Not many years ago, Nevada Republican Party activist Tony Dane was known as a notorious and unrepentant practitioner of political dirty tricks.

With his robocalling phone bank working overtime, Dane was capable of sliming Democratic Party enemies with innuendo, deception and outright fabrication.  From the sound of things, he made a pretty good living at it.

He was even capable of conflating his gutter tactics with doing the Lord’s work. The avowed conservative Christian appeared to take a certain glee in going after Democrat David Parks, Nevada’s first openly gay legislator. Whenever questioned about his obsession with Parks, which to my mind bordered on harassment, Dane reminded reporters that God didn’t approve of the gay lifestyle.

Back when the Nevada GOP was capable of blushing, mainstream Republicans in the state publicly distanced themselves from Dane. But his style of sleaze rarely failed to find a client and an audience, often among the far-right reaches of the party.

That all changed starting in late 2014. Dane’s venom and robo-dialing thuggery landed him in the middle of an extortion investigation. Ironically, he was upended not by the Democrats he badgered, but by Republicans he thought he could intimidate behind the scenes.

He found out otherwise in 2016, when a Metro investigation led by then-Detective William Schoen resulted in an 11-count indictment alleging he’d tried to extort GOP Assm. Chris Edwards and others into changing their votes for speaker of the Republican-controlled Assembly. In Dane’s mind, the GOP majority wasn’t sufficiently reactionary.

At a time when he might have been wise to remain silent, Dane went after Edwards, who in turn called law enforcement. After news of the investigation surfaced, Dane argued that his surreptitious recordings and apparent threats were constitutionally protected issue advocacy.

The 11 charges were later reduced to four. The case was delayed not by courtroom maneuvering, but by a deadly vehicle crash in 2017 with Dane at the wheel.

On the afternoon of Sept. 8, a food truck Dane was driving ran a stop sign in Leesburg, Virginia, and plowed into an Audi station wagon carrying a mother and her four passengers. Dane was charged with involuntary manslaughter, reckless driving and failing to have insurance. He was convicted and sentenced in 2018 to 11 and a half years in prison. His carelessness caused the death of 39-year-old Erin Kaplan and injured her teenage son, two daughters and her mother.

Instead of reflecting on his actions, Dane did what those who have followed his career expected of him. He denied responsibility and appealed his conviction at the state and federal levels. The conviction was repeatedly upheld by the courts. At one point, the Court of Appeals of Virginia observed, “The totality of the evidence presented in this case objectively establishes that (Dane’s) negligence was so gross, wanton, and culpable as to show ‘callous disregard of human life.’”

In Clark County, the case against him has remained active while he served his prison sentence in Virginia. That changed Jan. 22. Dane was allowed to admit guilt via an Alford plea to a single charge of perjury. His Alford plea enabled him to acknowledge that the state would present evidence at trial sufficient to return a guilty verdict against him.

As part of his guilty plea agreement, he received a 180-day sentence with credit for time served. He also agreed to be immediately returned to Virginia to serve the remainder of his sentence. He is scheduled to be released in 2027, according to published reports.

The passage of time, prosecutorial priorities, judicial economy and the defendant’s incarcerated status were among the considerations, Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson says.

“We’re pleased,” Wolfson said. “We got a solid felony conviction. Based upon priority of cases, to get a solid felony on this guy — and he went back to Virginia to finish his prison sentence — we thought that was appropriate.”

A lot can change in a decade. Detective Schoen retired and today is a partner in a successful private detective agency. Edwards lost a primary challenge in 2020. And bottom-feeder Dane is no longer at the top of his game.

His robo-dialing operation, which authorities believed kept its computer servers in multiple states and Canada to conceal the source of the deceptive calls and skirt wiretap statutes, has been replaced by much more effective methods of voter manipulation.

In the current political climate, what once seemed so technologically tricked-up now feels almost quaint by comparison.

John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Readers Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters and Desert Companion, among others.