So picture this: Las Vegas, early 2000s, and a strip club owner named Michael Galardi has a business problem that money usually solves fast in this town — except the thing he needs to buy isn’t a loan or a liquor delivery on credit. It’s the Clark County Commission. Galardi owned Cheetah’s and Jaguars, two of the valley’s best-known nude and topless clubs, and over roughly a decade he paid county officials somewhere around $400,000 to keep his business exactly the way he wanted it: a club-separation ordinance rewritten from 500 feet to 1,000 feet to box out competitors, a liquor license pushed through for Jaguars, code enforcement quietly aimed at rival clubs instead of his own, and — the fight that mattered most to him — a proposed “no-touch” ordinance that would have banned lap-dance contact between dancers and customers, killed before it ever reached a vote. It wasn’t subtle once you knew what to look for. It just took the FBI two years of court-approved wiretaps to know what to look for.
The money moved the way money always moves when nobody wants a paper trail: cash handed off in person, campaign contributions that landed suspiciously close to a favorable vote, golf outings, lap dances comped for a commissioner’s convenience, even a $5,000 tuition payment for a grandchild’s ski school. One wiretap caught Commissioner Dario Herrera telling lobbyist Lance Malone in September 2001 that he was separating from his wife and needed money from Galardi to set himself up in an apartment — not a bribe disguised as anything, just a sitting county commissioner asking his strip club contact for rent money. Malone was the middleman for most of it, the guy who carried envelopes between Galardi and whichever commissioner needed convincing that week, and years later, explaining to investigators why the arrangement had run so smoothly for so long, he gave the case its best line: “It’s called plausible deniability, baby.” Nobody wrote anything down. Nobody said the word bribe out loud if they could help it. Everybody just understood what everybody else needed.
It started coming apart on May 14, 2003, when the FBI executed search warrants on Galardi’s clubs — the visible part of an investigation that had already been running quietly for years. Five days later, Galardi started cooperating, and by that August his own attorney was proposing he wear a wire to record the very people he’d been paying off, including Malone, at least one commissioner, and, according to FBI reports, judges and casino operators too. Galardi told agents he was afraid the people he’d implicated might hurt him for it, and the FBI put him under protective custody in a hotel room while he saw a psychologist and a psychiatrist to manage the stress. The county commissioner Erin Kenny, who’d once run for lieutenant governor, was the first to see where this was headed and flip, pleading guilty in July 2003 before almost anyone else in the case had even been charged — she’d end up owing a $200,000 fine so far unpaid, eight years later, that federal prosecutors were still hauling her back into court over it in 2015.
By 2006, a Las Vegas jury had convicted both Herrera and Commissioner Mary Kincaid-Chauncey on federal racketeering and extortion charges after a six-week trial. Herrera got fifty months, having admitted to lap dances at a Galardi club, an affair with a Galardi employee, and roughly $200,000 in bribes traced to him on wiretaps. Kincaid-Chauncey got thirty months and insisted to the end that the roughly $85,000 alleged against her — including that ski-school tuition — was gifts, not votes for sale; the Ninth Circuit didn’t buy it and upheld her conviction in 2009. Malone pleaded guilty that September, facing up to twenty years. Galardi himself got two and a half years and, once it was all over, gave reporters a line almost as good as Malone’s: “Bribery is just part of the business,” he said, calling the four years of the investigation “pure hell” — a strip club owner explaining, without much apparent shame, that this was simply the cost of operating a Nevada nightclub.
It wasn’t even his only city. Galardi ran an identical playbook at his San Diego club — same brand name, Cheetahs, same fight over the same “no-touch” ordinance — where two city councilmen and Malone again were convicted in 2005 in a case prosecutors nicknamed “Strippergate.” One juror’s assessment of the San Diego defendants afterward could’ve applied just as easily to the Vegas side of the operation: “They wanted the money,” she said, and knew from the start the whole scheme would eventually collapse under its own weight.
To understand why a strip club owner had that kind of leverage over elected officials in the first place, it helps to know how strange Nevada’s own rules for the industry actually are. Since the late 1990s, state and county law has drawn a hard line between two entirely different kinds of clubs: topless venues, which can serve alcohol, and fully nude clubs, which by law can’t — patrons at an all-nude club are drinking juice or bringing their own bottle, not ordering off a bar menu. The one grandfathered exception in the whole valley is the Palomino Club, nude and licensed to pour liquor because its permit predates the rule entirely. That single regulatory line — alcohol or nudity, pick one — is exactly the kind of zoning-and-licensing machinery Galardi spent a decade paying people to bend in his favor. When your entire business model depends on which side of an ordinance you land on, the county commission isn’t background noise. It’s the whole game.
And it’s an industry that runs, in part, on borrowed fame. Clubs across the state have long paid touring “feature entertainers” — adult performers, reality-TV names, the occasionally famous face of the moment — flat appearance fees to headline a weekend, less for what happens onstage than for the crowd a familiar name pulls through the door. Jenna Jameson, who spent the late 1990s and 2000s becoming the best-known adult film star in the country and eventually one of the wealthiest, built a career partly on exactly this kind of booking — famous enough by the mid-2000s that she reportedly turned down a customer’s on-the-spot $10,000 offer at one club appearance because her actual contract only covered photos and a meet-and-greet, nothing more. Stormy Daniels, a performer and director who’d go on to become one of the most talked-about women in America after a very different kind of story broke in 2018, worked the same touring-feature circuit for years before any of that, booking multi-night club weekends built entirely around her name recognition at the moment. Neither woman’s tour ever gets tied on paper to Cheetah’s or Jaguars specifically — that receipt doesn’t exist, at least not one anyone’s found — but the economy Galardi was operating inside, the one worth $400,000 in bribes to protect, was built on exactly this kind of traveling star power passing through Nevada clubs on a fee. Two names worth remembering. This almost certainly isn’t the last you’ll hear of either of them in this book.
By the time it was all finished, U.S. Attorney Daniel Bogden called the case proof that “these offenses strike at the very foundation of our government” — the kind of line prosecutors always reach for, and, in this instance, not an exaggeration. The FBI’s Las Vegas field office was still citing Kenny, Kincaid-Chauncey, Herrera, and Malone by name on public corruption-awareness billboards two decades later, the same four names doing the same cautionary work long after all of them had finished their sentences. Vegas built its whole identity on the idea that the house always wins. For a few years in the early 2000s, the house wasn’t the casino at all. It was a strip club owner with $400,000 in cash and a lobbyist who understood, better than anyone got caught on tape saying so, exactly how much plausible deniability was worth.