Take a look at any photograph of Erin Kenny from before the ex-county commissioner fell from grace—I'm speaking now of the mid-to-late '90s—and you will see a woman on the move. It's as if the pictures—which, of course, are still there, in newspaper archives, stored files at the Clark County Government Center, her friends' albums—can hardly contain Erin Kenny. They seem to be able to hold her in time just long enough to capture her slender fingers, her thin lips, her blond hair cut short in the style popular among soccer moms at the time, and above all her disposition, energetic and ambitious.
The image of Erin projected in those days, when she was hot on the public opinion thermometer, was acute: a woman not yet 40, full of zest, and for sure on the rise. And with enough energy and ambition to be more. To be great. To one day become governor of this entire state, perhaps.
She was unlike her fellow Democrats. She didn't possess the unsuspected boldness of Mary Kincaid (who didn't have the dash Chauncey then), or Dario Herrera's young-buck audacity, and in all certainty not Harry Reid's old-school brazenness. But boy, ol' Erin, a real Tasmanian devil, she had temerity. Like the popular high-school cheerleader who'll do anything to get ahead; the one who anticipates neither ramification nor disapproval no matter whom she hurts or forsakes.
As one newspaper put it during those times, Erin was a "pep-girly county commissioner." Even Bruce Woodbury, who served on the commission alongside Erin then, says that "she was what folks around here called high-maintenance," involving herself with so many issues each week, often of a controversial nature, and on such a micromanagerial level, that her colleagues were left to wonder: All right, what's Erin gonna bring up next?
It was always something with Erin Kenny, as one journalist wrote at the turn of the millennium, and he couldn't have been more accurate. There was her ruthless and inexhaustible campaigning, her efforts to usher a casino into one of her District F neighborhoods, her proposed ordinances to ban new-car dealerships from operating on Sundays, cell-phone use in moving automobiles (even though the voluble commissioner had just accrued more than $4,000 in taxpayer money on her own cell) and Wal-Mart in general; there was her suspicious relationships with superstar developers like Jim Rhodes and Donald Davidson, her absences from county meetings and her tantrums when she was present, her 11th-hour decision to run for lieutenant governor; and then, after her popularity begin to cool—I'm talking now about 2001, 2002—there were the G-Sting charges, the plea agreement, the testimony on the witness stand, the vertigo she incurred and the strip club mogul who said Erin gave him multiple blow jobs, unsolicited, for her own personal aggrandizement.
Yep, it was always something with Erin, a woman who lifted herself to prominence as a public figure through sheer energy, ambition and temerity, only to be dethroned by those same characteristics soon thereafter.
Born the grandchild of a Yugoslavian entrepreneur and the daughter of a public servant—a teacher—Erin Kenny moved at a young age from Southern California to Chicago's windy suburbs, and there she came to understand the ways of the world. She learned the devices of rhetoric at the University of Illinois, where she majored in speech, and after graduating in the early '80s, she delved into the world of public relations at the renowned Rogers & Cowan Corporation, where only the quick and competitive survived. She didn't. By the end of the decade, having had no greater success at a new public relations firm, Callin & Callin, she filed for personal bankruptcy. Then she married a chiropractor of means named John, with whom she moved to Southern Nevada in 1989, her energy and ambition undeterred.
And her personality didn't waver during the next three years in Las Vegas, even though she didn't make it as a waitress at Imperial Palace and failed in her endeavor to open a consulting business. She had the zeal and aspiration to flourish, but the problem with Erin back then was that she lacked the resources—the connections. Which, in large part, is the reason she decided to run for the State Assembly in 1992. And why not? She was now in Nevada, where you can have limited experience in politics, like current governor Kenny Guinn, and still be victorious; where former mob lawyers, like Oscar Goodman, can become city mayors; and where one day Harry Reid, top Democrat in not just the state but also the whole damn nation, would endorse people like Dario Herrera on account of his good looks and model charm and Erin Kenny herself, because, well, she was so energetic and ambitious. Erin hoped her endless roadwork and singular resolve would be enough to overcome an underdog status and win District 4.
They were. And she went on to use those qualities—energy and ambition like a freight train charging full speed ahead—to surge through two years on the Assembly, and then, in 1994, to the race for the Clark County Commissioner's seat in District F.
According to the office of campaign consultant Kent Oram, who conducted Erin's train back then, Erin never once worried about losing.
