Vegas Mayor Threatens to Kill N.Y. Times Columnist After Anti-Sex-Trade Column

This post, written by Wolfrum, originally appeared on Shakesville

Remember the scene in the movie "The Untouchables" where Al Capone, as played by Robert DeNiro, brutally murders a lackey with a baseball bat in order to prove a point?

For Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, the scene was obviously how he views the real world.

"I have no use for him. I'll take a baseball bat and break his head if he ever comes here," Goodman said of New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, after Herbert's column "City as Predator."

The point the mayor wanted to prove? That if some N.Y. columnist wanted to shine a light on the sex trade and prostitution business of Las Vegas, he'd murder them with a baseball bat.

But the sex trade and prostitution business of Las Vegas desperately needs a light shined on it, and Herbert did a fine job of doing just that.

"City as Predator"

There is probably no city in America where women are treated worse than in Las Vegas.

The tone of systematic, institutionalized degradation is set by the mayor, Oscar Goodman, who told me in an interview that the city would reap "tremendous" benefits if a series of "magnificent brothels" could be established to cater to johns from across the country and around the world.

"I've said there should be the beginning of a discussion of that," said Mr. Goodman, a former defense lawyer for mobsters who unabashedly describes his city as an adult playground where "anything goes -- as long as you don't go over the line."

Most of the lines in Vegas have long since been erased. It is without a doubt, as the psychologist and researcher Melissa Farley, says, "the epicenter of North American prostitution and sex trafficking."