Joseph Conforte

• Comment: Sentences like "Thus even in death, Joe Conforte seems to mock the world by not having proof he is gone." certainly have no place in an encyclopedia Theroadislong (talk) 18:27, 4 February 2021 (UTC)

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Joseph Conforte
Born	Giuseppe Christophe Conforte December 10, 1925 Augusta, Sicily
Died	March 4, 2019 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Cause of death	Natural
Nationality	Sicilian
Citizenship	United States, Brazil
Education	2 years high school
Occupation(s)	Brothel owner, restauranteur, boxing manager
Movement	Legal prostitution
Criminal charges	33 counts under RICO, pattern of racketeering
Criminal status	Fugitive
Spouse	Sally Conforte

Joseph "Joe" Conforte (December 10, 1925 -- March 4, 2019) was a legal brothel owner from Sparks, Nevada, spokesperson for the legal prostitution movement, a professional boxing promoter, restauranteur, philanthropist, and Nevada statesman who embarrassed the United States Department of Justice and swindled the IRS and got away with it. He impacted federal law and the laws of Nevada and was a fixture of pop culture, affecting people's attitudes and opinions about prostitutes and prostitution. He is sometimes called the Godfather to legal prostitution. He was the underworld boss of Northwestern Nevada.

Early Years

Born Giuseppe Christophe Conforte in Augusta, Sicily, December 10, 1925, the youngest of one brother and three sisters. His birth date is often mistaken as January 6, 1926. His mother died of breast cancer in 1931 when he was five. His father had relocated to Boston, Massachusetts to find gainful employment and then Giuseppe and his siblings were raised by their aunt and uncle. When Giuseppe obtained a certain age, he was a balitila or balilla-- a member of the youth fascist party under Mussolini.

Coming to America

Giuseppe, along with sisters Serafina and Pasqualina, traveled to Ellis Island on The Rex steamliner in December 1937. Giuseppe was given the name Joseph by immigration services. He and his sisters lived with their father, Agostino Conforte (1887-1972), in the Dorchester suburb of S. Boston. Agostino had remarried to a woman with two daughters older than Joseph.

Coming of Age

Agostino ran a small produce shop where he taught young Joe how to sell fruits and vegetables. Agostino also sold bootleg alcohol.

Joe completed his freshman year in high school in Boston and dropped out his sophomore year.

Joe ran away from home to Manhattan in New York City at age fifteen where he had trouble holding a job. He engaged in robberies and stick ups and ran into trouble with the law.

He moved to Los Angeles in 1942 and soon leased the produce side of the Shermart Market at the corner of San Vicente and Santa Monica Blvd. He ran afoul of local authorities when he was caught shorting the weights of boxes of strawberries.

Teenage Joe Conforte gravitated to the criminal element while living in Los Angeles. He learned to gamble. He visited prostitutes. Being young and Sicilian, operating his own produce store that happened to be on the edge of Mobster Mickey Cohen's territory, Joe also familiarized himself with certain members of organized crime and they him.

Joe Conforte turned eighteen in 1943 and for various reasons drove across the country, seeking adventure. He met his first wife, Susan Stallings, and they married in Noonan, Georgia on May 20, 1945.

Military Service

Because of Joe's fake birth date, he was drafted late, enlisting into the Army on November 1, 1945, before his twentieth birthday. After basic training in Fort MacArthur, San Pedro, California, he was sent to Guam, where he volunteered for the Military Police. In 1946, he was discharged under the marriage/family hardship provision. He re-enlisted in 1947 and was stationed in Fort Ord in Monterey, California where he earned promotions to T-5 Corporal and then Buck Sergeant. 1948, he requested special training at Fort Riley, Kansas and was promoted to Staff Sergeant of the Military Police. November 1, 1948, the term of his second enlistment ended. He quickly re-enlisted again with the rank of Staff Sergeant, and received Criminal Investigation training in Camp Gordon, Georgia. In July 1949, he returned to Guam and served in the 220-2nd Military Police brigade. He was discharged a third and last time on January 25, 1950, under the recently enacted pay raise leave provision.

Family

Joe Conforte was married and divorced to Susan Stallings. They bore a child named Anita. In August 1961, he married Jessica "Sally" Burgess and stayed married until her death in 1992. No children with Sally. Between 1946 and 1995, Joe had a total of eight children by several mothers, including Susan.

