This is an
old article from May of 2001, but it's a really great read.
Do hackers control sin city? Adult entertainment operators, private eyes, a bail bondsman and his bounty hunter all say they've felt the pinch from a shady cyberpunk syndicate. Now the state has launched an investigation, with millions on the line.
"In this business, you receive your calls from five o'clock in the afternoon until five o'clock in the morning, and that's when they hit us," says Munoz. "It's like you're the Maytag man. The phone will not ring."
These days Munoz is lucky if he gets one or two customers a night, and his once great empire of vice is a threadbare operation run from an office in his home, far from Vegas' neon core. He's hanging on primarily through his hard-won ownership of nearly half of the five hundred licensed news racks on the Strip, which he crams with stacks of his own paper, "The Las Vegas Informer" -- twelve gritty pages of advertisements for "Red Hot Red Heads" and "Hot Hot Hot Tall Sexy Blondes." Until recently, every phone number advertised in the paper went to Munoz's switchboard, yet his phones still didn't ring. The economics of the situation eventually forced him to sell advertising space to a competitor to pay the rent.
Munoz's phone problems are legion; his log of trouble-reports stretches longer than a junkie's rap sheet. Callers from outside Vegas, or from payphones and cell phones, get through, he says, but hotel callers get false busy signals, or reach silence, driving them into the arms of competing services. Sometimes calls are rerouted directly to a competitor, he claims. And when a would-be customer does get through, and Munoz dispatches a dancer to the tourist's hotel room, she's likely to find another entertainer already there. "Sometimes they beat us to the calls, like they're listening," says Munoz.
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Or
click here to read several equally cool followup articles.
