by Alexa Albert
Now, Daisy and Fernanda were using the message board to stir things up. The two women said they were out to set the record straight, to correct the CyberWhoreMongers’ misconceptions about prostitution, sex, men, and women. According to Fernanda, “Coincidentally, Daisy and I ended up online at the same time. We were the first women who really spent any amount of time there. All these old-fogy fuckers sitting around bullshitting about LPIN [licensed prostitution in Nevada] had no idea what was really going on. They were just reiterating all these stereotypes and bullshit.”
A twenty-seven-year-old tomboy with short, wildly curly, honey-blond hair, Fernanda had a mischievous grin that only hinted at her chutzpah. After being kicked out of her adoptive parents’ home at fourteen, she had hitchhiked from New England to Florida, and ultimately found herself smuggling alcohol and tobacco out of the United States with her boyfriend, who later became her husband. He was caught; Fernanda fled to Nevada to escape prosecution and became a prostitute at Mustang Ranch to cover her husband’s mounting legal expenses. One of the most outspoken women at Mustang, Fernanda regularly challenged brothel management’s authority. During her first two weeks of work, she broke a customer’s nose when he bit her nipple. After she had earned enough money to cover her husband’s bills, Fernanda formally left him, prompted by his fury that she had resorted to prostitution. In the meantime, she had found a new family in her Mustang colleagues.
Of the online postings, Fernanda said: “[Daisy and I] came in and were like, ‘Oh no, fuck that. You guys have got it all wrong. The houses don’t give a shit about us, are you kidding? You’ve got your blinders on.’ So, we started telling them what was really going down.”
The Internet offered brothel prostitutes like Fernanda long-awaited autonomy to promote and broker their business. And, shielded from retaliation by management, Fernanda and Daisy and later others could express their opinions freely and air their grievances about self-serving brothel owners and poor work conditions. The women sought to squelch unfair and dangerous misinformation, such as claims of rampant, concealed sexually transmitted diseases among brothel prostitutes.
More interestingly to me, they let loose their feelings about the profession, and their clients—feelings I had heard few other brothel prostitutes express, especially to their customers. When a man posted a message asking how she really felt about being a prostitute, Daisy replied: “The first words that come to mind are: degraded, dehumanized, used, victim, ashamed, humiliated, embarrassed, insulted, slave, rape, violated. I know these words are hard to you … but I just closed my eyes and typed the words that come into my mind.” She went on to describe her true thoughts about brothel customers: “99% of them fit these words: pig, dog, animal, uncaring, user, slave owner, asshole, mean, thoughtless, rude, crude, blind.”
Stunned by Daisy’s frank communication, CyberWhoreMongers flooded the message board with humble, apologetic replies. Typical was that of a man with the user name GS: “It makes me take a good hard look at myself, and I don’t like what I see. It is posts like this one, and your previous posts about your feelings that open our eyes. I hate that I have contributed to making a woman feel this way.”
As more prostitutes posted to the board, they united in teaching the men brothel customer etiquette and admonished any man who used the message board to exhibit disrespect for prostitutes. One man with the handle XL wrote: “I was shocked and offended when Fernanda and Daisy first came on the board. They were hitting us over the head with some of the behind-the-scenes reality of licensed prostitution in Nevada (LPIN), which some of us preferred to ignore and others never knew existed. It needed to be offensive to get the point across—the medium of crudeness and anger was as much the message as the facts were. Eventually I got it. They completely changed the tenor and personality of the board and have influenced our view and knowledge of LPIN as much as anyone.”