Career

Joe Conforte operated illegal brothels in Oakland, California in 1952 and 1953. He moved to Wadsworth, Nevada in 1955 and started the Triangle River Ranch brothel with two ladies working for him.

His operation grew and soon he met and teamed up with Sally Burgess, and they became partners in crime.

What followed was a series of run-ins with law enforcement, expansion of their prostitution business into an empire, five years in prison for Joe, his comeback, and attempts by his nemesis, Washoe County District Attorney William Raggio, to keep him out with the creation of the 'evil reputation ordinance'. A judge ruled the ordinance unconstitutional and in 1966, after four long years away, Joe was back.

Joe Conforte took over the Mustang Bridge Ranch brothel in Storey County in 1967. The Nevada Gaming Commission had Joe on a list to be included in their Black Book of Excluded Persons that year but did not add him for reasons the FBI would later look into.

February 26, 1971, Nevada's Governor Mike O'Callaghan signed SB214, known as the anti-vice bill, actually the county option brothel bill, into law, giving counties the ability to license and regulate brothels while outlawing Clark County-Las Vegas to keep Joe out.

Mustang Bridge Ranch, with Sally Conforte as licensee, was first in the nation to be state sanctioned. The event lead to instant fame for Joe Conforte who assumed the role as leader of the legal prostitution movement.

1970s Fame and Legal Prostitution Spokesperson

1971: Joe Conforte and/or Mustang Bridge Ranch were featured on TV shows 60 MINUTES and Mantrap (Canada), and in Look Magazine--photos by Marvin E. Newman. 1972: the Donahue Show, Rolling Stone--photos by Annie Liebovitz. 1973: Mantrap, and Tomorrow with Margo St. James. 1974: Oui. 1975: Hustler, and "The Girls of Nevada" by Gabriel Vogliotti. 1976: Documentary movie "Mustang: The House That Joe Built", and New York and New West magazines.

Joe Conforte spoke publicly about the need and benefit of legal prostitution to organizations such as the Lions Club, Rotary Club, on national and regional TV shows, and on talk radio. He was behind a 1971 initiative in California to legalize brothels in that state.

Joe Conforte started Joe Conforte Sports Promotions to manage professional boxers. In 1976, he began sponsoring heavyweight Bernardo Mercado (Colombia) who went on to beat Trevor Berbick in 1979 to win the World Boxing Council Continental Americas Heavy Title. Mercado beat Earnie Shavers, the hardest puncher of his time, in March 1980, but lost to Leon Spinks later that year in an elimination bout to determine who would fight for the world title.

The grand opening of the Mustang Ranch brothel on May 15, 1976, was overlooked by the news media. Two weeks later, the Mustang Ranch was mentioned in almost every newspaper around the globe.

Infamy and Crime

Much of Joe Conforte's fame is born from infamy.

By 1976, he'd been accused of being evil, had been coined Reno's Frankenstein, had narrowly avoided inclusion into the Black Book, and was commonly perceived as a corrupter of the innocent. Legalization of brothels and the resulting accolades Joe received in the early 70s, however, tipped the scales of public opinion back to his favor.

The scales tipped again when, in March 1976, the Washoe County Grand Jury released its Final Report on Joe Conforte, exposing his Mob ties and political connections across the country, resulting in Joe Conforte suing the grand jury, newspaper editor Warren Lerude, and the Nevada State Journal and Reno Evening Gazette for printing the grand jury's unsubstantiated lies about him in various articles. Warren Lerude made no retractions.

Two weeks after the Mustang Ranch opened in May 1976, seventh-ranked heavyweight boxer from Argentina, Oscar Bonavena, was shot and killed at the front gate by Joe Conforte's enforcer, Willard Ross Brymer. It was a shot heard around the world.

Joe was accused of conspiring to murder the boxer but charges were never filed against him. Once again, his reputation hit rock bottom.

In 1977, Joe Conforte was convicted of tax evasion and fraud; fraud added for regularly destroying his financial records.

In 1980, Joe fled the country to avoid prison for the tax evasion and lived as a fugitive of U.S. justice in Brazil for three years.

While on the lamb, Joe Conforte claimed he had bribed federal judge Harry E. Claiborne (Nevada 1978-1986). The Department of Justice offered Joe a reduced sentence in exchange for testimony against Claiborne.

