S2: Episode 1

Battlelines

In a changing Reno, city boosters concoct a plan to force strip clubs out of downtown. But Reno’s strip club kingpin won’t go quietly. As the city tightens its grip, it’s dancers who feel the squeeze.

Episode | Transcript

Battlelines

Robin Amer: Hey everyone. This season of The City is about strip clubs, so it won’t be suitable for everyone, especially kids. This episode contains explicit language, including explicit conversations about sex.

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Robin Amer: It’s a typical summer night in Reno, Nevada, a glittering casino town tucked into the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Three guys walk into a downtown strip club and take a seat near the front. The club is small and dark, but brightly colored lights splash across the stage. Almost beckoning the next dancer to come on up.

Dancer: What brings you guys out tonight?

Man: Oh, just looking to get out, you know? Just got off work, so we're just chilling.

Robin Amer: They’re a little hard to hear, but they tell the waitress that they just got off work at a sporting goods store across town. They want to blow off some steam.

In Reno, strip clubs are just one of many options for a night of debauchery. There are big resort casinos and nightclubs—even legal brothels just outside city limits.

Now, sex for money is not legal in this club—or any of Reno’s strip clubs. But the illusion of sex for money, well, that’s definitely for sale here.

Three strippers join the three men, sliding into their laps.

Man: What's fun to do in here?

Serenity: In the back it's like an orgy.

Stephanie: We have the most fun in the back.

Man: What do you do in the back?

Robin Amer: One of the guys tells them that he just broke up with his girlfriend. His pals say they’re trying to cheer him up.

Man: But the real reason we're here is because my boy just had a nasty break up with his girl.

Serenity: Oh, no!

Robin Amer: The dancer on his lap is a brunette dressed in red lingerie. On stage she goes by the name Stephanie. For 20 bucks, she’ll give him a lap dance. She’ll dance topless just for him, right there in the room.

For 150 bucks, she’ll give him a lap dance in one of the private rooms in the back of the club.

But he doesn’t seem interested in that. Instead, he says his goal is to “get some action.”

Man: Would that be included?

Robin Amer: “Would that be included?” In other words, would sex be included in that private room in the back. Even better, he wants to know, could we go to a hotel?

Stephanie, the dancer in his lap, keeps telling him no. But she’s trying to be polite about it—even seductive.

She’s not going to straight up tell the guy to get lost for asking her to get it on in the back. She makes way more money giving lap dances in the private room than she does at the tables up front.

Stephanie tries to sell him on a private lap dance without agreeing to something that would get her fired. But he keeps pressing.

Eventually, he asks if he can lick her, you know, down there.

Man: What about licking you down there?

Stephanie: Uhhh…

Robin Amer: And Stephanie says ... “maybe.”

Stephanie: Uhhh...maybe.

Man: Maybe?

Stephanie: Maybe if you get me wet enough.

Man: If I get you wet enough?

Stephanie: Yeah…

Robin Amer: But this guy does not work at a sporting goods store. And he didn’t just break up with his girlfriend. He’s an undercover cop.

A cop sent in to crack down on vice.

And even in Reno—a city famous for debaucher—if you’re a dancer on the lap of an undercover cop, and he asks you for sex, and you say “maybe,” well, even that could get you in hot water.

So how did we get here, exactly?

Well, there’s a battle underway in Reno, one where undercover raids like this one have suddenly become a lot more common.

The city’s power brokers are cracking down on the vice they once tolerated, all while vying for control of some of Reno’s most sought after real estate.

As powerful people fight to remake Reno in their image, the question is: How far are they willing to go? And who will have a place in that new city?

At stake here is Reno’s identity and with it, the very future of the city itself.

I’m Robin Amer and from USA TODAY, this is The City. Season 2: Reno.

ACT 1 

Robin Amer: You may think you know Reno. As the butt of a joke, right? As the degenerate city from Reno 911, perhaps.

Narrator: The new season of Reno 911 is locked—

Character 3: It’s go time.

Narrator: and loaded.

Character 4: Drop down your weapon! You, take your top off.

Late night comedians like Seth Meyers love to take swings at Reno.

Seth Meyers: According to a new list, the least happy city in America is St. Petersburg, Florida. But that's only because Reno, Nevada finally killed itself.

Robin Amer: The Muppets even ragged on Reno. It was kind of heartbreaking for people who live there. In The Muppets movie, Fozzie Bear tells Kermit the Frog that he’s afraid to go back to his job as a washed-up entertainer doing gigs at a dumpy casino.

Fozzie: I really don’t want to go back to Reno.

Robin Amer: Despite the jokes, over the years Reno has survived by embracing vice as a powerful economic engine.

Adults would come to Reno to do what they couldn’t do at home: get a quickie divorce, gamble, even pay for sex, back in the days when prostitution was legal inside city limits. You might say that Reno was Vegas before Vegas was Vegas.

But now, Reno is reinventing itself. And it’s starting to become what a lot of folks are calling the “New Reno.”

Mayor Hillary Schieve: We are truly experiencing a Reno revival. National media outlets are talking about us, like the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, CBS This Morning.

Robin Amer: That’s Reno Mayor Hillary Schieve during a campaign debate late last year.

And she’s right. A bunch of national media outlets have all run stories celebrating that revival, noting Reno’s scenic landscape, or its trendy new bars, or its thriving art scene, or its top-ranked research university.

But it’s not just the media that’s been paying attention. Reno has recently caught the eye of Silicon Valley.

Mayor Hillary Schieve: We are truly rebranding this city and companies like Tesla, Amazon, and Apple are all building and investing right here.

Robin Amer: And that’s propelling the city into a period of epic change.

City boosters in Reno are looking to cash in on this big-tech gold rush, and it’s sparked a battle here that may feel familiar to you—a battle that might be happening in your city.

But this battle has a twist that’s just so Reno. And it’s pitting this stubborn and once revered strip club owner against a new regime of well-connected developers, and political operatives, and city leaders who’ve decided that the strip clubs are standing in the way—not just of progress, but of their ability to cash in on that progress.

That’s the story we’re going to tell this season on The City. And our guide to that story is Anjeanette Damon, an investigative reporter for the Reno Gazette Journal.

She’s spent the last year and a half looking into the fight over Reno’s strip clubs. And this season, she’ll take us inside those strip clubs—and inside Tesla, a company driving the change at the root of this fight. Along the way we’ll meet the people at risk of losing their footing in the fight for Reno’s future.

Here’s Anjeanette.

Anjeanette Damon: So I’m standing in the middle of Midtown. It’s this an eclectic little neighborhood that’s just south of the big, aging casinos downtown. You can kind of see the snow-capped mountains that surround the city of Reno. Down the street is my favorite bottle shop, Craft—it’s kind of the bar where everybody knows you name, so to speak. Across the street is Two Chicks. It’s a great breakfast joint that started out as a food truck.

I grew up in this city. I built a career as an investigative journalist. And to a certain extent, the geography of this city is marked by the stories that I’ve told over the years. So north of here is the county jail where I uncovered a string of deaths that the sheriff at the time was trying to keep quiet. And just up the road from that is a traffic signal that they installed after a series of stories I did documenting pedestrian after pedestrian who were killed in that intersection.

But in 20 years of reporting in this town, one place I had not been was inside a Reno strip club.

Reno has a bunch of strip clubs, but the biggest and most famous is the Wild Orchid. It sits in an old hotel-casino in between downtown and Midtown. The front part of the building, where the casino was, is now the strip club. It’s big and windowless with a white-stucco facade.

The hotel is still there, too—six-stories of varying shades of tan. It’s now mostly housing for low-income residents but still rents out nightly rooms when the rest of the city’s hotels fill up.

The whole thing is surrounded by a sea of cracked asphalt.

This place is gaudy, decaying, and sits on one of the most sought-after corners in the city. Gentrification has crept right up to the edge of this strip club. And so has the interest of developers.

Anjeanette Damon: Alright, are we rolling?

Fil Corbitt: We’re rolling.

Anjeanette Damon: It's the middle of the day, so it's not actually open...

Anjeanette Damon: I step from the afternoon sun into the dark club and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust.

The proprietor of the Wild Orchid is a guy named Kamy Keshmiri.

Kamy and his family own three of the four strip clubs in downtown Reno: The Wild Orchid, Fantasy Girls, and the Spice House—the club visited by the undercover cops at the top of the episode.

You could call Kamy Reno’s strip club kingpin.

Kamy isn’t here yet, but his lawyer, Mark Thierman, is.

Mark Thierman: Kamy should be here any minute.

Anjeanette Damon: OK, good.

Mark Thierman: Do you want half a sandwich? I only had half.

Anjeanette Damon: Oh, no thank you.

Anjeanette Damon: Mark is a constant presence at the Wild Orchid, and he’ll turn out to be a key player in Kamy’s dispute with the city. He’s a 60-something lawyer from New York, with a ruddy complexion, a bit of a potbelly and an affinity for profanity. He also loves to date strippers.

Anjeanette Damon: Hey, is that your Tesla out front?

Mark Thierman: Yeah.

Anjeanette Damon: Nice.

Anjeanette Damon: Tesla’s all-electric cars stand out in Reno these days. They’re a symbol of the fledgling New Reno economy. And Tesla is the company that is most actively changing the face of the city. Its giant battery factory on the outskirts of town employs thousands of people here.

As Mark continues eating his sandwich, I take a look around the room. The chairs are drab and stained. The carpet is spotted with smashed chewing gum. The Wild Orchid’s main stage dominates the middle of the room. It’s empty, save for the stripper pole that glistens with oily fingerprints from the night before.

I’d never actually met Kamy Keshmiri in person before. But I’ve known of him for years. When I was a teenager, Kamy was a superstar athlete, setting national records as a discus thrower. He was regularly on the front page of the local newspaper.

Now when people talk about him, they use words like “bully,” and “stubborn.” I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of him.

