Rope Burns

There are various versions of how James Daveggio met Michelle Michaud. One of the most compelling versions comes from Janet Williams. According to her, Michaud sashayed into Bobby Joe’s one day in 1996, took one look at the blue-eyed, muscular Daveggio behind the bar, pointed her finger at him and announced loudly to a friend, “I want that!”

Michaud usually got what she wanted.

A different version comes from Michelle Michaud herself. It happened right around Halloween 1996. “When I first met him,” she said, “I was introduced to him through some friends at their house. He was there to help with a mutual problem his friends and I were having with our daughters. He asked me not to take care of it myself but to let him have the opportunity to talk to this gentleman.”

What Daveggio had in mind was probably a lot more than just a “talking” to the gentleman in question. He generally had rougher solutions than that.

Daveggio became interested in Michaud, but she warned him that she didn’t like men. She was a prostitute and she’d seen the worst that men could dish out. She told him, “I think they’re pigs because of the way they treat women. They generally piss me the fuck off! I’m a ho, a hooker, a prostitute, and have been for twenty-two years of my life, and I’m not changing.”

Despite the warning, they continued to see each other, and against all expectations, she began to fall for him. Even though he had no upper front teeth by now, and only four bottom teeth, she found his manners “charming,” just as many other women had done. She fell in love with his “striking blue eyes” and muscular build. It was nice to be treated as a lady, even though he knew her background. Somewhere deep inside, Michelle Michaud always craved acceptance. When she didn’t get it, she would put on a front of foulmouthed worldliness and biting sarcastic humor. But when she was treated with respect and affection, she could return the same.

A case in point was when James Daveggio stuck up for her when some of her family members gave her a rough time about her lifestyle. “He’s the kind of man who demands respect for you from your family,” she said.

He also stuck up for himself when those same family members told Michaud that he wasn’t good for her. They soon sensed that Daveggio might mean a lot of trouble for her. But she wouldn’t listen to their advice, much as Daveggio’s second wife, Donetta, didn’t listen to her friends’ warnings. Michaud said, “He stands up to your family and doesn’t let them chase him out of your life. He’s been nothing but good for me.”

Unlike Daveggio, who could sometimes be shy and tentative around women when first meeting them, Michaud was brimming with self-confidence and had an attitude that no one in the world was better or more potent than herself. She had a huge chip on her shoulder and the determination of someone who could walk right through a brick wall.

At first the two of them seemed an unlikely match. Michaud always dressed well and used proper English when she felt like it; Daveggio was more likely to be sporting greasy jeans, T-shirt, beat-up biker boots, and his English was more often than not grammatically incorrect. She was a champagne and mixed-drink aficionado; he would mainly stick to beer. She carried herself with a certain self-confident ease; he often slouched and seemed vaguely uncomfortable. And most glaring of all, Michaud spoke of her sex life in the most graphic of terms to anyone who would listen; Daveggio would barely discuss his love life at all. When approached by most women, he would turn off rapidly and the charm would disappear. He did not like being the object of their lusts. He liked to be in command.

But there was definitely something about Michelle Michaud that secretly turned him on. If not her body, which was still in good shape at the age of thirty-seven, it was her mind. She was sharp, sarcastic, irreverent and provocative. She spoke of things she had done sexually, and things she wanted to do, that he had only dreamed about. She could spin the most outlandish stories of carnal delight beneath the soft glow of Bobby Joe’s neon lights. She was an explicit Scherazade with 1,001 nights of depraved sexual fantasies. Buying drinks for everyone at the bar from her prostitution money, Michaud would regale the crowd with stories of her liaisons on the seamier side of town. As she delivered her soliloquies of lust, it was an incredibly surreal scene. Michaud never dressed suggestively, looking more like a secretary from one of the uptown businesses out for a break. But the filthy words pouring from her mouth hovered around her like tiny demons, betraying another darker side to this well-dressed, well-coiffed mother of two.

“You never knew which Michelle would show up,” Janet Williams said. “The proper lady or the foulmouthed slut.”

There was no doubt about it—Michelle Michaud had always been a very pretty girl. She was blessed with long red hair and deep green eyes that made heads turn. Everyone who met her commented on her striking good looks. Born in the exotic locale of Casablanca, Morocco, she had traveled around the world with her military father and family, bouncing from one location to another. At the age of fourteen she finally settled down in South Sacramento in a normal middle-class neighborhood of green lawns and two cars in the driveway. Her family, by all outward aspects, came to enjoy just an average California life.

