S2: Episode 2

If They Want War, We’ll Give ‘Em War

A secret report on the strip clubs is revealed, but it’s no smoking gun. As Midtown changes, residents of a weekly hotel make their fury known to a council that says they’re just pawns in Kamy’s game.

Episode | Transcript

If They Want War, We’ll Give ‘Em War

Robin Amer:  Hey everyone. Just a reminder that because this season of The City is about strip clubs, it won’t be suitable for everyone, especially kids. This episode includes explicit language, including explicit conversations about sex.

Production team member: Previously on The City:

Mark Thierman: The destination is downtown Reno. They want a little bit naughty. They want some nice.

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

Kamy Keshmiri: I think there's just certain people that just do not like what we do.

Mike Kazmierski: Because 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.

Par Tolles: They have a goldmine there. We've all tried to buy it.

Stephanie: I've had guys give me condoms before, and I tell them I can't do that. Like, I'm sorry.

Kamy Keshmiri: There's no records. There's no reports. There's nothing. So what do you do? Lie.

Jenny Brekhus: You had informed me that staff had commissioned a private investigator to go into all of the licensee holders and observe activities there.

Kamy Keshmiri: I'm being persecuted and the worst thing to do is get angry and do something stupid. I just wait. There'll be a time when I get my revenge.

Robin Amer: Velma Shoals has trouble sitting still. The 64-year-old grandmother spends her days darting up and down the hallways of the Ponderosa, the six-story hotel attached to the back of the Wild Orchid strip club.

The movement helps stave off depression, which is so bad Velma gets disability payments for it. But it’s not aimless wandering. She uses the time to check on her neighbors, who she looks out for with the watchful eye of a den mother.

Velma’s one of more than 100 people who pay week-to-week to live at the Ponderosa.

As for the strip club next door, Velma doesn’t mind it.

But living at the Ponderosa does come with its frustrations and indignities: the neighbor who disappeared without notice, leaving his room so dirty it became infested with roaches. Or the men Velma saw stealing AC units from the building.

And then there was the letter she found tacked to her door one day last winter.

Velma Shoals: OK. This is the letter we received on our doors that said, “To all Ponderosa hotel tenants: Unfortunately I must relay some bad, very bad news to you.”

Robin Amer: The letter was from Kamy Keshmiri. Remember, he and his family own both the strip club and the hotel. And the note warned Velma and her neighbors that their rent might be going up—by a lot.

Velma Shoals: “We are aware that many if not most of you living on fixed incomes are collecting Social Security, disability, unemployment, and/or veteran's benefits. With that in mind we have always strived to keep your rents low.”

Robin Amer: Kamy goes on to say that he’s been able to keep the rent low because he uses money from the strip club to subsidize the Ponderosa.

But things have changed. Now, Reno City Council members are openly talking about tougher regulations for the strip clubs—maybe even forcing them to move.

And Kamy’s letter to Velma and her neighbors makes clear that if that happens, he might have to nearly double their rent from around $750 to around $1,300 a month.

But Kamy has a suggestion for how his tenants might stave off this rent increase: Go talk to your rep in city council, he writes. He even includes a list of their phone numbers.

Velma Shoals: “Perhaps you can stop the city from gentrification [sic] of the Wild Orchid at the expense of your homes. You have my sincere apologies for this bad news. ”

Velma Shoals: Ain’t no way in the world. $1,300?! Who's got that kind of money? Nobody. That's a lot of money.

Robin Amer: Velma and her granddaughter have nowhere else to go. This is the only stable place they’ve had to live in almost a decade. And she’ll do anything to keep it.

So by sending that letter, Kamy has effectively conscripted some of the city’s most vulnerable residents as foot soldiers in his fight to save his strip clubs. Velma and her neighbors are now embroiled in this fight too—whether they like it or not.

From USA TODAY, I’m Robin Amer, and this is The City.

ACT 1

Robin Amer: So, at the end of our last episode, the Reno City Council had just drawn battlelines for its fight against the strip clubs—including Kamy’s. They voted to pursue new laws that would force the clubs to stop serving alcohol, take down any digital signs, and eventually move out of downtown altogether.

We also learned that Reno City Attorney Karl Hall had secretly hired a private eye to dig up dirt on the clubs—dirt the city could use to bolster its case.

Now, Karl Hall had refused to release the report to the public. But our reporter, Anjeanette Damon, wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Here’s Anjeanette.

Anjeanette Damon: Karl Hall had refused to give me the report. So I wrote a story about it. And the Reno Gazette-Journal’s lawyer threatened legal action.

The next day, the city manager overruled Karl Hall and released the report.

Whether it was being called out by the paper or our lawyer threatening to sue that ultimately did it, I don’t know. Either way, I finally got my hands on the report.

To give you a sense of what was in it—of what Karl Hall found from his secret surveillance—I want to take you back to the three nights in early February 2017 when the private investigators first went into Reno’s strip clubs.

Just a head’s up, it gets kind of racy.

Picture this: a team of private investigators fans out through downtown Reno.

They post up outside two of Reno’s sex toy shops and five of its strip clubs, including all three of Kamy’s.

They count every person walking into the clubs and they note any bad behavior: rowdiness, swerving vehicles, that kind of thing.

At Fantasy Girls, one PI watches as a guy walks out of the club, gets in a car with another guy, and then goes back into the club a few minutes later.

Could it be a drug deal? They don’t say.

Then, they head inside the clubs and start logging what they see.

At the Wild Orchid, an investigator watches as dancers pull a man on stage. It’s his birthday, so they try to make a show of it. They take off his shirt and violently rip off his underwear. They whip his chest and back. He looks like he’s in pain. Then, a dancer blindfolds him and shoves a sex toy into his mouth.

Over at Fantasy Girls, things get even more lewd, according to this report.

The PIs see dancers so drunk or high they can’t keep their heads up. They watch three guys walk into a stall in the men’s room and snort what they presume to be cocaine.

At one point, a brawl breaks out between two groups of guys. Then the dancers jump into the fray too. No one calls the cops.

The PI says he saw dancers on stage grind their bodies together and even perform oral sex on one another. One dancer reportedly sits on a man’s face while he licks her. Another dancer asks the investigator if he wants to—and I quote!—“snort a line of blow off her ass.”

Over the course of the investigation, the dancers also try hard to get the PIs into a back room. Remember, the dancers make more money working in the back. But that's also where the really dirty stuff was supposedly taking place.

The PI writes that he heard dancers talking about having sex in the back room, but he didn't do the obvious: he didn’t try to buy a lap dance or get in the back himself, because he didn’t have approval to spend money on that.

A lot of the activity the private eyes reported seeing in the clubs is technically illegal. Patrons aren’t supposed to touch dancers, period. And dancers aren’t supposed to touch each other’s breasts or genitals. Oral sex on stage is definitely forbidden.

But here’s the thing. What the private eyes did not see was the really serious stuff: Prostitution. Drug trafficking. Sex trafficking.

What they saw was troubling. Even illegal. And it was definitely ammunition the city could put to use.

But if Karl Hall or the city council was looking for a smoking gun—something that might sway public sentiment against Kamy, something to justify kicking strip clubs out of downtown—this didn’t seem to be it.

Kamy felt vindicated by the report.

Kamy Keshmiri: So for me, I took it as a compliment. It's obvious that they don't have anything, so it's sad that you're wasting City of Reno resources on this, on bringing private investigators in to look at boobs. That's all it is. Yeah, there's boobs.

Anjeanette Damon: As for the illegal stuff, well, Kamy said the private eyes must have exaggerated.

The person I really wanted to talk to though was Neoma Jardon—the city council member who had first proposed a moratorium on new strip clubs, but then later voted against kicking strip clubs out of downtown. I wanted to know what she thought of the PI’s report, and whether the city was being too aggressive in its push to get rid of Kamy.

I went to see Jardon at her office at City Hall.

Reno City Hall looks like this giant Lego piece—a black, glass-and-steel tower flanked by defunct hotel-casinos. Jardon’s office is on the 15th floor.

It has a view over downtown, out to the mountains that frame the city’s western edge. You can see the storms roll in from here. But you can also see the stretch of downtown that gentrification has missed—the empty Woolworth’s building, sketchy liquor stores, and t-shirt shops.

Jardon tells me that, in her opinion, this whole movement to kick out the strip clubs has gone too far, and she points the finger at Karl Hall’s office.

Neoma Jardon: You know, um, our legal department brought forward this ordinance to say, um, you know, if you’re non-conforming, we do have a legal basis and background where we can move you into a conforming area. I did not support that. And I still, as I sit here today, don't support that strategy.

Anjeanette Damon: What do you think about the idea of the city hiring a private investigator to essentially spy on a private business?

Neoma Jardon: That to me, uh, makes me a little itchy. And it makes me wonder: What was the rationale behind it? 

Anjeanette Damon: I was wondering the same thing: What was Karl Hall’s rationale for hiring a private eye?

Like I said before, Karl Hall won’t explain any of this to me. But interviews aren’t the only way to get information. We all have a paper trail.

Karl Hall was a county prosecutor for nearly 26 years before he was elected Reno’s City Attorney in 2014. And elected officials like Karl Hall, they have to file financial disclosure forms—documents that list their assets and investments.

Not a lot of people take the time to actually look at them, but these forms are important. They’re supposed to provide transparency and prevent elected officials from making decisions that could benefit them financially.

They also come in handy for reporters.

I looked up Hall’s form, and it showed he and his wife owned half a dozen properties in Reno. But there was something significant about one of them. It was a 9,000-square-foot office building in Midtown just a block away from the Wild Orchid.

Karl Hall and Kamy Keshmiri were basically neighbors.

I dug further through property records and found that this building had been in Karl Hall’s wife’s family for decades. The couple inherited it in 2006. I also found that Karl Hall and his wife put this building on the market for $1.5 million in May 2017—just four months after he’d hired private eyes to snoop on the strip clubs. That meant that while Karl Hall’s staff was arguing to the city council that strip clubs could lower the value of neighboring properties, Karl Hall was trying to sell a neighboring property.

