Lawmakers demand probe of sheriff's Las Vegas brothel visit

0 Comments | Oakland Tribune, Apr 18, 2008 | by Michael Manekin

Nearly one year ago, Las Vegas police broke down the door to an illegal brothel, caught San Mateo County Sheriff Greg Munks inside and marched him at gunpoint out of the building and into the street.

Now a Bay Area News Group investigation into what happened that night has prompted the county's two U.S. representatives to call on the Board of Supervisors to conduct a thorough inquiry into the sheriff's alleged misconduct.

"This cries out for a comprehensive external investigation because the highest law enforcement officer in the county should not be under any suspicion of illegal activity at any time ever," said Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Hillsborough. "I don't think the public is naive, and I don't think they're stupid.

Added Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Palo Alto, "The whole element of accountability is missing. People simply don't know what happened that night."

It was shortly after 9:30 p.m. on April 21, 2007, that Munks and his friend, Undersheriff Carlos Bolanos, were detained during the climax of "Operation Dollhouse," a two-year investigation targeting an alleged ring of sex traffickers.

Neither man was arrested, nor were any brothel visitors. The targets of "Operation Dollhouse" were the suspected pimps who allegedly sold sex with women, many of whom police believe were indentured sex slaves.

That night, police arrested six alleged pimps at a half-dozen suspected brothels, detained 25 suspected prostitutes and confiscated 3,500 tablets of the drug Ecstasy.

Like other men caught at the brothels that night, the sheriff and the undersheriff were briefly detained, then released.

Munks and Bolanos had traveled to Las Vegas with 54 employees from the Sheriff's Office, Probation Department and district attorney's office to run the Baker to Vegas Challenge Cup Relay, a 120-mile foot race that attracts law enforcement from across the West Coast and beyond.

"I believed I was going to a legitimate business -- it was not," Munks told reporters in Redwood City three days after the raid. The sheriff called the incident a "personal embarrassment" and insisted he never broke the law. Then he told reporters he wouldn't "be answering any more questions or talking about this anymore in the future."

The sheriff has been true to his word. For nearly a year, Munks and Bolanos have refused to comment publicly on anything related to the Las Vegas trip.

Sources have told the Bay Area News Group that Munks and Bolanos spent the weekend at the Mandalay Bay, an opulent resort on the Las Vegas Strip with two world-class spas offering more than a dozen types of massages, including in-room service, to its guests. Both the sheriff and the undersheriff have refused to confirm where they stayed in Las Vegas.

"I'll let your sheriff and undersheriff answer to questions about how they were found in one of our city's brothels," said Lt. Karen Hughes of the Las Vegas Police Department's vice section. "All I'm telling you is that if you're staying at the Mandalay Bay, that hotel offers a spa that caters to tourists and anyone else."

Las Vegas Boulevard boasts at least 20 legitimate spas offering massage services. From the end of the Strip to the residential area where the two men were detained, there are at least four more legitimate spas that offer massages.

A limo ride in Las Vegas ranges between $50 and $150 per hour, whereas Munks could have gotten a massage at most first-class spas on the Strip for well below $150.

Munks and Bolanos ended up that night at 3474 Eldon St., a ranch home fitted with barred windows and furnished sparsely with a couch and TV in the front room and nothing but mattresses on the floors of the bedrooms, according to police.

There was no business sign on the outside of the building, which sits two miles off the Strip in a gritty residential neighborhood.

Inside, there were large boxes of condoms and great quantities of lubricant, said Lauren Hermosillo, a social worker with the Salvation Army who assisted the women inside once police arrested the people accused of selling their bodies.

Describing the house, Hermosillo said, "It smelled like urine, it smelled like feces, it smelled like cigarette smoke. It didn't look like a massage parlor. It was very obviously not a massage parlor."

Ten hours before police found Munks in the brothel, at 11:30 a.m., the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office had begun the relay race in the desert of Baker. Munks himself was the second of 20 runners, traversing 5.6 miles over a stretch that began with low rolling hills and concluded with a steady downward descent. He likely finished running his part of the race in the mid-afternoon.

Now it was 9:30 p.m. and he and Bolanos -- who hadn't run in the race and was outside the building at the time of the SWAT raid, according to Las Vegas police -- were standing in a lineup outside a brothel.

The Las Vegas Police Department quickly confirmed that Munks and Bolanos had been detained but provided no further information. Police reports from the raids on the various brothels were sealed by local and federal courts.