Del Mar-red

Barricaded from passersby by a steel fence, the sign stands Space Needle-like amid the bulldozed rubble at 1411 Las Vegas Blvd. S.—the lone remnant of the 52-year-old Del Mar XXX Movie Motel. Blocks away, near the Clark County Detention Center, Richard Shives, who worked five years in housekeeping at the Del Mar and whose City Council testimony about rampant prostitution there helped get it shut down in May, can only muster a half smile. The night before, he heard on the news that the Del Mar was being destroyed; the morning newspaper confirmed the death. "I was very happy to hear that it was demolished," says Shives, 46.

As for walking the few blocks from his apartment to see the Del Mar's remains—forget about it. An attack by a gun-wielding couple on November 30—the same day of a police prostitution sting that led to Del Mar's closure—left him with emotional scars way more debilitating than the 27 stitches it took to patch up his head, the herniated discs that have put a hitch in his gait, the memory loss and the diet of pain pills. "I'm paranoid," Shives says. "I think they (the attackers) are going to come back and finish the job ... I'm just thankful that nobody else will be getting hurt in that damn place again."

"These prostitutes are just a percentage of the action."

Shives says things were fine when he was hired on at the Del Mar in 2000. Over five years, he worked his way up from housekeeper to a supervisory position on the graveyard shift, monitoring a four-person crew that cleaned the motel's 35 rooms, which rented for $35 an hour. "I came to the Del Mar because I knew someone that worked here," Shives says. "I'm illiterate, so jobs are real hard to get. But it was a good job and I got promotions."

In the beginning, he says prostitution was present but not problematic, generally a handful of working girls and johns taking advantage of cheap hourly rates—they did their business, he did his. Shives contends that the criminal tide turned when Wrenn hired his son-in-law, schoolteacher Ed Kammer, to manage the motel in 2002.

"When Ed Kammer came, he did away with the nightly room charges, made the rates hourly only and charged a $100 deposit to stay overnight, making it so that people couldn't afford the overnight stays," Shives says. "Kammer chased the overnighters away because the property was making more money. Most of the time, people would stay only seven minutes. With the hourly rates, the prostitutes could get folks in and out. Everyone was scared to tell him (owner Edgar Wrenn) about what was happening."

Says Joseph Kent, who quit last year after six years as a Del Mar employee: "Kammer put the fear of God in his employees." Kent says his dictatorial boss offered no help in dealing with a criminal element that grew increasingly brazen.

"I'd been hit (assaulted) before by hookers and drug addicts when I told them they weren't welcome. So have other workers," Kent says. "I told Kammer. He told me that it was his motel and he'd do what he wanted."

Shives and Kent say Kammer didn't suffer conscientious objectors. "We were given days off without pay for not obeying, for things like not leaving the TV on a porn channel after cleaning a room," Kent says. Dissidents fared worse. "He fired 10 people in the first week. He fired my girlfriend, Catherine Klong, because she has epilepsy. We filed a lawsuit against the hotel and won."

Adds Shives: "Kammer used to nitpick at me a lot. I know that there is a whistleblower law to protect you, but that can't help when you're fired. I was hired at $7 an hour and was now making $9.80. I wanted to keep my job. He treated his employees like shit."

"It was a kangaroo court." Sandy Wrenn is talking about the three-and-a-half-hour City Council meeting in May during which the Del Mar's business license was revoked, shuttering a family business that had been open for a quarter century. (Earlier this month, Wrenn's father, Ed, sold the property to the Eliades family, which owns the nearby Olympic Garden strip club.)

Since the meeting, Wrenn says she's looked at the Del Mar controversy inside and out, upside down, every which way, and all roads lead to the same path: Someone had it in for the property. The cops? City Council? Somebody?

"Everything the City Council didn't like was legal," she says. "Putting condoms in the rooms—legal. For 25 years, we had a three-hour rate. My husband (Ed Kammer) came in and made one- and two-hour rates. The cops objected, saying it led to prostitution, but there was nothing illegal about the rates. The cops contacted my husband a couple of times, but never talked to my father. My father has done stings for the cops for 20 years to break up prostitution and drugs; (the) vice (squad at Metro) liked the Del Mar."

As for the City Council voting to close the motel, Wrenn claims the city wants to build high-rises on the Del Mar's 1-1/2 acres. "The monorail will end up going right past it and it's not the image (Mayor) Oscar Goodman wanted people to see," she says.

Somewhat surprisingly, Wrenn says her husband is most responsible for the Del Mar's brothel-like behavior. "Honestly, I think my husband created the entire thing," she says. "We knew that doomsday was coming but he accelerated doomsday."

When contacted by the Weekly and told of his daughter's comments, Ed Wrenn declined to elaborate. "I don't want to get into that," he says. "My kid's not too bright."

During the May City Council meeting, Shives testified that Kammer promoted the motel's cheap hourly rates in strip clubs and implemented a policy to place three condoms and four peppermints on the bed each time a room was cleaned. Reached via phone, Kammer says, yes, he suspected prostitution may have gone on at the motel, but that what happened in the rooms was none of his business.

"No shit, (prostitution) goes on. It goes on at Bellagio, Sahara, Stratosphere, Mandalay Bay, too. I wasn't playing ignorant to the prostitution," Kammer says. "It was about privacy. Say you come to the Del Mar. You give your name and contact information. Say you have a woman in the car with you—that woman could be your wife, mistress, girlfriend, one-night stand or a prostitute. Do we have the right to ask you who you are with? The funny thing that the police said (at the City Council meeting) was that there were older men with younger women. You walk through Bellagio and you see a lot of older men with younger women. We've had men check in with men. We don't ask you who you are with."

