MAJOR PHOENIX NEW TIMES ARTICLES ON JOE ARPAIO

1. OVERVIEW
The following articles sample the range of law enforcement abuses under Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Breathtaking Abuse of the Constitution
Jailers Show a Paraplegic Who’s Boss
The Cost of Cruelty
Barbarism as a Public Relations Strategy
Human Plights
Enemies List
Boob’s Tube
Head on a Skewer
In the Crosshairs
Murder on Madison: The Norberg Remix
Jailhouse Blues
Inhumanity Has a Price
Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Jails Lose National Accreditation
Brown Out
Are Your Papers in Order?
NOPE to Janet Napolitano

2. “TARGET PRACTICE” SERIES

Maricopa County law enforcement violated the constitutional rights of this newspaper’s readers in October 2007. Using secret grand jury subpoenas, County Attorney Andrew Thomas sought records that would reveal the identity of anyone who’d looked at New Times online in the previous four years. When the paper’s leaders revealed the grand jury probe in a cover story, sheriff’s deputies arrested them.
Our investigation has made one thing clear: Maricopa County’s sheriff has a vivid history of ignoring the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Breathtaking Abuse of the Constitution
Who’s Sorry Now?
He Just Doesn’t Get It
Wilenchik’s a Liar, and There’s More
Extraordinary Contempt
Enemies List
Siege Mentality
Power Play
Information Blockade
Inmates’ Rights Lawsuit Languishes
Inhumanity Has a Price
Flushing Them Out
Money Shot
Alien Nation

3. HATE GROUPS/NATIVIST EXTREMISTS

Only one state in America has more active hate groups than Arizona, according to The Southern Poverty Law Center. Members of these organizations play a prominent role in the anti-immigrant movement. Sheriff Joe Arpaio has spoken at their meetings, received their applause, accepted their awards, and launched one “crime suppression sweep” of Hispanics at their behest.

Feathered Bastard: Triumph of the Swill
Jarrett and Goliath
King of Pain
Feathered Bastard: Rusty Childress Embraces a Neo-Nazi
Rusty’s World
Feathered Bastard: Bloody Christmas at Pruitt’s
The Bird: Resident Evil
Feathered Bastard: Arpaio and the Minuteman
Feathered Bastard: Sheriff Joe’s Easter Ethnic Cleansing
Feathered Bastard: Another Neo-Nazi in the Nativist Woodpile

4. IMMIGRATION

Arizona, the birthplace of César Chávez, is the focus of a renegade effort to sweep Mexicans off of American streets and deport them back across the border.

Brown Out
Are Your Papers in Order?
The Bird: Police State
The Bird: Bad Break
The Bird: No Holds Barred
Feathered Bastard: Arpaio’s Circus Comes to Buckeye
Feathered Bastard: Arpaio’s Thugs Menace Press Conference
Feathered Bastard: Arpaio Profiles Street Vendors
Feathered Bastard: Columbus D-Day

5. INVESTIGATING CRITICS

Sheriff Joe Arpaio routinely unleashes his deputies to investigate critics. His targets have included judges, civil rights workers, journalists, and rival politicians.

Enemies List
The Trial
False Positive
America’s Toughest Suspects
Insider Account
Blowing His Cool
Trick or Threat
Goon Squad
Information Blockade
Free Ray Stern
Boob’s Tube
Breathtaking Abuse of the Constitution
Who’s Sorry Now?
Talk About Intimidation

6. EVIDENCE DESTROYED, SUPPRESSED, AND OBSCURED

In an ongoing probe, New Times examines how the Sheriff’s Office has destroyed, altered, and withheld incriminating evidence in numerous cases involving heinous brutality by deputies and jailers.

The Trial
False Positive
Gag of an Order
Jail Bait
Jailhouse Justice
Sanitized for Joe’s Protection
Sheriff’s Cover-up?
Fed Up
Tweaking the Truth
Dead Again
Hart v. Arpaio
Another Jail Death
Torture Chamber
Lies and Videotape
Public Pays in Jail Death

7. BARBARISM IN THE JAIL

Though repeatedly investigated by the courts, the Justice Department — even Amnesty International — the corpses continue to accumulate in Sheriff Arpaio’s jail.

The Shocking Details on Juan Mendoza Farias
Stillborn: Babies Are Dying in Arpaio’s Jails
Jails Lose National Accreditation
Dead Again
Hart v. Arpaio Awaits Verdict
Inhumanity Has a Price
The Cost of Cruelty
Assisted Suicide
Turning Up the Heat
Jailhouse Justice
Jail Bait
109 Degrees of Incarceration
Murder on Madison: The Norberg Remix
Tweaking the Truth
Fed Up
Sheriff’s Cover-up?
Keeping ‘Em in Stitches
A Hoss-Style Witness
Jailers Show a Paraplegic Who’s Boss
Barbarism as a Public Relations Strategy
Sanitized for Joe’s Protection
Tent City Beating Is Nearly Fatal
Jailhouse Blues
Gulag-Rolling
Hog-Tied by the Truth
U.S. Lawsuit Re-Alleges Abuse in Jails
Human Plights
Hangin’ with Sheriff Joe
Feds Probe Alleged Abuse in County Jail

Not one of the county supervisors was willing to talk about Arpaio’s finances. Pictured above: Maricopa County Supervisor Don Stapley.

County Supervisor Andy Kunasek

County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox

County Supervisor Max Wilson

County Supervisor Fulton Brock
Subject(s):
Sheriff Joe ArpaioAfter 15 years in the job, Arpaio has yet to endure a comprehensive audit of his office’s finances. Limited audits examining Arpaio’s payroll, his travel policies and the county’s jail enhancement funds have found plenty of problems. But despite that, and even though the sheriff’s $241 million budget is the biggest in the county, Maricopa County supervisors have failed to order a look at the bigger picture.

Compounding the problem, issues identified in the limited audits have been virtually ignored by the Sheriff’s Office.

Consider overtime. This fall, the county revealed that Arpaio spent nearly $2 million more on overtime in the fiscal year’s first quarter than he had been allotted for the entire year. That spending binge, the county manager concluded, was “not sustainable.”

Arpaio’s solution was drastic: He stopped transporting prisoners to court hearings. Forty-six inmates never made it to court on November 6 — even though getting defendants to hearings is one job the sheriff must do under state law. (Suffice it to say that rounding up illegal immigrants and sheltering abused animals are not state mandates, but Arpaio has yet to run out of money for either venture.)

Judges and defense lawyers erupted over the plan, and Arpaio was forced to backpedal, blaming the lack of transports on miscommunication. But his next cost-cutting solution was no less controversial. Arpaio announced that jail visiting time would be limited to the hours of 6:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. Again, the court fell into chaos, and now, Arpaio faces a lawsuit from attorneys unable to meet with their clients. Though the sheriff lost round one, he’s appealing — which, observers note, is hardly the way to save money.

But the most stunning thing about Arpaio’s budget problems isn’t that he overspent so badly. It isn’t even his cockeyed remedy for his financial woes.

The real shocker is that it took this long for overtime to become an issue.

A New Times analysis of financial records show that overtime has been a huge problem for Arpaio for years. Even as the county increased the sheriff’s overtime budget by 85 percent over the last four years, Arpaio has continued to exceed the amount he has been allocated. In fact, in the last four years, the sheriff’s expenditures on overtime have increased 635 percent.

In the 2004 fiscal year, Arpaio spent twice the amount budgeted for overtime. In 2005, he spent more than four times what the county had allotted — overspending by $6.6 million. Last year, Arpaio set a new record: He overshot his overtime budget by a whopping $10.4 million.

In May, the county completed a 25-page audit of the sheriff’s payroll. That report outlined the overtime problem, making specific recommendations to fix the root causes.

The auditors did not suggest slashing jail hours. Or stopping inmate transport. Instead, they pointed out “a need for better management.” That, clearly, was a suggestion Arpaio wasn’t willing to emulate, and his overtime spending continued to swell until it reached crisis proportions six months later.

Such stonewalling has been a pattern when it comes to the sheriff. During his 15 years in office, Arpaio has endured investigations, lawsuits, and audits. He’s cost Maricopa County taxpayers $41.4 million solely in legal fees, insurance premiums, and payouts to the people who’ve sued him. His budget has doubled, his jails have been condemned by the U.S. Department of Justice, and he has never faced an audit that didn’t reveal genuine problems.

Those things, of course, pale next to the list of people who have died in Arpaio’s jails: people awaiting trial who were denied proper medical care or who were abused or ignored by guards. Law enforcement officials and lawyers believe that records on inmate deaths have been destroyed and criminal investigations into those deaths thwarted.

But Arpaio, the Teflon prince of Maricopa County, has outmaneuvered everyone who’s attempted to hold him accountable.

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In 1995, the U.S. Department of Justice began investigating conditions in Joe Arpaio’s jails after receiving a complaint about excessive force. Civil rights investigators announced that they would be looking at a litany of serious allegations: physical abuse of inmates by staff, false reporting regarding use of force, denial of access to counsel, and inadequate medical care.

When the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the sheriff a year later, the suit confirmed many of the original allegations. But, unbelievably, then-U.S. Attorney Janet Napolitano appeared at a press conference with Arpaio and attempted to convince reporters that Arpaio had actually been exonerated. Napolitano even described the lawsuit as a “technicality.”

The actual suit, of course, says nothing of the kind. Instead, it alleges that Sheriff’s Office brass had “been consciously aware of, but deliberately indifferent to” excessive and improper use of force by jail employees. “Such conduct and practices have and will cause inmates confined in this jail irreparable harm,” the Justice Department concluded.

The suit forced Arpaio to enter into a settlement agreement, mandating a new use-of-force policy and new guidelines for non-lethal weapons.

But during their dog-and-pony show, Napolitano and Arpaio downplayed the findings — and downplayed the idea that there would be any change in the jails. Arpaio even joked about running for governor against Napolitano at some future date.

Six years later, Napolitano did run for governor. Arpaio didn’t, but he proved to be a factor in the election. Arpaio endorsed his old press-conference buddy over her Republican opponent, allowing Napolitano to beat Matt Salmon with just 1 percent of the vote.

In the years since, corrections auditors, county inspectors, and inmates all confirm that conditions in the jails have only gotten worse, as New Times’ John Dickerson reported last week. County inspectors found vermin and cockroaches in jail kitchens. The Justice Department’s own statistics show that Arpaio’s jails are the most chronically overcrowded in the nation. Meanwhile, Justice hasn’t audited Arpaio for compliance. (Justice Department officials say they’re unable to discuss the particulars of the case because it’s simply too old.)

The Justice Department investigation was one of many times that Arpaio has managed to battle his away out of trouble. Whether it’s by stonewalling, or obstruction, or political gamesmanship — no matter who’s come after him, the sheriff has always managed to skate.

The investigation into the death of Scott Norberg is a perfect example. Norberg, who had struggled with drug addiction, was arrested after attempting to slug a cop. He was in Arpaio’s jail just 15 hours before he was handcuffed by guards, kicked, stomped on, and then strapped into a restraint chair. There, guards held a towel over his head, literally suffocating him. Medical records later revealed that he had been shot with a stun gun at least 14 times and beaten so badly that his larynx cracked.

The county was forced to settle with Norberg’s family for $8.25 million. Astonishingly, says Norberg’s attorney, Mike Manning, Arpaio promoted the guards who did the beating.

Arpaio’s critics say Norberg’s death was far from an isolated incident. But there’s one reason the case continues to be talked about when so many other inmate deaths have fallen into obscurity: Scott Norberg’s family had enough money to hire a good attorney. Manning’s investigation showed that important records had been destroyed — including the X-ray of the cracked larynx. He also obtained the videotape that showed Norberg pleading for his life.

Even then, Arpaio managed to thwart a criminal investigation.

The sheriff’s internal affairs investigators, Manning says, failed to give deputies the proper warnings before interviewing them. That invalidated the evidence they had obtained. Even worse, internal affairs and criminal investigators sat in on the same interviews, which Manning says is strictly forbidden by most police agency policies.

“There is no doubt, no other explanation, than that they intentionally botched the investigation,” Manning says. “This kind of stuff was too stupid — too stupid even for them.”

Even so, then-County Attorney Rick Romley was anxious to prosecute jail employees. “Rick’s office was horrified at how the evidence was developing,” Manning recalls. “They were looking at least at manslaughter — and you also had destruction of evidence, the fact that they’d intentionally botched the investigation.”

But Arpaio had a trump card.

After Norberg’s death, Romley had instructed his staff not to give jail employees legal advice. He didn’t want his criminal investigation compromised by conflict-of-interest claims.

But as Romley’s investigation was heating up, he received a letter from his former employee Jack MacIntyre, who informed his old boss that, working for Romley in the aftermath of the jailhouse death, he had disobeyed Romley’s orders. MacIntyre had given legal advice to some deputies.

Worth emphasizing is that MacIntyre had left Romley’s office to work for Arpaio.

MacIntyre’s confession left Romley with a real conflict. He couldn’t prosecute people in the Sheriff’s Office, be they Arpaio or his deputies, when one of his own staffers had served as their legal counsel.

The top prosecutor was forced to recuse his office.

“There had been numerous attempts to get me to stop the investigation, but none of them worked until Jack MacIntyre was able to effectively get me off the case,” Romley says today. “To say that I was upset would be putting it mildly.”

Romley handed the case over to Arizona’s then-Attorney General Janet Napolitano, the same politician who, as U.S. Attorney, had downplayed the Justice Department lawsuit.

Napolitano closed the case without prosecution.

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Although Arpaio’s office has always managed to avoid prosecution, someone always has to pay. And, in many cases, it’s been taxpayers.

As New Times first reported last week, Arpaio has cost Maricopa County a staggering $41.4 million in legal fees, insurance premiums, and payouts to jail-abuse victims. Arpaio’s track record is so bad that the county has been forced to switch to an insurance policy with a $5 million deductible. Insurance won’t cover a cent of any suit that settles for less than that.

Even beyond the pricey lawsuits, evidence suggests that the sheriff’s books are a mess. Every limited audit done of the Sheriff’s Office during Arpaio’s tenure, whether by the state or by the county’s in-house division, has found problems.

The problems have never risen to the level of criminality, as the sheriff’s supporters are quick to point out. Indeed, many of the sheriff’s financial missteps seem petty. But considering that the audits have covered only small areas of Arpaio’s budget, they raise the question of what a larger audit might reveal.

For example, in 1996, New Times writer Tony Ortega reported that the sheriff had misused jail enhancement funds. The money is administered by the state to assist with jail operations and to train detention officers. As the biggest county in the state, Maricopa gets more than $1 million from the fund annually.

Ortega found that Arpaio was using enhancement money for expenses that had nothing to do with jails, much less enhancing them. The sheriff used the fund to finance a lawsuit against the county Board of Supervisors in 1994, despite telling reporters that taxpayers wouldn’t get stuck with the bill. He had used it to send himself to National Sheriff’s Conferences. He had also paid for a video news-clipping service. Jail conditions be damned, Arpaio needed to watch himself on Nightline.

Ortega’s reporting triggered an investigation from the Arizona Auditor General, which echoed his findings. A total of $122,419 in expenditures “did not demonstrate that they ‘enhanced’ jail facilities and operations,” the auditors concluded. Their report specifically cited the news clipping service and the money Arpaio had spent on conferences.

But nothing seems to have changed. Since 2003, records show, Arpaio has spent $34,387 in enhancement funds on news clipping services. He’s also spent $345,644 of the fund to send employees to conferences and training seminars, records show. Employees were sent to classes for Photoshop, good grammar, and, of course, the National Sheriff’s Conference.

Dennis Matthiesen, financial audit director for the auditor general, says his office is unlikely to revisit the issue. “Our office doesn’t have any enforcement authority, whatsoever,” he says. “We find what we find and we report it.” From there, Matthiesen says, it’s up to the sheriff to make changes, or the Board of Supervisors to demand them.

And that hasn’t happened. Not only has Arpaio ignored the state auditor general, he’s also ignored the county’s in-house audit team.

In 2005, county auditors looked at how various agencies were handling travel expenses. The audit was so limited, it only looked at 24 trips involving the sheriff’s office, all of them extradition cases where deputies picked up fugitives in other states.

The auditors still found plenty of problems.

In more than half the cases, the deputies were booked to arrive on the scene by early evening, giving them time to rest before prisoner pick-ups the next day. But, the audit noted, “deputies often took an additional day before taking custody of the prisoner and returning to their duty posts.”

Deputies, apparently, were milking the taxpayers for beach time. When they picked up a prisoner in muggy Orlando, for example, the deputies stayed 119 miles away, in breezy Daytona Beach. The county got stuck paying for their mileage and an extra day at the hotel. The same pattern repeated itself in Myrtle Beach and Hawaii. (Weirdly, two deputies even chose to stay an extra day in Buffalo.)

The auditors concluded that, if the limited findings held true in a bigger sample, the sheriff could have saved $170,000 in 2005 alone by tightening travel policies.

But records suggest that everything is the same. In the year after the audit, the sheriff’s costs for training and travel increased 11 percent.

The audit dealing with overtime spending was even more dramatic. It found that overtime had escalated, even as the sheriff added employees to the payroll.

The problem was lousy management. Sheriff’s employees, the audit found, regularly write themselves down for overtime pay before they’ve even worked a full 40-hour week. (Stay late one night, and rather than cut hours later in the week, it’s an automatic bonus.) Management, the auditors wrote, did “not appear to have considered staggered or overlapping shifts, or other alternatives, to reduce premium costs.”

