Kenny Red

The rare case where the documentary boast and the federal docket can be read side by side.

Louis Kenneth Wright, who operated as Kenny Red, was a Las Vegas prostitution operator who gained public visibility through the Hughes brothers' 1999 documentary American Pimp, where he described himself in absolute terms as a professional. That on-camera notoriety later formed part of the backdrop to his prosecution.

Federal agents arrested him in April 2005. A Nevada indictment that May accused him of moving teenage girls between Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles for commercial sex, one of them fifteen years old; his son was named as a co-defendant and accused of supplying a false Arizona identification to a seventeen-year-old. In October 2005 he pleaded guilty to two counts of money laundering, admitting that he had run roughly $95,000 in cash from prostitution and identity theft through a bank account opened under an assumed name with a stolen Social Security number, and had bought a Summerlin house for $388,000 while filing no tax returns and holding no lawful employment.

His file is the archive's clearest illustration of why the documentary record and the legal record have to be held apart. The film gave him a platform and a nickname; the docket gave the only verified account of what the business actually was, and who it was done to.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Louis Kenneth Wright

BORN
Not established

STATUS
Not established — see Not Established panel

ERA
1990s–2000s

ASSOCIATED WITH
Las Vegas, Nevada

STANDING
Documented