The Art of the Pimp: One Man's Search for Love, Sex, and Money (28 page)

Glen Heggstad

I’ve known Dennis for more than thirty years. I retired from the Hells Angels and was living in Palm Springs, teaching martial arts, and for almost two years I was running into people who kept saying the same thing: “You’ve got to meet Dennis. You’re going to love Dennis.”

One night I was leaving a club, getting on my Harley, and Dennis was on his way in. He said, “You must be Glen,” and I said, “You must be Dennis.” And that’s how it began. We started riding motorcycles together and hanging out and forging a very deep, rich friendship.

• • •

One day Dennis told me he was thinking of buying a brothel up in Carson City, Nevada, and he wanted me to partner with him. “Come on, bro! Let’s buy a whorehouse!”

I said, “Nah. I’d rather be a customer.” I also didn’t want to go into business with a good friend because that usually kills the friendship.

But Dennis is incredibly stubborn. He had two sets of business cards printed up, identifying us as owners of
the BunnyRanch. This was before he had even bought the place! I told him, “Dennis, I’m not doing it. But you go ahead. You’ll be fulfilling your destiny.” And look at him now: Dennis is living the American Dream.

• • •

He loves being a celebrity and it suits him, but at first it worried me. He was hanging out with people who weren’t his real friends, and I wondered if he knew that. I also wondered if he was going to forget his old friends. But fame didn’t change his relationships with us regular people. He’s the all-American working-class kid who made good, and I know he remembers that kid and wakes up every morning grateful for his success.

• • •

The women in his life, that’s another story. Dennis has a problem with commitment. He’s also very controlling. He controls everything and everyone around him. Dennis is the Puppet Master. He has a way of getting people to do exactly what he wants them to do. It worked for him when he was in the time-share business and it works better than ever in the bunny girl business.

Dennis may have commitment issues with women, but he is the most faithful friend I’ve ever had. In 2001, I took off on an extended motorcycle trip. I was going to go all the way from Palm Springs to Tierra del Fuego, and the first five thousand miles went great. But when I got to Colombia, I was taken hostage by terrorists. They saw my green motorcycle and thought I was with the military, but when they found out I was American, they figured they’d hit the jackpot. For five weeks in the winter of 2001, I was a guest of the National Liberation Army.

Dennis was frantic. He didn’t think the Feds were doing enough to secure my release, so he decided to do it himself. He began putting together a team of ex–Army Rangers to get me out. But word got back to the Feds, who quickly told he was interfering with a federal investigation. “Cease and desist or we will lock you the fuck up.”

He didn’t listen. “There’s only one way to resolve this,” he told them. “Either you get him out, or we’re getting him out. And I don’t see you guys making yourselves particularly useful.” He came very close to getting locked up, but then the Red Cross got involved and somehow negotiated my freedom.

• • •

Dennis is the Ultimate Dominant Alpha Male. A lot of us are that way, and I know I am, but I know when to give the other guy a little space. Dennis doesn’t know how to do that. He’s not good at give-and-take. He never backs down. He always has to be the Silver Back. Charming as he is, that quality makes it difficult to be with him for extended periods of time. I love the guy, but does he always have to get his way?

CATHOUSE
TURNED OUT TO BE
much more than entertainment; for many viewers, it was an education. We did
Cathouse: The Series
in 2005 and
Cathouse 2: Back in the Saddle
two years later. The show aired in forty-nine countries and twenty-seven languages. People would look at the shows and think, “The girls are nice, fun, safe, and drug-free. They’re people just like us, only in a somewhat unusual business.”

The show went a long way toward making people understand
that prostitution is an acceptable profession. It also created a whole new customer base — and not just men, either. Turned out I’d been right about taking down that
MEN ONLY
sign. Suddenly guys were coming in with their wives. I wasn’t surprised. The number one fantasy for heterosexual males in America is a threesome. The thing that did surprise me, however, was the number of times the visit had been the wife’s idea. On many occasions, I heard a variation of the following: “I told my husband, ‘You know what, baby? I’ve been watching this
Cathouse
thing on HBO. You’re a good husband. We’ve been together fifteen years. You haven’t had a strange piece of ass in all that time and neither have I. Let’s go to the BunnyRanch. My treat’.”

Often the wives just wanted to watch, but they would get turned on and some would eventually become active participants, sometimes
very
active. (Some of them began coming back without their husbands.) Many couples said it did wonders for their marriages. They had fun and learned new tricks. Suddenly Soccer Mom was saying, “What are we doing tonight, honey?”

“I don’t know,” says Overworked Dad, tired after a long day.

And Soccer Mom says, “Well, I do. You’re going to come into the bedroom and lube my ass.”

• • •

Looking back on it, the
New Yorker
article was a quantum leap forward for the BunnyRanch, at least in terms of recognition. In many ways, it led to
Cathouse
, and in turn,
Cathouse
had put us on the world stage.

We were deluged with interview requests — from abroad and at home — and Diane Sawyer, the television personality, was among the first in line. She turned out to be the exact opposite of Rebecca Mead. Where Ms. Mead had been respectful, open-minded, and
genuinely interested in telling a balanced story, Ms. Sawyer thought only of herself and of her ratings. I don’t think I have ever met a more self-absorbed reporter in my life. I don’t think she even
noticed
the girls. Everything was about her own needs and she had an immense crew to service those needs. They did a couple of dozen interviews, with me, with Suzette, with some of the girls, but Diane looked more and more unhappy. It was obvious she wasn’t getting what she wanted, and still more obvious that she had her own agenda.

