Reno Gazette-Journal from Reno, Nevada • Page 6

6AR Sex for saleThe laws SSSaBiJaj986 I 1 While legislators ducked the issue, courts set brothel law to turn down York's application. The state Supreme Court upheld Gregory in a unanimous 1973 decision that said a brothel license is a privilege, not a right. That paralleled a similar finding the Nevada Supreme Court would make for another of Nevada's "legislated industries" gaming. It also gave county commissions absolute authority to grant or deny brothel licenses. York, who lives at Lake Tahoe and still runs La Belle, declined to be inter-viewed.

In 1978, the late Walter Plankinton challenged Nye County's attempts to kick his Chicken Ranch brothel out of Pahrump, where it was the closest legal brothel to Las Vegas. Plankinton? an ex-truck driver, had built the Chicken Ranch before Nye County passed a brothel licensing ordinance. District Attorney Pete Knight attempted to close the it as a public nuisance under the 1949 Cunningnam For nearly a century, Nevada lawmakers managed to sidestep the prostitution issue. Brothels thrived, yet legislators never made them legal. But they didn't outlaw them either.

Into this legal vacuum stepped the Nevada Supreme Court, albeit quite gingerly. In its 1949 decision, Cunningham vs. Reno, the court said a brothel was a public nuisance that could be "abated" by county commissions or city councils. Reno used the decision to eliminate brothels. Although rural law enforcement officials sometimes went after individual brothel owners, they never used the Cunningham decision to stamp out prostitution in their jurisdictions.

But after Nevada counties began to pass brothel licensing ordinances, the courts upheld the authority of local governments to allow or disallow bordellos. There were three important cases. In 1971, Irene York, madam of a small Lovelock brothel called La Belle, tried to move into the lucrative Reno-Sparks market that was dominated in Storey County by the Mustang Ranch. Had she been successful, Mustang owner Joe Conforte might not have become the kingpin of Nevada's sex-for-sale industry. York's brothel would have been a mile or two closer to Reno and she could have intercepted customers.

Storey County commissioners denied her a license on the grounds that two brothels competing in an isolated corner of the county might lead to violence and bloodshed. "I was afraid if we allowed another brothel operation, there might be some kind of argument and someone might get killed," former Storey County Commissioner Clint Salmon said later, explaining his vote to deny. York went to court, claiming that by licensing only Conforte, Storey commissioners created a monopoly and were guilty of restraint of trade. Carson District Judge Frank Gregory ruled that commissioners had the right In 1980, Judy Kuban and Lorraine Helms, two madams whose brothels had been closed by a referendum in Lincoln County, tried to say the Plankinton decision obligated counties to have brothels. They argued that the Plankinton decision had stripped Lincoln County's authority to deny brothel licenses.

While it had said in the Plankinton case that brothels were no longer public nuisances, the state Supreme Court this time said voters had spoken and the county had a right to ban brothels. Thus it upheld the right of rural Nevada counties not to license brothels, as well as the right to allow them. But as U.S. Magistrate Phyllis Halsey Atkins observed after wrestling with Nevada's ambiguous brothel laws in a recent federal court case: "The manner in which prostitution became legal and regulated in the state of Nevada has been accomplished by less than clear statutory language." This time, however, the state Supreme Court sided with a brothel owner. Justices said that, by implication, state legislators had made brothels legal in the rest of the state when they passed a law in 1971 making them illegal in Clark County.

When the Legislature declared brothels illegal in counties with a population of 200,000 or more Clark County it "repealed the common law rule that a house of prostitution was a nuisance," the court said. The Cunningham decision, which had never been effective at controlling brothels anyway, was dead. Rural counties with prostitution finally had the "local option" to allow brothels something officials had claimed for years. Veteran state Sen. Bill Raggio, a longtime brothel foe, said that if legislators had anticipated the Supreme Court's ruling, they probably wouldn't have passed the Clark County ban.