Karl Hall could potentially benefit from the same changes in Midtown now threatening not just Kamy, but also Velma Shoals and her neighbors.

Hall’s property sat on the market for almost two years. And just before the Reno City Council made its final decision on what to do with the clubs, the property sold for $1.25 million dollars—about 250 thousand dollars less than the original asking price.

Reno’s city council members frequently disclose potential conflicts of interest and will even recuse themselves if the conflict is too great. Even if that conflict is on their financial disclosure form, they still have to stand up in a city council meeting and tell the public about the conflict. State law requires it. And it’s actually Karl Hall’s job to make sure they do it.

That law applies to Karl Hall, too. Filling out a financial disclosure form isn’t enough. And government ethics experts I talked to said Karl Hall should have disclosed his potential conflict during the strip club debate.

But when the council debated the strip clubs, Karl Hall never stood up to say, Hey, just so you know, I own a building across the street from the Wild Orchid.

Kamy’s lawyer Mark Thierman was on his sailboat in Bermuda when I broke the news to him.

Anjeanette Damon: I just discovered that Karl Hall owned an office building pretty much across the street from the Wild Orchid and he just sold it in March for like $1.1 million dollars. Did you know about—?

Mark Thiermani: Really?

Anjeanette Damon: Yeah.

Mark Thiermani: So he had a self interest in this whole thing?

Anjeanette Damon: I mean, it kind of looks like that.

Mark Thiermani: Wow. That bastard. OK.

Anjeanette Damon: So you didn't know either?

Mark Thiermani: I didn't know. Kamy knew?

Anjeanette Damon: No, Kamy didn't know. Kamy didn’t know, I didn't know.

Mark Thiermani: So we have, we have a city attorney going after a strip club that happens to be a block away from his lovely property that he thinks lowers the value of the property? Great. And he doesn't disclose any of this?

Anjeanette Damon: Most council members didn’t know either. I reached Councilman Devon Reese by phone while he was waiting to catch a plane.

Anjeanette Damon: Did you know that he had property a block away from the Wild Orchid?

Councilman Devon Reese: Nope. That's the first I've heard of that.

Anjeanette Damon: That’s how most of my conversations with council members went. Only one, Jenny Brekhus, knew Karl Hall owned the office building, and she only knew because she’s super familiar with the neighborhood.

Council members I talked to said they would have liked to have known about it, and they didn’t understand why Karl Hall didn’t disclose it in a public meeting.

Here’s Devon Reese again:

Councilman Devon Reese: I just think it's important because, as elected officials and handling sensitive subjects, the public really deserves to know the information. Because otherwise what happens is, you know, it's, it gets out through other means, and people view it as something that should have been disclosed, and then it looks more nefarious than maybe it was, or looks like a motivating factor, when maybe it wasn't. And again, I can't comment on either one of those, because it wasn't disclosed to me.

Anjeanette Damon: I finally got Karl Hall on the phone this summer.

Karl Hall: This is Karl.

Anjeanette Damon: Hey, Karl. It's Anjeanette.

Karl Hall: Hey, Anjeanette.

Anjeanette Damon: He was in his city hall office toward the end of the day. I asked him, again, if he’d do an interview with me.

Karl Hall: You know, I'm not really inclined to do that.

Anjeanette Damon: So I just launched into my questions about his property deal in Midtown.

Anjeanette Damon: I mean, we'd just like to, I guess, understand why it wasn't disclosed during the process, and if the whole of—

Karl Hall: Why what? The fact that I own an office building? Why that wasn't disclosed to who?

Anjeanette Damon: To the public.

Karl Hall: It’s public record, right? I mean, what’s the, what does that have to do with anything?

Anjeanette Damon: Well, it is public record, and it was on your financial disclosure form. But in my discussions with the experts on the state ethics law, elected officials are required to disclose potential conflicts of interest in a manner that is sufficient to inform the public. Similar to, you know, I think—

Karl Hall: Well, what's the conflict?

Anjeanette Damon: Um, I guess owning a piece of property that could be affected by a decision that's before the city council and that your office was working to develop the policy on.

Karl Hall: No. It didn't have anything to do with any work that I did on behalf of the city.

Anjeanette Damon: OK. And you don't think, you know, something that would affect the future of the strip club could affect the value one way or the other of your property?

Karl Hall: Nope.

Anjeanette Damon: Karl Hall is well-versed in the state’s ethics law. He’s the city attorney. He’s at these meetings when council members make these kinds of disclosures. It’s his job to tell them when to disclose. But when it comes to his property, he says he just doesn’t see the conflict.

Karl Hall: I'm not trying to influence them one way or the other. I'm trying to defend their policy decisions. So...

Anjeanette Damon: Mmhm. But that's, I mean, do you think—?

Karl Hall: I don't have a dog in the fight.

Anjeanette Damon: Well, I guess some people might think you do, if you own property real close to the club.

Karl Hall: Well, not anymore.

Anjeanette Damon: Right. You sold it for a lot of money!

Karl Hall: Yeah, I think you're trying to make something that's not there. So, I'm sorry.

Anjeanette Damon: We went back and forth like this for a bit before wrapping up. And then he let me know he didn’t appreciate my line of questioning.

Karl Hall: Frankly, I'm a little offended, frankly, and I'm offended by that. So, anyway...

Anjeanette Damon: When I later told Kamy about Karl Hall’s building, he told me that, suddenly, everything made sense. He could never quite figure out why it seemed the city was out to get him.  

Kamy Keshmiri: I mean, come on. I mean, this is such a cornball small town corrupt politics.

Anjeanette Damon: To Kamy, Karl Hall’s possible conflict of interest explained everything.

But me, I wasn’t so sure. Yeah, Karl Hall potentially stood to benefit if the clubs were kicked out of Midtown. But there were a lot of different people pushing for that to happen. He wasn’t the only person with power, and he wasn’t the only one who had stakes.

And although the private eye hadn’t found a smoking gun, the report didn’t exactly exonerate Kamy, either. The PI hadn’t even been in the back room!

So I still had a lot of questions about what really goes on in those strip clubs, and about the effort to get rid of them.

Even before he found out about Karl Hall’s land deal, Kamy felt besieged. The private investigators. The accusations about drug and sex trafficking. Government harassment at its worst, Kamy thought. And he wasn’t going to sit back and take it.

So in September 2017, the day after the council voted to oust his clubs, Kamy unleashed his lawyer.

On its face, the federal lawsuit Mark Theirman filed against the city had little to do with the new ordinances. The suit accused the city of discriminating against women by putting more restrictions on female dancers than male revue dancers.

But in reality, Mark said, the lawsuit was payback.

Mark Thierman: When they had this ordinance floating around, I didn't think it was going to get past, you know, that initial vote. I thought that was crazy. Then I said, fuck 'em. They want to see what war is, we’ll show ‘em what war is.

Robin Amer: Next up, Anjeanette takes a step back and goes looking for clues in Kamy’s past. Clues that could explain why he’s so combative.

And she learns that his roots in Old Reno explain a lot of his conflicts with New Reno.

That’s after the break.

ACT 2

Robin Amer: With the plan to oust the strip clubs still very much on the table, the way Kamy saw it, his hometown had turned on him.

He was a Hall of Fame athlete and a successful businessman. If anything, the city should be putting him on a pedestal.

But Kamy had been knocked off that pedestal before.

Anjeanette picks it back up from here.

Anjeanette Damon:  It’s a sunny day in April—the kind of day that makes you feel as if winter is over and spring has finally taken hold.

At Reno High School, classes have just let out for the day. More than 100 student athletes are milling about the track, waiting for practice to begin. Jumpers head to the north end of the track, sprinters line up in the middle. The distance runners set off for their circuit through the neighborhood.

Over to the side of the track is a dusty shot put ring. Some of the brawniest students, both boys and girls, are lining up to take their turns heaving a dense metal ball as far as they can.

One boy crouches into the starting position, the shot resting in his hand near his cheek. He winds up for the throw, hops forward twice, whips his torso around and thrusts the shot through the air.

Kamy Keshmiri: Drive! No. No. I like the height, but you opened up! But you got the ball up in the air.

Anjeanette Damon: If that voice sounds familiar to you, it should. It’s Kamy. Yes, in Reno, the strip club kingpin is also the assistant track coach at the local high school.

Kamy Keshmiri:  You guys, look, your bodies are dead. So we're just going to work on legwork. OK, drive right through it. Just go! Left, down, rip! One movement. OK, not bad. Attack!

Anjeanette Damon: Both Kamy and his brother Jamy have coached discus and shot put at their alma mater for years.

As we’re standing there, the head coach pulls up in his full-size pickup truck and sees me interviewing Kamy. He makes a beeline towards us. He wants me to know how much he likes Kamy.

Lewis Green: It's an absolute pleasure to have Coach Kamy Keshmiri here at Reno High School. The contribution he makes not only to the school, but giving back to the community, is a huge asset, and we're thankful to have him here.

Anjeanette Damon: This is the kind of adulation Kamy is used to. He’s a hometown sports hero—a local boy made good in a place where being a local boy matters.

Kamy runs the kids through their throwing drills. He lectures one kid who dropped his elbow on a throw—he’ll hurt himself if he keeps doing that, he says. He advises another kid to use more torque.

On the side, he complains to me about their lack of discipline in a grouchy “kids-these-days” kind of way.

Kamy Keshmiri: When I grew up, it was dedication, desire, and drive. The “three Ds” is what we grew up with. These kids, I'll take one of the three, you know? 

[To the kids] There you go. Much better! See how that works? Feels good, doesn’t it, when you get it right?

Anjeanette Damon: Kamy’s coach growing up was his dad, an Olympic athlete from Iran.

