Brothel: Mustang Ranch and Its Women

by Alexa Albert

  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.

  As of early 2000, there were twenty-six brothels in Nevada, scattered throughout ten of the state’s seventeen counties. (Sixteen counties plus Carson City, considered the Capital District, which enjoys all the benefits of a county, such as having its own courthouse and police and fire departments.) Three of the ten—Elko, Humboldt, and White Pine—prohibit brothel prostitution in unincorporated areas, but do allow it by municipal option in the cities of Elko, Wells, Carlin, Ely, and Winnemucca. Each county has devised its own brothel ordinance, from Lyon County’s exhaustive forty-eight-page document to Esmeralda County’s more terse seven-page code. Brothel licensing fees vary, with Storey County’s being the highest ($25,000 per quarter) and Lander County’s the lowest ($50 per quarter). Brothel regulations differ on details such as the size, content, and placement of exterior signs, and the wattage of red exterior lighting permitted on brothel premises. Only five counties have opted to outlaw brothels, including those that contain Reno, Lake Tahoe, and Carson City. (Two counties—Eureka and Pershing—have yet to address the matter formally.)

  But times and county demographics are changing. A recent editorial in the Reno Gazette-Journal declared that the legal brothels “stamp Nevada as a hick state mired in an outmoded and unsavory past.” Nevada is currently undergoing one of the fastest rates of growth in the nation, with a population increase of 44 percent between 1990 and 1997. Brothel owners and county officials contend that the recent influx of transplants who don’t understand or appreciate Nevada’s peculiar history and libertarian ideals threaten the survival of this century-old state institution. Consequently, they argue, regulation of the industry is ever more important to keep brothel prostitution tolerable to Nevada’s expanding population.

  New prostitutes got a taste of these regulations as soon as they applied to a brothel for employment. When a woman named Eva arrived at Mustang Ranch looking for a job, I saw firsthand just how formalized, not to say bureaucratized, was the process of becoming a licensed brothel prostitute.

  Eva pulled up in front of Mustang #2 in her ’84 Chevy one afternoon around two o’clock. She had followed the instructions she had been given on the telephone: to ring the doorbell on the electric fence twice, not once, so the working girls would know it wasn’t a customer. They didn’t want to line up for nothing. When Irene, the manager, greeted her at the front door, Eva explained that she had called about a position as a working girl. Irene chuckled warmheartedly and said she got calls all day long from women looking for jobs as prostitutes. By noon on this particular day, six women had already called. Mustang Ranch received nearly a dozen telephone inquiries a day. It didn’t seem to matter much that the brothels weren’t permitted by law to advertise for prostitutes.

  With fifty-four bedrooms in #1 and thirty-eight in #2, Mustang could hire a maximum of ninety-two women but usually chose to cap the number of prostitutes at seventy-five. The brothel usually approached capacity over the weekend and then thinned out at the start of the week. (Mustang’s scheduling practices have evolved over the years and the brothel no longer requires women to work three weeks on, one week off; some women, especially those who live nearby, work a four- to five-day week, leaving Sunday or Monday and returning on Wednesday or Thursday.) In a year’s time, about 515 prostitutes came through Mustang Ranch. Since hiring over the telephone was a potential violation of both interstate commerce and pimping and pandering laws (under the Mann Act of 1910), brothels required in-person interviews.

  A woman in her early twenties, Eva physically reminded me of the model Kate Moss, with her serene, creamy face, delicate, waiflike facial features, and petite, nubile body. She parted her fine, dishwater-blond hair in the middle and let it fall naturally below her shoulders. Eva was beautiful in the most natural of ways, with a preference for patchouli oil over department store fragrances and no interest in makeup. She was a sure hire, I thought, and I expected Irene to offer her a position immediately. I was surprised to hear her explain that Eva would need to spend the next two days meeting a number of requirements before she could be hired as a licensed prostitute.

