Original music from The City

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Meet our composer Hannis Brown

When he’s not writing music for The City, he composes for podcasts such as The Anthropocene Reviewed, Death, Sex and Money and Scattered from New York Public Radio. A Peabody Award winner, Hannis also recently received Columbia duPont awards for the investigative podcasts Trump, Inc and Caught: The Lives of Juvenile Justice.

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What does Reno sound like?

“We wanted some punk. Some touches of lounge music. The glossy sound of new tech. The grit of the strip clubs. But also the emptiness and beauty of the desert.”

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Hannis grew up outside Phoenix, so the desert is a special place for him. To capture the feeling of its endless sky and touch on the musical tropes of Reno, he used “reverb-y electric guitar, twang, and atmospherics.”

To capture the more “glossy” sound of new technology companies like Tesla, Hannis drew on an electronic music palette. And for the strip clubs, he was inspired by lounge music, 1990s club music, and hard rock.

His favorite track from the Reno soundtrack is “Suns Set, Psychedelic Take.” It features trumpeter Indofunk Satish, who plays live in a what he calls a “Calexico style” over Hannis’s guitar. 

 (Note from Hannis: “He’s played with Bruce Springsteen! Not Reno-related, but geeze!”) 

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What does Chicago sound like?

“The soundtrack really captures the spirit of progress. But the underlying idea that everything remains essentially the same underneath the veneer of change.”

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The sounds of Season 1: Chicago was influenced by house music, jazz, and blues, and the post-rock sound of Chicago’s legendary Thrill Jockey label.

Hannis’s favorite track is “Traffic Layers,” a meditative saxophone track played over a layer of traffic ambiance. It was captured on a Chicago overpass not far from North Lawndale, the neighborhood at the center of our Season 1 story.

He also recruited Curtis MacDonald to play the sax in the track. MacDonald plays in Henry Threadgill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning band, and he was an important member of the largely Chicago-based Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in the 1980s.

Follow Hannis on social media @quietguynoises, and hear his other work at hannisbrown.com

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Send us your favorite Reno songs…

…so we can add them to our Spotify playlist! Some are about the Biggest Little City, some were inspired by it, some were created by local artists. Some even inspired the music composed by Hannis Brown for the podcast.

Did we miss any songs? Send us suggestions for the playlist at info@thecitypodcast.com. Or get in touch on social media — we’re @thecitypod on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. 

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Transcript 

Robin Amer: Hey everyone. I know you know this by now, but just want to emphasize again that because this season of The City is about strip clubs, it’s not suitable for everyone, especially kids. That is especially true of this episode, which has a lot of explicit conversations—like, very explicit conversations—about sex. OK, thanks a lot. 

Production team member: Previously on The City … 

Elon Musk: This is very much the land of opportunity here. Like, feels like freedom, right here. Feels like freedom. [Applause]

Chad Dehne: I know that they provide jobs for a lot of beautiful families here in the Reno area and beyond. But at the same time, there’s a protocol that you’ve got to follow so that those people can go home safe and sound to their families or not suffer ill effects from things they may have been exposed to down the line.

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

Mayor Hillary Schieve: I want them patrolled. I want them well-lit. I want them in places where they cannot hide.

Kamy Keshmiri: There’s no records. There’s no reports. There’s not police act—there’s nothing. So what do you do? Lie.

Stephanie: That’s when the undercover cop said, “Oh, we need someone to sit on my buddy.” And like, I’m just thinking, like, “OK, well if I go sit on his lap, I’m for sure gonna get that dance.” 

Undercover cop: We got a deal. Heavy-set girl in a red top. Heavy-set girl in a red top. 

Robin Amer: It’s a busy day at the Reno Municipal Court. The judge in Courtroom B is plodding through a cattle call of cases: DUIs, domestic violence, car crashes.

Stephanie is waiting in the gallery. It’s been six months since she was cited in an undercover prostitution sting at the Spice House, one of Kamy Keshmiri’s clubs. This sting was bad news for Stephanie. But it’s also central to the city’s efforts to kick strip clubs out of downtown—clubs they see as an obstacle to Reno’s reinvention. 

Stephanie is actually feeling pretty optimistic. Kamy Keshmiri’s combative lawyer, Mark Thierman, is at her side. But more than that, she believes the evidence is on her side. She’s certain the secret recording of that night at the Spice House will exonerate her.

Stephanie: You know, it’s all in the tape. Like, maybe’s not yes. And so I was really confident.

Robin Amer: Remember, Stephanie landed in court because when an undercover cop asked her if he could lick her in the back room of the club, she answered, quote, “maybe.” 

Fast forward to the middle of the trial, and that word “maybe” is now the focal point, as the prosecutor argues that “maybe” actually means “yes,” and Mark Thierman pushes the undercover cop to concede the opposite.

Mark Thierman: When you asked if you could lick her down there, didn’t she respond by saying “maybe”?

Undercover cop: At one point, yes.

Mark Thierman: She responded twice by saying maybe.

Undercover cop: I don’t recall the number, but yes. 

Mark Thierman: Does “maybe” mean yes to you?

Undercover cop: No.

Robin Amer: Stephanie’s case hinges on this word “maybe,” but you could argue that the outcome of the larger battle between Old Reno and New Reno also rests on an uncertain promise.

Is Stephanie selling actual sex? Or is she selling a fantasy? In that same vein, how much of New Reno’s promise is real, and how much is just an illusion? And is the Reno City Council’s real problem with Old Reno the image of Kamy’s clubs or the reality of what’s happening inside?

In our last episode, we looked at what it’s really like to work in New Reno by taking you inside Tesla’s Gigafactory. Now, it’s time to pull back the curtain on work in Old Reno, by looking at the jobs inside Kamy’s clubs. 

And as it turns out, one dancer’s “maybe” isn’t the worst thing happening there.

