Sheriff Joe Arpaio's tenure in Maricopa County featured unconstitutional "jail cams," a dangerous "posse" program with untrained volunteers, and severe neglect in tent city jails that caused at least 160 deaths, including miscarriages from denied prenatal care. Despite over 2,200 federal lawsuits and defiance of court orders, Arpaio received a presidential pardon after being convicted of criminal contempt for ignoring immigration injunctions. His legacy of viral spectacles and human rights abuses underscores the corrosive impact of unchecked political power on American justice systems. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Taking Control of Your Money00:02:16
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On a recent episode of the podcast Money and Wealth with John O'Brien, I sit down with Tiffany the Budginista Aliche to talk about what it really takes to take control of your money.
What would that look like in our families if everyone was able to pass on wealth to the people when they're no longer here?
We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
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Will Farrell's Big Money Players and iHeart Podcast presents soccer moms.
So I'm Leanne.
Yeah.
This is my best friend Janet.
Hey.
And we have been joined at the hip since high school.
Absolutely.
A redacted amount of years later.
We're still joined at the hip.
Just a little bit bigger hips.
This is a podcast.
We're recording it as we tailgate our youth soccer games in the back of my Honda Odyssey with all the snacks and drinks.
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They had a BOGO.
Well, then you got it.
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I'm Ana Navarro, and on my new podcast, Bleep with Ana Navarro, I'm talking to the people closest to the biggest issues happening in your community and around the world.
Because I know deep down inside right now, we are all cursing and asking what the bleep is going on.
Every week, I'm breaking down the biggest issues happening in our communities and around the world.
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The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal00:16:01
The Justice Department, through we counted four presidential administrations, failed these victims.
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You want me to do it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That was good.
That was good.
You're a natural.
You're natural.
This is behind the basketball.
Noah was better.
All right.
Thank you, Sophie.
I didn't need to hear that today, but podcast, Bad People, where I get shown up at my only talent, A Tonally introducing a podcast by today's guest, Noah.
Noah Schachtman of The Daily Beast, soon to be of Rolling Stone.
Noah, how has life changed for you in the last, I don't know, seven minutes since we concluded part one?
I ate a lot of meat with my hands.
Oh, good.
Hand meat.
Yeah, everybody loves it at handmeat.
Yeah, yeah.
Now, it was my wife brought back some leftovers, which I shoved into my face.
It was delicious.
Oh, good.
Yeah.
You ate hand meat.
I drank a bunch of kratom.
We're both ready to kick off and talk about Sheriff Joe Arpaio in the new millennium, Noah.
Very exciting.
Very exciting.
Yeah.
So Joe started off the 21st century with a bang.
In 2000, he launched his jail cam, one of the very first live stream websites, with the stated hope that people would see how horrible his jails were and thus avoid committing crimes.
Now.
That's not why he did it.
He did it for a publicity stunt.
He did it as a publicity stunt.
He is ahead of the eight ball on this one, you know?
If you're live streaming in 2000, you are on the ground floor, you know?
Oh, yeah.
That's about to be done.
Mr. Beast.
Yeah.
So by this point, Joe's deputies had already blatantly entrapped at least one person.
And the degree to which he actually saw jail cam as a prevention strategy is debatable.
I might argue that this was an early example of the cruelty is the point style logic in mass American politics, you know?
The cameras were not there to scare criminals.
They were there to entertain Americans who wanted to see people they had otherized.
Joe knew this, and he knew that providing suffering porn to the masses could be a key part of his continued relevance.
The first day his jail cams went online, more than 3 million people tried to visit.
Now, if you drop a video today that gets 3 million views in its first day, that's not bad in 2021, no?
Like, this is 2000.
Like, that's huge trap.
That's the entire internet.
Yeah, that's the whole internet.
And the website goes down immediately.
It takes him a long time to be able to, like, handle that kind of strain.
Initially, four cameras made up the jail cam program, which allowed visitors to view detainees being led into jail, being fingerprinted, and being taken to their holding areas.
Quite frustratingly, Joe claims that a private company paid for the project, and I have not found more information on who that was.
In an interview with the New York Times shortly after the cameras were installed, Joe claimed, we get hundreds of emails from all over the world, and 95% love it and feel it's a great deterrent.