Mark Thierman: Hey Kamy.

Kamy Keshmiri: Sorry, I was—

Mark Thierman: That's OK.

Kamy Keshmiri: —I was thinking about the game yesterday.

Mark Thierman: You lost track of time.

Anjeanette Damon: Kamy is really into sports. And the man is almost always dressed in athletic clothes. I’ve seen him in jeans maybe once or twice, but other than that: track suits. He’s wearing them at city council hearings. Court appearances. Business meetings. Today, it’s a nylon shirt and shorts and a Nevada ball cap.

At age 50, he still sports a shock of black hair, which he usually keeps shaved into this manic mohawk of sorts. And he’s a giant of a man. He has biceps that look like they could heave a Buick onto its side.

But here, I’ll let him describe himself:

Kamy Keshmiri: I'm 6’3”, 245 pounds. I stay very active. I spend, you know, 12, 14 hours a week in the gym, so…

Anjeanette Damon: How big are your biceps?

Kamy Keshmiri: I’ve got some muscles. Twenty, 21, 21-inch arms. I used to have 36-inch thighs, 24-inch arms, 30-inch waist, 305 pounds.

Anjeanette Damon: Wow.

Kamy Keshmiri: Yeah, I used to bench almost 600 pounds.

Anjeanette Damon: But I’m not here about Kamy’s muscles. I’m here to see the club.

Anjeanette Damon: Can you show me around?

Kamy Keshmiri: Sure! I'd love to show you around!

Anjeanette Damon: Kamy, his brother Jamy, and their father opened the Wild Orchid in the late ‘90s and it’s still got that distinctly ‘90s feel—purple velour upholstery and glowing hot pink lights.

Kamy Keshmiri: And we thought, at the time, it was, you know, it's a little dated now,  but give the citizens of Reno a little Vegas. Just touch of Vegas.

Anjeanette Damon: Despite the drab condition of the place, Kamy’s proud of it. The Wild Orchid is the crown jewel in his strip club empire. Its prominent location gives him access to tourists tourists, as opposed to his other clubs that cater more to locals.

Mark jumps in:

Mark Thierman: We're a destination. The destination is downtown Reno. People are coming in to play downtown Reno. They want a little bit naughty. They want some nice. They wanna go skiing...

Anjeanette Damon: The club’s condition becomes really obvious when we wander to the back to these private booths—the place where guys pay extra for a private lap dance. Water drips from the ceiling.

Kamy Keshmiri: I know. I think we have a water issue or something here.

Anjeanette Damon: Is it dripping?

Kamy Keshmiri: Yeah, we get water sometimes. Sometimes we get a leak here and there. Um, so anyways, my guys will fix it. Old building.

Anjeanette Damon: This place is the epitome of old Reno—the kind of place Fozzie Bear dreaded being stuck in.

Anjeanette Damon: You never updated it?

Kamy Keshmiri: We wanted to update. We were planning on going through a major updating about two years ago. And then all of a sudden here, we got slapped with, the city wants to get rid of us, and that kind of derailed our plans for remodeling. But we were in the process of remodeling the whole club and then this came about, so we halted that.

Anjeanette Damon:  When Kamy says “this came about,” he’s talking about the city’s attack on his clubs.

When I first went to talk with Kamy at the Wild Orchid last spring, the undercover raid hadn’t happened yet. But Kamy was already under attack. He said he’d been deflecting low-ball offers from developers who wanted to buy the Wild Orchid property. One guy had offered a million dollars for the property, but Kamy says he won’t sell for less than 30 million.

He was also fending off rumors that his clubs are dens of sex trafficking and drugs. Undercover cops had been creeping into his clubs trying to find proof of illegal activity.

But perhaps the biggest threat to Kamy was that the once hands-off Reno City Council had suddenly raised the prospect of passing new laws that would make it very difficult for him to stay in business, including one that would force him to move his clubs out of downtown altogether.

We’ll get to those new laws a little later.

But Kamy insists the city has no reason to be after him. There’s no prostitution here. No drugs, he says. He runs a clean establishment, where guys can just come and have fun.

Kamy Keshmiri: The only thing that's being massaged is their egos. Nothing else.

Anjeanette Damon: So, in your view, Kamy, why do you think they're trying to kick you off this corner?

Kamy Keshmiri: I don’t know why. I mean, I think there's just certain people that just do not like what we do. And they felt, let's start lying to people with sex trafficking, because that's the hot word these days, which absolutely has nothing to do with our business. They're lying to people.

It doesn’t make any sense. I've never, I've been in this business 23 years. I've never had one incident, one case, one person, one issue of sex traffic, not one. I never even thought it was ever—I couldn't even fathom, even think it was an issue, other than the lies that I'm hearing that people, they're feeding people, because they have nothing to go on. There's no records. There's no reports. There's no police act... There's nothing. So what do you do? Lie. 

Anjeanette Damon: Yeah, he gets a little worked up about it. In fact, Kamy gets worked up a lot. Almost every time I’ve interviewed him, we’ve arrived at a moment like this, where his breath comes in quick gasps, sweat collects at the edge of his nose, and his eyes bug out a little bit.

This is really personal for Kamy. They’re going after his livelihood, but it’s more than that. It’s an affront to his status as one of Old Reno’s favorite sons. He believes he deserves better.

Kamy Keshmiri: Makes me angry. Yeah, because I'm born here. I mean, I'm a Hall of Fame athlete. I don't know how many people drive around with the Hall of Fame license plates. I went to school here. I'm three-time NCAA champion. I’m number one in the world in my sport. I've always been pro-Reno. I've grown up in this town. And for them to do this to me, it puts, makes me bitter.

Anjeanette Damon: It’s not just Kamy who has been affected by the effort to shut down the clubs. Nearly 175 women are licensed to dance topless in Reno.

Take Stephanie, the dancer who sat in the undercover cop’s lap at the top of the episode.

By that point, she had been working at the Spice House for a couple of months. The Spice House, which sits on the eastern edge of downtown up against the railroad tracks, has the lowest profile of Kamy’s three clubs.

I’ve spent a lot of time there with Stephanie, trying to get a sense of what life is like as a stripper in Reno.

DJ: Alright, put your hands together for Stephanie! That girl is lookin’ good up there. Show her some attention, fellas. Remember, $20 gets ya a lap dance.

Anjeanette Damon: At the moment, she’s swirling provocatively around a pole on the main stage at the Spice House, dressed in a black lacy teddy and shimmering seven-inch platform stilettos that she calls her “mermaid shoes.”

But when she arrived at work, she was in her real life clothes—stretchy yoga pants, a warm sweatshirt, and Uggs. It was a cold spring day and I met her in the parking lot.

Anjeanette Damon: Hi!

Stephanie: Hi!

Anjeanette Damon: Your poor little car's covered in ice.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Anjeanette Damon: How was the drive?

Stephanie: Um, long.

Anjeanette Damon: Stephanie actually lives in a small town in California’s Central Valley, about 200 miles to the west of Reno. She drives three hours through the scenic Sierra Nevada mountain range to get to the Spice House.

Again, Stephanie isn’t her real name. She agreed to talk to me on the condition I only use her stage name. She doesn’t want people in her small hometown to know what she does for a living.

Stephanie's a single mom in her mid-20s who spends most of the week with her two young daughters. On Friday mornings, she hands them off to her ex and heads to Reno.

The long drive is worth it for her. The guys in the California clubs, they aren’t as nice. Don’t tip as well.

Stephanie’s worked a bunch of different minimum wage jobs, from repoing cars to food service.

Stephanie: But that job, I only made like $300 like a week, maybe. Maybe even less sometimes.

Anjeanette Damon: Wow. How much do you make in the clubs?

Stephanie: Right now it's a little slow because it's, like, wintertime. And so, like, right now, on a good night, I can make from, like, $500 to $700. But during the summer, like, I can make like, $1,000, like a night. Like, on a good night.

Anjeanette Damon: Stephanie is doing this because it’s important for her to make enough money to raise her girls. She wants to provide a more stable life for her daughters than she had growing up.

So she puts up with a lot at the club. Guys who treat dancers like trash because they strip for a living. Guys who get handsy in the back. Guys who want more than just that lap dance.

Anjeanette Damon: Do you often get customers asking you for sex in the back?

Stephanie: Um, yeah. There has been a few and I just always tell them no. And they still buy dances. So, and, you know, if anything were to happen, I can, I walk out. I've had guys give me condoms before, and I tell them, “I can't do that. Like, I'm sorry.” And you know, they beg you, but I'm... First of all, I just, I'm not going to do that, you know? Second of all, I'm not trying to lose my job. Like, that's my job. Like, there's nothing more important than my job, because it's what I, how I take care of my kids.

Anjeanette Damon: But Stephanie’s job, her very livelihood, is at risk. If the clubs shut down, her job goes with them.

One afternoon when I’m with her in the dancers locker room upstairs at the Spice House she expresses that indignation.

Stephanie: Just trying to shut us down for no reason. I think it's, like, ridiculous. Like, I just don't understand it.

Anjeanette Damon: I don’t understand it either. The city is clearly trying to shut down the clubs. But for what reason?

Is stripping suddenly too unseemingly for a city that made its name monetizing vice?

Is this just a matter of a big, gaudy strip club on a high profile corner reminding some people of the Reno they’d rather not be?

Is it about getting a stubborn landowner out of the picture so developers can swoop in?

That’s exactly what I’m trying to figure out.

Robin Amer: Up next, as Anjeanette looks for answers, she learns about what happened before the cops tried busting Kamy’s clubs. When local powerbrokers assembled behind the scenes to deal with the Wild Orchid.

That’s after the break.

ACT 2 

Robin Amer: OK, here’s Anjeanette.

Anjeanette Damon: The movement against the strip clubs in Reno is not some kind of organized campaign with defined leaders. Things are rarely so organized here.

