The drawing cards of Nevada's oldest and most famous brothel will move to its largest rival, after a long-running battle over taxes, conspiracy, bankruptcy and wire fraud ended with the closing Monday of the legendary Mustang Ranch.
The Mustang closed after 5 p.m. Monday, and plans included some of its women moving to the Moonlight Bunnyranch. Owner Dennis Hof says the Bunnyranch "will now not only be the best legal sex in Nevada but the biggest facility."
The Bunnyranch is known best as the brothel where so-called A-list porn stars and centerfolds, including Playboy Playmate Teri Weigel and Penthouse Pet Sunset Thomas, make feature appearances. It's also known as a frequent party haunt of now-Minnesota Governor and former wrestler Jesse (The Body) Ventura. The Mustang prostitutes waited until the actual day of closing before moving out of the ranch where, after paying the 50 percent house commission, they earned as much as $50,000 a year.
"We don't want any part of the negative reputation the Mustang has," says Hof, who blames the Mustang's downfall on managers who lacked business sense. "If they were operating a Dairy Queen, they wouldn't be in business, either."
At least two former Mustang prostitutes say they're concerned about their former colleagues. "I'd probably just go be a waitress somewhere," says one named Jesi to the AP. Now a prostitute at the Moonlight Bunnyranch, she says she wouldn't go to work at any other house. "Been there, done that," she says.
The other, Regina Winters, has reportedly teamed with a partner to try to buy the Mustang. "It's going to be out on the streets for a lot of (the prostitutes)," Wells told the AP. "There's going to be problems. Some might get out of the business. And some will go to other houses."
Hof wasn't exactly unhappy to see the Mustang go, but he told the Associated Press he's being cautious about hiring any of its staffers. The AP says the Bunnyranch interviewed at least 40 Mustang women but hired only four.
Despite its troubles, the Mustang remained phenomenally popular. "A lot of people refuse to believe that the federal government actually won its corruption trial against the brothel's owners," wrote Evelyn Nieves in the New York Times last month. "More than that, they cannot believe that the government can padlock the oldest, biggest, most famous brothel in the one state in the nation that lets them be."
"It's the federal government trying to legislate morality against what the state wants," Nieves quoted Storey County Commissioner Charles Haynes as saying. "The federal government wants to rule every part of your life." And Nieves also wrote that people worry about the Mustang case giving opponents of prostitution a powerful weapon to open any new movement to close Nevada's 35 brothels for good.
The federal government insists they had to act against the Mustang's "flouting of the law and giving houses of prostitution a bad name," Nieves wrote.
Earlier in July, a Reno federal jury ordered the Mustang's owners to turn the Mustang over to the federal government, as well as holdings owned by two companies convicted of being created to hide the Mustang's true owner, Joe Conforte. Former Mustang madam Shirley Colletti, also a former Storey County commissioner, was convicted of conspiring to protect her true employer.
The founder of the Mustang in 1955, Conforte was the driving force behind Nevada's legalisation of prostitution in 1967. He owned the Mustang until 1990, when the IRS seized the Mustang for tax delinquency. The government argued successfully that Conforte bought the Mustang back at a tax sale for "pennies on the dollar," using allies as fronts and running it from South America as a fugitive.
The death of the Mustang also means a large dent in Storey County, which counted the Mustang's $500,000 annual tax nut as about an eighth of its $4 million budget. The brothel was third behind the Kal Kan pet food factory and the county school district as Storey's largest employers.
One of the Mustang properties the government seized is a mobile home park where the $90-a-month plot rent is one of Nevada's lowest. Others dismayed by the Mustang's closing include merchants and salespeople who visited the ranch each week
That was a far cry from earlier times, when the Mustang began as a ranch of four connected trailers and the prostitutes serviced twice as many clients in one night as they did recently. From the four trailer beginning, the Mustang evolved to a cushy facility with a security tower and a grand ballroom built in 1976. The Mustang grew so successful that a Mustang II, with low ceilings and disco-style velvet sofas, was built and opened in 1982.
