The Chicken Ranch Begins
Harry Ford provided his version of events that followed. One day Tim Hafen, a Pahrump town father, discovered “a red light was burning” near his home in the south end of the valley. Hafen remembered the ordinance, and contacted law enforcement officials. Indeed, a brothel had opened in 1976 within the boundary of unincorporated Pahrump.
It was called the Chicken Ranch.
According to Ford, the sheriff went out and arrested the owner, Walter Plankinton, for violating the ordinance. Plankinton fought the closure of his brothel through the courts. He eventually took it to the Nevada Supreme Court and the 9th Circuit Court in San Francisco.
In each jurisdiction they ruled in favor of Nye County.
Plankinton, Ford said, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court and they turned it down.
“They wouldn’t hear it,” he said. Regarding the brothel’s closure, Ford said with pride, “If there’s nothing else I’ve ever done in my life, I’m proud of this.”
The victory of the opponents of a brothel in Pahrump, however, was short-lived. When Ordinance no. 3 was drawn up, all the private land in Pahrump ended at the township line at the south end of town. Ford said, “After the ordinance, time loped along and a farmer named Carberry, who was an aerial crop-duster and had a crop-dusting business, came in. He was quite a large farmer in the San Joaquin Valley (Calif.), and through the Desert Land Entry Act he acquired a lot of property and some of it was outside the unincorporated boundaries of the town of Pahrump.”
Ford explained that if the ordinance had been drawn up to go from the California state line to the Clark County line, it would have covered all of the affected area. “But” he said, “we didn’t, we chopped it off at the township line, where the ordinance’s jurisdiction ended.”
Plankinton recognized this, did a little shopping around, and moved his brothel outside the town boundaries. He moved in several mobile homes and quickly had a new brothel outside Pahrump. Ford said, “Well, the man was very brilliant—that’s the only thing I can give him, and I hate to give him that. But he really flaunted this. I understand it was all over the United States, and many parts of the world. He immediately moved in some more mobile homes and, of course, history has recorded what has happened since that time.”
Ford said that with the Chicken Ranch saga, many in Pahrump just “boiled over it.” The issue, he said, was put on the ballot as an advisory question. The problem was, he said, it was written in a tricky way, in effect asking, “Do you want brothels to be legal?” or “Do you want brothels to be illegal?” Ford took the question’s language to mean, “You’re going to get brothels— how do you want them? Do you want them legal and we’ll tax the devil out of them, or do you want to get them and get nothing out of them?”
And so legal brothels won the advisory question on the ballot by a few votes. Of the affair, Ford said in bitter tones, “So we get that stuffed down our throat forever.”
Despite his victory in opening the Chicken Ranch brothel, Plankinton did suffer a loss, this one in court. Harry Ford was wont to point out that “because of Harry Ford’s ordinance” allowing no brothels within the town of Pahrump, Plankinton had to pay the piper.
“He still owed the county some jail time because he had violated the law” in first placing a brothel within the town limits.
Ford suggested there were negotiations on what would happen to Plankinton regarding jail time. Peter Knight, Nye County district attorney, Harry said, wanted to send Plankinton to prison—figuratively, Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. In the end, he was allowed to spend his time at a halfway house in Las Vegas in 1981 if he would sell his Chicken Ranch brothel and be gone.
Ford recalled, “He sold it for a nice $1,000,000 and stuck a million dollars in his pocket and jogged on down the road.”
Plankinton sold the Chicken Ranch in 1982 to an ownership group that included Russ Reade, who took over as manager.