When people pointed out that the folks shown on his cameras were all innocent until proven guilty, he actually had a pretty smart response, unfortunately.
Quote, Sheriff Arpaio compares the unfiltered viewing with news photographs of crime suspects or even the televised chase involving OJ Simpson.
He wasn't even arrested yet, the sheriff said.
What's wrong with it in a jail?
Which is fucked up morally logic, but is a good response, like a smart response.
You know, though, back to the 3 million for a second.
Maybe that's just, I mean, first of all, who knows if that figure is true.
And secondly, maybe you just got like a denial of service attack.
He got DDoxed.
Something awful went after him.
Yeah, like, I'm sorry, I don't think like the entirety of the 2000 internet was like, let me...
I mean, I was on the internet in 2000.
Yeah, same.
You know, I don't think the entirety of the 2000 internet was like, let me check out this suffering porn.
That just doesn't seem true.
That number gets reported by a lot of news agencies covering him at the time, but I think they are relying on him for those numbers.
Yeah.
I have no way of, but I also have no way of verifying what the real numbers were.
It does seem to have been popular.
And I'll explain the degree to which it was popular in just a second here.
But yeah, I think you're right.
Obviously, when you're only getting your only source for the number is Joe Arpaio, you have to question that source.
And again, it's kind of frustrating the degree to which a lot of people don't.
That said, if you're writing about, if you're working with the New York Times and writing about the internet in the year 2000, you are probably 57 years old.
You don't understand anything about the internet.
So that is true.
Very true.
Now, that New York Times article ended with a whiff of frustration from Joe, noting that while the website had a disclaimer warning viewers that they might see extreme and disturbing situations, what happened on camera was mostly boring paperwork.
Joe seems to have been frustrated by this, and he discussed wanting to add audio and expand the reach of the cameras to make it more interesting.
And he did.
In 2001, cameras were added to the men's and women's restroom.
I know, right?
I know.
So then it becomes literal jail porn?
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly where this is headed, Noah.
Your instincts have served you well.
People immediately, people with very specific fetishes, realized that there were cameras in the ladies' room of a jail and started linking them on porn sites.
Like, obviously, that's what's going to happen.
Now, this pretty quickly became a problem for the department.
And a spokesperson claimed that stated that inmates were only visible due to a misalignment, which was soon corrected.
They also claimed that no women could be seen using the toilet, which I find questionable at best given the previous statement.
The most disturbing part of the whole saga is this line from a write-up by the Los Angeles Times.
Jack McIntyre, an attorney for the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, told the Arizona Republic that a short partition blocked the camera's view of the toilet itself.
No juveniles would have been displayed unless, quote, they look older and lie to us.
So there's no child porn unless a kid lies.
Or if they look old, maybe it's a hard 14.
Oh my God.
So America's Sheriff is fresh off of setting up a teenage pyromaniac for a fake assassination attempt.
If this is in part one, if you haven't listened, is now become, America's Sheriff has now become a child pornographer.
Well, you can't prove it, Noah.
You can't prove that any children were on those cameras.
And if they were, it's because they lied or they looked older.
So no one committed a crime is the important thing here.
Yeah.
Okay.
So in 2004, a court ruled that Sheriff Joe's jail cameras violated the rights of pre-trial detainees who are, again, by definition, not criminals.
Now, for the last several, so obviously, jail campus, but he got what he wanted out of it, right?
He got the PR boost, right?
He got everybody covering his jail camps.
That's all this is, you know?
You want to get a couple of news cycles out of it.
That's all you ever hope for.
You don't care if the program gets declared illegal a couple of years later.
It's the same with the assassination attempt.
That guy was exonerated four years later.
Arpaio still got the news cycle.
That's all he ever wanted.
Now, for the last several years, Joe made repeated claims that he could easily become the governor of Arizona if he wanted.
And I don't think this is him lying.
He was, for like a decade or more, the most popular politician in Arizona, very consistently.
There's a good chance he would have been able to win the governorship if he decided to run for it.
But despite solid polling, in 2002, he decided not to run, saying, I want to go out into the sunset as a law enforcement officer.
He would remain in office for 14 more years.
So I don't know why.
Yeah.
It's weird, right?
That he doesn't go for governor.
