With campaigns over, sheriff, DA can now address pimp scandal, right?

After watching their many television campaign advertisements in recent weeks, it’s obvious Sheriff Joe Lombardo and District Attorney Steve Wolfson have been busy running for re-election.

Following Tuesday’s primary, which saw Lombardo and Wolfson win handily against what can generously be described as underdog competition, the space on their daily calendars devoted to making speeches and greeting voters is once again open.

That should leave our leaders of Southern Nevada law enforcement enough time to openly address the vice scandal that continues to fester inside their departments. It’s ugly. And from the look of things, it’s not over.

The Las Vegas sex business is lucrative, and the competition is fierce and at times violent. Police have long been challenged by the presence of rampant prostitution in a place where the activity is technically illegal, but more than tolerated inside the vast casino tourism corridor.

Ocean Fleming was an unrepentant player who in September 2011 found himself in the crosshairs of the Metro vice pandering squad. From all appearances, detectives Christopher Baughman and Al Beas were just doing their jobs when they put together their case against Fleming. Taking down a pimp with violent tendencies was a high watermark in the cops’ careers.

By November 2012, Fleming was convicted of 23 felonies, including kidnapping and domestic battery with strangulation involving five victims who worked for him as prostitutes. At trial, prosecutor Liz Mercer’s case relied heavily on victims’ testimony and resulted in a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole.

It should be a cause for celebration any time a pimp gets put away (despite the fact Nevadans are poised to elect legal brothel baron Dennis Hof to the Legislature.) Goodbye, Ocean Fleming.

But it soon became suspected that Fleming’s conviction was based on more than good investigative work. It also benefited from the detectives’ relationship with Fleming’s rival in the pimp trade, Jamal Rashid, a rapper known as “Mally Mall.” By 2014, the FBI was investigating the investigators and conducted a raid on Rashid’s residence.

Thanks to the efforts Fleming’s court-appointed attorney, Janiece Marshall, allegations that victim testimony was coached, the detectives benefited financially and were provided sexual favors and the prosecution was engaged in ethical misconduct have resulted in a decision by tough-sentencing District Judge Michael Villani to re-evaluate the case and structure a new deal that threw out 20 of 23 felonies. Fleming, who is nobody’s hero, is scheduled to be re-sentenced in July and could be out of prison before the end of the year.

Along the way, Marshall has also helped uncover substantial and troubling anomalies in the prosecution and sentencing of others tied to the pimp trade here. Commuters get stuck in traffic longer than some of these mugs have been serving in jail.

And there’s the disturbing story told by Justice of the Peace Melanie Andress-Tobiasson, whose attempt to prevent her own teenage daughter from being recruited as a prostitute led to the discovery of valuable information that, she says, was essentially disregarded by vice detectives.

“What’s embarrassing is the fact that you would become aware of this and go to the people who you believe could do something about it, and nothing’s done,” she said in a recent interview. “These are people that I’ve worked with, that I know, that know who I am, that know what kind of work ethic I have. And who didn’t do anything for a reason, and we can speculate as to what those reasons are, but some of them are very validated by what’s being said: That there are some officers who are getting paid to go after certain people and leave other people alone.”

With little known about the status of the FBI’s investigation, and Metro’s decision to retain attorneys for the express purpose of preventing the department’s own detectives from sharing information about the comportment of past and current officers, plenty of troubling questions remain.

But I know who can help answer even the toughest questions: Lombardo and Wolfson.

Now that their campaigns are in the bag, they need to make shedding light on this mess a priority.

We know you love Las Vegas, gentlemen. We know you’re tough on crime and work hard to protect the credibility of your departments.

The public deserves to hear the answers you can provide.

Disclosure: Joseph Lombardo has donated to The Nevada Independent. You can see a full list of donors here.

Contact John L. Smith at [email protected]. On Twitter: @jlnevadasmith.