Some towns tried to dictate prostitutes' civil rights "No girls shall have pimps in town. "No girls are to shack-up with any local men. If so, they will be ordered out of town. "Any girl who marries anyone and lives off the line in the City of Winne-mucca or anywhere else in the State, shall not come back to work or operate a house in this district. Those were some of the rules that prostitutes working in Winnemucca's red-light district had to abide by until recently to keep their jobs.

Enforced by the police chief, they were discarded by the city after Reno attorney Richard Hager filed a federal lawsuit against Winnemucca in 1984. The suit contends the rules violated the constitutional rights of prostitutes who had been fired for breaking them. Hager filed the suit in U.S. District Court in Reno on behalf of Joani Hagen, an English-born woman who worked as a prostitute at the Villa of Joy, one of the five brothels on "the line," a cul de sac at the end of Baud Street. Winnemucca police revoked her work card May 18, 1981, after finding out she had married a Lovelock man who was living in a Winnemucca motel.

That violated two brothel rules: one against prostitutes marrying, and another against allowing their husband, boyfriend or any "male acquaintance" to stay in Humboldt County. Hager said those rules violated women's most fundamental constitutional rights. He is trying to pursue the issue as a class action lawsuit on behalf of all Winnemucca prostitutes who lost their work cards for the three years after Hagen lost hers. Former Mayor Joe Jamello, ex-Police Chief Les Jones and former police Capt. Charles Jackson are defendants.

The outcome also could affect Ely, Elko, Wells, Lovelock and Battle Mountain, which had similar rules for their red-light districts. As soon as Hager sued Winnemucca, they also threw out their brothel rules, though none would as a prostitute, that does not mean that she has no constitutional rights in other respects," Atkins wrote. However, the magistrate recommended against certifying the case as a class action because Hagen, as a citizen of Great Britain, is subject to deportation at any time. Noting that a class-action lawsuit could affect prostitutes in other Nevada cities, Atkins said it is important to have a good representative of the class, which Hagen is not. Hager since has added seven more women all U.S.

citizens who worked at Winnemucca brothels to an amended complaint and filed a motion last January to renew the case as a class action. One of the women was a brothel maid; the other six were prostitutes. All had their work cards revoked by police. Regardless of whether the suit is a class action or argued only on Hagen's behalf, several other issues merit a trial, Atkins said. They include Hager's contention that Winnemucca police used the brothel rules as unofficial "criminal admit the lawsuit had anything to do with it.

Volumes of motions have been filed in the case in the past two years, with no trial date in sight. William Cobb, the Reno attorney defending Winnemucca, argues that since there is no federally protected constitutional right to be a prostitute, Hagen's rights were never violated. He cites a 1950 U.S.' Supreme Court decision which held that gambling is not a federally protected right. He ties that to a Supreme Court decision in 1900 defining prostitution as "one of those vocations which minister to and feed upon human weaknesses." Hager counters that the status of prostitution under federal law is irrelevant; the courts have held that a person has civil rights regardless of his or her occupation. In her report recommending the case go to trial, U.S.

Magistrate Phyllis Halsey Atkins agreed. "While a plaintiff may have no constitutional right to work sanctions" against' prostitutes, and that the rules were illegally promulgated since the Winnemucca City Council never passed an ordinance authorizing them. Denying the rules were ever used as criminal sanctions, Cobb said the point is moot since they no longer are in force. But Hager says they constitute banishment vague threats "to get out of town by sunset" or face jail. Winnemucca "obviously was concerned about prostitution proliferating" beyond the line, Cobb says in one of his legal responses, and "had no way of knowing whether a prostitute's husband living out of a back-street motel is a bonafide husband or whether the prostitute and the husband are using the marriage as a subterfuge for illicit and illegal prostitution." Tne only thing the city would have been able to do without the rules in such See CIVIL RIGHTS, back page Preacher looks back on Winnemucca crusade Twenty-five years after it ended in failure, La Verne Ray Inzer vividly recalls his crusade against Winnemucca's brothels.

