Yesterday, we saw how the racketeers who became casino executives controlled prostitution at their hotels from the mid-1940s up till the mid-1960s. Today we trace the history of the world’s oldest profession up to the present day.
In 1967, Howard Hughes showed up in Las Vegas. His presence, including the quarter-billion dollars he pumped into the economy, helped stimulate a five-year boom in which the Aladdin, Caesars Palace, Landmark, Circus Circus, Four Queens, International (now the Las Vegas Hilton), Holiday Inn (now Harrah’s), and MGM Grand (now Bally’s) opened, and nearly every existing casino expanded. Increased tourism and gambling revenues reflected the prosperity and full-employment of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Social upheaval, the drug culture, and the so-called sexual revolution also helped transform Las Vegas during the short, intense, and uncertain Hughes era.
For these reasons and others, thousands of new hotel workers -- bellmen, bartenders, cocktail waitresses, and showgirls among them -- suddenly joined the Las Vegas fray, possessing as little idea about the traditional dynamics of the local sex industry as did the vast new wave of visitors. A strangeness and ambiguity crept into the sex business.
This vacuum was quickly filled by the greatest pimp in Nevada history: Joe Conforte. Conforte, who owned the world-famous Mustang Ranch in northern Nevada, roughly 15 miles east of Reno in Storey County, was a staunch advocate of legalizing prostitution in Nevada. By this time, the mid-1960s, bona fide brothels had been servicing Nevada towns for more than 100 years and nearly 50 rules and regulations had been entered into the state statutes governing the brothel business. For example, no brothel could operate on a main street or within 400 yards of a church or school (one town moved the school). No advertising was permitted. City councils and county commissions could declare brothels a public nuisance and close them, or tax and regulate them, or just ignore them. In short, the state had continually increased control of brothels without finally outlawing them altogether.
Conforte’s Mustang Ranch was the largest taxpayer in Storey County, which gave Joe a certain amount of juice in local politics. In 1971 Conforte convinced the commissioners to pass Ordinance 38, which legalized prostitution in Storey -- the first county in the country ever to do so.
But when he set his sights on Las Vegas, the state legislators stepped in. Largely, again, to safeguard the image of and revenues from gambling, also in 1971 they passed Statute 244-335 (8), rendering prostitution illegal in counties with a population of more than 250,000 -- which applied in that year only to Clark County. Roughly 30 years after the feds shut down Block 16, prostitution was finally illegal in Las Vegas.
Well, it might’ve been illegal, but it certainly wasn’t going away anytime soon. With the demand swelling and the old rules increasingly relegated to history, a dilemma of supply suddenly surfaced. Maybe the conventional wisdom that Hughes had bought out the mob opened the door, or maybe the radical Sixties finally arrived in Las Vegas, but whatever the cause, hard-core streetwalkers came out of the woodwork. In addition, weekend warriors -- California secretaries, Utah Lolitas, and the like -- descended on Las Vegas like locusts. Today, long-time residents recall the time, in the late 1970s, when a man couldn’t walk the long block between the Sahara and the Riviera, with his wife, without getting at least a couple of bold and lurid solicitations. The corner of Flamingo and the Strip was so overrun that streetwalkers took turns directing traffic. It was what the cops, the casinos, and Carson City had feared all along: obvious, rampant, defiant, and dangerous prostitution in Sin City.
In the early 1980s, John Moran was elected Clark County Sheriff on a platform, in part, of ridding the county of its highly visible prostitution problem. In 1982, police made 13,000 arrests of prostitutes. In 1984, 6,000 arrests were made and in 1985, around 5,000. In 1986, 90% of prostitution-related arrests were made inside the hotels by undercover vice cops. Las Vegas relieved itself of its unsavory image as an out-of-control sex capital by removing the most visible evidence. But by then, the sex system had, once again, evolved.
In 1971, the first handful of sex ads appeared in the Yellow Pages phone book under Escort Services. By 1975, three pages of explicit ads left nothing to the imagination. The ads rotated among different categories: Dating Services, Massage Parlors, before finally settling on Entertainers. And that’s where it stands today: A man calls a phone number listed in the Yellow Pages, or a sex rag from newsracks lining the Strip, or cards handed out by smut peddlers on the sidewalks, and a girl shows up at his door. It might be illegal, but Las Vegas tradition still tolerates it.
