So you move to Henderson from the Midwest with your girlfriend on the very first day of 1999, get a place to live together, marry the woman and without hesitation you start whoring her out. All standard stuff.
And because prostitution is big business in the Las Vegas Valley—even in little ol' Henderson—you start to stack some serious dough. Hundreds of thousands. The problem, though, is the money itself: It's illicit. And so you do what any respectable American would do: You buy stuff. Jewelry, a fur coat, a nice new Mercedes-Benz S430V (its title in your friend's name), some deluxe landscaping for your home, all in cold hard untraceable cash. And then, of course, you buy some property tucked away down South Gibson Road, and you open a restaurant to conceal the rest of the money. It's all good.
Now you're riding the gravy train with biscuit wheels, and, hell, you can keep doing this for as long as your wife can put out.
But whatever you do, pay your taxes. Always, always, always pay your taxes. Because that's where Louis H. Young and Nancy Adams went wrong, after they had come to Henderson in '99, made more than $125,000 a year in the prostitution business and opened up L&N Restaurant in 2001 to conceal the money. Like Capone, their éclat met its demise due to not paying their taxes.
They took off in 2003, before Metro, the IRS and the Department of Justice could catch them. Clandestine in Gary, Indiana, they were. But it's no secret that the government, when cheated out of money, can be ruthless and unflagging.
Which is why Young and Adams are now in Nevada state prison, where the former will serve 51 months, and the latter, 15. They were sentenced last month.