"What prompted me," said Inzer, a circuit-riding preacher now living in Carlin, "was there was teen-agers going down there, 16 and 17 years old." One brothel also had been harboring a fugitive, he said, refusing to elaborate. The community "wouldn't let me tell why I made my move because some officials would be burnt," said Inzer. He is still bitter that the news media never printed his side of the story. "When I made my stand it was illegal as it could be," he said. Winnemucca had no law licensing brothels in 1961, and only last year passed a brothel Inzer even lost his job at a lumber company, only a stone's throw from the brothels he was trying to eliminate.

But he harbors no ill will against John Tall-man, who fired him. In fact, he pronounces Tallman a close friend, although the two come down on opposite sides of the brothel issue. Inzer noted he's built several country churches since then with materials bought from Tallman. "I ain't got no fuss with John," he said, adding that "community pressure" forced Tallman to dismiss him. Tallman, however, remains an outspoken advocate of brothels.

His father, the late Aaron Tallman, was the state senator whose bill to legalize prostitution by local, city or county option, was killed by Gov. Vail Pittman veto in 1949. "The church people may not like it," said Tallman, "but they're part of our Western heritage. We may not be proud of the damn places but we leave it alone." Inzer says he was an unlikely candidate to lead an anti-brothel crusade. "It's weird.

I'm a meek, mild-mannered person. I would never carry a banner or march in a picket line. I just speak my mind." But when an Elko businessman applied to open a brothel in Carlin eight years ago, Inzer was at the forefront of the opposition in his new hometown. He lost that fight, too, but the brothel closed of its own accord three years ago. "Basically, they're wrong," says Inzer.

"They should be blotted out The Bible says it's wrong." of small-town Nevada, the state's growing sex-for-sale industry was grabbing national attention, and the publicity was going to get worse. After Conforte's sensational extortion trial for attempting to blackmail former Washoe County District Attorney Bill Raggio into ceasing his campaign against the Triangle Ranch, Foley by then attorney general demanded in mid-1960 that all 17 Nevada district attorneys report to him on the status of prostitution in their counties. Foley refused to say what he intended to do with the reports, but rural district attorneys anticipated another state campaign to close brothels under the Cunningham decision a 1949 state Supreme Court ruling that threw out the last Reno brothel as a public nuisance. Not one rural district attorney complied with Foley's request. One DA told Foley to act "more like an attorney and less like a general." The Nevada District Attorneys Association responded with a resolution accusing Foley of overstepping his authority.

Conforte accused Foley of trying to use an anti-brothel campaign to propel himself into the governor's mansion. "Cow county" district attorneys took the position they had to have a citizens' complaint before trying to close a brothel. A reluctant battle Just such a citizen appeared in Winnemucca the year after Foley's demand for prostitution reports fell on deaf ears. La Verne Ray Inzer, a Baptist minister, revived the issue by asking Foley to help close the five bordellos on "the Line," Winnemucca's red light district sequestered north of the business district. Humboldt County's district attorney, the late James Callahan, was caught between Foley and Inzer.

Callahan began a cautious and seemingly reluctant action against the Line, but found no help in Winnemucca. His own county commissioners refused to give Callahan the go-ahead he needed to move against the houses as public nuisances. So he filed criminal prostitution charges. That made his job inevitably harder since Winnemucca had an ordinance allowing prostitution on the Line. On Oct.

11, 1961, Callahan had the madams of all five brothels arrested for running their taverns "for the purposes of lewdness, assignation and prostitution." Irene Roy, madam of the biggest house, the Combination Bar, was brought to trial first. It took a jury of 11 men and one woman 11 minutes to acquit her. Callahan dropped charges against the other four madams, saying it would be a waste of taxpayers' money to prosecute them. "Hell, everybody was hoping they would find them not guilty," recalled former Winnemucca Mayor Felix Scott. Foley announced he would take no action against prostitution "in counties where it flourishes" and dropped his anti-brothel campaign.