Where once the all-male cyber-community was almost unconditionally accepting of one another, now the men began turning on one another in shows of gallantry. The message board grew cluttered with posts from men blasting each other’s ideas and reprimanding one another for being insensitive. Bashful even submitted to the prostitutes’ requests and removed all mention of prices from the field reports. By publicly disclosing prices on the Internet, Bashful had intended to expose the brothels’ pricing system as a shell game that kept consumers guessing as to real prices, and to enable novice brothel visitors to make more informed choices. Now, his critics contended, he had forsaken his original mission in order to “kiss the girls’ asses” so as not to have “a bunch of girls mad at him.” Much antagonistic discussion on the message board followed before Bashful decided to try to strike a balance between the interests of the clients and those of brothel workers. He posted the general results of a pricing survey he had conducted among the CyberWhoreMongers, which revealed that men’s parties cost an average of $335 an hour and 90 percent of them ranged between $150 and $500 an hour.
Despite all their bickering, the CyberWhoreMongers and a handful of prostitutes had become a tight-knit virtual community. “In the long haul,” Bashful posted on the message board, “we seem to have become a family that fights a lot but still has a remarkably warm and cohesive quality to it. My best friends are members of our community.” Because of the illicit and confessional nature of their conversations, the CyberWhoreMongers found themselves bound by a sense of intimacy and vulnerability. In addition to their usual titillating discussions and playful banter, individuals began to use the message board to ask for support during serious life crises, ranging from romantic breakups to health problems. One man who went by the handle Clatch claimed his cyber friends offered more moral support after his heart attack than did people in his everyday life. “After I got home from the hospital, I checked the message board and I was astounded to see so much concern about me. People asking each other where I was, saying things like ‘This isn’t like him to go this long without posting.’ In some senses, I have gotten to know these people better than people in my real life.”
But in spite of their burgeoning sense of kinship, the community was still only a virtual one, until one day in 1997 when Bashful proposed a real-life meeting, a rendezvous in Nevada to go brothel-hopping together. Only twelve men showed up that first year; many others were too apprehensive about both losing their anonymity and doing the unimaginable—going to a brothel to consort with other men. But the twelve who took the dare found immense satisfaction in chatting about computers and swapping stories about their favorite brothel prostitutes before heading out together en masse to the Ranches and partying with each other’s recommendations, including Annabella and Fernanda. “My days of solitary brothel cruising came to an end,” one man posted afterward, “and I learned the joy of hanging out in whorehouses with the guys.” Thus was born the annual CyberWhoreMongers Convention.
The second annual convention promised to be different. Bashful expected many more men—regular posters as well as lurkers—to make an appearance. Rather than simply congregating at a different brothel each night, the CyberWhoreMongers filled their four-day fête with scheduled events, from an awards dinner on Friday night to a Saturday afternoon barbecue. Perhaps most extraordinary, however, was the fact that some of the men’s favorite working girls planned to attend the convention as participants.
I was deeply curious to see who CyberWhoreMongers were. Sure enough, many of the men I met at the convention were computer programmers and software designers, but there were also lawyers, pharmacists, and truck drivers. To my shock, I even met a man from my own stomping ground: a Harvard Medical School alumnus and faculty member named Daniel. Naturally concerned about his reputation, Daniel was initially mortified to meet me. He didn’t want to tell me at which Harvard hospital he attended. Should I ever choose to “out” him back in Boston, he said, I would ruin his career. Eventually, however, he relaxed, and he ended up talking my ear off for over five hours, a soliloquy that was half philosophical self-reflectio
n, half shamed confessional.
Daniel first discovered brothel prostitution when he stumbled across the Georgia Powers website two years earlier, on the heels of a painful divorce. “I was just so depressed. I had sacrificed so much to attain professional success, and then I felt I sacrificed my profession in attempts to have a happy marriage—futilely.” Brothel prostitution helped restore his sense of manhood and self-confidence, he said, while the CyberWhoreMongers provided him with a sense of camaraderie that relieved some of his shame. Believing he was probably the only Harvard physician who patronized Nevada’s brothels, Daniel suspected his colleagues would have been even more appalled to learn he had actually fallen for Fernanda. Only recently had Daniel come to terms with the fact that they would never become lovers. Still, he continued to care deeply for her. “I can’t recall a friend who has made me feel so completely accepted and comfortable to be around as Fernanda.”
