Selling Sex in the Silver Valley

by Dr. Heather Branstetter

  talking about the [outsider] cop who was scared of the people here and left Wallace speeding “out of control with paranoia” and “perceived danger” was just overblown and sensationalized. When you’re working underground you have real danger. There’s enough serious crime in this country that when you have 150 FBI agents staying in Post Falls and coming to raid almost harmless crimes, it seems like a waste of money and resources. Busting into the bar with guns drawn was overkill. Things were just done differently around here.286

  In the valley, June 23, 1991, is now referred to as “Black Sunday” as a result. Federal officials focused on gambling and racketeering rather than prostitution and did “not so much [target] the machines as the local authorities who had allowed them to flourish.”287 Bar owners and bartenders say that the agents were also looking to make a large drug bust, but they never found anything related to that.288 Money may have been part of the motivation as well: during the raid, FBI agents took more than a half a million dollars in cash from the bars and “seized all the video poker machines.”289 Locally, we know that an informal “phone tree” gave bars on the east end of the valley enough advance warning they were able to sneak out some of the machines as the agents moved from west to east along the I-90 corridor. The government kept the money and other confiscated property unless the bar owners or operators could prove in court that the earnings weren’t the result of illegal activity.

  About a month later, in a New York Times article titled “Gambling Raid Angers Mining Town,” Egan wrote:

  It wasn’t exactly a surprise when, on the morning of June 23, Federal agents from all over the West raided virtually every bar here in Shoshone County and found more than 200 video poker machines.... What is so perplexing to residents of the panhandle of north Idaho, and to outsiders as well, is why the Federal Bureau of Investigation used such a show of force.... Not since the late 19th century, when Federal troops were sent here to battle union organizers, have so many Government agents moved so heavily against one community in the region.290

  This narrative, repeated on the streets of Wallace and in the newspapers, was difficult for the FBI to counter. It was a clear case of big government versus a small town trying to get by in a changing economy. The federal agents didn’t care enough to look into the Silver Valley interest until a few disgruntled sheriff ’s deputies complained about corruption.

  As a result of the raid, the U.S. Justice Department tried Sheriff Frank Crnkovich on allegations that he violated the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act. The two trials following the FBI raid revealed the extent to which Shoshone County’s sheriffs learned to respond to the community’s wishes. After bragging that he had never lost a case, the prosecutor for the well-funded U.S. Office of Public Integrity tried the sheriff twice in a federal court and failed to make the case both times. Because the jury was not persuaded by the government’s attempt to turn the sheriff into a scapegoat responsible for one hundred years of gambling and prostitution, the first case resulted in a mistrial and the second ended in the sheriff ’s acquittal.

  When I asked Crnkovich’s defense lawyer, Sam Eismann, what his main argument was, he said:

  They [the prosecution] had all this fancy gear. So the jury could listen to all the [surveillance] tapes, high-tech stuff. So in my argument I stood up, and I said, “Well, I’m sorry I don’t have all this high-tech equipment, I can’t afford it, I guess the government can. But what this case is really about is,” and I wrote on the board that “Frank’s a scapegoat.” And it stayed there during the whole argument, you know, and a couple of jurors after the trial said, “That guy was nothing but a scapegoat.” So if you can put out a little keyword like that in some trials it helps.

  A few others were prosecuted along with the sheriff. Terry Douglas, who began working for Prendergast Amusement in 1978, put his own case into perspective this way: “Now, I bought the [electronic gambling] business March 14, 1989. Three-fourteen-eighty-nine. And then on six-twenty-three-ninety-one, twenty-seven months later, the feds tried to blame me for a hundred years of gambling in Shoshone County.”291 Douglas was sentenced to house arrest. Merrill Field, who also ran a machine business, did not want to revisit the incident and talked with me reluctantly. “They were not after prostitution—they were after me and my machines.… That cost me $200,000,” he claimed. Field said most of that money was from vending machines and jukeboxes, though, not gambling machines. Again, he added bitterly, “I don’t really want to think about it. Lost two hundred grand.”292 Even if the federal government was not interested in the prostitution angle, the investigation and prosecution needed to include the houses in the case because a successful conviction under the RICO Act required evidence of more than one kind of corruption.293

  Oasis door in the 1980s. Oasis Bordello Museum; photo by Heather Branstetter.