I think it's maybe because he would have had to do shit other than just like torture people and do news interviews.
No, no, that's not the why I said what.
I said what because this guy was still in office till 2016.
2016, yeah.
It's fucking bonkers.
That was my reaction.
It is out of its mind how long this motherfucker is in doing his job.
Like this guy is like definitely on some like neo-Abu Ghraib level torturing at minimum.
Yeah.
Then it's like there's the fake assassination plot that puts an innocent man, you know, in these 10 cities for four years.
Then there's like, okay, maybe it was only he was running an adult-born site.
There were probably no children photographed jail camps.
And then this dude keeps going for more than a dozen years.
Yeah.
I can't believe it.
It's outrageous.
It's really fucked up.
And I have to give credit.
Like, you're going to note that we have a lot of sources for this episode.
Like, half of them are different articles from the Phoenix New Times, who for like 20-something years, like bit onto this guy like a bulldog and deeply reported every fucked up thing he did.
And eventually it did matter.
It did not matter soon enough as a journalist.
You don't want to wait 22 years or so for this to have an impact, but it does eventually break through.
And credit goes to them because they really like, they had some people who were who stuck to him like glue.
Now, it's here I should note, Noah, as I talked about briefly, teased really last episode.
In the 1990s, Joe Arpaio started a posse.
Now, this was what it sounds like.
A group of volunteer amateurs, untrained, who were given certain law enforcement powers and partnered off with real cops to do cop shit, or at least Joe's version of that.
Some of these men were allowed to carry firearms.
Much of what they did was publicity driven.
It became an annual spectacle for members of Joe's posse to patrol malls and shopping centers armed during the holiday season.
Joe's posse would max out at about 3,500 men, many of whom were taught to breach rooms and again, carry weapons.
They're doing like armed entry trainings and shit.
What the hell?
Hold it.
This guy's whole job is to run the jail.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, he's got, he's managing the sheriff's department, which does law enforcement shit, right?
Like if a town doesn't have a cops of its own, it's the sheriff's deputies they call, you know.
Sure, but these guys weren't like basically...
This isn't like the Phoenix PD.
No.
Like, this guy's gonna be a good idea.
In fact, the Phoenix PD gets very angry at them in a number of occasions.
This guy's main gig is to run the jail.
Yeah.
And instead, he gets 3,500 volunteer hoolings to patrol the mall on Christmas.
Don't worry, they do other fucked up shit.
In 2004, news broke about a prostitution sting carried out in November of 2003 that in the county attorney's words violated accepted standards of professionalism.
Now, what this means in practice is that as part of one of his big ongoing media pushes, Sheriff Joe sent dozens of undercover deputies and members of his posse, 60 men in total, a mix of deputies and posse members, to do a huge bust on sex workers.
They arrested almost 60 women and 10 or so Johns.
At first, this looked like normal Arpaio shit.
He held a big press conference.
There were news stories.
He claimed that this was the largest single-day bust of sex workers in county history.
But then the real story trickled out.
From the Phoenix New Times, quote, the county attorney's office said that some undercover deputies and certain posse members engaged in oral sexual contacts, breast fondling, genital contact, masturbation, nudity, and other behavior which is contrary to professional law enforcement and legitimate public policy.
The techniques undermine prosecution by reducing the likelihood of conviction.
A key factor to note is that all that is needed to establish commission of a crime in a prostitution case is for two people to discuss the exchange of money for sex.
No sex act need occur, nor does anyone have to remove a shred of clothing.
Therefore, prostitution cases are the simplest to make, virtual no-brainers for cops.
Here's an example of how posse memper Glenn Kaufman handled an encounter with an alleged prostitute.
Last October 29th, Kaufman drove to a massage parlor on West Thomas Road and agreed to pay $40 for a 30-minute rub down.
A woman in her early 50s told Kaufman to take off his clothes.
Kaufman agreed.
He then lay face first on a massage table and the woman began rubbing his back.
She started to chew on my left ear, put her tongue in my ear, and whispered words to the effect of me not to be surprised if she ran her tongue over my balls in my shaft until I came all over her.
Kaufman states in his signed police report.
She told me that for an additional $100, she did the massage in the nude and would give me oral sex.
I told her I would get $100.
