The likely price of lost battle over handbillers

By Joe Schoenmann (contact)

Sunday, Nov. 16, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Few meetings pass during which the Clark County Board of Commissioners doesn’t agree to pay out money for lawsuits lost or settled.

The payments are typically approved without discussion during the consent agenda portion of the meeting, for which dozens of items are gathered together and one vote is taken for all.

Next week’s meeting includes a few of those. A $50,000 payment is likely to be approved for a man injured in an April 2007 accident with a county vehicle. Another $42,814.41 will likely go to a woman injured when her vehicle was hit by a county street sweeper.

Then there’s the $119,000 payment to the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada and $124,000 to the company of Richard Soranno.

What’s the story behind those two larger payments?

They have nothing to do with physical injuries and everything to do with the First Amendment. And they stem from a dispute that extends back to 1999.

Soranno is one of the kings of the valley’s notorious “outcall” industry, the businesses people try to keep their young children from asking about when they see their rolling billboards, handbills or 100 pages of ads in the Las Vegas yellow pages. “Nude dancers direct to your room!” Soranno’s company gets a fee for setting up the private entertainment.

Metro Police believe the business is a cover for prostitution. Soranno bristles at the notion. His office in downtown Las Vegas is lined with warnings against prostitution. His folks are hired to entertain clients by dancing only, he has insisted in the past. When pressed he has also made the point that the dancers are independent contractors, so if they are accused of prostitution on the job, it has nothing to do with his company.

But the lawsuit that led to the likely county payment is related to a different arm of his business altogether: The people who line the Strip handing out pamphlets and cards showing (mostly) semi-nudes and their contact phone numbers.

Soranno and the Nevada ACLU sued Clark County in 1997 over a county code prohibiting the distribution of printed materials promoting commercial transactions in areas around the Strip and the Las Vegas Convention Center.

In March 2007, District Court entered a judgment against Clark County. A year later, in March 2008, the court ordered fees and costs, then asked for a recalculation of the fees. And now the county is paying up.

You mean, if the county had not insisted on fighting for this law, taxpayers would not be footing the bill?

This is how Gary Peck, Nevada ACLU executive director put it last week: “It’s unfortunate that the government saw fit to repeatedly attempt to defend an indefensible, unconstitutional law at taxpayer expense. And it’s unfortunate that Clark County chose to pass that law in the first place.”

Peck hailed the verdict as a victory for anyone who dares think of handing out literature on the Strip.

“This is about the free speech rights of the general public,” he said. “Everyone who cares about the First Amendment should celebrate the court’s decision.”

Wasn’t Soranno also in the news in connection with a nationally publicized criminal investigation years ago?

Yes. In 1998, the FBI tapped phone calls while doing a police corruption investigation during which they heard talk of a plot to horn in on Soranno’s business.

To persuade Soranno to get out of the business, Soranno’s business competitors had hired Vincent Congiusti. His mob nickname, federal authorities said, was “Vinnie Aspirins” because he was said to have bored holes into a victim’s heads with a power drill.

The FBI arrested Congiusti and his crew before any cranial deconstruction took place. When he was pulled over, a power drill was found in the SUV he was driving.