The audit suggests a certain chaos in jail operations.

Forty-three percent of sheriff’s office employees weren’t working in their budgeted departments, the auditors found. “[Employees] are frequently transferred between divisions, often without notice to applicable management.”

After the auditors finished in May, the Sheriff promised to make changes. Still, he finished the 2007 fiscal year (ending June 30) more than $10.4 million in the red for overtime, and in the first quarter of the current fiscal year, Arpaio already shot his entire overtime budget for the year. It’s clear that cost-saving measures were not a priority.

Today, county officials say they have control of Arpaio’s budget. A recent memo from the budget office suggests that, if Arpaio can continue his new and improved cost-cutting plan, he will finish the year in the black.

But the plan depends, in part, on keeping visitors out of the jails after 2:30 p.m. Defense lawyers say they’re going to do everything in their power to scuttle that.

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So who can hold Sheriff Joe accountable?

Not the county attorney. Rick Romley tried, but he’s since retired, and his replacement, Andrew Thomas, is more interested in making nice with Arpaio than declaring war on him. Thomas and Arpaio even formed an anti-corruption task force designed to target public officials who screw up. Clearly, they have no interest in using their authority to investigate each other.

It can’t be the state attorney general, either. Democrat Terry Goddard is actually a target of the Thomas/Arpaio anti-corruption task force. Even after that investigation inevitably winds down, Goddard can hardly take on Arpaio without looking like he wants revenge.

What about the Justice Department? Its civil rights department doesn’t just monitor jails; it could also look at Arpaio’s treatment of his political enemies. And Justice has the distance to keep any investigation from getting mired in local politics.

Then again, that didn’t happen in 1996, when Janet Napolitano made her deal with the devil. And though rumors are rife that Justice investigators are eyeing Arpaio again, it’s not clear how much credence to give them.

That leaves the county supervisors.

The county’s organizational chart is not a linear model. It’s a series of bubbles, and Arpaio’s bubble is shown answering directly to the people, not to the supervisors.

But the supervisors manage Arpaio’s money. And with Arpaio’s budget problems in the news, it’s worth remembering what happened to Sandra Dowling.

County officials will tell you that Arpaio doesn’t answer to them. (Remember those bubbles.) They may quietly express distaste over his abuses of power and the millions he costs taxpayers, but they say it’s not their job to hold him accountable. He’s elected by the people.

But Dowling was also a bubble on the county organizational chart. As Superintendent of the Maricopa County Schools, Dowling also, supposedly, answered only to the people.

Like Arpaio, only a few short years ago, Dowling seemed unstoppable. She had been elected to five consecutive terms without any real competition. Her big innovation, the Thomas J. Pappas Schools for Homeless Children, had been celebrated by everyone from Oprah to 60 Minutes. The much-lauded schools were actually failing badly, but the media didn’t seem to care and neither did the voters. Dowling was flying so high, she actually asked the district’s lobbyists to see whether George W. Bush was interested in her services.

That was then.

In 2005, Sandra Dowling’s school district went over budget. She asked the county supervisors for an extra $2 million.

That’s when Dowling’s charmed political life came to an abrupt end. The supervisors demanded the district’s financial records, and when Dowling didn’t produce the detailed documentation they wanted, the board obtained a subpoena and sent officers to force her to turn it over. Even though Dowling had just been audited a few years before, in 2004, county auditors were again assigned to look at her books. By May 2006, they completed a 118-page report detailing a host of problems: misspending, faulty bid processes, nepotism. The supervisors then hired three educational consultants to help close the Pappas Schools — an idea Dowling bitterly contested.

In November 2006, Dowling was indicted on 25 felony counts. (Ironically, it was the Sheriff’s Office that did the investigation.)

It’s unclear what will ultimately happen with the criminal case. The U.S. Attorney, who’s prosecuting, recently dropped a number of the charges; Dowling still awaits trial on the others.

What is clear is this: When the county supervisors chose to take on Sandra Dowling, Dowling was finished.

Contrast that with their treatment of Arpaio. Despite the sheriff’s abysmal record in every area that auditors have examined, the county has yet to order a comprehensive audit.

There’s reason for that. Because the sheriff’s $241 million budget is the biggest in the county, such an audit would undoubtedly require the entire 18-member audit staff working for months on end.

“It would take the board to come and tell us they wanted us to spend our resources onto such a big audit,” says County Auditor Ross Tate. “They haven’t done that.”

Jim Bloom, chief of staff for Supervisor Andy Kunasek, echoed Tate. “If we were to audit the Sheriff in totality, it would take not only our entire audit staff, but a lot of his staff, too,” he says. “It wouldn’t make any sense. If we did an audit that big on his operations, in the meantime, we wouldn’t be doing an audit on anyone else.”

New Times left repeated messages over a weeklong period with Supervisors Max Wilson, Don Stapley, Fulton Brock, Andy Kunasek, and Mary Rose Wilcox.

Not one of them called back with a comment.

The will to stop Arpaio simply isn’t there. But Sandra Dowling’s quick fall from power holds an obvious lesson: Whether the supervisors want to admit it or not, there is a way.

Stephen Lemons
Will the real Guy Fawkes please step forward?
Subject(s):
Scientology protests, raids on Scottsdale bars, David Hendershott, MCSO in HondurasWhat’s galling is, that figure has got to be a lot less than the total cost of the Honduran boondoggle. The number includes $34K in RICO reimbursements, and $123K in MCSO payroll hours spent training Honduran cops, purchases of material, and shipping costs. But it doesn’t cover untold man-hours spent on planning the mission, phone calls to Honduras, or time spent last June chaperoning Honduran cops around Phoenix and introducing them to Governor Janet Napolitano for a photo op.

Still, it’s way more than the $100K the Bird had estimated (“Evil Weed,” March 6), as this wacky warbler didn’t then have the breakdown of what each deputy made. In a February presentation to the county Board of Supervisors, MCSO honchos informed the supes that the program’s total cost was $34,061.81. They craftily neglected to include payroll hours spent in Central America during the whole of 2007.

The MCSO has since released its RICO budget for the past three years. Millions of dollars are assigned to broad categories, with hundreds of thousands of dollars each year placed under the category of “other.” The budgets were approved by Jabba the Hendershott and the supes chairman at the time — in one case, Don Stapley; in another, Fulton Brock.

Per state law, County Attorney Candy Thomas’ office has oversight on RICO funds used by the MCSO. One of the RICO docs released has a stamp of approval with the signature of Deputy County Attorney Victoria Mangiapane. To date, the County Attorney’s Office has yet to respond to The Bird’s public-records request regarding its approval of RICO funds.

Recently, Channel 12’s Joe Dana showed these RICO budget docs to former County Attorney Rick Romley, who noted there was some “missing money.” Dennis Matthiesen, financial audit director for the AZ Auditor General’s Office announced on the same newscast that he was moving up a 2009 audit of the Sheriff’s Office to this spring, as a result of news reports.

Matthiesen told this mockingbird that the audit would cover only the Sheriff’s Office use of RICO funds, and it would not be a full MCSO review. Matthiesen said his office hadn’t done an audit of RICO funds since Romley was county attorney. And, back then, Romley actually asked for the audit! Hard to imagine Candy, a.k.a. “Little Joe,” asking for a similar review.

Do you reckon Attorney General Terry Goddard might be interested in investigating what is obviously malfeasance on the part of Arpaio and his deputies?

Nah. AG flack Andrea Esquer told this tweeter, “It would not be in the state’s best interest to duplicate [the state auditor's] effort.” So the AG’s going to sit on his hands and await Matthiesen’s findings. Matthiesen told The Bird his office has no real power. But if his people find evidence of lawbreaking once they get started in a couple of months, they’ll turn it over to the AG.

Should that happen, can we count on Goddard to go after Arpaio and Hendershott — and maybe even Candy, too — for rubber-stamping the whole megillah? Let’s just say this bilious bill-bearer won’t be counting those huevos before they’ve cracked.

At least the information avalanche kicked off by this kestrel forced the issue with the state auditor, and that’s something. So is the fact that Channel 12’s taken up the cudgel. Dana and the station’s news team have stayed on Arpaio’s fanny and broken new ground in this sorry saga. Dana recently revealed that the MCSO had planned a vast facial-recognition program for Honduras, instituting the expensive high-tech system at the Third World nation’s ports of entry.

Dana also uncovered tantalizing tidbits regarding Hendershott’s pitching facial-recognition software to a European Union representative, and the fact that the MCSO was awarded a $264K grant from the AZ Department of Homeland Security for the purchase of such technology to be used in Maricopa County. Dana asserted there was a friendship between Hendershott and an unnamed exec of local facial-recognition company Hummingbird Defense Systems, which has done work previously for the MCSO.

Interestingly, the office address and phone number for Hummingbird Defense Systems are actually for a company called Regus, which offers “virtual offices” for clients. Basically, it’s a place to pick up mail and messages. A source at the company informed this egret that Hummingbird stopped checking its mailbox last September. Hummingbird left no forwarding address, said the source.

Guess which business maintains an office at Hummingbird’s old Camelback Esplanade address? The Symington Group, disgraced ex-AZ Governor Fife Symington’s consulting firm. Symington was once Hummingbird’s board chairman. But he’s not had any involvement with the company for years, according to Symington spokeswoman Camilla Strongin.

What’s it all mean? Could Hendershott’s passion for facial recognition have been a pathway for personal profit? Maybe he was helping out a pal at Hummingbird? Or, perhaps, Hendershott really has the best interests of Honduras’ way-impoverished denizens in mind?

That last query was the punch line, peckerwoods. Even Hendershott’s three-tiered chin would jiggle at that one.

Subject(s):
Hart vs. HillHundreds of inmates involved in a class-action suit against the Sheriff’s Office have waited 30 years for their day in court. Their jail-conditions suit, called Hart vs. Hill (Damian Hart was an inmate and Jerry Hill was sheriff), was filed in federal court long before Arpaio’s tenure. But after 14 years of Arpaio’s infamous jails, the complaints leveled in the matter are more relevant than ever.

Long before Dennis Wilenchick ordered the arrests in the New Times case, he was hired to bury Hart vs. Hill. Wilenchik — who came into the case in 2005 when he was hired to represent the Sheriff in an array of matters by County Attorney Andrew Thomas — set out to do that by filing an avalanche of paperwork that an 82-year-old federal judge must plow through.

At issue in the case are the rights of pretrial detainees — prisoners awaiting trial for crimes they may or may not have committed. Such detainees now make up about 70 percent of the population of Joe Arpaio’s lockups, according to the 2007 Performance Report for the county jails.

Pretrial detainees were subjected to harsh conditions in Maricopa County jails before Arpaio. But during his tenure, evidence of inhumane treatment has mounted. Four inmates who died in county jails in the Arpaio era were detainees (out of 11 preventable deaths documented in various lawsuits).

In 1995, Arpaio agreed to a consent decree in Hart vs. Hill. He promised to remedy a long list of concerns mentioned in the lawsuit. In what has become a refrain about county jails here, inmates complained in 1977 of poor health care, inhumane living conditions and physical abuse by detention officers, among other cruelties.

In 2001 — without implementing many, if any, of the changes — Arpaio’s office filed a motion to terminate the consent decree.

By 2004, the sheriff still hadn’t complied with the consent agreement when his office got its day in court. In January of that year, the county argued before U.S. District Judge Earl Carroll for dismissal of the decree.

After that, motions were filed on behalf of the inmates against dismissing the agreement, saying Arpaio’s jails continue to violate the civil rights of inmates. In 2004 alone, more than 200 inmates declared that their civil rights were violated, according to court documents.

In January, it will be four years since the county argued in court to dismiss the consent decree, and no end is in sight for Hart vs. Hill. Judge Carroll hasn’t even called attorney Debra Hill, who started representing the inmates in 2006, to present arguments. Hill, of the law firm Osborn Maledon, speculates that the main reason is the mounds of paperwork that Wilenchik has filed in the case.

But whatever is holding things up, the delay is working to Arpaio’s advantage. After the county argued for the dismissal, the consent agreement was frozen — which means that the sheriff doesn’t have to do what he promised to do pending outcome of the matter.

Matt Mignanelli
Honduras This Week Online
Honduran high jinks: (from left) MCSO Chief Deputy Dave Hendershott, Honduran police official Julio Benitez, retired MCSO deputy Roger Marshall, and MCSO Captain Jim Miller.
Subject(s):
Dave Hendershott, Dan Saban, Sheriff Joe ArpaioThis incredulous avian kept rubbing its peepers in disbelief. Was that really Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s chief deputy, David Hendershott, looking like a cross between Marlon Brando in The Island of Dr. Moreau and mad scientist Dr. Mephisto from South Park?

Them eagle eyes weren’t lyin’. The pic, which appears on a couple of Honduran Web sites, shows a visit Hendershott made in early 2007, along with men identified as MCSO Captain Jim Miller, retired MCSO deputy Roger Marshall, and Honduran cop Julio Benitez, to the Roatan Bruce Radio Show. Roatan? That’s the largest of the Bay Islands. Collectively, the Bay Islands are one of the Central American state’s 18 “departments,” a Caribbean paradise 35 to 40 miles off the northern Honduran coast.

According to an article written by radio host Bruce Starr, a.k.a. “Roatan Bruce,” for Honduras This Week Online, which summarized FM interviews Starr did with MCSOers, the Sheriff’s Office is in Latin America as part of a program “to help us educate, train, and equip [Bay Islands] police.” Starr further states that MCSO pooh-bahs “have committed to coming down to The Bay Islands on a regular basis to accomplish this goal.”

Miller tells Starr that the MCSO team has taken investigative equipment to the Honduran National Police, and “it is just the beginning of more resources” the MCSO will supply. In April, another columnist for HTWO praised the MCSO for sending “fingerprinting apparatus, a camera,” and “crime scene paraphernalia” to local coppers.

No word on whether the MCSO’s sending down some of those old restraint chairs they’re no longer allowed to use in Joe’s gulags. From one banana republic to another, with love.

In October 2007, Roatan Bruce again wrote up an interview with some MCSO mugs. This time, it was Captain Brian Beamish from Special Operations and Lieutenant Kevin Riddle from the Central Investigations Division, who “were part of a second wave of police that spent a month in Honduras training policemen in Tegucigalpa before coming here.”

A month? So whose dime was that on, this dodo wonders? Maybe there’s some grant involved or some federal moolah or something, but any way you cut it, Beamish and Riddle could have been back here in Sand Land, helping the MCSO fight crime, assuming the MCSO gave a hoot about that. Instead, they’re training 160 student police officers in the ways of one of the worst metro police agencies in this nation.

Beamish tells the Roatan man that the new Honduran gendarmes “will now be taking a strong stand towards community and customer service. This is a fabulous approach towards law enforcement. We know that from where we come from. Sheriff Arpaio has been especially successful in the Arizona area with that kind of process.”

Are you kiddin’? “Community and customer service”? Is that MCSO code for arrest journalists, round up the Mexicans, and ignore average citizens when they kvetch about crime? (Think Aguila, folks, where people have had to arm themselves against a crime wave ignored by the Sheriff’s Office until recently.)

Beamish then makes an even more outlandish promise.

“There is more training scheduled for the beginning of the year (2008) and it is going to continue for the next several years,” Beamish assures Starr. “The next group to come down will be on anti-corruption.”

Now this nightingale has heard everything!

The MCSO advising Latin American cops on anti-corruption? That’s like Jamie Lynn Spears teaching abstinence classes. Ironically, in the photo that accompanies this October article, Beamish and his MCSO buds look like they haven’t bathed in days and are in dire need of some hair o’ the dog, if you catch this cockatoo’s drift.

And what’s with Beamish’s vow to be in Honduras indefinitely? Sounds like we’re gonna have MCSO down there for as long as we have troops in Iraq.

The Bird’s still looking into all this, having requested public docs from Sheriff’s Office flack Paul Chagolla. But even if there’s some legitimate source for the funding of this Honduran excursion — like a grant of some kind from the feds, or some international agency, it’s an odd project for heavyweight Hendershott and his underlings to be involved in.

Especially at a time when the MCSO’s budget is gushing red faster than a hemophiliac with a needle fetish.

The Bird did find an executive order from Governor Janet Napolitano declaring June 5, 2007, to be “Bay Island Sister Agency Project for Justice and Service Day,” one of numerous such proclamations regularly issued by AZ’s chief exec.

But this proclamation doesn’t explain why the MCSO can’t afford OT, and has been employing such cost-cutting measures as closing satellite jail facilities and slashing visitation hours for inmates, but can still afford to send Jabba the Hendershott and his minions to Honduras for a working vacay.

Could it be that Hendy, et al., are developing a Plan B, just in case Arpaio doesn’t win re-election this year? You know, setting up a lil’ deal in sunny Honduras where they could retire in case their services are no longer needed?

JOE SHOW BLOWS

The main reason this feathered fiend winged his way down to 32nd Street and Thomas Road recently for an episode of the Joe Show was to ask Arpaio about these junkets to Honduras that Hendershott and his MCSO henchmen have taken to train the po-po down there.

The stated reason for the Friday-afternoon press conference had to do with the PHX’s version of Idi Amin using his posse for an anti-illegal dragnet in the rectangle of P-town bounded by 16th and 40th streets, between Indian School and McDowell roads.

The posse? You mean those moss-backed Matlocks who gum their food and roam the malls during Xmas time?

Yep, Joe was touting these wanna-be deputies, who have no power to actually stop and arrest anyone, as the backbone behind a crime sweep intended to net as many illegals as possible in the predominantly Hispanic area. The dippy dragnet would therefore cost less, cried Arpaio, with fewer actual MCSO deputies needed.

