My View From Las Vegas
Monday, June 27, 2005
Christophe Vorlet
June 26, 2005
Maybe Saving Money Is Just for Chumps
By DANIEL AKST
ON a recent tour of Europe, Treasury Secretary John W. Snow talked about the need for Americans to save more. Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, recently told Congress that "our household saving rate remains negligible." From time to time, various economists, pundits and others in the financial peanut gallery chime in on this theme as well. If there's one thing Americans have to do more of, everyone seems to agree, it's save.
But why should we? What if there are good reasons for the seemingly low savings rate? If there really is such a thing as the wisdom of crowds, maybe it makes sense to consider whether most Americans know something that all the worrywarts don't.
I think they do. I think they've noticed that, given the way society is organized and the way the securities markets have been acting lately, saving doesn't make a lot of sense.
First, how can anybody take savings exhortations seriously from a government that seems to revel in fiscal profligacy? Secretary Snow is part of an administration whose policies have plunged the federal budget deep into the red with tax cuts, an expensive prescription plan for older Americans and a costly war in Iraq.
The government's shortfalls are seriously undermining national savings, and they strongly imply higher taxes down the road. Somebody will have to cover all those deficits, and a climbing ratio of retirees to workers will mean increased levies to pay for Social Security and health care for the elderly.
Higher taxes tomorrow make saving less appealing by reducing future after-tax investment returns. That is especially the case for tax-deferred retirement savings: why defer taxes if they're going only higher?
Retirement savers may also worry that when the great waves of baby-boomer retirees hit the Social Security system without adequate private savings, the prudent will be taxed even more to cover the costs of the imprudent. That's another reason not to save.
Maybe parents have noticed that the same reasoning can be applied to saving for college - a process that is unlikely to help get financial aid. Why show up on campus with your piggy bank full if the bursar is likely to expropriate the money?
Taxpayers have had decades to notice that the income tax system, which penalizes working and saving by taxing the earnings from each, is yet another good reason not to save.
In a rational world, we would have a progressive consumption tax that would penalize high levels of spending instead of earning and saving. As it stands now, the system encourages gigantic homes and commensurately large mortgages, because mortgage interest is tax deductible.
Potential savers have certainly noticed, too, that there is no good place to invest their money. Returns are dismal across the board. That makes saving less attractive - and requires extra risk to achieve any given level of reward.
There is also the problem of purchasing power. Signs that inflation may be reviving suggest that your money may be worth less later than it is now. And sooner or later, the dollar will fall against the yuan, making much of what we buy - from China, anyway - cost more.
Given all this, perhaps what we have here is not truly a failure to save. Perhaps it's something closer to rational profligacy.
Under the circumstances, is it any wonder that our main savings vehicle is our homes - or that home prices are soaring? In the long run, houses outperform inflation, provide tax-advantaged financing and capital gains, tend not to implode like Enron and, at the very least, provide a comfortable place to live.
The funny thing is that while society discourages saving, Americans probably save more than the numbers suggest. The government's system of measuring personal saving fails to capture changing asset values, mishandles pensions and has other shortcomings that cause it to understate actual savings, at least in the opinion of some economists.
EVERYONE needs a rainy-day fund, of course. But if we really want society to save more, we have to stop penalizing thrift, stop taxing earned income and stop the federal deficits.
Until that happens, consider the bright side. If Americans started saving seriously, they would have to cut back on consumer spending. That would kick the last prop out from under the global economy. Instead, we're gamely fighting world poverty, one purchase at a time.
Daniel Akst is a journalist and novelist who writes often about business. E-mail: culmoney@nytimes.com
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TERRIFYING PREDATOR: A shark swims close to shore off Miramar Beach one day after a shark fatally attacked a girl. Officials doubled the number of life guards on patrol and sent a boat and chopper looking for sharks
SHARK ATTACK
Surfer had to fight off shark to rescue girl, punching the animal
A Florida surfer said he acted as ''bait'' to try to distract the shark while he wrestled the 14-year-old girl onto his surfboard: ''I've never been so scared in my life.'' The teen later died.
BY MONICA HATCHER
mhatcher@herald.com
Off Miramar Beach on the Gulf Coast of Florida's Panhandle, longtime surfer Tim Dicus has seen the dark, lithe shadows dart beneath the water -- the glistening gray fins split the waves.
He was once even bumped by a shark, he said. But Saturday was different. Dicus tussled in the water with what experts say was most likely an 8-foot-long hungry bull shark hellbent on snatching a dying 14-year-old girl from the surface.
''The shark kept coming back around,'' said Dicus, 54, who punched the shark on its snout as it circled the girl in bloody water.
A day after the horrific attack near Destin, a still-shaken Dicus said he had a sleepless night. ''I've never been so scared in my life,'' he said. ``It was like the movie Jaws, except I was in it.''
Jamie Marie Daigle, of Gonzales, La. did not survive the attack by the shark as she was boogie boarding with her best friend about 250 yards offshore.
It was around 11:15 a.m., the beach full of tourists and locals. Dicus was surfing. He said he suddenly heard screaming and saw a girl swimming frantically to the shore. When he reached Jaime, she was bobbing face down. One of her legs had been cleaved to the bone from knee to thigh, he said. He saw the pool of blood in the water.
The shark made another snap at her hand, but missed because Dicus pulled it out of reach.
He hoisted the unconscious girl onto his surfboard. All the while, the shark continued to try to get to her, Dicas said. He circled the surfboard. Dicas said he struck the shark hard with his fist once. It did little to discourage the animal.
Dicas finally towed her to a sandbar where two other men were ready with another board and a raft to paddle the girl back to shore.
Using himself as live bait, Dicus said, ``I swam away from them and started slapping the water and kicking to distract the shark.''
Once ashore, paramedics tried to revive the teen, but she had likely lost too much blood.
George Burgess, a researcher at the University of Florida, who investigates shark attacks worldwide, was at the scene and called the attack ''unusual'' for Florida water, mainly because of the shark's aggression.
''This was not a normal Florida attack,'' Burgess said. ''Usually a shark will make a mistake, thinking it's a fish,'' Burgess said. ``In this instance, the shark apparently very knowingly went after a large prey item and persistently tried to follow through on its normal feeding behavior, which would be to come back and attack again and again.''
It was the third unprovoked fatality this year, he said.
On Sunday, a bloody spot in the sand marked where paramedics worked on Jamie, who had come to the vacation spot with her best friends' parents.
Back in her hometown of Gonzales, a suburb of Baton Rouge, parishioners of St. Theresa of Avila Catholic Church mourned the teen's death, calling her ''very beautiful and popular.'' Pastor Gary Belsome, who is also a friend of the Daigle family, said they were dealing with the grief as best as they could.
''At all of the masses yesterday and today, we informed the community about the death and asked them for prayers,'' Belsome said.
Jaime, an accomplished student who was a day camp counselor at the church, was preparing to start high school in August at the prestigious St. Joseph's Academy, an all-girl Catholic school in Baton Rouge.
Last week, she finished a computer prep course with her best friend, who was also admitted to St. Joseph's in the fall.
Jaime had gone with her friend's family on an RV trip to Florida for the weekend. The girls had likely known each other since kindergarten, Belsome said.
Belsome, who spent time with the family Sunday, said that despite the tragedy, the family took solace in that she died while having fun with a good friend.
The Walton County coroner's office will conduct an autopsy today to officially determine the size and species of the shark involved Saturday, believed to be a bull shark.
On Sunday, the 20-mile stretch of beach that officials had closed after the attack had been opened.
''It was business as usual, or almost as usual,'' said Capt. Danny Glidewell, who said the incident was the first of its kind in Walton County.
He said there had been no sightings by midday Sunday. His department had doubled the number of life guards on patrol. A boat was out scanning the water for the predatory fish. Helicopters were also deployed to scour the waters for sharks. Dicus said he had gotten a phone call from Jamie's father thanking him for going out to get her.
``They said they wouldn't have been able to have a normal funeral, if I hadn't gone out there. The shark would have taken her under for good.''
? 2005 Herald.com and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
http://www.miami.com
June 26, 2005
At PartyGaming, Everything's Wild
By KURT EICHENWALD
AS a rule, companies don't often draw attention to business practices that could land their executives in jail. But for PartyGaming PLC, potential illegalities aren't just a secret hidden in its business plan - they are the centerpiece of its business plan.
A giant in the online gambling business, PartyGaming is an often-overlooked megasurvivor from the dot-com crash of the late 1990's. As hundreds of profitless commercial sites disappeared into the digital ether, PartyGaming's popular gambling sites - like PartyPoker.com - soared, with revenues and profits growing exponentially year after year.
This week, the company will go public in what is expected to be the largest offering in years on the London Stock Exchange, one that will make billionaires out of its ragtag assortment of founders and major stockholders - including a California lawyer who earned her first fortune in online pornography and phone-sex lines. All told, as much as $9 billion is expected to be raised, with all of the cash going to private shareholders selling portions of their stakes.
But there will be no Wall Street investment houses lapping up fees in the giant deal, no victory dances in the offices of American corporate lawyers. That is because PartyGaming, based in Gibraltar, has no assets in the United States, and its officers or directors could risk being served with a civil suit - or an arrest warrant - if they came to the United States on business.
The reason? The Justice Department and numerous state attorneys general maintain that providing the opportunity for online gambling is against the law in the United States - and PartyGaming does it anyway. Indeed, of its $600 million in revenue and $350 million in profit in 2004, almost 90 percent came from the wallets and bank accounts of American gamblers.
To justify this, PartyGaming walks a very thin line. Providing online gambling is not illegal per se in the United States, the company argues - federal prosecutors just say it is. The company has already received an e-mail message from the Louisiana attorney general demanding that it cease providing online gambling in that state; PartyGaming simply ignored the communication and waited for additional action that never came.
The company's prospectus - a British document that is not available in the United States - at times reads something like a legal brief, citing American case law to support the company's position that no prosecution would ever take place.
