Of tarts and parrots — another ho-hum Vegas landlord/tenant dispute

In the genre of news that can only be labeled "Vegas Bizarre" comes the item of the ex-exotic dancer landlord who wants to sue the ex-tartmistress renter over the condition for which she and 25 parrots left a rental house.

Here's the scorecard according to Nevada's largest and most interesting newspaper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal: Landlord Christiana MacKnight (a former exotic dancer who now owns a lingerie shop in Las Vegas) wants to sue former madame and wannabe brothel owner Heidi Fleiss for $45,000-50,000 worth of alleged damages to MacKnight's house in Pahrump. For those of you reading this in Paxton, Illinois, or Macon, Georgia, this must all seem very confusing, but stay with me.

Pahrump is a bedroom community to Las Vegas. It's in Nye County where brothels are legal. Fleiss moved there to open up a brothel of guy-tarts for women. But the only thing that happened to Fleiss in Pahrump was an arrest on drug charges, which is another story in the unusual life of Heidi Fleiss. In this chapter of her story, she rented a house from MacKnight and allegedly moved in with about 25 of parrots. When she flew the coup, the house was damaged (hard to imagine, I know), says MacKnight. Apparently, the cupboards, the molding and all kinds of other stuff bore evidence of parrot. So she hired a Vegas attorney on contingency to sue for the $50,000 of alleged damages.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal is a wonderful newspaper, if I do say so myself. R-J reporters spend countless hours covering "normal" news -- stuff like the school board, churches, zoning, police, fire, courts, roads, taxes and sometimes even the Cub Scouts. But just about every week the Review-Journal also runs into "Vegas Bizarre" stories like these. We don't make them up.

I'm not sure I even have a comment on all this other than to ask a few concluding questions: What kind of attorney do you get for a $50,000 contingency case? And, are the parrots OK?

You can view the whole story (along with pictures of Heidi and her parrots) at: http://www.lvrj.com/news/18572449.html.