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

Act 1 

Robin Amer: When it comes to its campaign against the strip clubs, Reno didn’t just conduct police raids or prosecute dancers. After the mayor said she wanted the clubs to be, quote, “patrolled, well-lit, in places they cannot hide,” the city unleashed an arsenal of inspections on Kamy’s clubs. 

If the city couldn’t kick Kamy out of downtown, it sure could make his life miserable. 

Here’s our reporter, Anjeanette Damon.

Anjeanette Damon: It’s January 2019. I’m sitting in the office on kind of a slow afternoon, if such a thing exists in the news business, when I get a text from Jeremy Cronick, the manager of the Wild Orchid. It says simply: “Code enforcement is here again.”

The Wild Orchid is just five minutes from the newsroom, so I jump in my car and get there just in time to see a parade of city vehicles leaving the club.

Kamy’s whole crew is gathered around the table in that back office at the Ponderosa Hotel. Kamy’s in his usual spot at the head of the table. His brother Jamy’s at the other end. Lawyer Mark Thierman’s at Kamy’s side. The managers of his three strip clubs fill out the rest of the seats.

Calvin, the maintenance guy who takes care of the Ponderosa and Wild Orchid, is briefing the group on what the city inspectors found in their latest visit.

Calvin: All of this back area here is illegal. Every bit of it. The Secrets Lounge and all these rooms back here is illegal. If the wall was gone and the booths was on the other side so you could see it from the main floor, it’d be fine.

Mark Theirman: Oh, they’re going back to the “in plain sight” thing? Screw that.

Anjeanette Damon: That was Mark. Yes, the Reno City Council is trying to ban private rooms, but it turns out that even under existing code, back rooms are already illegal. 

But Mark says the back rooms in all three of Kamy’s clubs have been there since before any of the laws took effect, so they must be allowed to remain. The city says otherwise.

There are other issues too.

Calvin: The curtain that separates the front from the back? The label says “Not fire retardant” right on it! He goes, “Well you can’t keep these here!”

Anjeanette Damon:  Yeah… Curtains that could burst into flames? That’s a problem. 

Code enforcement also checked on the strip club’s restrooms to make sure they were accessible to people with disabilities. Lucky for Kamy, the club was OK there.

Calvin: If it wasn’t that, they was gonna shut your doors down today. Literally, pfft, you’re done.

Anjeanette Damon: Kamy and Mark are indignant about all of it. 

Mark Theirman: They want to impose impossible standards for you to make a living so that you will sell the building and they can turn it into a parking lot. But at least they wouldn’t have to deal with it, because of what’s inside it.

Anjeanette Damon: They’re also starting to feel the pressure of all this scrutiny. 

Since the fight with the city started, the Wild Orchid and the Ponderosa Hotel, where Kamy’s low-income tenants live, have been visited by Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors, city fire marshals, code enforcement, and the health department. 

Now, these visits were a legitimate use of government power, meant to keep workers and the public safe. And the inspectors found problems, which were detailed in extensive reports. OSHA, for example, found Ponderosa employees exposed to dirty needles, asbestos, and live wires. They fined the hotel nearly $13,000.

And while Kamy’s fighting those fines, he did spend money to correct the problems inspectors found.

Still, many of the problems found by inspectors had existed for years without the city seeming to pay them much mind. For example, cupboards in the Ponderosa that blocked fire sprinklers and those curtains in the Wild Orchid, they weren’t new.

But suddenly, at the same time an effort was underway to kick the clubs out of downtown, the city was taking notice of these things. Typically, when fire inspectors would visit the Ponderosa and Wild Orchid, they’d spend about an hour-and-a-half doing their annual inspection. But last year, the inspector spent five-and-a-half hours on site.

Kamy saw these visits as baseless attacks on his business. Attacks so aggressive, that he started to believe that there’s an outlandish plot against him—a belief fueled by one city visit in particular. 

Let me take you back to the summer of 2018. The private eye has secretly been through the clubs. The city council has voted against them—twice. And the police and code enforcement have received their marching orders.

So Kamy calls me up one afternoon with a wild story about the police poking around the Wild Orchid’s basement in the early morning hours, when no one is around. He’s got them on surveillance video, he says—“Come see for yourself.”

So I do.

I meet Kamy and Jeremy—he’s the manager of the Wild Orchid—in that Pondrosa backroom. Jeremy lays it out for me.

Jeremy Cronick: So, on like, 4:30 in the morning, whatever, a couple cops come over, say, “Hey, we want to see the basement.” The gal up front is like, “Mmm, yeah, sure, whatever.” So they come in and they end up in the Wild Orchid basement.

Anjeanette Damon: The cops don’t have a warrant, but the desk clerk lets them in anyway, and shows them how to get downstairs.

Jeremy shows me still images from the club’s video cameras. Sure enough, there are two officers in uniform, shining their flashlights into dark corners of the basement. They’re in there for about ten minutes.

Kamy is super suspicious. He finds the timing odd.

Kamy Keshmiri: So they purposely picked Sunday night, Monday morning, knowing the club was closed, to go down in the basement. For—we have that bug down there that we saw, right? Did you show her the bug?

Anjeanette Damon: Wait, what? A bug? 

For a split second, I think Kamy may be talking about a cockroach. But, no, he’s talking about a black box kinda bug. He’s not sure what it is. Some kind of spying or listening device? Kamy’s IT guy found it plugged into the building’s phone system after the cops left. 

I want to see exactly what he’s talking about.

Anjeanette Damon: Maybe, do you, can we go down there with you now that I have this picture?

Kamy Keshmiri: Sure.

Anjeanette Damon: It is that—OK.

Kamy Keshmiri: Yeah, of course.  