Kammer admits the rooms were set up for sex—blue lights, lots of mirrors, XXX movies; the condom-on-the-pillows idea was an added benefit. His argument: "You can go to the Clark County Health District and get them (condoms). We were just providing them there for safe sex. If a woman is a prostitute, what's the main thing she carries? Condoms. Most of them already had their own condoms, so they weren't coming to the Del Mar for condoms."

Then what were they coming for?

"What were we advertising on the outside sign? (XXX movies)," he says. "Yes, I admit to being a dictatorial boss—housekeepers had to keep TVs on XXX movies. When I came, I made sure the rooms were nicer—new carpets, new paint, new bedspreads, new curtains. But it was a major fallacy that this was done for the johns. Lots of business was repeat business—lots of married couples. Rooms were clean and smelled nice. Wouldn't you come if you were a prostitute?"

In separate interviews, Wrenn and Kammer questioned the timing of the police sting; they say it came shortly after the first city audit on the Del Mar in 15 years. Kammer claims the city wanted to know the secret to the Del Mar's suddenly gangbusters business—annual profits had jumped from $200,000 to $500,000. Kammer says cops found none of what they were looking for in the first raid in October—no evidence of cabbie kickbacks, prostitution or the drug-dealing some staffers claimed was rampant. "Drug use and dealing—it might have been housekeeping doing that," Kammer says. "We only let two people per room. Every time someone walked into the property, a bell went off. At other motels, girls would rent rooms and have traffic through it all night. We didn't rent rooms to a single female."

City spokeswoman Diana Paul says the room-tax audit was conducted months after Metro began its prostitution investigation and that Metro asked the city to mete out disciplinary action because Del Mar management promoted and condoned prostitution.

Up until the raids, Kammer claims Metro vice detectives ran prostitution stings out of the Del Mar each month. "Metro was there all the time and they never once told us that prostitutes were using the place."

Didn't have to, according to Metro Sgt. Chris Jones. "This sounds like a case of blame-reversal. While the place was under investigation, we weren't using it for reversals (stings)," he says. "We have used the Del Mar for reversals in the past—I can't say when we stopped—but when we were there, the activity (prostitution) didn't go on. Even if we did use it for stings, we don't have to tell people they are being investigated. Just because we use your property doesn't mean you get a free pass."

"Shives was laying on the sidewalk when police arrived. Shives' hands had been freed prior to police arrival. Shives was transported to UMC [University Medical Center] by AMR 907 for medical treatment. Shives had several lacerations to the face, forehead, lips and back of the head. Shives didn't appear to have any broken bones but had gotten 27 stitches in the head region at the time of the report, but the doctor had to stop for another emergency."

It's midafternoon and a nervous Shives is standing outside his apartment with a mailman's haul of paperwork—X-rays, MRIs, insurance claims, physical therapy reports, effects of the medicines he's been taking since the attack (hydrocodone, acetaminophen, alprazolam). Every so often his eyes dart to and fro. Since the attack, he's been edgy and, admittedly, unstable. His mind wanders. His conversation can be one rambling non sequitur. Depression and fear have become twin companions. When the $7,000 lump-sum settlement from the attack runs out, he worries about being homeless.

"I've spent three months seeing psychiatrists and doctors. I have no drive to do anything," he says. "I really think somebody had the attack plotted on me. Nobody knew me to have this done to me."

Rewind back to November 30: Shives says he was cleaning a room that had been recently vacated. "It was slow that morning, so I took my time. I went back to the office to get coffee. I go back to finish the room, my back was turned and a guy and a girl come in. The guy pointed a gun at me and said, 'Get down on the ground or I'll blow your motherf--king head off.' They got duct tape. I screamed for help. They bound my feet with duct tape, tied my hands behind my back with a phone cord and beat me in the head with the gun. The guy put the gun down and told me he was going to strangle me. I felt I was going to pass out, but I didn't, so he picks up the gun. As I try to get up, he knocks me out. They drag me to the bathroom, turn the light off and lock the door and tell me to keep my mouth shut or they'll come back and finish the job. Apparently another housekeeper heard my screams and told people to call the cops."

Atop the stack of paperwork are two Physician Activity Status Reports (November 30 and December 7) from Concentra Medical Centers that reveal the extent of his injuries: concussion with no loss of consciousness, anxiety, neck sprain, face laceration, contusion of face, scalp and neck. Letters from his insurer, Employers Insurance Company of Nevada, note that he's approved for physical therapy for a cervical spine strain (November 22), anxiety (December 9), cervical and scalp contusions and lacerations (December 20), neck strain (January 13) and counseling/biofeedback (January 18). The company accepted his claim as a "compensable industrial injury," which strictly limits liability to "coverage of scalp and facial lacerations with contusions, head concussion, cervical contusion with strain and anxiety stemming from assault." In a February 5 letter, his insurer says it will pay for medical prescriptions he bought from Walgreens—this time. "The pharmacy you have chosen is not a participating retail pharmacy."

Cleared to return to work on March 7, Shives says he didn't receive back pay but instead got a $7,000 lump-sum settlement. When the City Council closed the Del Mar in May, he claims he wasn't given severance pay either.

"I never missed a day in five years," he says. After the attack, he says neither Kammer nor Wrenn came to check up on him.

It's been more than two weeks since the Del Mar's demise and Shives has yet to visit the gravesite. Wouldn't do any good, he says. He wants justice.

He wants it in the form of more insurance money to help him pay for treatment of his physical pain and emotional suffering—his insurer recently denied another request for a lump-sum payment.

He wants it in the form of finding out who set him up—he's convinced Del Mar management played a role; Kammer says that's simply not true.

Finally, he wants it in the form of arrests for his assailants. Contacted by the Weekly, Metro spokesman Jose Montoya says police have exhausted all leads in the attack. Shives' case is closed.