Joni Wines 1926-2012

Four days before the 32nd anniversary of her recall from office, former Nye County sheriff Joni Wines died at Lake Tahoe.

Wines became sheriff at a time when corruption and an old boy’s network reportedly ruled the county. Women seeking changes drew Wines, a grandmother, into the race for sheriff, and she was elected in an upset over incumbent Jay Howard in 1978. Though not the first woman sheriff in the state, she was the first elected woman sheriff.

But as so frequently happens in small county corruption cases, the resulting turmoil alienated the public, and soon Wines was facing a recall petition. (Earlier, Lyon County District Attorney John Giomi, who reported a bribe attempt by Joe Conforte, had been defeated for reelection.)

Wines’ tenure became ensnarled with a rivalry between established brothel owner Bill Martin and a new and more successful brothel owned by Walter Plankinton. In June 1978, Martin paid arsonists to burn down Plankinton’s Chicken Ranch brothel and was later murdered himself.

The brothel battle proved irresistible to out-of-state reporters, resulting in wide publicity of the Nye County turbulence, which exacerbated the sheriff’s political problems.

After her recall by a 1,228 to 979 vote in February 1980, she and her husband left town in the dead of night. U.S. Justice Department investigators pursued the corruption investigation and achieved some convictions, but the biggest targets were never indicted.

Wines later ran unsuccessfully for governor and the U.S. House and was appointed to the Nevada Ethics Commission by Gov. Bob Miller.

The saga became the subject of Jeanie Kasindorf’s book The Nye County Brothel Wars/A Tale of the New West, described by a New York Times critic as “splendid … a taut account of a chain of vicious acts perpetrated by a group of toughs,” and of the fictionalized 1981 CBS movie Incident at Crestridge, which starred Eileen Brennan as Wines.

Wines was 85 when she died at Lake Tahoe.