Joe Conforte, Crusading Pimp

“There are three things in life,” said Conforte, “three things that will make you number one in anything you do. You gotta have all three; two out of three is not gonna get it for you. First, you need breaks. In other words, the opportunities. No matter how great or strong you are, unless you are near the gold line, you could dig all your life and not find any gold.

“Number two, you need guts. To become on top of anything, it’s not something for a gutless man to do, because you’re gonna have a lot of challenges, you gotta take chances.

“Number three, you need brains. If you don’t have the brains, then once you’ve had the opportunities and you’ve had the guts to get there, if you don’t have the brains to keep it going and manipulate it, you won’t last. So: Breaks, guts, brains.”

Conforte bit off another chunk of banana and continued the story of his rise to success. “This is very interesting,” he recalled. “The first time I started driving a cab was right after I got out of the Army in ’50. This was even before I had the house of prostitution in Oakland. That was in ’52. But back in ’50 I was in Oakland, driving a cab.

“I didn’t even know what the word trick meant. I didn’t know anything at all about the business. A sailor gets into my cab and says, ‘I want to see a girl.’ I says, ‘What do you mean?’ He says, ‘Oh, I want to see a girl, I want to have some fun, and I want to pay for it.’ And I said, heh, heh, ‘Well, I can’t help you. I don’t know anything about it.’ And he got a sad look in his face.

“But the very next day, or two days later, a colored girl gets in my cab. We had quite a bit of colored trade — uh, black trade — and she says, ‘If you ever have any business, send it to me.’ Just the opposite! So then it hit me.” He laughed, rolled his eyes and hit his forehead with his flattened palm.

“I said, ‘Ooooooooooooo! You mean customers! You mean guys that want to have intercourse with you and pay for it!’ So. A couple days later that same sailor comes by again. I says to him, ‘Hey, now I know where to take you.’ I took him to this girl’s apartment, and when he got through, she hands me three dollars.

“Well, I didn’t know what the hell it was. I didn’t know I was supposed to get money. Naturally, I took the $3; then I put two and two together. And that was the start.”

With this new knowledge his taxi/pimping business flourished, and before long Conforte discovered Nevada, where houses of prostitution had been operating unobtrusively since the days of the Comstock Lode. Prostitution was illegal in the two counties where Reno and Las Vegas are located, but in the rest of the state it was condoned; which is to say there were no laws against prostitution, and as long as brothels didn’t locate too near schools or churches, or advertise, they were tolerated.

Unless, Conforte learned, they were owned by newcomers like himself with noisy ideas about legal prostitution. But he soon devised a method for dealing with the authorities — a sort of trailer shell game. He parked his one trailer at a spot where three counties come together. When it got hot with one set of county officials, he’d simply tow his business a few feet to another county.

In 1955 he settled in Wadsworth, 30 miles down the Truckee River from Reno. Here he prospered for ten years until another brothel owner staked out territory 20 miles up the river, intercepting his Reno trade. Conforte’s operation countered by moving to Mustang, two miles closer to the city than his competitor. Pretty soon a gang war was raging. Thugs with shotguns began cruising the area, firing at each other and throwing bombs. Finally, someone managed to blow up the Mustang Bridge, the sole access to both brothels.

“If anybody has anything that’s successful and lucrative,” Conforte philosophized, pushing his empty breakfast dishes into the center of the table, “there’s always people that try to muscle in. Most of that stuff you can prevent before it starts by …” He searched for the right words. “… you build up a reputation that, uh, that I don’t take any shit from nobody. For instance, that you don’t leave no stone unturned.

“But this time they had the DA on their side. They tried to muscle in when I was, uh, gone.”

“When you were gone?” I asked. Conforte picked his teeth and stared through sliding doors to the kidney-shaped pool in his cement backyard.

(He avoided the question, but later, Bill Raggio, DA of Warshoe County from 1958 to 1970, told me the answer. “There was a statute on the books back then,” recalled Raggio, “that a pimp, which is what Conforte is, was defined as a vagrant. He liked to come around with his girls, parading himself all over the city. So every time he came into town, we arrested him on a charge of vagrancy.

(“It was during that time that Conforte arranged a meeting with me. He told me that if I didn’t leave him alone he would let out a story that I was having relations with a teenage girl. He likes to do that, have something on people.

(“Well, I got that conversation down on a tape recorder. There was a jury trial, he was convicted of extortion and sent to Nevada State Penitentiary for three years. While he was there he was tried for income tax fraud and sent on to McNeil Island for another year.”)

Conforte finished picking his teeth, then continued, “When I came back … I straightened things out. They learned their lesson, there’s been nothing since.”

“You straightened things out? What did you do?” I joked. “You give them an offer they couldn’t refuse?”

He tossed his napkin on the table and rose, chuckling softly. “They never even got the offer.”