The day Nye County came for Dennis Hof, and what it tells you about who this county's power is really for.
On the afternoon of August 7, 2018, sheriff's deputies drove out to the Love Ranch in Crystal, north of Pahrump on Highway 160.
They had a warrant. The people inside had already told them no once.
The deputies went in and came back out with the brothel's licenses. They also took eighteen work cards. Those cards belonged to the women who worked there. Without a card, you cannot legally work in a Nye County brothel. So eighteen women lost their jobs that afternoon.
Nobody arrested anyone. Nobody was charged with a crime. This was paperwork.
Twenty days later, a federal judge gave all of it back and told two Nye County commissioners they were not allowed to vote on anything involving Dennis Hof ever again.
That is the part worth sitting with. Not the brothel. Not the man. The fact that a judge in Las Vegas looked at what Nye County had just done to a business owner and decided the county could not be trusted to vote on him.
The man they wanted gone
Dennis Hof was loud, rich, and running for office.
He owned the Love Ranch and six other legal brothels. He had been on an HBO show. He wrote a book. He called himself the Trump of Pahrump and he meant it as a campaign slogan.
In 2016 he ran for the state Assembly as a Libertarian against the sitting lawmaker, James Oscarson, and lost. In 2018 he switched parties and came back at Oscarson as a Republican.
The money in that first race tells you who was behind whom.
Oscarson raised $228,404 in 2016 from dozens of donors and political action committees. Hof put in $60,000, $50,000 of it his own money. Every report either man filed is public at the Nevada Secretary of State's campaign finance portal.
The county's Republican leadership did not want him. He was an embarrassment to them, and worse, he was winning.
He was also suing them. By early 2018, Hof had two lawsuits going against sitting Nye County commissioners.
Then his license trouble started.
The paperwork
In February 2018, the county suspended the Love Ranch license.
The reason given was that manufactured homes on the property had been modified without the right permits, going back to 2010, and that there were fire and safety problems. The bar and the restaurant could stay open. Just not the brothel. Hof was given 90 days to get permits.
"They are using their county powers to hurt me politically," he said. "It is an attempt to embarrass me and make me look bad."
He won the Republican primary anyway that June, beating Oscarson by about 430 votes.
Six weeks later the licensing board voted to take his license away for good. That board is five county commissioners and the sheriff.
The reasons on the record were three code violations, from October 2016, May 2017, and July 2017, and a renewal form he turned in late. He filed it July 27. He was supposed to file it 30 days before the license expired.
Look at those dates. The violations were between one and two years old. The county had lived with them the whole time. Then, in the middle of an election Hof was winning, they all came due at once.
The vote was 3 to 2. Commissioners Lorinda Wichman and Dan Schinhofen voted to revoke. Commissioners John Koenig and Donna Cox voted no. Their pay, like every Nye County officer's, is set by state statute and posted publicly.
Schinhofen said this out loud at the meeting: "Mr. Hof has shown himself to be dishonest and lying under oath."
That is a county commissioner calling a candidate a liar while voting to close his business, four months before the election.
They took his sign, too
Somewhere in the middle of all this, Nye County took down one of Hof's campaign signs.
He sued over that as well. A federal judge ordered the county to give the sign back.
A candidate for state office had to go to federal court to get his own campaign sign returned by his own county.
The vote she did not cast
Sheriff Sharon Wehrly sat on that licensing board. On August 7, she abstained. She did not vote to revoke.
Then she went to Pahrump Justice of the Peace Margaret Whittaker, got a warrant, and sent her deputies out to Crystal to take the licenses and the eighteen work cards.
She would not put her name on the decision. She carried it out anyway.
Twenty days
Hof went to federal court and said this was payback for suing commissioners and for running for office. The case is Hof v. Nye County, No. 2:18-cv-01492, filed August 10, 2018, naming the county, the licensing board, and Commissioners Schinhofen and Borasky personally.
On August 27, 2018, U.S. District Judge Richard Boulware agreed enough to act. He ordered the licenses and the work cards handed back while the case went forward.
And he did something else. He barred Commissioners Dan Schinhofen and Butch Borasky from voting on any Hof matter at all.
A federal judge did not just reverse Nye County. He took two of its elected officials off the board for one specific citizen, because he did not believe they could be fair to him.