But Michaud was not only blessed with good looks, she also possessed a keen intellect and an incisive memory. Perhaps she was too intelligent and too emotional for her middle-class surroundings. She didn’t join any school organizations and she generally found the other students dull and too immature. School life in the mid-1970s became a joke to her, especially when the other students gushed in the yearbook about “Earth shoes, overalls, socks with toes in them and the various dances such as the bump and the hustle.” Even more ridiculous to her cynical nature was something called CHANGES, a program that meant “Community Happenings and New Growing Educational System.” It was pure 1970s. One of the teachers tried to validate it by saying, “We wanted to erase the idea that everyone here were burned-out vegetables just getting credits. Most classes offered were college preparatory.” But in retrospect it’s hard to keep a straight face when learning there were also courses in Pyramid Power and The Beatles.

By the age of fifteen Michelle Michaud was going through her own changes and she was starting to rebel in a big way. No amount of arguing or punishment of the girl seemed to work. Things got so out of control that she was adjudged to become a ward of the Juvenile Court. Before she graduated from Elk Grove High School in 1977, she dropped out and her school days were over. She hooked up with a wild boy named Danny Logan, who had already had a few scrapes with the law. To Michaud he was fascinating in a dangerous and exciting way. Michaud didn’t end her school days with any formal announcement—she simply quit.

But she wasn’t cut out to be a fast-food waitress or maid like other high school dropouts her age. She was too precocious and pretty for that. Even at that tender age she realized she had been given “unusual” good looks and a brain to go along with them. She intended to capitalize on them as best she could. She knew herself, and she knew what men wanted. Through Logan she met a Sacramento man, Charlie S., who ran a couple of massage parlors. These were in reality only a front for prostitution. Michaud began working at one and it wasn’t long before she was hooking for top dollar, trading her now mature body for security and wealth.

In her early twenties she moved to Moundhouse, Nevada, just outside of Carson City, to work at the Kit Kat Ranch, a collection of wide mobile homes grouped together behind a high wire fence, where prostitution was legal. The surrounding scenery was less than romantic—treeless, scrubby mountains of the famous Virginia City silver district, a large agricultural plumbing outfit next door, and a collection of auto junkyards. Michaud’s living space consisted of only a small room with a large bed, sink and toilet. Like the other girls at the ranch, she spent most of her time in her room when not busy with a customer. She had brought in her own posters, audiotapes and knickknacks to make it feel more like home. Her days and nights saw an endless parade of tourists, truck drivers, businessmen and cowboys as she lined up with the other girls in the lounge area when the bell at the front gate rang. She was very young and pretty at the time and more often than not Michaud was picked over the others.

At least there was Lake Tahoe, just over the mountains about twenty miles away, to distract her from the hours of boredom and frequent assignations with johns. With its pristine waters and blue skies, Tahoe became a kind of haven for Michaud away from the endless round of “servicing” customers. She became familiar with its streets and byways, especially The Lakeside Inn at Stateline. Perched right on the eastern shore of the lake, it was a hangout for the locals and perennially voted the number one casino by them. It had a laid-back atmosphere and a certain camaraderie, especially at the long central bar where many of the locals gathered. It was here that they could drink beers for a dollar and forget about the rat race of catering to tourists for a while. With its easygoing charm, The Lakeside Inn must have seemed like a haven from the intense confines of the Kit Kat Ranch.

After a few years at the Kit Kat Ranch, Michaud moved up to the more famous and larger establishment of the Mustang Ranch brothel near Reno, Nevada, world-renowned for its sexy ladies of the night. Michelle fit right into the mix of high-class call girls with her good looks and intelligent, sarcastic style. She was nobody’s fool and had a fairly clear picture of who she was and what she was doing. During her stay at the Mustang Ranch, her working name became “Ruby.”

Joseph Conforte was a legend in his own time in Nevada. He had been a cabdriver in Oakland during the 1940s, then moved to Nevada where he started a bordello, the Triangle River Ranch, in Wadsworth in 1955. Its location had just one problem; it was at the junction of Washoe, Lyon and Storey Counties, and prostitution was not legal in any one of them at the time. Conforte spent the next several years playing tag with the police by moving his trailers that the girls worked in back and forth across the county lines. He also tried to “influence” police and politicians by presenting them with cigars that had been wrapped with currency. According to him there was more than one policeman, judge and district attorney who accepted his cigars.

But one man he couldn’t influence was the Washoe County district attorney, Bill Raggio. In 1959 Conforte attempted to set up Raggio with a young woman. According to Raggio, “Conforte told me [that if I didn’t cooperate] I would be publicly accused of furnishing liquor to a minor girl and that I would be further accused of having been intimate with such girl unless I agreed to dismiss the criminal charge pending against him.”