So this obstreperous oriole eased up next to the sheriff and peeped his query as soon as he got a chance.

“Do you have to use the posse because all of your MCSO officers are in Honduras, Joe?” wondered The Bird to our Pennzoil-haired lawman. “Just what is Chief Deputy David Hendershott doing in Honduras training cops there?”

The sheriff advised this avian that he doesn’t answer questions from New Times employees, and he proceeded to ignore the Taloned One, for the moment. But he did flinch as The Bird inquired several times as to Hendershott’s Honduran escapade.

Maybe Arpaio doesn’t know that much about it. After all, Hendershott is Arpaio’s own blubber-bound Dick Cheney, the evil genius who pulls Arpaio’s strings and runs the day-to-day operations of the MCSO while Nickel Bag Joe is out at staged events and press conferences. Arpaio should know about it, however.

“We are utilizing our volunteer posse,” announced Joe to the flock of journos in the otherwise vacant parking lot where he’d set up his mobile command center. “We’ve done this many times before. We’ve gone after prostitutes and other criminal activity utilizing the posse.”

Right, Joe, and that prostitution sting was sooooo successful. For those who weren’t here back in 2003 when it went down, posse members and regular MCSO officers went undercover to bust massage parlors and whatnot, and in the process, some of the posse members got nekkid and had their wrinkled weenies stroked by the working gals involved. (See “In the Crosshairs,” June 24, 2004, for more on this MCSO bumblefuck.)

The anti-ho operation was so compromised that then-County Attorney Rick Romley refused to prosecute the collars made. The fiasco’s just one of many that has made the sheriff’s posse a laughingstock, a Metamucil-primed gaggle of alter kockers who should be relegated to a support role, at best, instead of involved directly in legitimate law-enforcement activities.

Along those lines, this winged wordsmith persisted in peppering the ancient lawman with inquiries.

“What special training do posse members have to enforce immigration law?” wondered this woodpecker. “And do you have enough Depends to go around to all the posse members, Sheriff?”

There was a long pause after that crack, though still no reply.

“How old is the average posse member, Joe?” peeped this pigeon.

Joe ignored this egret, who followed up by asking whether most of the posse-ites were retirees. Joe then quipped, “I hear someone whispering . . .”

“It’s a little bird in your ear, Joe!” this beak-bearer squawked not far from his ear.

To that, there were a few chuckles, even from ol’ Joe.

“So would you say most posse members are around 50, 60, 70?” persisted this pelican.

“I don’t think 60 is old,” he grumbled. “They keep saying I have wrinkles on my hands. My hands look pretty good.”

Hands? The Bird let it go. After all, the guy is pushing 80.

Pro-immigrant activists, including Salvador Reza, showed up at the event. They were concerned that Joe would do his racial profiling shtick so close to where the Pruitt’s protests had been going down (until a truce was called between Reza and Pruitt’s owner Roger Sensing, ending the months-long standoff).

Later that evening, those concerns were made real when MCSO officers stopped U.S. citizen Israel Correa nearby, supposedly for driving without his headlights on. He was arrested for allegedly failing to show his driver’s license.

But when Correa was released, his Arizona driver’s license was returned to him with his possessions, according to Channel 12. (The MCSO incident report later showed that Correa had given the deputy his driver’s license after he was arrested.)

Can anyone say, “lawsuit in the making”? And it was the regular MCSO cops who made the bust, supposedly, not posse pinheads.

No wonder the sheriff’s “mobile command center” was gone the next day, the parking lot at 32nd and Thomas empty once again. And the posse members? Presumably back at the Luby’s in Sun City, gumming their meatloaf.

SABAN ATTACKS

Energetic, angry, and ready to rumble. That was the mood of the crowd of 200-300 who showed for Buckeye Police Chief Dan Saban’s recent announcement at Phoenix’s Wyndham Hotel that he intends to flay Arpaio’s flaccid fanny in this year’s general election for Maricopa County sheriff.

“Today will mark the beginning of the end of Mr. Arpaio and his infamous reign,” declared Saban at the podium after being preceded by a series of supporters, including former Republican County Attorney Rick Romley, community activist Donna Neil of Nail’Em, and lefty former State Senator Alfredo Gutierrez.

This dastardly duck dug most of what Saban had to say, especially his promises to reopen satellite jail facilities, not renew the expensive MCSO lease on HQ offices at the Wells Fargo Bank Building, go after the 40,000 felony warrants Arpaio’s ignored, and “order an immediate and detailed audit of existing finances and expenditure patterns” within the MCSO.

Of course, this worm-wrangler would’ve liked Saban’s speechifying even better if he’d pledged to close Tent City. But heck, even Rome wasn’t unbuilt in a day. This clucker ain’t countin’ his chicks yet, but he does believe Saban has a chance to take Joe, entrenched though our sadistic ol’ sheriff may be.

Remember, Saban ran against Arpaio in the 2004 Republican primary, and ended up getting 44 percent of the vote. This despite Arpaio’s smear tactics against Saban as detailed in New Times journo Paul Rubin’s cover story, “Boob’s Tube” (January 25, 2007). If it had not been for the smear, Saban would likely have won his party’s nomination. Especially since many in the party bucked Arpaio in 2004.

Saban’s since switched to the Dem column, which gives him a better chance of taking Arpaio to the woodshed, especially with Republicans and Independents able to cross over and vote for Saban’s new Democratic self.

Will the sheriff slime Saban again? That would be a foolish move, one likely to backfire, much in the same way there was a backlash to the arrest of this blackbird’s bosses Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin by members of the MCSO’s Selective Enforcement Unit in October.

“Numbered are the days,” spoke Saban, “when members of the press and our citizens need to fear having a sheriff who violates their constitutional rights to privacy and freedom of speech.”

Sounds good to the winged wonder, who counts some 292 days ’til the general election, and (hope against hope) removal of Joe from office.

Defendant Joe Arpaio

Defendant Andrew Thomas
courtesy of the Arizona Republic
Defendant Dennis Wilenchik

Click here to read New Times’ Notice of Claim against Arpaio, Thomas, and Wilenchik.
Subject(s):
Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Dennis Wilenchik, Andrew ThomasThe notice, required under Arizona law before government officials can be sued, paints a political landscape gone awry, with public servants turning taxpayer-supported institutions on end in defiance of the U.S. Constitution, due process, and the right of a free press to operate without intimidation.

“This is not a decision undertaken lightly,” said Michael Lacey, executive editor of Village Voice Media, which owns New Times, and who, along with CEO Larkin, founded the paper. “We are not an organization, and Larkin and I are not individuals, that sue people. It’s just not what we do. But I feel like if we don’t do something, it’s an invitation for this kind of behavior to continue.”

The “behavior” to which Lacey referred was particularly chilling: a special prosecutor running amok, issuing overbroad and unconstitutional subpoenas aimed at the reading and browsing habits of citizens; a vendetta by Sheriff Joe Arpaio against New Times and its staff, the arrests of the paper’s executives on petty charges in the middle of the night by members of the sheriff’s clandestine Selective Enforcement Unit.

“What emerges is one of the most nakedly oppressive, conscience-shocking assaults on a free press by police and prosecutors in U.S. history,” observes New Times lawyer Michael Manning in the Notice of Claim.

By law, the notice had to be filed within 180 days of the culmination of the events described here and had to contain a damages amount. New Times is asking for $15 million in damages if the matter is settled before April 15, the end of a 60-day period in which the defendants — Arpaio, Thomas and Wilenchik — must reply. “If New Times is required to pursue litigation, the settlement demand will increase,” the notice warns.

——————————————————————————–

Earlier in the day on which Lacey and Larkin were arrested at their homes and bundled off to jail, County Attorney Andrew Thomas’ handpicked special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik essentially demanded that New Times be bankrupted.

Wilenchik had asked Superior Court Judge Anna Baca to impose crushing fines against the paper for daring to publish an October 18 story (“Breathtaking Abuse of the Constitution”) about his grand jury subpoenas seeking vast, detailed information about New Times’ readers. For this misdemeanor, Wilenchik not only wanted the story’s authors, Lacey and Larkin, and their lawyers arrested, he wanted Baca to assess fines of $10,000 for every hour that New Times refused to take the grand jury story off newspaper racks and the Internet. In the course of a year, the fines would have totaled about $90 million.

To get a better handle on the enormity of Wilenchik’s demand, consider that New Times bills about $14 million annually, out of which printing, rent, supplies, salaries, benefits, and taxes must be paid.

Wilenchik’s gambit was not an aberration. After his appointment as special prosecutor, he continually upped the ante in his extra-constitutional game of brinkmanship. No grand jury was ever impaneled during the affair. Rather, as Lacey observed in a subsequent column (“He Just Doesn’t Get It,” November 1, 2007), Wilenchik “anointed” himself the grand jury in power-mad defiance of state law. The law holds that a prosecutor must notify the grand jury foreman and the presiding judge within 10 days of issuing any subpoenas.

“Wilenchik did neither,” New Times’ Notice of Claim states. “The grand jury was nothing more than an empty prop to Wilenchik.” Accordingly, it was not the legal system that put the brakes on this rogue prosecutor; it was a public incensed over the news of the Lacey-Larkin arrests. County Attorney Thomas, Wilenchik’s former employee at the law firm of Wilenchik & Bartness, grudgingly called a press conference at his office on October 19, the day after the arrests, and fired Wilenchik as special prosecutor.

“We are not going to proceed with this investigation,” stated Thomas, before a packed room of reporters. “There is a right way and a wrong way to bring a prosecution and to hold people accountable for their offenses. And what happened here was the wrong way. I do not condone it. I do not defend it. And so it ends today.”

Thomas nervously hedged his mea culpa. He would not apologize to New Times, instead insisting that the newspaper apologize to Arpaio for publishing his home address online, even though Arpaio’s address remains readily available on government Web sites, such as those of the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office and the Arizona Corporation Commission.

Though Thomas fired Wilenchik from handling future criminal matters for the County Attorney’s Office, he retained him as counsel in civil matters. As a result, Wilenchik & Bartness continues to rack up county money.

As the notice against Wilenchik and the others explains, Wilenchik’s lucrative stint representing the county appears to be quid pro quo. Wilenchik employed Thomas at his law firm during the time Thomas was first running for county attorney in 2004. Yet there’s no proof available that Thomas ever billed legal work for the firm. Since Thomas took office, Wilenchik’s firm has banked $2.4 million — and counting — for legal work for the county.

Speaking to the New York Times, ASU legal scholar James Weinstein labeled Wilenchik’s subpoenas seeking information on New Times’ readers “grossly, shockingly, breathtakingly overbroad” and “a case of harassment of the press.” The path to the issuance of these subpoenas was a lengthy and circuitous one.

In mid-2004, Arpaio was in the midst of a pitched and ugly primary against challenger Dan Saban, whom MCSO officers smeared with the ugly and untrue allegation that he had raped his adoptive mother, Ruby Norman. Meanwhile, New Times writer John Dougherty was making serious inquiries into various aspects of Arpaio’s rule in Maricopa County. He sought public records on the Saban investigation, information on inmate deaths, personnel files on certain sheriff’s deputies, and information on the sheriff’s personal real estate investments.

In a July 1, 2004 column, “Sheriff Joe’s Real Estate Game,” Dougherty revealed that Arpaio had invested $690,000 in cash in two real estate holdings in Scottsdale and Fountain Hills. Dougherty wondered if Arpaio was hiding ill-gotten gains, because information about this commercial property was redacted under a state law aimed at protecting law enforcement officials from harm. The law was meant to allow police officers to keep their home addresses out of the public eye for obvious reasons, but Arpaio misused the statute so that it hid most information about his commercial real estate. At the same time, Arpaio’s Fountain Hills home address was available on myriad public and private Internet sites.

Dougherty noted that $690,000 in cash was a lot for a public official to invest, considering that Arpaio made about $78,000 a year, along with federal Drug Enforcement Agency civil service retirement pay of about $65,000. A week later, Dougherty wrote in another column about the real estate ventures again (“Stick It to ‘Em!”). At the column’s conclusion, he listed Arpaio’s home address to illustrate the irony of its being so readily available while his commercial property information was hidden.

Months later, New Times learned that the sheriff was seeking to have New Times prosecuted under another state law that made it unlawful to publish a law enforcement official’s home address on the World Wide Web.

The law was a throwback to a time when the Internet was considered newfangled technology. While making it a Class 5 felony to reproduce such a home address on the Web, the law made no sanctions against such publication in newspapers and magazines or on TV and radio. Indeed, even putting a law officer’s address on a billboard near his neighborhood would be perfectly legal.

A required element of the Internet law was that the publication of an officer’s address must cause “an imminent and serious threat” that was “reasonably apparent” to the publisher.

When Arpaio first sought New Times’ prosecution under the arcane statute, then-County Attorney Rick Romley declined to prosecute. There seemed to be no real threat to the sheriff — though his top deputies have been fixated on the notion that “America’s toughest sheriff” could easily be the target of assassination.

It’s been as though his staff believes that, without anybody trying to kill the sheriff, Arpaio’s hard-on-crime policies lose credibility. So the MCSO hasn’t been above manufacturing a plot to make the boss look like a tough guy.

In 1999, Arpaio and his chief deputy, David Hendershott, attempted to frame 18-year-old James Saville in a phony bomb plot supposedly aimed at Arpaio (“The Plot to Assassinate Arpaio,” August 5, 1999). TV reporters were called ahead of time to chronicle the teenager’s arrest outside an Italian restaurant where Arpaio was dining. Saville’s lawyer noted the obvious entrapment, and Saville was unanimously acquitted by a jury after the MCSO’s unscrupulous antics were aired in court.

Last year, the Sheriff’s Office revealed that it had spent an estimated $500,000 investigating a bogus death threat that involved such highly improbable co-conspirators as the Minutemen, immigrants rights activist Elias Bermudez, and hit men working for the Mexican mafia. On the word of a confidential informant who failed a key question on a lie-detector test about whether or not he was telling the truth about the alleged conspiracy, the sheriff’s Selective Enforcement Unit (the same group that nabbed Lacey and Larkin) staked out a dairy in Tolleson and flew to Connecticut to interrogate a teenage girl whose e-mail was linked to the pseudo-scheme.

Most recently, the MCSO trumpeted the conviction of Matthew Carl Sanderson, a native of Canada, for making an Internet threat against Arpaio. The sheriff flew to Toronto for the three-day trial. In the end, Sanderson received just three months of incarceration.

“There has never been any credible evidence of death threats against our Sheriff,” attorney Manning states in New Times’ notice. “Indeed, the only ‘death threats’ to Sheriff Arpaio have been made-for-TV productions procured or created by the Sheriff’s sizable PR staff.”

Arpaio’s obsession with such dubious threats would be comic if not for their dire, costly, and time-consuming consequences.

Though Romley would not touch the sheriff’s desired prosecution of New Times, Arpaio refused to let the matter drop. When County Attorney Thomas took office, he had a political ally, and again he asked for the legal action. Thomas, however, had already borne the brunt of critical articles in New Times by the time the complaint reached his desk so he handed it off to Pinal County, citing a conflict of interest.

After two years, Pinal County returned the matter to Thomas last spring. As Manning put it in New Times’ notice, “the Pinal County Attorney’s Office did not share the Defendants’ passion for political revenge.”

This time, despite Thomas’ already-declared conflict, he appointed his friend Dennis Wilenchik as special prosecutor in the New Times matter.

A lawyer who had made his name in toxic-mold litigation, Wilenchik was known for his bull-in-a-china shop approach to civil law. He used the same tactics against the new objects of his prosecutorial zeal.

As Lacey and Larkin revealed in the grand jury subpoena article, Wilenchik demanded “every note, tape, and record from every story written about Sheriff Arpaio by every [New Times] reporter over a period of years.”

Acting on his own (remember, no grand jury ever existed in the matter), Wilenchik hit New Times, as well as reporters John Dougherty and Paul Rubin individually, with subpoenas.

Rubin’s personal subpoena was especially egregious, as it sought everything Rubin had used to write his cover story “Below the Belt” (September 20, 2007), which documented Buckeye Police Chief Dan Saban’s failed lawsuit against Arpaio for the 2004 smear involving his adoptive mother. Wilenchik defended Arpaio in the case, and his unsavory out-of-court activities were criticized in the article. The Rubin subpoena, sent the day after New Times published the article, sought records that had nothing to do with the home-address matter.

“Rubin’s only ‘misstep’ was in criticizing Arpaio and Wilenchik,” reads New Times’ notice. “His story was not even remotely relevant to the matter Wilenchik had been hired to pursue (a 2004 story Rubin did not author).

“In the column disclosing the profound corruption of the investigation that led to their arrest, Lacey and Larkin succinctly summarized what was all too clear: ‘It is impossible to view Rubin’s subpoena as anything other than what it was: an act of vengeance.’”

Wilenchik also demanded in overarching subpoenas sent to New Times and to Dougherty all information on New Times’ online readers from 2004 to 2007, including IP addresses, browsing habits, cookies, and domain names. Wilenchik had cast a wide, unprecedented dragnet. The targets were not just journalists and publishers, but readers and anyone who had pointed their Web browser toward New Times’ Web site.

But it took something else to push Lacey and Larkin to write “Breathtaking Abuse of the Constitution.” It took Wilenchik’s attempt to establish ex parte communications with Judge Anna Baca, who presides over county grand juries. Wilenchik telephoned political fixer Carol Turoff, a recent two-term member of the Commission on Appellate Court Appointments, and asked her to set up a meeting with the judge, a close friend. Turoff’s spouse, Larry Turoff, is a senior member of County Attorney Thomas’ management team.

