LYONS COUNTY, Nev.—In an article published last Friday on the Reuters.com news site, Lyons County Sheriff Al McNeil charged that Dennis Hof, owner of several Nevada brothels and current Republican candidate for the Nevada Assembly, was implicated in "immigration violations" regarding some of the prostitutes working at Hof's brothels, and even claimed that an investigation conducted by his office in concert with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) found "indications of possible human trafficking" among the sex workers.
"The discovery of U.S. immigration law violations in our legal brothel system is extremely alarming," McNeil said in a statement posted on Facebook on October 4, later adding, "The ability to coerce, exploit and traffic non-US citizens into Lyon County by foreign criminal enterprises is going to be difficult to detect and deter by our limited capabilities and resources of foreign born applicants, which has caused us to develop better working partnerships with federal agencies to combat human trafficking efforts."
There's just one problem: It's McNeil and his office whose job it is to vet all of the women wishing to work in brothels, to make sure that they are citizens or lawful permanent residents with green cards, and after doing their due diligence in vetting the women, to issue licenses to them to work in the brothels.
"This is all on the Sheriff's Department; they check all the women's identifications to make sure they're legit and that they're U.S. citizens and all that," Hof told AVN. "Then they give them a business license. It has nothing to do with me at all. That's all I need. If they've got the okay from the Sheriff's Office, that means their identification has been scrutinized, they've been fingerprinted and the sheriff thought they were worthy of having a card, so if somebody had a fake ID or something like that, it's on the Sheriff's Department, not me. It's been that way for 27 years since I bought the place."
But according to the Reuters article, after a four-month "internal" investigation conducted by the Sheriff's Office and ICE, supposedly the sheriff's vetting procedures were "rife with violations over several decades."
"Those practices include US immigration law violations, foreign country human trafficking indicators, fraudulent statements, issuance of work cards prior to completing criminal history background checks, and inability to validate out-of-state and US and other foreign national documents to determine identity," a statement from the Sheriff's Office said, which did not elaborate on what those "human trafficking indicators" were. (AVN attempted to speak to someone in the Sheriff's Office to inquire about what those "indicators" were, among other subjects, but had not received a response at press time.)
"It's not our job to check their identity; it's the county's job, and it looks to me like all they're doing is tightening up their procedures," Hof opined. "The ICE people are making everybody tighten up their procedures and that's all fine; we'll work within the system; it's nothing to do with me but it's making it sound like I'm involved in it. I've got absolutely nothing to do with it."
Almost needless to say, the National Coalition on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE, formerly Morality in Media) seized on the Reuters report, taking its equivocal findings as gospel:
"Here at NCOSE, one of our primary focuses is exposing the seamless connections between issues related to sexual exploitation. There are two issues that are very clearly linked: Prostitution & Sex Trafficking," a recent NCOSE email stated.
"In one of our newsletters a few months ago, we raised awareness about the issue of legal brothels in Nevada. Some people believe full decriminalization of prostitution, in which the laws regulating the activities of pimps, sex buyers and sellers are eliminated, will solve the issue of sex trafficking in prostitution. Unsurprisingly, its biggest advocates are brothel owners and pimps," the email continued. "However, full decriminalization doesn't stop sex trafficking or abuse. A recent police investigation into three legal Nevada brothels found evidence of human sex trafficking."
There's good reason to believe that last statement is simply untrue, since it linked only to the Reuters article, which provided no evidence of trafficking in the brothels, nor did NCOSE.
Over the past several months, Hof has been the focus of various officials in both Lyons and Nye Counties, some of whom started a petition drive to criminalize prostitution in the counties, and in the run-up to the primary elections in June, several Nye County officials, including the Nye County district attorney, the Nye County sheriff and members of the County Board of Commissioners reportedly removed a campaign billboard from Hof's land, forcing the candidate to go to court for a temporary restraining order to have the billboard replaced, with the election just one day away. Hof beat his incumbent opponent, James Oscarson, one of the anti-prostitution petitioners, by 42.8 percent to 36.5 percent, or by about 450 votes, in the primary, and will face Democrat Lesia Romanov in the District 36 general election in November.
Pictured: Dennis Hof with Sheriff Al McNeil.
