During the 1980s and ’90s, Americans let their fingers do the walking — and then some.
It was the era of phone sex: 1-900 numbers that horndogs called, paying $4 or $5 a minute, to play out their fantasies with a real, live woman on the other end of the line.
Not that you necessarily got what you imagined. Callers could request their dream girl — a busty blonde or a leather-loving brunette, for example. What they didn’t know was that phone-sex operators, tipped off seconds before the calls began, portrayed themselves to match the requests. That skinny redhead with a taste for spanking might actually be an earth mother with mousy hair, but the customers never knew that.
“I would have a vibrator so they could hear it,” said one of the phone women on the new podcast “Operator,” which chronicles the rise and fall of American TelNet (ATN), the big daddy of the phone sex world. “And you wouldn’t believe the fetishes. One guy wanted to hear me laugh. I’d laugh for an hour. Other guys would want to hear me fart. I’d ask how they like it.”
On a good Friday night, ATN processed up to $2 million in calls. “Operator” explores how an ex-con, a strip club owner and a computer nerd were able to leverage aural sex into ATN’s billion-dollar business.
It goes back to the 1970s and Mike Pardes, a New York City nightclub owner who spend nine months in Rikers after working as a fence for the mafia.
After getting out in the late 1970s, Pardes headed down to South Florida and got into the telecommunications business, which was suddenly booming due to the 1982 federally-mandated breakup of the Bell System’s industry monopoly.
That’s when he stumbled across the burgeoning world of 1-900 numbers. At that point, it was mostly the province of horoscopes, weather reports and Major League Baseball scores — customers paid a couple bucks to call for info. But then Pardes encountered a fellow entrepreneur, called “Richard” in the podcast, selling live psychotherapy via telephone.
“Richard had a problem: Most of the callers were men requesting psychiatrists with large breasts,” Mike Connors, who co-created and wrote “Operator” (along with host Tina Horn) told The Post.
Pardes saw an opportunity to create a company that would help these men, well, find relief. From his years in the nightclub business, which led him to dabble in the world of swinging, according to Daryl Freimark, co-creator and executive producer of the podcast. “He had an inside knowledge of people’s sexual taste and knew he could blow this up.”
In 1990, he founded ATN.
“Pardes looked at himself as a businessman,” said Freimark. “He liked to say that wanted to run his company like General Motors.
The heart of the company was the hundreds of women working around the clock and offering sexual relief to horndogs across the country. “At the peak,” said Connors, “there were 500 or 600 people working out of a converted Toys ‘R’ Us warehouse in Miami. In a bid to liven the atmosphere, beanbag chairs were brought in and ceiling monitors silently played porno films.
To keep up with demand, Pardes had roped in Michael Self, a Fort Lauderdale tech nerd he found running a strip-mall computer store. For $20,000, Self created an elaborate and ground-breaking phone system that handled billing and allowed callers to press 1 for dominatrix, 2 for teachers’ pet, etc.
“Most of the callers were men requesting psychiatrists with large breasts.”
Mike Connors, co-creator of “Operator”
The ATN women were all business. Their incomes were based on “hang time” — how long a caller could be kept on the line.
But the women discovered a way to click on the phone’s receiver and trick the system into inflating hang time. Word reached Self and he wrote software that caught offenders in the act. Whenever an operator was detected “flash hooking,” as the practice came to be called, a recording of Self’s voice announced: “You’re busted, bitch.”
Pardes struck deals with Playboy, Hustler and vanity-number operations like 1-900- BIG-TITS, which got routed into the warehouse. Calls were coming in non-stop at $3.99 to $5.99 a minute. “Pardes liked to say, I made money while I was sleeping,’” Connors said.
The desire for phone sex was so great, nothing could stop it — not even Hurricane Andrew. When the storm tore through Southern Florida, knocking out power, in 1992, ATN’s switchboard went silent and the lights shut off.
“But,” Michael Self recalls in the podcast, “we noticed houses across the street with power.”
Pardes sprung into action, offering neighbors a couple hundred dollars each for access to their electricity. Extension cords snaked from homes where families were sharing meals and into the warehouse, where the operators kept customers talking about their dirtiest desires, hurricane be damned.
Meanwhile, Pardes — who adopted the nickname the Telephone Pimp — enjoyed the rewards of America’s horniness.“
Self was making around $300,000 per year; Mike was making $500,000,” said Freimark. (Self told The Post that, with dividends factored in, “It was millions per year for me and tens of millions for Mike.”) “Mike bought a yacht; Self bought a helicopter. They both resided in huge houses.”
ATN executives kept bars in their offices, snorted cocaine, and wined and dined with porn magnates like Larry Flynt. Not that most of them bragged about it in public.
“Executives distanced themselves from the fact that they made money by selling phone sex,” said Connors. “They told friends and family, ‘Oh, yeah, I work in telecommunications.”
But by the mid-1990s, their work was becoming increasingly public. ABC’s “20/20” did an expose on the business that rankled Self and thrilled Pardes. “He loved attention,” said Connors. “Self recognized that it could hurt them.”
He was right: government agencies and the religious right began rallying against phone-sex operations. It got to the point where phone companies were monitoring 1-900 sex calls to make sure they were being kept clean. Operators complied by describing the sucking of hard lollipops and licking of juicy peaches.
And then there was the problem of the customers — described in the podcast as “horny dads” — who would deny ever having called 1-900-HOT-SLUTS (which is how it could appear on phone bills) and refuse to pay the toll fees.
Self came up with a solution: “Guys called in, received collect calls back [from ATN], and were billed for an easily explained collect call,” said Freimark. “Self said that the collect call gambit allowed [ATN] to corner the market in phone sex, even as competition grew.”
But then the FTC figured out that the collect calls were being used to get around people wanting to block sex calls from their phones. ATN was hit with a $2.5 million fine and collect sex calls were shut down.
Meanwhile, turmoil was stirring within the company. “Self’s discomfort with being in the phone-sex business increased,” said Connors. “He wanted to take his technology and create a mainstream call-center marketed to outside companies. He got Pardes and Ted Liebowitz [an investor in ATN] to invest $7 million in it.”
The call center flopped miserably. “It hemorrhaged money and Pardes pulled the plug on it,” said Freimark. “That was when Self decided to betray his father figure.”
Self approached Liebowitz and agreed to give Leibowitz his voting shares in exchange for keeping the call center going.“
Ted [took control] but then he saw the call-center accounting books and betrayed Self by shutting it down,” said Connors.
ATN continued for a while longer but dissolved in 2003 — a relic of a different era. “Making people for pay-old fashioned phone calls,” said Connors, “you couldn’t keep up with free porn on the Internet.”
