Now this seemed interesting. Brian Joseph, who was fired as an investigative reporter at the Las Vegas Review-Journal, was writing a book entitled, Vegas Concierge: Sex Trafficking, Hip Hop and Corruption in America. Breathless pre-publicatio promised a broad look at how American society disregards sex trafficking victims, how Las Vegas is probably its center and in Vegas, “how self-interest corrupts news organizations and the corridors of power.”
Oooh. With hype like that, I expected something cataclysmic on the order of The Green Felt Jungle. That’s the 1963 exposé by Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris that laid out details of organized crime control of Vegas for the whole world to see. The international best-seller greatly embarrassed important state and local pooh-bahs, helping to spur government reforms that eventually drove out the mob and spur dramatic economic growth. I wrote about the book’s continuing impact last year, the 60th anniversary of its publication.
I have finished reading a reviewer’s copy provided by publisher Rowman & Littlefield of the 292-page Vegas Concierge, whose official publication date is tomorrow. To put it bluntly, I don’t think the book quite delivers on its promised premise to blow the lid off Sin City and America in this regard. But Vegas Concierge certainly has its moments.
Ostensibly, the book recounts the checkered career of Jamal Rashid, better known as Mally Mall, a hip-hop producer who has worked with some big names. Mall was sentenced in Las Vegas in 2021 to 33 months in federal prison after admitting he ran a high-end prostitution operation out of Vegas for a dozen years to 2014. One of his businesses was named Las Vegas Concierge VS1, hence the name of Joseph’s book. According to documents cited in the case and the book, Mall used oppression, coercion, threats and force to run his empire in ways that certainly met the commonly understood definition of sex trafficking. (Technically, Mall pleaded guilty to a single count of use of an interstate facility in aid of unlawful activity; now 47, he’s been released from prison.)
Significantly based on on-the-record interviews with one of Mall’s workers and an ex-vice-cop with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, Joseph’s book does not lack for colorful and disturbing content. Joseph offers this history of things sexual hereabouts:
Prostitution has been a particular problem in Las Vegas, at least since the 1970s. Las Vegas is known as Sin City, but the entire state of Nevada is rooted in a Wild West, anything-goes, libertarian ethic … Brothels existed i Nevada almost since it became a state in 1964. They were technically illegal, but often tolerated, until 1971, when Nevada made them legal–but ultimately only in counties with a population of less than 700,000, and only if those counties elected to legalize it. That makes brothels and prostitution illegal in Las Vegas, but legal nearby. Just an hour wet of Las Vegas tourists can go to the town of Pahrump in rural Nye County, Nevada, and legally purchase sex in a licensed brothel. By the 1970s, Las Vegas was transforming into the lascivious metropolis it is today and the added proximity of legal, commercial sex just upped the ante. Out of towners unfamiliar with the nuances of Nevada law thought prostitution was legal in Las Vegas and the city’s powerful casinos, not wanting to lose their customers even for an hour, had little incentive to tell them otherwise. Crowds of prostitutes soon became a common sight on Las Vegas Boulevard.
My complaint is more with what’s not supported in the book. Las Vegas, the author writes flatly, is “arguably the epicenter of sex trafficking in the United States today.” As someone New To Las Vegas, I might be willing to believe that. But Joseph provides little in the way of sourcing or comparative data to support that proposition. However, he suggests at one point that some of the lack of detail was deliberate on his part, out of fears the RJ might sue claiming it owned his previous research on that topic. “As many as a thousand working girls descend on the [Las Vegas] Strip every night, strolling Las Vegas Boulevard or loitering in casino lounges, lobbies and bars,” he writes, again without a source. As I understand it, sex trafficking and prostitution overlap but are not always the same, with consent and age of the worker being among the significant distinguishing characteristics.
Joseph acknowledges that as early as 1994 Las Vegas Metro was treating child prostitutes–a secondary focus of the book–as victims rather than perps. He describes Metro’s vice squad as honest enough with a few bad apples but not efficient, often reducing or even dropping charges against pimps in hopes of cultivating confidential informants who rarely imparted much confidential information. (Such an expectation may be one reason for the seven-year gap between a police raid on Mally Mall’s Las Vegas mansion in 2014 and his sentencing in 2021.) Joseph notes that prostitutes were charged, but rarely their customers. “The casinos don’t want their customer getting arrested; it’s bad for business,” Joseph was told by a source. The writer paraphrases a former Las Vegas sheriff, Bill Young, as admitting in an interview there was such a policy, because arresting johns damaged the Las Vegas economy and its appeal for tourists.