  When I interviewed Eismann in 2010, he told me that the investigation began sometime between 1987 and 1989, after five sheriff ’s deputies took records from the Shoshone County Sheriff ’s Office and brought them to the FBI’s office in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, or Spokane, Washington. Eismann explained that the FBI conducted a two-year investigation prior to the raid. He mentioned that the FBI “bought a tavern” and “bought a whorehouse up there.… And they had that all [set up] with [the ability to record] videotape and were catching pay-offs and stuff.… And there were some people on there that shouldn’t have been, like law enforcement people.… A couple guys rolled over and said there was graft and corruption and payoffs.” Eismann further told me that “a few days before the trial, they [the U.S. Justice Department attorneys] brought in like sixty or seventy audio tapes and probably forty or fifty video tapes, and I had to review all those at the last minute to see what was on them.” Eismann recalled listening to these tapes, especially “some of the phone calls on the day of the raid. Like one person would call somebody: ‘Oh, the FBI’s in town.’ And the other person would say, ‘Well, don’t say anything, this might be taped,’ and then he’d still blab on, you know, it was really something.” The FBI has not yet sent the files I requested through a Freedom of Information Act submission almost two years ago, so this part of the history is still rather open-ended.

  Even though Crnkovich was not convicted, the whole episode

  Black Velvet and Nostradamus. Oasis Bordello Museum display; photo by Heather Branstetter.

  broke his spirit. You go through one of these graft and corruption cases, for some reason, it doesn’t matter if you’re found not guilty. It haunts them the rest of their lives. It’s just amazing to me. It just totally changes them. I think you go into a phase where you just want to be undercover because you’ve been through this whole public spectacle, and I bet you think everybody’s staring at you and talking about you, all this stuff, you know, even though you’re not guilty.294

  Eismann explained that he’d told one of the prosecuting attorneys:

  What you really ought to do is get up there and get to know these folks. Get to know why they do what they do. Get to know the history of the community. Get to know why they have to have poker machines in their bars to survive. You know I said, “It’s a different world up there, and maybe that will help you understand this, and maybe we can get this case dismissed.”

  “I don’t need to do that,” the justice department’s lawyer responded, “I’ve tried these cases [before] and I’ve never lost one.”

  Apparently the trials didn’t examine the women who worked in the brothels in too much depth, but they did talk about the houses as a part of the community’s willingness to accept illegal activity:

  We went into what the gals did—the community accepted them up there. They served a purpose, I think, in the old mining days. And they gave band uniforms. They bought the police department a new police car. But it wasn’t the result of any graft, it was just being good to the community, really, for allowing them to be there. The madams did good public relations. I think something like that probably was
necessary in the old days, you know, it kept the local gals safe. That’s what some of the old-timers told me.295

  Ginger’s attorney echoed Eismann’s feelings about the work and the attitude of the town:

  That was probably the highlight of my career. Oh, it was awesome. Ginger takes the stand, and I can’t be in there because I’m representing her. She says, “Well, Mister Butler,” who was just an asshole federal prosecutor. But he was easy; we creamed him. We made creamed corn out of him. Anyway, she goes, “I don’t remember ever saying that, in fact, you know, I really don’t remember much about that whole thing.” And then Merrill [Field] took the stand and said, “I am sorry, I think I have the flu. So I’m not going to be very helpful to you because I don’t feel good and I’m not sure I can remember everything.” He left the stand never testifying to anything. And of course it was dismissed. It truly was the top of my career. I never met people that were so smart that had created a web, which they did here, to protect themselves and never stopped. You can charge me, send me to jail but this is my family and I’m protecting my family. It was awesome.