Inzer, for his stand, lost his job at a local lumber yard. (See "Preacher looks back on Winnemucca crusade," this page.) Nevada district attorneys lost their appetite for going after the brothels. Three years later, another Baptist minister, the Rev. Mr. Arthur Blessitt of Elko, complained about bordellos there.

Elko officials almost exchanged winks in responding. Brothel laws From page 1A Searchlight bordellos continued to run off and on for the next several years in what Moody jokingly calls "the pop-up effect." Clark County officials would raid the brothels, which would "pop up" again as soon as the county officials drove the 55 miles back to Las Vegas. Roxie's, a bordello fronting as a motel six miles out of Las Vegas on the Boulder Highway, was shut down and reopened repeatedly, before saving county officials further trouble by burning down in 1956. That year seems to have been a turning point for Nevada brothels. Perhaps it is only coincidence that Joe Conforte, who was to become the most notorious brothel operator in the state's history, set up his first "cathouse" in 1956, near Wadsworth.

The shell game he played with law enforcement officials from Washoe, Lyon and Storey counties moving his trailers and prostitutes from one county to the other when any of them tried to shut him down drew attention to other brothels. It was a cat-and-mouse game that would be played with recurring frequency in rural Nevada counties in 1956-57: When the Churchill County Sheriff moved against two brothels in Fallon Sandy's, which had operated for years in the center of town, and Sally's, run by Sally Burgess, the future Mrs. Joe Conforte, next to Fallon Naval Air Station both madams left town. When four Beatty brothels started competing for the prostitution market next to the growing Nevada Test Site by firing shots at each other in the night, Nye County District Attorney William Beko, now the Fifth District Court judge, shut them all down, including Conforte's Jolly Dolly. When the operator of a brothel at Ash Meadows Hot Springs, near Amargosa Valley, absconded with money from Las Vegas investors, telling them he used the money to pay off Tonopah officials, Beko shut it down.

The brothel never reopened. When Dead Horse Wells, a brothel and bar on a lonely dirt road midway between Gabbs and Hawthorne, was the site of a shooting and suspected arson in a fight over its ownership, the FBI arrested its madam on white slavery charges and closed it. When FBI agents found a Yering-ton madam harboring a man wanted for armed robbery in St. Louis, agents arrested her and the Lyon County seat watched its last bordello close. When entrepreneurs set up a brothel on private land within the Walker River Indian Reservation, Mineral County officials evicted them at the request of tribal officials, who said a brothel would hurt efforts to revitalize the reservation's economy.

When Lyon County District Attorney Wayne O. Jeppson tried to keep Conforte out of the triangle area of Lyon County, he also began to move against bordellos in the Dayton area. With nothing in the state criminal code expressly forbidding brothels, using the civil procedure of public nuisance abatement left local law enforcement officials vulnerable to pay-off accusations. However, no bribery charges were filed in connection with brothels until 20 years later after most local brothel licensing ordinances had been passed. Far from the discreet little bordellos district attorney of Clark County, prepared an ordinance to allow a brothel just west of the Las Vegas Strip.

Supporters argued it would reduce the activity of the streetwalkers who were invading the Strip with increasing numbers and boldness. But the city's gaming and convention leaders were alarmed at the impact legalized prostitution might have on the tourist trade. "One thing we are fighting in booking conventions is the image of Las Vegas," said Las Vegas Convention Authority Chairman Wes Howery. "If we legalize it, it would really hurt us." Rumors flew that Joe Conforte was behind Woofter's proposal. Woofter, unsuccessful Democratic candidate for attorney general in 1986, refuses to talk about his proposal.

But the specter of Joe Conforte was enough to make Clark County lawmakers immediately close ranks and push one of the most peculiar of Nevada's vague brothel laws through the Legislature. On Feb. 25, 10 days after Woofter unveiled his brothel ordinance, the Legislature passed a law banning brothels in counties with a population of more than 200,000 namely, Clark County. It was another in a long line of "special interest legislation" that Nevada lawmakers have become so fond of measures aimed at one specific locality, business, or person. It also was the first time since the early 1900s that the Legislature had addressed the legality of brothels.

