Brothel

by Alexa Albert

  Reade came to his new profession brimming with excitement and full of innovative ideas; he quickly proved himself to be cut from a different cloth than old-time brothel owners. Aware of the troubles Conforte and other owners had had with the IRS, Reade immediately sought counsel from first-rate accountants on how best to handle his finances in an aboveboard way. Unlike his predecessor, Walter Plankington—who, some rumored, kept two sets of books: one for the IRS, in which he reported annually grossing $150,000–$200,000, and one for himself, in which he recorded grossing $500,000–$1,000,000—Reade had every intention of keeping things legal. He brought in financial planners, tax counselors, and investment counselors to teach the prostitutes about tax planning and investment when he realized that less than 15 percent of them saved or invested any of their income. “I hope they can educate themselves and invest wisely so they can protect themselves past their prime years,” said Reade. “I guess once a teacher, always a teacher.”

  Reade did admit to making some classic mistakes as a novice. Brothel owners are infamous for taking advantage of their position and becoming involved with the women, generally without paying them. Although he initially resisted, Reade said, he gave in to temptation when some of the prostitutes took offense at his rebuffs. Because owner-prostitute relations were so common in the business, he said, Chicken Ranch prostitutes interpreted his refusal as a slight. Did Reade think he was better than they? After becoming involved with some of the women over the course of several months, Reade forced himself to go cold turkey because he realized that his behavior could cost him the respect of his staff as well as of other prostitutes.

  When George approached the new Chicken Ranch owner to recruit him into the NBA, Reade jumped at the chance and even agreed to act as president. Still filled with the enthusiasm of a relative newcomer, he suggested to his colleagues that they hire a public relations firm. He hoped to market the brothels as legitimate businesses that contributed to Nevada’s economic vitality and protected the public’s health and safety. “I really tried to get all these renegade brothel operators to work together to protect the industry. The media constantly denigrated us, and nobody ever bothered to counter their arguments. When were we going to finally stand up and have official answers instead of no answers at all? We needed a nice, favorable report about the industry that we could send out anytime anybody called us up.” When Reade proposed that each owner chip in $25,000 to cover a PR firm’s fees, however, no one wanted to participate. Old-timers told him the brothels needed “to stay low in the bush.” In the end, Reade and his partner alone financed the production of a polished information package, which they sent out to law enforcement officers, prosecutors, health agencies, and legislators.

  But it was only a matter of time before Reade came to agree with other owners that it was better for the brothels to keep a low profile. After appearing on many call-in radio shows and television talk shows, from Dr. Ruth to Donahue and Larry King Live, in an effort to inform the public about Nevada’s brothels, Reade finally accepted that these programs didn’t care about facts, only sensation. “I thought that logically presenting what the brothels were about and what they accomplished would carry some weight and make points,” said Reade. “But people had already made up their minds in the majority of cases and logic didn’t crack the closed mind. People just wanted to be titillated. I decided to quit being a part of that because it didn’t serve any purpose.”

  Today, Reade shies away from publicity. He wasn’t even interested when George suggested that, given the pervasive, suggestive advertising of Vegas and Reno’s strip joints and gentlemen’s clubs, the NBA should challenge the ban on brothel advertising. He told George he didn’t want to rock the legislative boat. Instead, Reade would continue his own discreet advertising campaign, which entailed educating Vegas cabdrivers about the health benefits of brothels in the hope that they would pass the information on to their passengers. He distributed to taxi drivers a flier entitled “Your Party Will Appreciate Knowing These Facts …,” which cited an Associated Press article about the absence of HIV infection in the brothels. Finally, Reade pushed Chicken Ranch souvenirs, giving women a commission for selling their customers brothel T-shirts and other mementos. “The girls make more than I do. But the whole idea is to get the shirts out there without ruffling too many feathers in the process.”

