'Hustlers': The Story Behind the Headlines

“Hustlers,” a movie about that scandal starring Jennifer Lopez and Cardi B, opened in theaters Friday. It is based on a 2015 New York magazine story about the women and their exploits. But long before that, the case was a subject of fascination among New York’s news media, largely because it seemed so improbable.

It started when a strip club sued a cardiologist.

“‘I was drugged’: Doctor refuses to pay $135K strip club bill,” blared a headline in The New York Post on April 22, 2014. That doctor, Zyad Younan, a cardiologist who lived in New Jersey, was sued by Scores, a strip club in Chelsea, which accused him of not paying $135,000 charged to his American Express card. The lawsuit said that the doctor spent tens of thousands of dollars in late 2013 on tips for dancers and room rentals during several visits to the club.

Younan claimed that he was either drugged or not there. Scores said it had videotape of him with several women. “This happens every once in awhile,” a representative for Scores told The Post. “People get out of control with their credit cards.”

Even by tabloid standards, the story seemed fantastical. The next day, The New York Daily News followed, with more salacious details from more unnamed sources.

But the tabloids were onto something. Two months later, The New York Times reported about an indictment unsealed in state Supreme Court in Manhattan detailing the episode and more. It recounted accusations of a criminal ring of women who, according to the indictment, drugged men, brought them to strip clubs and racked up bills on their credit cards.

Investigators from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the New York Police Department arrested four women — Samantha Barbash, Roselyn Keo, Karina Pascucci and Marsi Rosen — in the scheme. The women were accused of taking $200,000 from the men, which included Younan, as well as a banker, a hedge fund executive and a real estate lawyer.

According to the indictment, the women would flirt with men in upscale bars, exchange telephone numbers and arrange to meet a few days later at a restaurant or bar, where they would slip tranquilizers and narcotics into the men’s drinks. Once the men were woozy, the women would bring them to Scores or Roadhouse Gentlemen’s Club in Queens, and rack up tens of thousands of dollars in tips and dance money, it said.

Prosecutors said the women also received cash from the clubs to bring the men in. But the men could not recall having been there. In October 2014, The Daily News reported that two of the women had been offered plea deals.

Nothing was decided then, though. Instead, it would take more than a year, or longer in some cases, for the women to reach agreements with prosecutors. In October 2015, Rosen and Pascucci, who helped bring men to Scores, pleaded guilty to grand larceny and conspiracy. The syndicated show “Crime Watch Daily” aired an interview with Pascucci, who said she was given five years’ probation and 16 weekends in Rikers Island.

In December 2015, all four women were interviewed by Jessica Pressler for New York magazine in what most consider the definitive account of the crimes.

“Here’s a modern Robin Hood story for you,” read the story’s headline. “A few strippers who stole from the (mostly) rich, (usually) disgusting, (in their minds) pathetic men and gave to, well, themselves.” In the story, Pressler explored the ambition and hardscrabble lives of the four women.

She explained, too, how they got caught.

One man taped a conversation with one of the women, who confessed to drugging him. The man gave the tape to police. Pressler described, too, the impact of the scheme on the victims. One of them, Fred, was fired from his job because the women charged his corporate credit card. He got a new job but was fired again, she wrote, after his name was reported to an agency that tracked white-collar crime.

Rosen and Pascucci were sentenced in 2016. (Rosen was given the same sentence as Pascucci.) Barbash would later be given five years’ probation, according to news reports.

Keo was given no jail time and is touting a memoir, “The Sophisticated Hustler,” on her website. Barbash is writing one, too, according to her Instagram account. An excerpt was recently published in The New York Post.

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