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Wall Street Journal , February 14th, 2002
Wells, Nevada - And now for
a look at that other sport and it's efforts to play a role in the Olympic
Games.
Utah may sometimes bridle at
it's square reputation but adjacent Nevada revels in being Utah's naughty
neighbor - all those garish, spangled Las Vegas casinos and since 1971,
legalized brothels in certain Nevada counties.
This being America and
brothels being, after all, businesses, it makes sense that some of Nevada's 32
legal houses, like those sad Salt Lake City area ski resorts that got left out
of official games events would still want to get on the Olympics gravy train.
We decided to inquire, after
browsing the World Wide Web and noticing that, though the nearest brothels are
about 180 miles west of Salt Lake City, they had indeed caught Olympics
marketing fever, one trumpeting a "2002 Olympic Valentine's VIP Party.'
The great thing about
Nevada's brothels being legal is that if you want to find out stuff about them,
the easiest thing to do is go straight to the police. Nobody's trying to
cover up anything. So we wandered into the Elko County Sheriffs
Department, on whose watch are two of the aforementioned businesses.
Bella's Hacienda Ranch and Donna's Ranch. They sit side-by-side on a dirt
road just outside this pop. 1,000 Interstate 80 town whose motto could be:
"You don't have to be lonesome here!"
Olympics related traffic?
Anecdotally, yes. For one thing, the police say, the number of new
sex-industry workers ( a term preferable to prostitutes) registering to do
business in Wells this month is about five to ten above normal. Lacking
any other explanations (save Valentines Day), law-enforcement officers hew to an
Olympic tie-in.
This is bolstered by an
incident last week when, according to Sgt. Dale Lotspeich, a sheriff's deputy
working the graveyard shift noticed a van wandering lost on the back streets of
town. It turned out to be filled with federal agents who said they were headed
for security duty at the Games - a tense job, if there ever was one. They
were looking for Bella's, Sgt. Lotspeich says; the deputy pointed his fellow
peace officers in the right direction. We headed straight to Bella's Ranch
to check this out.
Bella's, in fact, looks
nothing like the hacienda it's name implies. Perched at the end of a dirt
lot where an 18 wheeler is parked, it's a one-story rambling affair that
resembles a truck stop motel. It's owner is Shauna "Bella" Cummins, who
greets a visitor in smiles and a jewelry-studded red blouse and gold pendant
that reads "JFDI (Just Focus and Do IT)." A Chicago native who grew up in
New York state and studied ranching, she bought the place for $600,000 in 1981
and has since spent "several hundred thousand dollars" to build it into the 15
room service center it has become today. The grand opening of the addition
coincided more or less with the Games opening ceremonies.
"I never had visions of
running this type of ranch," she says with just the right amount of irony.
Ms. Cummins is all business
when it comes to talking about the Olympics. One of her first inklings
that the Games could provide a spillover came, she says, when she was visited by
a pre-Olympic delegation from a certain Eastern European country last summer.
Even she recognized a transportation hurdle - 180 miles is an Olympian distance
to travel. Hence, while many Nevada brothel owners don't like to talk
about their business and don't advertise at all, she decided a major Olympics
marketing push was in order.
"These three weeks are the
most incredible opportunity for the world to know what Bella's Hacienda Ranch
is," Ms. Cummins says.
Besides the
Olympics/Valentines Day tie-in, in which customers are entered into a raffle to
win free quality time with the sex-worker of their choice, she has aggressively
tackled the transportation issue by arranging for customers to be picked up by
limousines in Salt Lake and driven in style to the hacienda. She has also
concocted Olympic-like competition for clients and their servers - competitions
best left undescribed in a family newspaper.
The bottom line thus far?
Ms. Cummins estimates she's already gotten about 100 Olympics related customers,
though such a number is impossible to verify. Unlike at the Games, here
nobody checks credentials.
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