"Because she was too busy campaigning to concern herself with odds," one of Oram's representatives told me. "And Erin was so bubbly and energetic, it was hard not to like her."
Plus, she had a maniacal focus, which at the time was to win the election at any cost. And so without provocation she held a press conference in which she said, HEY! HEY! HEY! I am not the one who generated the flier going around that says MY OPPONENT, DON SCHLESINGER, IS GAY, even though no one in reality had even noticed the flier at hand.
She won. And then she did some good in her new capacity, says Bruce Woodbury. She—Erin, a mother of five, all school-aged—fought to open up Desert Breeze Park in Spring Valley, and she earned much of the credit for improving the air quality in this dusty valley with her efforts to consolidate its regulating bodies. Erin, moreover, made good friends. She endeared herself to the Culinary Union, whose plate of gripes she carried to countless meetings. The AFL-CIO came to love her after she fought hard to prevent abominable Wal-Mart from infiltrating her District F neighborhoods. And so too did the police and firefighters, who not only endorsed Erin but even took it one step further: They campaigned door to door on the young blonde's behalf. And she did it all while maintaining her household and raising her children in health and good care.
For these reasons she gained the blessings of Harry Reid. He praised her back then "for her set of principles," and he said he admired Erin for her robust sense of individuality.
"She may not follow what is popular at the time," said Reid. "She's a person who does what she thinks is right."
Of course, back then, in the mid-'90s, Reid, like the rest of Nevada, had no idea what kind of pestilential politics Erin was about to submerge herself into.
Boy, did that woman have temerity. After she spent $1.2 million in her 1998 campaign to be re-elected as commissioner, a record at that time in Clark County, Erin embarked upon a train ride of corruption that would carry her through the next four years in office, and she did it without stealth or apparent regard for being caught.
Yep, she tightened her relationship with Jim Rhodes—the prodigious developer whose postcard houses have sprouted throughout the valley anywhere and everywhere the county has permitted them; the multimillionaire for whom Erin went to bat during several county meetings; the man whose signature was on the house in which she came to take residence. That guy.
Erin has said that she used to meet with developer Donald Davidson once a month, and that he would toss her treats—$2,000 or $3,000—for every vote she cast favorable to his plans. Then, in 2001, she said to hell with my constituents' wishes and helped rezone the Desert Inn Road-Buffalo Drive region, in order for a CVS Pharmacy to be erected there; and in the end, according to the Department of Justice, she received $200,000 from Davidson and $100,000 from his company, Triple Five Development, to be placed in her own personal account overseas. Erin has said that Davidson encouraged her to ditch politics and rejoin the business world—where energy and ambition and temerity are glorified—but she rejected him. With hundreds of thousands of dollars in her pocket, chances are she felt as if she were doing a fine job milking both worlds.
Then, in 2001, 2002, came her indiscreet meetings with Lance Malone, a former Clark County Commissioner who acted as the intercessor between Erin and strip club king Michael Galardi, also a person of great energy and ambition. As she herself would later admit, Erin did anything Galardi asked—like casting her commissioner's vote to separate strip clubs by at least 500 feet, to issue zoning and licensing permits to Galardi's Jaguars club, to control and harass Galardi's competitors, to defeat proposed ordinances that would ban touching or people under 21 from stepping in strip clubs—and he fed her sums of $5,000 to $10,000 each time.
(All of which is not to mention the time a county employee accused her before the state ethics commission of masterminding a break-in at the Clark County Government Center, to steal documents Erin believed would destroy Mary Kincaid in her District B race against Erin's good friend, Stephanie Smith; nor the time she tried to prohibit car dealerships from operating on Sundays, which, Steve Sebelius, political commentator for the Review-Journal back then, said was an obvious case of submitting to a special-interest request.)
On top of her yearly salary of $54,000, Erin, according to the confessional she would give in 2006, during the infamous G-Sting trial, had accepted at least $370,000 in bribes.
"It seemed like she couldn't get enough," says Dr. Craig Walton, UNLV political science professor and president of the Nevada Center for Public Ethics. "There's never been a more expensive case of corruption in this state.
"Did she want to become queen of the universe or something?"
The hunger of the woman who had failed at business before entering the world of politics had never abated, and she only became more ravenous with time and success, to the point where she could no longer resist the only temptations more alluring than the devil's: those of a very rich man.
"I'm on my knees," she once said in reference to Michael Galardi. "I'll do anything."
And it's true—she would have. Take another look at her track record: She had become enslaved by her hunger.
