Nevada’s legendary brothel owner Dennis Hof is running for political office, and it’s stirring up all kinds of trouble. Could he lose it all?

Inside the tiny chapel of Nevada’s Patch of Heaven Christian retreat camp, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, cowboy-hat-wearing locals are meeting political hopefuls. A crusty law and order Republican running for local sheriff pulls a copy of the Constitution out of his pants pocket and holds it high. A guy running for governor as an independent tells the assemblage that God has told him to run for office.

The gubernatorial candidate is Ryan Bundy, and he’s the son of Cliven, the Nevada rancher who got in an armed standoff with the government in 2014, and the brother of Ammon, who got in a similar standoff in an Oregon wildlife refuge in 2016.

At issue both times was land management policy. Cliven Bundy became an anti-government hero to many, and was even embraced by Sean Hannity of Fox News until Bundy made comments so racist Hannity himself disavowed them.

The evening proceeds much as you’d expect, in terms of flavor, until Patch of Heaven founder and pastor Victor Fuentes invites America’s most notorious pimp onto the stage and warmly embraces him. The pimp is Dennis Hof, ever-smiling owner of seven Nevada brothels, including the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, best known as the bustling sex palace featured in the HBO reality-TV series Cathouse.

In Hof, the HBO cameras captured a lovable rogue, a freethinker with a twinkle in his baby blues, a savvy businessman, a charismatic father figure, and a horny, fun-loving, middle-aged dude living the dream — if your dream is to be around bounteous breasts and amazing asses morning, noon, and night.

But what’s he doing in an evangelical Christian chapel, part of the Ministerio Roca Solida Igelsia Cristiana church? And why is the pastor hugging him?

“Thank you lord Jesus,” Fuentes prays. “I ask you for Dennis [and Bundy, and others], I ask you to guide them and give them wisdom and understanding.”

“Amen!” holler ranchers, grandmothers, and their neighbors at this public event. Hof, you see, has set his sights on the District 36 Assembly race in this very red swath of Nevada. Pastor Fuentes hopes those present will vote for him.

Later, as voters exit into the desert night, Hof stays in campaign mode, shaking hands, chatting with these conservative Nevadans. Standing with him is an entourage of three: his portly gay millennial assistant, Zachary Hames, a hooker named Paris Envy, and a slender platinum blonde in a white and gold leather trench coat with a face so pale it looks ghostly. She gazes toward the star-flecked sky, sniffs the manure-scented air of the Amargosa Valley, and doesn’t seem quite sure of where she is. Hof informs a voter that she’s newly arrived in Nye County from Cleveland, Ohio. Her name is Jessica Johnson, and she was a contestant on the Food Network reality show Chopped. She got chopped, so she’s joining the Bunny Ranch to capitalize on her notoriety.

“We’re doing a Cookin’ and Hookin’ cookbook!” Hof announces.

When an elderly woman walks past, Hof transitions from promotion-minded pimp to grassroots politician. He encourages the woman to vote, and hopes he might get her support. She thanks him for coming to Patch of Heaven on this April evening.

As for me, I’ve driven from Los Angeles to Nye County to cover its 2018 election season — and to watch Hof, a Trump admirer, attempt to execute a small-scale Trump-style campaign, parlaying his people skills, reality-TV celebrity, business success, and playboy alpha-male personality into a vote-gathering politician.

“Never thought I’d see Christians praying for you,” I say to him. I’ve known Hof for almost five years now, having first met him in a journalistic context.

He winks — a trademark response. Of course, not every local Christian leader is in the pimp’s corner. When Hof mentions a certain preacher who’s advocating for a brothel ban, Hames jumps in with a story, alleging that he ran into a younger male relative of the preacher at a drag show. As Hames tells it, the preacher’s kin yelled at one point, “I want to tongue-punch a drag queen’s fart box!”

Hames laughs. “We should tweet that,” says Hof with a grin, seeing a way to throw a little shade in the direction of the anti-Hof clergyman. For a moment he joins new arrival Johnson in looking at the stars. Then, reflecting on his situation in the Silver State, a place Hof has called home for more than 30 years, he says, “One minister is trying to put me out of business, another has his arm around me, praying I get elected. Only in Nevada!”

The thing is, Dennis Hof isn’t just fighting a preacher or two these days. After a quarter-century as a brothel owner, and a lengthy run as America’s most visible purveyor of legal prostitution, Phoenix-born Hof, 71, is facing opponents on multiple fronts. The idea of banning brothels is getting a push from an array of social conservatives, by certain officials in the counties where Hof does business, by a new antiprostitution non-profit called No Little Girl, and even by some ex-employees, former working girls who now argue sex work is exploitative and wicked.

