Brothel (28 page)

Early in the morning, crowds had begun to form outside Mustang #1’s gate. Tourists and locals flocked for one last look. Men and women got out of their cars to pose for photographs in front of the brothel. These gawking sightseers camping outside the brothel gates hoping to snap a photo of one of America’s curiosities, a licensed prostitute, reminded me again of how disconnected these women were from the rest of society. The pink souvenir trailer stationed in the parking lot had sold out of Mustang merchandise, save for one extra-extra-large white golf T-shirt with the Mustang logo over the breast pocket.

Media trucks with satellite dishes from NBC, ABC, and Fox affiliates sat parked in front of the brothel. Reporters stood outside the front gates, desperate for sound bites from
anyone who passed through. Customers who’d thought the brothel would be open for business until five
P.M
. were turned away disappointed after learning they couldn’t even get a drink at the bar. Many tried to shield their faces from the cameras. In an act of defiance, Baby managed to sneak one latecomer into her room to turn a final trick several hours after the Feds had closed out Mustang’s register. She smiled triumphantly at me ninety minutes later as she walked Mustang’s last, unofficial customer back to the front gate.

By noon, when George arrived, most of the women had cleared out. He invited the media inside the front gate for a press conference. He spoke about “the sadness of the day” and “the breakup of a family.” A few women chose to participate in the interviews, including Baby. Her mother had died recently and she had no one else she needed to protect from the truth of her profession.

Not long before five, I wandered back through Mustang one last time while the staff gathered together in the kitchen. The hallways were still and the bedroom doors flung open. Inside, beds were stripped down to the mattresses, save for some rooms where pillows and blankets had been abandoned. Discarded clothing and business cards were scattered on the floor. The brothel had been deserted.

At precisely five, Bob Del Carlo announced it was time for us all to leave. “Let’s walk out together one last time,” he said. Single file, we emerged from the brothel and faced a swelling crowd of sixty or so. I’m not quite sure how I ended up marching out with the remaining seventeen brothel workers, but I
did. After we all passed through, George shut the Mustang gate for the last time in the business’s history.

Moments later, a caravan of unmarked cars full of federal agents screeched into the Mustang parking lots. IRS, FBI, and U.S. Customs officials poured out, their bulletproof vests bulging beneath their suits. Three agents stayed outside to guard the gates; the rest rushed inside. About twenty minutes later, James Collie, chief of the Criminal Investigation Division for the Southwest District IRS, emerged from the brothel, issued a press release, and briefly answered reporters’ questions. Five minutes later, he hopped into his sedan and sped away. It was final.

That night I watched the evening news in a Reno motel room as I repacked my belongings in preparation for an early flight home the next day. A short clip showed the brothel’s padlocked gates. The news anchor capped the closure with a shrug and a jab: “It’s just a bunch of hookers, all they have to do is find another corner to make a living on.”

I wanted to scream.
Don’t you realize that by eliminating Mustang Ranch, you don’t simply displace “a bunch of hookers”? You eradicate a community, a family!

The brothel had provided an income as well as friendship, compassion, trust, and hope for countless women and men. In many ways, Mustang Ranch picked up where society had dropped the ball. It had provided a safe, nonjudgmental, economically sound work environment and a fair way for a community
of several dozen women and their families to meet their most basic needs.

Legal brothels are one alternative in dealing with prostitution. However disturbing the idea of commercial sex may be to some of us, it’s naïve to believe that prostitution can ever be eliminated. The demand will be met with supply one way or another, no matter what is legislated. Turning our backs on the women (and men) who do this work may be far more immoral—even criminal—than prostitution itself. Only when we recognize and validate the work of professional prostitutes can we expect them to practice their trade safely and responsibly.

My time at Mustang Ranch proved to me just how complicated human sexuality and everything about it can be, especially how it eludes total understanding. Consensual sex between adults—whether for pay or pro bono—is exactly that, consensual. As such, it’s a personal and private decision. What seems universally to be true about it is our need to supercharge it politically and load it down with the heavy freight of moral issues.

Baby once told me that she wanted to make it known that she and her colleagues were “okay people, too.” Perhaps her point was best made in a phone call we shared not long after Mustang’s closing. “I feel like I’ve made a difference in my clients’ lives. That they can breathe easier each night. I appreciate these guys and I feel they don’t see me as a hooker or prostitute, but see me as a person, as Baby. That makes me feel worthy—not only as a prostitute or working girl but as a human being.”

This was my experience also: seeing the women of Mustang Ranch as human beings. In a business built largely on desire and fantasy, it’s easy to be deceived by our assumptions and, in doing so, overlook the humanity that’s at the core of this complex and timeless profession.

EPILOGUE

N
early three years after its closure, Mustang Ranch sits vacant and silent. In July 2001, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled in favor of upholding money-laundering and racketeering convictions against brothel parent companies A.G.E. Enterprises, Inc. and A.G.E. Corp., Inc., and former Mustang manager Shirley Colletti. Until the U.S. Supreme Court decides whether or not to review the case, the federal government must maintain Mustang’s facilities so that the brothel can reopen for business should the Court overturn the guilty verdicts. In the meantime, Colletti began serving her forty-six-month term in a minimum-security federal prison in Dublin, California, in February 2002, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected her petition to remain free on appeal until their decision.

