Nev. Brothel Going Belly-Up After Decades -- Mustang Ranch Survived Tax Problems And Fire Only To Succumb To A Court-Ordered Padlock

THE STORY OF the Mustang Ranch is the story of Joe Conforte, once its manager and owner. After serving a sentence for extortion and another for bribery, he always came back.

MUSTANG, Nev. - The district attorney burned it down, and Joe Conforte rebuilt it. The government shut it down, and Conforte bought it back.

Now Conforte is on the lam somewhere in South America. The payoffs to county officials have dried up, and the feds say they're itching to padlock the place forever.

The court-ordered shutdown of the Mustang Ranch on Monday will remove a legal but shady business that for decades has been a thorn in the side of many and a boon to others.

It will cut off a quarter of a million dollars in revenues to tiny Storey County and will throw about 70 legal prostitutes out of work and - some argue - to the far more hazardous world of working illegally.

"It's a sad situation because you're going to have prostitutes on the streets in Reno like you do in Las Vegas," former Mustang manager and Storey County Commissioner Shirley Colletti said.

Prostitution is legal in Storey County but illegal in Reno and surrounding Washoe County.

Colletti was convicted last month of conspiring with two shell companies to conceal Conforte as the true owner and biggest benefactor of the $5 million-a-year operation.

The story of the Mustang Ranch is the story of Joe Conforte.

The squat, cigar-puffing Sicilian immigrant, whose raspy speech echoes that of Don Corleone, landed in Oakland in 1950.

He supplemented his cab driver's income by pointing men to prostitutes working out of local hotels, then opened his own brothels, first in Oakland and then in San Francisco, before moving to less fussy Nevada. There he teamed up with veteran madam Jesse Sally Burgess to operate the Triangle Ranch near Wadsworth, 30 miles east of Reno.

When Washoe County District Attorney Bill Raggio tried to close the place down, Conforte just moved it to a location abutting Washoe County. Their battle led to a feeble extortion plot in 1959 in which Conforte accused the district attorney of allegedly plying a woman under 18 with liquor in a seduction attempt. Conforte didn't know Raggio was taping the conversation, and he went to jail for extortion.

While Conforte was in prison, a judge declared the Triangle Ranch a public nuisance, and it was burned to the ground in 1960.

After serving that sentence and a federal one for tax evasion, Conforte bought the nearby Mustang with Burgess and expanded it to the Mustang II and the Old Bridge Ranch. The Old Bridge Ranch, operated by Burgess' nephew, David Burgess, is not affected by the federal shutdown.

The government kept the heat on Conforte's tendency to overlook paying taxes until he fled to Rio de Janeiro in 1981. He cut a deal with the government to testify that he bribed U.S. District Judge Harry Claiborne to keep him out of prison.

Claiborne was imprisoned, impeached and removed from the bench. Conforte was back at the Mustang after a year behind bars.

By then, the place was showing signs of absentee ownership.

A 10-foot fence surrounds the brothel. The walls are a dark red, as is the carpet. The artwork tends to nudes and the Rubenesque.

By the mid-1980s, the flocked wallpaper bore shadows of too many cigarettes smoked in the lobby, and the carpeting and stuffed sofas were worn. Conforte tried to convince the IRS that his business was less profitable than the government thought.

His tax problems continued to dog him and finally, in 1990, he and Burgess declared bankruptcy, and the IRS seized the Mustang Ranch.

It was sold at tax auction in November 1990 when Victor Perry, the brother of Conforte's attorney, Peter Perry, made the lone bid on behalf of Mustang Properties, snapping it up for $1.49 million - a tenth of the back taxes claimed by the government. Conforte said he had no part in the bidding.

Even the accommodating Storey County Commission was uneasy about the ownership question and scheduled a meeting in December to debate whether to allow prostitution to resume at the 104-room brothel. Conforte, then listed as the manager, made the issue moot.

"We re-opened this morning," he said, with his customary bravado. "I'm not here to ask for a license. I'm here as a common courtesy to this board to tell you how it is."

He fled to South America the following year with the federal government still pursuing him for taxes. But he remained in constant touch with the Mustang management and on retainer as a $10,000-a-month consultant. Testimony at last month's trial said 10 times that amount was siphoned from the brothel to South America.

Money has always flowed freely, if covertly, from the brothel.

Last month's trial confirmed that Colletti was on the payroll as manager while serving as a county commissioner. Other county officials still deny testimony that they received tributes from the brothel.

More subtle have been the 1,000 turkeys donated each Christmas, a school bus bought for the county, almost unquestioned handouts to anybody asking for them, and reduced rent for the needy at a Mustang-owned trailer park.

A woman who worked at the Mustang for 22 years as a cashier said Conforte was a good boss and Colletti a good manager.

And while there are stories of drug use at Mustang and other brothels, she said Conforte's strict ban on narcotics was honored while he was there.

"It hasn't always been that way since," she said.

The woman, who now works at another brothel, requested that her name be withheld to protect her children.

She sees prostitution as a must and feels sorry for the girls. She expects they will wind up on the streets, where arrests, beatings by pimps and disease are common.

Brothel prostitutes are tested weekly for sexually transmitted infections. While there have been cases of gonorrhea and herpes, none have tested positive for HIV. Several street prostitutes, mostly in Las Vegas, have been caught working after testing positive.

In the brothels, as on the street, the girls negotiate a price. The average is between $100 and $400. A street hooker may charge less; the Moonlight Bunnyranch east of Carson City promotes porn actresses and centerfolds whose prices run above $1,000.

The house gets half and charges the girls about $20 for room and board.

Along with what the girls spend in the area, the brothel pays thousands of dollars a month to the county in fees and taxes.

"They have been a very good neighbor to us. They've donated thousands of dollars to the community," said County Commission Vice Chairman Carl Trink at a meeting to debate how to absorb the loss of $230,000 in revenue generated by the brothel.

"It could be as much as 1/16th of our entire county budget," Commission Chairman Charles Haynes said.

Others who find the brothel morally offensive are just glad to see it go.

"I would like to see this historic day as the beginning of the end of the brothels in Nevada," said Barbara Jones, a member of the Sunrise Fellowship and Point of Grace in Reno.