Still, in its offering documents, PartyGaming makes no secret of the fact that even if the company's view of the law proves wrong, it is banking on its executives' belief that there is little that law enforcement can do - or will do - to prosecute. "In many countries, including the United States, the group's activities are considered to be illegal by the relevant authorities," PartyGaming says in its offering document. "PartyGaming and its directors rely on the apparent unwillingness or inability of regulators generally to bring actions against businesses with no physical presence in the country concerned."
That type of unusual disclosure is typical of the entire PartyGaming story - a stranger-than-fiction tale laced with an unlikely combination of sex, money, technology and the kind of luck that is fitting only for a gambling company. And there are already signs that before the tale is done, it could well inflame trade disputes between the United States and Britain over America's arguably inconsistent behavior toward the gambling industry.
Fergus Wheeler, a spokesman for PartyGaming in London, said that the company and its executives could not comment, in part because no offering of shares was being made in the United States.
THE story begins, improbably enough, at a collection of lucrative massage parlors operated in San Francisco. Their owner, Richard Parasol, saw fabulous wealth from the businesses. State property and business records show that Mr. Parasol - at times in deals involving his Swedish wife, Gunna - moved his family into an upscale home in Marin County and bought an array of investment properties while putting money into a leather goods concern and other businesses.
By the early 1990's, Mr. Parasol had a new business partner in his ventures - one of his three daughters, Ruth, the woman who ultimately would prove to be a driving force behind PartyGaming. After spending years in private school, Ms. Parasol attended college at the University of San Francisco, state records show, before she moved on to Western State University in Fullerton, Calif., where she earned her law degree.
Ms. Parasol, now 38 and a resident of Gibraltar with her husband, J. Russell DeLeon, has universally declined to be interviewed and did not respond to an e-mail message.
But the lawyer's life of filing briefs and making court appearances was not to be for Ms. Parasol. Instead, her father brought her in as an adviser on a phone sex-chat business he had formed with Ian Eisenberg, a Seattle businessman whose father, Joel Eisenberg, was a pioneer of sex-oriented phone lines in the 1980's.
Quickly, Ms. Parasol emerged as one of the small clique of prominent executives in the growing world of interactive pornography. In 1994, she split off from her father's business, forming her own sex-chat phone business with Seth Warshavsky, another young Seattle businessman who had worked with Mr. Eisenberg.
But her business dealings with her father were not over. California state business records show that Ms. Parasol and her father established Starlink Communications, another phone-sex business. They also invested with Mr. Warshavsky's biggest venture ever, the Internet Entertainment Group.
Cash was coming in by the fistful for everyone. While online pet stores and cosmetics companies were struggling, Internet pornography was a gold mine. The phone lines almost printed money, and, through I.E.G., Mr. Warshavsky became the most prominent businessman in online pornography, with hundreds of thousands of paying members. Time magazine called him the Larry Flynt of the Internet.
But soon, everything began crashing down in a storm of unpaid debts and lawsuits. Mr. Warshavsky, for example, moved overseas, leaving behind a huge collection of unpaid bills. Mr. Eisenberg, meanwhile, had a falling out with Mr. Parasol and his daughter and the dispute ended up in court. Mr. Warshavsky and Ms. Parasol were co-defendants in lawsuits contending improper business practices. The Federal Trade Commission sued Mr. Eisenberg, accusing him of engaging in deceptive trade practices by tricking customers into authorizing billings to their telephone lines for Internet access.
The pornography business was beginning to look dicey. But Ruth Parasol had another idea.
While many of her former associates found themselves in legal trouble, she emerged relatively unscathed. According to people who have spoken with her, she and her father sold their interests in electronic pornography, just as the litigation was heating up.
Instead, Ms. Parasol pursued a new venture: online gambling. It was the new buzz of the Internet world, and Ms. Parasol decided to apply the knowledge she acquired from her pornography ventures into the more reputable gambling business.
Using her profits from the pornography business as seed capital, she and a handful of partners opened a Web site called Starluck Casino in 1997. According to company records, Starluck maintained all of its operations - including servers and offices - in the Caribbean, beyond the reach of American authorities. But the business was nothing special; the software that drove the site was simply licensed from a third party.
Then, the next year, Ms. Parasol struck up the relationship that would transform her company into the giant it is today. She spoke with Anurag Dikshit (pronounced DIX-sit), then a 25-year-old computer-engineering specialist who had recently graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, asking him to write a proprietary program for casino games. Within a year, as Mr. Dikshit's skills were recognized as crucial to her company's future, he became an investor.
By 2000, the new team of executives began exploring the idea that would bring them billions: developing a platform to let gamblers from around the world play against one another online, either at individual virtual tables, or in larger tournaments. PartyGaming is then paid a commission, known as a rake, for its role in hosting the games.
The timing could not have been more fortuitous.
At that point, a poker craze was about to sweep across the United States, pushed by the advent of televised poker events like the World Poker Tour and the World Series of Poker. These programs helped to transform poker, once a penny-ante game played out on kitchen tables by neighbors and friends, into a glamorous event with celebrity matches and color commentators.
HELPING to push the growth was the use of cameras under tables during the competitions. That allowed viewers to see the players' cards and gain an insider's view of the unfolding game.
Once Mr. Dikshit's software was improved to allow for hosting as many as 70,000 players at once, Ms. Parasol's company further fueled the game's popularity. Now, players could join a game anytime, from anywhere, without having to wait for their buddies or to restock on beer and potato chips.
Players responded in droves, making poker by far the fastest-growing segment of the online gambling market. Total revenue for online poker among all companies was already a healthy $92 million in 2002, but it then exploded, surpassing $1 billion just two years later, according to Christiansen Capital Advisors L.L.C., a consulting firm in New Gloucester, Me., that specializes in advising gambling companies.
Ms. Parasol's company, by then known as PartyGaming, did its part to fuel the mania. To help introduce its poker Web site, it hired a well-known poker player named Mike Sexton as a marketing consultant, and with his help it developed the "PartyPoker.com Million" tournament - a live contest played on a luxury cruise ship with a guaranteed first prize of $1 million. With cable channels hungry for more poker programming, the PartyPoker.com contest was soon on television - featuring none other than Mr. Sexton as a commentator.
The company's base of players - and the cash they generated - exploded. In 2002, the casino business at PartyCasino.com, which included slot machines, blackjack games and roulette wheels, was still the big piece of PartyGaming, with 535 registered players compared with 105 registered poker players. By the end of 2004, the number of registered casino players had jumped to 1,296 while the number of poker players had soared to 5,225.
But that is only part of the story. After a blitz of television advertising in the United States, the poker games attracted an escalating number of casual players. At the end of 2002, the average number of daily active players was 1,297. Two years later, that had risen to 77,094 - and by the end of March had reached 121,570.
Profits rode right along with that growth. The company had revenue of just $9 million from its poker business in 2002; by the end of 2004, revenue had climbed to more than a half-billion dollars.
As the business grew, PartyGaming brought in more professional managers. It hired Richard Segal, the head of Odeon Limited, Britain's leading operator of movie theaters, as chief executive in 2004, and hired Michael Jackson, the chairman of the Sage Group, a big British software company, as non-executive chairman. Ms. Parasol and her husband, Mr. DeLeon, now serve as consultants to the company and, after the offering, will retain the right to name one director to the board.
At the same time, PartyGaming adopted a long-term strategy for managing its growth, which is likely to continue to be robust. According to the Christiansen Capital analysis, poker players should continue to migrate to online games over the next five years, even as new players are attracted to the game. In the process, the firm estimates, the total online poker market will mushroom to $6 billion in 2009 from $1 billion in 2004.
But there is a problem with these estimates. Players in the United States make up three-quarters of the market, and even with all that growth they are expected to continue to be at least half of the overall business. At PartyGaming, American players currently make up just under 90 percent of the company's business. And American law enforcement argues that providing online poker is simply illegal.
It is called the Interstate Wireline Act - known colloquially as the wire act. Passed in 1961 and aimed primarily at mobsters, the law prohibits anyone involved in the gambling business from using wire communication to transmit bets on "sporting events or contests."
The question becomes this: Is poker a contest? The Justice Department has historically maintained that it is and, as a result, has argued that operators of online poker, including PartyGaming, are acting in violation of the law.
But it is hardly that simple. In an astonishing bit of luck, in 2001 - just as PartyGaming was preparing to start its poker business - Federal Judge Stanwood Duval in New Orleans ruled in a case pertaining to MasterCard International that the wire act "does not prohibit Internet gambling on a game of chance." That position has since been upheld by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.
Still, the Justice Department has maintained that such gambling is illegal, and numerous states have argued that it violates their laws as well. Some authorities have tried flanking maneuvers to frustrate online casinos. Eliot Spitzer, New York's attorney general, for example, opened an investigation into how PayPal, the online payment firm owned by eBay, helps online bettors pay gambling companies. PayPal agreed to suspend all such payments, as did the Citibank division of Citigroup, one of the country's largest issuers of credit cards.
And there have been rumblings in Congress about toughening up federal laws to curb the business. For several years, Senator Jon Kyl, an Arizona Republican, has pushed for a federal law to prohibit the use of credit cards or other payment systems for online gambling. But each of those attempts has collapsed, as various sectors of the American gambling industry - including horse racing and Indian casinos - have sought to insert exemptions into the law for their businesses.
In an odd way, the questionable legality of online gambling in the United States ultimately proved to be a huge boost for PartyGaming. Even as hundreds of millions of dollars started rolling in from American players, gambling giants - notably the operators of Las Vegas casinos - stood on the sidelines. With valuable assets and all of their executives in the United States, none of them were willing take a chance on where the law would finally settle. That paved the way for independent virtual casinos like PartyGaming to succeed.
The company got a gambling license from Gibraltar, where it established its headquarters. It carefully made sure that none of its assets were in the United States, making it impossible for law enforcement to seize anything. Even the computer servers used to handle the poker games were located in Canada, and will be moved to Gibraltar by the end of this year.
