Dennis Hof, the man in charge of the Moonlight Bunny Ranch brothel made famous by its HBO show “Cathouse,” said in a new interview with Derek Hartley and Romaine Patterson on Sirius XM’s OutQ radio that it was his outreach that led to the arrest of Drew Peterson.
“Absolutely, there’s no question about it,” Hof said. “There hasn’t been one bit of talk about arresting this guy and all of a sudden he’s coming to the Bunny Ranch, they grab him. They were afraid he was a flight risk and was not coming back.”
Peterson, a former police sergeant and a suspect in the October 2007 disappearance of his fourth wife, Stacy Peterson, was arrested on Thursday and indicted for the murder of his third wife, Kathleen Savio. Savio was found in a bathtub on March 1, 2004, and was initially ruled an accidental drowning. Stacy Peterson has been missing since October 2007.
Earlier, Hof reached out to Peterson about a possible job at the Nevada Ranch, an idea that HBO didn’t approve of — at least if Peterson were going to be on camera.
“We would cancel the show before doing a stunt like this,” an HBO rep said in a statement to Access.
Hof told OutQ radio that the situation came about thanks to a tongue-in-cheek offer he made to former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.
“I saw this thing where Rod (Blagojevich) wanted to be on a reality show, so I put out a press release saying I wanted to offer him a spot as my apprentice on the HBO ‘Cathouse’ show,” Hof said. “If he could run a state, he could run the Bunny Ranch.”
But while he claims the ex-governor’s people turned down the offer thanks to Blagojevich’s legal situation (which is also keeping him off the reality show, NBC’s upcoming “I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here!”), he said Blagojevich’s publicist referred him to another client, Peterson.
“The next day I’m on a radio show in Chicago and they bring Peterson on, and I invite him, and it has turned into a national news story,” Hof said. “He said, ‘I want to come out there, I watch the show, I want to be a part of it and maybe I could be on the show.’”
“HBO hated it, oh my God,” he added, noting that following Peterson’s arrest, any plans had been nixed. “We can’t have anything to do with this guy.”