Reports That Brothels Are Outlawed Fall Into Erroneous Zone

The headlines in a couple of Nevada’s largest newspapers this week sent shock waves through the state’s legalized brothels, and no wonder.

“Ooops! Nevada Accidentally Outlaws Brothels,” the Reno Gazette Journal blared Thursday.

“Brothels Mistakenly Outlawed,” was the Page 1 headline in Wednesday’s Las Vegas Review-Journal. Its story began: “Nevada has outlawed brothels. Sort of. By mistake.”

George Flint, lobbyist for the Nevada Brothel Assn., was jarred out of bed by a 3 a.m. phone call from a stunned brothel owner vacationing in Europe.

Then came the call from the disbelieving brothel owner vacationing in Palm Springs, who had heard the news on TV.

Relax, gentlemen, Flint told his clients, brothels are not out of business in Nevada, news reports to the contrary notwithstanding.

Nevada state legislators were simply cleaning up an existing law to better define loiterers, vagrants and prowlers so prosecutors can enforce laws against vagrancy. The state defined a vagrant, among other things, as someone who begs, wanders the streets, trespasses on private property--or solicits for prostitution.

The new law, Flint and state officials agree, is not in conflict with existing statutes that specifically enable rural counties to permit prostitution. The 36 brothels serve about 10,000 customers a month, Flint estimated.

But after the Las Vegas Review-Journal suggested that brothels were busted because of the law’s language, the Associated Press distributed the story with the brothel-ban spin and by Thursday the word was out.

“This was an example . . . of the very worst sort of journalistic misinformation I’ve come across,” Flint fumed, fielding phone calls from reporters around the country and trying to set the record straight on radio talk shows.

“When you’re in a business that operates tenuously at the grace and favor of the Legislature and is always threatened with closure, the average brothel owner doesn’t know Chapter 1 from Chapter 101 and just reacts, ‘My God, the paper says we might be illegal!’ ”

Of equal concern, he said, was the number of tourists who might have stayed away from a brothel this week, for fear of being arrested because of the news reports.

Nevada Assemblyman Robert Sader, chairman of the Legislature’s Judiciary Committee, which shepherded the bill into law, agreed that “there’s lots of confusion” because of the local media’s coverage.

“One brothel owner called me because he was scared to death. He said, ‘Is this true?’ ” Sader said.

The anti-vagrancy law, Sader explained, “is no different than when a state says you shall not practice medicine without a license. Well, in Nevada, you cannot engage in prostitution without a license.”

Vagrants do not have licenses to engage in prostitution; brothels regulated by counties do.

“Anybody who is a lawyer and particularly a lawyer-lawmaker would realize the two statutes do not conflict. There is indeed no prohibition of legalized prostitution in the state of Nevada because of our loitering statute,” Sader said. “But I can understand how a lay person could pick up the law and think we have a conflict.”

Nevada Deputy Atty. Gen. Bob Auer said his office sought the new vagrancy and loitering language, modeled on a law that had passed court challenges in another state. In Nevada, when the vagrancy and brothel laws are compared side by side, it is clear state lawmakers had no intention of banning brothels, Auer said.