Mr. Madame : Joe Conforte, Master of Fast Shuffle and Mustang Ranch, May Even Have Bested IRS

Joe Conforte is a whoremaster by trade, a dictator by disposition and a Sicilian by birth. He was a Fascista in his youth, so he rather likes being compared to Mussolini.

“Hey, Mussolini wasn’t a bad guy,” he says. “His only mistake was joining up with Hitler.”

Conforte doesn’t flinch at his reputation as the Al Capone of Storey County, an underpopulated swath of desert and high ponderosa east and southeast of here. He doesn’t mind being called Mr. Madame. Even Joe Joyhouse. Or tax dodger, ex-convict, convicted extortionist, confessed card shark, unfaithful husband and indifferent father. He is honest about all of that.

Just don’t call him a pimp.

“Mention that and you get sued,” Conforte storms. The voice is a shower of dry gravel. “I sued (columnist) Herb Caen for calling me a pimp. I got $1 in damages to my good name.” His excitement flares higher. “You see, pimping is a felony in the state of Nevada. Pimps are nothing. They’re lowlifes. A pimp is a bastard who preys on women and takes their money.

“I just take enough from my girls to pay expenses and make a small profit.”

Last year, Conforte’s small profit from Mustang Ranch, his world-reputed house of ill repute and the oldest and largest of Nevada’s 35 legal brothels, was $2 million.

That’s on a gross of $5 million earned by 50 ladies of the night--and day--working three shifts. Including holidays. That was after taxes, work permits for his employees, condom purchases, political contributions, school gifts, turkey donations, costs of HIV and syphilis exams, brothel freebies and other expenses of the world’s oldest profession.

It also was a short earnings year.

Conforte’s 1990 income was abbreviated in the fourth quarter when Internal Revenue Service agents seized Mustang Ranch for an estimated $13 million in back taxes, interest and penalties.

The bordello--actually two high-fenced bagnios, one in mission tile and Maidenform pink adobe, the other of shake shingle and Sonoran flag--was sold matchbook by bidet at government auction in November.

A freshly formed Mustang Properties Inc. paid $1.49 million for the property and 400 surrounding acres. The company also purchased other assets seized from Conforte: A trailer park and 100 acres on the developing outskirts of Reno. Someone else snapped up Conforte’s hilltop home in Sparks and a residence in Danville, Calif., for $400,000.

Conforte, the street-smart ex-cabbie who has been cowed by no one, seemed finished.

He talked of retiring to Brazil after 36 years of owning the biggest little whorehouse in Nevada, only 10 miles east of the biggest little city in the world.

One newspaper report of the auction described him as a sad, hollow, fading parody of the world showman he once had been.

Storey County commissioner Karl Larson even spoke a Requiem for this heavyweight of at least three of the seven deadly sins: “We’re tired of the circus. . . . Conforte is gone.”

Wrong.

In December--just in time for the Christmas rush--Mustang Ranch was back in business and Conforte was back running it.

The signposts went back up: Mustang Ranch No. 1 this way, Mustang Ranch No. 2 that way. Credit cards accepted. But bring your Visa, because they don’t take American Express.

And Conforte’s New Year’s resolutions were typically flamboyant, contradictory and dubious: He resumed his annual donation of 1,000 turkeys to the poor and offered brothel passes to any Desert Storm veteran with sun-dried hormones and 24 hours to spare.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” says Conforte. “We had 800 Desert Storm guys show up. At $1,000 a day, splitting that 50-50 with the girls like I always do, I figure that cost me $400,000.

“I’m very patriotic.”

He’s also a life master of the fast shuffle.

Despite denials from the principals--although they decline to provide proof of their protests--few Nevadans believe Conforte isn’t the money, the means and the man who has short-sheeted the IRS by buying back his own property.

The evidence is circumstantial but considerable:

* Nevada corporations are not obligated to reveal their officers or financial structure. The only visible representative of Mustang Properties Inc. is Peter Perry, a Reno attorney. Perry also is Conforte’s longtime lawyer.

* The man who bought the Conforte homes from the IRS is David Burgess of Reno. The red strobes of his parlor house (“The Old Bridge Ranch Welcomes PRCA Cowboys,” notes the current sign) are within flashing distance of Old Glory flapping above Mustang Ranch. Burgess is Conforte’s nephew.

* The Storey County brothel license for Mustang Ranch--a vital and valuable asset that somehow escaped IRS seizure--has not been transferred to Mustang Properties Inc. It remains in Conforte’s name and has been ruled valid by the Nevada attorney general.

Perry insists Conforte has no financial interest in Mustang Ranch. He says his client is an unsalaried general manager working only for expenses. Conforte has no hidden money, Perry adds, and probably is living off repaid debts and returned favors.