On top of this, for the past year or so, Hof has been cited and fined for workplace code violations — a development he ties to his electoral ambition, which he says is threatening the Republican powers that be in his part of the state. Never one to take shit laying down, he’s filed lawsuits against Nye County commissioners. So, given the trouble it’s stirring up, why enter the political arena, especially when he’s been living out that heterosexual male fantasy, waking every morning with a blonde at his side and a gun and two dildos on his nightstand, with plenty of money for the finest cars? Well, blame Tucker Carlson.

Okay, it’s not that cut-and-dried, but the knit-browed Fox News host did play a role in Hof’s turn to politics. In June 2015, Hof woke up not with a raging hard-on but with a swelling sensation of rage. His local assemblyman, Republican James Oscarson, helped pass a $1.4 billion tax bill that included a commerce tax levying extra fees on businesses earning $4 million or more. In other words, Hof was going to have to send more of his hard-earned money to weasely bureaucrats in Carson City. Pissed off, he called his friend Carlson to vent. After listening to Hof rant, the cable host told him, “There’s only one thing you can do.”

“What?”

“Dennis, run for office.”

“No.”

“Then you have no right to complain.”

Carlson’s comment lingered in Hof’s mind. Nearly a year later, Hof says he met with several Nevada Republicans. They had already chosen to primary Oscarson with ultraconservative Tina Trenner, a retired television producer, but encouraged Dennis to run as a libertarian if Oscarson won. According to right-wing Nevada radio host Alan Stock, it was part of a broad Republican effort to vote out party members who had supported the commerce bill. Encouraged by the fact that the incumbent Oscarson defeated Trenner by only 133 votes, Hof threw his hat into the ring on Labor Day 2016. He didn’t win, but earned 39 percent of the vote after just a two-month campaign — a rarity for a candidate running on a third-party ticket.

Throughout late 2016 and early 2017, Hof looked toward the 2018 election. A Ron Paul supporter in the 2008 and 2012 presidential races, Hof had officially joined the Libertarian Party in 2015. But in December of 2016, buoyed by Trump’s victory and realizing the challenges of running for office as a Libertarian, not to mention getting stuff done if elected, he reregistered as a Republican. A few months later, Nye County authorities started finding code violations at Hof’s brothels, the timing of which he finds extremely suspicious. On July 29, 2017, he emailed commissioners Butch Borasky and Daniel Schinhofen: “Thank you for helping me make my final decision to run for office. I will get you all the proper collateral materials to give to all your friends in the Republican Party to support me like a good Republican.”

The message ended with a photo of a billboard that read, “VOTE HOF.” He was officially launching his campaign to steal the nomination from Oscarson in the June 2018 primary.

“If I should disappear,” said Butch Borasky, “[get] hit in the head with a brick, get run off the road or any other function to take my life away from me, then I would ask that they talk to Mr. Dennis Hof.”

At a meeting of Nye County commissioners last November, Borasky said, “If I should disappear, [get] hit in the head with a brick, get run off the road or any other function to take my life away from me, then I would ask that they talk to Mr. Dennis Hof.” (When asked by Penthouse to elaborate, Borasky declined comment.)

Then on January 5, Hof sued Commissioner Borasky for defamation. The following month, he filed an additional First Amendment lawsuit against Schinhofen, for forcing him to remove a roadway sign that said “Lovers at Play” and included an illustration of a stick-figure couple engaged in the act.

Boom — on March 7, Nye County officials and the state fire marshal visited Hof’s Love Ranch South brothel. They announced 33 code violations, upheld a suspension of the brothel’s license, and told Hof that to be in compliance he’d have to hire an architect or engineer, submit plans, get approval, pay fees, and hire a contractor to remedy what they deemed improper modifications to multiple buildings on the property.

“All they’re doing is moving the goalpost again,” Hof told the Las Vegas Sun. “Any dirty thing they can do in the corrupt county of Nye.” Schinhofen says the timing was coincidental, and claims Hof’s previous citations were just not grievous enough to provoke a suspension.

The Love Ranch license was reinstated on March 16, but problems have worsened. That month, in a commissioners’ meeting in the county, Nye, where Hof owns three brothels, Commissioner Lorinda Wichman wondered aloud if taxpayers benefited from the brothels. As she later told the Las Vegas Sun, “Staff is looking into what it is costing the taxpayer to have legalized prostitution [in Nye]. I asked them to compare what it is costing us to what we receive. My curiosity is to whether or not taxpayers of Nye County are subsidizing the brothel industry.”