Brothels were declared illegal but only in one county. Many people mistakenly thought the law also applied to Washoe County. But in 1979, when Reno-Sparks population began to challenge the 200,000 mark, the Legislature raised the population trigger to 250,000. Thus Washoe County outlaws bordellos on its own, while Clark County has the force of state law behind its prohibition. Police Chief Dan Taelour said he suspected prostitution might be occurring inside the city's five brothels, "but I can't verify it." He said he saw no reason to try, since prostitution also was occurring in Reno and every other city in Nevada.

District Attorney Joseph McDaniel was only slightly less forthright. "I won't say whether there is or isn't prostitution in Elko," McDaniel was quoted in the Nevada State Journal as saying. "I'm sure that if there is, there's no one in Elko County that's going to be surprised." However, nobody had complained about it, he said, not seeing fit to elevate Bles-sitt's objections to a formal complaint. "Our position is the less said the better, and when the point comes when the majority of people don't want it, I'm sure it will be eliminated." McDaniel, Elko County District Court judge today, has the same response 22 years later: "If the majority of the people become upset with them, they would close them all down, and it never has come to that." With public nuisance prosecutions against brothels largely discredited, the raids abated, but not the brothels. Only Conforte, who continued to move his portable brothels from county to county, continued to get hit.

In 1965, the state Legislature cleared up confusion over the Storey-Washoe County line, which Conforte had been using to thwart abatement proceedings. That put the Triangle Ranch squarely in Washoe County. Conforte moved into Storey County permanently to a place occasionally nicknamed "Happy Valley." Storey County authorities continued to raid the brothels. But the 40-mile drive from the county seat stretched Storey's small sheriff's department too thin to make sure that the "River District" bordellos stayed closed. The late Robert Berry, Storey's district attorney at the time, complained that as fast as officers closed down the houses, they re-opened, even with the county's four deputies working double shifts.

After deputies responded to gunfire between "rival camps" at the brothel and found "an arsenal" of guns in Sally Conforte's fleeing car, an angry Sheriff Eric Jacobson declared: "As of today, prostitution in Storey County is finished. In 1967, when Carson District Court Judge Richard Waters ordered the brothels closed again as public nuisances, he instructed Conforte to reimburse Storey County $5,000, in monthly installments of $1,000. The payments were to offset the costs of patrolling the River District to see that the bawdy houses stayed closed. Ironically, Conforte continued to make the payments beyond the five months ordered by the judge. Three years later, with Storey County still accepting them, they were used to justify a licensing ordinance.

Berry, who had closed down Conforte's brothels numerous times, told county commissioners in late 1970 they needed the ordinance "to make the $1,000 per month now coming into the county legal," according to commission minutes. First brothel licensing law On Dec. 5, 1970, two lame-duck Storey County commissioners Lowell "Buzz" Goodman and Martin Rosso passed the first brothel licensing ordinance in Nevada, and probably the first such law in the nation. Commission Chairman Gino del Carlo was absent the day the ordinance was introduced and voted against it the second time it came before the board. Passed 2-to-l as an emergency ordinance, it took effect Christmas Day 1970.

Joe Conforte's persistence had paid off. The Mustang Ranch was legal. While few rural brothel owners subscribe to Conforte's high-profile, flamboyant style, few deny he was responsible for giving the industry its legal foothold. The new ordinance made prostitution legal within a 500-foot radius of the old Mustang bridge, only taking in land leased by Conforte from two local potato and onion growers, the Peri brothers. Sally Conforte showed up next month at the Storey County Courthouse in Virginia City with $3,000 in cash for the Mustang's first quarterly license payment.

It easily eclipsed the county's previously highest-paying license, the $500-per-quarter paid by a Virginia City fortune-teller. The fee was quickly raised to $4,500, with the county collecting for two licenses: the Mustang Ranch and the Old Bridge Ranch. In February 1971, Roy Woofter, then What's ahead Sunday: The future of legalized prostitution. Stories by Doug McMillan.