  Irene led Eva back to her office and invited her to sit down on one of the red folding chairs cluttering the room. How had Eva heard about Mustang Ranch? Irene asked. Eva took a deep breath before explaining that she’d been working as a cashier in a gentleman’s club in Sacramento, struggling to pay off a credit card debt of over $30,000. Some of the dancers had suggested she try prostitution, but Eva had been too scared. She was afraid of getting arrested or being killed by a deranged customer. One of the women told her about Nevada’s legal brothels. Irene quizzed Eva some more about her background, asking about her previous work experience and home life. Somewhat defensive, Eva made a point of telling Irene that she came from a stable middle-class home with a functional family and married parents.

  After a few minutes, Irene shifted gears and began describing the conditions under which Eva would be working. Specifically, all working girls were restricted to the immediate brothel confines (save for outdates, or paid excursions with clients) for the duration of their stay, which ranged from days to weeks depending upon their financial goals. Even though Eva had just rented an apartment in nearby Reno, she couldn’t go home after her shift. The rationale was simple: owners worried about the women “freelancing,” turning tricks on the outside.

  I would later discover that police and brothel owners had worked in collusion for many years to enforce unofficial codes of conduct that segregated prostitutes from the communities in which they worked, although no law quarantining brothel prostitutes was actually on the books. For example, on the pretext of protecting public decency, the town of Winnemucca in Humboldt County prohibited brothel prostitutes from frequenting town bars, casinos, or residential areas, associating with local men outside of work, being on the downtown streets after five P.M., or having any family members residing in town. Violation of any one of these rules could result in confiscation of a woman’s brothel work card and her expulsion from town. (Because brothel work cards and licenses were considered “privileged” licenses, they could be revoked for any reason.)

  Finally, in 1984, Reno attorney Richard Hager filed a federal lawsuit against Winnemucca, contending the rules violated the constitutional rights of prostitutes who had been fired for breaking them. “Is it acceptable or tolerable for a community to license commercial sex and yet discriminate against the women who provide it?” wrote Ellen Pillard, a professor at the University of Nevada–Reno and occasional brothel critic, in an article entitled “Legal Prostitution: Is It Just?” “That would be like licensing gambling, but prohibiting 21 dealers from living in the community.” Following the filing of the women’s lawsuit, Winnemucca and several other towns that had similar regulations (e.g., Ely, Elko, Wells, Lovelock, and Battle Mountain) discarded their unlawful codes of conduct, although to this day brothel management and law enforcement still try to
limit prostitutes’ contact with local communities. Mustang Ranch, for example, required a runner, or escort, to accompany prostitutes on errands to town at the women’s own expense—$5–$10 per errand or stop.

  Women’s activities were strictly controlled within the brothel gates as well. Each bedroom was equipped with a hidden intercom system that cashiers used to eavesdrop on women’s negotiations to assure they didn’t steal money from the house or trade sex for drugs. Women were told to turn off their radios, televisions, and ceiling fans when discussing money with customers so as not to muffle the sound of their negotiations. Despite this deterrent to theft, stealing was ubiquitous. Out of intercom range in the hallways, prostitutes whispered to customers their plans to quote aloud a reduced price if the man would agree to silently hand over an additional sum of money. With multiple prostitutes negotiating simultaneously, women also gambled that the cashier wasn’t listening, and turned in less money than was actually paid. To combat theft and drug use, management conducted unannounced room searches, led by floor maids who had been brothel prostitutes and knew all the places a woman might hide money or drugs: in bars of soap, hair spray cans, mattresses, and air vents.

  After Irene spelled out the restrictions on Eva’s movement, she explained that Mustang Ranch hired prostitutes as independent contractors, which meant the brothel wasn’t responsible for withholding taxes from the women’s earnings. It would be Eva’s responsibility to submit a copy of the Form 1099 filed on her behalf by Mustang with her taxes. (In actuality, however, there has never been close to 100 percent compliance by either prostitutes or owners in filing 1099s.) In return, as an independent contractor, she could set her own work schedule and negotiate her own prices with customers. Eva would be expected to split her gross earnings 50–50 with the brothel. In addition, she would be docked $31 daily: $10 to cover room and board and $21 to tip seven brothel employees $3 apiece: the manager, the cook, the floor maids, a laundry maid, and two cashiers. In exchange, Eva would receive three warm meals a day, with twenty-four-hour access to additional snacks, and be assigned a bedroom in which to work and live for the duration of her stay, with an adjoining bathroom shared with her next-door neighbor.