The Art of the Pimp: One Man's Search for Love, Sex, and Money (11 page)

While gainfully employed at the ranch, Bonita had met Chuck Le’Mon. He had owned the Moonlite since 1955, back before prostitution was even legal, and ended up bringing her to live with him in Palm Springs. Le’Mon was older now and had lost interest in sex, which was good news for me. I saw a lot of Bonita in the weeks ahead.

Stacy, meanwhile, was trying to find the strength to dump her loser boyfriend. She’d call me two or three times a week. We’d talk and I’d get hard on the phone, remembering the way I’d rocked her perfect ass in my Tampa hotel room. She finally called on New Year’s Eve, crying. “My boyfriend beat me up,” she said. I told her there’d be a ticket waiting for her at the airport and to forget about her boyfriend and her stuff and to just get on that plane and fly west.

As soon as Stacy arrived, I stopped messing around with Bonita and for a time we lost touch. But one afternoon I saw an ad in the paper about a brothel in Nevada that was up for sale. I contacted the broker, who told me it was the Moonlite. I was absolutely floored by this coincidence. I called Bonita and told her that I might be interested in buying the ranch. She arranged a meeting with Chuck and we went for lunch at the Ritz Carlton, his favorite place. I told him about the old days at the Moonlite, and how Andy Kaufman and I had fantasized about all of the things we would do to make it the best little whorehouse in the world. “Not that it’s not great now,” I added quickly, hoping I hadn’t hurt his feelings.

Le’Mon told me to stop fantasizing and to start giving it serious thought. He had sold the brothel some years earlier, but he still held the note on the property, and the buyers were running the operation into the ground. Worse, they had fallen behind on the licensing fees. Fortunately, Le’Mon knew the Lyon County sheriff, who had called to tell him what was going on, and he had made the necessary payments. “It was a very close call,” he said. “Once you lose your license, it’s almost impossible to get it back.”

Despite the fantasies I’d shared with Andy Kaufman, I had never seriously imagined owning a brothel. But suddenly I was interested — and so was Stacy. And since we both wanted to know more about the business of prostitution, we did our homework. We learned a lot of interesting things and I’ll share a few of them with you. We learned, for example, that prostitution was legal in this country until the early 1900s, when the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union came along and tried to ruin everybody’s fun. They put all sorts of nice girls out of business, from New Orleans to Alaska. Nevada became the lone holdout — the only state that continued to recognize prostitution as a respectable profession.

Nevada had always liked women. Back in the 1850s, it was basically a mining state, populated mostly by single men, hustlers, and cowboys, and the men had outnumbered the women three to one. Smart women took advantage of the odds and the mining companies — eager to keep the men happy — went out of their way to help them set up shop. This wasn’t Oregon, after all. Nobody came to Nevada for the farming and few people were there to celebrate God. People were pretty much free to do whatever the hell they wanted, within reason, and I responded to that. Nevada is probably the last live-and-let-live state in the country, and I’m a live-and-let-live kind of guy.

“Prostitution is a lot like time-shares,” I told Stacy. “You’re not
really buying the property. You’re just visiting for a short period of time.”

We also learned a lot about Joe Conforte, who owned the Mustang Ranch, which was about fifteen miles east of Reno. I’d never been there, but I’d heard about it, like most of the rest of the world, and I’d heard a few things about Conforte, too. In the early years, for example, before prostitution was legal, he ran his business out of trailers. Whenever the law came calling, he’d move the trailers to the neighboring county and the girls became somebody else’s problem. I also learned that people in the business owed Conforte a significant debt of gratitude. By 1972, he had pulled enough strings, greased enough palms, and had his girls suck enough cock to make prostitution legal in a number of Nevada counties.

There were rules, of course.
Lots
of rules. State law required that the girls be tested for STDs every week, which I thought was a great idea. Men could visit the brothels with confidence, knowing that the girls were disease-free. Another law stipulated that a brothel could not be located near any city with a population of more than 250,000 (a number that kept changing over the years). Suddenly I understood why all the brothels were in cow country, miles from civilization.