  In contrast, Dennis Hof didn’t care how many feathers he ruffled with his publicity stunts. Hof, fifty-three, a former condominium time-share developer and brothel customer, owns two brothels in Lyon County, Moonlite Bunny Ranch and Miss Kitty’s. He has been in the business a little more than seven years but has already gained notoriety on par with Conforte’s. In January 1998, he hired John Wayne Bobbitt, of severed-penis fame, to tend bar at the Moonlite and drive its limousine. That same year, he began hiring porn stars like Sunset Thomas, Samantha Strong, and Laurie Holmes as brothel prostitutes, with minimums of $1,000. Hof’s newest PR concept was to film XXX-rated films on location at the Moonlite. He also had plans to add a 100,000-square-foot adult bookstore and go in on an Internet venture with Hustler magazine mogul Larry Flynt.

  According to George Flint, owners like Hof, who wanted to mass-market the brothels, threatened the entire industry. “You’re witnessing the fragmentation of the Brothel Association as it’s been,” he told me the day he learned Hof had blitzed the media, from Hard Copy to The Howard Stern Show, with boasts that his business had improved 20 percent because of Viagra. “Dennis Hof is a very aggressive businessman and promoter, and very naïve about the tenuousness of the business and the required delicacy of handling certain things. Leave the industry up to owners like Dennis Hof and you won’t have any organization or industry in eight years.” Because the NBA didn’t serve as a governing organization, brothel owners were free to operate their businesses as they liked. George could only sit them down and advise them to try to remain discreet. Up to that point, he had been unsuccessful with Hof.

  George hoped to have better luck with two of Nevada’s newest brothel owners, Mack and Angel Moore. A former mortician from Oregon, Mack relocated to southern Nevada with his second wife, Angel, to try his hand at running a brothel. They had bought Fran’s Star Ranch, which sat on seventy-seven acres of farmland in Beatty. Mack aspired to cultivate fruits, vegetables, and a new sort of brothel business. They renamed the place after Angel: Angel’s Ladies Brothel. In contrast to Mustang Ranch, it was a mom-and-pop operation in the desert, offering a lineup of no more than five women. Like the parlors in many of Nevada’s smaller brothels, Angel’s Ladies felt like a cramped living room in a prefab home. Acquainted with the business as an occasional customer because of his first wife’s alleged frigidity, Mack was feverish with newfangled ideas.

  Devout Christians, Mack and Angel required everyone (including any customers who happened to visit around six P.M.) to participate in a sit-down dinner each evening, with a fine imposed on anyone who started eating before grace was said. The brothel was dry, and it was the first to institute random drug testing of its workers. Other owners doubted that Mack and Angel would be able to attract enough women to work under these conditions. (Mack and Angel hoped to compensate by offering a 55–45 cut in favor of prostitutes, rather than the usual 50–50 cut.) Of more concern, perhaps, was the fact that Angel had been lining up, competing with the working girls, allegedly “only when there weren’t enough girls on the floor.” When I went out for a visit, I found a photo album entitled “Angel’s Services” sitting on a table in the parlor. In it were photos of Angel in a variety of sexual positions with Mack and other men.

  Angel felt strongly that if a man came in and bought forty-five minutes’ worth of sex, he should get a party for that long, whether the woman got him off faster or not. “Sex is a beautiful thing God gave us to release the tension inside. Sex is more than money; it’s taking care of the individual.” Angel claimed she wasn’t taking business away from the girls and really only dated clients no one else wanted. “But I don�
�t want someone to walk outside and hang himself because he couldn’t relieve himself.” Mack said he didn’t mind since he and Angel were swingers anyway, but the women did. Angel was stealing their customers, they felt, and because she was the owner, they had no recourse. George still hoped he could educate these amateurs and get them in line.

  Still, no matter how hard brothel owners like Russ Reade, Dennis Hof, and even Mack and Angel Moore tried to normalize the business, through mass marketing or proselytizing teetotalism, the results were mixed. In the face of Nevada’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” attitude, most brothel owners and employees coped by keeping low public profiles and insulating themselves within the business. The few outsiders adopted into this world became fiercely loyal and protective. What developed was an insular subculture kept on the fringes of mainstream society.

  *As early as 1985, nearly three-fourths of Nevada’s brothels voluntarily started testing their prostitutes for HIV after business dropped 30 to 50 percent as a consequence of heightened publicity about the disease. Not until 1988, after the institution of the mandatory condom law, did business fully rebound.