Instead, the people lining up against Kamy are more like a loosely networked coalition of interests.

You’ve got Mike Kazmierski, a West Point grad, former military commander from Colorado Springs. He runs the region’s primary economic development agency.

To him, the strip clubs are the epitome of that stubborn image of Reno as a degenerate city—an image that stands in the way of his mission, which is to attract new and expanding companies to the city.

He sees the Wild Orchid in particular as a boil on the face of an otherwise vibrant urban neighborhood. Mike Kazmierski will go out of his way to avoid letting his clients see the strip club. He explained it to me one afternoon while driving through Midtown.

Mike Kazmierski: I think it's an embarrassment to our community, and it's something that I believe we should have done something about a long time ago. They should not be defining us.

Anjeanette Damon: Then there’s Melissa Holland. She runs an anti-sex trafficking non-profit called Awaken. She sees the strip clubs as fertile territory for sex traffickers and a dangerous entry point for women to the sex industry.

She’s actually kind of a crusader for the sex trade, both legal and illegal. There’s no grey area for her.

Melissa Holland: They all look the same. It's all these violent acts against women. It's all power differentials. It's all exploitive. It's all privileged men getting to do whatever they want to women because they have money.

Anjeanette Damon: And then there’s developer Par Tolles.  Par isn’t anti-strip club per se. Not in the way Mike Kazmierski and Melissa Holland are. Though he is married to a Nevada assemblywoman who’s very active with Awaken.

Par has more of a dollars and cents interest in seeing the Wild Orchid ousted. He and his business partner have bought up a bundle of properties in Midtown. Two of their largest Midtown developments sit within a block of the club.

When Par looks at the Wild Orchid, he sees opportunity.

Par Tolles: They have a goldmine there. We've all tried to buy it. We've all made offers. And they could redevelop that into a really, really interesting boutique hotel-apartment. It doesn't have to be what it is. And I don't know the owners. I know, I know them by reputation, and they've kind of put a middle finger to the city and to the city council, and they're gonna fight it to the end.

Anjeanette Damon: When this loose coalition of folks—Par and Mike and Melissa—need something done, they all turn to one woman: Abbi Whitaker.

Abbi Whitaker: Hi!

Anjeanette Damon: I went to visit Abbi in her Midtown office on one of Reno’s perfect fall days.

With me on my trip to visit Abbi is field producer Fil Corbitt.

Abbi Whitaker: Have we met before?

Fil Corbitt: We may have.

Abbi Whitaker: You were at the Tesla event I believe.

Fill Corbitt: Yes! Yes, I was. Yeah. Yeah.

Anjeanette Damon: Abbi Whitaker is perhaps the greatest driving force behind Reno’s rebranding effort. She runs her own PR firm, and she’s made her name pushing the narrative of new Reno in the national press. She’s also close friends with the mayor. Oh, and Tesla has hired her, too.

She does like to rib us about the age old tiff between journalists and PR people.

Abbi Whitaker: Well, welcome to the other side—the dark side—where things are spun and stories are created and messaging is tweaked!

Anjeanette Damon: Despite her small stature, Abbi Whitaker is a big personality. She’s brash. She’s self-made. She loves to swear. She’s not afraid of a fight. And despite the fact that she’s taken up the anti-strip-club mantle, she’s not a prude, either.

Abbi Whitaker: I, for one day, until my mother found out, I worked on the phone sex line. And you were not allowed to say the real words. So we would use words like “chocolate pot” and “banana” and “melons.” I mean, I could give you...

Anjeanette Damon: One of Abbi’s most valuable PR clients is Mike Kazmierski, the former military commander turned economic development director.

Abbi and Mike, they have the same goal: They want to scrub the smut off the face of downtown Reno. But they differ a bit on how and why to do it. Abbi doesn’t think strip clubs necessarily stand in the way of economic development. But she does think the Wild Orchid is an eyesore and she’s frustrated Kamy doesn’t seem to be doing much about it.

Abbi Whitaker: For me, I don't know if the strip club is as pivotal to becoming the New Reno. People collaborating and working together and not digging their heels in on what they might have been able to get years ago and they want to keep it and it has to always be this way? That is not going to cut it anymore in Reno.

Anjeanette Damon: So back in 2015, before the Reno City Council got involved, Abbi thought maybe she could strike a compromise between the Wild Orchid and those New Reno boosters.

If she could just get in a room with Kamy Keshmiri maybe she could talk him into, at the very least, classing up the joint.

Abbi Whitaker: I would think I was one of the first people to go and say, “Hey guys, this could turn out—this could get cray cray, right? So, um, let's figure out a solution.” Like, everybody deserves a right to run their business. I get that. Like, I have no problem with your business. I have a problem with the fact that my kid sits at Truckee Bagel and has to look at that sign and then ask me....”

Anjeanette Damon: So about that sign. Back in 2011, Kamy put up a particularly salacious digital sign in front of the Wild Orchid. This sign, on one of Midtown’s key intersections, would flash video of gyrating strippers and ads for topless jello fights.

That really pissed off the neighbors.

Anyway, Abbi didn’t know Kamy, but she did know his brother, Jamy. The two run in some of the same social circles.

Abbi Whitaker: I was like an intermediary. I'm like, hey, you know, Jamy Keshmiri is a nice guy. I'm like, let me go talk to him. So he was like, “You could totally come in and talk to my brother.” He's like, “I don't know how far you're going to get, but totally, Abbi. Come in.” So he got me a meeting.

Anjeanette Damon: Abbi said she went to Kamy’s regular Thursday afternoon staff meeting, when he and Jamy and Mark and the managers of the three clubs assemble in a back office of the hotel to go over business.

She thought she could help them brainstorm some marketing ideas for the club. Maybe slip in some suggestions about fitting in better in Midtown while she was at it.

But Abbi and the strip club folks, they were not on the same page.

Abbi Whitaker: I listened to them talk about their different marketing ideas: throwing powdered donuts at Black girls on stage. Maybe like choking midgets in lingerie could be like some great ways.

Anjeanette Damon: Abbi was appalled. These ideas were offensive and demeaning—not the kind of thing she would sign on to.

When it was her turn to talk, Abbi brought up the sign. Hey guys, how about you know, dropping the gyrating stripper videos?

Abbi said it didn’t go well. A dancer who was in the room for the meeting laid into her.

Abbi Whitaker: This stripper started screaming at me and yelling at me, and she’s like, “We could put way worse things on that sign. You're just jealous because your husband drives by and looks at that sign and he doesn't look at you.” And then Kamy was like, “We could make it so much worse, duh duh duh.” And I'm like, alright. I'm like, “This isn't going to go anywhere.”

Anjeanette Damon: When I later ran this by Kamy, he said he had a vague memory of Abbi attending a meeting. But he flat out denied that anyone on his staff suggested throwing donuts at black dancers.

Kamy Keshmiri: First of all, that’s, I wouldn't, I couldn't even think of something like that. And if somebody brought that up in this meeting, I would fire them if they work for me or I would have thrown them out if they didn't. That's disrespectful. Why would I ever think of something like that? I don't even know how to respond to that. I mean, honestly that's so, to me, grotesque. 

Anjeanette Damon: In any case, Abbi’s prodding didn’t work.

The sign stayed up. And Kamy was as alienated from New Reno as he’d ever been.

But two months later, something unexpected happened.

Neoma Jardon: Thank you. Just an update...

Anjeanette Damon:  It was at the end of a Reno City Council meeting. Almost off handedly, a councilwoman named Neoma Jardon says, hey, I think we should consider a moratorium on new strip clubs.

Neoma Jardon: And the other one that was brought up earlier and brings about a bigger conversation is an L-item to bring back a moratorium on adult entertainment as we study things in our downtown core and become a university town. We, I think, should be looking at this.

Anjeanette Damon: That got my attention. Why ask for a moratorium on new strip clubs? It’s not like the city was suddenly fielding a rush of people who wanted to open up strip clubs in town.

People in the community had been irritated about the Wild Orchid’s sign, but no one was complaining to the council about strip clubs in general, at least not publicly.

But these imaginary new clubs weren’t the real target. The real targets were the clubs already in business downtown. Clubs like Kamy’s.

Robin Amer: After the break, Reno’s City Council makes a move.

ACT 3

Robin Amer: Let’s go back to Anjeanette.

Anjeanette Damon: Abbi’s message to Kamy had been simple.

Abbi Whitaker: If you're making money and you're doing well, like, follow the rules. Follow the law. Don't be an asshole. Don't be a bad neighbor and we can all live harmoniously together to some degree.

Anjeanette Damon: But Kamy appeared to have rejected that approach. And he was unapologetic. So Abbi's side changed tactics. If they couldn't get Kamy to clean up his act, and they couldn't buy him out, maybe Reno’s City Council could force Kamy and his clubs out of downtown.

Abbi Whitaker: Like, dude, like, they can move you! They can legally move you!

Anjeanette Damon: Reno City Councilwoman Neoma Jardon’s proposal to bar new strip clubs from opening up in the city gave the council time to consider more restrictive laws to regulate those new clubs.

Existing businesses like Kamy’s are usually protected from such changes, something called grandfathering. And so initially, Kamy and his family weren’t very worried.

But government moves so slowly at times. More than two years had passed between when Councilwoman Jardon brought up the moratorium in 2015 and when the council actually got around to reviewing those proposed regulations in 2017.

And during this time, the city itself had also embarked on a stealth campaign to rid downtown of the existing strip clubs. City staff had been hard at work researching ways to better restrict strip club operations and what came before the City Council in the fall of 2017 weren’t just proposals that would affect new clubs, but proposals that could strangle existing clubs as well.

Clerk: Madam Mayor, we're on item J2.

Mayor Hillary Schieve: Alright, thank you very much. At this time …

Anjeanette Damon: Here’s how it all happened:

It’s September 13, 2017—two years after the proposed the moratorium. The council chamber is packed. Standing room only. Anti-sex trafficking activists are wearing “Yes to Change” buttons. Strippers in street clothes are fuming. Kamy is pacing. Mark Thierman is bouncing on his heels waiting for his turn to speak.