I got off the table, took the $100 out of my trouser pocket, and gave it to her.
At this point, a crime had been committed, and Kaufman should have made the bust.
But the sheriff's posse member was far from done.
He continued to pay for sexual acts from her for quite some time.
The article goes into much more detail about what this posse member did and what other posse members and deputies did.
I'm not going to belabor the point.
The gist of it is that Arpaio's men, a mix of cops and volunteers, were straight up using prostitutes for sex and then arresting them once they got their rocks off so they didn't have to pay.
That's what they were doing.
Oh my God.
Oh my God.
So this is wild.
It's incredible.
So, okay, so this guy starts out his career in drug enforcement pretending to be a pimp.
Yep.
And then like 50 years that may be what they called the treatment, the full circle.
50 years later, he's sending his crew out to get blowjobs and then instead of paying for them, arresting the blowjobbers.
Yeah.
That is fucking nuts, man.
Yeah.
It's pretty great.
Oh my God.
It's so evil.
The good thing is all of these women had their charges dropped.
Like no one actually got because what the police were doing and these posse members were doing was blatantly criminal, right?
Like, yeah, nobody actually got in trouble.
I mean, some posse.
They still probably had to send.
Wait a minute.
They got the did they have to go to Arpaio's 10th city and you know, I think they're like 130 degree E.
Yeah.
You know, it's like, okay, great.
They got their charges dropped, but still it fucking sucked for whatever the 8, 12, you know, 24 hours it was.
Yeah, it's definitely not trying to say it was not horribly fucked up, but at least none of these women wound up with fucking felonies, you know?
But yeah, it's like just incredibly fucked up.
And it shows, we'll talk more about his posse later, Noah.
There's more to say about this posse.
But like, that's the kind of shit the posse got up to.
Oh my God.
Joe Arpaio's Demographic War00:08:10
Now, 2006 is the year when things really started to shift for Joe Arpaio, and he became the man we know him as today.
Again, he'd started his career focusing on as a sheriff, focusing on the crimes he'd gone after as a lawman, drugs and sex and violence and the like.
But 2006 is when he really started to shift his focus towards immigrants.
One important fact to note about Joe Arpaio is that while he's always exhibited a degree of personal racism, racism was not initially central to his political campaigns.
He ran for sheriff the first time by making two points.
One was that the existing sheriff was shitty and wasting money, and the other was that he could reduce crime by doing drug war bullshit.
By the time he settled into his third term, though, the United States had gone through some pretty significant shifts.
In 2001, you may remember this, Noah.
In 2001, the Tim Allen movie Big Trouble debuted, and it was followed shortly thereafter by a terrorist attack on New York City.
And both of these events changed our nation forever.
The Tim Allen movie was the big one.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah, totally.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nothing was ever the same after that.
The war on Tim Allen continues until this day.
Until this day.
Tim Allen hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan with the Tim Allen band.
Yeah, we can workshop that idea.
Wow, that is a, that was a dead, are you a dad?
That dad joke was really bad.
Tim Allen ban?
Come on, man.
I think it could be a fun ABC show.
Tim Allen is like a, like, like a conservative suburban dad who, through some quirk of circumstance, moves into Kandahar.
We can make that work.
It gives a whole new definition to tool time.
So, um, obviously, by the time Sheriff Joe is in his third term, everyone's worried about terrorism, right?
Drugs are not as big a concern.
You know, crime is down.
Like 2006, crime is down to its lowest level in generations, right?
So terrorism is like the big thing everybody's freaking out over.
And the right-wing media is particularly warning people in the early aughts that a whole bunch of terrorists are sure any day now going to cross into the country via Mexico.
Despite the fact that this has never happened, to my knowledge, it's a thing they keep harping over.
And over the next few years, the number of undocumented immigrants into the United States began to rise.
And by 2006, border crisis was a term Democratic and Republican politicians were dropping constantly.
That year, Joe Biden boasted about voting to add 700 miles to the U.S.-Mexico border fence.
So the immigration and like the border becomes a huge political hot button by 2006.
And again, crime itself is down really low.
So the only way that Joe Arpaio can tickle the amygdala of his electorate and make it seem like he's protecting them from something is to go after immigrants.