Ironically, Joe Conforte, the focus of the investigation that brought Mustang Ranch to its knees, appears to have gotten off scot-free. Two months after Mustang’s closure, the Brazilian Supreme Court decided in an 8–0 ruling that Conforte couldn’t be extradited, given the narrow terms of the extradition treaty between the United States and Brazil, which doesn’t cover bankruptcy fraud. Assistant U.S. Attorney Greg Damm, one of the case’s chief prosecutors, more or less admits defeat and concedes the federal government may never get their day in court with Conforte. Meanwhile, Conforte continues to grumble from abroad that if he can’t run a brothel in Storey County, no one else should either.

Despite Conforte’s grousing, Storey County commissioners recently decided to issue a new brothel license. With the loss of once-sizable revenue after Mustang’s closure, the county initially coped financially by imposing a wage and hiring freeze in order to stay within its annual budget. However, Storey County now hopes to generate $300,000 in annual tax revenues from the proposed new brothel, Wild Horse Canyon Ranch & Spa, to be built on a site almost four miles from the closed Mustang Ranch. This will be the first test of Storey County’s revised brothel ordinance that now requires a detailed investigation of all brothel owner applicants and the prohibition of convicted felons like Conforte from owning a brothel. The ordinance also demands any corporation that owns a brothel to reveal the names of its shareholders as well as the names of those in associated corporations.

Although the new owner’s license application passed the
close scrutiny of county officials, other legal problems may doom prospects for Wild Horse Canyon Ranch & Spa. A public relations debacle ensued early on over original plans to name the new brothel after the legendary American Indian chieftain Crazy Horse. More recently, two national companies, Kal Kan Foods Inc. and Roybridge Investments, each with facilities approximately one mile away from the proposed site for the new brothel in the 102,000-acre Tahoe-Reno Industrial Park—considered the largest industrial park in North America—filed a federal lawsuit asking that the brothel license be voided. Their contention: that the brothel will hurt business, threaten the safety of employees of the park, and lower property values.

Most troublesome to George Flint isn’t the fate of Storey County’s newest brothel, but rather the liability it now poses to Nevada’s entire brothel industry. George fears that all the media attention spawned by this incident coupled with the high-power lobbyists retained by Tahoe-Reno Industrial Park interests may be enough to pressure legislators in 2003 to consider bills that further restrict, or even outlaw, brothel prostitution. Of not much help is the recent proliferation of negative brothel press brought on in part by several of Nevada’s twenty-seven currently operating brothels themselves. For example, the Sagebrush, Nevada’s second-largest brothel, outside Carson City, first hit local headlines when it nearly burned to the ground after an untended candle set the complex ablaze. More recently, heavy radio and newspaper advertising for Squeeze Play, the new topless bar/dance club adjoining the brothel, has local area residents irate.

Brothel problems sprawl well beyond the north into southern Nevada as well. After Sheri’s Ranch, a brothel neighboring the Chicken Ranch in Pahrump, was sold to a thirty-year Las Vegas Metro police veteran and one-time sheriff’s candidate and former car dealer, the green new owner challenged industry tradition unwittingly when he announced plans to turn the brothel into a full-scale resort with an 18-hole golf course, casino, and steakhouse. Following flaming editorials in state papers, George gave the apologetic owner a crash course in brothel survival tactics while attempting to do damage control with the press; Sheri’s owner now redirects all media inquiries to George.

Despite Mack and Angel Moore’s supposed righteous intentions, a sting operation busted them for selling outdates at Angel’s Ladies in Nye County, where doing so is illegal. The licensing board ultimately voted to close the brothel for two weeks and fined the owners $35,000. (Angel’s Ladies appeared in the press again after an appeals judge reversed the convictions of the three employees who were found guilty of prostitution-related charges off brothel premises, declaring the police sting operation entrapment.)

And then there’s always Dennis Hof, of course. Hof finally shut down his XXX-movie enterprise when county officials threatened to revoke his brothel license on grounds that his license allowed only the sale of prostitution, not the filming of pornography. Still, his publicity stunts haven’t stopped. His newest scheme is to get brothel prostitutes to appear on the
Howard Stern Show
, including most recently a mother-daughter
team; Stern staged an on-the-air contest for a listener to win sex with both women.

Aggravated by the glare of unwanted publicity, George organized two brothel-owner meetings in the last six months to discuss “ways to preserve and improve our industry.” Even though the 2001 state legislative session proved less contentious than George anticipated, with no significant antibrothel legislation proposed, the meetings’ agendas addressed George’s apprehensions and emphasized the need for political savvy in order to restore the industry’s public image, with formal presentations entitled “Friends, enemies and trends in the legislature” and “How to deal with the media: Low vs. high profile.”