  *In 2000, Wynn sold his gaming holdings for $1 billion and acquired the old and famous Desert Inn as a birthday present for his wife. He subsequently closed the property with plans to raze the building and erect his most lavish casino-resort yet.

  *For example, in 1997, Nevada’s rate of forcible rape per 1,000 population was .57, while the national rate was .36. Despite the proximity of Mustang Ranch and Old Bridge Ranch to Reno and Sparks, the two cities documented a total of 144 rapes in 1997, or .64 per 1,000 population, almost two times the national rate. While some Nevada state officials contend that the state’s tourists—42 million in 1997—inflated these statistics, Nevada’s two biggest metropolitan areas, Reno and Las Vegas, ranked far ahead of other popular American tourist cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco, in rapes. (Still, in Nevada’s defense, the atmosphere of tourism is characteristically different in this state from most others.)

  *Brymer pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and served sixteen months in prison.

  *As executive director of the NBA, George was strictly a consultant and lobbyist. He has never been an employee of any individual brothel. Any attention George gave to Conforte’s demands stemmed from their longstanding friendship.

  8 .. AN EXTENDED FAMILY

  I often saw just how close-knit the brothel community was. That community extended beyond the prostitutes themselves; if anything, the other employees were more protective of the women than they were of each other. To be an employee at a brothel—a floor maid, bartender, cook, laundry maid, whatever—inevitably meant tolerating derogatory comments about the sort of women who would do “that.” One developed a tough skin.

  One afternoon, for example, I overheard a customer sitting alone at the bar, hunched over his third Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, hiss, “Psst. Hey, bartender. Which of these bitches would you fuck?”

  Brian, the day bartender at Mustang #1, was working. He looked up from the sink where he stood rinsing beer glasses, cocked his head, and furrowed his eyebrows. “Excuse me,” he said, just barely concealing his hostility. “What did you say?”

  Too drunk to recognize his bad manners, the customer repeated himself. “Which of these bitches is worth my money?”

  Brian’s ruddy Irish face turned crimson. “Let’s get something straight, asshole,” he snapped. “These are not bitches, these are my friends. This may be a legal brothel, but at least you don’t waste your money buying a girl fourteen drinks with no promise of getting laid. Here, the ladies are straight up. You don’t have to buy them a drink, and you’re guaranteed a lay. You treat these women with respect or I’m going to bounce your ass right out of here.”

  The man sat stunned. Under his breath, he mumbled an apology before slipping off his bar stool to head to the men’s room.

  By the time the man returned, word had spread among the working girls there was a jerk in the bar. For the rest of the afternoon, every prostitute he propositioned “walked” him, deliberately quoting a prohibitively high price. They trusted that Blanche the floor maid would excuse them: a former brothel prostitute herself, Blanche knew all about partying with men who didn’t respect working girls.

  When the customer finally left, as sexually unsatisfied as he came in and much more frustrated, I asked Brian about the confrontation. Fortunately, he said, customers like that were few and far between. Outside, however, Brian heard his fair share of disparaging comments about brothel prostitutes, and he was just as quick to jump to the women’s defense.

  Brian had never expected to become a defender of Mustang Ranch prostitutes. He had stumbled upon the job: working as a security guard at a nearby casino, he met a Mustang Ranch bartender who told him of the opening. Brian had found the salary increase and the schedule—one week on, one week off—more attractive than the fact that he would be working in a brothel. A “burnt-out” forty-nine-year-old ex-cop from California, Brian had no romantic visions of prostitution: “I’d had my fill of drug-crazed girls covered with sores, stoned or smashed out of their minds, propositioning me at the window of my patrol car.”

  Despite himself, Brian had come to see the women less as degenerates and more as human beings in the two and a half years he worked at Mustang. He knew that some of the prostitutes abused drugs and alcohol, he said, but he respected the fact that the women sold sex as licensed professionals rather than as illicit hustlers. “I no longer feel prostitution is a moral issue or a question of someone’s integrity and principles,” he said. “I think it’s just a job to a lot of girls. I come and do my job tending bar, and they do theirs. And least they’re doing it responsibly and respectably.”