Carol Turoff’s late-night call to Baca did not sit well with the judge. She called the stab at a behind-the scenes conversation “absolutely inappropriate.”

But the mold-litigation specialist was unbowed by even a presiding judge’s admonition. After all, he had just emerged from a battle with another powerful Superior Court judge.

He had publicly attacked Judge Timothy Ryan, an associate presiding criminal judge, as part of Andy Thomas’ assault on the local judiciary. Thomas was annoyed over certain judges’ failure to deny bail to illegal aliens in Proposition 100 cases. He was particularly miffed at Judge Ryan, whom Wilenchik termed a “danger to public safety.” Incredibly, Wilenchik asked Ryan to recuse himself from all cases brought by Thomas’ office. Also, he sought the recusal of all 93 Superior Court judges on the question of whether Ryan should step aside.

The move failed, but Wilenchik was emboldened. So much so that he asked for the secret meeting with Baca while the New Times case was pending.

Lacey and Larkin felt that the pugnacious lawyer’s flagrant disregard of the rules left them no choice but to engage in their act of civil disobedience.

“Publishing the terms of a grand jury subpoena is a minor misdemeanor,” observes Manning in the notice, referring to Lacey and Larkin’s article on the subpoenas. “The statute was designed primarily to [protect] witnesses, targets of investigation and others from negative publicity.’ It was not designed to insulate from public disclosure by a newspaper [the] unethical and unlawful behavior of a prosecutor who is misusing the grand jury to attack the newspaper, its reporters, and its readers’ right to privacy.”

The retort of Wilenchik and the MCSO was swift. The same day that Lacey and Larkin dropped their bombshell, Wilenchik filed an Application for Order to Show Cause, demanding that the two New Times executives and their lawyers be placed in custody, and that New Times be slapped with the staggering fines mentioned above.

The MCSO and Wilenchik’s office collaborated on the evening arrests of the paper’s founders for writing “Breathtaking Abuse of the Constitution.” Larkin got the worst of it. With his children in the house, he was hauled away in handcuffs in an unmarked car bearing Sonoran plates. The Selective Enforcement Unit even threatened to arrest Larkin’s wife when she demanded that they show proper identification. Lacey was collared in front of his girlfriend and taken to the Fourth Avenue Jail. He was released at 4 the next morning.

Before a gaggle of television, radio, and print reporters, Lacey said after his release, “We’re being arrested for raising hell. It’s sort of a tradition journalism has.”

A tsunami of public outrage followed. Outlets as varied as slate.com, the New York Times, Reason magazine, the Washington Post, and gawker.com reported on the arrests. The Arizona Republic’s Laurie Roberts weighed in on the side of the arrestees, as did the Goldwater Institute’s Clint Bolick, who wrote, “Regardless of one’s ordinary proclivities regarding the players involved, there is only one place for friends of freedom to stand at the moment: shoulder-to-shoulder with the New Times.”

In County Attorney Thomas’ capitulation 10 hours after Lacey’s release, he claimed to have had no prior knowledge of the arrests. After firing Wilenchik as special prosecutor for criminal matters, he quashed the subpoenas and ended the investigation of New Times.

So who did order the arrests? When asked that question, Wilenchik wrote in an e-mail to New Times, “Don’t know. If I find out, will be back.”

But MCSO public information officer Paul Chagolla told the Associated Press that “the arrests came at the requests of the prosecutor.” Confronted with Wilenchik’s slippery e-mail, Chagolla got more specific, informing New Times that MCSO detectives worked with attorneys William French and Rob Somers of Wilenchik’s firm. French, a former prosecutor and judge, later resigned after the fallout from the arrests (“Dennis the Menace,” December 27, 2007). In subsequent interviews, French pinned the responsibility for the arrests on Wilenchik.

“Somers told me that Wilenchik said, ‘No more Mr. Nice Guy. We’re going to arrest them.’ That’s what happened,” French intoned to the Arizona Republic.

In New Times’ notice, Manning puts the arrests into their legal context:

“Misdemeanor violations that do not threaten lives are usually handled by the issuance of citations, not by [Selective Enforcement Unit] raids, arrests, handcuffs, and jail cells in the dead of night. Responsible prosecutors know these circumstances would never justify such conduct.”

——————————————————————————–

Sheriff Arpaio’s office has never expressed any misgivings about its dealings with New Times, much less over the arrests of Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin.

The outright obstinacy of the MCSO in providing public information has forced New Times to do battle with Arpaio and his officers for the past 15 years.

Time-consuming legal remedies, such as New Times’ current notice, seem the only possible remedy when dealing with a Sheriff’s Office bent on keeping information that might reflect badly on Arpaio secret from the public.

This newspaper’s recent appellate court win regarding numerous public-records requests submitted by writer John Dougherty to the MCSO in 2004 illustrates the MCSO’s hostility in dealing with not just New Times but any news media outlet that criticizes Arpaio or the actions of his office.

This publication was forced to sue in 2004 because the Sheriff’s Office refused to comply with Arizona’s public-records law and release the information that Dougherty had requested. The MCSO forked over the documents only after the suit was filed. New Times then sought legal fees from Arpaio’s office. Though a Superior Court judge denied the request in 2005, New Times appealed.

On February 5, the three-judge Arizona Court of Appeals assessed nine of Dougherty’s requests individually, finding in all but one that New Times was wrongfully denied access to public records. In eight instances, the appeals court found the excuses of MCSO public information officers Lisa Allen MacPherson and Paul Chagolla to be unconvincing.

Take for instance a request by Dougherty for the personnel file for MCSO Sergeant Leo Driving Hawk. The MCSO acknowledged that it had the documents when Dougherty made the request, but MacPherson said she didn’t read the request very carefully, and offered that as an excuse for not providing the documents promptly, as well as the fact that she was angry with Dougherty.

The appeals court’s response to MacPherson’s evasions was stinging.

“If mere inattention by the employee of a public body could meet that body’s burden of establishing that it promptly provided documents, and thus that a request was not wrongfully delayed or denied, it would turn on its head the core purpose of the public-records law,” wrote the court, adding, “If public entities could be excused from providing public records merely by being inattentive to requests, then access to the records would be easily frustrated.”

Ultimately, the appeals court vacated the lower court’s judgment and remanded the case back to it for a decision on whether New Times is entitled to recover the attorneys’ fees.

This ruling is significant because the MCSO obstructed New Times every step of the way. It refused to comply with the state public-records law, treated reporter Dougherty and other New Times journalists with contempt, and forced New Times to go to court to get the records to which it is entitled. In addition, the MCSO continues to bar New Times from attending press conferences and continues to prohibit its reporters from going to the Sheriff’s Office to pick up public records.

Dougherty made several public-records requests to the MCSO in 2004. They included requests for documents on the smear Arpaio’s officers perpetrated against Dan Saban, Arpaio’s rival for the 2004 Republican nomination; for records on a proposed fish pond to be constructed near Tent City; for MCSO financial records from the jail canteen and vending machines; for personnel files on certain MCSO employees and for records on deceased inmates.

But in defiance of the public-records law — which plainly states that the custodians of public records must “promptly furnish such copies, printouts or photographs” to all citizens who ask for them — the sheriff’s media machine stonewalled Dougherty. That resulted in the reporter’s confronting Arpaio during a public post-election event, asking when the sheriff would turn over the lawfully requested information.

Arpaio had Dougherty dragged away by Selective Enforcement Unit deputies, suggesting to one of his men that the writer’s mere question could be considered a threat.

Days before this incident, Dougherty ran into MCSO spokeswoman MacPherson outside a downtown rally for Arpaio opponent Saban. He queried her as to when New Times might get the records. “Never,” MacPherson told Dougherty. When Dougherty asked why, she informed him that the MCSO did not regard New Times as a legitimate newspaper. Dougherty replied that under the state public-records law, any citizen can request such records from the MCSO. “So sue us!” MacPherson challenged.

New Times had no choice but to go to court.

Three years later, the appeals court’s February 5 ruling revealed the MCSO’s pattern of obstructing news organizations critical of Arpaio from obtaining public information. It was mentioned in the appellate court’s decision that MacPherson admitted it took her 108 days to produce 11 pages of documents, and that when Dougherty requested information on an inmate death in the jails, she misinformed him there had been no death on the date and that she never bothered to clear up the confusion when she learned otherwise.

In a recent item on New Times’ appellate court win in the Arizona Republic, Jack MacIntyre, another of Arpaio’s flacks, was quoted as saying that MacPherson had acted the way she did because of a personality conflict with Dougherty. He said certain “steps” were taken to avoid such future conflicts.

In light of this statement, New Times put in a public-records request with MCSO flack Chagolla, asking for documentation of the “steps” mentioned by MacIntyre.

Chagolla advised that no such public records existed. He then warned ominously that the MCSO might be contemplating charging John Dougherty with a crime.

“I will forward a document detailing two assaults committed upon me by former New Times reporter John Dougherty,” stated Chagolla in an e-mail. (Dougherty left the paper in August 2006.) “I am aware that the New Times knows of these assaults, as they were brought up in deposition. I will also seek out the Channel 3 televised coverage of Dougherty poking me with his recorder during the second incident. Please note the statute of limitations has not expired on the assault.”

Chagolla is referring to the night that Arpaio had Dougherty thrown out of his political event because the reporter asked him a question. Chagolla is alleging that a reporter holding up a tape recorder to a public servant constitutes an “assault.”

In the past, Chagolla has said there would be “legal consequences” if New Times reporters dared to pick up public documents at MCSO offices in the Wells Fargo building downtown. When reporter Ray Stern disagreed with MCSO lawyer Michelle Iafrate in her law offices over whether he could photograph public records, Iafrate complained to the MCSO. This sparked a “disorderly conduct” citation getting delivered to Stern by the Selective Enforcement Unit in the same nighttime spree that netted Lacey and Larkin.

Other reporters also have been bullied by MCSO deputies, as have Arpaio’s political rivals and citizens daring to oppose him or his officers. The history of this ongoing abuse of power is detailed in Sarah Fenske’s “Enemies List” (November 29, 2007) segment of New Times’ “Target Practice” series.

In that article, Fenske described how anyone who crosses the sheriff, or even happens to work for someone who opposes Arpaio, could find themselves the subject of an unwarranted investigation, have their assets and computers seized, and even be arrested on trumped-up charges that never go to trial. Anyone from a politician aiming to replace Arpaio as sheriff (like Dan Saban) to a graphic designer working for local Democrats to a tow-truck operator loyal to the GOP could find themselves in the MCSO’s crosshairs.

Raids can be timed to slander an enemy and his business, as happened with erstwhile Arpaio-supporter Lee Watkins. Watkins backed local radio personality W. Steven Martin over Arpaio in the 2004 general election. Then, his business, Cactus Towing, was raided in 2005, with computers, cell phones, and records seized as evidence. The raid came at the end of the month, when Watkins’ business normally billed expenses. Watkins was ruined. No charges were ever filed.

In 2000, Jim Cozzolino managed the campaign of an Arpaio opponent. Arpaio’s deputies sorted through his trash and tapped his phone, but nothing came of it. Still Arpaio held his grudge, and in 2003, when Cozzolino stepped in to protect a woman who was being assaulted at the bowling alley Cozzolino operated, deputies popped him for attempted murder and seized his car. Cozzolino plea-bargained, pleaded guilty to illegal discharge of a firearm, and got four months in jail. Deputies set up Cozzolino on a drug charge while he was incarcerated. He beat that rap and ended up suing Arpaio, who later settled for an undisclosed amount.

Or take the case of Nick Tarr, falsely arrested in 2002 while portraying “Joe Arizona” in a lighthearted spoof of the sheriff sponsored by backers of a ballot initiative opposed by Arpaio. Tarr had the bad luck to walk into a restaurant where Chief Deputy David Hendershott was eating. Hendershott wanted to charge him with impersonating a DPS officer. The DPS wanted no part of it, but Hendershott had his men hold Tarr and cite him. The MCSO dropped the complaint against Tarr, whose lawsuit against the Sheriff’s Office is scheduled to go to trial this year.

The list goes on.

“These and many other incidents show that the Defendants’ actions against the New Times in this case were more than the aberrational consequence of simple neglect,” Manning observes in the notice. “They were the product of a long-standing pattern and practice of the abuse of power against dissenting voices — of intentional, punitive and retaliatory conduct against the New Times, its reporters, and its readers.”

This is the same sheriff’s administration that has cost the county $43.4 million in lawsuit payouts and insurance premiums because of wrongful deaths and injuries in Arpaio’s jails.

Yet the sheriff and his underlings appear indifferent to atrocities in MCSO jails, to the financial burden they impose on county taxpayers, and to the international embarrassment they cause Maricopa County. Amnesty International, which usually chastises Third World dictatorships, cited deplorable conditions in Arpaio’s lockups after a 1997 investigation.

As New Times writer John Dickerson reported in “Inhumanity Has a Price” (December 20, 2007), “With a fraction of the inmate population, Arpaio has had 50 times as many lawsuits as the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston jail systems combined.” Since Dickerson wrote the article — which warns of MRSA staph infections in Arpaio’s jails and describes the horror of a pregnant mother bleeding incessantly and losing her child while one of Arpaio’s prisoners — the payout figure (which was $41.4 million) has climbed another $2 million.

In the face of such persistent, institutionalized cruelty and spitefulness toward anyone who disagrees with the MCSO, Michael Lacey believes New Times’ notice is also about preservation of the Fourth Estate. He argues that not just New Times, but all Maricopa County media, are threatened by Arpaio’s administration — particularly because the County Attorney’s Office provides no check on the sheriff’s power.

“These people just don’t understand boundaries,” Lacey said of Arpaio and his officers. “They don’t understand the Constitution. It’s a fine comment on where we’ve come in the community when this sort of action on our part is necessary. But we actually believe it is necessary.”

Lacey added: “I hope it keeps [the MCSO] off our throats. And I hope it keeps it off the backs of the media, in general.”

Michael Manning offers an eloquent appraisal of New Times’ case against Wilenchik, Arpaio, and Thomas in the claim notice:

“The facts known, thus far, demonstrate a disturbing picture of muscle-bound police and prosecutorial abuse. The corrupt perversion of the law to attack a newspaper, its reporters, and the privacy rights of thousands of its readers. When fair criticism of these public officials became too piercing for them to tolerate, they flexed their political muscle in the form of a conspiracy.

“They abused their governmental authority by attacking the press, punishing free speech, demeaning the role and function of an impartial prosecutor and an independent judiciary, perverting the grand jury function, and serving notice to citizens who read news online that neither their identities nor their reading habits are safe from the reach of a vindictive government.”

Former New Times reporter John Dougherty

Joe Arpaio’s director of communications, Lisa Allen, confronted John Dougherty outside a county jail in 2004. “So sue us!” she said when he asked about public records the MCSO was illegally withholding.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his lawyer harangued two county attorneys’ offices to seek a criminal charge against Dougherty.

County Attorney Andy Thomas wouldn’t say no to his political ally, Arpaio.

Fired special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik, a key player in the Dougherty and New Times investigation.

Former Pinal County Attorney Carter Olson’s office heard from the MCSO on the “Dougherty matter” incessantly.
Subject(s):
Sheriff Joe Arpaio, John Dougherty, Ron Lebowitz, Carter OlsonPhil MacDonnell, second-in-command to County Attorney Andrew Thomas (who had assumed office five months earlier), gave the okay for the agency’s Incident Review Board to evaluate the case against John Dougherty, a veteran reporter then at New Times.

It had started with a Dougherty column published in July 2004 partially about Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s refusal to release financial details about his surprisingly extensive real estate holdings.

Dougherty concluded his opinion piece by revealing Arpaio’s home address in Fountain Hills. Actually, “revealing” might be the wrong word. Because the location of the sheriff’s residence is available all over the Internet — including on government Web sites, people-search sites, and even (at one time) on a Republican Party site.

The prosecutors had to decide whether publication of the address on the New Times Web site had violated May 1999 legislation signed into law by Governor Jane Hull. And if it had, would a jury vote to convict the reporter?

The law made it a felony to put addresses and other personal data of police officers on the Internet — if that information posed an “immediate and serious threat” to the officers and if the person who published had meant for it to be a threat.

It still was okay to publish that same information in newspapers and magazines and to report it on television or on the radio.

In April 2005, John Stolze, a respected investigator with Thomas’ office, had drawn the sticky assignment of looking into what became known as the “Dougherty matter.” That was nine months after publication of the column containing the sheriff’s home address.

According to files recently released to New Times by the County Attorney’s Office, Stolze got involved after MCSO Lieutenant Ray Jones (commander of Arpaio’s Selective Enforcement Unit) alleged: “Sheriff Arpaio is afraid and concerned for his and his wife’s safety, because of the actions of Dougherty.”

The files show that Arpaio made his feelings about Dougherty known to County Attorney Thomas in their first official meeting soon after Thomas assumed office in January 2005.

But after familiarizing themselves with the previously unused and legally untested law, Stolze and others came to believe that the section about an “imminent and serious threat” would be tough for prosecutors to overcome, among other issues.

How, they wondered, could Arpaio claim such a pressing “threat” when he hadn’t tried to seek redress for months after the fact and when nothing threatening had happened to him in the interim?

“Lieutenant Jones related that MCSO did not request an investigation until April 2005, nine months later, because Sheriff Joe did not want to make it look like it was politically connected,” prosecutor Liz Gilbert and Stolze’s supervisor, Mark Stribling, wrote in their May 2004 internal memorandum, referring to Arpaio’s successful November 2004 re-election bid.