Kamy started discus when he was really young, like nine years old. By the age of 23, he was throwing farther than anyone in the world. In 1992, Kamy was just a step away from competing in the Olympics himself.

Back in his office at the Ponderosa, I asked Kamy to tell me more about his glory days. His office is actually more like a storage room, overflowing with file boxes and a ratty couch. There are no medals or trophies. No framed magazine covers.

Kamy tells me that growing up, he thought his dad was invincible. He was a mountain of a man with a thick mustache who hoped his son would follow in his athletic footsteps.

Kamy Keshmiri: Iran was kind of exotic. “Ooh, that's kind of a cool place! Far away!” People in Reno didn't understand much about Iran. So my dad would come to class, you know, because the Olympics. Everybody knew the Olympics. They don't know much about Iran. So it was, it was kind of like people were in awe of that, a little bit.

Anjeanette Damon: That changed in 1979. Kamy was 10 years old when a group of Iranian college students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in what became known as the Iran Hostage Crisis.

Kamy Keshmiri: You know, these kids are turning on me. “Your dad competes for a country that, you know, represents terrorists.” So you know, I had kids bully me, you know, in school. I mean, it was like, normal. Everyday I'd get into a fight with somebody else.

What I did was, my dad's like, “Well, you learn to fight back.” And I guess in a lot of ways, it motivated me. And I worked out a lot harder. And I ended up being the biggest kid and everybody left me alone. It was kind of nice being the biggest kid in school.

Anjeanette Damon: Hearing this helped me start to understand Kamy a little better. So did what he told me next—about his rise to superstar athlete, and his subsequent fall.

When his dad began training him for discus, absolute discipline was required.

Kamy Keshmiri: He grew up poor in Iran. He grew up poor in a third-world country. It's a lot different growing up poor in this country. So he felt that Americans were weak. So he wanted me to be tougher.

Anjeanette Damon: The discipline, the demanding coaching, it worked. In 1987, his senior year, Kamy broke the national high school discus record. The Nevada governor proclaimed June 22, 1987, Kamy Keshmiri Day. Gatorade named him Track and Field Athlete of the Year, which is a big deal in the world of high school sports. Emmitt Smith, who would go on to become a star NFL running back, won the same award that year.

When Kamy was in college at the University of Nevada, he won three NCAA discus titles.

By this point in his life, it was Kamy in the newspapers, not his dad.

I pulled an old story from the Reno Gazette-Journal and read Kamy the lead.

Anjeanette Damon: All right. He says, "The best young discus thrower of all time doesn't walk through Flex Fitness gym in South Reno. He floats. His hair is teased and moussed so it stands on end, hardened like fingers of black licorice. He wears coal-colored spandex tights streamlined to his rocky thighs like a corset." [Laughs]

Kamy Keshmiri: [Laughs] Very good writing there. That's good stuff.

Anjeanette Damon: Is that how you see yourself?

Kamy Keshmiri: I mean, I don't see myself that way. I mean, you know, you're young. When I was competing, I was 300 pounds. I was a big boy. I was strong. So, yeah, maybe I stood out in the gym.

Anjeanette Damon: But Kamy’s athletic glory was cut short.

In 1992 he won the U.S. Olympic Trials with a throw more than four feet longer than the guy who came in second. They hung a gold medal around his neck. He was headed to the Olympics in Barcelona. He would represent his country, just like his dad wanted.

But then his mom called.

Kamy Keshmiri: So I win the trials, right? And literally I get a call from my mom saying I've got a FedEx thing for the drug test that says I failed, or whatever.

Anjeanette Damon: His pre-competition drug test came back positive for steroids.

Kamy never competed in the Olympics. A guy from Lithuania won the gold that year with a throw almost 20 feet shorter than Kamy’s all-time best.

In Kamy’s eyes, he was the victim of a conspiracy, the details of which are too convoluted to get into here. He said he routinely did uppers during competition. Excessive amounts of caffeine, for instance. But he never did anything illegal.

Kamy fought the suspension for a while, but eventually gave up on his appeals. They banned him from the sport for life.

But talking to me today, Kamy waves that part off. He says he had already made the decision that 1992 would be his last year throwing.

Kamy Keshmiri: And I knew at that point I was done. For me it was over. So, you know, it was meant to be. Like I said, that, God didn't want me to do it. And thank God, because my dad would have paraded me around as his Olympic champion son, and I would've literally thrown until my arm fell off.

Anjeanette Damon: As Kamy tells me his life story, I can’t help but think that his life seems to run in these cycles of adulation and excoriation. He’s popular because his dad’s an Olympian. Then he’s bullied because he’s Iranian. He’s a hometown hero for his athletic prowess, then he’s branded a cheater. He’s a respected local businessman, then he’s the smut-peddling scourge of New Reno.

As he sees it, each time it’s the powers that be trying screw him out of what he worked so hard to achieve.

And each time, Kamy turns toward the fight. The bullies beat him up, he gets stronger. The city comes after his club, he readies for battle.

Kamy Keshmiri: My father had a sign over his office: “When life kicks you, it kicks you forward.” That was his motto. So they want to push this, I really feel that the city is on the wrong end of this, and they're going to end it, we're gonna end up getting more.

Robin Amer: Kamy presents himself as a victim standing up to bullies—as a righteous warrior fighting against the city.

But next up, Kamy shows he’s willing to use his own desperate tenants in service of that fight.

After the break, Kamy unleashes Velma and her neighbors.

ACT 3

Robin Amer: When Kamy stuck that letter on Velma’s door, he knew that the city council had been under pressure to do something about the lack of affordable housing in Reno.

So you could argue that it was a shrewd move to threaten his tenants with a rent increase while blaming it on the city. It was Kamy’s way of showing that if city officials came after his clubs, they wouldn’t just be hurting him.

Let’s go back to Anjeanette.

Neoma Jardon: 24th meeting of the Reno City Council. Our first order of business is the Pledge of Allegiance, and if we can get Tammy Holtstill to lead us in the pledge…

Anjeanette Damon: It’s January 2018, about four months after the city council approves the plan to start ousting the strip clubs, and I’m back at City Hall for a routine council meeting.

To be honest, I’m expecting a dull affair. Stripclubs aren’t on the agenda.

But just as the meeting is getting underway, about two-dozen people file into the room. Some are young and look to be blue-collar workers. A couple of others are in wheelchairs. There’s an elderly man in a frayed sports coat, his hair pomaded into place. Many have weathered faces.

This is the pack of Ponderosa residents that Velma Shoals has wrangled to city hall to fight for their homes.

Clerk: Velma Shoals followed by Warren Brown followed by Jay Williams.

Velma Shoals: Yes, my name is Velma Shoals. I’ve been at the Ponderosa for five years, six years, with my granddaughter.

Anjeanette Damon: At 4’8”, Velma’s barely taller than the lectern before her. Her graying auburn hair is pulled back in an elastic band, and her chin is set as she faces the council members.

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

Anjeanette Damon: Shortly before the council meeting, Velma had seen the letter on her door. And this confrontation is exactly what Kamy wanted. Remember, he’d encouraged his tenants to reach out to their elected officials. Even given them names and phone numbers.

Velma Shoals: We really need our, we need this hotel more than anything in the world right now. Not just me, but other families. I'm not the only family raising kids there.

Anjeanette Damon: Kamy’s gambit with the letter has scared the hell out of the people living in his hotel. Velma makes it clear that they are desperate to stay.

Velma Shoals: I mean, they was there when I had nobody, when I had no one and nowhere to turn. That hotel gave me a place to live, a bed to sleep in, and a way to cook for my granddaughter. When I was homeless, going from couch to couch, I mean, please don't take that from us. Just do the best you can to help us save that. I would appreciate that. Thank you very much. [Applause]

Anjeanette Damon: It’s clear that Velma and the other hotel residents don’t blame Kamy for any of this—they blame the Reno City Council.

But Councilwoman Neoma Jardon tries to turn their attention back to the guy threatening to double their rent.

Neoma Jardon: Thank you very much. I hope the owners see what this tactic has done in scaring you and making you cry at the podium and worry about the roof over your head. I hope they are watching today. 

Anjeanette Damon: She sees Kamy’s move with the letter as a political ploy.

Neoma Jardon: It's, it's a disgusting tactic and they're using you as their mechanism and pawn. I haven't seen the letter, but it concerns me greatly that you guys are here today out of your busy days, scared, and that, you know, it's an unfortunate tactic that I find offensive and frankly not effective. So I just wanted to let you know our side, from the city council. So Madam Clerk, next speaker…

Anjeanette Damon: OK, let me just step back here. Even without the strip club fight, the threat to the Ponderosa residents is real as Reno changes around them.

An influx of tech workers has helped push Reno’s housing prices to record heights.

When Ponderosa residents confronted city council members, Reno’s median house price was $370,000—that’s up from $135,000 in 2012.

Meanwhile, the average wage in Reno is just $46,000 a year.

Apartment vacancy rates are near zero. Investors are coming in and scooping up existing apartment buildings and jacking up the rent or even evicting tenants to make it easier to remodel.

Landlords once partnered with caseworkers to rent to people who needed help. Now they’re renting to Tesla workers.

The waitlist for housing assistance is so long officials have stopped taking new names entirely. People are living out of their cars or in tents along the Truckee River, which runs through downtown.

Reno’s only homeless shelter is so overcrowded that a man recently died from hypothermia after he was trapped on the roof. His body lay there for days before he was found.

And the weeklies—the motels where people like Velma pay to live—those are disappearing, too, even though they’re home to 4,000 people who have nowhere else to go.

In fact, Councilwoman Jardon has been a huge proponent of old motel demolitions. She even posed for a photo opp sitting astride a bulldozer sent to clear the land of one.

This is why Kamy’s note on his tenant’s doors was so damn frightening. When Velma says she has nowhere else to go if she loses her home at the Ponderosa, she’s right.

I wanted to better understand their situation. So I went to visit one day last July.

