Brothel (21 page)

Conforte was finally brought down by the most commonplace of crimes: tax evasion. From the beginning, he had evaded paying taxes, soon attracting the IRS’s attention and
ultimately bogging down the courts with appeals of his convictions for tax evasion. When his appeals finally ran out, Conforte fled to Brazil to avoid imprisonment. He returned in 1983 as part of a federal plea bargain to testify against his former attorney, U.S. District Judge Harry Claiborne; Conforte claimed that Claiborne accepted an $85,000 bribe from him.

But Conforte’s problems with the IRS weren’t over. They came to a head in 1990 when he purposely defaulted on his monthly interest payments on the IRS’s tax liability, and the IRS seized Mustang Ranch. The tax agency briefly considered running the brothel, but decided to sell it after the federal government became the butt of late-night television one-liners, with jokes poking fun at “Uncle Sam the pimp.” When the property sold at auction for $1.49 million to a Victor Perry—who happened, not coincidentally, to be the brother of Conforte’s personal lawyer—Conforte was hired as a consultant to oversee day-to-day operations. In 1991, he announced his retirement and once again fled the country to avoid further charges of tax evasion. (As of 2002, Conforte remains a fugitive, hiding out in South America. He even missed his wife Sally’s funeral in 1993.)

But even as a fugitive, Conforte was by no means out of the picture. George received static-filled telephone calls from him at all hours; Conforte usually used a phone card and called from a pay phone to avoid having his exact whereabouts traced. Occasionally, George held the receiver up to my ear so I could hear Conforte’s husky Mafioso-like voice ranting about the newest injustice obstructing his return to America.
Mostly, Conforte wanted to hear news about Mustang. He also liked to huff and puff and bark orders for George and other old friends to carry out. When he was overtaxed by Conforte’s incessant demands, George would avoid his calls for a couple of days.
^*

Conforte’s exile came at a time when the industry was witnessing the emergence of a new breed of owners, more conventional businessmen who knew that political action contributions and lobbying efforts were all part of the game. But these new owners also posed dangers to the industry, as Conforte had once prophesied before his flight. When George first signed on as the brothels’ lobbyist, Conforte took him aside to warn, “The one thing you’ve got to know is we’ve got a lot of squares getting into the business. They’ve got to understand that we’re not selling cough drops, we’re selling pussy. A lot of what works when you’re selling cough drops doesn’t work in our business.” Still, neophytes could make a success.

Russ Reade was a case in point. A biology and sociology teacher at a small high school in northern California, Reade had burned out over his fifteen-year career, frustrated by the low pay and inadequate spending on department supplies. An advertisement in
The Wall Street Journal
in 1982, sandwiched between brokerage ads and stock quotes, attracted him and his business partner. It read: “Good cash flow, legal in Nevada.”

All Reade knew about Nevada brothels came from a visit to Conforte’s Wadsworth brothel in the early 1960s with a group of football players from the University of Nevada–Reno who were intent on recruiting Reade from Santa Rosa Junior College. “They wanted me to see some of the perks of living in Nevada. I was standoffish. I was too concerned about venereal disease. Condoms were not required then.”

Reade and his partner spent six months doing research before buying the advertised brothel, the Chicken Ranch, for $1.25 million. (Today, brothel price tags vary from $200,000 to $4 million.) Although it was the closest brothel to Vegas, the Chicken Ranch was still a good distance away, fifty-five miles away, to be exact, outside the Nye County town of Pahrump. More remote than the Mustang, the Chicken Ranch drew fewer customers per day but made up for it because they were big spenders. The day I visited, women were turning one $1,000 trick after another. (Mustang parties averaged about $350.) The cab ride from Vegas alone cost over $200, so fewer barflies wasted prostitutes’ time.

Reade’s departure from teaching hadn’t exactly been seamless. When he disclosed his intentions to colleagues—he had asked for a leave of absence, in case his new career didn’t work out—the school board threatened to fire him and revoke his teaching certificate. His unusual career change made the
San Francisco Chronicle
, and the school superintendent became enraged and asked Reade what sort of role model he thought he was being for children. But Reade had always been a beloved teacher, and nearly two-thirds of the students signed
a petition expressing their support. They presented it to the school board under the name “The Immoral Majority.”