The mayor and six council members sit on a curved dais in the front of the room.

Mayor Hillary Schieve opens the discussion with a warning for the crowd: be nice.

Mayor Hillary Schieve: Really important to respect one another. This is very important, so I don't want to hear any yelling, cheering, clapping. I want you to be respectful on both sides, ‘cause I know that this is going to be a topic that a lot of people are very passionate about.

Anjeanette Damon: Schieve knows tensions are high because the council is set to vote on three big changes that go so much further than just barring new clubs from opening in the city. If they pass, it could completely change the strip club business in Reno.

Here’s what they’re considering.

First, should existing strip clubs be forced to take down their digital signs? This was clearly aimed at Kamy’s Wild Orchid sign.

Second, should existing strip clubs be forced to stop serving alcohol? This could effectively kill the clubs—they make most of their money on booze.

Third, and this one’s a doozy, should downtown strip clubs be forced to close their doors and move to industrial areas of town?

That last one was the biggest surprise to me. In all of the meetings I had sat through, not one council member said: Hey, maybe we should get rid of the clubs we already have! In fact, at a prior meeting, the council rejected a suggestion to force the clubs to move.

And here’s the thing: It’s not easy for a government to shut down a private business. And strip clubs, they enjoy special protection by the First Amendment.

But the Reno City Attorney’s Office had found a legal loophole.

It’s called the secondary effects doctrine—a court ruling that says government can regulate businesses like strip clubs due to their impact on surrounding neighborhoods.

The courts, they’ve generally held that clubs are associated with prostitution, drug trafficking, lowered property values, blight.

In the meeting, Deputy City Attorney Chandeni Sendall explains the secondary effects doctrine to the council like this:

Chandeni Sendall: The Supreme Court has said that cities have the right, local governments have an undeniably important interest, in combating these negative secondary effects. And so they found, case law has found time and time again, over since, since about the late '70s, that done right, governments can restrict and regulate adult businesses.

Anjeanette Damon: But if Reno’s clubs are producing specific secondary effects—prostitution, drug trafficking, lower property values—city staff has very little to say. Despite two years to prepare for this meeting, they offer no police data, no property assessment data, no code enforcement data.

And that’s when Councilwoman Jenny Brekhus drops a bombshell.

Jenny Brekhus: Tell me this: When I did one of my briefings with you all, you had informed me that staff had commissioned a private investigator to go into all of the licensee holders and observe activities there.

Anjeanette Damon: Did you catch that? The city attorney had hired a private investigator to spy on the clubs. Even Reno City Council members didn’t know about it until just days before this meeting.

Jenny Brekhus: Is that in the 522-page attachment, that report? Because I didn't get a copy of it. I've just been informed about it.

Anjeanette Damon: The city attorney’s office was not expecting the council to talk about this report in public. They wanted the report to stay secret.

So deputy city attorney Chandeni Sendall gets really nervous when the councilwoman brings it up without warning.

Chandeni Sendall: That was, uh, commissioned under attorney-client privilege, um, basis based on, uh, investigative anticipation of litigation.

But Councilwoman Brekhus keeps pressing. She wants this report out in the open, and part of the public debate.

Jenny Brekhus: But that document, since I've acknowledged the existence of it, and I just, I'm not, I haven't read it, I'm just acknowledging the existence of it, that I've been informed about. Is that a land use report? Crime impact report? Expert reports? Or anecdotal data?

Anjeanette Damon: Chandeni Sendall again says she can’t talk about the report because it’s supposed to be confidential.

At this point, her boss, City Attorney Karl Hall, finally stands up to address the council.

Karl Hall is a soft spoken former prosecutor, who, even on a normal day, doesn’t always look comfortable addressing a room full of people.

He walks from his seat at the front of the room and takes the microphone.

Karl Hall: That is a privileged report. It's attorney work product, and so that is not part of the public record. And the presentation that was made tonight was based on secondary effects and council direction. So in preparation for litigation, we did some further investigation, and that’s where we’re leaving it.

Anjeanette Damon: Karl Hall is saying he hired the private investigator to prepare the city for a lawsuit. But there is no lawsuit. At least not yet.

So this meeting takes hours to get through.

Kamy and his posse of friends, they’re not even sitting in council chambers anymore. They weren’t even in the room when the private investigator bombshell is dropped.

They’ve taken up some tables in the lobby. And every once in a while they send in an emissary to argue a point before council. But they don’t think it’s going very well for them.

And in the end, it doesn’t go well for them. At all.

Hillary Schieve: OK, it is getting late. So all those in favor, say aye.

Council: Aye.

Hillary Schieve: All those opposed, no.

Council: No.

Hillary Schieve: Alright, the motion carries.

Anjeanette Damon: The council votes 5 to 2 to give city staff the go ahead to draft all three of the ordinances that were up for consideration: the one to get rid of the digital sign. The one to end alcohol in strip clubs. And in a final blow to Kamy, the one to force the clubs to move out of downtown and into industrial areas within five years.

As someone who has sat through a lot of city council meetings, believe me when I say this one was extraordinary. I haven’t seen anything like it in two decades of government reporting.

I don’t remember ever seeing the city council so blatantly going after a specific private business. And I certainly don’t remember ever seeing the council base a decision like this on a secret report by a private investigator.

In essence, what happened here is the Reno City Attorney went to the city council and asked them to make a momentous decision on whether businesses that had been in their locations for decades should be forced to shut their doors and move to a new neighborhood, all on the basis of a secret report. A secret report generated not by the city police department or a city analyst. A report compiled by a private investigator.

Reno City Attorney Karl Hall, he didn’t want the public to see this report. He didn’t even want the public to know he had hired a private investigator to begin with.

Before the city council meeting even ended, I knew what I had to do: I had to get my hands on that report.

And Kamy? Kamy had plans of his own.

Kamy Keshmiri: I handle things in a different way. You know, I don't, I just, I just be patient. There'll be a time when I get my revenge. I'll just wait.

Anjeanette Damon: What do you mean by that? Like, what kind of revenge?

Kamy Keshmiri: I don't know. I don’t know. I just, I mean, I'm bitter. I mean, I feel like this is wrong. I've done nothing wrong. I'm being persecuted, and the worst thing to do is get angry and do something stupid. I just wait.

Robin Amer: This season on The City...

Abbi Whitaker: I appreciate old Reno, but I also am going to fight tooth and nail for this town to move into the future.

Velma Shoals: This has been a home for my granddaughter since elementary school. We don't want that taken from us. Please don't take that from us.

Stephanie: I don't understand how I could be in this situation. Like, why me?

Kamy Keshmiri: They wanna make me look like the bad guy. Who’s the bad guy?

Tawny: They are fucking liars. They're liars.

Anjeanette Damon: I mean, you really think that they were here to bug your phones?

Mark Thierman: Fuck 'em. They want to see what war is, We’ll show 'em what war is.

Dispatch: [Phone ringing] 911, what's the address of your emergency?

Caller: The Tesla Gigafactory at 1 Electric Avenue.

CREDITS

Robin Amer: The City is a production of USA TODAY and is distributed in partnership with Wondery.

You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening right now. If you like the show, please rate and review us, and be sure to tell your friends about us.

Our show was reported and produced by Anjeanette Damon, Fil Corbitt, Kameel Stanley, Taylor Maycan, and me, Robin Amer.

Our editors are Amy Pyle and Matt Doig. Ben Austen is our story consultant. Original music and mixing is by Hannis Brown.

Additional production by Emily Liu, Sam Greenspan, Wilson Sayre, and Jenny Casas.

Legal review by Tom Curley. Launch oversight by Shannon Green.

The Reno Gazette Journal’s executive editor is Brian Duggan.

The USA TODAY Network’s vice president for investigations is Chris Davis. Scott Stein is our VP of product. Our president and publisher is Maribel Wadsworth.

Special thanks to Liz Nelson, Kelly Scott, and Alicia Barber, whose book on Reno is a must read this season. It’s called Reno's Big Gamble: Image and Reputation in the Biggest Little City.

We’d also like to learn more about you. So we have a short survey at wondery.com/survey. That’s wondery.com/survey.

We’d be really grateful if you took the time to fill this out because you’ll have the chance to tell us what you like about this show, and what you’d like to hear in the future.

I’m Robin Amer. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @thecitypod. Or visit our website. That’s thecitypodcast.com.

Meet our reporter, Anjeanette Damon.

Anjeanette grew up in Reno, spends her free time scaling the surrounding Sierra Nevada mountains, and reports the city’s biggest stories for the Reno Gazette Journal. But out of all the places she’s been in her 20-year career, the one place she hadn’t been was inside a Reno strip club.

This story she investigated for The City changed that. Get to know Anjeanette, the (Biggest Little) city, and what makes this story stand out from the rest.

_________

For the uninitiated, this is Reno.

_________

With its colorful skyline, as seen at night on Aug. 10, 2019. (Hannah Gaber, USA TODAY)
And colorful traditions, like the Hot August Nights classic car festival… (Photo: Hannah Gaber, USA TODAY)
…and the annual Great Reno Balloon Race. (Photo: Jason Bean, Reno Gazette Journal)
Snow-capped mountains surround the city. and wild horses roam the land. (Photo: Jason Bean, Reno Gazette Journal)

_________

Here’s where to find Reno…

_________

(Graphic by: Veronica Bravo and Janet Loehrke, USA TODAY)

_________

… and here’s our battleground within the city, Midtown.

_________

(Graphic by: Veronica Bravo and Janet Loehrke, USA TODAY)

The crown jewel of Kamy Keshmiri‘s strip club empire, the Wild Orchid, sits on a corner lot of South Virginia Street, the high-trafficked and quickly gentrifying main drag of downtown Reno. The club has attracted the interest of a coalition of powerful people in the city, including developers and council members, who want to see the club moved off the valuable property to make way for something new.