Yet, even after all her illicit and lucrative dealings, Erin's high standing on the public opinion thermometer at the turn of the 21st century didn't drop much, for she had clout, a great defense lawyer in Frank Cremen and Harry Reid's enthusiastic support. Even Republican Gov. Kenny Guinn had to admit it:
"She's a very popular person in Southern Nevada, with a lot of money."
This was a time in America when terrorists were crashing planes into buildings, wreaking havoc on the East Coast and stirring citizens nationwide to cling tighter to their protective bodies, their government. The economy in Southern Nevada, as in the rest of the nation, descended with the towers, and so development was not seen as such a bad thing: It resurrected us in an undeniable way.
You have to understand the climate in which she was carrying out her politics, says Walton. Southern Nevada's political atmosphere has never presented the resistance necessary to stop devious behavior among its inhabitants.
"She didn't receive any negative reinforcement," continues Walton, whose NCPE group is working on 11 new ethics laws to present to legislators. "And it's hard to believe that she could have done it without others being aware."
The Valley, just a century old, was growing like a boy in puberty. Between 1990 and 2000, the population increased 85 percent, tops in the nation, and its 1.5 million residents in 2000 increased by 15 percent over the next three years, second in the nation. And while the County Commission (Nevada's most powerful elected body, according to the Las Vegas Sun) has remained a body of seven throughout the years, the number of constituents for which each commissioner is responsible has increased manifold. "The issues stemming from growth have been immense," says Commissioner Woodbury. "It's been very challenging to keep up, and it's made for less opportunity for personal attention."
And so during this massive influx (and efflux too: the U-Hauls deliver them out as well) Erin managed to elude the scrutiny of both her constituents and her peers. She would later say that none of her colleagues knew of her Machiavellian affairs. And they in reality must not have, because in 2002 she was encouraged by Senator Reid and supported by her party mates to leave behind her County Commission seat and run for lieutenant governor of Nevada.
"The old joke," says Hugh Jackson, the longtime political commentator who runs the Las Vegas Gleaner, one of the state's foremost political blogs, "is that if Harry had it his way, Erin Kenny would running to become Nevada's next governor right now."
Which, of course, would have been Erin's way, too. But 2002 was a bad year for Reid's protégés. Besides Erin, he had endorsed Dario Herrera, warning the world to watch out for the next Democratic king in Nevada, only to see him lose in his third congressional district race against Republican Jon Porter. And Erin lost in her race against Lorraine Hunt for lieutenant governor, Reid's old office.
Think that stopped Erin from moving on, energetic and ambitious? Hell no, it didn't. In her last months as county commissioner, Erin, promoting herself no doubt for potential employers in the business sector, introduced many items on the commission's agenda that would benefit the master plans of those respective companies and not of the county. Commissioner Woodbury said the commission had to shoot down Erin's rezoning issues every meeting, and according to Department of Justice reports, Erin and Donald Davidson continued their "social" meetings during those final months of 2002. And then, just as soon as she cleared her things from the Clark County offices, she became a full-time consultant for Jim Rhodes, whose contributions to her earlier campaigns had gone unreported. She had that kind of temerity.
Which is reason to believe that she would have continued, perhaps running for a new office this year, had she not been caught by the FBI in the G-Sting scandal.
The media, with its power to project caricatures before the public, has painted Erin ugly. Today, hers is the portrait of a politician utterly grotesque at 45.
No one can say she's been a good model. Above all since the G-Sting scandal broke open on May 14, 2003, and her unequivocal implication in it came to light the following week. Many of Erin's past sins became public knowledge, and therefore the woman who had once been the darling of the Democratic Party now resembles Macbeth's wife more than anything, victim to the excesses of her own energy and ambition. FBI agents, who had been conducting a clandestine investigation of Michael Galardi and his subordinates for two years, presented Erin Kenny with irrefutable evidence linking her to Galardi, as well as a fat chunk of the monetary meat with which he baited politicians during that time. Over $200,000 in total. They had so much evidence against Erin, in fact, that she, just like Galardi himself, must have felt that her defense was untenable, that a trial would be wasted time and money. So she cooperated with authorities. She settled an agreement on July 24, 2003, to plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and two counts of wire fraud. She would be required to serve a maximum of 46 months in the slammer, and forfeit $70,258.53 to the government. (That is, less than a quarter of what she is known to have embraced in bribes during her run as commissioner.) And she would have to testify in court against two other county commissioners implicated in the scandal: Dario Herrera and Mary Kincaid-Chauncey.