“Between you and me . . . Joe’s ego is such that he is willing to manage the ranch, get it back to where it was and himself back into the limelight,” Perry explains. “And maybe take a dig at the IRS at the same time.”

Conforte is closed-mouthed about his finances. Yet the unpaid, federally foreclosed and supposedly impoverished Conforte is still driving a Mercedes 560SEL. There is a Ferrari 308GTB gathering sap under a jacaranda in his driveway. Conforte’s silk suits continue to gleam as brightly as the 8-carat diamond on his finger.

So do tell, Joe Conforte, how you laundered money through Mustang Properties Inc. to purchase Mustang Ranch at auction.

“What did you say?” he replies.

Are the money and the fine hand of Conforte behind the renewed operations of Mustang Ranch?

“Can’t hear a word you’re saying.”

Look straight and unblinking and say you have no financial interest in Mustang Ranch.

“You stepped in what?”

Such coy double talk is standard from Conforte.

It’s also part of his lifetime talent for surviving against all odds and government powers that has built him the reputation of an indestructible, albeit vainglorious, Nevada folk hero.

To old-line Nevadans who resent federal intervention in any form, to these Western sons and daughters who have elevated their frontier independence to a religion, Conforte is a combination Robin Hood and Godfather IV.

To newer arrivals, to the state’s younger politicians and more forward businessmen dedicated to gentrifying Nevada away from its Helldorado image, Conforte falls somewhere between evil relic and comic philanthropist.

“Nah, I see myself as a unique person who is not ashamed of anything he did,” says Conforte, 65. He also admits that anything ranges from bribing police officers to extorting a district attorney. “But I got daughters in San Diego and Vancouver, Washington, who love who I am because they think I’m doing a community service.

“My sisters in Los Angeles don’t agree with what I do. But they’re devout Catholics from my mother’s side, and for them it’s a sin to say a swear word.”

Then there is Conforte the Really Outrageous.

Not content with apparently outsmarting Washington at its own auction, he recently counterattacked the government with a suit claiming the IRS owes him money.

His action centers on private offers to buy Mustang Ranch before federal closure. Conforte claims IRS officials refused to recognize letters of credit supporting one deal or the financial sources of another offer, until “both times they botched it up just as we were ready to make the deal.”

“The guys who were negotiating with us . . . wanted none of this. They backed out,” he says. “When (the IRS) sold (Mustang Ranch) at auction, they only got $1.5 million. We think the place was worth $16.4 million or something like that. So we’re suing (the IRS) for the difference.”

With that action joined, Conforte says he is free to court Nevada’s neighbor with another personal labor of commercial love: legalizing prostitution in California.

Some rate his chances alongside the shelf life of Eskimo Pies in Death Valley. Others remember that this man once suggested a role reversal for Mustang Ranch--opening a bordello with male prostitutes.

Conforte insists that bringing legal brothels to California could be mankind’s most significant advance since the birth of Jesus Christ. “That’s if people believe in religion,” he adds. “If they don’t, we’ll keep Him out.”

He would use the millions of tax dollars he says legalized prostitution would generate to finance a bizarre drug prevention program that includes a new state police force.

The condemnation of Joe Conforte, a stocky paesano of numerous vanities--including elevator wing-tips and a $4,000 hair transplant--has been consistent. Also quite impotent.

He is regularly hung, drawn and quartered by the Reno Gazette-Journal, which won a Pulitzer Prize for its editorials against him. “But often when we published negative stories about Joe, readers would call in and cancel their subscriptions,” says one reporter.

Former Republican Assemblywoman Barbara Zimmer of Las Vegas introduced a bill in 1985 to ban prostitution, owing to its apparent stifling of Nevada’s economic development. “It was the shortest-lived bill in legislative history,” she says. “It died in 15 minutes, never even got to committee.”

Conforte is despised by several Virginia City business owners, infuriates many politicians, has enraged the League of Women Voters and is reviled by church leaders.

But few will go on the record against him. Even state Senate Minority Leader William Raggio, the district attorney who once torched a Conforte brothel, refuses to discuss his old nemesis.

Conforte’s longtime enemies seem tired by time and their obvious inability to dislodge him. There is no active legislative opposition. Even the IRS seems to have temporarily backed off.

Mustang Ranch, once a single tacky trailer, has grown into a flourishing place of multiple wings, hot tubs, a swimming pool for guests and employees, Conforte’s personal apartment, a hotel-sized kitchen, soft couches, pastel themes, and a beamed temple ceiling over a long bar.

For Conforte, today clearly is a matter of business and survival as usual.

“I think you’ve got to give some of that credit to God Almighty, OK?” Conforte suggests. “The other some is that I don’t quit, I am not the fold-up type. I have always said to myself: ‘I’m either going to get to the top or die trying.’