When I arrive, a group of people are lounging in front of the Ponderosa Hotel, trying to escape the heat in their rooms. Children are playing with a deflated soccer ball between the cars in the carport.

As I stroll up to the front door, a guy sees my mic and launches into an animated monologue about how he could use ammonia to rid the Ponderosa of all of its bed bugs.

Gaetano Cercone: I only been here a few days, I get totally chewed by bugs. We’re gonna eradicate without Raid. We’re gonna do it with ammonia. Keep people healthy.

I start chatting with another guy standing on two prosthetic legs, and he says he’s having trouble finding a new place. Apartment landlords won’t take him when they find out he’s living at the Ponderosa. They’re afraid he’ll bring bedbugs with him.

Inside, I discover that the Ponderosa’s poor reputation has been earned.

[Grinding noise]

That noise is the elevator. You can hear it grinding away from far down the hall. Residents I spoke with said it constantly breaks down, sometimes leaving people who are in wheelchairs stranded for hours in the lobby or upstairs in hallways.

I step out of the elevator and onto the fourth floor. Half the lightbulbs are missing and the ones that are still working, they’re flickering—almost like a strobe-light. There’s just enough light to see a cockroach scoot down the wall to my left.

 Velma’s place is at the far end of the hall.

She invites me into the room she’s been living in with her 16-year-old granddaughter, Tayla, for seven years. She’s done a great job of turning the hotel room into a comfortable living space.

Velma Shoals: Well, it's got a, you know, it's got a living area here. It's got two beds in it. I could have tables and chairs, if I wanted. I do have the table.

Anjeanette Damon: Living in her small room at the Ponderosa is far better than the two years she spent homeless and couch surfing in California.

Velma Shoals: I'm gonna have to move where? Where am I going? I don't have money to move. I've got Tayla. What I'm gonna do with her? The river? That's the next best thing—the river.

Anjeanette Damon: Beyond having her own place, Velma has carved out an important role for herself at the hotel.

She’s a de facto leader here. She marches up and down the halls gripping her oversized cell phone by the pop it glued to the back. She picks up any trash she sees along the way. She checks in on her neighbors, makes sure people have food.

Velma Shoals: We've got a little man that just moved in a couple of doors over. He's lived here before, but he was homeless, So I told him I fix him a little box of stuff and bring to him. Some of us, we just kind of look out for one another.

Anjeanette Damon: I ask if I can meet her neighbors, and she insists that I meet her buddy John down the hall.

Velma Shoals: [Sound of knocking] Knock knock! Just a minute, I got the news popping in.

Anjeanette Damon: She announces me as “the news,” and initially, John wants nothing to do with me.But he’s no match for Velma’s relentlessness, and he ultimately invites me inside.

John: We live here. This is this is my home. I'm proud of my home, you know? I mean look, I love my home. I keep, I live all by myself, but I keep a nice clean house and I'm a happy camper. I like it. I like it.

Anjeanette Damon: John’s health is fragile. For years, he worked at a plant nursery until heart attacks and seizures made working impossible.

His room isn’t any bigger than Velma’s. But he chose it because of the view from the fourth floor window.

John: I like it. I like it. I love this view. I sit here and I, I sit here in the morning. I have a coffee. I say my prayers. And you know, it’s excellent. It’s a great way to wake up every morning. I can see from the very far east to the very far west. And I sit 60, 70 feet above the city. And so my view is an entire open view of the entire south of Reno.

Anjeanette Damon: The city is spread out before John’s window—the lively restaurants and bars along Virginia Street, the valley full of trees and houses beyond Midtown, the ski runs carved into the mountain range in the distance. You can see why developers would want to build high-priced condos here.

John has watched Reno change from this window. The weekly motel across the parking lot is now market-rate condos. Yoga shops and fancy cocktail bars have opened around him.

He used to watch tourists stream out of downtown hotel casinos. Now he sees people leaving their hotel rooms to catch a ride out to their new jobs at Tesla.

John: I've seen the entire crew marching every morning out of Harrah’s and out of Circus and marching over getting on the shuttles to get bussed out to the Gigafactories. Tesla, Panasonic, so on.

Anjeanette Damon: If these changes force the Ponderosa to close, like Velma, John would have nowhere else to go.

Kamy’s letter sparked panic among his tenants. But it also brought into stark relief the real stakes in this fight over what the New Reno should be. Council members celebrate motel demolitions as progress, all the while taking on a fight that could make that housing crisis even worse for the city’s most vulnerable residents.

So while Kamy may be the one scaring his tenants with threats of rent hikes, he says he’s not the real villain.

Kamy Keshmiri: They want to make me look like their bad guy. Who's the bad guy? You're the one wants to kick—I didn't, I didn't start this war. The truth of the matter is, you're the one kicking these people out. You're the one creating this. Not me. So you can lie to everybody and spin it to “bad Keshmiri.” But the reality is, Mr. Keshmiri has been doing a service for this town a long time and helping these poor people out. That's the truth.

Robin Amer: Velma and John aren’t the only people caught up in a fight that threatens their stability.

While Kamy was busy orchestrating the dramatic confrontation between Ponderosa residents and the Reno City Council, the city was quietly deploying a weapon of its own.

The cops are about to show up on Kamy’s doorstep. But just like with Velma and John, he’s not the only one who’ll suffer the consequences.

Stephanie: I was just like, I knew I didn't do anything wrong, so I was just like I don't understand how I could be in this situation. Like, why me? Like… [Starts crying]

Anjeanette Damon: Oh gosh, I'm sorry.

Stephanie: It's OK. It's not, it's just, I don't know why that happened to me.

Anjeanette Damon: Yeah, no. it's—you got caught. Like, you got caught in something a lot bigger that has nothing to do with you.

Stephanie: Yeah, because I didn't do anything wrong. And I'm just like, it sucks that they had to use me as a pawn for whatever is going on between them and the city. Like that's not right. Like, you're ruining people's lives.

Robin Amer:  That’s next time on The City.

CREDITS

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.

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

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

Brian Duggan is the Reno Gazette-Journal’s executive editor. Chris Davis is the USA TODAY Network’s vice president for investigations. Scott Stein is our vice president of product. Our president and publisher is Maribel Wadsworth.

Special thanks to Liz Nelson, Kelly Scott, and Alicia Barber.

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

Truckee River
A homeless camp along the banks of Reno’s Truckee River in the spring of 2018. (Photo: Jason Bean, Reno Gazette-Journal)

Reno’s tech boom has a hidden cost: an affordable housing crisis

On the heels of the city’s economic revival, rising housing costs have pushed vulnerable residents out onto the street.

By Emily Liu and Fil Corbitt

On a hot August afternoon near the banks of Reno’s Truckee River, Donald Thomas was in his tent, hiding from the heat. The 50-year-old has made his home in a corner of a vacant dirt lot near a bridge overpass. His tent is flanked by fences with barbed wire on two sides. On the other side of the fence, trucks cycle in and out of a recycling plant.

Thomas, dressed in a plaid button-up shirt and jeans, his beard neatly shaved, had been living on the river for six months. But it wasn’t always this way. Two years ago he moved to Reno from Michigan to work as an electrician for car maker Tesla, whose massive Gigafactory sits 20 miles east of the city. Hired by a subcontractor, Thomas was paid $130 a day and given a nice hotel room at the Sands Regency casino downtown.

“I always enjoy the work,” he says of his time as an electrician. “I like to see what it looks like and what it does after it’s all put together, after it works,” he says. “I’m standing there saying, ‘Damn, I did that.’”

But six months after starting at Tesla, a dispute with his foreman cost Thomas his job, and along with it, a place to live. Thomas moved into a weekly motel for a while, and then into the homeless shelter downtown. He lost his livelihood altogether after his work tools were stolen by other shelter residents—something he says happened more than once.

“Every single time you get built up to where you might be able to take a job and get out of the situation you in, tools gone again,” he says.

Paradoxically, while the burgeoning tech economy brought Thomas to Reno, it has now made it harder for him to afford a place to live.

Homelessness in Reno is at a historic high—up 79 percent to 1,256 people from 700 people a decade ago. The unsheltered population in particular has more than quadrupled. In a city of 251,000 people, Thomas is one of 226 people living outside, according to 2019 data from the Reno Area Alliance for the Homeless.

It’s the downside of Reno’s recent economic revival, which began five years ago after Tesla announced its plans to build the Gigafactory on the outskirts of the city. Since then, big name companies like Google have followed, setting up factories and warehouses there. In the decade since the recession, Reno has added almost 55,000 jobs—a nearly 30 percent jump.

With the influx of people drawn by the tech boom, home prices have soared, pushing out people on the lower end of the economic spectrum. In just six years, rents have jumped nearly 42 percent, to $1,316 from $822 per month, while the median price of a single-family home hit a record $400,000 this year. That means families in Reno need to make almost double the current median income of $46,0000 to be able to afford a home.

And unlike demand, housing supply hasn’t gone up. This year, the region’s planning agency identified a shortage of more than 25,000 housing units in Reno. Weekly motels, long the housing of last resort for some 4,000 people in Reno, are being sold to developers and torn down. No-cause evictions, where landlords boot tenants without reason, have spiked 300 percent. The city’s only homeless shelter is at full capacity. The overflow shelter is now open year-round.

In Episode 2 of this season of The City, we meet Velma Shoals, a resident of one of Reno’s weekly motels. Velma panics when she receives a letter from her landlord threatening to double her rent:

Where am I going? I don’t have money to move. The river? That’s the next best thing—the river.

Today, clusters of tents line the approximately 12-mile stretch of water that winds its way from Reno to Sparks, the city next door.

“You see more people living in their cars, you see people in their construction work outfits going into the tents,” says Nico Columbant, a multimedia journalist with Our Town Reno, a project that focuses on homelessness and gentrification. “That’s something you didn’t see a few years ago.”

