IF IT’S A-ROCKIN’…The DA says this sublet was used by a hooker ring run by Anna Gristina, whose arrest made The Post’s front page Wednesday. Gristina says it was just a crash pad. (
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It wasn’t just Anna Gristina’s girls who were giving the brothel bedsprings a workout.
The alleged hockey-mom madam — who prosecutors claim was using the $600-a-month sublet on East 78th Street for her high-end operation — said she only lent the pad to a multitude of mistresses who used the home as a crash pad to have secret sex with their filthy-rich sugar daddies.
“A lot of people have keys to that place,” Gristina, 44, said during Thursday’s exclusive jailhouse interview with The Post from Rikers Island, where she is being held in lieu of $2 million bond.
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Gristina admitted she has rented the place out to friends who cheat on their beaus and use it to “entertain their sugar daddies, girls who have boyfriends or husbands who need a place to go where they can be with these other men.”
But she completely denied ever running a hooker operation out of that apartment.
Gristina claimed the cheating beauties were likely the parade of people that neighbors have said they’ve witnessed coming and going from the apartment at all hours.
“That’s probably who they’re seeing — I don’t know,” Gristina said. “But I do let girls use it.”
The apartment was also a crash pad for sultry out-of-towners — many of them former models — who would stay at the apartment for weeks at a time, sources said.
On Rikers Island, Gristina admitted that “friends” from other cities were often allowed to use it as their New York base in exchange for cash.
“We let friends use it — people who come to New York, who need a place to stay. They pay us and we let them use it,” she said.
Gristina says she’s stunned that prosecutors claim that she — or anyone — would run a high-end hooker ring out of the tiny pad.
“Have you seen it? It’s hardly luxurious. It’s a small place that we’ve had for five or six years,” she said.
Those familiar with Gristina’s operation said that using a seedy in-call apartment to service her high-end clients would be out of character.
Gristina, who lives nearly two hours from the apartment in upstate Monroe, rarely came into New York City, and when she did, the mother of four was shadowed in 2001 by a burly bodyguard who was actually a moonlighting NYPD detective.
Sylvan “Sly” Francis worked for Gristina when he was also assigned to the Manhattan district attorney’s squad assisting prosecutors with investigations.
That same DA’s Office spent hours grilling Gristina last week, digging for dirt on 10 New York City power brokers.
Additional reporting by Frank Rosario