A few weeks later, residents of Lyon County filed a petition to add a brothel ban to the November ballot. They need roughly 3,300 signatures. Hof owns four brothels in Lyon, a western Nevada county east of Reno. Not long after, Nye County residents submitted their own petition. Wichman and Schinhofen both deny connections to the petitions or political motivations behind their scuffles with Hof.

Says Commissioner Schinhofen: “I am the only one who knows if this was politically motivated, so here it is: My motivation during all of this has been to uphold the rule of law.”

In the midst of all these legal skirmishes, Hof has seen evangelicals, hookers, conspiracy theorists, and libertarians come together to support him — in part through the good offices of the Patch of Heaven Christian camp retreat.

Cuban immigrant Victor Fuentes and his wife Annette bought the 40-acre property, which sits inside a federal wildlife refuge, in 2006. They had worked in casinos for years, saving to buy land where they could baptize followers in a river, just like Jesus did in the Jordan. Patch of Heaven had it all: flowing water, trees, and a complex of cabins and bunkhouses with room to build. Annette decorated the interiors with crucifixes, saddles, and “God Bless Cowgirls” signs, making the rooms look like western movie sets.

All was well until 2010, when U.S. Fish and Wildlife, determined to protect the endangered Ash Meadows minnow, a species which exists nowhere else, built a river diversion channel which rerouted water away from the Patch of Heaven acreage. The government bureau did not consult with FEMA or the Army Corps of Engineers to get their views on how such a diversion might affect surrounding land in terms of water access and flood potential.

After a six-year battle with Victor and his church, U.S. Fish and Wildlife agreed to install a pipe directing some water onto their property, but the pipe is small and lawyers for the couple claim the water volume is just one percent of what originally flowed

Victor and his wife have a lawsuit underway asking for monetary restitution and restoration of the water’s original flow. And their fight against the federal government has attracted the support of the Bundy family and other conservatives in rural Nevada. (When asked for comment, U.S. Fish and Wildlife directed Penthouse to the Justice Department, which did not respond to questions.)

“[The Fuentes] had water before Fish and Wildlife diverted [it],” state senator Pete Goicoechea points out. “The fact that [water was made] available to the pipe satisfies the duties for the water, but it does not satisfy where the point of diversion occurs. They did move their point of diversion. That’s illegal.”

Victor and Annette wanted Oscarson, their state representative, to visit the property, but he refused. Victor, though, does not give up easily — he’s someone who swam to Guantanamo Bay to escape Castro’s Cuba. He spent weeks researching legal rights and studying historical property documents. At night, he says, “We prayed for Dennis and Heidi Fleiss for a long time.” Fleiss, now 52, ran an L.A. prostitution ring in the early nineties before getting busted, earning the nickname “Hollywood Madam.” She and Hof were the most famous residents in Nye County, and the Fuentes knew the famous were as powerful as politicians.

Last year, Tina Trenner answered their prayers, driving Hof to see the property. Wearing her trademark hoop earrings, Annette served the brothel owner carnitas and rice and beans. As he ate, Hof eyeballed photos of Patch of Heaven in 2006. The images showed a spring-fed river flowing through a landscape of grass and leafy trees — an oasis in the desert. According to Victor’s research, the area looked this way long before the Fuentes family, or even Las Vegas’s casino resorts, arrived in Nevada. He showed Hof a Nevada State Land Office map. It depicted the river running through the area since 1881.

Shocked, Hof followed Victor to the back of the ranch. Where a river once ran, Hof found a long, deep dusty gully. Despite his bad knee, he climbed down into it and walked on the barren, hard ground. The government-installed pipe delivers little more than a glorified puddle.

Standing in the cut, Hof said, “We’ve got to do something.” Since that day he’s made this story an example of how the government can screw over citizens. He hasn’t fixed the Fuentes’s problem, but they have seen increased media attention. Oscarson has since claimed he helped Victor and his wife, but Victor says, “[He] did not even get us that puddle. He’s lying.”

Hof’s assistant, Zach Hames, asserts that Oscarson’s campaign manager, Laura Billman, has grown agitated with the Fuentes’s comments. Recently, he says, Billman had a military veteran call local citizens to counteract their claims.