Now, as the largest company pushing into the United States market, PartyGaming is best positioned to benefit if the question of online gambling is decided in its favor. Already, the World Trade Organization and foreign governments are siding with companies like PartyGaming and against the United States.
LATE last year, for example, the W.T.O. agreed with the Caribbean island nation of Antigua that United States legislation criminalizing online betting based in other countries violated global laws. An appellate body at the trade organization upheld the principal conclusions in that ruling in April.
Indeed, among international bodies and foreign governments, the American position on Internet gambling is becoming an object of derision. A 2003 report by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in Britain, for example, found that there was a "growing global market for online gambling where national boundaries" no longer had any meaning.
"Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the U.S.A., where despite the apparent illegality of cross-border gambling more of its citizens gamble online than anywhere else in the world," the report says. "To deny this appears in many ways to fly in the face of the reality of international banking and the inherently international nature of 21st-century telecommunications."
With America's strongest allies throwing in the towel, PartyGaming may well have been successful with its risky roll of the dice on Internet gambling. And now this week, its owners can cash in their billions of dollars in winnings.
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Court Rules File-Sharing Networks Can Be Held Liable for Illegal Use
June 27, 2005
Court Rules File-Sharing Networks Can Be Held Liable for Illegal Use
By LORNE MANLY
The United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously today that Internet file-sharing services like Grokster and StreamCast Networks could be held responsible if they encouraged users to trade songs, movies and television shows online without paying for them.
The case, which pitted the entertainment industry against technology companies in the continuing battle over the proper balance between protecting copyrights and fostering innovation, overturns lower court decisions that found the file-sharing networks were not liable because their services allowed for substantial legitimate uses. The justices said there was enough evidence that the Web sites were seeking to profit from their customers' use of the illegally shared files for the case to go back to lower court for trial.
"We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by the clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties," Justice David H. Souter wrote for the court in Metro-Goldwyn Mayer Studios v. Grokster.
The decision was hailed by the major Hollywood studios and global music labels, which had warned that rampant online sharing of content not only harmed their bottom lines, but ultimately could inhibit the creation of new content. The recording industry has been mired in a sales slump for most of this decade, and it has blamed song-swapping over the Internet for that decline. While movies and television shows are more difficult to trade online because of their greater file sizes, technological advances are making that movement increasingly easy and threaten the cash cow that DVD sales have become for the studios.
"The Supreme Court sent a strong and clear message that businesses based on theft should not and will not be allowed to flourish," Dan Glickman, the president and chief executive of the Motion Picture Association of America, said in a statement. "This decision will be of utmost importance as we continue developing innovative and legitimate ways to marry content and technology so consumers can access entertainment on a variety of devices."
There was some relief expressed among lawyers and advocacy groups aligned with Grokster, in that the Supreme Court seemed to clearly focus its attention not on the legality of peer-to-peer technology itself, but on the behavior of players seeking to make a profit from the technology.
But there was widespread concern that the court, which provided little in the way of describing what might qualify as behavior aimed at encouraging infringement, has opened up the door to prohibitive legal battles that just might stifle future innovations.
"The court has now given as precedent to the whole world of digital technology companies a very difficult road to follow," said Richard Taranto, the lawyer who argued the case on behalf of Grokster and StreamCast before the Supreme Court.
"The immediate impact for the future of our case is not clear," he said, but the impact on future technologies "is a chilling one."
Michael Weiss, the chief executive of StreamCast, seemed to welcome the chance to prove that his company did nothing to encourage illegal behavior among its users. "We'll have another day in court," he said. "Make that several days in court."
Grokster and StreamCast had argued that there were many legitimate uses for their technology, like the transmission of material in the public domain, and had pointed to the Supreme Court's decision more than 20 years ago involving the Betamax video recorder sold by the Sony Corporation to bolster its claims that they were not responsible for any copyright violations by their customers.
The Federal District Court in Los Angeles had ruled for the defendants in the case, and the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco affirmed the decision last August.
But the opinion by Justice Souter dismissed the Sony Betamax comparison. Unlike the Sony case, he argued that the Grokster and StreamCast sought to capitalize on the online trading of copyrighted material and that there was "no evidence" that either company tried very hard to block or impede that sharing. "The record is replete with evidence that from the moment Grokster and StreamCast began to distribute their free software, each one clearly voiced the objective that recipients use it to download copyrighted works, and each took active steps to encourage infringement," he wrote.
The court decision, analysts said, provides media companies with the legal support to use lawsuits as an economic weapon against the file sharing networks, in addition to its efforts against individuals the movie and record industries accused of widespread sharing of files.
"This is significant win for the record and movie industries," said Gene Munster, a media analyst for Piper Jaffray & Company. "It means that file sharing networks - and not just end users - have to share some of the responsibility for piracy."
The ruling, according to analysts, could provide a lift for legal music online businesses like Apple's iStore, RealNetworks and Napster, and the emerging online movie services like Movielink, CinemaNow and Starz on RealNetworks. But that depends on consumer behavior.
"The question is, will the people who have been stealing music and movies now step up and pay for it?" Mr. Munster said. "That remains to be seen."
Steve Lohr and Tom Zeller Jr. contributed reporting for this article
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Saturday, June 25, 2005
Friday, June 24, 2005
Paul Krugman
June 24, 2005
The War President
By PAUL KRUGMAN
VIENNA
In this former imperial capital, every square seems to contain a giant statue of a Habsburg on horseback, posing as a conquering hero.
America's founders knew all too well how war appeals to the vanity of rulers and their thirst for glory. That's why they took care to deny presidents the kingly privilege of making war at their own discretion.
But after 9/11 President Bush, with obvious relish, declared himself a "war president." And he kept the nation focused on martial matters by morphing the pursuit of Al Qaeda into a war against Saddam Hussein.
In November 2002, Helen Thomas, the veteran White House correspondent, told an audience, "I have never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war" - but she made it clear that Mr. Bush was the exception. And she was right.
Leading the nation wrongfully into war strikes at the heart of democracy. It would have been an unprecedented abuse of power even if the war hadn't turned into a military and moral quagmire. And we won't be able to get out of that quagmire until we face up to the reality of how we got in.
Let me talk briefly about what we now know about the decision to invade Iraq, then focus on why it matters.
The administration has prevented any official inquiry into whether it hyped the case for war. But there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that it did.
And then there's the Downing Street Memo - actually the minutes of a prime minister's meeting in July 2002 - in which the chief of British overseas intelligence briefed his colleagues about his recent trip to Washington.
"Bush wanted to remove Saddam," says the memo, "through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and W.M.D. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy." It doesn't get much clearer than that.
The U.S. news media largely ignored the memo for five weeks after it was released in The Times of London. Then some asserted that it was "old news" that Mr. Bush wanted war in the summer of 2002, and that W.M.D. were just an excuse. No, it isn't. Media insiders may have suspected as much, but they didn't inform their readers, viewers and listeners. And they have never held Mr. Bush accountable for his repeated declarations that he viewed war as a last resort.
Still, some of my colleagues insist that we should let bygones be bygones. The question, they say, is what we do now. But they're wrong: it's crucial that those responsible for the war be held to account.
Let me explain. The United States will soon have to start reducing force levels in Iraq, or risk seeing the volunteer Army collapse. Yet the administration and its supporters have effectively prevented any adult discussion of the need to get out.
On one side, the people who sold this war, unable to face up to the fact that their fantasies of a splendid little war have led to disaster, are still peddling illusions: the insurgency is in its "last throes," says Dick Cheney. On the other, they still have moderates and even liberals intimidated: anyone who suggests that the United States will have to settle for something that falls far short of victory is accused of being unpatriotic.
We need to deprive these people of their ability to mislead and intimidate. And the best way to do that is to make it clear that the people who led us to war on false pretenses have no credibility, and no right to lecture the rest of us about patriotism.
The good news is that the public seems ready to hear that message - readier than the media are to deliver it. Major media organizations still act as if only a small, left-wing fringe believes that we were misled into war, but that "fringe" now comprises much if not most of the population.
In a Gallup poll taken in early April - that is, before the release of the Downing Street Memo - 50 percent of those polled agreed with the proposition that the administration "deliberately misled the American public" about Iraq's W.M.D. In a new Rasmussen poll, 49 percent said that Mr. Bush was more responsible for the war than Saddam Hussein, versus 44 percent who blamed Saddam.
Once the media catch up with the public, we'll be able to start talking seriously about how to get out of Iraq.
E-mail: krugman@nytimes.com
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Aspen's Journal
? The Life
? Aspen's Journal
Monday, January 10, 2005
My name is Aspen, and I am going to work at the world famous Chicken Ranch Brothel in Pahrump, Nevada, which is as close as legally possible to Las Vegas. Most people think that prostitution is legal in Las Vegas, but it is not. Yes, they do have outcall services where the girls more often than not do engage in prostitution. The outcall services do not ever mention sex for money; what they offer is an hour strip tease/massage for a flat fee. Anything else is negotiated with the call girl after the flat fee is paid. Therefore, solicitation of sex for money is illegal?the brothels are not in Clark County but in Nye County where prostitution is legal.
Photo by Benjamen Purvis
I knew that there were brothels located close to Las Vegas when my boyfriend and I first moved out here, but I really had no idea what they were like and surely never pictured myself coming to work for one. I was asked several times if this was something I would ever do, but my only answer was that I'd never really thought about it. Unlike Eden, who had danced for many years, I had never danced. So I visited Eden in the bar of the Chicken Ranch, and she took me back for a tour. I met Diamond that night as well.