“Underlying problems with case: The nine-month time delay to report the incident . . . and showing that Sheriff Arpaio was in fear for his safety. The fact that Sheriff Arpaio’s home address, Social Security number, and other personal information [are] available to the public via the Internet from numerous Web sites. Note: Sheriff Joe and John Dougherty are involved in a long-standing ongoing feud and civil suit.

“High-profile case,” they concluded. “Sheriff Joe Arpaio is demanding that this case be charged. Sheriff Arpaio has several high-level employees calling Liz Gilbert to see when this case will be filed. Latest call indicated that there would be problems between the Sheriff’s Office and the County Attorney’s Office if this case is not charged.”

The newly released files and other sources of information suggest that personnel in Andy Thomas’ office played it straight with the Dougherty probe — at least at the start.

They did so despite repeated appeals by Arpaio to the new county attorney for action, and an onslaught of paperwork by sheriff’s official Ronald Lebowitz, an attorney, urging Dougherty’s criminal prosecution.

Instead, the Incident Review Board apparently declined in August 2005 to recommend prosecution under the 1999 Internet publication law — which calls for fines and a possible prison sentence.

The use of “apparently” is necessary because paperwork from the panel’s August 9 meeting wasn’t included in the records recently released to New Times under the state’s Public Records Law.

But four people familiar with what happened at the meeting tell the paper that the consensus of the 13 board members was that, even if Dougherty had broken the law, convicting him would be difficult.

One main hitch was that Arpaio’s home address was available across the Net. And, just as important, how could prosecutors prove that the reporter’s aim in publishing the address was to get someone to do harm to Joe Arpaio or his family?

Andy Thomas could have overridden his Incident Review Board and insisted on a prosecution. Instead, two weeks after the board met, Thomas asked then-Pinal County Attorney Carter Olson to assume the case because of an unspecified “conflict of interest.”

Almost two years passed without Olson’s office taking action.

Then, early last summer, Jim Walsh became the new Pinal County attorney after Carter Olson won a spot on that county’s Superior Court bench. Walsh soon declared his own conflict of interest in the protracted Doughterty case.

Walsh had been chief deputy to Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard and was serving as that office’s special counsel for Southern Arizona before leaving for the Pinal County job. His conflict was that Joe Arpaio and Andy Thomas earlier had announced that they were “investigating” political foe Goddard for alleged corruption in a criminal case involving former State Treasurer David Petersen. That case, by the way, has gone nowhere.

Walsh punted the “Dougherty matter” back to Andy Thomas in June 2007 — which is when things became famously mucked up.

Last July, Thomas urged the county Board of Supervisors to appoint private Phoenix attorney Dennis Wilenchik and three of Wilenchik’s colleagues as “special prosecutors.” One colleague was William French, a distinguished former Superior Court judge.

Wilenchik was a pal and former employer of Thomas’ and already was counsel of record in several high-dollar civil cases for Thomas, the Sheriff’s Office and Joe Arpaio. That should have raised an immediate red flag about whether Wilenchik would be unbiased against Dougherty and New Times in his new role.

But it didn’t. Or Thomas decided that he needed Wilenchik in command if he hoped to placate Arpaio with a prosecution, successful or not, against the relentless reporter.

Dougherty had left New Times in August 2006 to pursue other opportunities. Shortly before that, he had blasted Thomas and Wilenchik in columns about the propriety of their professional relationship.

A powerful sheriff’s obsession with busting a reporter for a local newsweekly probably would have disappeared from the public’s radar had not circumstances changed so dramatically in late 2007.

It was last October 18 when Joe Arpaio’s loathing of John Dougherty morphed into the high-profile arrests of New Times’ owners on misdemeanor charges of violating grand jury secrecy.

Regular readers of this publication know something about how that chapter ended:

County Attorney Thomas — beleaguered by negative reaction around the nation to the arrests — fired Team Wilenchik, dropped the misdemeanor charges against Jim Larkin and Michael Lacey and ended the investigations of Dougherty and New Times.

The county attorney came away looking foolish, at best; he laid the blame for the arrests and events that led up to them squarely on Dennis Wilenchik, saying he had no knowledge of what his special prosecutor was up to (the State Bar of Arizona is investigating both Thomas and Wilenchik in the matter).

What got New Times’ founders locked up (Larkin briefly and Lacey for several hours) was the story they wrote about Wilenchik’s overreaching grand jury subpoenas seeking information about New Times journalists and about the paper’s readers (including their Internet-viewing habits). “Breathtaking Abuse of the Constitution” hit the streets on the morning before Selective Enforcement Unit deputies showed up at Larkin and Lacey’s homes that night and hauled them to jail.

The October 18 article also revealed how Dennis Wilenchik brazenly had used the wife of a high-ranking county prosecutor to try to orchestrate a private (ex parte) meeting with the presiding Superior Court judge over grand jury matters who was then overseeing the case against Dougherty and New Times.

But what hasn’t been revealed until now is how the whole thing got started, how Joe Arpaio and his aides pressured prosecutors from two agencies continually to go after Dougherty, long seen by MCSO brass as the sheriff’s archenemy.

The extent to which the Sheriff’s Office wanted Dougherty’s head on a skewer was almost laughable at times.

Take, for example, the written “analysis” by MCSO Lieutenant Jones to Maricopa County investigators that publication of the address on the New Times site might cause harm to his boss from “terrorist countries” where Arpaio worked long ago as a federal drug agent.

How that what-if scenario proved a “serious and imminent” threat to Joe Arpaio and his family by John Dougherty remained unclear.

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In September 1998, the owner of a local pawnshop started a Web site designed to expose Phoenix police officers for alleged “shoddy investigations and/or perjurious testimony.”

The instantly controversial site included home addresses, phone numbers, and photos of officers, as well as internal affairs investigations, discipline records, and other documents.

After his earlier arrest on theft and other charges, shop owner Mark Brooks accused Phoenix police of buying thousands of dollars in items from his store at discount prices. In return, he claimed, the officers had run criminal background checks for him and let him attend parties that featured live sex acts.

An internal investigation ended with 28 officers disciplined and one fired because of their cozy relationship with Brooks.

As part of his plea bargain, Brooks ceded ownership of the site, phoenixpolice.com, to the County Attorney’s Office, which deleted the information before turning it over to the Phoenix Police Department.

As a direct result of the Brooks case, then-state Senator Marc Spitzer introduced legislation in early 1999 designed to rein in publication of personal information about peace officers on the Internet.

State senators on the Judiciary Committee considered the bill at a hearing that February.

Testifying on behalf of the Arizona Newspaper Association (a consortium mostly of daily publications) was lobbyist Phil MacDonnell, who told the committee that the proposed law conflicted with First Amendment issues. The Web is “speech,” he said, and the bill would seek to regulate speech.

MacDonnell said the phrase “imminent and serious threat” moved the proposal closer to being acceptable to the ANA, because it was more precise. But he warned that the state’s newspaper owners still had concerns about the part concerning the “culpable mental state” of the person who published the potentially dangerous information.

Five years later, MacDonnell would be intimately involved in the early stages of the John Dougherty investigation as Andy Thomas’ second-in-command at the County Attorney’s Office.

The Internet-publication bill sailed through the Senate and moved to the House of Representatives in March 1999. There, Judiciary Committee member Marilyn Jarrett said she supported it but wondered how it would be enforced.

“We have this problem,” Jarrett said. “We have the Internet with all of this information about everyone. But how can we make the connect? We’re all just scratching the surface of the problems we’re going to see on this.”

Representative Barry Wong picked up on that: “I support protecting the officers, but this is a law that can be challenged in the Supreme Court. Many legitimate entities can be publishing information on law enforcement that somebody could use against an officer.” (Wong voted for the law anyway.)

Pat Cunningham of the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, which had crafted the bill’s language, told the lawmakers it was “aimed at private individuals, not public officeholders, who are running Web sites or placing public information on the Web. This is a criminal statute focusing on people who are kind of wildcatting out there, and placing police officers and their families at risk.”

In the end, only six of the Arizona Legislature’s 90 members voted against the Internet bill. Governor Hull signed it into law on May 19, 1999.

John Dougherty published his column that listed Joe Arpaio’s address five years and two months after that. To this day, no one in the state of Arizona has been prosecuted under the law.

——————————————————————————–

John Dougherty has been a news reporter for more than a quarter-century, in the Phoenix area and elsewhere. He has won many awards over the years, including the Arizona Press Club’s Journalist of the Year award (three times).

The father of two college-age sons is a classic investigative reporter who is, yes, zealous about exposing scandal and scandalous characters. To that end, he authored groundbreaking pieces on the Keating Five, the shady business dealings that led to the criminal conviction of Arizona Governor J. Fife Symington, and on the machinations of now-incarcerated polygamist cult leader Warren Jeffs.

Dougherty does not suffer fools gladly, and, in his world, these fools may include elected officials and their minions who refuse to comply with legitimate public-records requests.

By 2004, Dougherty was regularly taking on the local law enforcement fiefdom headed by Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose standing with voters always has been better than it’s been with fellow cops, who generally despise his publicity-seeking antics.

To Arpaio and his public-relations team, you’re either with them or you’re the enemy. To them, John Dougherty was Enemy Number One.

By the time Dougherty published his July 2004 column with the sheriff’s home address, he had become increasingly frustrated by what he saw as a constant run-around by the MCSO on his myriad public-records requests.

The list of what he wanted the Sheriff’s Office to turn over included personnel records, receipts involving sales from jail vending machines, payroll records, and booking information. Sheriff’s officials didn’t even respond to some of his records requests, much less deny them.

Later in 2004, New Times filed the first of two lawsuits in Superior Court for MCSO documents.

(Arpaio won the first round of the public-records fight when Superior Court Judge Michael Jones concluded in 2005 that New Times’ claims were “unsupported by anything other than argument and histrionics.” But the Arizona Court of Appeals unanimously reversed Jones’ ruling February 7, noting that the MCSCO had fulfilled only one of nine public-records requests under consideration in the lawsuit in a timely manner.)

On July 8, 2004, a Dougherty column titled “Stick It to ‘Em!” appeared in print and on the Web. Most of the column concerned the Phoenix City Council and its problems with the city-owned downtown convention center hotel.

The last section switched topics to Joe Arpaio’s refusal to release details of his residential and commercial real estate holdings. This was a follow-up to a column Dougherty had written the week before (“Sheriff Joe’s Real Estate Game”). The sheriff had redacted the information from County Recorder’s Office records under another state statute designed to protect public officials’ home addresses. The key here is that Arpaio was misusing the redaction statute to hide his commercial property dealings, even as his home address and other personal information continued to be available all over the Internet.

To point out the irony of the situation, Dougherty’s July 8 column ended by listing the sheriff’s home address.

Recently, Arpaio feigned ignorance about New Times on National Public Radio: “Is that a porno magazine? You’re talking about the weekly paper they have to give away free?” he asked the reporter of a story that aired March 10.

But the truth is, Joe Arpaio has always been obsessed with the paper’s coverage of him.

The sheriff told investigator John Stolze in a June 2005 interview that he first learned about the publication of his home address on the Thursday that the Dougherty column hit the streets and the Internet.

“I do keep all of the articles of the New Times,” Arpaio said, “which means I have a file full of them. Every week they come out [with] very disturbing information, so I was aware of it when it came out.”

Ava Arpaio, the sheriff’s wife, told the investigator that her husband had been extremely upset when he got home and told her, “‘Would you believe it? Dougherty put our address in the paper.’ It made chills go up and down my back.”

That evening, the Arpaios drove to a District 8 Republican meeting at a library in Scottsdale. The sheriff was a few months away from a victorious primary election against Dan Saban, a retired Mesa police commander who had won the endorsements of law enforcement organizations statewide and of Senator John McCain.

Dougherty approached the couple in the parking lot as they returned to their car and leveled a few questions at the sheriff. Arpaio said he wouldn’t talk, jumped into his county car, inadvertently turned on his flashing red-and-blue police lights and drove off, as the reporter snapped photos with what he says was a disposable camera.

The following day, Arpaio filed an internal memo titled “Incidents at Mustang Library.”

Arpaio (or an aide) wrote, “A person, who may have come out of the bushes, approached suddenly in the darkness, yelled at my wife and me that he was John Dougherty, and pointed a large object at us. Because of his recent articles, in the most recent of which Dougherty purposely printed the address of my home, and because in response to his earlier columns the New Times printed nasty letters that bordered on threatening me (if they were not outright threats), my wife and I were shocked at his pointing an object at us. The object proved to be a camera.”

In hindsight, someone already may have alerted the sheriff to the Internet-publication law that John Dougherty allegedly had broken.

Arpaio wrote, “I am very concerned that Dougherty’s publication of my home address reaches not only the local Phoenix audience, and therefore, my enemies, including some who have threatened me, but also the entire ‘wired’ world since the Phoenix New Times is available on their Web site.”

Legally speaking, nothing immediately happened in the war between Joe Arpaio and John Dougherty.

But with New Year 2005 came a new county attorney, whose ascension would change the landscape on a host of fronts, not the least of which was the lingering “Dougherty matter.”

——————————————————————————–

Six weeks after Andrew Thomas took over from Rick Romley in January 2005, John Dougherty wrote, “Thomas looks like he’s content to be Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s handmaiden and to rubber-stamp Arpaio’s increasingly dangerous violations of constitutional protections.”

Dougherty marked a sea change from what had been a contentious relationship between the sheriff and Romley, whose clashes became increasingly public as the years passed.

In early 2004, Romley had announced his decision not to seek another term.

Thomas, a far-right conservative who had been trounced by Terry Goddard in a 2002 run for attorney general, took advantage of a split vote among more moderate Republicans to win the primary. He then easily defeated a weak Democratic rival in the November 2004 general election to win a four-year term.

Just last month, an attorney for New Times wrote to the county Board of Supervisors about the paper’s plan to sue Joe Arpaio (“Blowback,” February 21), Andy Thomas, and fired special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik.

In the February 20 Notice of Claim letter, attorney Michael Manning wrote that Rick Romley had rebuffed the sheriff’s request for the prosecution of John Dougherty during his last months in office.

But Romley tells New Times that he never heard about “the Dougherty matter” on his watch.

“I’m sure Joe and his people figured that we wouldn’t have done anything with this thing, and they were probably right,” Romley says. “That ‘case’ had nothing but trouble written all over it, from a prosecution aspect.”

Arpaio didn’t wait long after Romley left office to approach Andy Thomas. Lawyer Ron Lebowitz of the Sheriff’s Office wrote in a 2005 memo, “The Sheriff brought this matter to the attention of the present County Attorney almost immediately following [his] inauguration.”

That was several months after Dougherty’s column supposedly had caused such a “serious and imminent threat” to Arpaio’s safety.

On April 15, 2005, the county attorney’s investigator, John Stolze, met with the MCSO’s Ray Jones to discuss the Dougherty case.

Stolze asked Lieutenant Jones if he had interviewed Dougherty as part of his probe. Jones replied that he hadn’t, claiming Dougherty was “unstable.”

Jones handed Stolze a lengthy report that concluded with a plea for prosecution. He included a long history of alleged threats made against Arpaio, almost all of them supposedly occurring before the July 2004 column.

In a section titled “John Dougherty’s Erratic Behavior,” Jones recounted the sheriff’s version of the parking lot meeting at the Mustang Library, and included the transcript of a voice mail that an irate Dougherty left for one of the sheriff’s flacks in August 2004.

The lieutenant wrote that Arpaio had advised him that “due to his years as head of the DEA in the Middle East (some of these countries are now terrorist states)” he had made a load of enemies.

“Now they can access his home address as well,” Jones wrote, as if publication on New Times’ Web site was the only place on the Net to learn where the sheriff resides.

(Arpaio, incidentally, was known as “Nickel Bag Joe” inside the DEA because of the small-time busts he’d favored.)

“It is believed that John Dougherty has an obsession towards Sheriff Arpaio,” Jones concluded. “[His] commentaries in his articles about the Sheriff are damaging in nature.”

The lieutenant said it was “reasonable to assume that Dougherty himself knew that by disclosing the Sheriff’s address and all of the derogatory remarks he has written about the Sheriff, that the articles may incite some people to become so incensed that they may resort to some type of retaliatory attacks on Sheriff Arpaio and his family.”

Prosecutor Liz Gilbert asked investigator Stolze to check the Web for any personal information under Joe Arpaio’s name. According to Stolze’s report, “I located numerous documents that contain Sheriff Arpaio’s personal residence address.”

On April 18, 2005, Stolze phoned Dougherty. The paper’s legal counsel, Steve Suskin, returned the call, saying he had advised Dougherty not to talk.

The Incident Review Board meeting was scheduled for early May.

But Stolze’s supervisors wanted more facts before moving forward. The aforementioned interview with the Arpaios was a must, and the panel’s meeting was postponed until that August.

That gave Ron Lebowitz, then the sheriff’s legal point man on the “Dougherty matter,” more time to compose the first of dozens of memos he would send about the case to prosecutors in two jurisdictions over the next year and a half.

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Ron Lebowitz has had a long legal career in Phoenix, where he has been practicing since 1973.

As a private attorney, he defended New Times in a 1981 libel allegation by then-Arizona Republic Publisher Darrow “Duke” Tully, who resigned in disgrace a few years later after he was exposed as having lied about serving as a pilot in Korea and Vietnam.