“What about drugs, Dennis?” she asked, with the cameras rolling. “Isn’t it true that there’s a lot of drug use at the BunnyRanch?”

I said, “No.”

She said, “Please, Dennis. Be honest with me.”

“Diane,” I said, “we have a zero-tolerance policy on drugs. I know there are drugs in every workplace in America, including your office, probably, but we know what to look for. Have there even been drugs at the BunnyRanch? Of course. But we deal with the problem. We give the girl a warning and we also do what we can to help. We’ll get her counseling, put her in rehab, whatever it takes. But if she doesn’t want our help, and doesn’t clean up her act, she’s got to go. There is no room for drugs at any of my establishments.”

This only seemed to piss her off. If you didn’t give her the answer she wanted, the answer that, in her opinion, made for good television, she’d look at you as if you were a lower life-form. She was uppity as hell. She was bossy and rude and acted like fucking royalty. Everybody at the ranch hated her.

After she returned to New York, I got a call from one of her producers. They didn’t have enough material for a show, apparently, but they had some ideas about how to make it work. They had been
trying to do a piece on underage sex trafficking in New York and were thinking about combining that with the BunnyRanch story. “Can you help?”

I ended up doing their job for them. Through HBO, I found a film crew in New York that specialized in clandestine work and the network hired them. The crew rigged me up with a hidden camera and we traveled through all five boroughs, looking for underage prostitutes. We found a lot of prostitutes, including a number of underage ones, sadly, and the whole thing was very depressing. There’d be these shabby little storefronts with taped-up windows, with tiny rooms out back where the girls would take care of you for thirty dollars. For an extra ten, though, you didn’t have to wear a condom, which I found absolutely horrifying.

With the tape running, I spoke to dozens of girls and their stories were weirdly similar. They were from small towns in Latin America, all the way from Mexico to Brazil, and had answered ads from American sponsor families looking for nannies. The ads were in fact placed by local brokers, who charged exorbitant fees to make these phony “introductions” to the rich American families, and the girls’ parents, thinking they were giving their children a shot at a better life, would somehow scrape the money together. They had no idea their daughters were being sold into sexual slavery, and in many cases they never heard from them again.

There were also a huge number of young girls from Asia, some of whom told terrible stories about being shipped over in containers, in the holds of cargo ships, relieving themselves in buckets and fighting over the dwindling supplies of potable water.

Tragic as these stories were, they were not new, but I managed to get some great stuff on camera. When Diane Sawyer’s team took a look at the footage, however, they reported back that it was
unusable because it was “too heavy.” At that point, I was really confused. Initially I hadn’t understood why they had enlisted me to help “expose” things the world was already aware of, but now I understood it perfectly: They didn’t know what the hell they were doing.

That experience took the better part of a year and it was a monumental waste of time. When the piece finally came out, almost another full year later, I wondered where all the hard work had gone. The footage at the ranch was shot like an episode of
Cops
, dark, dreary, and heavy. It didn’t paint the BunnyRanch in an honest light. Dirtbag Diane wanted to make me and the girls look bad, and she wasn’t going to let the facts stand in the way of the story she was determined to tell.

The experience almost soured me on the media. But I needed the media, so I kept taking their calls and accommodating their requests. I subsequently took a chance on reporter Rita Cosby, who did an hour-long special that turned into the highest-rated show she’d ever done for MSNBC. I loved her. She was the exact opposite of Diane Sawyer. She’s a best-selling author, a three-time Emmy winner, and she’s interviewed world leaders, but she couldn’t have been nicer or more down to earth.

Rita Cosby

I was with Fox News when I first interviewed Dennis. After that appearance and after I left Fox News, my new producers at MSNBC decided it would be interesting to do a larger story about prostitution, with the idea of getting an inside look at the BunnyRanch. Dennis, the master promoter, was only too happy to oblige, and several of my male producers were quick to volunteer for the job.

I remember showing up at the BunnyRanch with my crew, expecting the brothel to be more remote and hidden, but it was out there in the open, not far from the main road. Dennis was there to greet us as we walked in with our cameras, and, in his element. I half expected a lecherous guy in a dark trench coat. Instead he was a big, smiling, lovable teddy bear of a man. He looked like a purveyor of cotton candy, not women. What’s more, he gave us unfettered access. He made it clear than nothing was off-limits. We spent almost the entire night there, filming and doing interviews, and I was absolutely fascinated.

Now I’m not someone who has ever been supportive of prostitution. I know it’s legal in certain regulated brothels in Nevada, but as a journalist I’ve seen many of the ills created by the profession, especially when it’s not legal. But in this case I was surprised — especially by the women. Many of them were intelligent, well spoken, and well educated. Several had master’s degrees, some had PhDs. One of them was a college teacher who had come to work at the ranch on several successive summers. “Look,” she told me, “I make more money in a month here than I do in a year teaching.” She had a photo of her two kids by the bed, in her homey little room, and she was talking about what great kids they were, playing ball and taking ballet lessons, and so on. She sounded like a typical suburban mom. A moment later she was telling me about all of the interesting clients she would meet over the course of her working summers. The whole thing was surreal.