La rep Theaters at the
time the Heidi fly story broke, leading me personally to
wrongly believe it was a play about Heidi Flas until
I finally read it and found out it's about feminism
in the seventies and eighties. Heidi is saturating the news cite,

(01:15:27):
goal and the glamorous high rolling myth of the Heidi
Girls has surpassed even the reality, but Heidi Fleiss herself.

Speaker 4 (01:15:36):
Isn't making any money off of it yet.

Speaker 3 (01:15:53):
Next time on Heidi World, Heidi's high end escort empire
comes crashing down around her in front of the entire
world when the Los Angeles and Beverly Hills police departments
decide to team up to make a big show of
busting her because she refuses to play the game and
bribe them