Lebowitz’s reputation for courtroom bombast has rivaled that of his better-known (these days) peer Dennis Wilenchik. Maybe that’s why he and Joe Arpaio connected in the late 1990s, when Lebowitz was working as a deputy county attorney.

In May 1999, Superior Court Judge Gregory Martin dismissed some criminal charges against an infamous Phoenix slumlord because of then-prosecutor Lebowitz’s “intentional, in bad faith, and grossly improper” conduct.

Lebowitz went to work for Arpaio full time after that.

He was present on June 13, 2005, when John Stolze and Deputy County Attorney Jonell Lucca interviewed Ava and Joe Arpaio, one at a time.

Word that their home address had been published “made my blood pressure go up,” Ava Arpaio said in her brief interview. “I was very, very nervous and have been, and I still am very worried about it.”

Stolze, who died of heart failure in December 2006, played it as straight as his stellar reputation suggested he would.

In a report on his interview with Ava Arpaio, he wrote, “It should be noted that towards the end of this interview, Mr. Lebowitz wrote something on a piece of paper and attempted to show it to Mrs. Arpaio. This note was taken by deputy county attorney Lucca before Mrs. Arpaio could see it, and she informed Mr. Lebowitz, ‘We’re not going to prompt the witness.’”

Interviewed after his wife, the self-described “toughest sheriff in America” told Stolze that his staff immediately had placed extra patrols around his residence after Dougherty’s column.

The investigator asked why Arpaio had taken so long to officially lodge his complaint.

“I was in a Catch-22, if you want to use that phrase,” the sheriff said. “It was a political year, and I was being blasted every week with slander and threatening news articles by Dougherty. I knew there would be a new county attorney coming in, and I felt that if I reported it during the election year that would be the first allegation — that I was doing this to shut the mouth of the reporter.

“The other reason was that I wasn’t sure that [Rick Romley] would pursue it, and number three, if he did, he may have held it anyway for the new county attorney to take office.”

Arpaio conceded that he wasn’t as worried about his home address being available on the Internet as he was about its being on the New Times Web site.

“I’m more concerned about the New Times and the mindset of Dougherty knowing that this could be a threat to me,” he said. “Also, when you look at the clientele of the New Times, those are people that have the propensity to do harm to this sheriff.”

Arpaio then launched into a riff:

“Everybody knows me around this world, there’s no doubt about that. I go back to being the director of Mexico and South America with the federal drug enforcement. I go back to Turkey, the Middle East, being head of that operation . . . People still remember me from my drug background, but they sure remember me from my sheriff’s background, and I do get a lot of nasty, nasty television and commentary from foreign countries. So my name, my address being on this World Wide Web makes me very, very concerned.”

Before the Incident Review Board met on August 9, 2005, Ron Lebowitz submitted his own take on the case: “It could be argued that Dougherty, when reviewing the very words that he chose to use when writing the July 1, 2004, and July 8, 2004, articles in particular, wanted to frighten the Sheriff, and Mrs. Arpaio, i.e. to make them fearful of life and limb by releasing the Sheriff’s home address on the New Times Web site.”

Then, according to Lebowitz, Dougherty would be happy “pursuant to his own scheme, by getting away with it, thereby obtaining a petty in-your-face sense of satisfaction, a component [of] his hubris.”

The County Attorney’s Office allowed Lebowitz to make a verbal pitch at the August 9 Incident Review Board meeting. But the board didn’t buy it, and that left Andy Thomas in a tough spot between his senior staff and an irate Joe Arpaio.

A few weeks later, Thomas asked Pinal County Attorney Carter Olson to take over the case.

——————————————————————————–

Ron Lebowitz immediately went to work on Olson, writing to him on September 12, 2005: “The Dougherty matter, for reasons which should be obvious, is something deeply felt and closely followed by the Sheriff.”

He first met with County Attorney Olson in mid-November 2005, and shortly thereafter he sent a memo that foreshadowed what would happen once Dennis Wilenchik came onboard in July 2007 and demanded access to everything but the proverbial kitchen sink from New Times.

Lebowitz suggested that Olson issue subpoenas to New Times management “to appear before an investigative grand jury to collect the evidence considered necessary.”

The attorney contacted the Pinal County Attorney by letter and phone incessantly, writing in early 2006 that the Arpaios “are experiencing a form of tension stemming from pent-up frustration and anxiety due to what appears to be a lack of activity in the Dougherty matter . . . A failure to go forward would convey the very worst of messages which we are certain you would never embrace.”

In May 2006, County Attorney Olson and one of his prosecutors met with Lebowitz and longtime Arpaio public-relations chief Lisa Allen at the Mesa Hilton coffee shop.

“During that meeting,” Lebowitz wrote to Olson afterward, “you raised arguments of insecurity and uncertainty which were identical to the kinds of arguments brought out in our previous meeting held in your office on November 15, 2005. The arguments which you have raised to justify your indefensible inclination to remain in a state of paralysis regarding the Dougherty matter have not improved with time. They do not age well, as if they are like some spirituous beverage. In short, your reasons for not going ahead with a prosecution, particularly against John Dougherty, remain feeble at best and craven at worst.”

Lebowitz noted that Arpaio earlier had given Olson “a ten-day deadline on which to take action, and even though you promised thereafter to proceed against New Times, nothing further has occurred . . . this is intolerable. The [Sheriff's Office] must make some public statement regarding the threat and the prosecution’s failure to take corrective action.”

But despite the continual pressure, Carter Olson held his ground.

On August 31, 2006, John Dougherty wrote his final story as a New Times staff writer (“Vaya Con Dios”), a first-person column in which he spoke of honing “the art of attack journalism” at the paper.

“Attack journalism inevitably leads to confrontation with powerful interests,” he wrote. “That is why the in-your-face, irreverent, counter-intuitive, fuck-’em-all attitude at New Times was the place for a guy like me.”

Dougherty concluded that, even though he was moving on, Joe Arpaio “will never be free with New Times around.”

Shortly after that article appeared, Lebowitz again wrote to Olson, saying that “Mr. Dougherty, through his most recent article, is encouraging New Times to go forward and, whenever and wherever possible, do even worse against the sheriff in the future as, if you will, a part of Dougherty’s legacy.”

As 2006 ended, Lebowitz may not have known it, but he finally seemed to be wearing Olson down.

On December 14, 2006, the county attorney wrote to New Times attorney Suskin that “the state of Arizona has drawn a line that the New Times appears to have crossed.”

Olson offered the paper an out, saying he would settle the case without a criminal prosecution if it would remove the sheriff’s home address from its Web site, admit the 1999 law was valid, and not violate it anymore. He added that if New Times believed the law to be unconstitutional, it should seek a court injunction to stop any further action on the matter.

New Times responded in its newsprint edition by publishing a Christmas card to Arpaio on its front cover, addressed to the sheriff’s Fountain Hills home. It keyed to a column in which the paper explained that it couldn’t, in good conscience, accept Olson’s deal (“Joe Strikes Back,” December 21, 2006).

A few months into the New Year, Carter Olson won appointment to the Pinal Superior Court bench, and that county’s Board of Supervisors chose Jim Walsh to replace him. Citing his conflict of interest, Walsh tossed the hot potato back to Thomas.

On July 11, 2007, Team Wilenchik came onboard at Thomas’ behest to potentially bust John Dougherty and, possibly, New Times, as a corporate entity.

It was almost three years to the day since Dougherty had written the column containing Arpaio’s home address.

Things were just beginning to get interesting.

Janet and Joe with the Hondurans; David Hendershott is the first on the right.
Subject(s):
Darrell Ankarlo, Joe Arpaio, MCSO in HondurasTake the MCSO’s Honduras project, which has cost the county at least $34K in RICO funds — up from $32K the last time The Bird put quill to paper. Spearheaded by Arpaio’s two-ton Karl Rove — Chief Deputy David Hendershott — the project’s been ongoing since 2006, has involved 10 MCSO pooh-bahs that we know of (up from last week’s nine), and nearly 2,700 man-hours from deputies working on the county clock.

This last bit about the man-hours is from docs recently obtained from MCSO flack Paul Chagolla. Conservatively speaking, if each high-ranking deputy is making $60K per annum (a definite lowball figure), that’d be about $30 an hour, and would mean $81K in county clock time. This is not counting the time-and-a-half of OT hours involved.

So this cranky cockatiel reckons the total bill for Honduras, including RICO and non-RICO funds, is well over $100,000. That’s more than $100K for a financially strapped county department that’s been cutting expenditures right and left.

The MCSO continues to release documents in dribs and drabs to this quacker, the most recent being a “Strategic Plan” that makes clear the MCSO was overhauling all six bureaus of the Honduran National Police, including patrol, traffic, investigations, training, border patrol, and prisons.

A high-minded “exchange of ideas” is proffered as the rationale, but the sweep of the program, with the MCSO advising Hondurans on every aspect of their police force, suggests something more’s afoot. This beaker will bet you a bucket of buffalo wings that these upper-echelon deputies weren’t messin’ with Honduras out of the goodness of their itty-bitty cast-iron hearts.

Among the newly released docs is a Diploma of Recognition presented to the “Sub-Jefe del Sheriffits David Hendershott” by Honduran officials. Also, there are several letters from Arpaio to various Honduran bigwigs — the Bay Islands governor, the sub-commissioner of police, the secretary of security — that speak of “forging an alliance” and offering “resources that will enhance the local police.”

In one letter, Arpaio invited four Honduran cops, all expenses paid by RICO, to Phoenix. While the Honduran po-po were here during the first week in June 2007, Arpaio scored them a gubernatorial proclamation and a photo op with Governor Janet Napolitano.

Why did Nappy do this? According to the Guv’s flack, Jeanine L’Ecuyer, the Governor’s Office isn’t even sure who those Honduran hombres are, and can’t identify them in the pic.

“As a courtesy to Sheriff Arpaio,” L’Ecuyer stated, “the governor honored a request from his staff to issue a proclamation in recognition of his agency’s work with law enforcement in Honduras . . . The governor spent five minutes with the delegation, during which time a photo was taken.”

Just so happens that the MCSO’s “work with law enforcement in Honduras” was improperly bankrolled by a RICO slush fund. But the Guv has denied knowing anything about RICO funds being used.

Still, it would’ve behooved Nappy to ask her political ally Arpaio why he was trundling Honduran cops through her offices. Especially since Arpaio’s currently using this photo and proclamation to claim the Honduran caper was on the up-and-up. Is Janet hunky-dory with that? Particularly, now that she knows the MCSO was wasting taxpayer and RICO money on this scam?

L’Ecuyer couldn’t answer that one.

“It may be useful to know the Governor’s Office prepares and presents an average of 450 proclamations per year,” she offered, weakly.

So if Sheriff Joe invited Fidel Castro to the PHX, would Janet pose for a pic and give the ex-dictator a scroll? If the sheriff told her to jump off the Luhrs Tower headfirst after making love to a koala bear, would she do it?

She just might. Back when Nappy was U.S. Attorney, she punted on an investigation of Joe’s jails. Arpaio returned the favor a few years later when she was running for governor by backing her in a TV ad.

To be fair, the Guv has no authority over the MCSO’s use of RICO funds. When it comes to RICO, it’s County Attorney Candy Thomas, a.k.a. “Little Joe,” who oversees its use by the MCSO, according to state law. Obviously, Candy’s office rubber-stamped the MCSO’s raid on the RICO piggy bank.

That explains why the County Attorney’s Office has been so incredibly slow to turn over public docs on the decision to pay for the Honduran project with RICO scrilla.

THE SUPES, DUPED?

But what about the estimated $100,000-plus in MCSO payroll expenditures? That’s the purview of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which rarely, if ever, challenges Joe’s malfeasance in office, no matter what it costs the county.

According to Supes PIO Deanne Poulos, there were three occasions when the sheriff’s Honduran project was mentioned during Supervisors’ meetings.

The first, dated October 17, 2007, dealt with the acceptance of a $4,000 contribution from the sheriff’s posse to the MCSO for the Honduran effort. The second, dated January 16, mentioned the donation of surplus MCSO computers to Honduras. The third was on February 4, when a presentation on the Honduran enterprise was made by MCSO muck-a-mucks Deputy Chief Mary Ellen Sheppard, Captain James Miller, and Captain Pat Lopez, who all participated in the project.

These MCSO big shots made their case during an “informal meeting” of the Supes. The Bird’s blogging Siamese twin, Feathered Bastard, posted the presentation document forked over by PIO Poulos — and it’s a humdinger.

The thing starts with the sort of pabulum you’d expect from a Peace Corps pamphlet. Stuff like, “Transnational cultural diversity is a reality for both agencies.” And, “With the sharing of cultures also comes the sharing of problems.” The doc makes the stunning revelation that some illegal aliens in the United States are from Honduras, and that some of these are involved in crime! (No duh, Dagwood.) Then it persists in this Hendershott-size pant load that MS-13, or Mara Salvatrucha, is a Honduran gang.

Don’t take this talon-bearer’s word that this is elephant caca. Read what the flippin’ FBI has to say on its Web site:

“MS-13, which started in Los Angeles in the late 1980s, has an estimated 8,000-10,000 members nationwide, mostly Salvadoran nationals or first generation Salvadoran Americans but also including Hondurans, Guatemalans, Mexicans, and other Central and South American immigrants.”

The MCSO presentation reads like a cover-your-ass move necessitated by the initial reporting done in January on this subject by both Feathered Bastard and The Bird. The MCSO also trots out the pic of the Guv with the Hondurans, and slyly mentions that it gave a presentation in June to Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, though this plumed penman wonders if this is true. (Wilcox reportedly has been out of town and unable to comment.)

The bottom line for all the Supes is that they’ve been snoozin’ on duty, allowing Arpaio a free pass.

In the February 4 document, the MCSO stated it has used $28,809.35 in RICO funds and $5,252.46 from the Sheriff’s Office budget. As The Bird’s already demonstrated, these figures are grossly inaccurate.

What did the Supes know and when did they know it?

The above-mentioned discussion of the $4,000 posse gift to the MCSO, and all this stuff about donating MCSO computers to Honduras should have pricked the Supes’ ears and got them asking questions. That is, unless they knew all along about the Honduran-RICO mess, just as Arpaio maintains.

ANKARLO KISS-ASS

Sheriff Joe can always count on ultra-conservative KTAR lip-flapper Darrell Ankarlo to wipe Arpaio’s fanny clean with his kisser, even when Joe’s been caught with his paw in the RICO cookie jar.

The Bird heard Arpaio growling on KTAR the other day as Ankarlo lapped it all up. Nothing new there. Ankarlo’s been an unabashed Joe buttlicker since the hate jock arrived in Phoenix. Even the stink of corruption does not deter him from puckering up to Joe’s geriatric hindquarters.

Basically, Ankarlo played Stepin Fetchit to Nickel Bag Joe, letting the geezer cop shoot off his mouth about the training of Honduran police by MCSO deputies, all paid for by the county and RICO money.

“What’s 30,000?” asked our spendthrift sheriff, snarling that he’s answerable to no one!

Joe justified the Honduran enterprise by claiming that the MCSO has received “millions of photos for our facial recognition” — whatever the hell that means. The number of photos cited by Joe has fluctuated wildly from 1 million to 5 million. Here’s a news flash, dunderhead: There are only 7.5 million people in Honduras. So, what, have they photographed all the little old ladies and kiddies, too?

Arpaio always begs off when asked to explain what he’s talking about, mumbling some malarkey about the situation’s “sensitivity.”

The money-shot of this Ankarlo-Arpaio love-fest was Ankarlo’s query to Arpaio, “Did one penny of my tax dollars pay for this trip in any way, shape or form?”

Ankarlo was suggesting the nearly $34K in RICO money was a non-issue if there were no “tax dollars” used. Arpaio’s response was chock-full of toejam.

“First of all, it was RICO monies . . . We were using that money — $30,000, which is nothing.”

Ankarlo followed up with, “Not one penny other than RICO money was used: Yes or no, Sheriff?”

“Well, I don’t know, there may be a couple of dollars here or there,” Joe fumbled. “But if there was, it was not significant.”

“Is that hundreds, thousands, do you know?” wondered Ankarlo.

“No, no, no,” insisted the crotchety top constable. “The majority of the money was the RICO money. I don’t know if we spent a few bucks otherwise. I doubt it.”

Check it, peeps: RICO money is our money! It’s money that comes from asset forfeitures from criminals doing bad stuff, and it’s supposed to go for specific law enforcement needs — not so MCSO goons can use the excuse of training some other country’s cops as a reason to vacay in Honduras on the county’s freakin’ dime (plus whatever else may be going personal-business-wise down there for any of these Deputy Doofs).

Ankarlo, of course, was clueless that county tax dollars were obviously used to pay for this Honduran adventure.

But the wing-nutty blowhard did correctly note the parentage of the Honduran story.

“Having seen the firestorm,” said Ankarlo in a windy wind-up to a softball Q. “And, again, it’s no love lost between you and New Times. New Times hates you, and I doubt you even have great aspirations to ever be a reporter for that organization. [Huh?] So New Times comes out, they expose it. And then KTAR, Channel 12, others pick it up.”

You got that right, Jack-Off. This was a New Times baby, no matter what Channel 12 maintains. But at least 12 reporter Joe Dana’s been dogging Joe’s ass about the story, not licking it, like Ankarlo.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio compares unfavorably to L.A. County Sheriff Lee Baca when it comes to jail conditions.

Baca’s office dealt with MRSA infections five years ago. Arpaio’s office has yet to start.

