Brothel (5 page)

For three months, I watched adolescents supply a staggering demand of adult men seeking out teens for impulsive, reckless sexual recreation—in their cars, in subway and bus stations, in seedy hotels, in alleys, and sometimes right on the street. Except for centers like Streetwork, the only affirmation these kids received came from the men who sought to abuse their bodies. This demand seemed never-ending, despite the well-publicized risks of unprotected sex.

Most of the adolescents had fled troubled homes, neglect, or outright abuse, and they had few resources. Most came to the streets with developmental handicaps and minimal education. The imminent hazards of street prostitution—HIV infection, drug addiction, incarceration, rape, and murder—only isolated these teens further. By the end of my summer, I came to regard the downward spiral of prostitution as inevitable and inexorable.

My experience at Streetwork thus informed many of my initial assumptions about Nevada’s brothel prostitution. I couldn’t believe a state in America would actually choose to legalize this atrocity. Were Nevadans amoral? What sort of cruel, detached people condoned a profession that brought
such pain on its practitioners? While I
had
considered the possibility that legalization might eliminate some of the perils of street prostitution and that Nevadans were actually brave pragmatists, I was skeptical.

I learned quickly that nothing I knew accounted for Nevada’s singularity in deciding to license prostitution. Brothel prostitution has been tolerated in the state for over a century; houses of prostitution have operated unobtrusively since the gold- and silver-rush days of the Comstock Lode, between 1859 and 1880. But unlike California, Arizona, and Colorado, which also tolerated brothel prostitution during the mining days, only Nevada would go on doing so. In the northeastern town of Elko, one licensed brothel now known as Mona’s has been operating since 1902.

Like a boastful parent, almost every longtime Nevada resident I met regaled me with brothel folklore. As far as I could make out from their tales, prostitutes first arrived in Nevada on the heels of the gold and silver prospectors, to fulfill what was then considered an important social need. At a time when men far outnumbered women on the frontier, prostitutes were welcome new additions. Every gold-rush town had a red-light district, and prostitution became a flourishing industry in mining towns such as Goldfield and Tonopah. At one point, over 50 brothels operated in Virginia City.

Some locals quoted their forefathers to prove the civic-mindedness behind their state’s permissive stance on prostitution. I heard James Scrugham, a Nevada governor in the 1920s, quoted more than once: “The camps were not for wives. They just couldn’t put up with the roughness.… The
miners, some coming in from a day in the drifts, some coming from months of prospecting, hands callused, boots worn, having smelled only sagebrush and sweat … why, the poor bastards knew the one place they could get a welcome, a smile, a bed with springs, clean sheets, the smell of perfume, was the crib [a string of small shacks where prostitutes would work].”

Several of Nevada’s frontier prostitutes have become legends, particularly over the last century. Like Julia Bulette, a well-known prostitute at the time who worked in some of the Comstock’s best brothels before she was brutally murdered in 1867 by a customer. It is said that Virginia City’s Fire Engine Company No. 1 elected her to be an honorary member, “in return for numerous favors and munificent gifts bestowed by her upon the company.”
^*
After her untimely and tragic death, the
Territorial Enterprise
wrote, “Few of her class had more friends.” Fire Engine Company No. 1 marched in her funeral procession through the streets of Virginia City. The public execution by hanging (the first for the city) of her alleged killer drew more than four thousand spectators, including Mark Twain, who was touring the country. But according to Nevada State Archivist Guy Rocha, it is twentieth-century writers of Nevada’s history who are responsible for creating Bulette’s bigger-than-life legend with their romanticized and glamorized writings of her life. Even the Virginia and Truckee railroad line contributed to her mythical status when they named a club car
after her in 1947, eighty years after her death, as a publicity gimmick.

As soon as “respectable” women and their families traveled west to join their men, however, lawmakers realized they would need to regulate prostitution if they were to keep it tolerable to their evolving populace. Legislators passed the first law to control prostitution in 1881; it vested county commissions with the power to “license, tax, regulate, prohibit, or suppress all houses of ill-fame.” Continuous pressure from community groups led the state legislature to prohibit brothels both on main business thoroughfares and within four hundred yards of schools, and later churches, for the presumed protection of public morality. (Refusing to cede their brothel, legend has it that the people of the old mining town of Searchlight in the 1920s complied with the law by moving the school.)