I began contemplating the idea of working at a brothel, selling myself. Why? Easy money. Furniture money. I debated quite a bit with my boyfriend until I finally decided that he was OK with it and that I was really OK with it. So after a long four days of the Adult Entertainment Expo, Eden and I headed for Pahrump. I feel very fortunate to have her to help me. She has schooled me on everything and even helped me shop. She said that I was coming in with an even bigger advantage than she was because she was just dropped off her first time.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
First lineup was at about 1:30. Three guys?one was a taxi driver who came in first, and one of the three girls picked was Eden. Wow ?at least I've had my first lineup and the butterflies are starting to go away ... A little before 4 p.m., we had the second lineup of the day. It was a cute, young guy. Eden was busy, so she didn't get to see it ?I was picked!! Yea! His name was Michael, and he knew what he wanted?blowjob. Diamond came and did the Dick Check, I got the money, he cleaned up, and away we went. This was my first blowjob ever with a condom, and it wasn't all that bad. Afterwards, we laid there for a bit after he cleaned up, talking about his friend he left in Vegas playing poker. He agrees with me that Texas Hold-'Em is boring. I encouraged him to come back before he leaves on Sunday to see me and to bring his friend, who happens to be a virgin. He left happy and gave me a nice tip to prove it. The whole thing took about 40 minutes?not bad for a blowjob.
Las Vegas Weekly. All Rights Reserved
The Life
Inside the brothel, days and nights are an unusual mix of strict rules, camaraderie, and sex for money. Richard Abowitz gets to know the women of the Chicken Ranch.
By Richard Abowitz
? The Life
? Aspen's Journal
It is 5 p.m. on Friday when I arrive at what looks like a typical small-town saloon?a television is turned to sports and two guys are having drinks at the bar. But there are also about a half-dozen girls spread around the room. Two are playing a game of pool. A thin girl with blond hair arches her back just so, less, it seems, to make the shot than to display her?is the correct word G-string or thong? (I could be wrong; she sinks the ball in smoking style.) A thought passes through my head, and it's the first time I have ever surveyed a room with this kind of confidence, the sort that rock stars have: I can have sex with any girl in this room any time I want. It's an unbelievable high.
Five minutes later, Debbie Rivenburgh, 48, the general manger of the Chicken Ranch, gives me a tour. Debbie, for all purposes, is the boss of the Chicken Ranch, responsible for all the prostitutes, maintenance, security, staff and shift mangers. Everyone answers to her.
Despite the building's campy front fa?ade and porch, the comfy bar and the plush, spacious parlor where the lineups take place, I am surprised to discover that within its depth the Chicken Ranch is a maze made up of five double-wide trailers interconnected by wooden passageways and other rooms added on in what seems an architecturally haphazard fashion. The walls are decorated with glamour- shot photographs of working girls, some of which seem to date from decades ago. Another hallway has a series of framed Marilyn Monroe photos. There are also some watercolors, faded perhaps from years of hanging around low ceilings and hallways that can be thick with cigarette smoke. There is huge a kitchen with three large tables, a gym, more bedrooms for girls to work than I can count jutting off in all directions, a shift manger's office, and a larger office for Debbie in the back. Behind the brothel is a pool surrounded by bungalows and a fenced back yard.
"You are about to make history," Debbie tells me as she rounds up sheets and pillowcases for me. She doesn't say this with any pleasure. She has been employed here for 18 years and never before has a reporter been allowed to move into a working girl's room for a few days to live unmonitored by her. In fact, it is her day off and she is only here to orient me before returning to her residence, which is another double-wide, placed further behind the brothel.
Over the years this has occasionally made for a thin line between her life and work. "It is a complicated business to run and it consumes your life. My personal life has suffered. I've missed events when kids were growing up because my job had to come first." It's a balance she's better at now. She just completed months of taking care of her grandkids while her daughter served in Iraq. (She's instituted a discount at the brothel for veterans as well as those currently serving.)
She doesn't think she's unusual. "The people who work here could be your next-door neighbor, because we are. All of the staff that work here are Pahrump locals that are raising families. We are just normal people."
Debbie was never a prostitute?"I took this job working part-time as a shift manager as well as two other part-time jobs. I was a change girl at Saddle West, and I did dishes in a restaurant. That's how desperate I was for work ... After six months here it turned to full-time and now it's been 18 years and I still look forward to every day I come to work. Not many people can say that about their job."
Even in our phone conversations leading to my trip?which was arranged so the dates didn't conflict with her family obligations and took place after her daughter's safe return from Iraq?Debbie made clear that to her core she's a strong traditionalist when it comes to the brothel industry:
"The man who owned the Chicken Ranch started here in 1982 and he learned the business from the working girls who were here at that time who taught him the business. He taught me the business."
The Chicken Ranch is perhaps the most famous brothel name in the United States. The original Chicken Ranch has a history that goes back to the 19th century in Texas (serving soldiers from the Civil War through WWII, cowboys, and eventually the workers drawn in by the Texas oil boom). Though prostitution was always illegal in Texas, it wasn't until 1973 that the authorities moved to close the brothel. They succeeded in shutting down the Texas establishment, but the story memorialized in the movie Best Little Whorehouse in Texas made the Chicken Ranch name legendary, and a brothel owner in Nye County acquired the rights to that name for a legal brothel. Though Debbie isn't sure, she thinks some of the older paintings on the wall may be from the original Chicken Ranch in Texas. The current owner, Kenneth Green, purchased The Chicken Ranch in 1982. Next to Debbie's desk hangs a framed photo of the front of the Chicken Ranch back then: The road leading to the brothel is still dirt, there is no front porch. Green clearly knew it wasn't much to look at. Underneath the frame is a plaque inscribed: "Would You Pay $1.25 Million for this?" (Currently the brothel is for sale and though there is no sign out front, the prices bandied about are in the $6.1 million-to-$7 million range, though the publicist for the Chicken Ranch told me that the worth of the place has been estimated at $10 million.)
"Things have evolved over the years since then to a point," Debbie says. "But I am a creature of habit. When I'm told to do something a certain way I do it that way and I don't change the way I do it. I was taught in 1987 that this is what you say, this is how you do a lineup and I still do it that way."
And that's why although radio, television and the Atlantic Monthly have all passed through the Chicken Ranch of late, Debbie still focuses on the significance of my staying in a room that would usually house a working girl as "making history," and making history in general is not something of which Debbie is inclined to approve, particularly when it involves the press. "We have been burned again and again by the press."
Mostly, Debbie's view of press falls more on the side of public service rather than with a mind toward promoting the Chicken Ranch. For example, she frequently does interviews by e-mail with college students doing research papers. She tells me that the man who ran the place before her had the same policy.
But it isn't just press. Debbie will never be excited about doing anything new at the Chicken Ranch. Take the issue of cell phones. Until quite recently they were not welcome at the Chicken Ranch. "I did not trust all of the working women to not answer their phones if they had clients in the room. And that would have been a nightmare, just a nightmare. So we didn't let the working girls have cell phones while they were here."
So even years after cells became acceptable at other brothels, the Chicken Ranch still held out. "We had two pay phones, and one was an old phone booth so the girls could have privacy." But according to Debbie, the working girls' constant complaining eventually reached a fever pitch. "They said they needed their phones to keep in touch with their families and check up on their children and all these different reasons."
Debbie was at last convinced. After much thought and discussion (about 18 months ago), a perfect solution was reached. In the shift manger's office, Debbie points to a series of little wooden cubbyholes against the far wall of the office. Each wooden box has a room number.
"We decided that we would let them keep cell phones. But when they book a client they have to check the cell phone. And they can pick up the phone when they are through with the party. It works, and we don't have to worry about the more immature girls wanting to answer their phones and talk to their husbands and boyfriends while there are customers around. It's working and I'm amazed."
Even when it comes to something as potentially profitable as setting up the website for the Chicken Ranch, the brothel was slow in coming to a decision. Debbie recalls:
"I know when the Internet started to be a big thing and people all started to get it in their homes, me and the man who taught me the business were reluctant to engage in having a website. We were old- school, and we held back because we didn't want to venture into that area because it was something we didn't know, and we were afraid of it. I know some of the other brothels and we were hearing that it was helping increase their business because guys could research. So we reluctantly gave in and got a website. I have noticed a vast change in business."
It was more than Debbie's temperament that accounted for the reticence, however. The brothels in Nevada are the only legal ones in the United States, and they exist because of the Silver State's unique history and quirky traditions. The truth is, all they have is that past; there is no guarantee of a future. Debbie fully realizes this. "Is it ever going to be legalized anywhere else? Probably not. Most people can't see past 'prostitution'; it's such a bad word." And therefore, time is likely not on the side of the Nevada brothels and particularly those near Pahrump.
When Debbie arrived in Pahrump in 1987, the population was about 3,000. It's now a town of over 30,000. The week after I left the Chicken Ranch?in what the Review-Journal reported to be one of the largest crowds ever to show up at a Pahrump Town Board meeting?a motion to lift a ban against brothels within Pahrump city limits to allow the annexation of the tiny bit of Nye County that includes The Chicken Ranch and neighboring Sheri's Ranch, was rejected. The town board member who sponsored the brothel amendment is quoted in the paper as estimating that this would've meant about $13 million over the next decade for cash-starved Pahrump; probably more tax revenue than any other business in the town. Though the bill would have created no new brothels and there was a common-sense financial benefit to making this annexation, Pahrump's citizens didn't want to have as part of their city the same brothels that were already a long-standing part of their community.
It's not an isolated case.
The Nevada Legislature just approved a massive new entertainment tax on topless strip clubs and, despite the brothel industry's lobbying efforts, the legal prostitution houses were exempted from the tax. On June 10, the R-J's John G. Edwards, reporting on the bill, noted, "Legal brothels, which operate in places such as Pahrump, will continue to avoid the entertainment tax even though a brothel-industry representative asked that brothels be included." In the history of the United State has there ever been another industry that has lobbied to pay more taxes? And that's the rub?the nation's only legal brothels exist always a vote away from extinction, with only a long tradition to protect them in a fast-growing community like Pahrump, with increasingly fewer people connected to local history. It can't be a good thing when politicians are scared to tax you.
I ask Debbie if she feels the days of legal brothels in Nye Country are numbered.