Jail records documented Deborah Braillard as diabetic. That didn’t stop guards from denying her medical requests and insulin. Braillard died as a result.
AP/Wide World
During his “Dirty Dining Crackdown,” County Attorney Andrew Thomas could’ve charged Sheriff Arpaio with criminal health violations in jail kitchens. He didn’t.
Subject(s):
Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Maricopa County Jail conditionsThe assault on New Times began in 2004 when the paper published Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s address as part of an investigation into his hidden commercial real estate transactions. Arpaio demanded that the newspaper be prosecuted under an arcane statute that makes it illegal to publish law enforcement officers’ addresses in cyberspace, even though that data is readily available on government Web sites and is perfectly legal to publish on newsprint.

Thomas responded by appointing a special prosecutor, who demanded not only the records and e-mails of the paper’s writers and editors — but also sought sensitive information on the Internet-viewing habits of our readers. On October 18, New Times published a cover story revealing the invasive subpoenas.

That story violated grand jury secrecy statutes, but the revelations in the article, compounded by the subsequent arrest of Village Voice Media Executive Editor Michael Lacey and CEO Jim Larkin, sparked public outrage. County Attorney Thomas fired the special prosecutor and dropped all charges. He also abandoned the Arpaio-inspired probe of the paper.

As the smoke began to clear, this newspaper began a series, “Target Practice.” The project sprang from a fundamental question: Why did law enforcement — the sheriff and the county attorney — believe they could force a newspaper to reveal the identities and habits of the publication’s readers?

Our investigation has made one thing clear: Maricopa County’s sheriff has a vivid history of ignoring the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He’s trampled the rights of prisoners, political enemies, and media critics. In partnership with the county attorney, the pair have expanded their enemies list to include the judiciary and immigrants. Private citizens and their Internet-viewing records were merely the latest victims in a long line.

“Target Practice” seeks to explain how we arrived at this moment.

——————————————————————————–

Like most attorneys, Kathleen Carey leads a busy life. So she didn’t take much time to examine what looked like a pimple on her arm. Twelve days later, Carey’s arm had ballooned to nearly twice its normal size, and pus was oozing from a boil where the zit had been.

After $180,000 in medical bills, four doctors, and two hospitals, Carey learned that the supposed pimple was actually the flesh-eating “superbug” bacteria commonly known as MRSA staph infection. You may recognize MRSA from recent news reports, following a study concluding that more Americans die each year from antibiotic-resistant MRSA infections than from HIV/AIDS.

MRSA commonly spreads through hospitals, but Carey hadn’t been to a hospital or doctor for months before her infection. So where did she get the potentially fatal infection?

Carey says she knows exactly where she got it — the Maricopa County Jail. She wasn’t there as an inmate, but as an attorney visiting her client. She was used to inmates complaining about skin infections. Then one day after her visit, Carey noticed the zit. Two weeks later, she was in the hospital with an IV in her arm. Now, more than a year after her hospitalization, she still has a scar from the ordeal.

The damage didn’t stop there. Once Carey learned about the deadly and contagious nature of MRSA infections, she paid to have her home professionally cleaned. Everything was sanitized, she was told.

Two months after Carey’s battle with MRSA, her 17-year-old son asked to use her computer. Within 48 hours, he contracted the same strain of MRSA. Even with the family’s early detection and knowledge about MRSA, he nearly lost his arm to the aggressive flesh-eating bacteria. He now has a two-inch scar where the infection began.

Carey is one of many Maricopa County residents who’ve never been booked into Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s jails but who are paying dearly for conditions inside his lockups.

Vermin, filth, medical care suggestive of POW camps, chronic mismanagement, the wanton destruction of records, and a steady parade of corpses in Maricopa County jails have cost taxpayers an astonishing — and until now, undisclosed — 41.4 million dollars.

Joe Arpaio has perpetuated his reign as “America’s toughest sheriff” with an open checkbook.

Your open checkbook.

——————————————————————————–

The Sheriff has captured the imagination of voters with his almost cartoonish contempt for the prisoners in his charge. He’s subjected inmates to pink underwear, chain gangs, and rancid bologna sandwiches, and he’s garnered big wins at the polls. But Arpaio’s jail policies have generated a tsunami of lawsuits from prisoners and their families.

There simply isn’t another jail system in America with this history of taxpayer-financed litigation.

New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston, for example, collectively housed more than 61,000 inmates per day last year. From 2004 through November of this year, these same county jails had a combined 43 prison-conditions lawsuits filed against them in federal courts.

In the very same three-year time frame, despite housing a mere 9,200 prisoners per day, Sheriff Arpaio was the target of a staggering 2,150 lawsuits in U.S. District Court and hundreds more in Maricopa County courts.

With a fraction of the inmate population, Arpaio has had 50 times as many lawsuits as the New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston jail systems combined.

Based on records produced under the Freedom of Information Act, a review of federal and state records and a comparison with other correctional facilities, the picture that emerges is clear: Cruelty costs.

Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Paul Chagolla refused to arrange an interview with Arpaio for this story.

Earlier this month, the front pages of local daily newspapers were dominated by stories about the sheriff exceeding his budget by a million dollars. The courthouse was shuttered for a day. Positions were slashed, and visiting hours for attorneys and court personnel were cut drastically. Naturally, that meant another lawsuit (Arpaio lost and has appealed).

County taxpayers have footed an undisclosed fortune to sustain Arpaio’s image as a tough lawman. The $41.4 million taxpayers coughed up to insure for, defend, or settle lawsuits is just the edge of the cesspool — one result of inhumane conditions that have long made Arpaio’s jails the target of investigations from both the federal government and advocates like Amnesty International.

Arpaio has an 11-year history of ignoring expert warnings that his jails violate basic tenets of the U.S. Constitution and threaten life and limb. At least 11 inmate deaths have directly resulted from Arpaio’s refusal to heed such warnings.

In that time, the deductible for the county’s insurance policy to cover lawsuits against the sheriff has jumped from $1 million to $5 million. The annual premium has quadrupled in recent years. These dollars come out of the county’s coffers, not from Arpaio’s annual budget of $288 million, which he’s already overrunning this year.

And which is $60 million more than the sheriff budget in a county jail of similar size in Houston.

While the sheriff has long argued that his crude jails prevent crime, a study that his office commissioned, and that cost $19,900, found that Arpaio’s jails have no effect on inmate recidivism.

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Despite the cost, the primary victims of Arpaio’s mismanagement are not taxpayers, or even attorneys like Kathleen Carey, but indigent inmates like Michelle McCollum.

McCollum, who was arrested for drug possession, could not make bail and, therefore, waited for trial in Arpaio’s lockup. She eventually was sentenced to nothing more than probation.

A medical test administered when McCollum was admitted to jail confirmed that she was pregnant.

On August 22, 2005, McCollum sat on the concrete floor of the Fourth Avenue Jail, a facility un-affectionately known by inmates as “The Matrix” (because the lights never turn off). She longed for a mattress and tried hard to overlook the rotting food and soiled feminine napkins on the floor.

Suddenly, two inmates attacked her, pummeling her face, back, and abdomen.

McCollum and another cellmate reported the beating to detention officers, pleaded for medical help, and reminded deputies that McCollum was pregnant and had been hit in the stomach. McCollum also put in a medical request to the infirmary.

No doctor or nurse looked in upon the injured McCollum.

Two days later, McCollum sat in the courthouse, chained to a row of inmates, when she started to bleed. She bled for five hours, looking frighteningly like Stephen King’s infamous Carrie. The inmates chained to McCollum to await their arraignments began to complain. Detention officers ignored the prisoners.

When she arrived at the E-Pod in Sheriff Arpaio’s Estrella Jail, a bloodstained McCollum again told guards about her beating and her need for medical care. An officer put in a priority request for medical attention, but nobody came. Alarmed at McCollum’s loss of blood, a guard finally ushered her to see a doctor.

Infirmary workers called an ambulance and rushed McCollum to Maricopa Medical Center. Doctors there found her baby with an ultrasound, but they couldn’t find the baby’s heartbeat. The baby was dead.

Doctors told the jail guards that McCollum must return to the hospital in two days — on August 26 — to see if the fetus would pass on its own.

Ten days later, the jail had yet to deliver McCollum to her hospital appointment. On September 5, while McCollum stood holding her tray in the food line, the bleeding started again.

Still, nothing was done.

Three weeks after the ignored doctor’s appointment, McCollum was finally rushed to the county hospital for the second time. She had lost so much blood that doctors gave her a massive blood transfusion. Then they removed the dead fetus.

It’s important to note that McCollum hadn’t been convicted of a crime. Like inmates whose deaths are recounted later in this story, McCollum was awaiting trial — innocent under the law.

Ignored cries for medical attention and resulting agony are not uncommon in Arpaio’s jails.

“Only 40 percent of inmate sick-call requests are responded to in a timely manner . . . Because sick-call requests are not responded to in a timely manner and health appraisals are not completed within the required time frames, an inmate’s health status is likely to deteriorate while in the custody of Maricopa County,” concludes an audit of jail conditions done for the county two years before McCollum lost her baby.

——————————————————————————–

Every sheriff gets sued over jail conditions. The problem is that Joe Arpaio gets sued thousands of times more than any of the others.

Before Arpaio’s reign, Maricopa County didn’t bother to pay for liability insurance. And with good reason — the county wasn’t losing multimillion-dollar lawsuits or paying families millions to settle their claims.

Peter Crowley, Maricopa County’s risk manager, says the county’s insurance rates have skyrocketed during Arpaio’s tenure. “I wasn’t here back when [the Scott Norberg case] happened,” Crowley says of Arpaio’s first major loss, a suit the county settled for $8.25 million. “But I can tell you this: Our deductible was only $1 million a few years back. Now it’s $5 million.”

Early into Arpaio’s reign, county officials realized they needed insurance. They were able to get a relatively cheap policy, and from 1995 to 1998, the county paid $328,894 a year for an insurance policy with a $1 million deductible.

But now, after Arpaio’s lawsuits have cost the county $30 million in legal fees and cost insurance companies millions more, it pays four times as much for a policy. That policy doesn’t even cover lawsuits under $5 million.

Today, Maricopa County pays a yearly premium of $1.2 million for outside insurance with a $5 million deductible. For any lawsuit that costs $5 million or less, the county foots the entire bill. It’s the best policy the county can get given Arpaio’s dismal track record.

Since 1995, that yearly insurance premium alone has cost taxpayers $11,345,609, according to the county’s Risk Management Office. More staggering is the official grand total of Arpaio’s attorney’s bills, lawsuit settlements and payments: $30,039,928.

Both figures were listed in a report produced by county officials after a recent New Times public-records request. Combined, they show the cost to insure for and defend against Arpaio lawsuits totals $41.4 million.

——————————————————————————–

In Joe Arpaio’s jails, even the paperwork is deadly.

For $6 million, the jails could have built a computer database of inmate health problems. Such a database, advised jail auditor Moore and Associates in 2000, would improve healthcare for inmates and improve efficiency for jail employees.

Three years after that finding, a 2003 audit concluded, “Personnel report that medication errors occur on a regular basis” and “there is a significant backlog in health-record filing that has been estimated to be between eight months to one year . . . the health records are not current and continuity of care cannot be maintained.”

Five years after that first warning, the jail still hadn’t built an electronic database for inmate health problems.

Deborah Braillard died as a result.

She had been arrested for riding in a stolen car.

When Braillard, 46, an insulin-dependent diabetic, started shaking, vomiting, and fading into a diabetic coma, Arpaio’s detention officers decided against taking her to the infirmary.

She had been in perfect health when she entered Arpaio’s jail, but after two days without insulin, she was on the verge of a coma.

Numerous inmates, including Braillard’s cellmates, who rattled cell bars and hollered for guards, say asking for medical treatment in Arpaio’s jails often merits a reply from guards that you’re faking it.

Braillard wasn’t faking it.

Tamera Harper was one of three Estrella Jail cellmates of Braillard’s who told an identical story of what happened next.

“I woke up to hear Deborah Braillard moaning and crying for help. The detention officers moved her to a television room to keep her from disturbing other inmates,” Harper wrote in a court declaration.

The detention officers didn’t take Braillard to the jail infirmary.

The cellmates all say that when officers flopped Braillard back into her bunk the next morning, January 23, 2005, she was unconscious. The inmates attempted to feed Braillard sugar, but she began convulsing.

Jail employees eventually arrived, lifted Braillard into a wheelchair, and opted for non-emergency transport to the Maricopa County Medical Center, where she was quickly transferred to the intensive care unit. Hospital doctors reversed the diabetic coma with basic insulin and fluids. But the damage was done.

Eighteen days later, Braillard’s daughter Jennifer watched as a county physician, Dr. Scott Van Poppel, declared her mother dead — ultimately from going 70 hours without insulin in Arpaio’s jail.

When Sheriff’s Detective J. Bryant arrived to check out Braillard’s body, he pulled back the blue hospital blanket to note that Braillard’s limbs were swollen, her toes were already black, and her calves were spotted with sores. Hospital tubes and IVs were still in her body.

The problem isn’t just that the jail denied Braillard insulin and refused to treat her. It’s that the jail knew Braillard was diabetic before she was even arrested.

Like many inmates, Braillard had passed through the jail months earlier. On that visit, she had marked the jail’s intake sheet, declaring her diabetes. The jail’s health records documented Braillard’s need for insulin.

Yet, on her second incarceration, jail employees denied her insulin, ignored her cries for help, and failed to get her insulin when she became unconscious.

A shoestring budget-records system of paper folders (with misspelled and misfiled names) costs healthcare employees hours of time spent inefficiently, warned the 2000 Moore and Associates audit. It also probably cost Braillard her life.

An electronic database (as was standard in most jails of Maricopa County’s size by 2005) would surely have shown Braillard was diabetic and saved her life.

Consider that Harris County (Houston), Texas, operates a jail and sheriff’s department of a similar size on a budget of $60 million less than Arpaio’s. Harris County is no model jail, but officials there say they’ve had an electronic database of inmate health concerns for years. An electronic database for Maricopa County jails was finally started in July of this year — 18 months after Braillard died and eight years after auditors advised its installation.

The $6 million database was commissioned not by Arpaio but by healthcare officials, on the advice of a third-party consulting company recently hired by the county to “turn around” jail healthcare. The database should be finished by 2012 — 13 years after it was recommended and seven years after Braillard’s death.

Even without the database and even with detention officers misdiagnosing her, Braillard should not have died. Fearing the ineptitude of Arpaio’s jails, Braillard’s friend, Deborah Fouts, faxed a note to the jail at 9:42 p.m. the night before Braillard went into diabetic coma. The note reminded Correctional Health Services, the jail’s healthcare agency, that Braillard was diabetic and would die without insulin.

“Inmate Braillard, Booking # P037486 is diabetic and has not had insulin for two days,” Fouts wrote in the fax, sent to the sheriff and the jail infirmary.

So what happened? An internal Sheriff’s Office report after Braillard’s death concluded that the faxed note “slipped through the cracks.” And with a quick point of the finger to nobody in particular, Arpaio’s detectives wrapped up the investigation.

Physicians and attorneys outside the jail say it’s still common for prescriptions to slip through those same cracks that killed Braillard. They say inmates are being denied medication for diabetes, seizures, high blood pressure, asthma, thyroid conditions, and mental health disorders.

Braillard’s was a costly slip-up indeed, not only for her, but for the county and its taxpayers. The county now faces a wrongful-death lawsuit brought by attorney Michael Manning, who has collected more than $18 million in settlements and judgments from wrongful deaths in Arpaio’s jails.

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Like the thousands of other lawsuits against Arpaio, it’s impossible to predict the outcome of the suit by Braillard’s family. Easier to calculate are the multimillion-dollar suits Arpaio already has lost from deaths that would have been prevented if Arpaio had only listened to expert warnings.

On March 29, 2006, a $9 million court judgment was leveled against Arpaio and the county in the beating and restraint-chair death of inmate Charles Agster III.

Agster, 33 and mentally retarded, was arrested for trespassing on August 6, 2001. Detention officers at the Madison Street Jail pulled a hood over his head and slammed him into a medieval-looking restraint chair. The hood around Agster’s throat smothered him to the point that he became brain dead. He was pronounced legally dead three days later on August 9, 2001.

Agster’s death should have been prevented. Two years before he was killed, the county had paid $8.25 million to settle the Norberg suffocation suit. Surveillance video shows officers wrestled Scott Norberg into a restraining chair, bound his mouth with a towel, and continued to beat and Taser him after he was handcuffed. Even after the multimillion-dollar payout to Norberg’s family, Arpaio kept using the chairs — costing Agster his life and the county another $9 million.

But, really, the restraint chairs should have been discarded before that first payout. Three years before the Norberg settlement, in 1996, detention expert Eugene Miller warned Arpaio, “The best recommendation I can professionally make in respect to the Restraint Chair is to remove it from any use associated with the MCSO jail.”

Then in 1997, Amnesty International protested the restraint chairs — an odd move considering that Amnesty usually focuses on prison conditions in Third World countries. The U.S. Department of Justice also took Arpaio to court twice over the chairs and other concerns.

In December 2005, Clint Yarbrough died as Norberg and Agster had died — bound and suffocated in a restraint chair. On April 18, 2007, the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors approved a classified settlement in excess of $1 million to Yarbrough’s family.

Norberg, Agster, and Yarbrough were never tried for the charges they were arrested on. They didn’t live to see their first court dates.

These legally innocent Maricopa County residents died in Arpaio’s jails because the sheriff refused to listen to expert advice.

