Mustang Ranch May Rise Again Out of Ashes

The cathouse is out of the bag, sort of.

When last we visited the Mustang Ranch outside Reno on Nov. 13, the famed bordello was being sold off piece by piece by the Internal Revenue Service, which had seized the property after owners Joseph and Sally Conforte failed to pay an estimated $13 million in taxes.

At the time, a Reno attorney named Victor Alan Perry, acting on behalf of unidentified clients, bid $1.49 million for the land and the ranch buildings, including a companion brothel called Triangle River Ranch. What was to become of the property remained a mystery.

It so happened that Perry’s brother, Peter A. Perry, has been an attorney for Joe Conforte for the past 10 years. It occurred to people that Joe Conforte just might be involved. And he is, although apparently not as an owner.

As Peter Perry explained Friday, the purchasing group is Mustang Properties Inc., members of which he declined to identify. Conforte, he said, “has no (ownership) interest.”

However, Perry said, the partnership does plan to tap Conforte as general manager of a brothel at the site, if it can win approval for a new license from the three-member Storey County Board of Commissioners. Perry said he intends to go before the board to request a license on Dec. 18.

Getting such approval might not have seemed an easy matter a few weeks ago, when Storey County commissioners were fed up with the circus atmosphere that surrounded the IRS’ seizure of Nevada’s oldest brothel. There was even a short-circuited attempt by a court-appointed trustee to keep the place operating so funds would continue rolling into the government.

But when local television stations began joking about the bordello’s “federally operated Orgy Room,” the commissioners took offense.

Lately, though, the county has watched its revenue deflate by 10% without the income generated by Mustang and Triangle River. So suddenly the idea of putting them back in business is looking pretty good.

“We’re not against opening a brothel under the right circumstances,” said Commissioner Shirley Colletti, who indicated in a telephone interview Friday afternoon that the right circumstances would consist, among other things, of the partnership agreeing to bring the Mustang up to code, fork over back taxes, pay higher license fees and resume donations to a historic school building that Conforte used to support.

Colletti, who as former general manager of the Mustang Ranch is not exactly a disinterested observer, boasted that she had just been talking with a local television station that agreed to retract a statement that she had been “a madam.” (The other two commissioners could not be reached for comment.)

As Colletti understands it, some of the new owners were involved in three efforts over recent years to take the Mustang Ranch public to raise money to pay the IRS. The brothel had been operating under the protection of Chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code since 1982.

Should the licensing effort fail, does the partnership have a fallback position--say, plans for an RV park or museum?

“No, ma’am,” Perry said. “This is a typical Nevada crap table thing. If you crap out with snake eyes, you’re in big trouble.”