"I think they will stay legal into the future, but how far into the future I don't know. As this town grows and you have your younger families raising children moving to town, you're hearing more and more opposition to us being here. But we stay down here where we're at, we don't abuse the emergency services in town?I have been here 18 years and I've never once had to call the sheriff's department to assist us. We like to be a good neighbor to the people who live down in this area. As long as we continue to stay down here, be good to the town and don't bother anybody, then we'll be OK."
So while the brothels near Reno?where the population boom is far less extreme and threatening to the legality of the brothels?have been active in courting publicity, porn-star appearances and, these days, even presenting the occasional reality television fodder for cable, things have stayed far more traditional in Southern Nevada. And that's especially true at the Chicken Ranch.
? ? ?
This desire to stay on the lowdown is also perhaps a significant factor in what everyone agrees is the most onerous practice of brothels in Nevada, the lockdown. Lockdown is custom, not law, and it is practiced primarily by Southern Nevada brothels including the Chicken Ranch and neighboring Sheri's Ranch.
During the periods the women work?which can last for months at a time (the minimum stay at the Chicken Ranch is 10 days with girls always spending the first few days unable to work until STD test results arrive from a clinic in Las Vegas)?prostitutes are not allowed beyond the gates that enclose the brothel. Debbie admits that lockdown is hard on the girls:
"People tend to lose sight?and even I tend to lose sight?in the day-to-day grind, that they have lives outside of here. To completely leave your life and go be locked up in a place for a couple weeks at a time, well, your personal life doesn't come to a standstill."
The girls are more blunt in referring to life under lockdown as "pussy prison."
The only exception to lockdown is on Tuesday, dubbed "Doctor Day," where the girls are allowed into Pahrump on their own for no more than four hours?divided into morning and afternoon shifts so there are always women available for customers back at the brothel, which is open 24/7. But even on this day there are limits. First off, at least an hour of that precious time away from the Chicken Ranch is spent at the doctor's office getting more STD tests.
Unofficially, the girls are discouraged from going to casinos, hotels and any other high-profile place or places they could conceivably ply their trade outside of the legal confines of the brothel. They are also asked to dress modestly and behave appropriately.
In fact, the brothel management, according to a few working girls, is so nervous about the weekly outings to Pahrump that according to one girl, "That pretty much just leaves Wal-Mart, the grocery store, the gas station and fast food as the places we can go." On the Doctor Day I am there, despite having spent a week straight bottled up in the brothel, all of the girls who went out that Tuesday morning returned more than an hour before curfew. There just isn't much they can do in Pahrump.
The tour ends in front of my home for the next few days. Room 7 is a Spartan affair with a bureau, a mattress hoisted up on four cinder blocks next to a small nightstand, the lower drawer of which?where the Gideon Bible would be in a hotel?is filled with medical waste bags to dispose of condoms. The carpet has that meaningless gray-tan color that would be immediately recognizable to apartment renters in Las Vegas. There is a television with a reading lamp placed next to it. I figure they are being thoughtful, knowing that as a writer I will be making use of the lamp. I put it on the nightstand and adjust it to reflect on my notebook, thinking it pretty convenient. It is only the next morning that I learn the lamp's actual purpose: the girls use it to perform dick checks on customers to make sure they have no visible signs of an STD.
I share a bathroom across the hall with T. and any of T.'s customers who want to use it. She's a tall blond in her late 30s who is completing the testing for a regular job in the medical field and wishes to be identified only as T. There are nicer rooms with faux-wood floors, and one I saw even had a private bathroom. But those are for the girls who are regulars. My room is meant for the more transient girls. And while there is certainly a lot of turnover in a business like this one, there are also some surprisingly long-term working girls employed at the Chicken Ranch. One tall blond who can't yet be 30 has been living here more or less since 1997, and every morning she walks the brothel's dog, Heidi, and pays for and feeds the brothel cat, Meow Meow.
After showing me to my room, the first thing Debbie does is call a mandatory meeting to introduce me to the working girls and staff and to make sure everyone is aware that I will be around reporting a story. They have just finished dinner?meals are served at noon and 5 p.m. and so the gathering takes place in the kitchen. A few days earlier, Debbie told me over the phone about the considerable effort and time on her part it took to prepare the girls for my arrival. She said it wasn't easy. The girls were used to the routine under lockdown and having anyone?but especially a man?stay over at the house was very troubling to some of them. So Debbie's regulations seemed compiled more to meet the concerns she heard from those girls along the way than to protect the brothel from my snooping. She gives us all a handout labeled "Richard" with a dozen rules. Typical among them:
"Do not listen to or include in your article any private conversations between working girls."
"Do not enter the working girls' bedrooms unless you are invited by one of the interview participants."
"Above all, respect the privacy of the women who are not participating with you."
Even the girls who had appeared to be party animals (who I am introduced to as Trinity and Diamond) in the bar just a few moments before are now fully focused employees paying close and sober attention. It turns out, there were no fast times going on in the bar, anyway, at least not when I got here. The scene I had witnessed in the bar when I arrived at the Chicken Ranch was nothing more than a "barlor," a display of the wares meant for the two men who had been sitting watching the television. ("Barlor" comes from "bar" and "parlor".)
When the customers request a barlor, the working girls must all file into the bar and introduce themselves, and after that comes the awkward period when the men must make some decisions for things to go forward. The decision of which, if any, girl to choose is one I soon learn guys love to agonize over and put off making. During the next few days I will see countless barlors and they tend to all end up like a bad high-school dance: boys on one side of the room, girls on the other. After introductions, the men tend to talk among themselves and the girls must wait to be asked back to their room, and so amuse themselves by playing pool or sitting together chatting. Some girls resent this waste of time since so many men arrive simply as gawkers.
Photo by Benjamen Purvis
"I don't really like barlors," Eden tells me. "Unless there is a barlor, most of us who don't really drink much never go in there." (Eden has great hair and a lovely face and no illusions about her number-one selling point, her chest: i.e., her website address, Eden38dd.com). Eden explains that she tends to prefer the more traditional lineup that, while somewhat more demeaning, involves less socializing and works better for keeping the customers from procrastinating. Actually, it isn't too long after Eden and I start talking that I get to go see for myself, as the bell rings to signal to all the girls in the house that a customer has arrived for a lineup.
There is nothing more ritualized and traditional at the Chicken Ranch than the lineup. The customer or customers sit on thick, comfortable sofas while the girls all crowd in the hallway adjacent to the parlor, around the corner, passing back intelligence reports on the age, nationality and whatever other details of the men become available from sneaked glimpses.
"Ladies you have a visitor," the shift manger says. And, with that, the girls file out and stand single file in a row in front of the sofas. A curtain covering the back wall parts, revealing a mirror behind the girls that allows customers a rear view. Each girl introduces herself, but is not allowed to say anything else. As in the barlors, customers tend to not want to make up their mind, and that can be agonizing for the girls who must stand half- naked (and, if it is late enough, half asleep, too) fully displayed. The girls try to hide their discomfort and smile and project a sensual attitude, but it is hard for them not to inwardly groan when, as usually happens, the customers will stall for time with something like, "Wow, they are all so lovely. Can I have all of them?" Mostly, the girls are good-natured enough to laugh as if amused by this line they hear every day. If the men take too long, it is up to the shift manager to nudge things along with "Are you ready to go back with one of the girls now?" or "I really can't have them just keep standing out here like this. Is there someone who you would like to spend time with?"
After being picked?either by lineup or barlor?the girl then takes the customer back to her room to negotiate money. Though the menu of available services itself is posted on the website ( www.chickenranchbrothel.com), it is without prices since the working girls are independent contractors and they fix their own rates. One of the few truly sensitive areas to both the brothel and the working girls is the discussion?to be blunt?of how much specific sex acts cost. The truth is, even for the girl the amount can vary. A customer can strike a better deal during a slow time than during one that is busy. The problem is that it's almost impossible for a customer to know which times are busy and when things are slow.
On Saturday night I ask the shift manager when the rush begins. "Who knows?" she says. "This isn't a nightclub." And that's true. Saturday night turned out to be far quieter than Saturday afternoon, when the bell rang over a dozen times before noon. Monday evening seemed busier than Saturday night. Who would've guessed?
Diamond, Trinity and T. call themselves the three musketeers. All sexy and ready do business on Saturday night, instead they sit crashed out together on the couch watching three movies in a row on the Lifetime channel. According to Trinity: "We also watch Jerry Springer and every day at 2 there is our soap opera, Passions." I could be wrong, but based on their dedication, my guess is there will be no discounting from these girls when Passions is on.
Over my time there I am stunned at how cheap guys can be. Especially, since?and, of course, there is no way for customers to know this?behind the scenes every little difference means more than you think to the working girls. I am sure it has to do with the deeply personal nature of what they are selling. But there are probably no other workers whose income can easily enter the six figures annually whose personal happiness is so much increased by performing an act for $600 instead of $500. The girls don't use the word "date," preferring "party," and if you kick in the extra hundred it really does make the girl feel more like she is at a party.
Interestingly, no girl would admit to performing the act differently or more enthusiastically on account of money. The sex a girl provides for $800 would be little different than the sex for $400 (if you can get her to agree to it). In short: halfhearted sex is not for sale at a discount. During my time at the Chicken Ranch the range was extraordinary, with deals cut that ranged from $200 to $3,000 (for a bungalow). All of this money is split 50/50 with the brothel. The girls must also pay $30 room and board to the brothel as well as pay for their own medical testing (about $60 a week) and even provide their own condoms. So in general, the girls who make the most money are doing it through volume rather than a few high rollers. According to Eden, "I don't have notches in my bedpost, because at this point my bedpost would be shredded to a toothpick."
Still, making the girls' happy isn't the only reason to err on the side of bringing too much money to the Chicken Ranch if you go, because not having enough can mean a long, wasted trip from Vegas. Amazingly it happens all the time. On Saturday morning at 7 a.m. a man paid $150 to arrive by taxi from Vegas, only to not have enough money left for what he came here for.