They’re not the only ones. Arpaio ignored warnings from experts about suicidal inmates, as well. Even before the sheriff was warned about understaffing, unorganized records, and restraint chairs, the Department of Justice warned him that his mental wards were unfit for suicidal inmates.

Arpaio’s refusal to heed that Justice Department’s warning led to at least four more preventable jail deaths.

Months before Thomas Bruce Cooley, 44, was found hanging by his bed sheets in his Madison Street Jail cell, a federal inspector told Arpaio that his psychiatric ward was a tragedy waiting to happen. The 1996 report specifically cautioned that inmates could use “overhanging structures” to hang themselves.

“Given that acutely psychotic patients are housed at Madison jail, psychiatric housing there is dangerous,” the DOJ report stated. “Acute psychiatric patients should not be allowed in this unit unless major structural and staffing deficiencies are corrected.”

After Cooley’s death, at least three of Arpaio’s other psychiatric inmates died in the same manner.

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In 2003, the Arizona House of Representatives passed a bill requiring that jail healthcare meet national standards.

The Department of Justice has also required Arpaio to meet national jail standards.

But neither government body has taken steps to make sure Arpaio is meeting its standards.

And according to the county’s own auditors, he isn’t. They say Arpaio’s jails fail to meet constitutional and state standards required by law.

In 2003, the county hired Jon Bosch, a corrections consultant with 20 years of experience, to audit Arpaio’s jails.

“The current correctional healthcare program at Maricopa County is not in compliance with the basic healthcare rights provided to inmates under the U.S. Constitution,” Bosch concluded. He found that Arpaio’s jails violate the Eighth Amendment prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishment.”

National jail inspectors like Bosch are not bleeding-heart prisoner advocates. They’re a jaded breed familiar with corrections law and have spent decades walking the stinking, cramped corridors of jails. Bosch would be out of a job if he threw claims of constitutional violation around casually in the hundreds of jails he audits.

Attempts to interview Bosch, who still works as a corrections auditor, were unsuccessful.

In addition to constitutional violations, Arpaio’s jails have also broken Arizona law, according to another county-hired inspector. “The Sheriff is required to verify that healthcare services are [in] compliance with nationally accepted correctional healthcare standards. The current program would not qualify,” concluded the 2003 Maricopa County Correctional Health Services Staffing Proposal Draft.

Under Arizona law, Arpaio must obtain certificates showing successful inspections and keep this certification on file.

Despite the statute, when New Times asked to see these certificates, Arpaio spokesman Paul Chagolla said he could not hand them over because the sheriff no longer keeps them. In the next breath, Chagolla assured New Times that the jails do meet the required standards.

Arpaio has paid no more attention to federal mandates.

On December 6, 1999, Arpaio agreed to change a number of jail policies after federal attorneys took the sheriff to court a second time over alleged civil rights abuses.

“We have concluded that unconstitutional conditions exist at the Jails with respect to (1) the use of excessive force against inmates and (2) deliberate indifference to inmates’ serious medical needs,” stated a federal audit of jail conditions.

The DOJ wrote up a civil rights “settlement” that Arpaio signed.

However, records show that not once in the past seven years have the feds checked to see if Arpaio made the changes he promised.

According to local inspections, as well as complaints from inmates, Arpaio ignored the following terms of the settlement:

• “Inmates assigned to tents will have free access to adequate cooled interior areas.”

• “Inmates will have free access to adequate indoor toilet facilities 24 hours per day, and inmates will have adequate access to shower facilities.”

• “All Medical Request Forms received will be triaged by [Correctional Health Services] nurses within 24 hours.”

• “Inmates may make oral requests for medical attention.”

• “When an inmate has not received prescribed medication relating to infectious, chronic, or life-threatening conditions during a regular medication [distribution], the nurse will take appropriate action to ensure that the inmate receives the medication as soon as is feasible.”

When the DOJ put Arpaio in a headlock, he cried “uncle” by claiming he had implemented a list of to-dos. But he hasn’t, and the Justice Department hasn’t made him.

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Health code violations in Arpaio’s kitchens go beyond the usual jailhouse whining about the quality of chow. The conditions cited by inspectors create a breeding climate for disease. Arpaio’s mess halls routinely fail reviews by Maricopa County Environmental Services inspectors — the same inspectors who monitor restaurants and public facilities across the county.

County Attorney Andrew Thomas could literally shut down Arpaio’s jails and arrest the sheriff for criminal public health violations.

That’s exactly what Thomas did last year to a number of Phoenix restaurant owners whose kitchens had fewer violations than Arpaio’s.

During Thomas’ botched “Dirty Dining Crackdown,” he pursued Tepic Restaurant’s owner with criminal charges that resulted in jail time, fines and two years of probation. He also held a press conference to announce the criminal charges against the owners of Ajo Al’s. The owners demanded a trial; Thomas lost.

Another targeted restaurant during this campaign had only four violations. Meanwhile, a single one of Arpaio’s jail kitchens has netted more than 30 such violations in the past two years.

Here’s a glimpse into Arpaio’s kitchens based on county inspection reports from Environmental Services:

• Roaches are frequently spotted swarming behind major appliances, scuttling through food-preparation stations and lurking where food is stored. The presence of flies and rodents is routine.

• “Pest control is not properly performed,” noted one report dryly.

• Just as prevalent are piles of rodent excrement and nests polluting food areas. More alarming, inspectors repeatedly note the presence of rodents and rodent feces in the water wells.

• Sanitation is hardly better. Inspectors report human waste on shower floors, standing water, a frequent lack of hot water and, again, vermin infestations.

While chain gangs outside the jail garner national publicity for Sheriff Joe, his captive pool of labor is not directed to clean the festering conditions inside the jails. Instead, this cesspool breeds contagious infections that healthcare employees can only hope to contain.

When Arpaio’s culture of violence has produced corpses and lawsuits, his staff has destroyed records and faked documents repeatedly.

In fact, Arpaio’s first major legal payout of $8.25 million came as the result of obvious records tampering by the Sheriff’s Office. Attorney Mike Manning had smoking-gun proof that jail employees fabricated a fake health intake report for Scott Norberg (who died after being beaten by guards and strapped into a restraint chair). Not only that, but half of Norberg’s postmortem X-rays were missing, and his name was deleted from the X-ray logbook.

So conclusive was the proof of records destruction that the county opted to pay Norberg’s family to drop the case. In other words, the county’s legal experts looked at the evidence of records-tampering and decided they would be better off not letting the case get to court.

A further obvious effort to destroy records was proved in March 2006, when Arpaio lost a wrongful-death suit filed by the family of Charles Agster III.

During the Agster court case, jail nurse Betty Lewis testified that jail authorities commanded her to create a series of false documents after Agster’s death. Some of Agster’s health records also disappeared from the jail, and his falsified booking number didn’t exist until the day after he was transferred out of the jail into the hospital.

The Agster case also documented a second nurse who collaborated with sheriff’s detention officers to make up fake entries and notes after Agster’s death.

Next month, on January 8, 2008, a trial is scheduled in Maricopa Superior Court in a lawsuit filed by deceased inmate Brian Crenshaw’s family. The family can’t present jail-records evidence because the Sheriff’s Office destroyed it — even after the court ordered it to hand over the evidence.

Crenshaw, 40, was legally blind and serving a short sentence in Tent City for shoplifting. After a documented struggle with Arpaio’s detention officers, Crenshaw was transferred to solitary confinement at the Madison Street Jail. Six days later, he was found comatose in his cell with a broken neck, ruptured intestines, broken toes, and severe internal injuries.

Only sheriff’s guards had contact with Crenshaw in his cell, but Arpaio still maintains that Crenshaw sustained the life-ending injuries when he fell off his four-foot bed.

On September 26, 2006, the court ordered Arpaio’s office to produce the jail’s videotaped recordings that lawyers suspected would have shown officers beating Crenshaw. Then, on August 31, 2007, nearly a year later, the sheriff’s attorney replied that the records had been destroyed — even after multiple requests and court orders to preserve the videotapes.

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In November, New Times requested information about antibiotic-resistant MRSA staph infections and inmate-reported spider bites (which national jail experts say are often actually MRSA or other staph infections) among inmates.

Betty Adams, the jail’s interim healthcare director, officially answered that the jail tracks spider bites. “Data indicates zero occurrences for 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007 year-to-date,” Adams wrote.

Ironically, Arpaio’s spokesmen have said exactly the opposite. On April 23, 2006, Arpaio’s publicists told the Arizona Republic, “Inmates routinely complain about spider bites at Tent City.”

Somehow, jail healthcare officials say they have recorded “zero” spider bites when asked in the context of deadly and contagious MRSA staph infections. Yet inmates “routinely” complain about spider bites when asked in the context of a puff story highlighting animals in the jail.

Whatever the statistics on spider bites actually are, attorney Kathleen Carey, who caught MRSA while visiting her client in jail, says deputies take precautions to protect themselves.

“In court, you’ll often see detention officers wearing gloves. That’s because they don’t want to catch MRSA from the inmates,” Carey says.

Jail healthcare directors reported 41 incidents of “lab confirmed” MRSA infections in the 2006-07 fiscal year. They also reported “zero” spider bites from 2004 to 2007. At the same time, multiple caseworkers, attorneys, and inmates have reported rampant skin infections and spider bites in the jails.

Attorney Carey is living proof that infectious diseases aren’t confined behind bars. They spread to the general public from the jail through lawyers, guards, caseworkers, hospitals, courtrooms, and released inmates.

Other counties and the Centers for Disease Control have targeted MRSA in jails, but jail healthcare officials refuse to produce a policy on the flesh-eating bacteria — if they have one.

Interim Correctional Health director Adams told New Times, “CHS does not maintain a database that shows the number or frequency of categories of health concerns.”

Adams then canceled a previously scheduled interview with New Times to discuss MRSA and other infectious diseases among inmates. She also didn’t produce requested records of MRSA-related deaths in the jails.

Even without official statistics, it isn’t hard to confirm that MRSA is killing inmates. Dr. Patrick O’Neill is one of the last doctors to see patients dying of MRSA at the Maricopa Medical Center, where Arpaio’s office sends dying inmates.

O’Neill says, “The majority of [MRSA] patients I see will come from jail, either the sheriff’s or the prison system’s. You also have to realize the ones I see are the most severe cases. There could be a whole other class of patients that our ER guys see, whereas I only see the nearly dying.”

Requests to interview county hospital emergency room physician Dr. Frank LoVecchio went unanswered. But there’s good reason to believe LoVecchio sees MRSA cases, as well. He just received an $8.9 million federal grant to study MRSA infections.

O’Neil says patients who don’t die from organ failure or other MRSA-related causes require amputation or skin excising. “I only typically see patients who are sick enough to require the inpatient hospitalization and treatment. So there are a whole lot more who have the less-complicated skin and skin-structure infections,” O’Neil says.

O’Neil wouldn’t estimate the actual number of MRSA patients he sees, from the jails or otherwise, but he says, “I do know that it’s increasing, and it’s something we’re very aware of.”

Former inmate Jay Carey had an MRSA infection when he entered the jail. Despite telling jail employees about the contagious and deadly infection, he says he was left in the general jail population and didn’t see a jail physician until the day before his release.

In a court complaint, Carey also says a jail nurse then told him and his attorney, “We handle these MRSA cases all the time. We know what we’re doing.”

In all fairness, MRSA thrives in jails and prisons across the country. It’s just that other jails are doing something about the problem. For example:

• Los Angeles County Jail authorities identified MRSA as a major problem in 2002, and invited federal and clinical researchers in to help study and contain the MRSA “superbug.”

• In October of this year, the Tulsa County Jail in Oklahoma scrubbed its entire 1,700-cell facility with a chemical bacteria killer that targeted MRSA.

• County jails in Kentucky created a MRSA training course so corrections officers can identify MRSA-infected inmates within 24 hours and take them to health officials.

Meanwhile, Maricopa County inmates report skin infections weeks before treatment — if they get medical attention at all. As the infections ooze, they contaminate the overcrowded cells and spread to other inmates.

Recent figures estimate that 70 percent of inmates are pretrial detainees. Meaning many of them will soon walk out of court hearings and back to their lives outside jail.

One inmate tells of getting the infection on her buttock after she sat on a toilet in the jail. Inmates with skin infections interviewed for this story reported a two-to-three-week wait to see a jail physician — even after filling out medical requests to report staph or skin infections.

“The operation of the jail facilities is a constitutional mandate of the sheriff and the delivery of medical services within the jail system falls within that constitutional mandate,” Arpaio wrote in an October 7, 2004, memo to the County Board of Supervisors.

This proves that Sheriff Joe Arpaio clearly understands that he is responsible for the conditions in his jails — even though he does little to improve them.

The decrepit health and sanitary conditions within Arpaio’s jails breed lawsuits as well as disease.

The cost to taxpayers to finance this culture of cruelty is $41.4 million, and counting.

The $41.4 million is just the edge of the cesspool — a single result of standards that have long made Arpaio’s jails the target of investigations from both the federal government and advocates like Amnesty International.

Stephen Lemons
Lessee here . . . three-aught-decimal point-aught-four, and eleven-decimal point-three-five equals . . . ?
Subject(s):
Joe Arpaio, Russell Pearce, Anderson’s Fifth EstateSee, reporter John Dickerson’s cover story “Inhumanity Has a Price” (December 20), part of New Times’ “Target Practice” series, called Sheriff Joe Arpaio out as the most-sued Sheriff in the United States, costing county taxpayers a whoppin’ $41.4 million in lawsuit-related money because of the inhumane conditions in his jails and the numerous in-custody deaths occurring in them.

Even if you don’t give a hummingbird’s heinie about how prisoners are treated in Joe’s gulags, you should at least care that such cases vacuum moolah out of your wallet. Well, unless you’re a complete Arpaio-suckup. You know, like the faux-journos at KPNX Channel 12.

These fourth-estate nimrods did a short news segment on Dickerson’s cover story, asking MCSO flack Paul Chagolla for a comment. Chagolla, or “Chicken Little” as he’s known at MCSO HQ, spewed a non-denial denial.

“Most of what the New Times says are lies and innuendos,” squawked Chagolla. “We won’t dignify this with a response.”

If Channel 12’s fourth-estaters had bothered to check it out for themselves, they could’ve easily found that all the numeral facts came from federal court dockets and from Maricopa County Risk Manager Peter Crowley.

In response to a query from New Times, Crowley sent records covering payouts during Joe’s tenure.

“For the period January 1, 1993, to [November 29, 2007], the county has paid $30,039,928.75 on Sheriff Department General Liability claims,” state the docs. “This figure includes all payments, attorney fees, other litigation expenses, settlements, payments on verdicts, etc.”

Additionally, New Times asked Crowley how much the lawsuit insurance policy that also covers the sheriff has cost taxpayers. Crowley croaked, “The county has paid for General Liability coverage for the period 3-1-95 to 3-1-08 total premiums of $11,345,609.50.”

Keep in mind that this liability coverage figure is high, in part, because of all those lawsuit payoffs to relatives of dead inmates.

From 1995 to 1998, the county paid $328,894 a year for an insurance policy with a $1 million deductible.

Today, Maricopa County pays a yearly premium of $1.2 million for outside insurance with a $5 million deductible. For any lawsuit that costs $5 million or less, the county foots the entire bill. It’s the best policy the county can buy because of Arpaio’s terrible track record.

This truculent tweeter knows adding is, like, real hard for the county’s top law dawg and his goons, but even a freakin’ fourth-grader can punch $30.04 into a calculator, press the plus sign and add $11.35 to get the figure of $41.39 million, then round that out to $41.4.

The Bird’s beginning to understand why the Sheriff’s Office is waist-deep in its own sea of red ink. The MCSO doesn’t have a calculator! All the time they’ve been tryin’ to do their maths like Jethro Bodine in The Beverly Hillbillies. You know, with their fingers and toes. Once you get into them millions, with all them “aughts,” you start to run outta protuberances.

The week Dickerson’s story ran, this feathered fiend caught up with the county’s numerically challenged top cop near M.D. Pruitt’s Home Furnishings, where he was holding court among a gaggle of dentally challenged nativists. The Bird hollered at Joe, asking him, “Hey, when are we taxpayers getting our $41 million back?”

Joe first derided our accounting skills, telling us math wasn’t our strong suit, then claimed, “That was because of CHS, not me,” CHS being Correctional Health Services, the county entity that provides healthcare to inmates.

Bzzzzzt. Wrong again, Grecian Formula head!

The lawsuit figure does not include CHS. Perhaps Joe forgot to take his Alzheimer’s medicine that day. Or could it be that he really doesn’t know how much he’s cost taxpayers? Come to think of it, Chief Deputy David “Jabba the Hutt” Hendershott — the guy who really runs the MCSO — likely doesn’t bother ol’ Joe with such nigglin’ details.

Now on to the figure mentioned in the Dickerson piece of 2,150 “prison condition” lawsuits since 2004. Anyone with two licks of sense can go online at pacer.psc.uscourts.gov, or dockets.justia.com, enter “Arpaio” into the federal court docket, then count the lawsuits that name “prison conditions” as the cause. Count back to 2004, and as of mid-December, that number was more than 2,150.

The same search for the top jail custodians in L.A., New York, Chicago, and Houston nets a total of only 43 “prison condition” lawsuits.

Remember, those 2,150 lawsuits against Arpaio are only in federal court. There are hundreds more listed online with the Maricopa County Superior Court, at superiorcourt.maricopa.gov/docket/civilcourtcases/.

This heron can only hope that if no one at the MCSO can do the math, maybe the voters can. Meanwhile, The Bird will be counting the days until the general election for sheriff.