Born elsewhere but raised here, a graduate of Boulder City High School and a teacher at Community College of Southern Nevada since 1976, Mark Peplowski became a man in Southern Nevada. He's seen it, and he's served it, and in his multiple capacities—as a lawyer, professor, marketer, activist, arbiter—he has earned himself a reputation throughout the Valley as being a just man, knowledgeable above all in the ways of politics and often a good source in that recondite topic for media sources to quote.
Goodbye to the Klondike |
Was. In '85, '86, '87—the good days—the Klondike was a locals place, one of many while the city wasn't yet so big that folks didn't call you by your first name. And further, it was our place: It was where we used to line up in the parking lot trying to find a seat at a slot machine or a table at the restaurant, where you could get the Klondike's legendary prime rib, pork chops or BLT sandwich for a working-man's price. Ever since big John—we call him John Wayne; that's the kind of guy he is—expanded it, back in '77, '78, into a place we locals would congregate, gamble, smoke, eat and let loose with incoming visitors, under a roof that was nearly touchable and an atmosphere that was invigorating, Klondike was the Strip for us. In the old days, '62, '63, '64, when we pioneers saw it go up, it had been just a tiny Motel 6 in a tiny town still more desert than anything. Before being sold last fall to Royal Palm, to soon be supplanted by modern megaresort condominiums, and before the Mirages and Mandalay Bays and Bali Hai golf clubs had started to encroach upon it, and even before the last locals spot on the Strip had begun hinting at an archaic air, empty seats, silent slot machines, a funereal mood and the medicinal smell and feeble voices of us persisting old people, the Klondike Inn was.
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Mark Peplowski: a man. Just like any other, but perhaps a bit more accomplished than some. He's taught in the Valley for three decades now, and with such enthusiasm and efficacy that Henderson Chamber of Commerce awarded him Teacher of the Year honors in 2003. His standing with the court as a practicing lawyer had been so outstanding that Clark County appointed him as a pro-tem justice, to fill in as needed. On the bench, just as in the classroom, and in essence with the bulk of his life, he has professed the idea of democracy in this state, according to the Nevada Legislature, which bestowed him with the inaugural Jean Ford Democracy Award just one year ago.
Then he screwed up. With sex. He gave into his innate urges without due diligence. On Saturday, June 24, police spotted a white truck on the 3100 block of Fremont Street picking up one of the little birds of the night who have been prancing up and down that region seeking birdhunters for the past century. The police allowed the ephemeral and loveless act of sex to consummate, conclude, and then they confronted the truck. Peplowski was in the driver's seat.
Like any self-respecting man, above all a married one, he denied the charge, telling police that they had been in search of an unknown woman. But the police, of course, weren't buying Peplowski's excuse, and in the end they got him to confess.
Then he wept, he repented, he begged to save face; for it took no great act of clairvoyance to see the personal and professional destruction that was to follow, and Peplowski, who for almost four decades now has been building for himself a venerable stature in the community, knew he had a lot to lose if his private indulgence were to become public knowledge.
Somewhat like Bill Clinton, at the end of his presidential term, when he had his eight years of tangible effectiveness as the leader of this country desecrated and nearly eradicated on account of the same transgression: a blowjob.
But in Peplowski's case, because it was soliciting prostitution, it was a crime, as well. A misdemeanor according to Nevada Revised Statutes 201.354, punishable by a brief detention in jail, which could be remedied with a little bail money, and an abject mark on one's record, which could be eradicated for first-time offenders like Peplowski with a stint in john school. But the media—part and parcel of our society, as well as its professed servant—was not happy with that. No: They, according to longstanding media logic, wanted to make big news out of a public official caught with his pants down, and so they ran accounts of his ignominy, accompanied by his mug shot, and his alone, even though 184 other people had been arrested during the prostitution sweep in which Peplowski had been picked up. Wreaking the most damage was the Review-Journal, Southern Nevada's most widespread daily newspaper. For not only did they run the news of his arrest, but in the report itself they recounted pitiless and salacious details of the event that served no purpose other than to arouse the public's glands—on the front page. In essence, routine news coverage painted Peplowski with a scarlet letter. As if his rightful punishment—jail time and the cost of bail, a few hundred dollars; a jeopardized marriage; a guilty conscience—wasn't enough. As if violating the old Puritan code still warranted the same punishment Hester Prynne incurred in novelist's Nathaniel Hawthorne's time, a castigation that wasn't even just back then and so gave rise to Hawthorne's most enduring novel.
It's because the press has the right of discretion. True, it is in fact our job to hold accountable men like Peplowski, who in taking his positions as a pro-tem judge and a professor at a public institution accepted a responsibility to be of a higher moral standard than the public he serves, the media in Peplowski's case was well within its liberties to print the man's photo, as well as the details of his shameful act. And because we enjoy freedom of the press in this country, editors are free to make the news as big as they like, even if those editors know full well the massive destruction it could bring to a man's life. But the thing that has often been forgotten is that the media also has a duty to practice discretion, which we sometimes fail to do.
His reputation is now tarnished. Who now will hire his legal services? His teaching post at CCSN, full-time since 2000, could now be in jeopardy, not because he was arrested for a misdemeanor (that alone does not warrant termination, according to CCSN policy), but because his arrest became bad public relations for the school when it showed up on the front page of the R-J. His post as pro-tem justice, which was somewhat under the public radar because of the sheer number, and inactivity, of most fill-in judges, and which would have been ceased anyhow, media report or not, was resigned, in disgrace.
It's not that Peplowski was inculpable, or even irreproachable, because the truth is: The man committed a crime that he, a judge and a lawyer, knew very well was illegal. It's just that the consequences do not seem to have been warranted by the crime, which brought neither harm nor danger to anyone or anything but him and his marriage. It was consensual sex (albeit the two consented for very different reasons), and there has been a whole succession of men who have taken a dip into that river of paid evanescent love rushing through cities around the world since currency began.
One would think justice today would not be the same as that of the 1800s, or that of the days when people stoned prostitutes in public. As a lawyer, Peplowski knew it was, and so upon wishing his ephemeral lover goodbye on Saturday night, just before his arrest, perhaps as an eerie presentiment, he gave her his personal phone number with a single ironic phrase: "If you ever need a lawyer, give me a call." The sadder irony, however, is that before Peplowski had himself been caught, sent to jail, and then publicly ostracized on television screens, newspapers and Internet sites, he, as a pro-tem judge often serving in the Henderson municipal court, had been part and parcel of that archaic system that has now done him in.
The citywide sting in which Peplowski had been caught was called P.I.M.P—prostitutes incarcerated by Metropolitan Police—and one Metro sergeant described it in this way:
"When you run an operation like this, you are casting out a net."
It is a perfect metaphor. That is exactly what happened: Metro cast a net into Las Vegas, a sea of prostitutes, pimps and johns, and plucked out 184 fish from a variety of schools whose misfortune was being in the wrong place at the wrong time. As any fisherman will say, one can cast a net to his heart's content, but the sea continues. Given that, and Clark County's high recidivism rate for prostitution—over 70 percent—it appears the only lasting impact of the sting will be the destruction of Peplowski's life.
All because he had surrendered to his sexual urges with a grown woman who charged him $40 dollars for her servitude.