“James [Oscarson] helped me,” the veteran allegedly told one woman who got such a call. She countered by saying he hadn’t helped some friends of hers, despite what he said. At this point, Hames alleges, Billman snatched the phone out of the vet’s hand and barked, “Are you talking about the damn Fuentes?” The woman said yes, calling Victor and Annette good friends. “That’s a lie,” Billman snapped. “He helped them!”

When asked for comment, Laura Billman did not deny the exchange. “Sounds like they have a lot of stories,” she texted me. “Print that quote. I see no point in getting into a ‘he said, she said.’” The Oscarson campaign declined further comment.

James Oscarson has attempted to latch onto Hof’s past, creating a website called StopHof. It points to Hof’s Democratic ties, like his 2016 “Hookers for Hillary” press stunt and donations he made to Democratic Nevada senator Harry Reid. Oscarson’s campaign has also made a fuss about Hof helping a girl auction her virginity in 2009 to pay off student loans.

Unlike how most politicians would handle the accusation, Hof hasn’t denied it. The Love Ranch continues to hawk his 2015 memoir, The Art of the Pimp, which includes a whole chapter on the virgin auction. For his part, Hof has purchased billboards reminding voters that Oscarson was once arrested after assaulting someone at a hockey game. 

Hof’s embrace of his past and his presentation of Oscarson as a hypocrite seem to be working. “People who criticize the brothels are spiritually dead,” Pastor Fuentes says. “As a human we cannot eliminate sin. If a politician comes to you and says he’s going to eliminate sin, he’s lying to you.” The Patch of Heaven founder goes on to quote Scripture: “The Bible says in Roman 3:23, ‘We are all sinners and feel short of glory of God.’ All. You cannot single out Dennis Hof. We are all sinners.”

Adds Annette: “[People] are so concerned with brothels and how bad they are, what about the casinos and the bars? How many lives have gambling and alcohol ruined? Many more than brothels.”

“They come through [Patch of Heaven]!” says Victor, referring to people whose addictions have dragged them down and who hope for renewal through faith.

“Gambling addicts’ lives are ruined,” his wife observes. “We haven’t had someone come here from a brothel.”

Hof’s political aspirations have transformed the Love Ranch into a de facto campaign headquarters. Employees wear “VOTE HOF” hats. Customers discuss the commerce tax with prostitutes at the bar. Beneath a framed Penthouse cover at the brothel’s entrance, Madame Sonja has placed a stack of “VOTE HOF” pamphlets.

His three top campaign issues are repealing the commerce tax, protecting private landowners’ water rights, and preserving the Second Amendment.

Hof identifies as a “conservatarian,” taking a libertarian stance on hot-button cultural issues like gay marriage and abortion rights. “On social issues,” he says, “don’t fuck with me. I don’t care who sucks whose dick. Don’t talk to me about abortion. I don’t have a pussy, so I can’t make choices for one.”

But his pamphlet also lists controversial conservative platforms, like an anti-immigration position that no doubt pleases his friend Tucker Carlson. Just two years earlier, as I had dinner with Hof and porn star Ron Jeremy, the brothel owner had predicted that Trump’s stance toward Mexico and the wall would lose him the election. He felt that Trump would alienate America’s millions of Latino voters — a big no-no to a businessman like Hof, who claims he “stayed in the closet” as a Republican for decades because he believed you should never discuss religion or politics.

These days, though, Hof explains that he has attracted anti-immigration activists into his base, which is fine, because he doesn’t like the way sanctuary city policies oppose the law of the land. At the same time, he isn’t that personally invested in the immigration issue. “Why do you embrace anti-immigration activists then?” I ask him. He looks at me like I’m stupid. “[Because] they like me!”

To a cynic, the pimp is boiling American politics down to its basest form. To local voters, Hof comes across as honest in a district that often makes national news because of political corruption. In 2010, district attorney Robert Beckett refused to file charges against himself for misusing Pahrump city funds, then targeted Sheriff Tony DeMeo, Beckett’s original accuser. More notoriously, an arsonist burned down the Chicken Ranch brothel after owner Walter Plankinton announced his run for Nye County commissioner in 1976. The fiasco inspired Nye County Brothel Wars, a book the Bunny Ranch’s Madam Suzette has been encouraging Hof to read. The Cassandra in his world, Suzette, sensing doom, has opposed Hof’s political run. “Be careful,” she warned him, according to both Hof and Hames.