The mood was jovial throughout the course of the entire convention. Insider jokes abounded, such as the lapel pins in the shape of miniature carrots handed out to everyone, an allusion to a story Daisy once posted about a client who wanted anal sex with a carrot; she screwed him so hard he bled. Even lurkers came forth. One, who called himself John (he had no user name, since he had never posted), bought so many raffle tickets—fifteen—that he won the prize, a free outdate with Baby’s friend Savannah. As the convention came to a close and people began departing, handshakes and back pats turned into bear hugs and kisses.
As I drove back to Mustang after the weekend ended, I questioned my decision to attend the convention. While I enjoyed the company immensely, I wondered if I’d been duped. What did women like Tanya and Linda always say—“A trick is always a trick”? Many of the prostitutes at Mustang disliked the field reports, believing that the reviews worked to their disadvantage no matter what. A marginal review could cost them potential clients, while a good report could build unrealistic expectations that led to dissatisfaction and disgruntlement. Despite numerous glowing reports of her work, even Baby had had a few men come in and say disappointedly, “You’re much older than Bashful made you sound.” During the convention, the men angered a number of prostitutes at Mustang Ranch when they acted more interested in hanging out in the parlor talking among themselves than in partying with the women. “ ‘So you’re Uncle Bob,’ ” said one woman, mocking an exchange she’d heard the night before. “ ‘You’re my hero. I love you.’ ”
Mustang management cursed the men for an entirely different reason. Bashful and friends had assumed that brothel owners would appreciate the free publicity furnished by their website. Instead, owners worried that the information could actually endanger the brothel industry. Posting specific prostitutes’ work schedules could be interpreted as a form of advertisement, which was illegal. According to George Flint, the men’s frank discussion about controversial aspects of the business posed another potential liability for the industry. For example, the men’s heated discussions of whether or not “bareback” blow jobs and intercourse ever occurred could be used as evidence against the brothels by opponents like John Reese or Senator O’Donnell.
And how beneficial was this association for the men, really? It certainly ate up their time. Bashful figured he spent at least five hours a day on the message board, two hours at work and three hours at home. For all that this cyber community offered its members, I suspected it actually hampered further social development. Men felt justified in devoting inordinate amounts of time to being online with others equally obsessed with brothel prostitution. Bashful, for example, had only had sex with prostitutes, a fact he almost sounded proud of when he told his cyber friends. Daisy once posted a very frank, unflattering picture of the CyberWhoreMongers: “I think that about 80% of the men on this board have given up and are taking the easy way out. This group of guys has replaced a normal, healthy social life with licensed prostitution in Nevada. I feel bad for them. You don’t have to pay for ‘love’ and attention. Sure there are a lot of you out there that are not Brad Pitt … but you are people. Overweight? Balding? Socially shy? Get over it, go meet someone that will love you for real. You deserve it, we all do.”
The Internet was also straining the old boundaries of the prostitute-client relationship in ways that could be frightening. Annabella learned this firsthand soon after the convention, when she received a threat from a former CyberWhoreMonger who had the user name Chisel. A wealthy married man, Chisel had frequently contributed field reports about Annabella, his favorite brothel prostitute, to Bashful’s original website. As his obsession with her grew, Chisel cut ties with the CyberWhoreMongers to start another website devoted to prostitution. Soon afterward, he began demanding that Annabella quit prostitution and become his mistress. When she refused, and subsequently refused to further service him, Chisel decided if he couldn’t have Annabella no one else would. (Most of the other men who posted lacked possessiveness. As Bashful put it, “If you are territorial or possessive you aren’t going to like this medium; you aren’t going to want to tell other guys about the great girls.”) Chisel threatened to post Annabella’s real name and other personal information he had secured unless she agreed to stop posting on the CyberWhoreMongers’ message board and to have all her field reports deleted.