Tech companies aren’t immune

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, left, and former Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval shake hands following a 2014 tech summit.  (Photo: Cathleen Allison, Associated Press)

Ironically, even the tech companies driving this housing crunch aren’t immune to its effects.

At a tech summit held at the Gigafactory last year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk urged then-Nevada Governor Brian Sandoval to build more affordable housing.

My biggest constraint on growth here is housing and infrastructure. People need houses, they need schools, roads, electricity. All these things.

Musk also suggested one possible solution: building an adjacent mobile home complex for the 7,000 people who now work at the Gigafactory.

“Then people could just walk here,” he says.

The city’s efforts 

Debris from the March 2018 demolition of the El Ray, Keno, and Star of Reno motels, which were bought for redevelopment. (Photo: Mike Higdon, Reno Gazette-Journal)

Activists are also pressuring Reno’s leaders to address this blossoming crisis, accusing them of failing to act.

“At the rate that we add new affordable housing, it would take us well over 100 years at the current resources to actually meet the current need,” says J.D. Klippenstein, executive director for ACTIONN, a local faith-based housing non-profit.

Activists also accuse leaders of making the problem worse. The city council has been a vocal supporter of redeveloping the weekly motels. When the excavators started work on two motels in 2016, Mayor Hillary Schieve and four council members were there to celebrate the event. A photo shows them posing with a bulldozer on the lot.

This year, city attorney Karl Hall went a step further, encouraging Reno to submit a legal brief in support of Boise, Idaho’s proposal to ban camping in public places—a move that would effectively criminalize homelessness there.

“The criminal justice system will not solve the homeless problems we face today,” Hall’s office wrote in the brief, “but it is a pivotal piece to a larger puzzle.”

Too little, too late?

Northern Nevada HOPES, a non-profit community health center, is building 30 tiny homes with communal facilities for the homeless in Reno. Each home will be 96 square feet. (Photo provided by Northern Nevada HOPES)

But building more housing isn’t as easy as it may seem.

Funding is limited. In 2018, Reno received  $1.5 million in federal subsidies for affordable housing construction. That money went to just 54 units across five properties—a drop in the bucket relative to the shortage.

The Reno Housing Authority, which manages public housing and gives out housing vouchers, has also seen federal funding decrease by 30 percent in the past five years, limiting how much the organization can do for the 3,154 families on its waitlists.

“There’s always more people asking for the money than money that we have,” says Monica Cochran, a housing analyst for the city.

The city’s regulatory powers are also limited. Local governments in Nevada don’t have jurisdiction to implement their own affordable housing policies, meaning that things that have worked in other cities, like inclusionary zoning and rent control, are off the table in Reno.

Within these constraints, Reno has been exploring some new solutions to the crisis. There are some new projects underway: a dorm-style living complex, a tiny home village, an affordable housing trust fund. The city has started inspecting motels to make sure living conditions there are up to par. And the county is finally building a homeless shelter in neighboring Sparks.

But activists like Klippenstein say what’s really needed is more public investment into affordable housing. And even then, it will take years to adequately address the housing crisis.

“It’s decades in the making,” he says. “It will take a decade to dig out of it.”

An uncertain future

When asked about what the future holds for him, Thomas is unsure.

At times, he seems confident he’ll get out of his predicament one day. The same way he obsesses over an electrical problem until he figures it out, he’ll find a way to get back on his feet.

“I’m proud of myself for not making the same mistake twice,” he says.

But at other moments, he seems bitter and despondent:

Once you’re in this perpetual loop of BS, oh, you’re stuck.

“And if you don’t have no resources and no family, you may be here for a while,” he says as his voice rises in frustration. “Everything is geared to keep you in one spot.”

Special thanks to Wendy Wiglesworth, who introduced us to Thomas and other people living along the river.

Read more:

Reno housing resources:


 

Transcript

Robin Amer:  Hey everyone. Just a reminder that because this season of The City is about strip clubs, it won’t be suitable for everyone, especially kids. This episode includes explicit language, including explicit conversations about sex.

Production team member: Previously on The City:

Mark Thierman: The destination is downtown Reno. They want a little bit naughty. They want some nice.

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

Kamy Keshmiri: I think there’s just certain people that just do not like what we do.

Mike Kazmierski: Because 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.

Par Tolles: They have a goldmine there. We’ve all tried to buy it.

Stephanie: I’ve had guys give me condoms before, and I tell them I can’t do that. Like, I’m sorry.

Kamy Keshmiri: There’s no records. There’s no reports. There’s nothing. So what do you do? Lie.

Jenny Brekhus: You had informed me that staff had commissioned a private investigator to go into all of the licensee holders and observe activities there.

Kamy Keshmiri: I’m being persecuted and the worst thing to do is get angry and do something stupid. I just wait. There’ll be a time when I get my revenge.

Robin Amer: Velma Shoals has trouble sitting still. The 64-year-old grandmother spends her days darting up and down the hallways of the Ponderosa, the six-story hotel attached to the back of the Wild Orchid strip club.

The movement helps stave off depression, which is so bad Velma gets disability payments for it. But it’s not aimless wandering. She uses the time to check on her neighbors, who she looks out for with the watchful eye of a den mother.

Velma’s one of more than 100 people who pay week-to-week to live at the Ponderosa.

As for the strip club next door, Velma doesn’t mind it.

But living at the Ponderosa does come with its frustrations and indignities: the neighbor who disappeared without notice, leaving his room so dirty it became infested with roaches. Or the men Velma saw stealing AC units from the building.

And then there was the letter she found tacked to her door one day last winter.

Velma Shoals: OK. This is the letter we received on our doors that said, “To all Ponderosa hotel tenants: Unfortunately I must relay some bad, very bad news to you.”

Robin Amer: The letter was from Kamy Keshmiri. Remember, he and his family own both the strip club and the hotel. And the note warned Velma and her neighbors that their rent might be going up—by a lot.

Velma Shoals: “We are aware that many if not most of you living on fixed incomes are collecting Social Security, disability, unemployment, and/or veteran’s benefits. With that in mind we have always strived to keep your rents low.”

Robin Amer: Kamy goes on to say that he’s been able to keep the rent low because he uses money from the strip club to subsidize the Ponderosa.

But things have changed. Now, Reno City Council members are openly talking about tougher regulations for the strip clubs—maybe even forcing them to move.

And Kamy’s letter to Velma and her neighbors makes clear that if that happens, he might have to nearly double their rent from around $750 to around $1,300 a month.

But Kamy has a suggestion for how his tenants might stave off this rent increase: Go talk to your rep in city council, he writes. He even includes a list of their phone numbers.

Velma Shoals: “Perhaps you can stop the city from gentrification [sic] of the Wild Orchid at the expense of your homes. You have my sincere apologies for this bad news. ”

Velma Shoals: Ain’t no way in the world. $1,300?! Who’s got that kind of money? Nobody. That’s a lot of money.

Robin Amer: Velma and her granddaughter have nowhere else to go. This is the only stable place they’ve had to live in almost a decade. And she’ll do anything to keep it.

So by sending that letter, Kamy has effectively conscripted some of the city’s most vulnerable residents as foot soldiers in his fight to save his strip clubs. Velma and her neighbors are now embroiled in this fight too—whether they like it or not.

From USA TODAY, I’m Robin Amer, and this is The City.

ACT 1

Robin Amer: So, at the end of our last episode, the Reno City Council had just drawn battlelines for its fight against the strip clubs—including Kamy’s. They voted to pursue new laws that would force the clubs to stop serving alcohol, take down any digital signs, and eventually move out of downtown altogether.

We also learned that Reno City Attorney Karl Hall had secretly hired a private eye to dig up dirt on the clubs—dirt the city could use to bolster its case.

Now, Karl Hall had refused to release the report to the public. But our reporter, Anjeanette Damon, wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Here’s Anjeanette.

Anjeanette Damon: Karl Hall had refused to give me the report. So I wrote a story about it. And the Reno Gazette-Journal’s lawyer threatened legal action.

The next day, the city manager overruled Karl Hall and released the report.

Whether it was being called out by the paper or our lawyer threatening to sue that ultimately did it, I don’t know. Either way, I finally got my hands on the report.

To give you a sense of what was in it—of what Karl Hall found from his secret surveillance—I want to take you back to the three nights in early February 2017 when the private investigators first went into Reno’s strip clubs.

Just a head’s up, it gets kind of racy.

Picture this: a team of private investigators fans out through downtown Reno.

They post up outside two of Reno’s sex toy shops and five of its strip clubs, including all three of Kamy’s.

They count every person walking into the clubs and they note any bad behavior: rowdiness, swerving vehicles, that kind of thing.

At Fantasy Girls, one PI watches as a guy walks out of the club, gets in a car with another guy, and then goes back into the club a few minutes later.

Could it be a drug deal? They don’t say.

Then, they head inside the clubs and start logging what they see.

At the Wild Orchid, an investigator watches as dancers pull a man on stage. It’s his birthday, so they try to make a show of it. They take off his shirt and violently rip off his underwear. They whip his chest and back. He looks like he’s in pain. Then, a dancer blindfolds him and shoves a sex toy into his mouth.

Over at Fantasy Girls, things get even more lewd, according to this report.

The PIs see dancers so drunk or high they can’t keep their heads up. They watch three guys walk into a stall in the men’s room and snort what they presume to be cocaine.

At one point, a brawl breaks out between two groups of guys. Then the dancers jump into the fray too. No one calls the cops.

The PI says he saw dancers on stage grind their bodies together and even perform oral sex on one another. One dancer reportedly sits on a man’s face while he licks her. Another dancer asks the investigator if he wants to—and I quote!—“snort a line of blow off her ass.”

Over the course of the investigation, the dancers also try hard to get the PIs into a back room. Remember, the dancers make more money working in the back. But that’s also where the really dirty stuff was supposedly taking place.

The PI writes that he heard dancers talking about having sex in the back room, but he didn’t do the obvious: he didn’t try to buy a lap dance or get in the back himself, because he didn’t have approval to spend money on that.

