But Fleiss, 39, who describes herself as a survivor, says she is reclaiming her life. She is building a brothel in Nevada - the only place in the United States where prostitution is legal - with which she intends to regain her position in the prostitution business. She has bought 24 hectares of land ('I don't want anybody else near me,' she says) in Pahrump, 100km outside Las Vegas, where she plans to construct a sprawling set of villas, each with its own theme.

In preparation, Fleiss has been trawling other Nevada brothels, making a list of what not to do. 'While I've been doing my research, I've been banned from some of these places,'

she says. 'The other pimps and madams are scared of me.

They know I'm going to shake them up.' During our conversation, her mobile phone rings several times with calls from 'the evil pimp', who is trying to talk her out of an idea she believes will bring her riches and newfound fame.

'I want to raise the stakes,' she says. 'I'm going to teach them all a lesson, show them how it's done. It will bring them more money too. I see this business differently. To me, it's not a con or a hustle. There are lots of things that separate me from the typical flesh trader. The brothels I've seen are really unsexy. I just want to change forever how Americans view sex.'

For starters, Fleiss says, her future bordello, scheduled to open next year, will be 'a Shangri-La, a Utopia, it will have everything anyone can ask for. We're catering to the top 1 per cent of the wealthiest people in the world. They're very well-educated. They're used to the best.'

Aesthetically, she is inspired by photos of Mark Twain's house. Initial plans are for 20 to 30 villas, each about 1,400 square feet and decorated by a cast of interior designers. Some will be for sale, at about US$1 million, to clients who want private residences. There will be helipads and a landing strip for private jets, a five-star kitchen and a central lounge/living area Fleiss promises will be the last word in luxury. All this will be surrounded by cacti and rocks, like an oasis in the desert.

Then, of course, there is the staff. Fleiss is about to launch a recruitment drive, picking the 10 most beautiful girls she can find in Brazil and more from Asian and European countries, until she has 'the 50 hottest girls in the world'.

'They need to be at least 21,' she says. 'In this country, they send you off to die in war at 18 but you have to be 21 to have sex. They just have to look good and be willing to do this for six months then get out. I don't need them to read a wine list. If they're too smart, I don't want them.'

Fleiss' brazen approach to the world's oldest profession would appear to be a slap in the face for women's rights but she wants girls who undertake the profession to be well-provided for. 'At the brothels I visited, most of the girls looked miserable. They looked like they were prisoners. They don't know how good it can be. It's like if you think Haagen-Dazs is the best ice cream you've had, then you try Ben & Jerry's. Now that's great ice cream.'

Fleiss admits the idea to open the brothel stems partly from vanity and partly from wanting to ensure her financial future through an industry she knows inside out. 'When I got out of prison, I promised myself I would never again take a terrible shower, one of those showers where there is just a little trickle of water. What I'm doing, it's an ego thing. It's just for my vanity. I want to show them all that I can do it legally so they can't touch me. I didn't even think of doing it [in Nevada] until [actress/comedienne] Roseanne [Barr] came into a shop I used to have in Hollywood and told me to try it.'

If Fleiss looks exhausted it is because she is going full steam ahead with the project. She has cut out contractors and is overseeing the project herself, working out a deal with an LA-based company called Metroshed, which supplies ready-built structures for a fraction of the cost of building them from scratch.

For now, Fleiss is financing the project on her own. She still has some of the money earned at the height of her career, as well as income from her book, Pandering. Negotiations are ongoing with an LA-based television production firm to make her own reality show, tentatively titled The Making of a Brothel. She says the media requests are relentless; the day before we met, she was on a new MSNBC news features show, and she has also appeared on Larry King Live. The exposure will probably work to her advantage when the brothel is operational.

She plans to charge US$5,000 a girl, although she has yet to work out 'the time frame'. As mercenary as all this might sound, Fleiss says there is a greater purpose behind it. 'I see my future beyond the sex business,' she says. After watching a television news item about how military families couldn't afford to buy their own homes once they left the service, Fleiss says, she was moved to consider building affordable housing. 'I want to start doing it near military bases. I want to price them at US$200,000 to US$400,000 each so everyone can afford one. In a couple of years, I'm going to be on the Fortune 500 list. I'm sure of it.'

Given her track record, and despite some spectacular upheavals, Fleiss seems to have the know-how to get there. She showed she had a gift for entrepreneurship at the age of 12, when she would baby sit children in her upmarket LA neighbourhood of Los Feliz. As more parents called on her, she began a babysitting circle, employing other girls and pocketing a share of their pay.