That should have been a scandal in Pahrump. It was not.
Now look at how fast they can move
Here is the part that should make you angry, and it has nothing to do with brothel licenses.
Two women went to the Nye County Sheriff's Office and said Dennis Hof assaulted them.
Jennifer O'Kane filed a report in November 2016 about an assault she said happened in 2011 at the Love Ranch. Diana Grandmaison came forward in December 2017. A sheriff's detective investigated both and sent them to the district attorney on December 4, 2017.
The district attorney declined to file anything. Her reason was the clock. Nevada gave prosecutors four years for these cases back then, and the four years were gone. The state opened its own investigation that September. Nothing came of it.
So hold the two things side by side.
When a woman reported a sexual assault, the county took years and then said it was too late.
When a candidate turned in a form eleven days late, the county revoked his license, got a warrant, and had deputies at his door inside a month.
Same county. Same buildings. Same officials. One clock ran out. The other one never even started ticking.
Who actually paid
Dennis Hof had money. He had a nationally known First Amendment lawyer. He had a federal judge who listened to him inside three weeks.
The eighteen women whose work cards got carried out of that building had none of that. Nobody sued on their behalf. Nobody asked them anything. They were the leverage, not the point.
The two women who reported him had none of it either. They got a detective, a file, and a letter saying the deadline had passed.
That is the shape of it. When Nye County power gets used as a weapon, the person it is aimed at might have lawyers. The people standing next to him never do.
What was left
Hof died at the Love Ranch on October 16, 2018, at his own birthday party. He was 72. It was a heart attack.
His lawsuit died with him. It was never tried. No Nye County official ever had to explain that vote under oath.
Voters elected him anyway on November 6, three weeks after he was dead. Then county commissioners from Nye, Clark and Lincoln met and picked his replacement themselves, with Nye's votes weighted heaviest. Gregory Hafen II got the seat and the salary that goes with it. The county chose the lawmaker after the voters had already chosen someone else.
Nye County brothel licenses cannot be handed to a new owner, so the Love Ranch never opened again. It sat out there in Crystal and fell apart. In 2024 a woman from Texas who buys brothel property to keep it closed had the buildings torn down.
And six months after Boulware benched those two commissioners, a captain in the same sheriff's office arrested the chief executive of Pahrump's electric co-op while he was quietly working to take a seat on her board. That case ended in a federal guilty plea in 2025. She lost her career and left Nevada.
Different target. Different year. Same machinery, pointed the same way.
The lesson Nye County took from Dennis Hof was not that you cannot do this to people.
It was that the ones who can fight back are rare.
Documents and records behind this story
Court: Hof v. Nye County, Nye County Liquor and Licensing Board, Schinhofen and Borasky, No. 2:18-cv-01492 (D. Nev., filed Aug. 10, 2018) · Judge Richard F. Boulware II · all D. Nev. Nye County dockets
County law: Nye County Code Title 9, Chapter 9.20, brothel licensing
Pay: Nye County salaries, all years · 2018 · 2019 · NRS 245.043, county officer salaries · NRS 218A.630, legislator pay
Campaign money: Nevada Secretary of State contributions and expenses search · PVT on the 2016 Oscarson and Hof filings · PVT, Oscarson's earlier haul
Elections: Ballotpedia, Dennis Hof · Ballotpedia, James Oscarson · Ballotpedia, Assembly District 36 · Ballotpedia, Gregory Hafen II
News: Nevada Independent, license revoked · Nevada Independent, license restored · Nevada Independent, state investigation · Nevada Independent, autopsy · Las Vegas Sun, February suspension · Las Vegas Sun, what happens to the brothels · Review-Journal, campaign sign ordered returned · Review-Journal, no charges filed · Review-Journal, elected after death · Pahrump Valley Times, lawsuit filed · Pahrump Valley Times, licenses restored · Pahrump Valley Times, Hof dead at 72 · Pahrump Valley Times, Love Ranch demolished · U.S. Department of Justice, captain's guilty plea
Note on legal status: Dennis Hof was never charged with any crime, and denied the assault allegations. Judge Boulware's August 2018 order was a preliminary ruling, not a final judgment, and the case ended without trial when Hof died. The commissioners named here were not accused of any crime.