A lot of the activity the private eyes reported seeing in the clubs is technically illegal. Patrons aren’t supposed to touch dancers, period. And dancers aren’t supposed to touch each other’s breasts or genitals. Oral sex on stage is definitely forbidden.

But here’s the thing. What the private eyes did not see was the really serious stuff: Prostitution. Drug trafficking. Sex trafficking.

What they saw was troubling. Even illegal. And it was definitely ammunition the city could put to use.

But if Karl Hall or the city council was looking for a smoking gun—something that might sway public sentiment against Kamy, something to justify kicking strip clubs out of downtown—this didn’t seem to be it.

Kamy felt vindicated by the report.

Kamy Keshmiri: So for me, I took it as a compliment. It’s obvious that they don’t have anything, so it’s sad that you’re wasting City of Reno resources on this, on bringing private investigators in to look at boobs. That’s all it is. Yeah, there’s boobs.

Anjeanette Damon: As for the illegal stuff, well, Kamy said the private eyes must have exaggerated.

The person I really wanted to talk to though was Neoma Jardon—the city council member who had first proposed a moratorium on new strip clubs, but then later voted against kicking strip clubs out of downtown. I wanted to know what she thought of the PI’s report, and whether the city was being too aggressive in its push to get rid of Kamy.

I went to see Jardon at her office at City Hall.

Reno City Hall looks like this giant Lego piece—a black, glass-and-steel tower flanked by defunct hotel-casinos. Jardon’s office is on the 15th floor.

It has a view over downtown, out to the mountains that frame the city’s western edge. You can see the storms roll in from here. But you can also see the stretch of downtown that gentrification has missed—the empty Woolworth’s building, sketchy liquor stores, and t-shirt shops.

Jardon tells me that, in her opinion, this whole movement to kick out the strip clubs has gone too far, and she points the finger at Karl Hall’s office.

Neoma Jardon: You know, um, our legal department brought forward this ordinance to say, um, you know, if you’re non-conforming, we do have a legal basis and background where we can move you into a conforming area. I did not support that. And I still, as I sit here today, don’t support that strategy.

Anjeanette Damon: What do you think about the idea of the city hiring a private investigator to essentially spy on a private business?

Neoma Jardon: That to me, uh, makes me a little itchy. And it makes me wonder: What was the rationale behind it? 

Anjeanette Damon: I was wondering the same thing: What was Karl Hall’s rationale for hiring a private eye?

Like I said before, Karl Hall won’t explain any of this to me. But interviews aren’t the only way to get information. We all have a paper trail.

Karl Hall was a county prosecutor for nearly 26 years before he was elected Reno’s City Attorney in 2014. And elected officials like Karl Hall, they have to file financial disclosure forms—documents that list their assets and investments.

Not a lot of people take the time to actually look at them, but these forms are important. They’re supposed to provide transparency and prevent elected officials from making decisions that could benefit them financially.

They also come in handy for reporters.

I looked up Hall’s form, and it showed he and his wife owned half a dozen properties in Reno. But there was something significant about one of them. It was a 9,000-square-foot office building in Midtown just a block away from the Wild Orchid.

Karl Hall and Kamy Keshmiri were basically neighbors.

I dug further through property records and found that this building had been in Karl Hall’s wife’s family for decades. The couple inherited it in 2006. I also found that Karl Hall and his wife put this building on the market for $1.5 million in May 2017—just four months after he’d hired private eyes to snoop on the strip clubs. That meant that while Karl Hall’s staff was arguing to the city council that strip clubs could lower the value of neighboring properties, Karl Hall was trying to sell a neighboring property.

Karl Hall could potentially benefit from the same changes in Midtown now threatening not just Kamy, but also Velma Shoals and her neighbors.

Hall’s property sat on the market for almost two years. And just before the Reno City Council made its final decision on what to do with the clubs, the property sold for $1.25 million dollars—about 250 thousand dollars less than the original asking price.

Reno’s city council members frequently disclose potential conflicts of interest and will even recuse themselves if the conflict is too great. Even if that conflict is on their financial disclosure form, they still have to stand up in a city council meeting and tell the public about the conflict. State law requires it. And it’s actually Karl Hall’s job to make sure they do it.

That law applies to Karl Hall, too. Filling out a financial disclosure form isn’t enough. And government ethics experts I talked to said Karl Hall should have disclosed his potential conflict during the strip club debate.

But when the council debated the strip clubs, Karl Hall never stood up to say, Hey, just so you know, I own a building across the street from the Wild Orchid.

Kamy’s lawyer Mark Thierman was on his sailboat in Bermuda when I broke the news to him.

Anjeanette Damon: I just discovered that Karl Hall owned an office building pretty much across the street from the Wild Orchid and he just sold it in March for like $1.1 million dollars. Did you know about—?

Mark Thiermani: Really?

Anjeanette Damon: Yeah.

Mark Thiermani: So he had a self interest in this whole thing?

Anjeanette Damon: I mean, it kind of looks like that.

Mark Thiermani: Wow. That bastard. OK.

Anjeanette Damon: So you didn’t know either?

Mark Thiermani: I didn’t know. Kamy knew?

Anjeanette Damon: No, Kamy didn’t know. Kamy didn’t know, I didn’t know.

Mark Thiermani: So we have, we have a city attorney going after a strip club that happens to be a block away from his lovely property that he thinks lowers the value of the property? Great. And he doesn’t disclose any of this?

Anjeanette Damon: Most council members didn’t know either. I reached Councilman Devon Reese by phone while he was waiting to catch a plane.

Anjeanette Damon: Did you know that he had property a block away from the Wild Orchid?

Councilman Devon Reese: Nope. That’s the first I’ve heard of that.

Anjeanette Damon: That’s how most of my conversations with council members went. Only one, Jenny Brekhus, knew Karl Hall owned the office building, and she only knew because she’s super familiar with the neighborhood.

Council members I talked to said they would have liked to have known about it, and they didn’t understand why Karl Hall didn’t disclose it in a public meeting.

Here’s Devon Reese again:

Councilman Devon Reese: I just think it’s important because, as elected officials and handling sensitive subjects, the public really deserves to know the information. Because otherwise what happens is, you know, it’s, it gets out through other means, and people view it as something that should have been disclosed, and then it looks more nefarious than maybe it was, or looks like a motivating factor, when maybe it wasn’t. And again, I can’t comment on either one of those, because it wasn’t disclosed to me.

Anjeanette Damon: I finally got Karl Hall on the phone this summer.

Karl Hall: This is Karl.

Anjeanette Damon: Hey, Karl. It’s Anjeanette.

Karl Hall: Hey, Anjeanette.

Anjeanette Damon: He was in his city hall office toward the end of the day. I asked him, again, if he’d do an interview with me.

Karl Hall: You know, I’m not really inclined to do that.

Anjeanette Damon: So I just launched into my questions about his property deal in Midtown.

Anjeanette Damon: I mean, we’d just like to, I guess, understand why it wasn’t disclosed during the process, and if the whole of—

Karl Hall: Why what? The fact that I own an office building? Why that wasn’t disclosed to who?

Anjeanette Damon: To the public.

Karl Hall: It’s public record, right? I mean, what’s the, what does that have to do with anything?

Anjeanette Damon: Well, it is public record, and it was on your financial disclosure form. But in my discussions with the experts on the state ethics law, elected officials are required to disclose potential conflicts of interest in a manner that is sufficient to inform the public. Similar to, you know, I think—

Karl Hall: Well, what’s the conflict?

Anjeanette Damon: Um, I guess owning a piece of property that could be affected by a decision that’s before the city council and that your office was working to develop the policy on.

Karl Hall: No. It didn’t have anything to do with any work that I did on behalf of the city.

Anjeanette Damon: OK. And you don’t think, you know, something that would affect the future of the strip club could affect the value one way or the other of your property?

Karl Hall: Nope.

Anjeanette Damon: Karl Hall is well-versed in the state’s ethics law. He’s the city attorney. He’s at these meetings when council members make these kinds of disclosures. It’s his job to tell them when to disclose. But when it comes to his property, he says he just doesn’t see the conflict.

Karl Hall: I’m not trying to influence them one way or the other. I’m trying to defend their policy decisions. So…

Anjeanette Damon: Mmhm. But that’s, I mean, do you think—?

Karl Hall: I don’t have a dog in the fight.

Anjeanette Damon: Well, I guess some people might think you do, if you own property real close to the club.

Karl Hall: Well, not anymore.

Anjeanette Damon: Right. You sold it for a lot of money!

Karl Hall: Yeah, I think you’re trying to make something that’s not there. So, I’m sorry.

Anjeanette Damon: We went back and forth like this for a bit before wrapping up. And then he let me know he didn’t appreciate my line of questioning.

Karl Hall: Frankly, I’m a little offended, frankly, and I’m offended by that. So, anyway…

Anjeanette Damon: When I later told Kamy about Karl Hall’s building, he told me that, suddenly, everything made sense. He could never quite figure out why it seemed the city was out to get him.  

Kamy Keshmiri: I mean, come on. I mean, this is such a cornball small town corrupt politics.

Anjeanette Damon: To Kamy, Karl Hall’s possible conflict of interest explained everything.

But me, I wasn’t so sure. Yeah, Karl Hall potentially stood to benefit if the clubs were kicked out of Midtown. But there were a lot of different people pushing for that to happen. He wasn’t the only person with power, and he wasn’t the only one who had stakes.

And although the private eye hadn’t found a smoking gun, the report didn’t exactly exonerate Kamy, either. The PI hadn’t even been in the back room!

So I still had a lot of questions about what really goes on in those strip clubs, and about the effort to get rid of them.

Even before he found out about Karl Hall’s land deal, Kamy felt besieged. The private investigators. The accusations about drug and sex trafficking. Government harassment at its worst, Kamy thought. And he wasn’t going to sit back and take it.

