Quick and Dirty: a notebook of news and politics

Nudie bar raises hackles in Pahrump

Last week's opening of The Kingdom in Pahrump marked a dubious first for the fast-growing community an hour's drive west of Las Vegas. The town now has an all-nude bar on the main drag, State Route 160, and many of the community's residents and leaders are more than a bit peeved.

The reaction might come as a surprise to outsiders. After all, Pahrump is already home to the "World Famous" Chicken Ranch brothel and the ambitious Sheri's Ranch brothel, so why would locals get upset over a bar with dancers who bare it all?

The reason is twofold. First is the old business adage: Location, location, location. While the brothels are situated several miles south of State Route 160 on Homestead Road, out of sight and out of mind for the everyday people of Pahrump, The Kingdom is on the main highway at one of the town's busiest intersections.

Some would be forgiven if they guessed moral objections were the second reason for outrage, but they would be wrong. Politics, plain and simple, is behind the righteous indignation. And not just any politics, but the Nye County brothel variety, where prostitutes are far from the only ones capable of giving a good screwing.

Here's the latest on the newest Nye County brothel wars: Kingdom owner Joe Richards owns a pair of brothels in Crystal and Amargosa Valley, roughly 20 and 35 miles west of Pahrump, respectively.

For years he's wanted to build a third brothel on property he owns across the street from the Chicken Ranch, which is a neighbor with Sheri's Ranch. But there's a catch. In the late '80s the Pahrump Town Board passed an ordinance prohibiting brothels within township boundaries. The two existing brothels were already established, so the Nye County Commission created a county island comprising roughly 340 acres on which sit the Chicken Ranch and Sheri's Ranch properties. The east side of Homestead, where the brothels are, is the island. The west side is where Richards owns his property.

Thwarted for more than a decade in his efforts to compete head-to-head with the other brothels, Richards used his newspaper, the Pahrump Valley Gazette, as a bully pulpit. He wrote scathing editorials about political and community leaders with whom he feuded, and the veracity or fairness of what he wrote never played a role. He made hundreds of enemies through his literary eviscerations, some who were or are quite respected and influential. The newspaper is now defunct, but Richards has shown a willingness to go to great expense to fight for his brothel even without the use of tabloid journalism.

In the mid-'90s Richards began to put up billboards touting his Crystal brothels. He had a trailer placed on the lot where The Kingdom sits today with a sign out front that said it was a massage parlor. Inside there were no massages being given, but there was a woman who directed stoppers-by to Richards' Crystal brothel and away from the brothels on Homestead. He also challenged the legality of the county island established for the two bordellos, and filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of himself and dozens of homeowners in the Calvada Unit 14 subdivision where his Homestead property is located.

So far, Richards has won a few preliminary rounds in court, most recently when Nye County District Judge John Davis agreed the 1988 annexation was not done in conformance with Nevada Revised Statutes. It seems the local leaders didn't want to pay for a survey so they just skipped that part. That kind of thinking was the norm in Nye County back in the day, and things are only slightly better now.

The truth is the current government boards are equally guilty of incompetence. The Nye County Commission, despite advice to the contrary offered by District Attorney Bob Beckett, has continued a pattern of depriving Richards of the right to compete in what is a legal business. The Pahrump Regional Planning Commission is just now getting around to implementing meaningful zoning, but in the case of Richards, they are about to close the barn door after the old sway-backed mule has run off and knocked up the neighbor's prized mare.

Additionally, the planning commission has had eight years to establish an enforceable sexually oriented business ordinance and has failed, miserably, at every turn.

That lack of performance is why community leaders are seeing red, why people who are offended by strip joints are embarrassed, and why Joe Richards opened Pahrump's first all-nude "gentleman's club" in the heart of town. The Kingdom was just the latest missile fired in a long-running battle.

Richards, a shark in pimp's clothing, is poised to move in for the kill. He told the Pahrump Valley Times last week he was going to build a third brothel at the end of Homestead Road--and he doesn't care if the county licenses him to do so or not. "I've got 'em by the balls," he said. "They can't win and they know it, so fuck them."--Doug McMurdo

Ticket snafu brings out beasts

Once upon a time, the Beastie Boys exhorted youth to fight for their right to party. So you could argue the kids were only following the Beasties' sage advice when they did a little shouting, scuffling and bottle-chucking at what some say was a poorly organized ticket giveaway for last week's much-hyped MTV2 $2 Bill Concert.