But Conforte’s scheme backfired. Instead of caving in to the demands, Raggio filed extortion charges, and when the young woman pleaded guilty to perjury in front of a grand jury, Conforte was found guilty as well. He ended up serving twenty-two months in jail. Meanwhile, Bill Raggio had a great time standing in front of the cameras as his team burned the Triangle Ranch to the ground.

In 1967 Joe Conforte built a legitimate trailer park in Lockwood, Storey County, next to a railroad siding known as Mustang. It also had the advantage of being a few miles outside of Reno right alongside new Interstate 80. The residents of the trailer park benefited by Conforte’s cheap rent and they saw fit to return his favor by voting in prostitution as legal in 1971. The following year Conforte, surrounded by his girls, made the cover of Rolling Stone magazine under the title “The Crusading Pimp, Joe Conforte’s Fight to Keep Nevada Clean.”

Conforte made sure the media knew that he contributed to the poor, helped rebuild historic buildings and supported county sports programs. Some of the prostitutes had good things to say about Joe Conforte and his Mustang Ranch. One, who called herself “Cookie,” told a Reno Gazette reporter, “We girls got pretty close, covered for each other. For many of those girls it was the closest thing to home and family they would ever know.”

The girls kept half the take, minus a couple of hundred dollars a month for doctor bills and kickbacks to the staff and cabdrivers who brought customers in from Reno. The house kept the other half. To make sure the girls weren’t cheating them, the manager could hear right through the heating vents of the girl’s room when the customer made an offer for services to be rendered.

Another prostitute, “Mistee,” told the same Reno reporter, “A lot of the girls were head-cases—bad backgrounds, abuse, drinking, welfare. They were cast-off people, throwaway people. For them the life made sense.”

Michelle Michaud wasn’t quite a cast-off person yet. She was young and pretty with a nice body and above average intelligence. She could have gone to college or business school and earned a respectable living. Instead, she chose “The Life” and in the process became chummy with Joe Conforte and, according to her, was “one of his girls. There were three of us who were his favorites.”

Despite the good money and steady stream of customers, Michaud became homesick, and just like James Daveggio, who always gravitated back toward Pleasanton, she opted to move back to Sacramento, California, in the mid-1980s. Still disdaining a workaday life, she hooked in massage parlors, calling herself “Micki.” She even hooked in her own home. In fact, she had become so homesick that she moved into a house right across the street from her parents on MacFadden Drive and not far away from her younger sister, Misty Michaud. She was great friends with her mom at this time and called her every day on the phone. Somehow her rebellious youth had been forgotten or at least not discussed. Despite daughter Michelle’s unorthodox lifestyle, they often went out shopping together like any other mother and daughter.

The rent for the house was soon paid for by a man in his seventies who was smitten with Michaud. He was an ex-career army man who was now retired. But he got a part-time job just to help keep her in style. He adored Michaud so much that he wanted to marry her. Though she liked him, Michaud often rather harshly referred to him not as an individual but as a “business.” There was no doubt in her mind that his main function was to supply her with money. Her main function was to supply him with sex. He not only paid the rent but bought her thousands of dollars’ worth of expensive furniture, elegant meals and took her on vacations. But he wasn’t the only one. A middle-aged gentleman also became one of her regular sugar daddies. Before long she was living quite comfortably off these two and making extra money hooking on the side.

Along the way she had two children out of wedlock, a boy and girl, by two different men. Her daughter was a dutiful and quiet child who needed little supervision. But the boy was something else again. He was hyperkinetic and had severe emotional problems. He needed constant supervision and help. Before long Michaud’s prostitution money was being siphoned off to provide a psychologist for her son.

By her late twenties Michelle Michaud was a strange combination of high-class hooker and caring mother of two. Despite all her rebellious ways, she was quite settled down. Neighbors remembered her as friendly and a good mom. It would be easy to write her off at this point in her life as a slightly interesting and good-looking hooker who masked her nightlife with a middle-class facade. But Michaud was much more complex than that. She had unexpectedly developed a devout spiritual side, which found free outlet at a nearby Catholic church.

Monsignor Edward Kavanagh, a native of Ireland, had moved to America in 1948. A kindly loquacious man, used to dealing with all sorts of people from different cultures and walks of life, he was a great storyteller. He could recount incidents from all fifty years of his service on Franklin Boulevard, and inserted them in his stories when it seemed appropriate. With a diverse congregation of nearly 1,600, he had helped many a troubled young person trying to come to grips with life, turning them toward becoming happy and productive adults. It was with a great deal of hope that he wished Michelle Michaud to become one of these.