Meanwhile, the gregarious, endlessly confident Hof has been treating voters like new friends. After the Patch of Heaven event, an older woman and a few Republican men gather at the Love Ranch’s bar. As Madame Dawn hands out plates of spaghetti, pizza, and ice cream, Hof yells, “Who wants pasta?”

Johnson, the Chopped star, skips around the tables, shaking shredded cheese onto guests’ free food. “You’ve got to have the sprinkle cheese,” she says in between giggles.

Sitting beneath a painting of a lava lamp, Hof asks the voters to listen. Sounding more like an avuncular, scene-setting Walt Disney on the fifties television show Walt Disney Presents than the flamboyant pimp of HBO’s Cathouse, he shares some historical background. “[Nevada] started with miners in Virginia City,” he says. “Then the girls came. Nevadans are the product of the miners and the working girls. Tough as nails, gun-carrying. I don’t fuck with you — you don’t fuck with me.”

“What [Hof] doesn’t tell everyone is he gets up at three in the fucking morning and thinks about [this kind of] speech all day,” Hames whispers to me.

The conversation shifts to recent events. Two days before my arrival in Nye County, the Las Vegas Review-Journal ran a story revealing sexual harassment allegations against Hof by two former working girls. In 2009, Diana Grandmaison and her daughter started at a Hof brothel. The mother/daughter pair had done porn in California, and were hoping to make quick money to fund a return to Florida. One day, Grandmaison alleges Hof grabbed her vagina at the bar.

“I tried to push him away from me,” she tells me later, “and he pulled me forward and he had his fingers in my vagina, and I could not leave. I had no choice but to stay there. I knew, when I tried to fight him, I would pay a price. You would lose your room; they would take your clients.” Since she quit working for Hof, Grandmaison has operated a blog asserting that “all porn is revenge porn.” And multiple times during our interview, she accuses me of participating in sex trafficking by writing for Penthouse. “You’re all enablers,” she states.

The second accuser, Jennifer O’Kane, tells a more brutal story. On her first day of work at the Love Ranch in 2011, she says a female employee ordered her to go to her room. “When I went to the room,” O’Kane relates, “and Dennis was there, he asked me to sit next to him. At that point, he put his hands around my neck and squeezed. ‘You belong to me,’ he said. ‘That vagina is mine.’”

O’Kane goes on to allege that Hof kept squeezing and told her to get undressed. “I was in shock,” she says. “I did what I was told. I started crying. I told him I didn’t want to.”

She accuses Hof of raping her. She worked for him for six months, she says, enough time to save money to go out on her own. In June 2011, she quit the Love Ranch and later ran the Calico Club brothel as its madame. It has since closed.

“On social issues, don’t fuck with me. I don’t care who sucks whose dick. Don’t talk to me about abortion. I don’t have a pussy, so I can’t make choices for one.”

Though O’Kane regularly uses Oscarson’s hashtag #StopHof on Twitter, she denies coming forward because of the election. “I’m not getting involved in the politics of this,” she says. “He doesn’t belong in politics as much as he doesn’t belong in brothels.”

Her story does not seem to be scaring away voters from the Love Ranch. Nor does it seem to concern Hof much, who claims his accusers are disgruntled ex-employees. In between injecting insulin into his belly at the bar, Hof, a diabetic, says, “[They’re] girls I wouldn’t have fucked out of bed. Girls that were fired.”

The next morning, Jessica Johnson walks back and forth across a gravel road outside the Love Ranch, holding her cellphone in the air. She’s trying to find service, but her carrier lacks cell towers in the desert. She tells me that her brother, who’s watching her house back in Cleveland, doesn’t know where she is.

“I just told my brother I was going to Vegas,” Johnson says. She worries he’ll think she might have met a bad end and been buried in a hole in the desert.

Johnson gives up and retreats to the Love Ranch kitchen to drink coffee, dressed in her white and gold leather trench coat. The space reminds me of an elementary school kitchen: stainless steel counters, with a heavy scent of meatballs. It’s a calm, pleasant morning until Bea, the Love Ranch chef, stomps into the room.

A local news anchor has just reported that No Little Girl, the anti-prostitution group, is promoting the brothel-ban petitions in Nye and Lyon counties. If they gain enough signatures, residents will be able to vote for an official ban on the November ballot. Like many Pahrump city residents, Bea, a German immigrant, came for the heat. Without the Love Ranch, she would be out of a job. And of course this could mess with Jessica Johnson’s dreams. “I just want to tell them to fuck off,” she says.