Those early days were, says Fleiss, part of a body of happy memories she has of her childhood. Her father, Paul, is a noted LA pediatrician, treating Hollywood offspring such as those of Madonna and Angelina Jolie. Her mother, Elissa, was a school-teacher. 'I had a really happy, secure childhood.'

Her parents divorced when she was 16, but Fleiss remains close to her family, which includes four siblings: two biological and two adopted. She admits to never having been very interested in academics, often cutting classes in high school and turning to odd jobs instead.

When she was 19, she was invited to a party at the home of a billionaire financier who was more than three times her age. She began working as his personal assistant and the two began an affair. By the time it ended, she was hooked on the high life and realised she needed to find a way to fund her love of lavishness. She got a real-estate licence but, although she fared well financially, it still wasn't good enough.

When she was 22, Fleiss had an opportunity to change all that. Through a chance encounter, she

met Madam Alex, who was considered at the time to be the most famous madam in Hollywood. A squat, balding Filipina woman who dressed in oversized muumuus, Fleiss says Alex's 'girls' were not spectacular and the whole business needed a thorough overhaul. Through her own network of contacts, Fleiss brought in a new contingent of gorgeous, glamorous girls. Almost instantly, the business went up from a US$50,000 monthly turnover to US$300,000. Fleiss and Alex, however, got into an argument and Fleiss eventually set up her own operation, taking most of the girls with her.

Her black book kept growing, ranging from 'bad boy' actor Charlie Sheen, movie directors and mega-producers to oil tycoons, heads of state and Arab sheiks. Over the next few years, she earned more than US$5 million, enabling her to buy a US$1.6 million mansion that had once belonged to actor Michael Douglas. At the height of her success, she had about 90 girls working for her, split between LA, the rest of the US and Europe. At an hour's notice, she would dispatch them around the world to service her clients.

'From a list of the wealthiest men in any country in the world, I had at least two from each list [as clients]. My girls were the best and everyone knew it.'

The money, she says, was a huge lure. One of her most important gigs was the polo-playing season in Argentina, where she did significant business and for which she advanced airfares and other expenses to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, trusting she would be reimbursed later. She almost always was.

'There were two people who screwed me,' she says. 'One was a fake prince from Geneva and the second was the cop that got me arrested.'

Fleiss' booming career came to a screeching halt in 1993. Her activities had been monitored by law enforcement agencies for some time and in June that year they decided to act. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, in conjunction with the FBI, set up a sting, getting a police officer to pose as a wealthy Japanese client. He called Fleiss asking for four girls for him and his colleagues, arranging to meet them at a suite at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills. The girls showed up with the 13 grams of cocaine the police officer had requested and they were all arrested. Fleiss was arrested the next day as she was taking out the rubbish.

She was convicted of eight counts of conspiracy, income tax evasion and money laundering. She spent three years in jail but estimates her total time 'in the system' - including parole and probation - is more like a decade. 'I try not to get bitter,' she says. 'But I look at people like Martha Stewart, or those other white-collar criminals, and everyone served less time than me.'

Her prison experiences will provide fodder for a book she is now writing. It will be a follow up to her self-published Pandering, the memoir that earned her more than US$1 million.

'In prison, I learned things I never would have known,' she says, adding that a confrontation with '14 bull-dykes' scared the wits out of her. 'Prison was lesbian hell,' she says, before admitting she formed a gay relationship while inside. 'There were 1,200 women there, most of them pretty hard-core. They knew who I was. They were waiting for me. As soon as I got there, I knew I was way out of my league.'

She spent her time jogging - up to 27km a day in the prison yard - playing chess and making mugs in the arts and crafts room. She also spent 64 days in solitary confinement after an altercation with a prison officer, when Fleiss threw two metal chairs against the wall. 'Nobody prepares you for going in and nobody prepares you for coming out. When I finally got out, even a car looked as strange as a spaceship. I found myself doing weird things such as looking up web-sites based on ads I'd seen on television, even if I wasn't at all interested in them.'

She started seeing actor Tom Sizemore, who was later convicted of physically abusing her. She is now dating another actor, but is taking it slow and living relatively quietly in Hollywood.

'When I'm settled and ready, I think I'd like [to have children],' she says. 'But in the meantime, I just want to be in touch with how I live my life, how good I am to people and what my core values are. I've never cared what people think about me. They can say what they want. If you care, you're still a prisoner.'