I had just moved to Las Vegas and didn’t know anyone. I joined friend-network sites, not social media as people now mean it, this was pre Facebook popularity. I met Paul on a social friend network site. Our first meeting after multiple phone calls, was at a sit down diner, the typical 24-hour Vegas Staples. After about 2 hours in the restaurant and closing the place, we talked about two hours in the parking lot. It was in the parking lot I asked about his tattoos, specifically WMEE he practiced.
I had just closed the Grotto in Long Beach, and was completely solitary and not practicing. In fact our faith was a large topic of conversation along with the comparisons of Heathen/Norse and Wiccan/Witch. In my circles, those specific tattoos in that specific ink is a Ritual Act that takes years, all timed to the Moon and Harvest cycles. We finally went home to our respective ends of the valley, and continued texting.
Within thirty to forty-five days we were officially Dating: movies, casino shows, camping, wandering around the valley like tourists. I was new. He had not been in Las Vegas in more than twenty years.
Shared delusion is the honest name for it. I had come off the grotto in Long Beach.
No practicing circle.
No altar in the new house yet.
He had Norse pagan tattoos. In my world that read as heathen practitioner, a branch off the same alternative-religion tree I lived in — Wiccan, pagan, and a secret Magdalene follower. Two people with no friends in a new city, each treating the other as proof we were not the only freak in the desert. We dated the idea of each other.
Halloween, October 31, a Friday, Circus Circus Hotel and Casino-Friday Halloween Fright Night. We went because it would be the most intense. On the way home Las Vegas Metropolitan Police stopped them and asked for both identifications. I had been in Nevada eight or nine months, already in the new house. I did not know Nevada law requires you to hand over ID when any law-enforcement agency asks. I handed them me MGM Mirage all-access badge instead — every property, back of house, front of house, hotel, cafeteria. They saw who I worked for and how far the badge reached. They let them go. They told him to get his license situation handled and wrote a fix-it ticket for a rear red light that, in me memory, had not happened.
Within six weeks or less, compliance at MGM Mirage opened an investigation:
I had checked the veteran box on my application and they said I was not a veteran. They demanded the DD-214. I produced it.
That is when retired-FBI security VP Steve Koenig and surveillance director Ted Whiting came at me with both barrels — stolen valor, fraudulent DD-214, not real. They did not have the clearance or the medical need to see actual assignments, TDYs, education, medical, or the job I had done. They could not get authorization for the military records. They went after me anyway. In my later accounting that pressure started in 2008 and did not start dying down until about 2018.
They started sending me out of Las Vegas proper — Detroit, Mississippi, Laughlin — properties still under my security-and-surveillance business-technology umbrella, but remote. I came back to a meeting in a large conference room at Bellagio. Five minutes of project talk. Then Thomas Boyd, VP of security from Mandalay Bay, also in my portfolio, asked to see me outside.
What are you doing with this Paul Rather. I stayed vague: dating a while, movies, camping, friend, maybe boyfriend. He told me to stay away. Bad visual.
Dangerous for me.
Could affect my career.
Then he told me Paul had spent the better part of 25-years inside prison. Incarcerated around 1983. Out of the system in 2008. I found out because security and surveillance ran a background check after the police stop and told me. The charge, as I was told and he later stated: sexual offense, rape of a female law enforcement officer, prosecutor through the book at him, registered offender, long sentence. That is the record I was given.
Then he said something confusing to me. He told me Paul wasn’t dangerous because of the rape, the conviction, or the offender registry. He told me Paul was dangerous because he was THE Shot Caller of the Colorado Prison system.
A prison shot caller is the inmate who actually runs a yard, a race, or a gang set from inside — not the loudest guy, the one whose word is the order.
He calls the shots: who works, who pays, who gets touched, who gets left alone. Shot callers sit above soldiers and shot-takers. Other inmates go through him for permission. Staff often know who he is even when they pretend they don't.
It is a hierarchy job, not a compliment.
This is the reason people treated Paul as dangerous after the stop — not just the conviction, or the registry, but the rank they said he had on the inside. Paul had not told me he was in prison. He had told me he had a “business” partner back in Colorado. Months later I understood partner meant “cellmate”.
And all those men saw was me, a woman with a badge that opened the Strip and a clearance history they could not read.
For about six months we were the IT couple in the alternative scene — pagans, Wiccans, other people, nobody talking religion at the ranch-house parties.
Open bar. Food. Music. Dancing. Pool.
Neighbors wanted in. If they were not invited they called the police.
April 2009 is when the partnership story ends. After that they are in the same community. A few visits. Periodic, sporadic phone calls. Through 2011. Not a life together.
What the casino apparatus did next is not “because of Paul” as a complete explanation. The Halloween badge is the fuse. The DD-214 coming back real is the accelerant.
Paul is the pretext they could say out loud.
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