By my estimate about half of the men who actually go back with a girl wind up leaving because they are unwilling to reach an agreement. Often though, the deal-breaker isn't money but the customer wanting an activity that is either banned by law (oral sex without a condom, for example) or something that the girls refuse to do, according to Eden: "For most girls it's: no kissing on the mouth, no fingering, and don't bite me."
Still, according to Eden, customers tend to be respectful. Eden says of the typical customer: "I would say generally it is 35- to 65-year-old professional men. It is a demographic of people with the disposable income and that generally is pretty nice guys."
A marketing major a few credits shy of graduation, Eden explains her approach to prostitution as a mix of entrepreneurship and post-post-post (hell, this kind hasn't even started yet) feminism. "I go about it as a business. I am a smart girl and I am an attractive girl so I know I can do many, many different things. But this is fulfilling an aspect of my sexual life. Most people don't embrace their sexuality for all it's worth. If you are a sexual person, you enjoy all the aspects of sex, the different things. Just because it is not mainstream doesn't mean it's wrong. Sex is such a crazy thing. Whatever is enjoyable sexually is in the mind and body and spirit no matter what it may be. And I am just a very sexual person and I am making a business out of it. Would I be doing this for free? No!"
Eden, of course, realizes she is an exception and this job is not always the career of first choice. "Lots of girls that do this line of work aren't good for anything else. I don't know how to say it without being politically incorrect, but this is all they can do. They are out here because they have no home, no place else to go. They have nothing. This is all they are good for. That seems very sad. But I also think they have the potential (because of the amount of money they earn) to do so much more with themselves but they opt not to do it. They are doing what they want to do with it and so I don't criticize them."
In a society where being a model for Playboy has become a status symbol of the highest order, most of the adult entertainment jobs that used to be a lifetime stain are now acceptable (two weeks ago a former stripper was elected to a judgeship). Also, to a large extent, strippers and even porn stars are now glorified by the mainstream media. But prostitutes are the day laborers of the sex business. The cultural status of a prostitute is as loathsome now as it was 20 years ago and the workers at the Chicken Ranch feel it acutely. And for all her independence, her pride in her ability to earn money and to manage her career and, most of all, to be exactly who she wants to be, even with all of that, Eden feels the sting of society's disapproval:
"In general with everything else I don't care what you think. I don't care what you think about what I look like; I don't care what you think about the way I dress; I don't care what you think about my car; I don't care what you think about me in any way, shape or form whatsoever. But yet when it comes down to this I don't tell people. Instantly, no matter how good a person you are, no matter how religious you are, what a good mother you are, what a good cook, no matter what it is you do that you are excellent at, at that point that you tell someone you are a prostitute you become a scum of the Earth. In general you are instantly degraded for that to the bottom of the barrel."
So why would Eden?so smart and capable?choose work that generates such hostility in the outside world such that even someone as fearless as she is balks at mentioning her work to people? "There are three factors. What order they go in, I don't know. It varies day by day. To me money is a factor, to me being able to use my sexuality in a positive way for me appeals to me, too." She then turns silent for a full minute. I can see in her face that she is struggling for a way to express the third factor, and I try to imagine what it could possibly be and draw a blank. When she starts talking again it is without her usual lucidity. Her sentences start, then stop, then try again. Yet this is clearly the most important thing of all to her:
"Third, um. Then probably third. Probably." There is another long pause. "I can't tell you how wonderful it is to have somebody thank you for being so nice to them and making them feel so good ... um ... making them appreciate life again. I mean, I have had someone say to me that coming out here ... Someone can enjoy themselves enough to go back to appreciating life. I have had someone say something that deep to me. Sometimes people come out here and you personally create a life-altering experience for that person. That to me is very rewarding."
This is Eden's story of that customer:
"A gentleman came out here. He was probably about 60. We went back and I gave him a menu. He says, 'No, this is going to be a special situation.' I'm like, 'OK, just talk to me.' He proceeded to tell me it was the two-year anniversary of his wife dying of cancer. Since she had passed away he had not been able to get past the fact that he loved his wife and that she is gone. He had not been able to have any relationships or to allow his life to move on because he had this guilt. He said, 'I am trying to make my life go on and to believe that just because my life goes on I don't love my wife any less. I picked you because my wife had red hair and was built like you. You actually resemble her. All I want you to do is just lay here next to me and let me hold you. I don't need you to talk to me or do anything. I just want to lay here and hold you and think of you as my wife and think about how much I loved her and what she felt like to me. I just want to say my good-byes to the only woman in my life.' We had no sexual contact whatsoever. He lay there for an hour and he held me in a spoon position, and he just cried. It took everything I had not to wail, but I figured that I couldn't break down because I was there being strong for him."
Eden kept in touch with the man until he sent a final e-mail telling her that he was remarrying and thanking her for helping him begin to move forward.
The girls frequently develop friendships with customers that can be hard for an outsider to fathom. One of the few customers willing to talk to me was Ernest, 37, of Las Vegas, a contractor with sandy blond hair standing about 6 feet 2 inches tall with a bit of a belly. He was Diamond's friend though not her customer?well, not exactly. "I don't party with her," Ernest says. "I did a two-girl party once with her and she was in the way and so technically I never partied with her. She's not my type." Rather Diamond is charged with picking the girl for Ernest to party with.
Ernest and I are sitting at the bar discussing this while watching Diamond and Trinity play pool, and Trinity is topless, because those are the stakes, and she is losing. As Diamond had told me earlier, "Sometimes we have drinks and play pool and wait for guys to come in. I always beat her. Trinity is a good friend but a bad pool player."
"Would you party with me?" Trinity asks Ernest.
His diplomatic answer: "I would have fun, but you probably wouldn't be my type."
"I knew it!" Trinity says.
I ask Ernest: "What's your type?"
"I'll tell you," Trinity says. "He likes a little bit of an older woman." Trinity is 21. Diamond is 25.
"Is that true?" I ask Ernest.
"I tend to enjoy myself more with the older women."
The women here today range from 21 to 41.
Ernest recalls his first trip to Chicken Ranch: "I'd been divorced for awhile. I hadn't been with anybody and so I decided to come out here. I was certainly nervous. I did the lineup. I've only done one lineup and that was the first time." That was about a year ago. These days he drops by a couple nights a week.
Two more men come in for a barlor and the room fills up suddenly with girls. I ask Ernest how many of the girls now in the room has he partied with? He surveys the area and then to my embarrassment he points and starts counting out loud like the Cookie Monster: "Um, 1, 2, 3, let's see, ah, 4, 5, 6. I guess around 7."
Ernest uses all of the clich?s to compare the brothel experience to the dating world: "The cost is about the same. I am serious. I am a numbers person, and I've gone through the numbers. I justify it. Here if I go back with somebody, I am going to be going back with somebody who I know is clean. That's the main thing. But the other thing is that I get what I want. I usually get treated really well. I feel comfortable with a girl when I go back with her. There have been a couple times when I partied with a girl and I would never party with her again, but I never felt cheated. They are courteous. I feel like I am at home out here. Everyone treats me like part of the family." But Ernest's popularity has not come cheap: "Since December of last year I've spent about $12,000." Still, not every visit is a party. "Sometimes I go months without a party."
"Are you going to party tonight?" I ask him.
"I haven't decided yet," he says. He sips his beer, not taking his eyes off Diamond.
"When do you make the decision?"
"When the mood hits me. And who knows when that will be?"
Ultimately, the mood hits Ernest, and Diamond picks the third Musketeer, T., for him. "I picked her because she is an older woman and I thought they would have more in common than someone my age and that would make him more comfortable. I know what he likes and doesn't like," Diamond says.
The friendship between the girls themselves is less complicated and in many ways more intense because they live together in such close quarters for such extended periods of time. When I arrive, for example, Diamond has been working at the Chicken Ranch for over three months straight. "The first two and half months were a piece of cake, but now I am starting to get a little crazy. Sometimes I am not in the mood and sometimes I get irritated fast." It is a position few could understand and this is how she defines the Three Musketeers:
"A couple girls came in and I got attached to them. We kind of hang out together, drink together and party together with guys. And of course, we watch movies on Lifetime. When you are down and out they are like family who are in the same business. They can tell you how to get through it. And we can be there to give each other support. It is a bond that we make between us three."
But even among the girls who don't seem particularly close there are surprising relationships. Eden and Diamond appear polar opposites. Think what you want of her work; Eden is sophisticated, thoughtful and articulate. Diamond is brash, tough and has a street education that at first appalled me with some ignorant comments she made about HIV positive people. I never once saw Eden speaking to Diamond or to any of the other Three Musketeers. I didn't see Eden so much as glance at the television that Diamond seems to watch with every free moment of time available to her. I thought of them as residing in different universes even within the limited space of the brothel. I assumed in fact that they probably did not even like each other. Even Debbie remarked at the contrast: "Diamond is more a little-girl personality whereas you have Eden who is more serious."
Then one night Eden takes me aside:
"This is going to surprise you. But you would never guess that one of the girls I am closest here with is Diamond. It surprises me. We are so different. I don't think we would have ever become friends if we had met outside of here. But we share a bathroom here and we are both neat freaks. She and I both tend to earn a lot of money and so there are occasionally jealousy issues with other girls. We have that in common. I am picking her up at the airport when she next flies out next time, and she is spending the night at my place."
The friend I see Eden spend most of her time talking with is Aspen. Eden, in fact, talked Aspen, whose previous work experience was as a sixth-grade teacher, into coming to work at the Chicken Ranch. "Yes, I recruited Aspen," Eden admits with a laugh. "She is a personal friend of mine back in Vegas, and once I got to know her I figured out she was very open, very nonjudgmental and very sexual. I had been telling her I was a stripper when I was actually out here. But when I got to the point that I was comfortable with her and I told her what I did, she thought it was really neat. And at that point we talked openly about it, and she thought it would be interesting to try and do just for the experience. So she came out here with me in January and really liked it."