It was supposed to go down like this: MTV2 officials would give away 400 tickets at 7 a.m. the morning of the June 9 concert. However, as fans and MTV flacks tell it, about 500 Beastie fans showed up a wee bit early--around 3 a.m.--prompting the police to ask concert organizers to give away half the 400 available tickets to disperse the crowd. They complied, which meant hundreds more fans who showed up that morning at the appointed time were disappointed when only 200 tickets were given away. Also, in order to discourage scalping, organizers scrapped at the last minute a two-ticket-per-person policy, meaning many fans there to pick up an extra ticket for friends or dates were left out in the cold.

"Some people were really pissed off," said one concertgoer. "They were yelling, throwing bottles. You can't really blame them."

Interestingly, MTV2 officials said they haven't had this problem at any of their $2 concerts in other cities. "While we wish we could accommodate every fan, MTV2's $2 Bill Concerts are by nature intimate performances and unfortunately there's limited space available," said spokeswoman Alison Mochizuki.--Andrew Kiraly

Local toughs to battle at Ultimate Fighting tourney

Admit it. You thought the Ultimate Fighting Championship--that raw scrapfest with minimum rules and maximum pain--would have gone the way of grunge music, Linda Tripp and Jerry McGuire by now. But it's still going strong, as evidenced by this Saturday's fightfest at the Mandalay Bay Events Center. This time, the eight-fight card features two locals going at it. Twenty-eight year-old Phil Baroni, originally from Brooklyn, will be in the ring facing off with Texas' Evan Tanner for a second time, after a controversial battle in November.

"I'm going for payback, man," says Baroni. "There's some bad blood between us. In the last fight, I had him knocked out and the ref saved him, he stopped the fight and gave him time to recover, and then he had a dominant position on me." Tanner officially won that fight. Adding injury to insult, Baroni lost after training particularly hard that year, recovering from a bizarre injury last April in which he essentially tore off his whole right pectoral muscle from lifting too heavy of weights.

"From the noise it made, I thought I'd broke my collarbone," he recalled. "Then I took my shirt off, and my whole chest was black from the biceps down. I've got a giant tit in the middle of my chest and a giant armpit. Everyone said my fight career was over." Baroni went to a doctor in Utah who treats Olympic athletes and had the "giant tit" reattached.

"I'm a banger, man," he says of his fighting style. "I get in there and mix it up. I'm a brawler. What I lack in technique I make for in aggression. I'm the most exciting fighter in this sport."

No less exciting is Las Vegas native Frank Mir, who will fight against Tim Sylvia. While UFC--reputed for its brutality--has made concessions toward safety, such as developing different weight classes, Mir balks at the notion that the new rules water things down. In fact, he says some of the rules--such as requiring gloves rather than bare knuckles--increase the sport's danger.

"When you wrap your hands up, you can punch much harder," Mir says. "If I have a bare hand and I punch you in the forehead or cheekbone, I might break my hand. Since they've started wrapping hands, the knockout percentage went through the roof. And the weight classes was just a way to create more stars."

Baroni agrees that UFC is still, well, the ultimate. "It's still the most brutal, completely raw sport there is," he says. "It's two guys put inside a cage in their underwear and they fight. There's no way to soften that." UFC 48: Payback is June 19 at Mandalay Bay Events Center. Info: 474-4000.--Andrew Kiraly

Let the CCSN president shuffle begin

Okay, so a District Court judge held that the Board of Regents violated the open meeting law, meaning CCSN President Ron Remington and lobbyist John Cummings are supposed to get their jobs back. And the regents already chose Remington's replacement, giving CCSN three presidents right now if you count the interim who's leaving. And, yes, another court could overturn the ruling. But while UCCSN leaders ponder the judicial opinion and what to do, the answer is simple. Kerry Romesburg has bailed on Nevada State College in Henderson after getting a better offer and presumably finding it's hard to raise money for a college only half a dozen people wanted. NSC needs a new president. The regents accused Remington of wanting to make CCSN a four-year school, so they could give him a four-year school to run, or shift new president Richard Carpenter to run it. It would be perfect. The regents illegally created Nevada State by taking a $500,000 appropriation to "study" the need for it and just going ahead and creating it. They illegally fired Remington, says the judge, which means that--technically--they illegally hired Carpenter. It's a perfect fit.--Michael Green