Johnson tells Bea that she once owned a restaurant in Cleveland called Weenie A Go Go, where other “really pretty girls” wore vintage dresses and served hot dogs. Football fans would eat there after the Browns game. The food and girls attracted attention in all the local papers and blogs. Johnson garnered so much attention in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, residents accused her of buying coverage.

But last year, when her landlord doubled Weenie A Go Go’s rent to $4,000, Johnson shut down and went on Chopped. After she lost, she became an Uber driver to make rent on her apartment. Passengers recognized her, asking why you was driving for Uber. “I didn’t know,” she tells Bea, “that people look down on drivers.”

After another day behind the wheel, Johnson googled, “How can I get my restaurant back?” Prostitution, she says, popped up as a money-earning option.

“Everyone in Cleveland called me the Weenie Queen,” she jokes, “so why not? With a title like that, you’ve got to follow your weenie dreams. Uber drivers get as much shit as hookers. Might as well make more!” Johnson emailed the Bunny Ranch, went back and forth with Madame Suzette, sent her numerous photos, and eventually got on the phone with Dennis Hof himself. She recalls telling him, “I feel like I’m destined to do so much more than be an Uber driver.” Successful at getting hired, Johnson says, “I didn’t expect I’d be wearing a Vote Hof hat.”

“I don’t want Dennis to win,” I tell her. “He has a nice life, and he’s getting older.” Johnson shakes her head, saying she wants Hof to get the nomination and triumph in November. Then she adds, “I love the freedom stuff out here. I feel it in my heart.”

Johnson is new to Nevada, but her story sums up why women work in brothels and how Hof is appealing to voters. She came to the Silver State because she was hopeless and brothels gave her help. Without legal prostitution in today’s America, she’d be back in her car depending on the Uber app.

Hof has received advice from people like Nevada’s chairman at the Republican National Convention, Michael McDonald, who worked on the Trump campaign, but also from nontraditional observers like Heidi Fleiss. When she met Hof shortly after she left prison at the dawn of the new millennium, Fleiss told him, “You don’t want to be a pimp. You want to be famous. Sell all this. Run for office.”

And now, in 2018, that’s what Dennis Hof is doing. But in chasing the political dream, it appears that he might also be putting his brothel empire on the line.

To aid Hof’s campaign, Fleiss has analyzed why Democrat Conor Lamb won a March special election in Pennsylvania’s conservative 18th Congressional District. Her conclusion: Lamb’s grassroots efforts. She’s since canvassed at the county fair and gone door-to-door, convincing independents to reregister as Republicans. She’s been so successful, Republicans have begun calling her “the switcher.”

“The tree hugger in me can get the people,” Fleiss explains.

Hof has taken her advice, crisscrossing sprawling District 16, which encompasses counties Nye, Lincoln, and part of Clark, in his Hummer H2. VOTE HOF signs are plastered on its black doors. Most days, he is driven by Hames, who has become his unofficial campaign manager. “I love having a gay assistant run my campaign,” says Hof. When he doesn’t elaborate, Hames says, “I’m shady as fuck!”

During the weekend I’m in Nye County, I accompany Hames in the H2 on his morning rounds. He wears a cowboy hat and Versace sunglasses. While speeding 80 miles an hour down a gravel road called Devil’s Hole, Hames texts Republican operative Roger Stone, Trump’s longtime political advisor. He wants Stone to Skype into an upcoming rally since he’d had to cancel an in-person appearance.

Hames’s phone rings and he picks up. “Pahrump sperm bank,” he says. “You spank it, we bank it.” It’s how he answers the many calls he’s getting this morning, most of them from women assisting Hof’s campaign. Some officially work for the brothel owner; other callers are local gossips with intelligence tidbits.

We stop at a VFW diner to pick up Tina Trenner, the retired TV producer who ran against Oscarson in the 2016 Republican primary, now supporting the maverick Hof. An aging Roseanne Barr look-alike with red hair, Trenner limps toward the black Hummer.

“Hillary won [Nevada] because of the illegal vote,” she tells me moments later.

Hames sighs. “You shut up with your tinfoil hat.”

“Yes, I have a tinfoil hat!”

Through the H2 window, she points at airplane vapor trails in the sky.

“Do you see those? What are those?” she asks. I hesitate. I do not have patience for conspiracy theories, so I stay silent. But when Trenner asks again about the familiar white cloud lines above, I mutter, “Some call them chemtrails.”

Hames finds it equally ridiculous, but he’s of a mind to banter with Trenner. “Some say chemtrails is how the government makes people gay,” he jokes.

