Exotic dancer pleads guilty in extortion

They met one night two years ago when she was a dancer at the Philadelphia gentlemen's club Delilah's; he was a businessman from Gladwyne.

Before long, slender Ngoc Tran Vo and Harry Pollack were meeting regularly at the Sofitel, the posh hotel on 17th Street just off Rittenhouse Square.

Things went sour when Vo, 26, of the Northeast, began trying to extort money from Pollack with sex tapes she had made of them without his knowledge.

He called the cops.

She was arrested in August and charged with attempting to commit extortion, invasion of privacy for viewing or photographing a person without consent, theft and possession of an instrument of crime.

Yesterday, Vo entered a guilty plea in Common Pleas Court on the extortion count.

The District Attorney's Office agreed not to prosecute her on the invasion-of-privacy charge. The two other charges were dropped after a preliminary hearing in September.

Judge Roxanne Covington sentenced Vo to five years' probation, 150 hours of community service and ordered her to stay away from Pollack and to destroy the incriminating electronic devices.

Vo, alone in court and dressed in a long, tan, cable-knit cardigan, blue jeans and light-colored boots, offered to take a reporter to McDonald's if he did not write about her case.

"Don't I have some say in this?" she asked.

She said she still works off and on at Delilah's, on Spring Garden Street near Front.

That is not true, the club's director of marketing said yesterday.

"She was terminated upon knowledge of this case and the situation," Buffy Varanese said of Vo. That would have been on Oct. 3, she said.

Varanese described Vo as an entertainer who worked at Delilah's but who was not an employee of the establishment.