And in this case, he's specifically protecting them from demographic change because Arizona, as this election showed, Arizona was rapidly growing less white, a fact that horrified all of these retirees who were, in a lot of cases, pretty racist and made up Joe's base.
He decided to use a state human trafficking law to go after smugglers who were bringing immigrants into the country.
But being Joe Arpaio, he found a way to give this application of the law an added twist to make it much more harmful.
From the New Yorker, the law's target is, of course, smugglers known as coyotes.
But Arpaio and Thomas, who is the attorney for the state, charge undocumented immigrants, the coyote's cargo, as co-conspirators in their own smuggling.
This is a class four felony, which makes the subjects ineligible for bond, so they can't leave his tent jail, and is one reason why Arpaio's jails are so full.
Maricopa is the only one of Arizona's 15 counties that interprets the law this way.
And the Sheriff's Office is the only agency among the 25 in Maricopa that does so.
The others figure, and a few are vocal about it, that their limited resources are better spent fighting serious crime.
So again, he's not super popular at this time with a lot of other law enforcement because he's keeping the jails that the whole county has to use.
Phoenix PD needs to use these jails too, filled with random people who are just trying to live their lives that he's charging with class four felonies because they're smuggling themselves into the country.
Yeah, the using the human smuggling statute to charge the smuggled, not the smuggler.
That is some next level.
Yeah.
Yeah, that is fuckery right there.
I mean, if you really wanted to get into it, you could make some, you could have, we could have a conversation about the ways in which human trafficking laws aimed at protecting sex trafficking victims are used to harm people who are themselves sex workers and in some cases even victims of sex trafficking.
This is not the only time, and he's not the only lawman who's interpreted a law in this way, but he is kind of, he's on the cutting edge here.
And he's not popular among cops around him for doing this.
One of the people he pissed off was George Gascon, who was the police chief in Mesa, which is basically a suburb of Phoenix, but it's a big city.
He's about half a million people in Mesa.
Gascon did not like Arpaio.
He was brought into the job from Los Angeles in order to reduce crime, and he decided a big part of that would be to build trust with communities who traditionally did not trust the cops.
This particularly included Latinos, many of whom were immigrants or had family who were and were thus terrified of people like Joe Arpaio.
Gascon told the New Yorker, quote, they need to believe that you're ethical and honest, that you're not the enemy.
I'm not an open borders man.
I believe we have a problem with illegal immigration, but I want to make sure we don't throw away the Constitution in the process of solving it.
Now, I'm not obviously, I don't think I would agree with George Gaskin on much, but just the point that like other cops who are not open borders types think that like what Joe is doing is fucked up.
And they say so at the time.
Like he's not, he's not surfing on a wave of only positive response.
Other cops are like kind of coming after him in this period, which you have to, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, look, it's like he's playing a cop on TV, right?
Yeah.
And so the actual cops are like, bro, what are you doing?
Yeah.
I mean, this guy failed the test to be a border patrol agent.
Like he literally couldn't handle it, right?
And so then, you know, all these years later, he's got to pretend.
He's got to, now, now that he's, he's got some power, he's got to swing his dick like he's like he's some cartoon version of a border patrol agent.
Meanwhile, the guys that really need to do the gig are like, come on, man, like you got, you got to stop this.
I don't know.
I'm just blown away.
I'm a little bit tongue-tied here, but like, I just can't believe I can't believe it.
I mean, I remember hearing about it, and I still can't believe it.
It's outrageous.
Now, when Joe Arpaio started doing, he starts, he takes his posse and he uses them to do these massive sweeps of immigrant neighborhoods.
And again, he's going into other police departments' turf because he's the sheriff of the county.
So he's not generally, you're not supposed to do shit unless, you know, Meso or Phoenix asks you to come in, right?
Like you're supposed to be focusing mainly on like sheriff's department stuff.
He starts sending not just his officers, but hundreds of volunteer randos into other people's cities to do sweeps of immigrant neighborhoods.
They're busting into like auto shops and grocery stores, pulling people out of their jobs and taking them to spend years in his tent city.
Like pulling people out of their blowjob guys.
The blowjob guys are like, okay, cool.
We've busted the, we've gotten some free blowjobs from prostitutes, then put them in jail.
And then our next one.