  Instead of pitying the women, Brian had come to feel genuine empathy for them. He enjoyed listening to their troubles and giving advice. Flattered by their trust, Brian reciprocated with unwavering loyalty. “I [couldn’t] give a shit whether I make some guy a Bacardi and Coke correctly or not. I give a damn about the women. Frankly, they’re all I give a damn about here. It took a lot for them to trust me. They figured I was just another bartender who wouldn’t last six months before getting canned for trying to get into one of the girls’ pants.”

  Although Mustang rules prohibited employees from “fraternizing” with brothel prostitutes, all too frequently staff members assumed that employment entitled them to freebies, or at least discounts. (To confuse the message, George Flint did occasionally give male employees free passes as bonuses, but he expected them to be used at other brothels.) For many years, to prevent consorting, brothels wouldn’t hire men. Male owners were supposed to stay behind the scenes, leaving day-to-day operations to the female staff. Today, men are permitted to work more visibly—as cooks, bartenders, cashiers, and maintenance people—but women still hold all the managerial and floor maid positions.

  But Brian hadn’t faltered. Having been divorced after eighteen years of marriage, he was committed to being faithful to his live-in girlfriend of almost four years. Despite Brian’s protestations, his male friends and the men he served in the bar kept fantasizing about all the free sex they thought came with brothel employment.

  Not every employee was as carefully chaste as Brian. There was Jeffrey, for example, another bartender, a big burly man who looked not unlike Popeye’s nemesis, Bluto. Jeffrey was Mustang’s resident bad boy, and with his long sleek ponytail, goatee, and Harley-Davidson, he did nothing to negate the image. He let it be known that he had ridden briefly with the Hell’s Angels. Jeffrey came from a long line of Mustang old-timers, among them his father, Joe Conforte’s former bodyguard and right-hand man and one of only two employees to be given a lifetime pension for his years of service. Jeffrey had tended bar and provided security at Mustang since he was twenty. Now in his thirties, he was nearly a Mustang institution in his own right.

  Jeffrey felt entitled to ignore brothel rules, and he had amassed a history of dalliances wit
h working girls, sometimes seeing several women simultaneously. It wasn’t unusual for women to buy him expensive gifts in order to win his attention and affection. Rumor had it that Jeffrey wasn’t beyond getting Mustang prostitutes to pay him to have sex. “He’s very protective, and that’s seductive,” explained one woman. “When a guy gets out of line with one of us and we hit the panic button, Jeffrey usually gets there first, even before security. I think a lot of the girls become infatuated with him, wishing they had somebody like that with them all the time.”

  Curiously, the women felt very little ill will toward Jeffrey, despite the numerous hearts he’d broken. I never heard a bad word said about him, and I heard plenty of dirt dished on other brothel staff. Most of the working girls felt indebted to him and consequently were very loyal. One working girl would only say, “Me and Jeffrey go back a long ways. I would kill for him. Actually, I’d rather not talk too much about Jeffrey without him here.”

  I got to see Jeffrey in action as soon as Heather appeared on the scene. He strutted past her with his chest puffed out, pretending not to see her, for the first few days. After almost a week, he began honoring her with an occasional glance or grunt when he served her drinks. Then one morning I caught the two of them cozying up to each other at the bar. Without much persuasion, Jeffrey had gotten Heather to pull out two porn magazines with back-page advertisements for the Houston “modeling agency” where she used to work. Coyly, Heather flipped the pages, showing off the ads that featured her dressed provocatively with a cartoon bubble over her head saying, “I speak Greek.” Heather explained that meant she performed anal intercourse.

  After their tête-à-tête, Heather placed eight dollars on the bar and seductively mouthed a thank-you before she turned to join the morning’s first lineup. Jeffrey grinned devilishly, obviously pleased. Brothel patrons were notoriously unappreciative of bartenders, who were left to rely on the generosity and good fortune of the working girls on busy days. Before Heather’s tip, Jeffrey had only made $33 in tips since starting his shift six hours earlier, at two A.M.