That’s put The Ponderosa Hotel next door at risk, too. Kamy also owns the weekly motel, and it’s one of the city’s few remaining low-income housing options. If the club goes, so does the Ponderosa, forcing long-time residents like grandmother Velma Shoals, who we meet in Episode 2, to search for new homes in the midst of a record-breaking housing shortage in the city.

A dancer called Stephanie also gets caught up in this fight over the clubs in Episode 1 (scroll up and press play to listen).  During an undercover sting at The Spice House, another of Kamy’s clubs, cops issue her a citation for saying “maybe” after an officer disguised as a persistent, love-lorn customer asks to perform oral sex on her in one of the club’s private back rooms.

Fantasy Girls, Kamy’s third club that you’ll hear more about in the next episode. Anjeanette gets her hands on the secret report on the strip clubs that City Attorney Karl Hall commissioned without the council’s knowledge, and the private investigators’ report proves troubling.

Follow Season 2 reporter and co-host Anjeanette Damon on Twitter and read more of her reporting:

How can I listen to The City?

Scroll up and press the play button at the top of the page, or click here for free ways to subscribe and download new episodes as soon as they’re available.

 


Transcript

Robin Amer: Hey everyone. This season of The City is about strip clubs, so it won’t be suitable for everyone, especially kids. This episode contains explicit language, including explicit conversations about sex.

—-

Robin Amer: It’s a typical summer night in Reno, Nevada, a glittering casino town tucked into the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Three guys walk into a downtown strip club and take a seat near the front. The club is small and dark, but brightly colored lights splash across the stage. Almost beckoning the next dancer to come on up.

Dancer: What brings you guys out tonight?

Man: Oh, just looking to get out, you know? Just got off work, so we’re just chilling.

Robin Amer: They’re a little hard to hear, but they tell the waitress that they just got off work at a sporting goods store across town. They want to blow off some steam.

In Reno, strip clubs are just one of many options for a night of debauchery. There are big resort casinos and nightclubs—even legal brothels just outside city limits.

Now, sex for money is not legal in this club—or any of Reno’s strip clubs. But the illusion of sex for money, well, that’s definitely for sale here.

Three strippers join the three men, sliding into their laps.

Man: What’s fun to do in here?

Serenity: In the back it’s like an orgy.

Stephanie: We have the most fun in the back.

Man: What do you do in the back?

Robin Amer: One of the guys tells them that he just broke up with his girlfriend. His pals say they’re trying to cheer him up.

Man: But the real reason we’re here is because my boy just had a nasty break up with his girl.

Serenity: Oh, no!

Robin Amer: The dancer on his lap is a brunette dressed in red lingerie. On stage she goes by the name Stephanie. For 20 bucks, she’ll give him a lap dance. She’ll dance topless just for him, right there in the room.

For 150 bucks, she’ll give him a lap dance in one of the private rooms in the back of the club.

But he doesn’t seem interested in that. Instead, he says his goal is to “get some action.”

Man: Would that be included?

Robin Amer: “Would that be included?” In other words, would sex be included in that private room in the back. Even better, he wants to know, could we go to a hotel?

Stephanie, the dancer in his lap, keeps telling him no. But she’s trying to be polite about it—even seductive.

She’s not going to straight up tell the guy to get lost for asking her to get it on in the back. She makes way more money giving lap dances in the private room than she does at the tables up front.

Stephanie tries to sell him on a private lap dance without agreeing to something that would get her fired. But he keeps pressing.

Eventually, he asks if he can lick her, you know, down there.

Man: What about licking you down there?

Stephanie: Uhhh…

Robin Amer: And Stephanie says … “maybe.”

Stephanie: Uhhh…maybe.

Man: Maybe?

Stephanie: Maybe if you get me wet enough.

Man: If I get you wet enough?

Stephanie: Yeah…

Robin Amer: But this guy does not work at a sporting goods store. And he didn’t just break up with his girlfriend. He’s an undercover cop.

A cop sent in to crack down on vice.

And even in Reno—a city famous for debaucher—if you’re a dancer on the lap of an undercover cop, and he asks you for sex, and you say “maybe,” well, even that could get you in hot water.

So how did we get here, exactly?

Well, there’s a battle underway in Reno, one where undercover raids like this one have suddenly become a lot more common.

The city’s power brokers are cracking down on the vice they once tolerated, all while vying for control of some of Reno’s most sought after real estate.

As powerful people fight to remake Reno in their image, the question is: How far are they willing to go? And who will have a place in that new city?

At stake here is Reno’s identity and with it, the very future of the city itself.

I’m Robin Amer and from USA TODAY, this is The City. Season 2: Reno.

ACT 1 

Robin Amer: You may think you know Reno. As the butt of a joke, right? As the degenerate city from Reno 911, perhaps.

Narrator: The new season of Reno 911 is locked—

Character 3: It’s go time.

Narrator: and loaded.

Character 4: Drop down your weapon! You, take your top off.

Late night comedians like Seth Meyers love to take swings at Reno.

Seth Meyers: According to a new list, the least happy city in America is St. Petersburg, Florida. But that’s only because Reno, Nevada finally killed itself.

Robin Amer: The Muppets even ragged on Reno. It was kind of heartbreaking for people who live there. In The Muppets movie, Fozzie Bear tells Kermit the Frog that he’s afraid to go back to his job as a washed-up entertainer doing gigs at a dumpy casino.

Fozzie: I really don’t want to go back to Reno.

Robin Amer: Despite the jokes, over the years Reno has survived by embracing vice as a powerful economic engine.

Adults would come to Reno to do what they couldn’t do at home: get a quickie divorce, gamble, even pay for sex, back in the days when prostitution was legal inside city limits. You might say that Reno was Vegas before Vegas was Vegas.

But now, Reno is reinventing itself. And it’s starting to become what a lot of folks are calling the “New Reno.”

Mayor Hillary Schieve: We are truly experiencing a Reno revival. National media outlets are talking about us, like the Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post, CBS This Morning.

Robin Amer: That’s Reno Mayor Hillary Schieve during a campaign debate late last year.

And she’s right. A bunch of national media outlets have all run stories celebrating that revival, noting Reno’s scenic landscape, or its trendy new bars, or its thriving art scene, or its top-ranked research university.

But it’s not just the media that’s been paying attention. Reno has recently caught the eye of Silicon Valley.

Mayor Hillary Schieve: We are truly rebranding this city and companies like Tesla, Amazon, and Apple are all building and investing right here.

Robin Amer: And that’s propelling the city into a period of epic change.

City boosters in Reno are looking to cash in on this big-tech gold rush, and it’s sparked a battle here that may feel familiar to you—a battle that might be happening in your city.

But this battle has a twist that’s just so Reno. And it’s pitting this stubborn and once revered strip club owner against a new regime of well-connected developers, and political operatives, and city leaders who’ve decided that the strip clubs are standing in the way—not just of progress, but of their ability to cash in on that progress.

That’s the story we’re going to tell this season on The City. And our guide to that story is Anjeanette Damon, an investigative reporter for the Reno Gazette Journal.

She’s spent the last year and a half looking into the fight over Reno’s strip clubs. And this season, she’ll take us inside those strip clubs—and inside Tesla, a company driving the change at the root of this fight. Along the way we’ll meet the people at risk of losing their footing in the fight for Reno’s future.

Here’s Anjeanette.

Anjeanette Damon: So I’m standing in the middle of Midtown. It’s this an eclectic little neighborhood that’s just south of the big, aging casinos downtown. You can kind of see the snow-capped mountains that surround the city of Reno. Down the street is my favorite bottle shop, Craft—it’s kind of the bar where everybody knows you name, so to speak. Across the street is Two Chicks. It’s a great breakfast joint that started out as a food truck.

I grew up in this city. I built a career as an investigative journalist. And to a certain extent, the geography of this city is marked by the stories that I’ve told over the years. So north of here is the county jail where I uncovered a string of deaths that the sheriff at the time was trying to keep quiet. And just up the road from that is a traffic signal that they installed after a series of stories I did documenting pedestrian after pedestrian who were killed in that intersection.

But in 20 years of reporting in this town, one place I had not been was inside a Reno strip club.

Reno has a bunch of strip clubs, but the biggest and most famous is the Wild Orchid. It sits in an old hotel-casino in between downtown and Midtown. The front part of the building, where the casino was, is now the strip club. It’s big and windowless with a white-stucco facade.

The hotel is still there, too—six-stories of varying shades of tan. It’s now mostly housing for low-income residents but still rents out nightly rooms when the rest of the city’s hotels fill up.

The whole thing is surrounded by a sea of cracked asphalt.

This place is gaudy, decaying, and sits on one of the most sought-after corners in the city. Gentrification has crept right up to the edge of this strip club. And so has the interest of developers.

Anjeanette Damon: Alright, are we rolling?

Fil Corbitt: We’re rolling.

Anjeanette Damon: It’s the middle of the day, so it’s not actually open…

Anjeanette Damon: I step from the afternoon sun into the dark club and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust.

The proprietor of the Wild Orchid is a guy named Kamy Keshmiri.

Kamy and his family own three of the four strip clubs in downtown Reno: The Wild Orchid, Fantasy Girls, and the Spice House—the club visited by the undercover cops at the top of the episode.

You could call Kamy Reno’s strip club kingpin.

Kamy isn’t here yet, but his lawyer, Mark Thierman, is.

Mark Thierman: Kamy should be here any minute.

Anjeanette Damon: OK, good.

Mark Thierman: Do you want half a sandwich? I only had half.

Anjeanette Damon: Oh, no thank you.