Time to destroy some families.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
He's an outrageous piece of shit.
But you know who won't tear people away from their families, Noah.
Raytheon and Family Bonds00:03:40
Well, the good news about Raytheon Noah is that they'll get you with your family.
See, this is the beauty of we like to talk about hexagen on this show here as an explosive compound.
If you want to make sure that the whole family goes, you want hexagen.
That's the hexagon difference.
And that's the Raytheon guarantee.
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We break down budgeting, financial discipline, and how to build real wealth, starting with the mindset shifts too many of us were never ever taught.
Financial education is not always about like, I'm going to get rich.
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If you've ever felt you didn't get the memo on money, this conversation is for you to hear more.
Listen to Money and Wealth with John O'Brien from the Black Effect Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.
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Look, money is something we all deal with, but financial literacy is what helps turn income into real wealth.
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Sex in the City Origins00:15:33
I mean, forgot about it.
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We're back.
And just having a lovely time thinking about Joe Arpaio and the fact that he now has gangs of goons ripping people away from their families and their jobs.
Now, this, again, cops tend to be, they're kind of like cats, right?
When you got a cat, it has a territory.
You throw another cat in that territory.
They're probably going to fight, right?
Cops are kind of the same way.
And Joe Arpaio is really fucking with other cops' territory.
He's coming into these communities.
He's fucking things up.
He's damaging, like in a lot of cases, hurting people's businesses because they're reliant on these people.
So Gaskin, The police chief of Mesa gets really angry about this shit, and he tells the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office that these raids are not welcome in Mesa.
Unfortunately, Gaskin does not have the power to stop Arpaio.
See, the sheriff of Maricopa County has a wide-ranging purview.
There's all these little communities without their own police forces, and state law gives Joe the power to police those towns.
But his deputies can go and do law enforcement shit anywhere in the county, even if other sheriffs or even if other police chiefs don't want his men around.
The best part of this is that, you know, police chiefs are appointed generally.
Sheriffs are elected, so they can't be fired.
Like, no matter how much he pisses people off, unless the voters kick him off, he's staying.
And the voters, like, never or don't vote him out for years and years and years.
No, they love this shit.
The New Yorker wrote about a raid in October of 2008.
Quote: He sent 60 detectives and posse volunteers into Mesa after midnight.
The plan was to raid the Mesa City Hall and the public library to look for undocumented.
Wait, what?
Yeah, yeah, the fucking library in City Hall.
Wait, he sent the blowjob posse into the city hall?
Yeah.
To look for undocumented janitors who, according to the sheriff's office, were suspected of identification theft.
Gaspin was not notified beforehand.
Arpaio claims he did inform someone at Mesa police headquarters about the raid.
A Mesa police officer spotted a large group of heavily armed men in flak jackets gathering silently in a downtown park.
Gaspin, when I asked about the episode, took a deep breath.
It was a very, very dangerous scenario, he said.
In my entire law enforcement career, I have never heard of anything close to this.
His officers managed to identify the armed men, but then had trouble getting a straight story from them.
The raid eventually went forward, monitored by the Mesa police, and resulted in the arrests of three middle-aged cleaning women.
Arpaio's press release said that another 13 suspected illegal immigrants were arrested later at their homes.
So, not just like fucked up moral, they also really reckless.
Like, you could have you could have had two different sets of cops shooting each other up in the city hall over this.
Like, oh my god, this makes like the movie LA Confidential look like a model of effective policing.
It is hard not to look like a good cop next to Joe Arpaio.
Oh, my God.
Like, Rudy Giuliani looks all of a sudden like, you know, a model mayor and law enforcement official.
Yeah, Joe Rizzo in Philadelphia all of a sudden looks like, you know, not a racist authoritarian, but all of a sudden like a model officer.
Yeah, because they don't have just gangs of armed goons busting into City Hall to arrest janitors.
Like, oh my gosh.
It's so fucking bad.
Now, that New Yorker article I found included some incredible context on the PR game Joe had by that point gotten extremely good at playing.
He'd hired an expert, Lisa Allen, who was the wife of one of his officers and someone who would prove to be an extremely savvy public relations expert.
She was hired in 1993, soon after Joe took office.
When Joe would institute a new rule in his tent jail, it was Lisa's job to make sure that rule went viral.