After Joe Conforte was convicted of tax evasion in 1977, he appealed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, sought tax re-determination in U.S. District Courts, and sued the Commissioner of Internal Revenue in U.S. Tax Court. When things appeared to not go his way, he filed a writ of certiorari at the U.S. Supreme Court, claiming his rights were trampled upon. In 1983, while still in Brazil, Joe's writ was denied a hearing. Justice William Rehnquist wrote the opinion stating a fugitive has no right to appeal--a case that is often cited as the precedent in fugitive appeal cases around the country.

Joe Conforte gave himself up to the U.S. federal authorities in Miami in December 1983. He provided testimony of alleged bribes paid to Claiborne and Claiborne was indicted by a grand jury based on those claims. Joe Conforte was sent to federal prison for twelve months of what was an original twenty-year sentence for tax evasion and fraud. The IRS then drastically reduced the tens of millions of dollars of taxes Joe Conforte owed.

To the embarrassment of the Department of Justice, the jury in Harry Claiborne's bribery trial failed to convict after Joe Conforte flubbed the date of one of the two bribes and Claiborne had a solid alibi on the other bribe Joe Conforte alleged to have made.

During this time, Joe deeded his assets to Sally and she filed for bankruptcy. After Joe's release from prison in December 1984, he opened a Swiss bank account under the alias Jose' C. Montoya and began skimming profits from Mustang Ranch and sending them to the Swiss account with the aid of several accomplices.

Joe Conforte created a public offering of Mustang Ranch stock that could have satisfied the remainder of his debt to the IRS, but three attempts at the IPO failed. Joe then blamed the IRS for interference.

Sally deeded her assets back to Joe and Sally Conforte, husband and wife, as part of the bankruptcy court's plan of restructuring her finances. In 1990, her health in decline, Sally deeded her assets to Joe and he prepared to file his own bankruptcy when U.S. Treasury Department lawyers sought emergency forfeiture in court while armed agents seized the Mustang Ranch. The IRS placed a trustee to operate the brothel in hopes of getting back the taxes Joe and Sally Conforte owed, but Storey County commissioners and the sheriff, who controlled county liquor and brothel licensing, rezoned the area of Mustang Ranch to outlaw prostitution, forcing the IRS to sell.

Using a proxy, Joe secretly bought the Mustang Ranch back from the government at pennies on the dollar of what he owed. Joe's brothel license with Storey County had been maintained throughout all this. The shell company that took control of Mustang Ranch hired Joe to run the place. Joe retired to Rio de Janeiro in 1991, after which the Mustang Ranch was sold to another company that was later found to be a subsidiary of the offshore A.G.E. Corporation of which Joe was the main shareholder.

Sally Conforte died in 1992.

Joe Conforte was indicted by the United States in 1995 in absentia for thirty-three violations under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), including a pattern of racketeering. A superseding indictment in 1998 added the A.G.E. Corporation and co-conspirators. Attempts at extradition from Brazil failed.

Mob Ties

Joe Conforte's ties to organized crime are broad and relatively unknown. Ultimately, most of the public's knowledge of Joe Conforte's criminal associations come from him.

Frank Bompensiero

Jimmy Fratianno

George Piscitelle

Mickey Cohen

Alfred Sica

Frankie Carbo

Sam Giancana

Anthony Spilotro

Joe Conforte on Tony Spilotro and the Mafia

Carlos Marcello

Johnny "Keys" Simone

Meyer Lansky

Joseph Stacher

Barney Perlman

Ed Levinson

Irving Ash Resnick

Death

It is firmly believed that Joe Conforte died in Brazil on March 4, 2019 at age 93 from pneumonia associated with Alzheimer's and a heart condition. The U.S. Embassy in Rio de Janeiro has refused to confirm or deny Joe Conforte's death to this Contributor. No news article, death certificate, or public source corroborates his passing. His place of burial or entombment is also unknown.

Thus even in death, Joe Conforte seems to mock the world by not having proof he is gone.

See also

• Nevada Brothel Association

External links

• Joseph Conforte Tribute YouTube Channel
• Joseph Conforte Facebook Tribute Page
• Countries Where Prostitution Is Legal
• United States vs Sullivan, 274 U.S. 259 (1927)
• Garner vs. United States, 424 U.S. 648 (1976)
• Joseph Conforte Geneology