Anjeanette Damon: Mark is a constant presence at the Wild Orchid, and he’ll turn out to be a key player in Kamy’s dispute with the city. He’s a 60-something lawyer from New York, with a ruddy complexion, a bit of a potbelly and an affinity for profanity. He also loves to date strippers.

Anjeanette Damon: Hey, is that your Tesla out front?

Mark Thierman: Yeah.

Anjeanette Damon: Nice.

Anjeanette Damon: Tesla’s all-electric cars stand out in Reno these days. They’re a symbol of the fledgling New Reno economy. And Tesla is the company that is most actively changing the face of the city. Its giant battery factory on the outskirts of town employs thousands of people here.

As Mark continues eating his sandwich, I take a look around the room. The chairs are drab and stained. The carpet is spotted with smashed chewing gum. The Wild Orchid’s main stage dominates the middle of the room. It’s empty, save for the stripper pole that glistens with oily fingerprints from the night before.

I’d never actually met Kamy Keshmiri in person before. But I’ve known of him for years. When I was a teenager, Kamy was a superstar athlete, setting national records as a discus thrower. He was regularly on the front page of the local newspaper.

Now when people talk about him, they use words like “bully,” and “stubborn.” I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of him.

Mark Thierman: Hey Kamy.

Kamy Keshmiri: Sorry, I was—

Mark Thierman: That’s OK.

Kamy Keshmiri: —I was thinking about the game yesterday.

Mark Thierman: You lost track of time.

Anjeanette Damon: Kamy is really into sports. And the man is almost always dressed in athletic clothes. I’ve seen him in jeans maybe once or twice, but other than that: track suits. He’s wearing them at city council hearings. Court appearances. Business meetings. Today, it’s a nylon shirt and shorts and a Nevada ball cap.

At age 50, he still sports a shock of black hair, which he usually keeps shaved into this manic mohawk of sorts. And he’s a giant of a man. He has biceps that look like they could heave a Buick onto its side.

But here, I’ll let him describe himself:

Kamy Keshmiri: I’m 6’3”, 245 pounds. I stay very active. I spend, you know, 12, 14 hours a week in the gym, so…

Anjeanette Damon: How big are your biceps?

Kamy Keshmiri: I’ve got some muscles. Twenty, 21, 21-inch arms. I used to have 36-inch thighs, 24-inch arms, 30-inch waist, 305 pounds.

Anjeanette Damon: Wow.

Kamy Keshmiri: Yeah, I used to bench almost 600 pounds.

Anjeanette Damon: But I’m not here about Kamy’s muscles. I’m here to see the club.

Anjeanette Damon: Can you show me around?

Kamy Keshmiri: Sure! I’d love to show you around!

Anjeanette Damon: Kamy, his brother Jamy, and their father opened the Wild Orchid in the late ‘90s and it’s still got that distinctly ‘90s feel—purple velour upholstery and glowing hot pink lights.

Kamy Keshmiri: And we thought, at the time, it was, you know, it’s a little dated now,  but give the citizens of Reno a little Vegas. Just touch of Vegas.

Anjeanette Damon: Despite the drab condition of the place, Kamy’s proud of it. The Wild Orchid is the crown jewel in his strip club empire. Its prominent location gives him access to tourists tourists, as opposed to his other clubs that cater more to locals.

Mark jumps in:

Mark Thierman: We’re a destination. The destination is downtown Reno. People are coming in to play downtown Reno. They want a little bit naughty. They want some nice. They wanna go skiing…

Anjeanette Damon: The club’s condition becomes really obvious when we wander to the back to these private booths—the place where guys pay extra for a private lap dance. Water drips from the ceiling.

Kamy Keshmiri: I know. I think we have a water issue or something here.

Anjeanette Damon: Is it dripping?

Kamy Keshmiri: Yeah, we get water sometimes. Sometimes we get a leak here and there. Um, so anyways, my guys will fix it. Old building.

Anjeanette Damon: This place is the epitome of old Reno—the kind of place Fozzie Bear dreaded being stuck in.

Anjeanette Damon: You never updated it?

Kamy Keshmiri: We wanted to update. We were planning on going through a major updating about two years ago. And then all of a sudden here, we got slapped with, the city wants to get rid of us, and that kind of derailed our plans for remodeling. But we were in the process of remodeling the whole club and then this came about, so we halted that.

Anjeanette Damon:  When Kamy says “this came about,” he’s talking about the city’s attack on his clubs.

When I first went to talk with Kamy at the Wild Orchid last spring, the undercover raid hadn’t happened yet. But Kamy was already under attack. He said he’d been deflecting low-ball offers from developers who wanted to buy the Wild Orchid property. One guy had offered a million dollars for the property, but Kamy says he won’t sell for less than 30 million.

He was also fending off rumors that his clubs are dens of sex trafficking and drugs. Undercover cops had been creeping into his clubs trying to find proof of illegal activity.

But perhaps the biggest threat to Kamy was that the once hands-off Reno City Council had suddenly raised the prospect of passing new laws that would make it very difficult for him to stay in business, including one that would force him to move his clubs out of downtown altogether.

We’ll get to those new laws a little later.

But Kamy insists the city has no reason to be after him. There’s no prostitution here. No drugs, he says. He runs a clean establishment, where guys can just come and have fun.

Kamy Keshmiri: The only thing that’s being massaged is their egos. Nothing else.

Anjeanette Damon: So, in your view, Kamy, why do you think they’re trying to kick you off this corner?

Kamy Keshmiri: I don’t know why. I mean, I think there’s just certain people that just do not like what we do. And they felt, let’s start lying to people with sex trafficking, because that’s the hot word these days, which absolutely has nothing to do with our business. They’re lying to people.

It doesn’t make any sense. I’ve never, I’ve been in this business 23 years. I’ve never had one incident, one case, one person, one issue of sex traffic, not one. I never even thought it was ever—I couldn’t even fathom, even think it was an issue, other than the lies that I’m hearing that people, they’re feeding people, because they have nothing to go on. There’s no records. There’s no reports. There’s no police act… There’s nothing. So what do you do? Lie. 

Anjeanette Damon: Yeah, he gets a little worked up about it. In fact, Kamy gets worked up a lot. Almost every time I’ve interviewed him, we’ve arrived at a moment like this, where his breath comes in quick gasps, sweat collects at the edge of his nose, and his eyes bug out a little bit.

This is really personal for Kamy. They’re going after his livelihood, but it’s more than that. It’s an affront to his status as one of Old Reno’s favorite sons. He believes he deserves better.

Kamy Keshmiri: Makes me angry. Yeah, because I’m born here. I mean, I’m a Hall of Fame athlete. I don’t know how many people drive around with the Hall of Fame license plates. I went to school here. I’m three-time NCAA champion. I’m number one in the world in my sport. I’ve always been pro-Reno. I’ve grown up in this town. And for them to do this to me, it puts, makes me bitter.

Anjeanette Damon: It’s not just Kamy who has been affected by the effort to shut down the clubs. Nearly 175 women are licensed to dance topless in Reno.

Take Stephanie, the dancer who sat in the undercover cop’s lap at the top of the episode.

By that point, she had been working at the Spice House for a couple of months. The Spice House, which sits on the eastern edge of downtown up against the railroad tracks, has the lowest profile of Kamy’s three clubs.

I’ve spent a lot of time there with Stephanie, trying to get a sense of what life is like as a stripper in Reno.

DJ: Alright, put your hands together for Stephanie! That girl is lookin’ good up there. Show her some attention, fellas. Remember, $20 gets ya a lap dance.

Anjeanette Damon: At the moment, she’s swirling provocatively around a pole on the main stage at the Spice House, dressed in a black lacy teddy and shimmering seven-inch platform stilettos that she calls her “mermaid shoes.”

But when she arrived at work, she was in her real life clothes—stretchy yoga pants, a warm sweatshirt, and Uggs. It was a cold spring day and I met her in the parking lot.

Anjeanette Damon: Hi!

Stephanie: Hi!

Anjeanette Damon: Your poor little car’s covered in ice.

Stephanie: Yeah.

Anjeanette Damon: How was the drive?

Stephanie: Um, long.

Anjeanette Damon: Stephanie actually lives in a small town in California’s Central Valley, about 200 miles to the west of Reno. She drives three hours through the scenic Sierra Nevada mountain range to get to the Spice House.

Again, Stephanie isn’t her real name. She agreed to talk to me on the condition I only use her stage name. She doesn’t want people in her small hometown to know what she does for a living.

Stephanie’s a single mom in her mid-20s who spends most of the week with her two young daughters. On Friday mornings, she hands them off to her ex and heads to Reno.

The long drive is worth it for her. The guys in the California clubs, they aren’t as nice. Don’t tip as well.

Stephanie’s worked a bunch of different minimum wage jobs, from repoing cars to food service.

Stephanie: But that job, I only made like $300 like a week, maybe. Maybe even less sometimes.

Anjeanette Damon: Wow. How much do you make in the clubs?

Stephanie: Right now it’s a little slow because it’s, like, wintertime. And so, like, right now, on a good night, I can make from, like, $500 to $700. But during the summer, like, I can make like, $1,000, like a night. Like, on a good night.

Anjeanette Damon: Stephanie is doing this because it’s important for her to make enough money to raise her girls. She wants to provide a more stable life for her daughters than she had growing up.

So she puts up with a lot at the club. Guys who treat dancers like trash because they strip for a living. Guys who get handsy in the back. Guys who want more than just that lap dance.

Anjeanette Damon: Do you often get customers asking you for sex in the back?

Stephanie: Um, yeah. There has been a few and I just always tell them no. And they still buy dances. So, and, you know, if anything were to happen, I can, I walk out. I’ve had guys give me condoms before, and I tell them, “I can’t do that. Like, I’m sorry.” And you know, they beg you, but I’m… First of all, I just, I’m not going to do that, you know? Second of all, I’m not trying to lose my job. Like, that’s my job. Like, there’s nothing more important than my job, because it’s what I, how I take care of my kids.