“I don’t believe that,” Trenner responds.

“How do you know I’m gay?”

“Because you’re always on Grindr!”

Hames laughs. They’re from very different demographics, but a shared liking for sarcasm, and, more importantly, their affinity for Hof, has brought them together. “They’re spraying on me like Raid!” Trenner says of the condensation trails. She pesters Hames until he pulls over at Seymour’s, an ice-cream shop whose building is shaped like a giant ice-cream cone.

Ordering me a frozen strawberry yogurt, Trenner assures me that yogurt counteracts the “chemicals” in chemtrails. She cackles. For all her ridiculous views, Trenner possesses a self-aware sense of humor. I can see why a young gay man like Hames enjoys the older woman’s wit.

Trenner never imagined she would end up discussing Grindr with a gay millennial in a pimp’s Hummer. Growing up in “Commiefornia,” she rode horses and campaigned for animal activists. She aspired to the high life, eventually moving to Las Vegas, where she worked as a television broadcaster and dined with real estate heiresses on the charity scene. It all imploded in the mid-1990s when she was hit by a semi-truck. “Don’t hug a semi,” she counsels.

Along with the accident, her husband suffered from multiple strokes, becoming a different person in the process. She says something about doctors finding “holes in his brain” before he passed away. Her career started to rebound in the mid-aughts, but then the 2008 recession happened.

I ask her why she believes in conspiracies, and she looks at me like I haven’t been listening to her monologue about her unintentionally tragic life.

“Everything is a conspiracy,” she says.

On Saturday evening at the Love Ranch, Christina Parreira, a sociology PhD student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is sitting at the bar with Bea. They’re discussing No Little Girl as if it itself was a conspiracy, wondering if it has ties to the Oscarson campaign. For the past five years, Parreira has studied Hof’s brothels. She has also worked there off and on to get personal experience for her dissertation. She has interviewed 53 women from five brothels and finds No Little Girl’s goals naive.

“Unfortunately, if the brothels were to close, it’s not like all the women are going to say, ‘Oh, let me switch what I do.’ They are going to be at risk for violence and incarceration and disease,” she says in the bar. “Without question, brothels are safer because it’s actually legal. You’re in a legal setting, so you can call the cops.”

No Little Girl is well-intentioned and claims to have no affiliation with Oscarson. After being sex-trafficked herself, the organization’s spokeswoman, Kimberly Mull, has worked as an advocate for women. “I have received several e-mails on No Little Girl from women currently working in the brothels saying they are upset with what we are doing because working in the brothels is how they ‘left an abusive husband,’” Mull says in a statement. “As a community, we should have better options and assistance available to them over ‘go sell yourself.’”

To the northwest in Lyon County, this kind of comment enrages Alice Little.

When she met Dennis Hof, Heidi Fleiss told him, “You don’t want to be a pimp. You want to be famous. Sell all this. Run for office.”

A Bunny Ranch working girl who looks like a child but speaks in the discourse of a liberal arts graduate, Little takes pride in her status as North America’s highest-earning legal prostitute. She lives in the Bunny Ranch’s luxury suite, with a window overlooking a horse corral where she keeps a pet pony — something she likely couldn’t afford if she wasn’t a prostitute.

“The fact is, no little girl wants to work at Walmart with a dead-end job and no promotions,” Little points out. “If you’re changing certain ordinances to cause a business to be banned, what’s to stop local folks from shutting down any business? Oh, we’re not comfortable with a women’s health clinic. Let’s ban Planned Parenthood! When do you say, ‘Enough is enough’?”

Little has offered to host a coffee for No Little Girl members at the Bunny Ranch, but says the organization responded by proposing she meet with Mull, a victims’ advocate. “One of those most bizarre aspects in their campaign,” says Little, “is that we are victims, that we are all forced to be there.”

Mull claims, as someone who was sex-trafficked herself, that she is best suited to speak to the working girls. And she refuses to come to the Bunny Ranch because she would find it triggering. “Hof is the biggest exploiter of women in the state and he likes the spotlight,” Mull writes in her statement.

Considering Mull has not visited the Bunny Ranch, Little rejects Mull’s depictions of her and her coworkers. “I’ve never slept with Dennis,” Little says, laughing. “We are talking about Dennis Hof, who is a teddy bear of a 71-year-old man. Is he really going to coerce or force? I don’t physically see that being possible.” The well-compensated working girl adds, “The biggest threat to my unhappiness is No Little Girl. It’s incredibly misogynistic and antagonistic.”