? ? ?
It was Aspen who wound up being picked from the lineup to take care of a severely handicapped 32-year-old man whose parents took him to the brothel. I found out from Eden later that the father? on vacation from Florida and who I couldn't help notice was bedecked in gold neck chains that suggested finances were not a serious issue for the family?lowballed Aspen on the price. While Aspen was with their son the parents watched television in the bar. Their son had very limited use of his hands and feet and as the parents worried that Aspen would charge more to dress him afterwards, they suggested she send for them when she was finished so they could put his clothes back on.
"His parents told me what he wanted," Aspen explained to me later. Aspen thinks the man was probably a virgin though she is not sure. "He told me, 'I don't have a girlfriend. I probably won't ever have a girlfriend.' So, I really, really wanted him to have a good time. I wanted it to be a very good experience for him so he would have that memory."
"Eden told me you weren't paid very much?"
"No I wasn't."
"She said it was the lowest you could take."
"Well, yes, but ..."
"But nothing. I saw the chains around the dad's neck. That family could have paid you a lot more."
Aspen sighs: "I gave them a range and they went to the lower end. But they weren't asking for anything outrageous and he was very nice, a very bashful man. The parents wanted me to come get them to dress him. But I thought if I could undress him I could dress him again. I just thought it would be more comfortable for him if I did it. And I did it. It was no problem."
"And you didn't mind going the extra mile for people who didn't want to pay you a penny more than they could get away with?" I ask.
Aspen waves her hand dismissing the notion and then she says: "I think he probably has the heart of a trouper himself. In some strange way I was grateful, because he reminded me of my husband."
It is one of those many moments at the Chicken Ranch where expectations, preconceptions and everything else explodes. "Excuse me?" I ask.
It turns out that Aspen is a widow. "My husband wasn't quite like that, but after he had a stroke he lost a lot of the use of the left side of his body." Aspen took care of her husband for three years like that before he passed on in 2001. Because she is widow of a man who knew he was dying, Aspen was taken care of financially to some extent. She is one of the few girls at the Chicken Ranch who is definitely not there primarily for the money. She too is seeking to explore her sexuality, though she does admit to earning good "furniture money" for her house.
Over days living with the working girls if I formed one real bond, it was with Aspen. I tell Debbie that Aspen is the sort of person who I would be friends with in the "real world." It is the truth. Aspen and I spend hours talking and very little of it winds up being about the Chicken Ranch. We both like Edgar Allan Poe, can spend an afternoon discussing Shakespeare, have an interest in biblical scholarship and enjoy debating philosophy. We get each other's taste enough to recommend books to each other. Not that we are identical. Aspen enjoys karaoke and has a fondness for Meatloaf's singing that I find hard to abide. But one night, sprawled on the floor of Aspen's room listening to Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited (someone has to save her from a life of Meatloaf fandom) I feel exactly like I am back at my college dorm hanging out in a friend's room. When the bell rings for a lineup it is a shock to be reminded that in reality I am sitting in working girl's room in a brothel in Nye County.
Yet, as diverse as all the working girls I meet at the Chicken Ranch are, I do notice that there are some similarities. Aspen is not alone in possessing a nurturing personality. Even Diamond, when asked what she would like to do if she could choose any career answers without hesitation: "My dream is to go to college so that I can be a nurse." This desire to take care of people is perhaps the greatest vulnerability the working girls share. And it is exploited.
Many of the girls have boyfriends and husbands and about the only common denominator among them: None of the men in their lives seem to have regular work. Of course, one has to be careful about stereotyping; there were many working girls at the Chicken Ranch I did not speak with and some girls I did interview chose not to discuss their private life at all, a decision that was respected. Some girls put up a valiant fight, too, claiming that their man was needed to watch children (as if millions of single parents don't pull that miracle off each week and work, too) while they were under lockdown, or that he was engaged in crucial home- improvement projects that otherwise would need to be paid for by a contractor (another feat pulled off by millions of working folks who keep the registers at Home Depot humming), or, perhaps, he is needed to handle the time-consuming task of paying bills and running the business affairs for a girl while she was at the Chicken Ranch (all of which can be done from the brothel thanks to phones and Internet access, not to mention: How could the few things left be too much to allow time for a job?). There were other answers, too. All foolish.
I tell Debbie that I have noticed a pattern. "That's just part of life and you can't judge them for that," Debbie says. "I learned early on that there was part of me that just needed to understand. If there was a girl who was willing to discuss her personal life with me she had to take whatever feedback I had or whatever questions I wanted to ask. But I gave up asking those kinds of questions, because there is always a reason. To me, 'Why does he not he have a job?' you just take as part of the business. And after awhile you just don't pay attention to it anymore, it just doesn't faze you."
And, when Debbie says she doesn't judge the working girls, she means it. She stops me cold when I offer my theory that on some level the answer to why men are able to accept their girlfriends/wives working at a brothel is that they are living off the proceeds. "That's a difficult area," Debbie interrupts. "I am not going to try to figure it out. I gave up trying to figure it out. There's a lot of things I gave up trying to figure out years ago and that's one of them."
Trinity is one of the few girls who is single and so is willing to discuss it. I ask her about the dismal employment rate among the partners of working girls. "Pretty much, yeah. A lot of times the other half chooses not to work because we woman make enough. We make a lot of money." Trinity estimates her monthly income at $9,000 to $12,000 a month. Another girl tells me she shoots for $500 for each day she works. Another is preparing to leave after an extended stay with close to $40,000 saved.
Of course, only the more successful girls are willing to talk to me about their earnings, and there are plenty of whispered horror stories of women who don't earn enough to cover their room, board and bar tab (girls drink if they want to, but not to excess). Not making enough to cover those bills, by the way, would be a good hint to get out of the business. Even Aspen, who is a relative newbie with only a half-dozen trips to the brothel (most lasting only a couple weeks) has had just one day when she did not have at least one customer. Few jobs make it easier at giving you the news that it is time to stop. It is certainly true that I had less sex?none, yeah, you needed to know, didn't you??than any other resident in the history of Room 7 at the Chicken Ranch.
But one thing my time at the brothel taught me is that nothing is straightforward, no judgment fully comfortable to make once you allow yourself into the details of a brothel's reality. Even something as seriously twisted as lockdown occasionally has strange benefits. Debbie points out: "I've seen girls come here who have a pimp. They come here and they start to get a clearer picture of the controlling abuse and the negatives that guy is having on their life. Because they are away from it and they can see it. And the girls support each other when and if they are fed up with the man. I've seen that a lot."
Of course, one person's idea of a pimp is another person's spouse and the distinction can be a very slender one in relationships where the man produces no income. Besides, lockdown can place significant stress on even the most stable relationship. Eden and Aspen (who met the man she lives with now about a year after her husband's death) have both been with the same partner for years. But they admit the topic of whether their boyfriend cheats during the weeks while they are out at the Chicken Ranch is one they can't stop talking about with each other. And Eden and Aspen both have seen plenty of cheating husbands at the Chicken Ranch. Both, of course, tell me that they are sure their man isn't a cheater, though Aspen seems to have more conviction on this point than Eden.
But mostly it is the little indignities of lockdown that are so hard on the girls; even meals take on ridiculous importance. Debbie puts it this way:
"I try to impress upon a new cook how important meal times are to a girl, because of the fact that they are locked up in here, they look forward to their meals. That is the one thing that changes every day in their life."
Debbie's mom Joan is a cook, and says, "Out here they like spaghetti. They like meatloaf with mashed potatoes and gravy. They like fried chicken and Mexican. I cook for them like I cooked for my family." Many girls also snack from one of the stocked refrigerators, and all say they gain weight at the brothel.
Still, while it seems trivial, Diamond and Trinity got very excited Sunday afternoon when I offered to bring them back whatever they wanted when I decided to make a run to Subway. On my way out I remembered one of the dozen rules was "Check in with the shift manager anytime you want to do something not covered here." So, thinking it routine, I asked at the shift office when I went to be buzzed out of the gate. Debbie wasn't around, and there was a change going on in shift managers. Standing with them was an office employee. But when I asked about bringing back some subs an intense three-way conversation broke out (one shift manager was inclined to say yes, and the other no with the office worker firmly disapproving to shift the balance). Permission was denied. Still in shock I find Diamond, who didn't seem at all surprised by the decision. "Don't worry about it. Don't get yourself in trouble," she tells me.
This is typical of the flip side of lockdown. Whatever the legitimate arguments for the practice, the prostitutes at a brothel on some level should always be treated as adults who are at work. Yet a shift manger has it in her power (they are all women) to treat an employee more like a prisoner than an independent contractor who is residing at her work location. The humiliation of this sort of treatment can sometimes be staggering to outsiders. I can almost see the sign on the cage: DON'T FEED THE HOOKERS. The power that brothels wield over the working girls who reside there can land in ways that are as overwhelming as they are arbitrary.
In the end, I smuggle back a contraband Subway sub for Diamond and Trinity to split.
? ? ?
My time at the Chicken Ranch was clearly coming to an end, and not just because I proved unable to follow the rules for more than a few days. On Monday a new batch of girls arrived for quarantine and Debbie had not prepped them for a reporter living at the Chicken Ranch. Their hostility was palpable. For the girls who had existed under lockdown for days straight before I arrived that Friday afternoon, having me around had turned out to be a novelty, but for these new girls, having a guy in one of their rooms was a distraction at best and at heart seemed to throw off the balance of their private space.
I realize now that Debbie had not been exaggerating when she spoke about how much effort it took her to get the working girls to be OK with my being at the Chicken Ranch these few days. It probably didn't help that a girl who has been assigned to Room 7 was being forced to live in a bunk bed (she was quarantined still, and could not work so didn't yet need the room) in another room while waiting for me to vacate so that she could set the place up as she wanted it. Though I had agonized about if it would be perceived as rude to bring my own sheets to the brothel (ultimately deciding not to do so), most girls bring way more than sheets; they completely personalize their rooms from the drapes to the art on the walls.
