For months, it seemed the wedding bells reclaimed their clang, drowning out the sounds of keys on cars, the whish of air leaving tires and the threats of hit men and handbillers, as the Wedding Chapel Wars quieted and eternal bliss assumed center stage. But with the approach of June, the most popular wedding month, the soldiers are suiting up again. There have been bomb threats. Death threats. Shoving matches. The return of a handbilling fugitive. And the revelation that one of the main players in the chapel wars doesn't even have a wedding chapel license. Will it ever stop?
"I don't think it's going to stop," says Hector Arce, who's a handbiller and driver for A Las Vegas Garden of Love. "Everybody wants a piece of the business."
Consider the recent events. Two weeks ago, Alex, a handbiller from A Las Vegas Garden of Love, was handing out fliers. A handbiller from rival chapel Las Vegas Wedding Bureau was grabbing the fliers out of his hand and replacing it with his chapel's flier. So Alex picked up their flier and set it on fire. "This is what I think of the Las Vegas Wedding Bureau," he said.
The next day, the chapel office was ringing with phone calls. One of them came from a pay phone, and when Barb Ludwig, who's the mother of Cheryl Luell, the chapel's owner, answered the phone, a man muttered, "There's a bomb in your chapel, you f--king bitch." She was scared, but not scared enough to interrupt the wedding going on in one of the chapels. She called the cops, who told her to evacuate the chapel.
"I have a wedding in progress and I'm not going to scare them," Barb insisted, in her staunch, Midwestern manner. She said that she'd been in the chapel all day, and no one had placed a bomb in there. She suggested that they look around back, but they weren't amenable to that. Barb says they laughed when she told them she wouldn't evacuate their chapel and left.
The next day, another threat. "Tell Cheryl she can watch the slide show of Hector being shot and dragged." The phone calls continued into the next weekend, with more threats. This time, they came from someone Cheryl knew, an ex-employee named Thomas, who used to work for Stained Glass Chapel, and also worked for Cheryl for one day. She hadn't heard from him for a while. Last time was months ago, when he called and harassed her from his jail cell in Elizabethton, Tennessee, where he was being held for theft charges. Now he's back.
"You know what? I'm going to climb up on your roof and I'm going to put a bomb up there. You're going to be f--ked up." Then, another call from the same guy. "I'm going to follow you home when you don't know that I'm behind you. I'm going to slice your throat, I'm going to slice your family's throat," Luell recounts. "I said, 'Dude, you know what, dude? Do what you want to do, man.' He said, 'When you least expect it, I'm going to catch you, bitch.'"
According to a rep at the Elizabethton jail, a warrant has been issued for Thomas' arrest, on charges that they "think" are theft. Charges that aren't serious enough for an extradition from Las Vegas. They say they won't pick him up west of the Mississippi. Locally, Luell and Ludwig say the cops haven't shown much interest in any of the threats. Metro's public information office didn't know whether or not the chapel task force created last year even existed anymore, and other Metro departments didn't return calls to the Weekly.
To throw more rice on the bridal-brigade war, we've learned that Stained Glass Chapel has been operating without a wedding chapel license. The chapel, doing business as "Las Vegas Info," has licenses for party planning, handbilling and as a travel and ticket agency, but not for the whole marrying business. Sources say it's because they claim to operate as a church, not a chapel, and consider themselves exempt from the license. Klute did not return phone calls seeking comment. The city cited the chapel March 3.
"We will monitor it and certainly hold them to their responsibility of maintaining a license," says Jim DiFiore, the city's business services manager. Looks like we're in for another long, heated summer.