Kamy Keshmiri: I’ll show you exactly how it was. I’ll show you. I was there. So, it was bizarre… [Fades under]

Anjeanette Damon: Kamy is out of his seat in a flash, striding toward the basement stairs. I jump up and chase after him. He walks fast, talking the whole time about the IT guy—a guy who lives in the Ponderosa and takes care of the club’s technology in exchange for a break on his rent.

We walk fast down the stairs leading from the Ponderosa back office and land in a shadowy hallway underneath the Wild Orchid. It seems to stretch endlessly into the dark. At our feet is just a bunch of junk—rat poison, tools, old pipe.

I can’t help but wonder: What the hell am I doing down here? Where is this leading? But I gotta keep up with Kamy.

Off the main passageway are openings to cavernous side rooms that are full of artifacts from the building’s past—old furniture reminiscent of its days as a casino. That replica of the Greek statue Discobolus, from when it was a nightclub.

The building was originally a car dealership in the ‘50s.

Kamy Keshmiri: This is old. You know, at one time this used to be a Packard dealership, so they had Packards down here.

Anjeanette Damon : A Packard—?  

Kamy Keshmiri: Packard—you know the car? Those days, you bought a car, you bought the parts and they assembled them at the dealers, and did all kinds of stuff… [Fades under]

Anjeanette Damon: Wholesome mainstreet car dealership, glitzy casino, pulsating nightclub. It’s like running through a dim memory of Reno’s past reinventions. Maybe in five years this building will be a sushi burrito joint and hipster hotel, the stripper poles abandoned down here beside Discobolus. 

We make it to a small control room of sorts. An alarm sounds when Kamy walks through the door.

He points to a mess of wires and cables attached to the wall.

Kamy Keshmiri: It was sitting right here. 

Anjeanette Damon: I have no idea what I’m looking at, to tell you the truth. Cables come in through the wall and plug into various routers for the club’s phone and internet service. More wires run through a complex switchboard-looking thing that provides phone service to all the Ponderosa’s hotel rooms. It’s seriously old school. 

Kamy Keshmiri: This is, uh, this is, like, our switch panel, you know. It does the club, it does the hotel. It’s all, you know, all our panels for credit cards, for our Internet. 

Anjeanette Damon: There’s an old line from the novel Catch-22—one that Mark likes to repeat when he’s talking about Kamy. It goes like this: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you. In this case, Kamy might be paranoid, but it doesn’t mean that the city’s not out to get him. I mean, the city did hire a private investigator to dig up dirt on him. It’s the main reason I went on this wild bug chase to begin with. 

If a device was indeed installed by the police, it’s in the perfect location.

But I’m still skeptical. 

Anjeanette Damon: I mean, you really think that they were here to bug your phones? Like the Wild Orchid phones or the Ponderosa phones or—?

Kamy Keshmiri: Well, this is what we do know. They came in. The guy that does all our work around here was down there a couple weeks ago. Said that was not there. That was transmitting a signal that none of us knew. … The police aren’t our friends.

Anjeanette Damon: OK, so what was Reno PD up to that night?

I know the cops were in the basement. Kamy has video proof they were there, but no footage of them actually placing a device. So there should be a police report, right? Like the documentation of all the other city visits to the clubs. 

But the city has nothing in its files about this visit. The only thing it has is two seconds of tape from the dispatch center noting two officers’ location at the Ponderosa.

So I call the watch commander to ask what they might have been up to. This is Lt. Joe Robinson.

Joe Robinson: OK, let me it pull up. What do we have going on there? … The officers were hailed. They talked to somebody on the street claiming to be an informant of some type. Said that they were cooking methamphetamine in the basement of the Ponderosa. [Laughs] The officers—

Anjeanette Damon: Really?

Joe Robinson: Yeah. 

Anjeanette Damon: So, here’s the story from the police: Two rookie cops—Robinson says they have a zeal to “do good police work”—were flagged down by a guy on the street who said he had information that someone was cooking meth in the basement of the Ponderosa. So the cops went to check it out. That’s it.

I ask him about Kamy’s conspiracy theory.

Anjeanette Damon: So, I don’t know If you’re the right person to respond to this being a patrol lieutenant, but Kamy Keshmiri is convinced that those officers planted a bug on the phone.

Joe Robinson: A bug? 

Anjeanette Damon: Yeah, his IT guy went down there after the officers left and found a router plugged into their phone system, um, and he’s he’s convinced that the officers are the ones that left that there.

Joe Robinson: You know, pretty sure that’d be a federal offense, planting any type of bug or anything like that without going through the proper court channels. So I will answer to that. 

Anjeanette Damon: Robinson repeats the story of the officers trying to hunt down a meth lab, stresses that the desk clerk let them in the building, and says nine minutes is a reasonable amount of time to be inside.

Joe Robinson: If Mr. Keshmiri or anyone else feels that the Reno Police Department unjustly planted a bug, I strongly recommend that he call the Reno Police Department Internal Affairs Division and have it investigated.

Anjeanette Damon: Kamy never did file an internal affairs complaint. He thinks, why bother. 

Robin Amer: With this new onslaught of enforcement, Kamy sees conspiracies where there may be none. The real question though—as it’s been from the beginning—is the city’s crackdown justified? Does it have good reason to go after Kamy? Or is it just trying to find a way to bulldoze the clubs to make way for New Reno? 

After the break, Anjeanette finally gets some answers. 

Jane: If you paid the bouncer like half, you can have sex in the back rooms. 

Anjeanette Damon: Did you do that?

Jane: Yeah, I—I unfortunately got really involved in the prostitution part.

Act 2

Robin Amer: The private investigators that the city sent into Kamy’s clubs documented touching, oral sex, and other activity that stretched beyond the boundaries of local law.

They also suggested that drug use and prostitution were happening inside. 

But their report also raised a lot of unanswered questions. For example, those private eyes never made it into the back rooms. 

So what’s really happening back there? 

