US News

HOW CO-ED BEGAN REIGN AT EMPERORS

A pal of the petite madam who ran the Emperors Club VIP has offered intimate details of how the pretty 23-year-old allegedly hooked up with her much older boyfriend to launch the high-end escort service that brought down the state’s governor.

It was the summer of 2003 when Cecil Suwal, on a break from studying advertising at the University of Miami, answered a seemingly innocuous job posting by Mark Brener in a free weekly New York paper, Mehal Darji, 25, told The Post yesterday.

From then on, Suwal, an 18-year-old prep-school grad at the time, threw herself into her work and a sexual relationship with the then-57-year-old Brener – leaving behind a boyfriend and her education for the controlling older man.

An outgoing, spunky and wild teen, Suwal returned to school in Miami with a new zest for work that she’d learned from Brener – and a new tattoo that drove away her college beau.

“Cecil got the name ‘Mark’ tattooed near her private parts,” Darji said, adding that Suwal’s ex-boyfriend was a “nice guy” and was “very angry.”

“She was into photography and when she came back to Miami, she was showing me all her work. She would take photographs of models,” said Darji, who remembered looking at the Emperors Club VIP Web site.

Soon Brener, an Israeli widower who previously worked as a financial consultant, began visiting Suwal in Miami.

“Mark seemed like a control freak,” said Darji, who saw the pair approximately 12 times in Miami and later New York. “Personally, I didn’t like him. My friends didn’t like him.”

“She was saying Mark has this great idea of creating this upscale service, modeling company,” said the pal, who noticed fees climbed to thousands of dollars an hour.

“I said, ‘If this is escort, you know you can get in trouble,’ ” Darji said. “She said, ‘It’s not sex, it’s professional services.’ ”

By the end of 2004, Suwal dropped out of college and returned to live with Brener in an apartment in Cliffside Park, NJ, and Darji visited her several times up until 2006, witnessing increasingly bizarre behavior.

“Mark was very health-conscious. He made her quit smoking. He had to know what she does, where she goes, where she is at any time,” said Darji, recalling that Suwal often lied.

“She always had three phones. All of a sudden she’d answer and put on a different personality and say, ‘This is Katie,’ or whatever,” Darji said. “She seemed very tense and nervous and I guess always on the guard of what she said.”

kati.cornell@nypost.com