That came on April 3 of this year. She took the stand in the heat of the G-Sting trial, which was more like reality television than real life, and along with confirming Herrera's and Kincaid-Chauncey's culpability she enumerated her transgressions as if she were sitting in a Catholic confessional:
She admitted to accepting anywhere between $50,000 and $70,000 from Galardi;
She confirmed that she had received $100,000 from the Triple Five Development corporation;
She acknowledged the $200,000 she got from its vice president, Donald Davidson, and $20,000 more from another developer, through Davidson, known only as Chinaman;
She confessed to stealing from her campaign coffers, and she did not deny accepting unreported contributions from Jim Rhodes.
And then, salivating at the chance to attack her credibility, opposing lawyers asked her several questions about conversations she'd had with Malone or the defendants, many of which she had no answer for.
It's vertigo, she told them. I've been suffering from a case of vertigo as of late.
She further contributed to the debacle of her public image when attorneys—pointing out the Rhodes home she had sold in 2004 for $324,000 more than she paid for it, the new home in Summerlin she had bought that same year for $869,000, and the $50,000 she spent to remodel it—asked her why she hadn't paid a single cent of the money she agreed to forfeit to the government, and she replied: "I was under the impression the money was not due until after I was sentenced."
The attorneys responded: "She is saying whatever the government wants her to say in an effort to maintain her lifestyle."
(Later, a lawyer for Triple Five, speaking to the Las Vegas Sun in an effort to rebut Erin's implications of his client, turned a negative spin on Erin's definitive characteristics:
"This is a very intelligent and wily person who spent years lying to the public and getting away with it. She is going to say whatever is going to work out best for her.")
It's a damn good thing for Las Vegas that neither Erin nor the G-Sting embarrassment received much notice on the national level. Not now, anyway. Not while the city is still trying to convince the nation of its credibility as a major metropolis. Not while USA Today still publishes articles like the one on February 28 of this year, headlined: "Las Vegas moving from circus act to regular city." Not while folk here still have to answer outsiders, Yes, people do in actuality live and work and raise families and function as civilized Americans here.
According to Walton, perhaps that's the exact reason Erin and the G-Sting trial didn't end up on CNN every night: The nation still views us as an immature town. One where sex as the currency of corruption (think of Dario Herrera's escapades) is not Earth-halting news, but rather, kind of anticipated, like sun in San Diego or traffic in New York. One with a perverted libertarian idea that people here are free from responsibility. And one, just 100 years old, still travailing through the throes of puberty, a time in which we all know awkwardness and unsavory behavior are more natural than not.
At any rate, Erin's smeared public portrait was saved from a national audience, but within the mountains of this valley she still elicited great infamy. And that was before Michael Galardi took the stand and said that he'd received at least five unsolicited blowjobs from Erin Kenny.
Few are willing to call Erin a flat-out evil woman. Not even her archenemies, the Republicans. And it's not just because she, like all of us, is multidimensional and far short of perfection, but also because it's common knowledge that all of politics is comprised of two-sided people.
They have public personalities, they have private lives; they are good at times, they are bad at times. Erin's friends call her a terrific mother; her political foes call her untamable and avaricious. And with one deft stroke, a political reporter for the Las Vegas Sun captured Erin whole:
"She was effective at dividing herself."
Jon Ralston, Southern Nevada's most industrious and shrewd political analyst, saw this duality manifested during Erin's testimony during the G-Sting trial, and so wrote about it:
"There was measured, knowledgeable and, at times, effective [Kenny], a mirror of her public persona as an elected official. And then, there was nasty, ruthless, and, at times, amoral [Kenny], providing a window into how she did business as a politician."
As of now, Erin, a gregarious woman by nature, is lying low in her home in the Eagle Hills neighborhood in Summerlin, an exclusive community 15 miles from the Clark County Government Center, and innumerable worlds away in ambiance. It's protected by two impenetrable guards in mountaineer hats.
I went there, without invitation, to speak to Erin in person, but was denied. And so I retuned, and tried again, to no greater success. Perhaps I didn't have the right cause to get through the impermeable walls; perhaps I didn't have the charm to get beyond the guards; or perhaps I just didn't have the clout to get to Erin Kenny—but in any case, I was forbidden from seeing her. And that, I'm sure, is how she wants it right now.