So in September 2017, the day after the council voted to oust his clubs, Kamy unleashed his lawyer.

On its face, the federal lawsuit Mark Theirman filed against the city had little to do with the new ordinances. The suit accused the city of discriminating against women by putting more restrictions on female dancers than male revue dancers.

But in reality, Mark said, the lawsuit was payback.

Mark Thierman: When they had this ordinance floating around, I didn’t think it was going to get past, you know, that initial vote. I thought that was crazy. Then I said, fuck ’em. They want to see what war is, we’ll show ‘em what war is.

Robin Amer: Next up, Anjeanette takes a step back and goes looking for clues in Kamy’s past. Clues that could explain why he’s so combative.

And she learns that his roots in Old Reno explain a lot of his conflicts with New Reno.

That’s after the break.

ACT 2

Robin Amer: With the plan to oust the strip clubs still very much on the table, the way Kamy saw it, his hometown had turned on him.

He was a Hall of Fame athlete and a successful businessman. If anything, the city should be putting him on a pedestal.

But Kamy had been knocked off that pedestal before.

Anjeanette picks it back up from here.

Anjeanette Damon:  It’s a sunny day in April—the kind of day that makes you feel as if winter is over and spring has finally taken hold.

At Reno High School, classes have just let out for the day. More than 100 student athletes are milling about the track, waiting for practice to begin. Jumpers head to the north end of the track, sprinters line up in the middle. The distance runners set off for their circuit through the neighborhood.

Over to the side of the track is a dusty shot put ring. Some of the brawniest students, both boys and girls, are lining up to take their turns heaving a dense metal ball as far as they can.

One boy crouches into the starting position, the shot resting in his hand near his cheek. He winds up for the throw, hops forward twice, whips his torso around and thrusts the shot through the air.

Kamy Keshmiri: Drive! No. No. I like the height, but you opened up! But you got the ball up in the air.

Anjeanette Damon: If that voice sounds familiar to you, it should. It’s Kamy. Yes, in Reno, the strip club kingpin is also the assistant track coach at the local high school.

Kamy Keshmiri:  You guys, look, your bodies are dead. So we’re just going to work on legwork. OK, drive right through it. Just go! Left, down, rip! One movement. OK, not bad. Attack!

Anjeanette Damon: Both Kamy and his brother Jamy have coached discus and shot put at their alma mater for years.

As we’re standing there, the head coach pulls up in his full-size pickup truck and sees me interviewing Kamy. He makes a beeline towards us. He wants me to know how much he likes Kamy.

Lewis Green: It’s an absolute pleasure to have Coach Kamy Keshmiri here at Reno High School. The contribution he makes not only to the school, but giving back to the community, is a huge asset, and we’re thankful to have him here.

Anjeanette Damon: This is the kind of adulation Kamy is used to. He’s a hometown sports hero—a local boy made good in a place where being a local boy matters.

Kamy runs the kids through their throwing drills. He lectures one kid who dropped his elbow on a throw—he’ll hurt himself if he keeps doing that, he says. He advises another kid to use more torque.

On the side, he complains to me about their lack of discipline in a grouchy “kids-these-days” kind of way.

Kamy Keshmiri: When I grew up, it was dedication, desire, and drive. The “three Ds” is what we grew up with. These kids, I’ll take one of the three, you know? 

[To the kids] There you go. Much better! See how that works? Feels good, doesn’t it, when you get it right?

Anjeanette Damon: Kamy’s coach growing up was his dad, an Olympic athlete from Iran.

Kamy started discus when he was really young, like nine years old. By the age of 23, he was throwing farther than anyone in the world. In 1992, Kamy was just a step away from competing in the Olympics himself.

Back in his office at the Ponderosa, I asked Kamy to tell me more about his glory days. His office is actually more like a storage room, overflowing with file boxes and a ratty couch. There are no medals or trophies. No framed magazine covers.

Kamy tells me that growing up, he thought his dad was invincible. He was a mountain of a man with a thick mustache who hoped his son would follow in his athletic footsteps.

Kamy Keshmiri: Iran was kind of exotic. “Ooh, that’s kind of a cool place! Far away!” People in Reno didn’t understand much about Iran. So my dad would come to class, you know, because the Olympics. Everybody knew the Olympics. They don’t know much about Iran. So it was, it was kind of like people were in awe of that, a little bit.

Anjeanette Damon: That changed in 1979. Kamy was 10 years old when a group of Iranian college students seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in what became known as the Iran Hostage Crisis.

Kamy Keshmiri: You know, these kids are turning on me. “Your dad competes for a country that, you know, represents terrorists.” So you know, I had kids bully me, you know, in school. I mean, it was like, normal. Everyday I’d get into a fight with somebody else.

What I did was, my dad’s like, “Well, you learn to fight back.” And I guess in a lot of ways, it motivated me. And I worked out a lot harder. And I ended up being the biggest kid and everybody left me alone. It was kind of nice being the biggest kid in school.

Anjeanette Damon: Hearing this helped me start to understand Kamy a little better. So did what he told me next—about his rise to superstar athlete, and his subsequent fall.

When his dad began training him for discus, absolute discipline was required.

Kamy Keshmiri: He grew up poor in Iran. He grew up poor in a third-world country. It’s a lot different growing up poor in this country. So he felt that Americans were weak. So he wanted me to be tougher.

Anjeanette Damon: The discipline, the demanding coaching, it worked. In 1987, his senior year, Kamy broke the national high school discus record. The Nevada governor proclaimed June 22, 1987, Kamy Keshmiri Day. Gatorade named him Track and Field Athlete of the Year, which is a big deal in the world of high school sports. Emmitt Smith, who would go on to become a star NFL running back, won the same award that year.

When Kamy was in college at the University of Nevada, he won three NCAA discus titles.

By this point in his life, it was Kamy in the newspapers, not his dad.

I pulled an old story from the Reno Gazette-Journal and read Kamy the lead.

Anjeanette Damon: All right. He says, “The best young discus thrower of all time doesn’t walk through Flex Fitness gym in South Reno. He floats. His hair is teased and moussed so it stands on end, hardened like fingers of black licorice. He wears coal-colored spandex tights streamlined to his rocky thighs like a corset.” [Laughs]

Kamy Keshmiri: [Laughs] Very good writing there. That’s good stuff.

Anjeanette Damon: Is that how you see yourself?

Kamy Keshmiri: I mean, I don’t see myself that way. I mean, you know, you’re young. When I was competing, I was 300 pounds. I was a big boy. I was strong. So, yeah, maybe I stood out in the gym.

Anjeanette Damon: But Kamy’s athletic glory was cut short.

In 1992 he won the U.S. Olympic Trials with a throw more than four feet longer than the guy who came in second. They hung a gold medal around his neck. He was headed to the Olympics in Barcelona. He would represent his country, just like his dad wanted.

But then his mom called.

Kamy Keshmiri: So I win the trials, right? And literally I get a call from my mom saying I’ve got a FedEx thing for the drug test that says I failed, or whatever.

Anjeanette Damon: His pre-competition drug test came back positive for steroids.

Kamy never competed in the Olympics. A guy from Lithuania won the gold that year with a throw almost 20 feet shorter than Kamy’s all-time best.

In Kamy’s eyes, he was the victim of a conspiracy, the details of which are too convoluted to get into here. He said he routinely did uppers during competition. Excessive amounts of caffeine, for instance. But he never did anything illegal.

Kamy fought the suspension for a while, but eventually gave up on his appeals. They banned him from the sport for life.

But talking to me today, Kamy waves that part off. He says he had already made the decision that 1992 would be his last year throwing.

Kamy Keshmiri: And I knew at that point I was done. For me it was over. So, you know, it was meant to be. Like I said, that, God didn’t want me to do it. And thank God, because my dad would have paraded me around as his Olympic champion son, and I would’ve literally thrown until my arm fell off.

Anjeanette Damon: As Kamy tells me his life story, I can’t help but think that his life seems to run in these cycles of adulation and excoriation. He’s popular because his dad’s an Olympian. Then he’s bullied because he’s Iranian. He’s a hometown hero for his athletic prowess, then he’s branded a cheater. He’s a respected local businessman, then he’s the smut-peddling scourge of New Reno.

As he sees it, each time it’s the powers that be trying screw him out of what he worked so hard to achieve.

And each time, Kamy turns toward the fight. The bullies beat him up, he gets stronger. The city comes after his club, he readies for battle.

Kamy Keshmiri: My father had a sign over his office: “When life kicks you, it kicks you forward.” That was his motto. So they want to push this, I really feel that the city is on the wrong end of this, and they’re going to end it, we’re gonna end up getting more.

Robin Amer: Kamy presents himself as a victim standing up to bullies—as a righteous warrior fighting against the city.

But next up, Kamy shows he’s willing to use his own desperate tenants in service of that fight.

After the break, Kamy unleashes Velma and her neighbors.

ACT 3

Robin Amer: When Kamy stuck that letter on Velma’s door, he knew that the city council had been under pressure to do something about the lack of affordable housing in Reno.

So you could argue that it was a shrewd move to threaten his tenants with a rent increase while blaming it on the city. It was Kamy’s way of showing that if city officials came after his clubs, they wouldn’t just be hurting him.

Let’s go back to Anjeanette.

Neoma Jardon: 24th meeting of the Reno City Council. Our first order of business is the Pledge of Allegiance, and if we can get Tammy Holtstill to lead us in the pledge…

Anjeanette Damon: It’s January 2018, about four months after the city council approves the plan to start ousting the strip clubs, and I’m back at City Hall for a routine council meeting.

To be honest, I’m expecting a dull affair. Stripclubs aren’t on the agenda.

But just as the meeting is getting underway, about two-dozen people file into the room. Some are young and look to be blue-collar workers. A couple of others are in wheelchairs. There’s an elderly man in a frayed sports coat, his hair pomaded into place. Many have weathered faces.