Over the past year, Anjeanette has tried to find out. 

Anjeanette Damon: To hear Mark and Kamy tell it, the clubs are spic and span: no prostitution, no violence, no underage drinking, no drug dealing. It does not happen!

Kamy can get worked up—as Kamy often does—about this subject. Like during this conversation I had with him at the Wild Orchid one night.

Kamy Keshmiri: We’ve been here over 24 years. That’s a lot of time, a lot of dancers, a lot of employees that have come and gone through here, that you could have gotten, that could have spoken one at a time about all the bad things that go on in these clubs, and they don’t have one. Not a single one in 24 years! That’s pretty damn amazing.

Anjeanette Damon: But I wonder: Is the reason no one has come forward really because there’s nothing to come forward about? What if people aren’t jumping up at council meetings or filing police reports or complaints because they’re intimidated?

Kamy doesn’t buy that theory.

Kamy Keshmiri: Why? What would they be afraid of? I’m not a criminal. I have no—I mean, what am I going to do? I’m not a crime figure. I mean, this isn’t the Sopranos here.

Anjeanette Damon: If his critics are right, if the club is a hotbed of prostitution and drugs and illegal activity, he says everybody would know it.

Kamy Keshmiri: Do you think if they had a real life person they wouldn’t parade that person all over town? They would. They don’t have anybody, because there’s nobody there, and there’s nobody there because there’s nothing going on!

Anjeanette Damon: But I did find people. People who tell a dramatically different story—a story that isn’t as black and white as the one Kamy likes to tell. 

Anjeanette Damon: So they, the managers and the Keshmiris say it doesn’t happen, it absolutely—

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

Anjeanette Damon: I’ve spent a lot of time in Kamy’s clubs over the past year. I’ve shadowed dancers, hung out in their locker rooms, chatted with managers. I wanted to understand what these jobs in my community are really like, whether in the new economy or the old. So as I did with Tesla, I went looking for the truth. 

So, the woman calling the Keshmiris liars is Tawny. 

Remember her? She’s the former A-list dancer who was at the club when the cops raided Safari Nights in 2007. Tawny worked at the Wild Orchid for about 10 years, until 2014, when she says Kamy kicked her out for being too loud and drunk too often.

Tawny says she never had sex with a client—that was a line she never wanted to cross. But what she did participate in—even made a business out of—were illegal “buyouts.”

Here’s how a buyout would work: A dancer would meet a customer who wanted to take her out of the club, say to go gambling, or dancing, or to have sex in a hotel room. But first, the customer would have to pay the club.

Tawny: You go up to a manager and he’s like, “I’m not going to let you leave unless—I need girls—so that guy needs to pay a thousand dollars for you to leave.” And literally the guy would pay the club a thousand dollars. It’s a buyout fee.

Anjeanette Damon: After he pays the club, the dancer is free to negotiate her own separate fee with the customer.

Tawny says it was a regular occurrence for her. She would go gambling with her customers or to fancy dinners, golf parties—even a military ball.

Tawny: Yeah and I just made it a business. That’s how I did it. 

Anjeanette Damon: For safety reasons, Tawny took photos of her customers’ drivers licenses before she left the club with them. And she built a network of Reno’s casino pit bosses, VIP hosts, and limo drivers who she could tip to make sure she wasn’t in danger.

Tawny: And I get in the limo and I hand a hundred through the window to the guy. And I’m like, “You’re on my ass all night.” He’s like, “OK, what do you guys need?” And I’m like, “This guy just wants to go dancing and gambling. I’m staying on the floor.” I said, “Make sure you have your eyes on me.”

Anjeanette Damon: Tawny often had to protect herself inside the strip club as well. She says she wasn’t afraid to slap a guy or yell at him for groping her. It got her in trouble with the club managers, who wanted dancers to be polite to customers. But she says it also kept her safe.

Tawny: It protected me, because that kept me from being with a guy that could rape me or take advantage of me. So that kept that from happening. 

Anjeanette Damon: Tawny tells me that strippers couldn’t always rely on the bouncers to protect them. Sometimes a customer could tip a bouncer to look the other way. Other times a bouncer might look the other way because he wasn’t being tipped enough by the stripper.

Anjeanette Damon: They’re supposed to be there taking care of you to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Tawny: That’s what we always said! And you only had, like, one out of every four bouncers that was truthfully taking care of you. That was it.

Anjeanette Damon: Some of the dancers I talked to felt completely safe in the clubs. If a guy got out of line, they said all they had to do was get the attention of the manager or the bouncer and he’d be dealt with.

I saw this myself at the Wild Orchid. Jeremy would intervene between dancers and patrons when they had an issue. 

But Tawny isn’t the only dancer I talked to who described buyouts. Other strippers independently confirmed that a guy could pay the club money to take a woman out of the club. And with as much time as Kamy and Jamy spend in their clubs, Tawny doesn’t believe for a second that they were unaware it was happening.

Also, some dancers I talked to said the clubs could be a dangerous place, particularly those private back rooms. Dancers told me about being verbally abused, groped, fingered, fondled, even drugged there.

Anjeanette Damon: It’s chilly.

Fil Corbitt: Yeah.

Anjeanette Damon: Hi, how are you?

Anjeanette Damon: Fil and I are meeting up for coffee with two former strippers who’ve transitioned out of the sex industry. There’s like six inches of snow on the ground outside, but now we’re sitting in Melissa Holland’s warm living room. 

Melissa’s the anti-sex trafficking activist we met briefly in Episode 1. She’s working with PR maven Abbi Whitaker and Mike Kazmierski to get the strip clubs kicked out of downtown.

While Abbi and Mike want the clubs gone to clear the way for economic renewal, Melissa is fighting the clubs on moral grounds. She believes what happens in the strip clubs, even the legal stuff, is morally wrong.