Anjeanette Damon: But Stephanie’s job, her very livelihood, is at risk. If the clubs shut down, her job goes with them.

One afternoon when I’m with her in the dancers locker room upstairs at the Spice House she expresses that indignation.

Stephanie: Just trying to shut us down for no reason. I think it’s, like, ridiculous. Like, I just don’t understand it.

Anjeanette Damon: I don’t understand it either. The city is clearly trying to shut down the clubs. But for what reason?

Is stripping suddenly too unseemingly for a city that made its name monetizing vice?

Is this just a matter of a big, gaudy strip club on a high profile corner reminding some people of the Reno they’d rather not be?

Is it about getting a stubborn landowner out of the picture so developers can swoop in?

That’s exactly what I’m trying to figure out.

Robin Amer: Up next, as Anjeanette looks for answers, she learns about what happened before the cops tried busting Kamy’s clubs. When local powerbrokers assembled behind the scenes to deal with the Wild Orchid.

That’s after the break.

ACT 2 

Robin Amer: OK, here’s Anjeanette.

Anjeanette Damon: The movement against the strip clubs in Reno is not some kind of organized campaign with defined leaders. Things are rarely so organized here.

Instead, the people lining up against Kamy are more like a loosely networked coalition of interests.

You’ve got Mike Kazmierski, a West Point grad, former military commander from Colorado Springs. He runs the region’s primary economic development agency.

To him, the strip clubs are the epitome of that stubborn image of Reno as a degenerate city—an image that stands in the way of his mission, which is to attract new and expanding companies to the city.

He sees the Wild Orchid in particular as a boil on the face of an otherwise vibrant urban neighborhood. Mike Kazmierski will go out of his way to avoid letting his clients see the strip club. He explained it to me one afternoon while driving through Midtown.

Mike Kazmierski: I think it’s an embarrassment to our community, and it’s something that I believe we should have done something about a long time ago. They should not be defining us.

Anjeanette Damon: Then there’s Melissa Holland. She runs an anti-sex trafficking non-profit called Awaken. She sees the strip clubs as fertile territory for sex traffickers and a dangerous entry point for women to the sex industry.

She’s actually kind of a crusader for the sex trade, both legal and illegal. There’s no grey area for her.

Melissa Holland: They all look the same. It’s all these violent acts against women. It’s all power differentials. It’s all exploitive. It’s all privileged men getting to do whatever they want to women because they have money.

Anjeanette Damon: And then there’s developer Par Tolles.  Par isn’t anti-strip club per se. Not in the way Mike Kazmierski and Melissa Holland are. Though he is married to a Nevada assemblywoman who’s very active with Awaken.

Par has more of a dollars and cents interest in seeing the Wild Orchid ousted. He and his business partner have bought up a bundle of properties in Midtown. Two of their largest Midtown developments sit within a block of the club.

When Par looks at the Wild Orchid, he sees opportunity.

Par Tolles: They have a goldmine there. We’ve all tried to buy it. We’ve all made offers. And they could redevelop that into a really, really interesting boutique hotel-apartment. It doesn’t have to be what it is. And I don’t know the owners. I know, I know them by reputation, and they’ve kind of put a middle finger to the city and to the city council, and they’re gonna fight it to the end.

Anjeanette Damon: When this loose coalition of folks—Par and Mike and Melissa—need something done, they all turn to one woman: Abbi Whitaker.

Abbi Whitaker: Hi!

Anjeanette Damon: I went to visit Abbi in her Midtown office on one of Reno’s perfect fall days.

With me on my trip to visit Abbi is field producer Fil Corbitt.

Abbi Whitaker: Have we met before?

Fil Corbitt: We may have.

Abbi Whitaker: You were at the Tesla event I believe.

Fill Corbitt: Yes! Yes, I was. Yeah. Yeah.

Anjeanette Damon: Abbi Whitaker is perhaps the greatest driving force behind Reno’s rebranding effort. She runs her own PR firm, and she’s made her name pushing the narrative of new Reno in the national press. She’s also close friends with the mayor. Oh, and Tesla has hired her, too.

She does like to rib us about the age old tiff between journalists and PR people.

Abbi Whitaker: Well, welcome to the other side—the dark side—where things are spun and stories are created and messaging is tweaked!

Anjeanette Damon: Despite her small stature, Abbi Whitaker is a big personality. She’s brash. She’s self-made. She loves to swear. She’s not afraid of a fight. And despite the fact that she’s taken up the anti-strip-club mantle, she’s not a prude, either.

Abbi Whitaker: I, for one day, until my mother found out, I worked on the phone sex line. And you were not allowed to say the real words. So we would use words like “chocolate pot” and “banana” and “melons.” I mean, I could give you…

Anjeanette Damon: One of Abbi’s most valuable PR clients is Mike Kazmierski, the former military commander turned economic development director.

Abbi and Mike, they have the same goal: They want to scrub the smut off the face of downtown Reno. But they differ a bit on how and why to do it. Abbi doesn’t think strip clubs necessarily stand in the way of economic development. But she does think the Wild Orchid is an eyesore and she’s frustrated Kamy doesn’t seem to be doing much about it.

Abbi Whitaker: For me, I don’t know if the strip club is as pivotal to becoming the New Reno. People collaborating and working together and not digging their heels in on what they might have been able to get years ago and they want to keep it and it has to always be this way? That is not going to cut it anymore in Reno.

Anjeanette Damon: So back in 2015, before the Reno City Council got involved, Abbi thought maybe she could strike a compromise between the Wild Orchid and those New Reno boosters.

If she could just get in a room with Kamy Keshmiri maybe she could talk him into, at the very least, classing up the joint.

Abbi Whitaker: I would think I was one of the first people to go and say, “Hey guys, this could turn out—this could get cray cray, right? So, um, let’s figure out a solution.” Like, everybody deserves a right to run their business. I get that. Like, I have no problem with your business. I have a problem with the fact that my kid sits at Truckee Bagel and has to look at that sign and then ask me….”

Anjeanette Damon: So about that sign. Back in 2011, Kamy put up a particularly salacious digital sign in front of the Wild Orchid. This sign, on one of Midtown’s key intersections, would flash video of gyrating strippers and ads for topless jello fights.

That really pissed off the neighbors.

Anyway, Abbi didn’t know Kamy, but she did know his brother, Jamy. The two run in some of the same social circles.

Abbi Whitaker: I was like an intermediary. I’m like, hey, you know, Jamy Keshmiri is a nice guy. I’m like, let me go talk to him. So he was like, “You could totally come in and talk to my brother.” He’s like, “I don’t know how far you’re going to get, but totally, Abbi. Come in.” So he got me a meeting.

Anjeanette Damon: Abbi said she went to Kamy’s regular Thursday afternoon staff meeting, when he and Jamy and Mark and the managers of the three clubs assemble in a back office of the hotel to go over business.

She thought she could help them brainstorm some marketing ideas for the club. Maybe slip in some suggestions about fitting in better in Midtown while she was at it.

But Abbi and the strip club folks, they were not on the same page.

Abbi Whitaker: I listened to them talk about their different marketing ideas: throwing powdered donuts at Black girls on stage. Maybe like choking midgets in lingerie could be like some great ways.

Anjeanette Damon: Abbi was appalled. These ideas were offensive and demeaning—not the kind of thing she would sign on to.

When it was her turn to talk, Abbi brought up the sign. Hey guys, how about you know, dropping the gyrating stripper videos?

Abbi said it didn’t go well. A dancer who was in the room for the meeting laid into her.

Abbi Whitaker: This stripper started screaming at me and yelling at me, and she’s like, “We could put way worse things on that sign. You’re just jealous because your husband drives by and looks at that sign and he doesn’t look at you.” And then Kamy was like, “We could make it so much worse, duh duh duh.” And I’m like, alright. I’m like, “This isn’t going to go anywhere.”

Anjeanette Damon: When I later ran this by Kamy, he said he had a vague memory of Abbi attending a meeting. But he flat out denied that anyone on his staff suggested throwing donuts at black dancers.

Kamy Keshmiri: First of all, that’s, I wouldn’t, I couldn’t even think of something like that. And if somebody brought that up in this meeting, I would fire them if they work for me or I would have thrown them out if they didn’t. That’s disrespectful. Why would I ever think of something like that? I don’t even know how to respond to that. I mean, honestly that’s so, to me, grotesque. 

Anjeanette Damon: In any case, Abbi’s prodding didn’t work.

The sign stayed up. And Kamy was as alienated from New Reno as he’d ever been.

But two months later, something unexpected happened.

Neoma Jardon: Thank you. Just an update…

Anjeanette Damon:  It was at the end of a Reno City Council meeting. Almost off handedly, a councilwoman named Neoma Jardon says, hey, I think we should consider a moratorium on new strip clubs.

Neoma Jardon: And the other one that was brought up earlier and brings about a bigger conversation is an L-item to bring back a moratorium on adult entertainment as we study things in our downtown core and become a university town. We, I think, should be looking at this.

Anjeanette Damon: That got my attention. Why ask for a moratorium on new strip clubs? It’s not like the city was suddenly fielding a rush of people who wanted to open up strip clubs in town.

People in the community had been irritated about the Wild Orchid’s sign, but no one was complaining to the council about strip clubs in general, at least not publicly.

But these imaginary new clubs weren’t the real target. The real targets were the clubs already in business downtown. Clubs like Kamy’s.

Robin Amer: After the break, Reno’s City Council makes a move.

ACT 3

Robin Amer: Let’s go back to Anjeanette.

Anjeanette Damon: Abbi’s message to Kamy had been simple.

Abbi Whitaker: If you’re making money and you’re doing well, like, follow the rules. Follow the law. Don’t be an asshole. Don’t be a bad neighbor and we can all live harmoniously together to some degree.