  And they didn’t lie. They just didn’t cooperate. Butler came back to me and said, “I hate you.” And I said, “I know you do…but it’s Wallace, Idaho; you should have called me before you ever came to town. I could have probably helped you with some of what you wanted, but you don’t walk into Wallace and arrest the people that you arrested and destroy the businesses you destroyed trying to get the poker machines and think you’re going to get anywhere. You can do that maybe in Coeur d’Alene, maybe you can do that in Washington, D.C., but you met your match in Wallace, Idaho.”296

  Regardless of whether or not there was money exchanged, the graft allegation was not confirmed, and the interpretation that aligns best with the locals’ understanding is this: yes, the madams and the gambling contributed a lot of money to the community, in both official and unofficial ways, but it didn’t amount to corruption. One man who used to be a miner and then an accountant told me that many people in the valley felt entitled to the privilege of gambling and prostitution because they had been here for 120 years and “our tax revenues built the state.” Unfortunately, he added, “We never had the population to get the money back” because the “state is very controlling” and the politicians in charge in the southern part of Idaho “don’t like to give up any power to the counties.”297 This interpretation aligns with a historic feeling that Boise stole the capital from northern Idaho along with the tax revenues that never returned to the Silver Valley. It also fits alongside the narrative that both state and federal government have bullied the isolated valley. Many people confirm the existence of a “golden fund” for the city that came from illegal activity, but it was a consensual agreement—there was neither extortion nor secrecy about it. The perspective that “at least it is honest and out in the open” is nearly identical to the argument made in response to the “north Idaho whiskey rebellion” raid of 1929. It was the way things had always been done, and it was the expectation of the community that it would continue as long as there was money in it. And so it did, for more than a century.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. S. Hansen, personal interview, 2010.

  2. Hart and Nelson, Mining Town, 135.

  3. Egan, “Gambling Raid Angers Mining Town,” A18.

  4. Goldman, Gold Diggers and Silver Miners, 155.

  5. Magnuson, personal interview, 2014.

  6. Anonymous 28, personal interview, 2016.

  Chapter 1

  7. Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 90.

  8. Wallace City Council Minute Books, 30–36.

  9. Hart and Nelson, Mining Town, 132.

  10. Magnuson, Coeur d’Alene Diary, 216–41.

  11. Grover, Debaters and Dynamiters, 33.

  12. Ibid., 1–2.

  13. Ibid., 35–37.

  14. Clemets, quoted in Barton, “Appendix B: Informant Transcriptions,” 325, emphasis added.

  15. Amonson, personal interview, 2010.

  16. Kottkey, quoted in Barton, “Appendix B: Informant Transcriptions,” 152.

  17. Laite, “Historical Perspectives,” 742.

  18. Murphy, Mining Cultures, 77.

  19. Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 109.

  20. Butler, Daughters of Joy, Sisters of Misery, 100.

  21. Ibid., 101.

  22. Caron, personal interview, 2014.

  23. Murphy, Mining Cultures, 77.

  24. Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 40.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Laite, “Historical Perspectives,” 753.

  27. Rosen, Lost Sisterhood, 139.

  28. Magnuson, personal interview, 2010.

  29. Ibid., 2014; Harman, personal interview, 2014.

  30. Magnuson, personal interview, 2014.

  31. Wallace City Council Minute Books, 7.

  32. Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 57.

  33. Ibid.

  34. Idaho Press, March 18, 1905.

  35. Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 57.

  36. City of Wallace Police Record Journal, April 1893–June 1908, quoted in Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 43.

  37. Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 137.

  38. Sanborn-Perris Map, 1901 and Wallace City Council Minute Books, March 1897–October 14, 1901, May 27, 1901.

  39. Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 52.