So on Tuesday morning I pack up my stuff to vacate. It is Doctor Day and Eden, Aspen, Trinity and Diamond all are on their morning excursion to Pahrump. I decide to wait for them to return to say farewell before leaving. But just as they get back my friend John arrives at the brothel with a friend of his I don't know. We are all sitting in the bar when the unthinkable happens; he starts to behave like a customer, and not one of the nicer ones. First he demands a tour of the brothel. Then after ordering a drink he begins to crack witticisms like, "How much would you charge to let me fart in your face?" Having already introduced him as a friend I decide the only thing to do is just slink out the door like anyone in the midst of a shame spiral. And I make it as far as the front porch when Aspen calls me back to the door of the parlor she has raced around the bar to get to in order to catch me before I escaped beyond the gate, outside the range of her lockdown.
"Hey, don't sneak off. It's fine about your friend. We get stuff like that all the time. Maybe you'll write something that helps people understand us better."
"I am really sorry about John."
She reaches over and pulls me into a quick hug. It is my first physical contact at the brothel. We say nothing for a moment. We are both looking over at Meow Meow, who is making a rare afternoon appearance on the porch where her food bowl is kept under a chair. Inside, I can hear John's laughter. He borrowed some cash from me before I left (an accident in Southern Nevada took out the ATM that morning so he can't use his card) and I wonder if he'll wind up spending it. I feel bad keeping Aspen since I hope she gets his money as much as anyone. They all deserve it for putting up with him. "What a strange way for your story to end," she says
"No," I tell Aspen, "This is the perfect ending."
I reach over and hug her back and then head to my car
Las Vegas Weekly. All Rights reserved
Wednesday, June 22, 2005
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
Vegas' Growth Is Gamble for Lake
Some fear sprawl will put more pollutants in Lake Mead and want treated sewage dumped deeper in it. Others say it'll just shift problems.
By Bettina Boxall
Times Staff Writer
June 19, 2005
Las Vegas' relentless growth has raised concerns that the city's expansion will send more pollutants into Lake Mead, hurting water quality in the nation's biggest reservoir and the source of drinking supplies for millions in Southern California and the Southwest.
With each new subdivision in the southern Nevada desert, more wastewater and urban runoff drains into Mead, a sparkling blue national recreation area but also the receptacle for all of metropolitan Las Vegas' treated sewage.
A wastewater coalition is proposing a solution: a massive pipeline that would take most of the effluent from a wash that now empties into a shallow bay and instead dump it directly into the cold depths of the lake closer to Hoover Dam. There, in theory, it would undergo more dilution and be less likely to feed surface algal blooms.
But some experts fear the pipeline project could simply export the pollution threat out of Mead to the lower Colorado River, where Southern California and Arizona draw water. "It's not a good situation for those downstream," said Alexander J. Horne, a UC Berkeley professor emeritus in environmental engineering and part of a team that reviewed computer modeling of the proposed pipeline project.
He and others argue that moving the wastewater outfall several miles south, closer to the dam, will eliminate natural scrubbing that now occurs in the wash and the lake. That could make it more likely that algae-breeding nutrients such as phosphorous will migrate out of Mead and reach the lower Colorado.
Douglas W. Karafa, program administrator for the Las Vegas Valley wastewater coalition that is overseeing the pipeline project, said that while phosphorous levels might rise slightly, they would remain well within water quality standards. "Saying there is a little more phosphorous going out of Hoover Dam doesn't necessarily relate to anything that is going to happen environmentally," Karafa said.
The ever-increasing volume of effluent draining out of the Las Vegas Valley makes it imperative, he said, that the outfall be moved from Las Vegas Wash, which carries a steady stream of treated sewage into Mead from the region's three water reclamation plants.
The daily effluent flow has swelled to 170 million gallons from 40 million gallons in the 1970s. It is projected to hit 300 million gallons by 2030 and 400 million gallons by 2050. There will be so much wastewater that planners want to use it to power an underground hydroelectric plant that would be built as part of the pipeline project.
The flow has eroded the 12-mile wash, cutting deep channels, tearing out wetlands and dumping sediment into the lake that hurts water quality.
Researchers have found that fish living near the wash's outlet in Las Vegas Bay have lower sex hormone levels and trace amounts of birth control chemicals and other compounds present in the wastewater.
Algae, which can be a pollution problem, has at times reached troubling levels in the bay, probably stoked by nutrients found in the discharge ? a situation expected to worsen as the wastewater flow increases.
To ease the effect on the wash and the relatively shallow bay, the wastewater coalition is proposing a $600-million project that would divert most of the effluent into a 12-foot-wide pipeline nearly 20 miles long. The pipe would extend seven miles through the River Mountains and release the waste into the lake about 1 1/2 miles off Boulder Beach, at a depth of roughly 260 feet.
Designed to encourage dilution and to keep the effluent in an algae-hostile dark layer of the lake, the new outfall would also move the wastewater flows downstream, away from the intakes that Las Vegas uses to draws its drinking water from Mead.
But like Horne, Mic Stewart, the water quality manager for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, worries that moving the wastewater discharge to within about 3 1/2 miles of Hoover Dam would leave more phosphorous and other nutrients in the water to flow through the dam to the lower Colorado.
"Even a little bit of increase in phosphorous in the river could stimulate algal growth," Stewart said.
G. Chris Holdren, a U.S. Bureau of Reclamation lake expert who was on the modeling review team, says the outfall move might even pose a threat to the lake above the dam. "The problems as I see them ? depending on how the discharge eventually gets mixed into Lake Mead ? is a potential increase in the algal blooms in the open part of the lake where it could impact recreation."
Algae can be toxic, although Mead's blooms so far have not been. Much of Mead, normally a clear blue, turned a cloudy pea green in 2001 when a giant bloom spread across its western portions. But fish and water quality were not affected.
Still, the 2001 bloom ? the cause of which remains unclear ? illustrated Mead's long reach. "The bloom was so extensive that it spread throughout the lower Colorado River system ? and even into reservoirs in the Southland region as far south as San Diego, a distance of about 400 miles," Stewart said.
The best solution to the algae threat, he said, was to increase treatment at the wastewater plants that serve the Las Vegas Valley.
Arizona water officials have not expressed concern about the outfall move. The National Park Service, which manages the Lake Mead National Recreation Area, said it had confidence in the modeling, which indicates the new outfall area would meet water quality standards ? whereas continuing to discharge all the effluent in the wash would lead to pollution problems in Las Vegas Bay.
Erik L. Orsak, environmental contaminants specialist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, also said that pumping the effluent into a deeper portion of the lake would mean less exposure to trace chemicals for the endangered razorback sucker, a native fish that spawns at the mouth of the bay. "The middle of the basin is one of the best choices [for Mead fish] and certainly has the greatest potential for dilution," he said. Still, Orsak said he advocates more treatment at wastewater plants before the effluent reaches Mead.
But what is good for the lake's razorback suckers may not be good for the ones living below Hoover Dam in the lower Colorado, where federal officials recently launched a $626-million restoration program for native fish and plants.
"We may indeed be relocating to some degree the wildlife exposure to sites below the dam," said Timothy Gross, a research physiologist and toxicologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who has helped document trace amounts of pharmaceutical compounds in Mead fish. "Water quality downstream of the dam is likely to decline ? significantly, probably," from increasing wastewater flows and moving the outfall.
Gross and other federal researchers began studying Las Vegas Bay fish in the late 1990s, testing nonnative carp and largemouth bass as well as razorback suckers. All three species exhibited lower thyroid function. Both males and females had lower sex hormone levels, and in males the quality and motility of sperm were diminished.
The fish additionally had trace amounts of chemicals ? also found in the Las Vegas effluent and Las Vegas Bay water ? that are derived from birth control pills, antidepressants, antibacterial soap and fragrances.
"Much of what we're detecting are things that come from sewage outfalls," Gross said.
While researchers have not definitively proved the cause of the fish hormonal problems, they "in all likelihood are tied to effluent," Orsak said.
Such compounds have been detected in wastewater worldwide, and regulators are trying to figure out what, if anything, to do about them. There are no clean water standards for them, and conventional sewage treatment removes only some of the substances, many of which are endocrine disrupters.
"It seems to me most scientists agree that it is not a human health issue from a drinking-water [standpoint]," said Shane Snyder, research and development project manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which supplies Mead water to the Las Vegas area.
"It's more of an ecologic, aquatic-life issue."
Snyder, who sits on a federal advisory committee examining the matter, said his latest research indicates ozone and reverse osmosis treatments can remove most if not all of the compounds from wastewater streams.
But "the cost of implementing these types of processes can be enormous," he said. "From the data I've seen, I certainly would not advocate vast amounts [of spending] for water treatment or removal of these compounds ? in Lake Mead for certain. I believe there are more important issues that public dollars can go to."
Karafa also said that while the valley's wastewater agencies can make some adjustments to improve the treatment all three plants already employ, there are limits to how much they can do without jumping to much more expensive technology that would have its own drawbacks.
Reverse osmosis, for example, would convert a significant amount of the wastewater to an unsavory brine that would have to be disposed of and ? more critically from southern Nevada's standpoint ? reduce the Las Vegas Valley's take of Colorado River water.
That's because Nevada is credited for whatever treated wastewater it puts back into Mead, meaning that in practice it can draw much more from the reservoir than its legal entitlement. Reduce the wastewater returns, and Las Vegas gets less Colorado River water.
At the Clark County Water Reclamation District, which generates a little more than half the wastewater going into Mead, Deputy General Manager Doug Drury said he is slashing the phosphorous output of his plant by fine-tuning the existing treatment process. Given that, he argues that more wastewater doesn't necessarily equal a nutrient problem for Mead or the lower Colorado.
"I don't see us being stagnant in treatment of phosphorous," he said.
"I believe we'll have to lower it and lower it."