Sixteen years later, Reade was now fifty-eight years old, a fit man with salt-and-pepper hair and a Tom Selleck mustache; he still looked more like an all-American high school football star–turned–teacher than a brothel owner. He doubted whether any PTA would allow him to teach again, but he professed no regrets, having found an occupation that tripled his income.

Reade came to his new profession brimming with excitement and full of innovative ideas; he quickly proved himself to be cut from a different cloth than old-time brothel owners. Aware of the troubles Conforte and other owners had had with the IRS, Reade immediately sought counsel from first-rate accountants on how best to handle his finances in an aboveboard way. Unlike his predecessor, Walter Plankington—who, some rumored, kept two sets of books: one for the IRS, in which he reported annually grossing $150,000–$200,000, and one for himself, in which he recorded grossing $500,000–$1,000,000—Reade had every intention of keeping things legal. He brought in financial planners, tax counselors, and investment counselors to teach the prostitutes about tax planning and investment when he realized that less than 15 percent of them saved or invested any of their income. “I hope they can educate themselves and invest wisely so they can protect themselves past their prime years,” said Reade. “I guess once a teacher, always a teacher.”

Reade did admit to making some classic mistakes as a
novice. Brothel owners are infamous for taking advantage of their position and becoming involved with the women, generally without paying them. Although he initially resisted, Reade said, he gave in to temptation when some of the prostitutes took offense at his rebuffs. Because owner-prostitute relations were so common in the business, he said, Chicken Ranch prostitutes interpreted his refusal as a slight. Did Reade think he was better than they? After becoming involved with some of the women over the course of several months, Reade forced himself to go cold turkey because he realized that his behavior could cost him the respect of his staff as well as of other prostitutes.

When George approached the new Chicken Ranch owner to recruit him into the NBA, Reade jumped at the chance and even agreed to act as president. Still filled with the enthusiasm of a relative newcomer, he suggested to his colleagues that they hire a public relations firm. He hoped to market the brothels as legitimate businesses that contributed to Nevada’s economic vitality and protected the public’s health and safety. “I really tried to get all these renegade brothel operators to work together to protect the industry. The media constantly denigrated us, and nobody ever bothered to counter their arguments. When were we going to finally stand up and have official answers instead of no answers at all? We needed a nice, favorable report about the industry that we could send out anytime anybody called us up.” When Reade proposed that each owner chip in $25,000 to cover a PR firm’s fees, however, no one wanted to participate. Old-timers told him the brothels needed
“to stay low in the bush.” In the end, Reade and his partner alone financed the production of a polished information package, which they sent out to law enforcement officers, prosecutors, health agencies, and legislators.

But it was only a matter of time before Reade came to agree with other owners that it was better for the brothels to keep a low profile. After appearing on many call-in radio shows and television talk shows, from Dr. Ruth to
Donahue
and
Larry King Live
, in an effort to inform the public about Nevada’s brothels, Reade finally accepted that these programs didn’t care about facts, only sensation. “I thought that logically presenting what the brothels were about and what they accomplished would carry some weight and make points,” said Reade. “But people had already made up their minds in the majority of cases and logic didn’t crack the closed mind. People just wanted to be titillated. I decided to quit being a part of that because it didn’t serve any purpose.”

Today, Reade shies away from publicity. He wasn’t even interested when George suggested that, given the pervasive, suggestive advertising of Vegas and Reno’s strip joints and gentlemen’s clubs, the NBA should challenge the ban on brothel advertising. He told George he didn’t want to rock the legislative boat. Instead, Reade would continue his own discreet advertising campaign, which entailed educating Vegas cabdrivers about the health benefits of brothels in the hope that they would pass the information on to their passengers. He distributed to taxi drivers a flier entitled “Your Party Will Appreciate Knowing These Facts …,” which cited an
Associated Press article about the absence of HIV infection in the brothels. Finally, Reade pushed Chicken Ranch souvenirs, giving women a commission for selling their customers brothel T-shirts and other mementos. “The girls make more than I do. But the whole idea is to get the shirts out there without ruffling too many feathers in the process.”

