By now we've heard about everything. This city councilwoman who's also a nurse, surgery center co-owner and mother is corrupt? Or is she naïve? Either way, Moncrief, an unknown who unseated Councilman Michael McDonald in 2003, has just been indicted by a grand jury on five felony counts of filing false documents and one felony count of perjury. So who is Janet Moncrief?
She's not who she says she is. Just ask Peter "Chris" Christoff, her former opponent, who now claims she gave money to his campaign (and is considered less than credible by many), and he'll start going off on pseudonyms and bring up Florida—something happened there, he says. He's just not sure what. But we're used to those accusations by now, from the motley gadfly crew of Steve Miller, Tony Dane and Chris Christoff who scratched her back when it came to the campaign but then turned against her when she stopped scratching theirs—so she says. Moncrief's difficult to get a finger on—and that's certainly not helped when she doesn't take phone calls from the press.
So, to glean a better understanding of the councilwoman without talking to her, I tried peering into the life of Ms. Moncrief. Beginning with the surgery center she co-owns. It wasn't easy.
The Trinadad Surgery Center is mentioned in Moncrief's bio on the city's website as a clinic for the uninsured, where she assists in affordable surgeries after hours. It sounds benevolent. Or maybe sketchy—a sentiment that grew after consulting the white pages and finding that it's not listed. I tried 411, and a nice man said he can't find anything like it. He asked for the intersection. A doctor's name. Still, nothing.
So I called the Nevada Board of Medical Examiners, which referred me to the Nevada Hospital Association. There, a baffled woman said it had no record of such a place. Dialed UMC and got the same response. Quest Diagnostics, one of the nation's leading lab providers? Same. And all Internet searches lead me right back to the city's website and articles in the Review-Journal and Las Vegas Sun that briefly mention it in reference to the councilwoman. It doesn't help that it's spelled "Trinidad" in these places, and not "Trinadad," as it's supposed to be.
I searched for it on the city's Department of Business and Licensing search engine. Nothing. When I called the department, they said it went out of business in February 2002, but told me where it was located.
Expecting to find a building shell, or maybe a new 99-cent store in that location, I drove by a strip mall at Bonanza and Eastern, right across the street from Councilman Gary Reese's barbershop—and there it was. Sandwiched between the El Taquito restaurant and Colortyme Rent-to-Own is a bright yellow sign with red lettering and a silhouette of Mary: Clinica Santa Maria, it read. And in smaller lettering: Trinadad Surgery Center. The Spanish descriptions read, "Vesicula, busto, quistes ovaricos." In English: "Auto accidents, eye care, therapy, gynecology, family medicine, pediatrics." It was still here—but was Moncrief?
Inside, a dozen Hispanic women and a few screaming babies sat, waiting. A handful of women in blue scrubs work at the front desk.
"Does Janet Moncrief still work here?" I asked.
"Who?"
"Councilwoman Janet Moncrief? She's a nurse and supposed to be part owner?"
Two of them exchanged blank stares. "Let me go ask," one said. When she returned, she said, somewhat surprised, "She comes in on the weekend sometimes." The woman was equally confused when told the city thinks the surgery center went out of business in 2002. "We've been open three or four years," she said.
The plot thickened over the weekend. I was hanging out in a bar and, without bringing up Moncrief, I wound up speaking with a man who says his private detective services may be hired to look into the possibility that she was set up.
Who is this woman?
Dr. Frank Silver (no relation to this writer) is a doctor and part owner of the Clinica Santa Maria and Trinadad Surgery Center, and confirms that the place never went out of business. The only possible explanation, he said, is that he, Moncrief and Dr. Robert Webb formed a limited liability corporation a few years ago, and the ownership change could have caused the confusion. Indeed, the Clinical Santa Maria is licensed by the city.
Silver, Moncrief's friend as well as business partner, has glowing things to say about her honesty, intelligence and competence as a nurse. But she got mixed up in the wrong crowd, is a newcomer to politics (the first time Moncrief even voted was for herself) and is still working to understand it. "She's a minnow swimming in a pool of sharks, and she's got to get her defenses together," Silver said. "I think all this is going to come and go and it's going to really embarrass people."
"She's a victim of sour grapes, and she's naïve," said Anne DiMartini, the mother of 17-year-old Jenna DiMartini, who handed out fliers for Moncrief's campaign.
If you believe that she's this naïve, then the theory offered is that she dove headfirst into accepting the support of outspoken gadflies like Tony Dane and Steve Miller, thinking that any help was good help. If that's the case, she knew nothing about their dirty game to unseat McDonald, sending out false campaign fliers while acting as the angelic nurse. She can be seen as a kind of Martha Stewart-style fall-girl, who's risen quickly in the public eye, bucking the good-old-boys network (recall the time that Moncrief cast the sole vote against powerful attorney John Moran Jr. getting a free 500-square foot piece of a Downtown alley last August) and making quite a few enemies along the way.
Conspiracy Theory: Nobody's that Naïve. She's Playing Us.
Beyond that wide-eyed stare, that innocent smile, rests the possibility that we've all been duped.
"She's too bright to be naïve," Miller said. "At all times she had knowledge of every minute detail of that campaign. She was micromanaging it."
Miller says he was approached by Bob Stupak, a good friend of Moncrief's since the time a motorcycle accident landed him in the emergency room, where she helped save his life. Miller says he was offered $25,000 to help with Moncrief's campaign and, should she win, he'd be crowned head ward liaison. The former city councilman is still waiting for that City Hall office.
"I don't think she was ever naïve," said Jim Ferrence, McDonald's campaign manager, who filed a complaint with the attorney general's office about Moncrief's campaign violations. "She was recruited to run, she made up reasons for wanting to run, she was disingenuous in one press conference after another. These pieces they were sending out that were made to look like they came from us, came from them. She's holding press conferences decrying our mailers that she did."
Ferrence frowns on the credibility of Miller, Dane and Christoff, describing them as "scumbags," but believes Miller taught her the dirty campaign tactics he says she used. "She's not ignorant," he said. "No, she's just good at playing ignorant."
Consider that she's educated enough to be a nurse, and, according to the secretary of state's corporate filings has become something of a businesswoman, being co-owner in Silver-Webb-Moncrief LLC, and also a company called Las Vegas Boxing Management LLC. And just last month, she registered her own cardiac-nursing business. Perhaps she's preparing for her own descent from politics and cranking up a safety net or two. Or maybe she's discovered the need for a medical business that will have its number, you know, listed.
"I think that people who are new to politics, who discover politics and participate in them for the first time, somehow think that they're going to change politics as opposed to the other way around," said Dan Hart, a political consultant who handled McDonald's first campaign. "When she was running for office, I'm sure she felt like she was running against the establishment. I'd venture to say she wouldn't do the same thing today. "
It doesn't help disprove any of the theories that neither Moncrief nor her office are returning phone calls, and that media are referred to her attorney, Richard Wright. He's on vacation.