‘So who’s the pimp? Cyrus Vance? Sounds like it to me.’ —Norman Pattis, lawyer for Madam Anna Gristina, speaking of the Manhattan DA (WireImage)
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She went out with a bang.
Notorious Hockey Mom Madam Anna Gristina turned herself in yesterday for what was essentially a no-jail sentencing, then joined her lawyer in taking a parting shot at Manhattan State Supreme Court prosecutors — by calling District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., a pimp.
“It takes one to know one,” defense lawyer Norman Pattis said when reporters asked Gristina’s reaction to statements by the DA’s office that she is nothing but a pimp who rented women’s bodies for profit.
“Look at the DA’s office itself!” Gristina agreed.
“She pled out to a sting operation by one cop — who paid $2,000 in taxpayers money to watch two women engage in cunnilingus,” Pattis added, referring to an undercover setup at Gristina’s East 78th Street brothel last summer.
“So who’s the pimp? Cyrus Vance?” he said. “Sounds like it to me.”
Gristina, a Scotland-born mother of four who rescues unwanted pet pigs on her 200-acre farm in upstate Monroe, had been promised a six-month sentence after pleading guilty in September to felony prostitution.
Official corruption prosecutors, relying in large part on Gristina’s own wiretapped boasts, initially fueled a media sensation by claiming Gristina ran a multimillion-dollar escort service with law-enforcement protection. Ultimately, despite a five-year investigation and with at least four people cooperating against her, they were only able to entrap her in a single hooker-booking.
She was taken into custody yesterday for only 45 minutes, the time correction officials needed to confirm that she has already served four months in jail and is entitled to two months off her sentence for good behavior.
Once sprung, her lawyer slammed Gristina’s beautiful strawberry-blonde accused accomplice madam, Jaynie Mae Baker, of continuing to operate, or in his words, “put the ass in assignation,” a charge Baker’s defense lawyer, Robert Gottlieb, called, “bizarre, ludicrous, absurd.”
“The system is more corrupt than the Mafia,” Gristina said when asked what she’s learned from her trip through the criminal justice system.
“I wish we would have tried this case, and that he had tried it himself, personally,” her lawyer added of the DA. “I think he would be pulling my shoe out of his ass.”
“There is nothing glamorous about prostitution,” Vance spokeswoman Erin Duggan said in the written media statement that was blasted by Gristina and her lawyer.
“Anna Gristina rented women’s bodies for profit, which makes her a pimp. That also makes her a felon, and the court has now issued that judgment,” Duggan wrote. “She has no one to blame but herself for her decisions.”