By the turn of the century, prostitution flourished in Nevada’s principal cities, Reno and Las Vegas, though it was limited to specific zones. Block 16, downtown and only a block from the staid First State Bank, became Vegas’s designated red-light district, while Reno confined its brothels to a stretch on the east end of town along the Truckee River called the Stockade, or the Riverside restricted district. The Stockade included a dance hall, a restaurant for working girls, and fifty cribs—austere rooms containing a bed, chest of drawers, and a wood-burning stove. These rooms could be rented out twenty-four hours a day in eight-hour shifts for $2.50. Prostitutes were required to register with the police and to visit the city doctor regularly.

Reno’s Stockade and Las Vegas’s Block 16 prospered until
1942, when a presidential executive order under Franklin D. Roosevelt directed the states to suppress all prostitution near military bases and installations. While soldiers might have had the same “needs” as miners of the Old West, the military feared that sexually transmitted diseases, particularly syphilis, could incapacitate their forces. Nevadans opposed the federal government’s intervention but did not want to suffer the economic hardship that would result if their communities were declared off-limits to military personnel. Not until the end of World War II and the lifting of the war emergency in 1948 would regulation of brothel prostitution be returned to local agencies.

At this point, however, authorities in Las Vegas and Reno decided to take a less tolerant position on brothel prostitution. The casino industry was blossoming; in an effort to avoid a federal crackdown on gambling, Vegas and Reno attempted to divorce that business from organized crime and prostitution. When a madam named Mae Cunningham challenged the closure of her Reno brothel in 1949, a judge ruled that county commissioners and district attorneys had the authority to abate brothels as “public nuisances,” even though Nevada had no statute explicitly barring prostitution.

Panicked that the outcome of the Cunningham case endangered all of Nevada’s brothels, rural libertarian lawmakers hurriedly signed a bill that explicitly gave counties the “local option” to legalize brothels. But powerful prodding from increasingly influential casino owners forced the governor, Vail Pitman, to veto this bill. He defended his actions by saying that legalization would result in “sensational and sordid
publicity” throughout America. Using the Cunningham case as precedent, brothels that had opened after World War II in and around Reno (e.g., Mae Cunningham’s) and Las Vegas (e.g., Roxie’s) were closed as public nuisances.

Brothel prostitution would change forever in 1955 with the appearance of Joe Conforte, the future owner of the Mustang Ranch and the man who would ultimately be responsible for legalizing brothel prostitution. A Sicilian immigrant with the tenacity of a bulldog and the narcissism of Napoleon, Conforte had been a cabdriver and sex broker from Oakland who came to Nevada intent on exploiting the state’s spotty and arbitrarily enforced prostitution laws. When he met resistance trying to establish a house in Reno, he settled upon a patch of alfalfa pasture in Storey County, just outside Washoe County. Here, in Wadsworth, he built the Triangle River Ranch. Within five months, he had partnered with his future wife, Sally Burgess, who had operated a house in Fallon, Nevada, and had purchased three more brothels.

Conforte, who would later attribute his prosperity to the “Three B’s”—brains, breaks, and balls—wasn’t one to keep his success quiet. Well aware of Washoe County’s antibrothel position, Conforte regularly enjoyed strutting through Reno, sporting expensive suits, a full-length fur coat, $18 Cuban cigars, and a $4,000 hair transplant, with several prostitutes draped on each arm. It wasn’t unusual for Joe to pass out crisp $100 bills and brothel passes to card dealers and busboys. Feeling that Conforte was making a mockery of law and decency, Washoe County district attorney William Raggio (who
served from 1958 to 1970 as D.A. and today is the Nevada State Senate majority leader) became incensed.

In his first act of aggression—many were to follow, in a long-ensuing feud between the two men—Raggio charged Conforte with vagrancy whenever he came into Reno. Raggio also got word to Reno’s main gambling houses and restaurants that Conforte should not be served. In retaliation, Conforte cooked up an elaborate plot to catch Raggio buying a seventeen-year-old girl (a minor) alcoholic drinks and having sex with her. Conforte threatened to make this scandal public if Raggio failed to back off on the vagrancy charges. Unbeknownst to Conforte, however, Raggio taped this incriminatory conversation, including Conforte’s bribe, resulting in Conforte’s arrest for attempted extortion of a public official; he appealed the conviction for many years before he finally had to serve time. (To this day, Raggio publicly denies seducing the young girl.)