She wants me to meet these two dancers she knows, Her organization, Awaken, helped them transition out of the sex industry.

Jane and April—not their real names—say they worked at the Wild Orchid. April for 10 years, until 2014, and Jane for six years, until 2016. Jane says she also worked at Kamy’s other two clubs from time to time. 

Jane started stripping when she was 16, homeless, and a new mom. She was too young to get the required work card from the city, so she never did. But she said the managers at Kamy’s clubs didn’t care. 

Both women describe scary situations inside Kamy’s clubs, where money reigned supreme.  Here’s Jane. 

Jane: If you pay enough money, and you can basically touch and do whatever. Especially in the back rooms. There’s, like, so much happens in the back rooms, and I mean people would come out with black eyes all the time from those rooms. And they, “Here’s some alcohol. You’re going to be OK. Like, here’s some makeup.” The house mom, like always, like, “Here, I have some extra makeup to cover that up.”

Anjeanette Damon: April says her friend was choked in a private room and she herself was once drugged at the club.

April: I had one drink, and I’m just holding onto the walls trying to make it down to the dressing room. And the girls saw me just laying on the floor and they just assumed that I was wasted and nothing was done. 

Anjeanette Damon: April tells me pimps would often prowl the Wild Orchid.

Anjeanette Damon: Were you ever approached by guys that seemed to be, like, pimps, like?

April: Oh, all the time.

Anjeanette Damon: And how would they approach you?

April: Oh, they come over and they’re, like, “Hey girl, you’re beautiful. You know, we can make some good money together.” And I was like, “Go fuck yourself, personally.” 

Anjeanette Damon: Jane wasn’t so lucky. She says she fell victim to a group of pimps when she went to a party at another dancer’s house. She says they beat her up and raped her. 

She never went to the police, because she says she was afraid the pimps would kill her. They told her they had an in with the police department and would know if she reported them.

To avoid beatings, she said they told her she had to earn them a certain amount of money each week.

To be clear, these pimps weren’t associated with the strip club, and Jane didn’t meet them there. I talked to several women who said they saw prostitution happening at the club, but Jane is the only stripper I talked to who said she was coherced by pimps. 

Jane said she would help fill her quota in Kamy’s clubs. She also worked in the brothels outside of town—including the Mustang Ranch, Lance Gilman’s brothel—and picked up clients from online escort services.

It’s all part of the ecosystem of sex work in Nevada, both legal and illegal—the ecosystem backers of the New Reno are trying to dismantle.

Even though he’s been adament he’s not aware of it, it seems pretty clear that solicitation for sex happens inside Kamy’s clubs. Jane, April, and other current and former dancers shared similar stories about customers offering money for sex. Some, not all, take them up on the offer.

Jane: If you paid the bouncer like half, you can have sex in the back rooms.

Anjeanette Damon: Did you do that?

Jane: Yeah, I—I unfortunately got really involved in the prostitution part.

Anjeanette Damon: Melissa Holland’s organization, Awaken, also hired a lawyer, Jason Guinasso, to take sworn statements from women who worked in Reno’s strip clubs as part of some early groundwork for a potential lawsuit against the clubs for poor working conditions. 

As of today, Jason hasn’t filed any lawsuits. So although the statements were taken under oath, they have not been filed in court or subjected to any kind of scrutiny by opposing lawyers. Mark Thierman told me he’s never seen them.

I joined Jason at his law office in south Reno to listen in on one of those statements. 

Court Reporter: Raise your right hand, please. 

Jane Doe #1: Alrighty.

Anjeanette Damon: He’s interviewing a former door girl from the Wild Orchid and Fantasy Girls over the phone.

Court Reporter: Do you solemnly swear or affirm that the testimony you’re about to give will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

Jane Doe #1: Yes.

Anjeanette Damon: The door girl says drugs were sold and prostitution happened at Kamy’s clubs. She says sometimes women were fined by the managers for engaging in prostitution. Sometimes they were fired.

That was up to the managers, the door girl says. But their primary concern was not about the dancers.

Jane Doe #1: Um, as long as they were making money there really wasn’t a, they didn’t really interfere in anything.

Jason Guinasso: So the main concern of management was whether the club was making money, not whether people were abiding by the rules or the laws. Is that right?

Jane Doe #1: That’s very correct.

Anjeanette Damon: Jason also interviewed a former stripper. She didn’t want to be recorded but Jason shared the transcript with me.

She says she worked at the Wild Orchid, but left about a year after the Safari Nights raid. So more than 10 years ago now. 

She also described dangerous situations in the private rooms. And just a quick warning here, it’s going to be a little graphic. 

Dancers would be masturbated on. They’d have to fight off men who tried to quote “stick their hands inside of them.” Everybody just dealt with it, she said. 

The dancer also said that she was drugged and raped in a private room at the Wild Orchid. She never reported it to police. Jason asked her why.

According to the transcript, she answered:

“I think you don’t think anybody will believe you. I know for me afterwards, I thought it was my fault, and because you choose to work somewhere like that, who’s going to listen?”

It’s time to talk to Kamy about everything I’ve learned. So field producer Fil Corbitt and I return to the Ponderosa Hotel.

It’s been almost a year and a half since I started reporting this story. I’ve interviewed Kamy a dozen times or more. He’s always been open in a way that city attorney Karl Hall or the folks at the Gigafactory are not. 

But now I’m walking in with stories of women whose experiences inside Kamy’s clubs are vastly different than what Kamy and Mark describe. Multiple women told me detailed accounts of similar dangers they faced on the job. Those stories lined up with each other. But I don’t have any documents or anything like that to back up their stories. I’m nervous about how this interview is going to go.

I first ask him about the illegal buyouts, when customers allegedly pay the club to leave with a dancer.

