"He would throw it in my face a lot," she says of her prostitution, "but he had no problem doing my drugs. We were no longer parents. We were no longer anything."
But she still had her son, Liam.
"There were times where Kristen [Baby] would go out and I would sit in the car with my son," she says. "I would have him out in my car on Tonnelle Avenue. I thought I was a good mom 'cause I would wait in the car. She would go out and she would come back and wait in the car for me to come back with money."
She began to leave Liam with his father at night while she worked the streets.
Cops, she said, were regular customers, although most refused to pay. Some threatened to arrest her if she did not give them unpaid sex.
"The first time I ever got raped actually was by a cop in Elizabeth," she says. "He wanted to 'trick off,' which is normal for cops."
"They would get you in the car because they would act like they were arresting you," she says...
"...and then once they got you in the car they would tell you, 'Oh well, if you blow me I'll let you go.' And you get smart after a while. I mean after a while I would let them take me to jail because they can't -- what are they gonna say? There's nothing on videotape. What are they gonna say? They can't. It takes you a while to learn this type of stuff."
"We were in the back of the police car," she says of her first rape...
"He had paid me. Then he punched me in the face and he took the money back. He pulled out his gun and told me I was gonna do whatever he told me to do. He stuck his gun up my vagina. He told me he was gonna pull the trigger if I didn't do what he said. He wanted to treat me like a piece of sh*t. Ya know, he called me a bunch of names. He made me call myself a bunch of names -- a dirty prostitute. At one point he made me say that I had AIDS. Yeah."The only cop I remember his name from down there was a Jersey City cop, we called him Barney, I don't know his real name. He looked like Barney [Rubble, the cartoon character]. He was my first prostitution arrest. And the only reason he arrested me was that I was standing next to Kristen. And she was known. When they brought us in, it was her 39th prostitution arrest. They [police officers] were clapping when they brought her in. Everybody knew who she was."
On a good night Pagano made $600 to $700. On a bad night she made $100. "I made the best money in snow and rain," she says.
Some customers wanted to indulge in fetishes. "I've put diapers on guys," she says. Others wanted to put on makeup and women's clothes.
She often injected herself with heroin or smoked crack as soon as she and a client got into a hotel room. "A lot of them would do it [take drugs] with you," she says. "A lot of them pay you to get their drugs for them."
She learned to immediately open the glove compartment to get the name and address of the driver when she entered a vehicle. She made more money by threatening to call the customer's wife.
She also learned what to avoid. "In Jersey City there's a street when you go down Tonnelle Avenue," she says. "I think it's called Industrial Way [probably Industrial Drive]. It's industrial parks. You never, ever, ever want to go down there. And you always knew you were in trouble if you got in a car with a guy and he started driving that way. I've jumped out of many cars. 'Cause as soon as you saw you were driving down that street, you knew you were gonna get raped."
She endured for nine months. She begged her boyfriend to help her get off the streets. He decided to rob a bank. He entered a bank in Jersey City in June 2010 with a backpack and a note that said he had a bomb. He did not cover his face. He took $578 from a teller.
"I was driving on the Turnpike from our house down to Jersey City and I saw a big sign 'FBI wanted' with a picture of my son's father," she says. "And I pulled over on the side of the road and lost my mind."
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