As for the promotional claim that the book shows “how self-interest corrupts news organizations,” I’m assuming that’s a reference to the circumstances surrounding Joseph’s time at the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His account does the RJ no favors. But the stated facts barely make a compelling case on that point, if at all.
After a decade as a newspaper reporter and two years working at Fair Warning, a small nonprofit investigative news organization in California that is now defunct, Joseph came to the RJ in early 2017 as an investigative reporter. The paper had been purchased two years earlier–secretly at first–by Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire owner of various Las Vegas entertainment properties, including the Venetian and Palazzo casino hotels and the Sands Expo and Convention Center. As I have written in this space, there were suspicions that Adelson was buying insurance against unflattering coverage of his enterprises.(He died in 2021 at age 87; his family still owns the RJ.) Joseph writes he was “queasy” about Adelson but took the job mainly for the money.
While working on other stories, Joseph decided to focus on sex trafficking–with an emphasis on child prostitution–canvassing court records, filing public records request with Las Vegas Metro and logging in arrests. As someone who over the years has done a fair amount of journalistic investigative reporting, I can tell you that process can take time and often leads nowhere. Joseph was onto a big, sensitive topic, and budget-conscious editors can get impatient and unpleasant.
After more than a year, Joseph hadn’t produced a major piece on the subject. Joseph writes he was asked at one point by his boss for a story about where prostitutes in general were being arrested on the Strip. Joseph thought that by itself was a bad idea; his sources had warned that the venue of the arrest meant nothing, as the prostitute frequently worked elsewhere but cops waited to make the arrest at a different location. However, under pressure to produce something, Joseph analyzed his spreadsheets and discovered that the top hotel location where prostitutes had been arrested was … the Venetian, owned by Sheldon Adelson.
Joseph says that he explained all this in a memo to his bosses. “I heard nothing more about it,” Joseph writes, “other than an offhand comment from the new managing editor, who remarked to me in a meeting that the worst place for prostitution on The Strip was owned by our employer.” (In a response included as a footnote, the new ME, who is unnamed, denied saying or thinking any such thought.)
My own view here is that if Joseph, as he writes, didn’t think this was a story, it’s not clear why this might be an example of “how self-interest corrupts news organizations.”
In any event, Joseph said that under pressure he eventually turned in the draft of a story about juvenile sex trafficking. “It had a lot of holes,” he writes, “but I thought it showed a nuanced understanding of the issue and portrayed the unjust treatment juvenile sex trafficking victims face in Clark County’s justice system.”
Joseph said he heard “radio silence” about the draft. But on one day in April 2019–a week after his unrelated investigation into the inept Nevada Secretary of State’s Office won a big regional journalism award– he was called to the editor’s office and fired. Joseph paraphrased the editor as saying he had no faith the sex trafficking project would ever be finished. (In a lengthy statement included as a footnote, the editor–also unidentified although everyone in Las Vegas knows his name–said the story was “unpublishable” and “unacceptable for a laundry list of reasons.”) Joseph says the RJ refused to allow him to take his accumulated work product for publication elsewhere. As a result, he writes he declined to sign a non-disparagement separation agreement with the RJ in exchange for two weeks’ pay.
Joseph declares that in the five years since his departure, the RJ has not not done a big sex trafficking piece. In a response included in the footnotes, an unnamed editor basically concedes that point, but says the paper has published at last 200 stories about “sex trafficking and related arrests.” Perhaps inadvertently, this supports Joseph’s point about the scope of the problem in Las Vegas.
After his firing, Joseph, now 44, remained in Las Vegas. He writes that with a stay-at-home wife and a young child he eked out a living with a string of “unsatisfying gigs” outside journalism. He finally decided to write a book. Because he didn’t cover the long-running Mally Mall case–Mall wasn’t accused of child sex trafficking–the RJ “couldn’t stand in my way,” he writes, so that became a focus of Vegas Concierge. “The themes of his story were similar enough to what I was originally researching that I could still use it for my goal of humanizing sex trafficking victims.” Joseph says he re-interviewed all of his sources. This might explain what I see as the book’s somewhat disjointed nature.
The book has a bit of a call-to-action cant. Joseph includes a 15-page list of “Resources” for victims. He writes that sex trafficking is “an entrenched, complicated affliction in our society, more akin to domestic violence or drug addiction than to plantation slavery; it is grossly misunderstood and too often ignored. My hope is that this book will help to change that.”
A worthwhile goal. But Vegas Concierge also can be read as a case study of a bad journalistic marriage and divorce.