3 former working girls trying to save bordello
Tom Gardner
Associated Press
Apr. 13, 2003 12:00 AM

RENO - As they walked around the pool and peeked into their old, denuded rooms, three former prostitutes at the Mustang Ranch made the world's best-known brothel sound something like camp.

Champagne remembered scaling the 10-foot fence that surrounds the pink stucco complex, and the time she was entertaining in her room when she spotted a mouse.

"I freaked and the guy chased it out. It went right across the hall into Honey Love's room, where she was busy, too."

Former madam Sharnel Silvey and the three former working girls, known then as Champagne, Honey Love and Devon, returned to the now-closed ranch to tape an independent documentary that they hope will help preserve part of what remains of Nevada's first legal brothel.

It was shut down in 1999 after years of tax problems, and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, which now owns the property, plans to level the complex next to the Truckee River by summer because the buildings are unsafe and in a flood plain.

Silvey is leading an effort to preserve at least part of the structure as a museum.

"What made this place so professional and made it the world's most famous place was it was the classiest," Silvey said. "So how can you destroy it? This is an artifact."

Silvey, 35, wants to rehabilitate part of the structure and fill it with Mustang memorabilia. If the ranch can't remain where it is, she hopes it can be moved, perhaps to nearby Virginia City.

"What's reasonable would be the parlor, the entrance where the lineup was, where it all happened," Silvey said.

The lineup followed the arrival of a client. Once he was buzzed through the ranch's locked gate and entered the brothel, the girls would line up for the customer to make a selection.

The BLM isn't opposed to moving the old Mustang Ranch, if Silvey's group comes up with the money, Carson City District Manager John Singlaub said.

The 104-room ranch, taken over by Sicilian immigrant Joe Conforte in 1967, entered Nevada history in 1971 as the state's first legal bordello. Prostitution is illegal in Las Vegas, Reno and Carson City, but 28 legal bordellos remain in 12 mostly rural counties.

Conforte fled to Brazil after years of legal wrangling with the IRS, which seized the property and ultimately turned it over to the BLM.

On the women's recent visit, the bureau said the buildings were unsafe.

Through the windows, they saw doors lying on the floors and rooms stripped down to trash, sinks and towel racks. Sofas from the parlor, garish paintings of nudes, props from the theme rooms and anything else that fetched a bid was sold at auction in December.

"It's sad, because the inside looked demolished," said Devon, who like the other two asked to be identified by her professional name.

Even the small mementos Champagne had hoped to recover were gone. "They sold our ROOM numbers," she said to Honey Love, near tears.

The pool has since been drained, but Honey Love described how off-duty prostitutes would parade naked for tips. Then they would put on their clothes and head for the bar.

Inside the rooms, there was just enough left for the women to remember how each was decorated.

"Honey Love, your bed posts are still there," Champagne said, looking at a floor-to-ceiling frame of 1-inch by 1-inch poles that had surrounded and topped the bed.

Amid the emptiness of the complex, Devon thought of lost friendships.

"We were so close. Now, we're all scattered, who knows where? They're all lost," she said. "Some of them, I hate to think what really happened to them."