Naturally wary of all people, especially sanctimonious ones, Michaud nonetheless came to trust and admire Father Kavanagh. He spent countless sessions with her emotionally disturbed son, always patient, always willing to help, and for this she was immensely grateful. For possibly the first time in her life, Michelle was determined to serve others. She became interested in the Altar Society and helped them in their duties. She even volunteered to become a crossing guard for schoolchildren on busy Franklin Boulevard. One parishoner remembered her standing on the busy street with a red stop sign like the most caring suburban “Soccer Mom.” It was if Michaud had rounded some emotional corner in her life and was ready to turn over a new leaf.

Monsignor Kavanagh said of her at this time, “If you talked to her and really got to know her, she struck you as an intelligent and reasonable person.”

Michaud was lucky in another respect during this time frame. She had a very nice neighbor named Marie Ward, who loved Michaud’s children. “They became almost like my own kids,” Ward remembered. “I took care of the boy from the time he was very young. He had his problems with Michelle, but he got along very well with my husband and me. When he and the girl were old enough, I began to take them to church. Then one day Michelle asked if she could go along. We were great friends from that time on.”

It was Ward who got Michaud interested in the Altar Society, a group of churchwomen who supervised bake sales, cleaned up the church after various functions, and sent items to the thrift store. Michaud got into it so much, in fact, that she was allowed to be the hostess of an interchurch society luncheon at one of Sacramento’s major hotels. Anyone who didn’t know her would never guess this well-dressed, well-spoken woman was leading a double life as a prostitute. She carried off the whole luncheon with a great deal of success.

Michaud became so religious that she asked some church members to come and bless her house. She listened to them very seriously when they told her that the statuette her daughter owned of the witch in The Wizard of Oz had to go, as well as her son’s poster of Darth Vader from Star Wars. These were items connected with satanism, they said. Michaud listened to their advice and dutifully complied.

She was even open to other people’s religions besides Catholicism. Marie Ward related that when a couple of Mormon missionaries stopped by they were so taken with Michelle Michaud’s sincerity that they decided to paint her house for free. She, in return, fed them good meals for the service they rendered.

Michelle Michaud was a good cook. When neighbor Marie Ward became very ill with a kidney problem, Michaud taught Ward’s husband how to cook.

“He couldn’t even cook oatmeal,” Marie Ward laughed. “But Michelle showed him how. Pretty soon she had him cooking all sorts of things.”

Michelle Michaud visited Marie Ward every day in the hospital and kept up the visits when she returned home.

“She was very sweet,” Ward confided. “Very caring and attentive. I knew about her lifestyle, but even prostitutes have hearts. And Michelle had a very good heart back then. She would come over every morning and have coffee with me. Then she would return in the afternoon, watch her favorite soap opera, Days of Our Lives, and we’d chat.

“She even helped care for my mother, who was nearly ninety at the time. She used to go over and comb her hair and rub her legs. My mom had terrible arthritis and Michelle used to rub her legs to ease the pain and get the circulation going.

“Her kids had a nice home. Always clean and tidy. She couldn’t stand a mess. She was a good mother to them. Like I said, she didn’t try to hide the fact that she’d been a prostitute. But now she was trying to do good.

“I liked Michelle very much. She was a real live wire. I remember one crab feed the church put on. She coaxed Father Paul out onto the dance floor and pretty soon they were dancing like kids. It was so funny to watch.”

It did indeed seem for a time in the mid-1980s as if the cynical, tough call girl might find a gentler side to her nature. By this time she was also making large sums of money from hooking and had two regular sugar daddies who were paying her, according to a friend, large sums of money “for services rendered.” The older one even went so far as to buy her a green Dodge minivan, which he registered in his name and hers. It was hard to give up this lifestyle, even if it entailed selling her body for loveless gropings in the dark. The emotional balancing act between hooker and altar girl was becoming harder and harder to maintain. She began to frequent neighborhood bars, spending large sums of cash and laying down twenty-dollar tips for the bartender for a single drink. And she spun tales of sex and debauchery to anyone who would listen.

Michaud especially began to frequent a bar called The Rustic on Stockton Boulevard, which was right down the street from Lizzy B’s. One bartender at The Rustic named Collette recalled that Michaud mainly drank champagne while she was there. She remembered, “Beer just wasn’t good enough for her. It had to be champagne. Once she began drinking, she just wouldn’t keep her mouth shut. Some of the things she said were totally outrageous. She liked to throw in a lot of swear words. She particularly ragged on men. How they were pigs and treated women like shit. She made no bones about it that she preferred women over men. And I mean sexually. She even came on to me one time.”

Then Collette laughed. “But I turned her down.”

Michelle Michaud was a boiling sea of contradictions: she was an intelligent, well-spoken single mother of two, and a guttural, filthy-language whore. By the time she reached thirty-two, the tightrope act between the sacred and profane had reached a point of unbearable strain. It only needed one slight shove to knock her off—and in January 1991 it came, pushing her over the edge into further darkness.