Advertising

« Snow! | Main | Confessions of an ambulance chaser--Weirdest of the Weird--Chapters One and Two--Daddy's a Mummy and Daddy's a Dame »

January 15, 2008

Confessions of an ambulance chaser--Sinners in Sicily--A religious pilgramage to Italy with Joe Conforte--Pimp King of the Mustang Ranch

By Mike Watkiss

He was wearing an ankle length mink coat and chomping on a cigar the size of an ax handle.



Joe Conforte had to be well into his 60s as he stood there surrounded by a group of short, stocky men on a dark and narrow street in an ancient Sicilian town called Augusta--the dirt poor prodigal son who had left this Mediterranean fishing village as a youth and now had triumphantly returned after hustling his way to a fortune in America.
If the stogie and stole weren't proof enough of Joe's Conforte rather twisted American success, the big bosomy redhead--clinging to the old man's arm like wallpaper--sort of drove home the point.
Subtlety was never part of Conforte's schtick. .

Indeed the flamboyant Joe Conforte had made millions as the owner and operator of Nevada's most notorious whore house, the Mustang Ranch--at the time the oldest and largest legal brothel in America.

And now Joe was making his yearly pilgramage back to the place of his birth--to share his good fortune with his old friends and old-world family members--and more importantly to stroke his annual check to the local Sicilian priest--for as I learned on that very memorable trip, pimp-master Joe Conforte took great pride in being the number one benefactor of the Augusta's Catholic church.

I've meet a lot of scoundrels in my day--but Joe Conforte was in a league all by himself. And like a lot of bad men that I have known over the years, Conforte obviously felt the need to make amends for his many misdeeds with a rather ironic gesture of contrition.
I don't know if he is still alive. Last time I heard, he was hiding out in South America after fleeing from federal tax evasion charges in Reno.

I was working as a reporter based in New York for the t.v. show A Current Affair when I first got to know Conforte.
The drunken Australians who ran ACA for Rupert Murdoch had assigned me to go to Nevada and do a story on the nation's most famous house of ill-repute. It seems Conforte was talking publicly about trying to sell stock in his whore house.
".....The Blue Chip Brothel....bringing a whole new meaning to the term "bare" market...."
I was already writing the story in my head!

My inebriated Aussie bosses knew that I was originally from Utah and--as far as they were concerned--with their blood-shot sense of American geography--everything west of New Jersey was just one big generic Western state.
"Utah's in Nevada!.....isn't it mate?"
...more to come.....mw

Posted by Mike Watkiss at January 15, 2008 8:57 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.beloblog.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/58033

Comments

Post a comment




Remember Me?

(you may use HTML tags for style)






Advertisement