“YOU need help with coconuts?” That’s what Hames yells into his cellphone in a large conference room in the Pahrump Nugget Hotel & Gambling Hall. “We’re sending someone!” He points at me, where I sit beneath a faux chandelier that looks like something pulled from Disney World’s Hall of Presidents.

“Who needs help?” I ask.

“Heidi Fleiss.”

As I exit the room into a hotel hallway crowded with men in cowboy hats and gray-haired women, I spot Fleiss storming my way in stiletto heels.

Huffing and puffing, she carries a box of coconuts. “Everyone gets a gift for showing up,” she explains, referring to the political rally that’s about to kick off.

I help Fleiss carry the box into the conference room. Ever the manager, she instructs some advance men to go grab more boxes of coconuts from her Land Rover. Fleiss places our box next to the stage, which bears multiple copies of Roger Stone’s book, The Making of the President: How Donald Trump Orchestrated a Revolution.

Fleiss hands Hof a coconut, smiling. They look like two old friends remembering all the times they’ve helped each other. “You’re the best,” Hof says, then asks where she got the coconuts. Fleiss smiles. “My L.A. connections.”

Hames interrupts the lovefest. Aging Republicans are assembling, and the room isn’t ready yet. Hof treats his campaign like a brothel, ordering two hookers in matching black dresses to stand at the door. “You have to greet them as they come in,” he instructs. The women practice their greetings. Hof shakes his head and tells them to say: “Hi, welcome to Dennis Hof’s party.”

The crowd builds. Readjusting her sparkly shawl, Fleiss sits at a table with Parreira and a reporter from England’s Daily Mail. The women gossip about the parrots Fleiss adopted and a corrupt animal shelter she wants to shut down.

Conversation eventually turns to No Little Girl and the brothel ban. Fleiss views targeting Hof’s brothels as “a low blow.” Then she jokes, “If someone wants to pay to compliment me, that’s a compliment.” Hames shushes us. Daddy — as the brothel employees call the bald-domed Hof — has taken the stage.

“Tucker and Roger Stone call me the Trump of Pahrump,” Hof begins. “We’re reality stars. We eat too much.” The crowd goes wild at Hof’s Trump invocation.

“He’s such a good speaker,” Fleiss whispers.

“You all should elect me because I put a photo of Bill Clinton with two working girls [in the Enquirer]!” Hof declares. Then he asks, “Who voted for Trump?”

Everyone screams except Fleiss, the Daily Mail reporter, and me.

Other local Republicans take the stage to discuss guns and sanctuary cities. Wearing a cowboy hat, Roger Stone Skypes in to utter familiar Trumpworld slogans.        

Fleiss rolls her eyes at the immigration talk. “There should be no wall,” she says. “Just a resort like the French Riviera.”

“Tucker Carlson and Roger Stone call me the Trump of Pahrump,”Dennis Hof says. “We are reality stars. We eat too much.”

One speaker denounces Jane Fonda’s protests against the Vietnam War, and Fleiss shakes her head. “Jane Fonda,” she asserts, “is the best-looking woman in Hollywood. She’s 83 and look at her!” Still, Fleiss says, she may run as a Republican in the next election if Hof wins.

I ask Fleiss why she’s voting for him.

“I like Dennis because he’s a loyal friend,” she says. “It’s so rare. Most people who steal from you or hurt you are your friends. It’s nice to have someone who will never betray you.”

A moment later, the woman dubbed the Hollywood Madam adds, “I want Dennis to win because he understands what I’m doing with my birds.”

The evening ends with Pastor Victor Fuentes coming to the stage to lead the gathering in prayer. Zach Hames hands him a $2,000 check for Patch of Heaven.

“It’s been a whirlwind experience meeting Dennis,” Fuentes begins. “James Oscarson has not brought water back to the property. I will not let someone take credit for something they didn’t do.” He then asks the crowd to pray.

Fleiss and I stand up. “We ask you to pray for Dennis,” the Patch of Heaven founder says. His words and the moment of prayer that follows recur to me more than once that night and the next day. Conservative Christians praying for political candidate Hof at a Republican candidate rally is not something that viewers would have predicted to see when Cathouse began airing in 2005. But it’s a new era, the Age of Trump. And given the federal investigations that have impeded Trump since he entered the White House, and the drama that has already engulfed the brothels, Hof may find that those prayers come in handy. Only God knows the outcome of the pimp’s political ambition.

As Pastor Fuentes would say, Lord help him.