“Conforte. You know what that means in Italian? Con . . . with . Forte . . . main strength .”

He also thinks astrology helped. “I never believed in signs,” says Conforte. He is genuinely impressed by the revelation to come. “Until I read the one about Sagittarius man: ‘He will try to conquer any mountain, no matter how high or perilous. He is a born leader.’

“Right about there, I started to believing in that stuff.”

The truth of his success, however, seems more a matter of maneuvering than mysticism.

He has purchased a reputation for benevolence and civic conscience. Conforte supports any local charity that cares to call. The Reno-Sparks Gospel Mission. A beauty pageant. Holiday turkey giveaways. He pays the admission of any youngster who steps up to the Class A Reno Silver Sox box office and says: “I don’t do drugs.”

He has cultivated an image. It comes with the silk suits, international bridge tournaments, walking with bodyguards and smoking $18 cigars smuggled from Cuba.

Conforte’s arrival at Reno restaurants is a ritual: The best seat, the best bottle of wine and bring him the check. He rarely appears in public without a low-cut lady one-third his age. Nuzzling is preferred. In private, he brags about bedding women, usually his employees, two at a time.

But beneath all the calculation, there is a crafty, sharp, slippery pit bull of a businessman. First he created a business. Then he propagated a political environment to befriend it.

Some have called it political corruption. Conforte calls it lobbying and career promotion.

Understand that there are only 2,500 residents in Storey County and less than 1,500 voters.

More than 350 of those voters live in Lockwood, a community of trailers and single-family homes next to Mustang Ranch. Conforte developed the community. His trailer residents are long-term, mostly elderly and paying rent of only $60 a month.

“I am not going to lie to you . . . I want to keep (the residents) happy and for political reasons,” Conforte says. “I go around the trailer park and tell the people: ‘Look, you’ve got two candidates. Now, I think this one is pro prostitution, this one is not, and I would like you to vote for this one.’

“I am not going to discount the fact that I control more than 20% of the vote in Storey County. But where is the law against that?”

Conforte also does not discount the fact that in past years, he has bought Storey County politicians. Television sets for Christmas. A $200 donation here, a $500 contribution there. Maybe a $20 bill wrapped around one of his Havanas. Ongoing guest privileges at Mustang Ranch.

“But don’t call it bribes,” he suggests. “Gifts, OK? I still help (public officials) . . . but in a small county, you don’t need campaign funds. You need votes, and I can deliver those.”

And when all is said and paid, the money Conforte provides to Storey County for brothel and liquor licenses, work permits and other taxes, comes to an estimated 5% of the county’s $2-million budget.

All of which is now continuing and once more situates Conforte as master of all he purveys. With time for national magazine interviews, Geraldo and Donahue, a full schedule of appearances at local service clubs, and frequent opportunities to speak his well-rehearsed outrages:

“It takes three things to succeed in business and I have enjoyed all three. Brains. Breaks. Balls. . . .

“Know what Mussolini once said? ‘It’s better to live one day like a lion than to live 100 years as a sheep’. . . .”

There is an authorized biography in process. It will tell of his birth in Augusta, Sicily, and his life as a runaway from a father and stepmother in Boston. Of tours as a military policeman and small fortunes won by cheating at blackjack. Of pimping at $3 a trick while a cabdriver in Oakland.

If it is honest, the book will also speak of today’s sadness.

He has a son, Joe Jr., 30, who clips weeds at Mustang Ranch because drugs left him incapable of much else. Conforte blames himself in part “for kicking him out of the house because he was using drugs . . . when I should have put him in a hospital.

“He could be taking over from me right now . . . but he is half a vegetable because of drugs.”

Sally Conforte, his third wife and nine years his senior, is in a nursing home. She is a diabetic; her kidneys are failing.

“It’s been a different marriage because I’m not a plumber and she’s not a clerk in a grocery store,” he says. “But we’ve been together for 36 years and have a lot of loyalty and respect for each other.”

And he has bad feet.

Conforte accepts that he is many people. Gentleman one moment, vulgarian the next. He agrees that he is close to no one and is quite unable to sort his identities.

One evening, driving the Mercedes, singing along with Pagliacci, he talks of Augusta, his birthplace. He visits the town every March 19 for the feast of Saint Joseph. He pays for fireworks and a brass band, takes town elders to dinner and is always high bidder at the parish auction.

That’s one Joe Conforte.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, a request to photograph the boss with employees sends prostitutes scattering and Conforte into a cursing rage: Get the bleep back here. Had he ever let them down? Couldn’t these bleeps trust him when he said there would be no photos without their permission?

That’s the other Joe Conforte.