There were other laws — the brothel couldn’t be within 400 yards of a schoolhouse or a church, for example, and it couldn’t be located on a main thoroughfare — and that made perfect sense, too. The only statute that troubled me was the fact that brothels were barred from advertising, which made me wonder how one was supposed to drum up business. After all, the time-share business was all about advertising and marketing, and without that we wouldn’t have survived.

“You’ll figure something out,” Stacy said.

“You really think I should do this?” I asked.

“Could be fun,” she said.

“Could be,” I said.

If I did in fact buy the Moonlite, I told Stacy, I wanted to be bigger than Joe Conforte, and I told her about those wild ideas I’d tossed around with Andy Kaufman. For starters, I wanted to class up the place. I wanted the customers to come through the door and be made to feel like kings. I wanted a nice bar, with comfortable seats that cooed at your buttocks. And I wanted the girls to be independent, to set their own prices and make their own deals. In fact, I imagined sitting down with them and teaching them how to sell themselves. I’d been a salesman for more than a decade now and I was good at it. I knew they could benefit from my experience. Hell, over the years I had created some of the best sales teams in the country. If I could teach a high school dropout how to sell a time-share, surely I could teach a hooker how to sell herself.

I had to be careful, though. For several decades, the Mustang Ranch had been the most visible and the most profitable brothel in Nevada, but Conforte had made a lot of mistakes. He did two years for tax evasion and had apparently learned nothing from the experience, because in 1991 he got nailed again. This time around, instead of risking five years behind bars, he fled to Brazil and I believe he’s living there to this day.

With my research out of the way, I called Chuck Le’Mon. I asked him to meet me for lunch at the Ritz Carlton, just the two of us. By the time lunch was over, I’d agreed to pay him a million dollars for the Moonlite Ranch.

So I wrapped up the time-share business in San Diego and moved forward with the purchase. And I moved quickly. I had to apply for my brothel license and the Lyon County Sheriff’s Office looked into every detail of my life. Family, finances, employment history, criminal records, ex-wives — everything. If someone has
ever been convicted of a drug charge, a felony, gun charges, or embezzlement — well, his or her chances of getting a license are basically zero.

I was asked how much I planned to invest and where the money was coming from to make sure I didn’t have mob connections. And just when I thought the investigation was over, I was made to cover the cost of a thorough background check on
myself
, which included a lengthy interview with the FBI.

Ten days later, I got a call from the sheriff’s office. My license had been approved.

The year was 1992 and I was about to launch a new career as a pimp.

I FLEW UP TO RENO
the following week to visit my new establishment, and in the broad light of day it was a bit of a shock. The building was squat and the paint was peeling. The fence that surrounded it made it look like a reformatory. I buzzed, the gate opened, and I went inside. It was nothing like I remembered. The furniture was ratty. The carpets were worn and stained. The lighting was unflattering.

This was just a trick of the mind, of course, because I’d been there many times as a customer, and as a customer, everything had looked fantastic. But ownership had changed my perspective. I was no longer looking at the place through rose-colored eyeballs. I was seeing it for what it was.

When people think about brothels, if they think about them at all, they imagine a ratty mattress and a naked lightbulb. The Moonlite wasn’t that bad, of course, but it needed a lot of work.

The girls needed work, too. Some of them, anyway. Back in those days, more than two decades ago now, the girls were a lot less refined. And I’m just being polite here: If you want to know the
truth, about half of them could easily have been classified as
rough trade
.

I went back to Palm Springs and shared my impressions with Stacy. “It’s a fucking dump,” I said. “It’s going to take another million to even
begin
to turn it into what I want it to be.”

“Let’s get to work,” she said.

Initially, it was a real challenge. The entire place consisted of about six rooms and I had to work around the girls. I brought construction crews in and they began to transform the place, one room at a time. I invested in new furniture. I painted the ceiling black and put in psychedelic lighting. (Call me crazy, but I liked the way it made those white hot pants glow.) I put in a gas-fueled fireplace. I ripped out the kitchen, replaced the old appliances, and made space for the girls to sit down and take their meals.

I also sat the girls down and had a serious talk with them in front of Stacy and in front of the husband-wife management team I’d inherited. First and foremost, I had no tolerance for drugs. If the sheriff walked into my premises and found drugs, I was liable. And I’d be damned if I was going to let any one of them put my investment at risk. I wasn’t an asshole about it, but I was firm. And those girls needed an iron hand.