Anjeanette Damon: But Kamy appeared to have rejected that approach. And he was unapologetic. So Abbi’s side changed tactics. If they couldn’t get Kamy to clean up his act, and they couldn’t buy him out, maybe Reno’s City Council could force Kamy and his clubs out of downtown.

Abbi Whitaker: Like, dude, like, they can move you! They can legally move you!

Anjeanette Damon: Reno City Councilwoman Neoma Jardon’s proposal to bar new strip clubs from opening up in the city gave the council time to consider more restrictive laws to regulate those new clubs.

Existing businesses like Kamy’s are usually protected from such changes, something called grandfathering. And so initially, Kamy and his family weren’t very worried.

But government moves so slowly at times. More than two years had passed between when Councilwoman Jardon brought up the moratorium in 2015 and when the council actually got around to reviewing those proposed regulations in 2017.

And during this time, the city itself had also embarked on a stealth campaign to rid downtown of the existing strip clubs. City staff had been hard at work researching ways to better restrict strip club operations and what came before the City Council in the fall of 2017 weren’t just proposals that would affect new clubs, but proposals that could strangle existing clubs as well.

Clerk: Madam Mayor, we’re on item J2.

Mayor Hillary Schieve: Alright, thank you very much. At this time …

Anjeanette Damon: Here’s how it all happened:

It’s September 13, 2017—two years after the proposed the moratorium. The council chamber is packed. Standing room only. Anti-sex trafficking activists are wearing “Yes to Change” buttons. Strippers in street clothes are fuming. Kamy is pacing. Mark Thierman is bouncing on his heels waiting for his turn to speak.

The mayor and six council members sit on a curved dais in the front of the room.

Mayor Hillary Schieve opens the discussion with a warning for the crowd: be nice.

Mayor Hillary Schieve: Really important to respect one another. This is very important, so I don’t want to hear any yelling, cheering, clapping. I want you to be respectful on both sides, ‘cause I know that this is going to be a topic that a lot of people are very passionate about.

Anjeanette Damon: Schieve knows tensions are high because the council is set to vote on three big changes that go so much further than just barring new clubs from opening in the city. If they pass, it could completely change the strip club business in Reno.

Here’s what they’re considering.

First, should existing strip clubs be forced to take down their digital signs? This was clearly aimed at Kamy’s Wild Orchid sign.

Second, should existing strip clubs be forced to stop serving alcohol? This could effectively kill the clubs—they make most of their money on booze.

Third, and this one’s a doozy, should downtown strip clubs be forced to close their doors and move to industrial areas of town?

That last one was the biggest surprise to me. In all of the meetings I had sat through, not one council member said: Hey, maybe we should get rid of the clubs we already have! In fact, at a prior meeting, the council rejected a suggestion to force the clubs to move.

And here’s the thing: It’s not easy for a government to shut down a private business. And strip clubs, they enjoy special protection by the First Amendment.

But the Reno City Attorney’s Office had found a legal loophole.

It’s called the secondary effects doctrine—a court ruling that says government can regulate businesses like strip clubs due to their impact on surrounding neighborhoods.

The courts, they’ve generally held that clubs are associated with prostitution, drug trafficking, lowered property values, blight.

In the meeting, Deputy City Attorney Chandeni Sendall explains the secondary effects doctrine to the council like this:

Chandeni Sendall: The Supreme Court has said that cities have the right, local governments have an undeniably important interest, in combating these negative secondary effects. And so they found, case law has found time and time again, over since, since about the late ’70s, that done right, governments can restrict and regulate adult businesses.

Anjeanette Damon: But if Reno’s clubs are producing specific secondary effects—prostitution, drug trafficking, lower property values—city staff has very little to say. Despite two years to prepare for this meeting, they offer no police data, no property assessment data, no code enforcement data.

And that’s when Councilwoman Jenny Brekhus drops a bombshell.

Jenny Brekhus: Tell me this: When I did one of my briefings with you all, you had informed me that staff had commissioned a private investigator to go into all of the licensee holders and observe activities there.

Anjeanette Damon: Did you catch that? The city attorney had hired a private investigator to spy on the clubs. Even Reno City Council members didn’t know about it until just days before this meeting.

Jenny Brekhus: Is that in the 522-page attachment, that report? Because I didn’t get a copy of it. I’ve just been informed about it.

Anjeanette Damon: The city attorney’s office was not expecting the council to talk about this report in public. They wanted the report to stay secret.

So deputy city attorney Chandeni Sendall gets really nervous when the councilwoman brings it up without warning.

Chandeni Sendall: That was, uh, commissioned under attorney-client privilege, um, basis based on, uh, investigative anticipation of litigation.

But Councilwoman Brekhus keeps pressing. She wants this report out in the open, and part of the public debate.

Jenny Brekhus: But that document, since I’ve acknowledged the existence of it, and I just, I’m not, I haven’t read it, I’m just acknowledging the existence of it, that I’ve been informed about. Is that a land use report? Crime impact report? Expert reports? Or anecdotal data?

Anjeanette Damon: Chandeni Sendall again says she can’t talk about the report because it’s supposed to be confidential.

At this point, her boss, City Attorney Karl Hall, finally stands up to address the council.

Karl Hall is a soft spoken former prosecutor, who, even on a normal day, doesn’t always look comfortable addressing a room full of people.

He walks from his seat at the front of the room and takes the microphone.

Karl Hall: That is a privileged report. It’s attorney work product, and so that is not part of the public record. And the presentation that was made tonight was based on secondary effects and council direction. So in preparation for litigation, we did some further investigation, and that’s where we’re leaving it.

Anjeanette Damon: Karl Hall is saying he hired the private investigator to prepare the city for a lawsuit. But there is no lawsuit. At least not yet.

So this meeting takes hours to get through.

Kamy and his posse of friends, they’re not even sitting in council chambers anymore. They weren’t even in the room when the private investigator bombshell is dropped.

They’ve taken up some tables in the lobby. And every once in a while they send in an emissary to argue a point before council. But they don’t think it’s going very well for them.

And in the end, it doesn’t go well for them. At all.

Hillary Schieve: OK, it is getting late. So all those in favor, say aye.

Council: Aye.

Hillary Schieve: All those opposed, no.

Council: No.

Hillary Schieve: Alright, the motion carries.

Anjeanette Damon: The council votes 5 to 2 to give city staff the go ahead to draft all three of the ordinances that were up for consideration: the one to get rid of the digital sign. The one to end alcohol in strip clubs. And in a final blow to Kamy, the one to force the clubs to move out of downtown and into industrial areas within five years.

As someone who has sat through a lot of city council meetings, believe me when I say this one was extraordinary. I haven’t seen anything like it in two decades of government reporting.

I don’t remember ever seeing the city council so blatantly going after a specific private business. And I certainly don’t remember ever seeing the council base a decision like this on a secret report by a private investigator.

In essence, what happened here is the Reno City Attorney went to the city council and asked them to make a momentous decision on whether businesses that had been in their locations for decades should be forced to shut their doors and move to a new neighborhood, all on the basis of a secret report. A secret report generated not by the city police department or a city analyst. A report compiled by a private investigator.

Reno City Attorney Karl Hall, he didn’t want the public to see this report. He didn’t even want the public to know he had hired a private investigator to begin with.

Before the city council meeting even ended, I knew what I had to do: I had to get my hands on that report.

And Kamy? Kamy had plans of his own.

Kamy Keshmiri: I handle things in a different way. You know, I don’t, I just, I just be patient. There’ll be a time when I get my revenge. I’ll just wait.

Anjeanette Damon: What do you mean by that? Like, what kind of revenge?

Kamy Keshmiri: I don’t know. I don’t know. I just, I mean, I’m bitter. I mean, I feel like this is wrong. I’ve done nothing wrong. I’m being persecuted, and the worst thing to do is get angry and do something stupid. I just wait.

Robin Amer: This season on The City…

Abbi Whitaker: I appreciate old Reno, but I also am going to fight tooth and nail for this town to move into the future.

Velma Shoals: This has been a home for my granddaughter since elementary school. We don’t want that taken from us. Please don’t take that from us.

Stephanie: I don’t understand how I could be in this situation. Like, why me?

Kamy Keshmiri: They wanna make me look like the bad guy. Who’s the bad guy?

Tawny: They are fucking liars. They’re liars.

Anjeanette Damon: I mean, you really think that they were here to bug your phones?

Mark Thierman: Fuck ’em. They want to see what war is, We’ll show ’em what war is.

Dispatch: [Phone ringing] 911, what’s the address of your emergency?

Caller: The Tesla Gigafactory at 1 Electric Avenue.

CREDITS

Robin Amer: The City is a production of USA TODAY and is distributed in partnership with Wondery.

You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening right now. If you like the show, please rate and review us, and be sure to tell your friends about us.

Our show was reported and produced by Anjeanette Damon, Fil Corbitt, Kameel Stanley, Taylor Maycan, and me, Robin Amer.

Our editors are Amy Pyle and Matt Doig. Ben Austen is our story consultant. Original music and mixing is by Hannis Brown.

Additional production by Emily Liu, Sam Greenspan, Wilson Sayre, and Jenny Casas.

Legal review by Tom Curley. Launch oversight by Shannon Green.

The Reno Gazette Journal’s executive editor is Brian Duggan.

The USA TODAY Network’s vice president for investigations is Chris Davis. Scott Stein is our VP of product. Our president and publisher is Maribel Wadsworth.

Special thanks to Liz Nelson, Kelly Scott, and Alicia Barber, whose book on Reno is a must read this season. It’s called Reno’s Big Gamble: Image and Reputation in the Biggest Little City.

We’d also like to learn more about you. So we have a short survey at wondery.com/survey. That’s wondery.com/survey.

We’d be really grateful if you took the time to fill this out because you’ll have the chance to tell us what you like about this show, and what you’d like to hear in the future.

I’m Robin Amer. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram @thecitypod. Or visit our website. That’s thecitypodcast.com.