This is the pack of Ponderosa residents that Velma Shoals has wrangled to city hall to fight for their homes.

Clerk: Velma Shoals followed by Warren Brown followed by Jay Williams.

Velma Shoals: Yes, my name is Velma Shoals. I’ve been at the Ponderosa for five years, six years, with my granddaughter.

Anjeanette Damon: At 4’8”, Velma’s barely taller than the lectern before her. Her graying auburn hair is pulled back in an elastic band, and her chin is set as she faces the council members.

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

Anjeanette Damon: Shortly before the council meeting, Velma had seen the letter on her door. And this confrontation is exactly what Kamy wanted. Remember, he’d encouraged his tenants to reach out to their elected officials. Even given them names and phone numbers.

Velma Shoals: We really need our, we need this hotel more than anything in the world right now. Not just me, but other families. I’m not the only family raising kids there.

Anjeanette Damon: Kamy’s gambit with the letter has scared the hell out of the people living in his hotel. Velma makes it clear that they are desperate to stay.

Velma Shoals: I mean, they was there when I had nobody, when I had no one and nowhere to turn. That hotel gave me a place to live, a bed to sleep in, and a way to cook for my granddaughter. When I was homeless, going from couch to couch, I mean, please don’t take that from us. Just do the best you can to help us save that. I would appreciate that. Thank you very much. [Applause]

Anjeanette Damon: It’s clear that Velma and the other hotel residents don’t blame Kamy for any of this—they blame the Reno City Council.

But Councilwoman Neoma Jardon tries to turn their attention back to the guy threatening to double their rent.

Neoma Jardon: Thank you very much. I hope the owners see what this tactic has done in scaring you and making you cry at the podium and worry about the roof over your head. I hope they are watching today. 

Anjeanette Damon: She sees Kamy’s move with the letter as a political ploy.

Neoma Jardon: It’s, it’s a disgusting tactic and they’re using you as their mechanism and pawn. I haven’t seen the letter, but it concerns me greatly that you guys are here today out of your busy days, scared, and that, you know, it’s an unfortunate tactic that I find offensive and frankly not effective. So I just wanted to let you know our side, from the city council. So Madam Clerk, next speaker…

Anjeanette Damon: OK, let me just step back here. Even without the strip club fight, the threat to the Ponderosa residents is real as Reno changes around them.

An influx of tech workers has helped push Reno’s housing prices to record heights.

When Ponderosa residents confronted city council members, Reno’s median house price was $370,000—that’s up from $135,000 in 2012.

Meanwhile, the average wage in Reno is just $46,000 a year.

Apartment vacancy rates are near zero. Investors are coming in and scooping up existing apartment buildings and jacking up the rent or even evicting tenants to make it easier to remodel.

Landlords once partnered with caseworkers to rent to people who needed help. Now they’re renting to Tesla workers.

The waitlist for housing assistance is so long officials have stopped taking new names entirely. People are living out of their cars or in tents along the Truckee River, which runs through downtown.

Reno’s only homeless shelter is so overcrowded that a man recently died from hypothermia after he was trapped on the roof. His body lay there for days before he was found.

And the weeklies—the motels where people like Velma pay to live—those are disappearing, too, even though they’re home to 4,000 people who have nowhere else to go.

In fact, Councilwoman Jardon has been a huge proponent of old motel demolitions. She even posed for a photo opp sitting astride a bulldozer sent to clear the land of one.

This is why Kamy’s note on his tenant’s doors was so damn frightening. When Velma says she has nowhere else to go if she loses her home at the Ponderosa, she’s right.

I wanted to better understand their situation. So I went to visit one day last July.

When I arrive, a group of people are lounging in front of the Ponderosa Hotel, trying to escape the heat in their rooms. Children are playing with a deflated soccer ball between the cars in the carport.

As I stroll up to the front door, a guy sees my mic and launches into an animated monologue about how he could use ammonia to rid the Ponderosa of all of its bed bugs.

Gaetano Cercone: I only been here a few days, I get totally chewed by bugs. We’re gonna eradicate without Raid. We’re gonna do it with ammonia. Keep people healthy.

I start chatting with another guy standing on two prosthetic legs, and he says he’s having trouble finding a new place. Apartment landlords won’t take him when they find out he’s living at the Ponderosa. They’re afraid he’ll bring bedbugs with him.

Inside, I discover that the Ponderosa’s poor reputation has been earned.

[Grinding noise]

That noise is the elevator. You can hear it grinding away from far down the hall. Residents I spoke with said it constantly breaks down, sometimes leaving people who are in wheelchairs stranded for hours in the lobby or upstairs in hallways.

I step out of the elevator and onto the fourth floor. Half the lightbulbs are missing and the ones that are still working, they’re flickering—almost like a strobe-light. There’s just enough light to see a cockroach scoot down the wall to my left.

 Velma’s place is at the far end of the hall.

She invites me into the room she’s been living in with her 16-year-old granddaughter, Tayla, for seven years. She’s done a great job of turning the hotel room into a comfortable living space.

Velma Shoals: Well, it’s got a, you know, it’s got a living area here. It’s got two beds in it. I could have tables and chairs, if I wanted. I do have the table.

Anjeanette Damon: Living in her small room at the Ponderosa is far better than the two years she spent homeless and couch surfing in California.

Velma Shoals: I’m gonna have to move where? Where am I going? I don’t have money to move. I’ve got Tayla. What I’m gonna do with her? The river? That’s the next best thing—the river.

Anjeanette Damon: Beyond having her own place, Velma has carved out an important role for herself at the hotel.

She’s a de facto leader here. She marches up and down the halls gripping her oversized cell phone by the pop it glued to the back. She picks up any trash she sees along the way. She checks in on her neighbors, makes sure people have food.

Velma Shoals: We’ve got a little man that just moved in a couple of doors over. He’s lived here before, but he was homeless, So I told him I fix him a little box of stuff and bring to him. Some of us, we just kind of look out for one another.

Anjeanette Damon: I ask if I can meet her neighbors, and she insists that I meet her buddy John down the hall.

Velma Shoals: [Sound of knocking] Knock knock! Just a minute, I got the news popping in.

Anjeanette Damon: She announces me as “the news,” and initially, John wants nothing to do with me.But he’s no match for Velma’s relentlessness, and he ultimately invites me inside.

John: We live here. This is this is my home. I’m proud of my home, you know? I mean look, I love my home. I keep, I live all by myself, but I keep a nice clean house and I’m a happy camper. I like it. I like it.

Anjeanette Damon: John’s health is fragile. For years, he worked at a plant nursery until heart attacks and seizures made working impossible.

His room isn’t any bigger than Velma’s. But he chose it because of the view from the fourth floor window.

John: I like it. I like it. I love this view. I sit here and I, I sit here in the morning. I have a coffee. I say my prayers. And you know, it’s excellent. It’s a great way to wake up every morning. I can see from the very far east to the very far west. And I sit 60, 70 feet above the city. And so my view is an entire open view of the entire south of Reno.

Anjeanette Damon: The city is spread out before John’s window—the lively restaurants and bars along Virginia Street, the valley full of trees and houses beyond Midtown, the ski runs carved into the mountain range in the distance. You can see why developers would want to build high-priced condos here.

John has watched Reno change from this window. The weekly motel across the parking lot is now market-rate condos. Yoga shops and fancy cocktail bars have opened around him.

He used to watch tourists stream out of downtown hotel casinos. Now he sees people leaving their hotel rooms to catch a ride out to their new jobs at Tesla.

John: I’ve seen the entire crew marching every morning out of Harrah’s and out of Circus and marching over getting on the shuttles to get bussed out to the Gigafactories. Tesla, Panasonic, so on.

Anjeanette Damon: If these changes force the Ponderosa to close, like Velma, John would have nowhere else to go.

Kamy’s letter sparked panic among his tenants. But it also brought into stark relief the real stakes in this fight over what the New Reno should be. Council members celebrate motel demolitions as progress, all the while taking on a fight that could make that housing crisis even worse for the city’s most vulnerable residents.

So while Kamy may be the one scaring his tenants with threats of rent hikes, he says he’s not the real villain.

Kamy Keshmiri: They want to make me look like their bad guy. Who’s the bad guy? You’re the one wants to kick—I didn’t, I didn’t start this war. The truth of the matter is, you’re the one kicking these people out. You’re the one creating this. Not me. So you can lie to everybody and spin it to “bad Keshmiri.” But the reality is, Mr. Keshmiri has been doing a service for this town a long time and helping these poor people out. That’s the truth.

Robin Amer: Velma and John aren’t the only people caught up in a fight that threatens their stability.

While Kamy was busy orchestrating the dramatic confrontation between Ponderosa residents and the Reno City Council, the city was quietly deploying a weapon of its own.

The cops are about to show up on Kamy’s doorstep. But just like with Velma and John, he’s not the only one who’ll suffer the consequences.

Stephanie: I was just like, I knew I didn’t do anything wrong, so I was just like I don’t understand how I could be in this situation. Like, why me? Like… [Starts crying]

Anjeanette Damon: Oh gosh, I’m sorry.

Stephanie: It’s OK. It’s not, it’s just, I don’t know why that happened to me.

Anjeanette Damon: Yeah, no. it’s—you got caught. Like, you got caught in something a lot bigger that has nothing to do with you.

Stephanie: Yeah, because I didn’t do anything wrong. And I’m just like, it sucks that they had to use me as a pawn for whatever is going on between them and the city. Like that’s not right. Like, you’re ruining people’s lives.

Robin Amer:  That’s next time on The City.

CREDITS

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.

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

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

Brian Duggan is the Reno Gazette-Journal’s executive editor. Chris Davis is the USA TODAY Network’s vice president for investigations. Scott Stein is our vice president of product. Our president and publisher is Maribel Wadsworth.

Special thanks to Liz Nelson, Kelly Scott, and Alicia Barber.

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