Kamy Keshmiri: First of all, we don’t do buyouts.
Anjeanette Damon: OK, so you’re saying these women are lying about buyouts? They didn’t happen?
Kamy Keshmiri: I’ll tell you our issue with these buyouts. First of all, our buyouts, we don’t do buyouts. Why would I allow that? I want everything to happen here. I can make my money here, right? Here. Why would I want them to leave to go anywhere? Why?
Anjeanette Damon: I mean, is it possible that you had managers or floor guys that let that happen? I mean, I just don’t—you know, Tawny seemed really credible to me when I talked with her. Like, she was very detailed about her experiences, and, you know, this other deposition kind of backed that up, so…
Kamy Keshmiri: You know, you know. They can… anybody can say anything. 

Anjeanette Damon: But then he backtracks a bit on his denial about the buyouts. If they happen, he says he fires the dancer.

Kamy Keshmiri: The dancers meeting outside the club every once in a while, yeah, I’ve heard that. And that’s why we, we, you know, it’s at the point where we may even have [to] hire a private investigator to come into clubs and just act like a customer and try to get the girls to meet him outside the club.
Anjeanette Damon: You’ve done that?
Kamy Keshmiri: We’ve been talking about doing that, yeah. Because I want to make sure they don’t meet customers outside the club. Because that’s the part I can’t control. 

Anjeanette Damon: It’s a little ironic that Kamy is thinking about hiring a private eye so soon after the city hired one to spy on him.

Prostitution, drugs, illegal activity—that all puts his strip club empire at risk, he says. He’ll do anything to protect his licenses. So he says he has checks and balances in place.

Like, dancers can call a hotline anonymously to complain about club employees. But dancers tell me they don’t really trust it.

Kamy says he relies on his managers to deal with employees who steal or allow prostitution, but acknowledges it’s hard to find managers he can trust. If he does find out about people doing anything illegal, he says he fires them on the spot. 

Several of the dancers I talked to backed this up. Remember, Stephanie was adamant she didn’t engage in prostitution. She said it would’ve been a quick way to lose her job.

But in this interview, Kamy seems pretty dismissive about the dancers’ safety concerns. Black eyes in the backroom? Impossible, he says. 

And here’s when things get a little weird.

He starts telling me that the dancer is always in the, quote, “power position” during a lap dance. He tries to demonstrate for me as he’s sitting in his office chair.

He pushes away from the table, and kinda slides down in his seat, spreading his legs open as if he were about to receive a lap dance. He motions as if he wants me to stand over him, like I’m the stripper. I decline. He keeps talking.

Kamy Keshmiri: The dancer’s the one that, it’s her game. It’s her rules. She’s—I’m sitting here. I’m not up. I can’t—What can I do sitting down?
Anjeanette Damon: Oh, I think I would be a little afraid [laughs] if I were—
Kamy Keshmiri: If you’re standing above me, Anjeanette.

Anjeanette Damon: You can hear me laughing nervously at this whole absurd exercise. Kamy may be sitting, but he’s still a huge man. There’s no way I could defend myself even if I’m the one standing. He sees the look on my face and seems to realize he’s larger than the average guy.

Anjeanette Damon: I don’t know—
Kamy Keshmiri: First of all, I’m not your average customer.
Anjeanette: I know, you’re right, but you’re the one sitting here, so I’m thinking about this scenario… 
Kamy Keshmiri: OK. I’m sorry, what was your name again?
Fil Corbitt: FIl.
Kamy Keshmiri: Fil is sitting down and you’re standing up, OK? Who’s in the power position? Not Fil. You are! You determine the rules of this game. Not, not Fil. You.

Anjeanette Damon: But who really has the power here? The dancer, who can be replaced by another one looking to make some cash? The bouncer, whose level of protection may be based on how much he’s been tipped? I am not at all convinced that a dancer would be safe from a guy who wants to do her harm simply because she’s standing over him.

Kamy insists that the bouncers would throw out any customer who is abusive toward a dancer, or at least tell the guy to knock it off. 

But then he switches gears and suggests that the bouncer’s job isn’t actually to protect the dancers. It’s to protect the club.

Kamy Keshmiri: It’s not the customers we have the issue with. It’s our dancers we’re on to make sure everybody follows the rules. 

Anjeanette Damon: Kamy says the strippers who spoke with me are straight up lying. And he says that because police have no record of assaults on dancers, nothing’s happened in his clubs.

Kamy Keshmiri: These are all lies. Go look at the police. Again, if this girl came out with a black eye, these girls were assaulted, you call the police department and you say, “I was assaulted.” And they come down here. We can’t stop her from calling.
Anjeanette Damon: They say they don’t call the police, because they’re worried the police won’t believe them.
Kamy Keshmiri: Oh, come on. Show me a police record. Show me a report, and then I will justify it. But I’m not gonna sit here and waste my time—I got to go work out. My girlfriend’s waiting for me right now—over what some dancer ten years ago said because she’s pissed off because, who knows why she’s mad.

Anjeanette Damon: Kamy’s right—it is difficult to find a police record. The strippers have already told me they don’t call the police.

And now, Kamy mocks me for listening to the strippers. It’s a move that seems to play right into that fear women have that they won’t be believed.

Kamy Keshmiri: Here you come with the great fictional, the great fictional stories. And you just wasted your time on a bunch of nonsense.

Anjeanette Damon: With that, he’s pretty much done with me. He’s ready to hit the weights.

Kamy Keshmiri:  We’re done?
Anjeanette Damon: OK. Yeah.
Kamy Keshmiri: I can go work out? 

Anjeanette Damon: But we know from one guy that Kamy isn’t telling the whole truth about buyouts. That guy is Mark Thierman.

I talked to him briefly on the phone about three months after my interview with Kamy. I asked him whether the club had once done buyouts, but stopped doing them because the city was ramping up pressure on the club. Mark confirmed that’s what happened.