With the transience of this town, and the high turnover rate among journalists and other political junkies, Erin should be clear to reemerge into public life again, says Hugh Jackson. That is, of course, if she's not in jail. Her sentencing should come in the near future.
"One thing I'll say about Erin is that she is a very positive person," says Maryland Plise, a longtime friend of Erin's who has not heard from the former commissioner in many months. "I know she'll learn from her mistakes and move on."
Maryland says, moreover, that Erin refrains herself from the public eye so as to protect her friends. Erin knows that to even be associated with Erin Kenny right now is precarious, above all for her political friends in the heat of election season, whose images are paramount and thus cannot afford to be mixed with the paint of Erin's tainted portrait.
I can testify to this. In researching this story, I found that nobody wanted to talk about Erin Kenny. The Democratic Party's leader, Tom Collins, who also serves as a Clark County commissioner (and who once served on the state Assembly with Erin), did not want to talk, despite calls to both of his offices and one to his home. Erin's good friend Stephanie Smith, a councilwoman now in North Las Vegas, didn't return phone calls. And Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid didn't want to talk either, leaving his public relations people to excuse him for reasons not unlike those given to me by Yvonne Atkinson-Gates, Myrna Williams, Dina Titus, et cetera, et cetera.
The political impact of Erin Kenny, along with her mates shipwrecked by the G-Sting tidal wave, can be seen in the current campaigns. Not only do politicians distance themselves as far as possible from the fallen ones, the Kennys and Herreras and Kincaid-Chaunceys, but many have now also built their platforms on the promise of integrity and ethics, and some guys, like Jim Gibbons, during the gubernatorial debate on August 4, were sure to expound that "ethics are the cornerstone of public office" and "my vote cannot be bought." Bruce Woodbury, who has served on the Clark County Commission since 1981, says that the honorable and hardworking public officials, who need no incentive to be upright, must now be more keen with their work and more cautious with their relationships. And now, he says, elected representatives face a higher level of cynicism on account of their former colleagues' deceitful actions.
It's true. "Erin Kenny betrayed the trust of the people with great energy, and great complexity," says Walton. "And that takes something extraordinary. I know a lot of people who believed in her.
"If Erin, who had been so highly touted, deceived, then the people must be thinking: who can we trust?"
Faith lost. It appears to me that that's the real tragedy in the story of Erin Kenny.
Ben Holden, a regular Las Vegan, not someone in a position to tempt the likes of Erin Kenny, told me:
"I saw that woman's face on the TV all the time, and I thought 'What's the big deal?' This town does everything half-ass anyway, and it's not like this Erin Kenny shot somebody."
But the thing to understand, says Walton, is that white-collar crimes harm the very foundation of this country, for they sever trust, and trust unites the people. The political system is built on it, and stability depends upon it. And with such weak ethics laws in this state, something that's been lamented by authorities for years, and such a precedent of political corruption in this region—see the LA Times' report on bribed judges this year, District Judge Gerard Bongiovanni's conviction for racketeering and wire fraud in '96, Clark County Commissioners Woodrow Wilson and Jack Petti accepting bribes in 1982 (and the list goes on and on back to the 19th century)—it's tough to imagine Erin's behavior wasn't cultivated in a climate of corruption, he says.
Jon Ralston agrees. He has written:
"Kenny cannot be anomalous. It's hard to believe Kenny has been the only one in Southern Nevada so expertly using a populist public persona to mask a darker, avaricious side.
"But who are they?
"I wonder."
Hugh Jackson says it will all blow over, or wash out with the new wave of citizens and political observers to crash into the valley, and Erin Kenny's image will soon vanish from Southern Nevada's collective consciousness. The reality is that a large piece of this busy region just doesn't care, he says.
The signs are already there. For example, in search of information on Erin Kenny's political career, I went to UNLV—the den of consciousness in our city, I had presumed—and the first librarian to whom I spoke responded with a quizzical stare.
"Hold on there," he said. "First tell me who Erin Kenny is."
Later, I approached a group of students, eight of them, who were all speaking with fervor about neither politics nor academics, but rather, American Idol. I interrupted, and said: "If you all could tell me where in the library I can find information on Erin Kenny, I sure would appreciate it." Half looked at each other with wide eyes. The others seemed to recognize the name, but weren't confident enough to respond. Until, that is, one of the students, a young man, said:
"Isn't that that politician who gave a dude a hummer in a strip club?"