Raggio still wasn’t satisfied. He managed to persuade Storey County authorities to use the precedent set by the Cunningham case to close Conforte’s Wadsworth brothel on the grounds that it was a public nuisance. Not convinced that this alone would stop Conforte, Raggio also persuaded the Storey County district attorney and Sparks Fire Department chief to descend upon the Wadsworth pasture with him one night with media in tow, and torched it. Raggio claimed he had a right to burn down the brothel because of its status as a public nuisance, even though the brothel was located outside of his jurisdiction. Sally Conforte, however, sued him for damages,
charging him with illegal burning. The case was eventually settled. After the fire, Conforte consolidated his business into a trailer that he situated at the juncture of Washoe, Storey, and Lyon counties. Whenever authorities in one county threatened to close him down, he moved the trailer across county lines.

While Conforte was away in prison on the extortion conviction, a competitor named Richard Bennet appeared on the Storey County scene. Bennet persuaded the county commissioners to let him open a brothel, Mustang Bridge Ranch; he picked a little-noticed spot in Storey County that was within twelve miles of Reno—twenty-seven miles closer than Wadsworth—on a ranch owned by two brothers, Jim and Joe Peri. Bennet convinced the Peris to rent him the land, and, like Conforte, bought four double-wide trailers, linking them into a compound. When Conforte emerged from prison almost three years later, more ambitious and driven than ever, he was enraged by his competitor’s good fortune, enjoyed at his expense. In what Conforte called his “comeback” phase, involving a series of dubious events about which locals are unclear, including several mysterious fires and the detonation of the suspension bridge over the Truckee River near Bennet’s Mustang Bridge Ranch, Conforte managed to drive out his competition. In 1967, rumor has it, Bennet “voluntarily” sold his brothel to Conforte for an undisclosed sum.

With Mustang Bridge Ranch now his, Conforte allegedly schemed to regain control of the county. To get more sympathetic politicians elected into county offices, Conforte enlarged a nearby settlement called Lockwood by adding trailers and
offering tenants cheap rents in implicit exchange for voting in local elections as he suggested. In this way, and by making regular contributions to politicians, Conforte became a major political influence in the county.

It was in this context that, in 1970, Conforte suggested the county pass the nation’s first brothel-licensing ordinance. Not surprisingly, he met little resistance. To assist officials in defending their legislation, Conforte suggested that the licensing fee be so high that it would be impractical fiscally not to legalize prostitution. He recommended a fee of $18,000 per year, later raised to $25,000. (As of 2000, the fee is set at $100,000.) As Conforte expected, Storey County officials jumped at his proposal; brothel prostitution in the county became legal on January 1, 1971. A Nevada Supreme Court decision upheld Storey County’s right to legalize prostitution; simultaneously, permissiveness was permeating the culture. Reno officials finally let up on Conforte. (The feud between Raggio and Conforte continued for some time, however. As a state senator, Raggio tried unsuccessfully to ban brothels within fifty miles of major cities, a proposal that would have closed only Conforte’s brothel.)

Meanwhile, Storey County’s new ordinance sent the rest of the state into a tizzy. When Las Vegas hotel and casino operators and convention bureau officials caught wind that Conforte—now feeling all-powerful—wanted to open a brothel at the edge of their city, they lobbied state lawmakers to pass emergency legislation making brothel prostitution illegal in counties with more than 200,000 people. At that time, in
1971, this population threshold applied only to Las Vegas’s Clark County. (Meant to apply exclusively to Clark County—without being considered “selective legislation”—this law is amended and the population limit increased routinely whenever other counties, namely Washoe, begin creeping up in size approaching this maximum; today the population threshold is prescribed at 400,000.) In contrast, commissioners in Nevada’s rural counties were thrilled by the prospect of licensing their brothels—Nevada had between thirty and forty houses as of 1969—and generating a new source of county revenue. In 1972, county commissioners in Lyon County licensed their three existing brothels. Between 1973 and 1978, three other counties—Churchill, Mineral, and Nye—legalized brothel prostitution in restricted areas following favorable public referendum votes.