Anjeanette Damon:  And then the buyouts, like, it sounds to me like you guys, it was a regular practice. So maybe you clamped down on it after this whole city council thing started?
Mark Thierman: Yeah, no, it was. It was. I mean, the theory is that the girl comes to you, the manager, and says, “I want to go gambling with this guy. He’s gonna buy me out.” Nobody says, “I’m gonna out to go to the hotel room with him.” If they do, that’s silly. What are you supposed to do? Say no? When the house makes money on it, everybody’s kind of happy and it goes on its merry way. I guess now it’s coming home to roost that, well, they didn’t go gambling. They just went out and had sex, or didn’t have sex. 

Anjeanette Damon: Still, even when confronted with his own lawyer’s comments, Kamy refused to acknowledge buyouts happened. In a text message to me, he said Mark is not involved in club operations and had never personally witnessed a buyout.

Robin Amer: If dancers are being hurt in the private rooms, then the city has good reason to crack down on the clubs—especially after ignoring them for so long. But when the city finally takes action, it doesn’t go after the pimps, or guys abusing the dancers, or the bouncers looking the other way.

It goes after Stephanie.

After the break, we return to Stephanie’s trial. 

Act 3 

Robin Amer: OK, let’s go back to Anjeanette, who’s in the courtroom waiting for Stephanie’s trial to start. 

Anjeanette Damon: Stephanie is sitting quietly at a table in the front of the room, her hands in her lap. Mark Thierman, wearing one of his many Darth Vader ties, is sitting next to her.

A little earlier, I saw Kamy here too, in his trademark athletic wear. But it took too long to get to Stephanie’s case and he left hours ago.

The city prosecutor is Angela Gianoli. She has a commanding presence.

She works for Reno City Attorney Karl Hall, the guy who secretly hired the private investigator to spy on the clubs. The guy whose office has built the case for ousting the strip clubs from downtown. They guy whose own building is for sale a block away from the Wild Orchid.

The judge in the case is Tammy Riggs. She jumps right into it.

Judge Tammy Riggs: Will the witnesses who are going to be testifying stand up and raise your right hand right now? And marshal, will you please swear in the witnesses? 

Marshal: Do you all swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?

Witnesses: Yes.

Judge Tammy Riggs: Thank you. Ms. Gianoli, who’s your first witness?

Anjeanette Damon: Detective Wesley Leedy is called to the stand. He’s the undercover cop who got Stephanie that night at the club. He’s still got that big bushy beard that made Stephanie think he looked like Bradley Cooper in American Sniper.

What follows is nearly two hours of some really squirm-worthy testimony. 

Detective Leedy describes how Stephanie, wearing her red lingerie, sat in his lap. How Serenity, Stephanie’s loud partner at the club, told a lewd story about things that happen in the back, and how he asked Stephanie about what he might be able to get in the back.

Then, the court’s attention turns to the oral sex incident—or the simulated oral sex incident, depending on who you ask. You might remember from the undercover tape, this is the moment when Serenity dove her head between Stephanie’s thighs as the pair tried to talk the cop into a private lap dance in the back. 

The detective testifies he believed Serenity was actually performing oral sex on Stephanie. 

Detective Wesley Leedy: And based on her positioning and behavior, it appeared as though some form of oral sex was being performed.

Mark Thierman: Objection, relevance.

Angela Gianoli: Judge, this is 100 percent relevant.

Judge Tammy Riggs: Yeah, objection’s overruled.

Anjeanette Damon: Mark keeps objecting to this whole line of questioning.

But this interaction between Serenity and Stephanie is a key moment for the prosecution. Was it part of the sales pitch for sex, as the prosecutor argues? Or was Stephanie just selling the fantasy, as Mark maintains?

Both sides spend an inordinate amount of time asking for the most minute details about this incident. How were the dancers positioned? What angle was the cop viewing it from? How many pairs of underwear was Stephanie wearing? Did Serenity move them aside? Did anyone actually see any tongue?

Mark’s like, look, this is all theater. This is all designed to entice a guy to spend more money in the club. There is no real expectation that sex will actually happen. The dancer will get fired if it does! This whole display by Serenity and Stephanie is just part of the wind up to a lap dance. 

Mark even tries to shame the detective for falling for the schtick

Mark Thierman: These are actors. They act for a living. They act like they’re having fun. You’re telling me based on that acting you were fooled into believing it?

Angela Gianoli: I’m going to object. This is becoming argumentative. Is there a question here?

Judge Tammy Riggs:  He’s getting to it. Overruled. Go ahead, Mr. Thierman.

Mark Thierman: Are you telling me you were fooled into believing they had oral sex? 

Angela Gianoli: I’m going to object to the characterization that he’s “fooled” into believing. 

Judge Tammy Riggs: Overruled. Ask your question again, Mr. Thierman.

Anjeanette Damon: The detective doesn’t have time to answer that question before Mark moves on and asks him something else.

Ultimately this case hinges on the word “maybe.” Stephanie was doing her best to earn a living and play by the rules. But the rules here are ambiguous and constantly shifting. It’s almost as if Stephanie is the rope in this tug-of-war between the strip clubs and the city.

The detective seems to be getting more and more uncomfortable with all this sex talk. And at one point, the judge stops the entire proceeding and admonishes everyone for talking like embarrassed middle schoolers during a sex ed class. 

Judge Tammy Riggs: This is a court of law. We’re all adults here. Let’s just hear what was said. We don’t need to be using euphemisms or anything. Let’s just please put it out there—what was said, what was done. 

Anjeanette Damon: Finally, the prosecutor gets the cop to explain what happened in grown up terms.   

Detective Wesley Leedy: After she had already indicated that she would allow me to lick her in the vaginal genital area if I got her wet enough, I then confirmed with her if I could do this act in the back room with her for her originally listed cost of $150.