Despite pleas—thirty-six posts in all—from other men to leave her alone, Chisel wouldn’t let up, and Annabella finally gave in. In a final post on the Georgia Powers message board, she wrote: “At one time, I thought him [Chisel] to be a friend, as close as any of you I have held dear. I trusted him and shared much of my life with him. As time went on he proved that he had another agenda.… His terrorism has become too much for me.… I have requested that all my reports be pulled, I will no longer post to this message board and I have given notice to Marvin [owner of the Sagebrush brothel] that I have retired as of today. This was a heartbreaking decision. I was looking forward to at least one or two more years in the business. I have met some wonderful people, some very very dear people. I will never forget any of you. I need to make a complete break though. No one can imagine the stress I have been put through. I must put all of this behind me.… It is with tears that I bid all of you farewell.”
The circumstances of Annabella’s retirement were indeed rare. But calling it quits and giving up the business was unusual for brothel prostitutes regardless of the circumstances. In fact, during my six years of involvement, I saw very few members of the brothel community leave Mustang Ranch. They were all too hooked.
10 .. HOOKED
In the spring of 1999, Mustang Ranch went on trial. For almost a decade, the federal government had suspected that Joe Conforte had covertly repurchased his brothel at the IRS’s 1990 auction with $1.49 million he had smuggled abroad. But the U.S. attorney had no proof until recently, when new evidence surfaced that Conforte was still controlling and profiting from Mustang Ranch despite his fugitive status in South America. Specifically, Conforte’s former attorney and bookkeeper, both of whom had been facing federal indictments, copped pleas and testified that Conforte had siphoned off over $4 million from Mustang Ranch between 1993 and 1996 through checks and wire transfers sent by brothel employees to his associates in South America.
I was at home in Boston when I received a phone call from George Flint letting me know the trial was over and the verdict decided. In less than ten hours, the federal jury had found the current Mustang owners (A.G.E. Enterprises, Inc., and its holding company, A.G.E. Corp., Inc.) guilty of racketeering crimes that included international money laundering, bankruptcy fraud, and domestic as well as foreign wire fraud with Joe Conforte as beneficiary.* The A.G.E. companies were merely shell corporations, federal prosecutors had successfully argued, set up in order to hide Conforte’s true proprietorship. And the upshot of all this, George explained, was that in less than thirty days, the federal government planned to seize the brothel and lock its doors for good.
News of Conforte’s active involvement with Mustang Ranch didn’t surprise me. E
ver since my first visit, I had gathered that Conforte played a role in day-to-day operations. Despite his physical absence, his presence was ubiquitous, from the daunting black-and-white portrait with trademark cigar in hand that hung prominently in the parlor to the almost daily check-in calls that George and others fielded.†
Still, I hadn’t expected the trial to turn out like this. Almost no one had. George had told me about the federal government’s preoccupation with nabbing Conforte, but given Conforte’s extraordinary survival record, no one could quite believe he would ever go down. Hadn’t Louis, the brothel’s cook, told me, “Mustang’s like a cat with nine lives. No matter what happens, it always rises from the ashes.” Only George voiced doubts. “Whorehouses never win in court,” he said unequivocally. As I listened to George dolefully explain the case, the people whose lives would be affected by the closing flashed through my mind. Where would everyone go? What would they do?
What did locals think about the demise of one of their state’s most noted institutions and landmarks? According to George, public reaction to the impending closure of Mustang Ranch was mixed. Long contemptuous of Conforte, the Reno Gazette-Journal wrote in a scathing editorial:
The only way we can be assured that the last chapter has been written in the long, sorry saga of the Mustang Ranch is for the federal government to tear it down.… Only when the Mustang is gone will we know that Joe Conforte’s ugly influence over Storey County will have been ended once and for all. The federal government … will be doing northern Nevada a huge favor by calling in the wrecking crew. As the Mustang is demolished, Storey County leaders can look clear-eyed at the real cost of their decades-long dance with Conforte.