  40. Ibid., 138.

  41. Ibid., 99–100.

  42. Idaho State Tribune, October 5, 1904, quoted in Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 45–46.

  43. Harman, personal interview, 2014.

  44. Idaho Press, March 4, 1909, quoted in Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 46.

  45. Times, May 5, 1907, quoted in Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 46.

  46. Spokesman Review, August 1909, quoted in Hart and Nelson, Mining Town, 138.

  47. Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 156.

  48. City of Wallace Council Proceedings Journal, March 1897–October 14, 1901, November 26, 1900, quoted in Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 104.

  49. Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 104.

  50. Spokesman-Review, “Mayor Connor Praised,” May 4, 1903.

  51. Hart and Nelson, Mining Town, 136–38.

  52. Spokesman-Review, “Is Found Guilty of Gambling” and “Wallace Notes,” May 10, 1903.

  53. Spokesman-Review, “To Shut Off Red Lights,” May 19, 1903.

  54. Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 104.

  55. Ibid.

  56. Henderson, “Low-Key Brothels Survive Lousy Wallace Economy,” B2.

  57. Goldman, Gold Diggers and Silver Miners, 161, emphasis in original.

  58. Roizen, personal interview, 2010.

  59. Cunningham and Shah, “Decriminalizing Indoor Prostitution.”

  60. Bisschop, Kastoryano and van der Klaauw, “Street Prostitution Zones and Crime.”

  61. Kottkey, quoted in Barton, “Appendix B: Informant Transcripts,” 151–53.

  62. Houchin, personal interview, 2014.

  63. Murphy, Mining Cultures, 78.

  64. Petrik, No Step Backward, 58.

  65. Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 104.

  66. City of Wallace Council Minute Book, October 28, 1901–September 10, 1906, April 24, 1905, quoted in Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 104–5.

  67. Anonymous 23, personal interview, 2010; Gordon, “Child’s-Eye View,” WDMM; Magnuson, personal interview, 2010; Rice, phone interview, 2010. Magnuson added that a gate or fence like this would not have been the sort of thing to appear on these maps.

  68. Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 158.

  69. Ibid., 155–58.

  70. Ibid., 155.

  Chapter 2

  71. Congregationalist and Christian World, August 22, 1908, quoted in the Idaho Press, 3 September 1908, reprint of W.M. Proctor, “Random Portraits, Brave Work in the Coeur d’Alenes.” Also appears in Po
well “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 144, and Smith, “It Will All Come Out in the Courtroom,” 53–54.

  72. “White-Slave Traffic Act,” H.R. 12315, 61st Cong., 36 Stat. 825, 1910.

  73. Abbott, Sin in the Second City, 207, 291.

  74. Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 142.

  75. Ibid., 143.

  76. Ibid., 151.

  77. Smith, “It Will All Come Out in the Courtroom,” 54–55.

  78. Wegars, “Inmates of Body House,” 45.

  79. Daily Idaho Press, October 31, 1908.

  80. Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 151.

  81. Daily Idaho Press, January 18, 1908; December 6, 1909.

  82. Wallace Press-Times, December 30, 1915, 6.

  83. Rosen, Lost Sisterhood, 116.

  84. Ibid., 129–30.

  85. Ibid., 125–27. Rosen notes that Jane Addams conducted a study of prostitution especially concerned with the vulnerability of immigrant women.

  86. Idaho Press, December 6, 1906, quoted in Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 48.

  87. Shoshone County Courthouse District Court Records, Index to Register of Criminal Actions, Proceedings Book B, 497.

  88. Ibid., 495 and 496.

  89. Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 152.

  90. Wallace Press-Times, December 4, 1915, 1.

  91. Ibid., December 5, 1915, 6.

  92. Shoshone County Courthouse District Court Record No. 655.

  93. Ibid.

  94. Ibid.

  95. Ibid.

  96. Magnuson, personal interview, 2014.

  97. Shoshone County Courthouse District Court Records, Nos. 598–602.

  98. Powell, “Beyond Molly B’Damn,” 108.