Angela Gianoli: And did she agree to allow you to go back to the back room and lick her vagina for $150?

Judge Tammy Riggs: Yes.

Anjeanette Damon: Mark says whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa hold on here. Stephanie didn’t say, sure, I’ll go in the backroom and let you go down on me.

Mark Thierman: When you asked if you could lick her, uh, down there, didn’t she respond by saying “maybe”?

Detective Wesley Leedy: At one point, yes.

Mark Thierman: She responded twice by saying “maybe.”

Detective Wesley Leedy: I don’t recall the number, but yes. 

Mark Thierman: Does “maybe” mean yes to you?

Detective Wesley Leedy: No.

Anjeanette Damon: But the prosecutor is ready with an argument that “maybe” actually does mean yes.

Angela Gianoli: Now, if you listen to the voice inflection by the defendant, this wasn’t a tentative “maybe.” She was not pensive about this. It was coyness. It was this cat-and-mouse game. The thrill of the hunt, so to speak. This was not a “maybe.” This was a, “Yeah, maybe.” This was flirtatious. This was a, “Yeah. If we go back there, you can lick me.”

Anjeanette Damon: To me, this is where the city gets into some really backwards-thinking logic—logic that doesn’t seem to square with this whole shift in the national conversation about consent. “Maybe” means “yes”? I mean, what if this were a rape trial? If the suspect tried to argue that the victim said “maybe” just before he assaulted her?

Stephanie is sitting at the table fuming.

Anjeanette Damon: What were you thinking when she was—

Stephanie: I was so angry that they were trying to paint me as this person. Like, they kept trying to, like, be like, “Oh yeah, she was enjoying this. She was being flirty.” But yeah, OK, you have to do that at the job. And if I didn’t act like this I’d be boring. 

Anjeanette Damon: The trial lasts for about four hours. 

By the time we get to closing arguments, it’s dark outside and stomachs are grumbling. 

When the lawyers are finished, the judge leaves to deliberate. She gets back more than a half hour later and launches into a meticulous explanation of her decision. 

Judge Tammy Riggs: We all know that this is a theater. And I think that what he’s saying as far as the name of the game is to step up to the line and not go over it, I think that’s true. What I have concluded, and what you have probably gotten from my comments so far, is that that line has been stepped over. But I do want to let you know what my conclusion is based on, so I will proceed.

Anjeanette Damon: This is the moment Stephanie realizes she might be in trouble.

To the judge, the entire production that night at the Spice House is a sales pitch for sex. The dancers’ actions—the sexy stories and simulated oral sex—outweigh the word “maybe.”

Judge Tammy Riggs: That’s sexual conduct, clearly. That, again, is not the charged conduct in this case. It’s simply part of the sales job for whatever comes later. But it’s clearly sexual conduct. 

Anjeanette Damon: But the judge seems to have some empathy for Stephanie. She says Stephanie likely had no idea that what she was doing was illegal. Mark even argues this is all part of the normal course of business in a strip club. It’s what the club expects of dancers. Sweet talk the guys, but don’t actually do anything in the back. The club even has dancers sign a document before every shift promising not to engage in prostitution.

Judge Tammy Riggs: It just seems like that is a document that is intended to protect the management. As we’re going to see, it didn’t protect the defendant, in this case. And that’s, that’s really, it’s too bad.

Anjeanette Damon: That’s when Stephanie knows she’s done.

Stephanie: Like, when she said that, I knew like she was going to say guilty. And so that just, like, broke me. 

Anjeanette Damon: All that innuendo. All that walking up to the line. To the judge, that was brokering a deal.

Judge Tammy Riggs: Whether she was going to change her mind, whether she was going to—whether, you know, she was going to disappear when he came back, it doesn’t matter, because she’s made an agreement. And I find that that agreement has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt and I do find you guilty of soliciting for prostitution. 

Anjeanette Damon: In the courtroom, Stephanie drops her face into her hands, and, for the first time that day, begins to cry.

Although the judge convicted Stephanie, she only fined her $8. Judge Riggs says the clubs, who are making money off of this, should be responsible for training their dancers on what actually constitutes solicitation.

But to Stephanie, the small fine was little consolation. Any solicitation conviction would make her ineligible for the city work card she needs to strip in Reno. 

Anjeanette Damon: Do you feel like the city was hard on you to try and make a point about the clubs?

Stephanie: Yeah. They’re still just trying to push it because they want to get that win. Like, they don’t care.

Anjeanette Damon: She’s appealing the case and hanging onto the hope that the next judge sees it differently.

Stephanie:  I’m just, like, praying that, you know, the next judge will be, you know, like, will actually see that, you know, I didn’t do anything wrong, and… I don’t know. I just… I don’t know.

Anjeanette Damon: It’s a scary position to be in. 

Robin Amer: Reno’s strip clubs can be dangerous places for women. And the way the clubs expect them to do their jobs can run them afoul of the law. But rather than protect them, as the city cracks down on Old Reno, it seems to be punishing the dancers most of all. 

Stephanie’s conviction could be used to bolster a case to move Kamy’s clubs, but it won’t be the main factor in his livelihood. Not the way it would be in hers. 

In next week’s episode, the Reno City Council decides the fate of Kamy’s strip clubs. 

Anjeanette Damon: What do you think’s going to happen in there today?

Kamy Keshmiri: You know, the way these meetings go, I couldn’t tell you. Honestly, I have no idea. We come here, we fight, and we’ll fight, and we’ll fight. 

Anjeanette Damon: And we learn what that outcome means for everyone caught up in the battle over Reno’s future.

Velma Shoals: Even if it hurts, you still walk until you can’t walk no more.

Robin Amer: That’s next time, on the season finale of The City. 

Credits

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

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

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

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

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 VP for investigations. Scott Stein is our VP of product. Our president and publisher is Maribel Wadsworth. 

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

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