I also talked to them about pimps. I didn’t have anything against pimps, per se, but I didn’t have much use for them, either. I told them they could keep their pimps and even give away all their hard-earned money, if that’s what they chose to do, but that they didn’t need them. They had me. I was Pimp Daddy. I would take care of them.

Not all of them were convinced. Some of the pimps were pretty rough trade themselves. They ruled through intimidation. They’d tell the girl, “I got another bitch in that place, and you’re never going to know who she is. But she knows who you are and she’s
watching you. So I know everything you’re doing and God help you if you lie to me.”

I told the girls, “I don’t know if God is going to help you. I don’t know if God is going to help any of us. But if you come to me, I’ll do whatever I can.”

The pimps created an atmosphere of mistrust and that wasn’t what I wanted for my ranch. I wanted a different kind of ranch. I wanted a place where we felt like one big happy family, with me at the head of the table.

The very next thing I did was to change the name. It had always been the
Moonlite Ranch,
but from now on it would be
Dennis Hof’s World Famous Moonlite BunnyRanch
. That was just smart marketing. If it wasn’t famous yet, it would be.

Then I took down the sign that said
MEN ONLY
. I’d been with enough women who liked women, and I figured there’d be some forward-thinking women out there who would be curious about The Moonlite. I even imagined a day when a woman would come in with her own husband, to fulfill the average man’s Number One Fantasy: having sex with two ladies at once. Still, any way you looked at it, opening the door to women made good sense. They comprised 52 percent of the population. Why bar them from my establishment?

At the end of that very first month, I caught one of the girls smoking weed and I had to show the others I meant business. “Get the Kentucky luggage,” I told Stacy.

She went off and came back with some of those green double-strength Hefty garbage bags. I went into the girl’s room, packed her things, and tossed the bags over the fence. She was all up in my face, screaming this and that. “I’m going to kill you, motherfucker! My man is going to come back here and cut you into little pieces.”

I told her, “Fine. Tell him I’ll be waiting for him.”

She was the first of many. As I said, those were some hard-core girls and they didn’t immediately get the message. They got the same treatment, though, and they made similar threats, and I got more than my fair share of calls from angry pimps. “You are a dead man, you hear me, Hof? I am coming to get you.”

“Well, come on, motherfucker. I’m waiting. Just me and my fucking arsenal.”

I wasn’t lying about the arsenal. Guns are a way of life in Nevada, and I’d gone out and bought what I felt I needed. Maybe I wasn’t as tough as I was making myself sound, but they didn’t know that, and I didn’t want them to know that. All they needed to know was that Dennis Hof wasn’t going to take any shit — from them, from their girls, or from anybody else. I didn’t want any drug users at Dennis Hof’s World Famous Moonlite BunnyRanch. They were nothing but trouble, and I was looking for a better class of working girl. Of course, to look at the bunch I’d inherited, that seemed more like a pipe dream. But that wasn’t going to stop me from trying.

UNFORTUNATELY,
I had to keep flying back to that time-share project in San Diego, and I had to leave the place in the hands of that lackluster management team. Construction moved slowly, but we were making progress. Within a few weeks, we had remodeled one of the rooms and were hard at work on a second.

Meanwhile, Stacy found herself taking on more and more responsibilities: handling payroll, balancing schedules, trying to keep the girls in line, and making runs to the bank to deposit the fruits of my posse’s labors. She was also looking for a new manager, because the existing team was ready to move on, and because smart
as Stacy was and capable as she was, it was more than any one person could handle. She put a small ad in the local paper, but had to be careful about the wording. As I said earlier, a brothel is legally enjoined from any form of advertising, even if you’re only advertising for a manager, so she kept it vague: ‘Establishment under new ownership looking for manager to help shape future course,’ or words to that effect — and she heard back from several candidates. I was in San Diego that weekend, as I was every weekend, and Stacy called to tell me she had really liked a gal from Lake Tahoe who had spent the last five years slinging cocktails at Harrah’s Casino. “Sounds perfect,” I said, but Stacy didn’t catch the irony and she hired her.