In contrast, Dennis Hof didn’t care how many feathers he ruffled with his publicity stunts. Hof, fifty-three, a former condominium time-share developer and brothel customer, owns two brothels in Lyon County, Moonlite Bunny Ranch and Miss Kitty’s. He has been in the business a little more than seven years but has already gained notoriety on par with Conforte’s. In January 1998, he hired John Wayne Bobbitt, of severed-penis fame, to tend bar at the Moonlite and drive its limousine. That same year, he began hiring porn stars like Sunset Thomas, Samantha Strong, and Laurie Holmes as brothel prostitutes, with minimums of $1,000. Hof’s newest PR concept was to film XXX-rated films on location at the Moonlite. He also had plans to add a 100,000-square-foot adult bookstore and go in on an Internet venture with
Hustler
magazine mogul Larry Flynt.

According to George Flint, owners like Hof, who wanted to mass-market the brothels, threatened the entire industry. “You’re witnessing the fragmentation of the Brothel Association as it’s been,” he told me the day he learned Hof had blitzed the media, from
Hard Copy
to
The Howard Stern Show
, with boasts that his business had improved 20 percent because of Viagra. “Dennis Hof is a very aggressive businessman and promoter, and very naïve about the tenuousness of
the business and the required delicacy of handling certain things. Leave the industry up to owners like Dennis Hof and you won’t have any organization or industry in eight years.” Because the NBA didn’t serve as a governing organization, brothel owners were free to operate their businesses as they liked. George could only sit them down and advise them to try to remain discreet. Up to that point, he had been unsuccessful with Hof.

George hoped to have better luck with two of Nevada’s newest brothel owners, Mack and Angel Moore. A former mortician from Oregon, Mack relocated to southern Nevada with his second wife, Angel, to try his hand at running a brothel. They had bought Fran’s Star Ranch, which sat on seventy-seven acres of farmland in Beatty. Mack aspired to cultivate fruits, vegetables, and a new sort of brothel business. They renamed the place after Angel: Angel’s Ladies Brothel. In contrast to Mustang Ranch, it was a mom-and-pop operation in the desert, offering a lineup of no more than five women. Like the parlors in many of Nevada’s smaller brothels, Angel’s Ladies felt like a cramped living room in a prefab home. Acquainted with the business as an occasional customer because of his first wife’s alleged frigidity, Mack was feverish with newfangled ideas.

Devout Christians, Mack and Angel required everyone (including any customers who happened to visit around six
P.M
.) to participate in a sit-down dinner each evening, with a fine imposed on anyone who started eating before grace was said. The brothel was dry, and it was the first to institute random drug testing of its workers. Other owners doubted that Mack
and Angel would be able to attract enough women to work under these conditions. (Mack and Angel hoped to compensate by offering a 55–45 cut in favor of prostitutes, rather than the usual 50–50 cut.) Of more concern, perhaps, was the fact that Angel had been lining up, competing with the working girls, allegedly “only when there weren’t enough girls on the floor.” When I went out for a visit, I found a photo album entitled “Angel’s Services” sitting on a table in the parlor. In it were photos of Angel in a variety of sexual positions with Mack and other men.

Angel felt strongly that if a man came in and bought forty-five minutes’ worth of sex, he should get a party for that long, whether the woman got him off faster or not. “Sex is a beautiful thing God gave us to release the tension inside. Sex is more than money; it’s taking care of the individual.” Angel claimed she wasn’t taking business away from the girls and really only dated clients no one else wanted. “But I don’t want someone to walk outside and hang himself because he couldn’t relieve himself.” Mack said he didn’t mind since he and Angel were swingers anyway, but the women did. Angel was stealing their customers, they felt, and because she was the owner, they had no recourse. George still hoped he could educate these amateurs and get them in line.

Still, no matter how hard brothel owners like Russ Reade, Dennis Hof, and even Mack and Angel Moore tried to normalize the business, through mass marketing or proselytizing teetotalism, the results were mixed. In the face of Nevada’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude, most brothel owners and employees
coped by keeping low public profiles and insulating themselves within the business. The few outsiders adopted into this world became fiercely loyal and protective. What developed was an insular subculture kept on the fringes of mainstream society.