A good case study would be the pink underwear.
In the early aughts, Joe started issuing pink underpants to all of his inmates.
Depending on who asked him, the purpose of this was to stop theft, to emasculate the inmates, or because the color pink has combing properties.
The real purpose was spectacle, because people would make news articles about the Joe's giving his pink underwear to all these hardened criminals.
It was Lisa Allen's job to get the maximum spectacle out of every decision Joe made.
The Phoenix New Times writes about one such moment in 2005, captured for a documentary about Sheriff Joe.
She practically directs Arpaio as he oversees the media spectacle of moving about 2,000 inmates to a new jail, handcuffed together and stripped to their Arpaio-mandated pink underwear.
I want you to look tough, Alan tells Joe as the prisoners mark past.
Just stand there and watch him.
Tap your foot.
I knew, Lisa knew, the minute we put these guys in the pink underwear, that will be what goes on air, Arpaio tells the filmmakers after the inmate parade.
Do you really think that no one is going to show these guys in their pink underwear?
Again, that's why he's doing it.
And he's got this PR lady who, you know, PR people are the greatest evil in the world, I'm of the opinion.
But she gets, yeah, I mean, she, she fucking is a huge part of this, of his success.
She works with him for like 20-something years.
And she's constantly in the news.
How does she spin like the armed attack on City Hall in order to get a couple of janitors?
We arrested a bunch of illegal immigrants.
They were breaking the law.
Committed felonies, dangerous people.
Got him out, got him off the street.
My God.
No tolerance in Joe Arpaio's Maricopa County.
Yeah.
In 2008, Barack Obama was elected president.
Joe Arpaio was not happy with this, and he immediately went on the warpath, demanding an investigation into the president's birth certificate.
He eventually launched one himself through the sheriff's department, staffed by posse members.
Do you remember this whole Joe Arpaio investigation?
Yeah.
He was the OG.
He was the OG.
Not the birth, but he's early in that.
Yeah.
Like when Trump is starting to whine about the birth certificate, he launches, he sees that this is the right-wing cause celeb, and he opens an investigation staffed by his posse for his sheriff's department into this.
So it's like, okay, guys, you smoked it on the prostitute entrapment move.
You killed it on the attacking City Hall.
Next up, find Barack Obama.
Investigate the president's birth certificate.
Oh, my God.
Yep.
You know, my old man is a book author and actually wrote a book about Obama's dad and his trip here to the United States.
And it's like this completely moving, amazing story.
And there's no question, unlike with Joe Arpaio's family, there's no question about whether he came here legally.
And it's just, it's so vile that the first black president, they just immediately try to turn him into the other.
He's a dangerous foreigner.
Yeah, we can't say enough about how disgusting the whole fucking birther thing is.
And Arpaio, I think the thing that's grossest to me about this is he doesn't start this.
He just cashes in on it.
He just sees, oh, we can make bank on this shit.
People are going to eat this up if I open an investigation.
He knew.
And then crime is way down in my area.
Yeah, I've done every stunt in the book.
Now I got one more card to play.
Yep.
Investigate the president.
Oh, my God.
We have some footage behind the scenes of him and Lisa Allen talking about this PR stunt.
And we knew, number one, Joe is the entire time bragging about how many donations he's going to get from racists.
Like he's just laughing about how much money he's going to get sent over this, right?
Like what a big profit thing it's going to be for him.
Lisa Allen makes fun of him because of how racist and dumb this is.
In a meeting filmed for a 2014 documentary, she says, you might as well go to your press conference in big old clown shoes and a big old nose.
This is his own PR person.
Yeah, his own PR person.
In 2010, Joe started a webcast and Lisa told viewers during this like kind of proto-podcast thing, Sheriff Joe is referred to as a media hog.
He's referred to as a media whore, but there's always been a reason behind it.
And the most obvious reason was political power.
But over the years, it morphed into something more for Joe.
When you read enough articles about him that include interviews with people that knew and worked with him for periods of time, significant periods of time, it becomes clear that sometime in the mid-aughts, right around when he pivoted hard on immigration, he got terminal viral brain disease, which is what happens when someone gets addicted to causing outrage online.
Today, it's better known as Glenn Greenwald syndrome.
But Joe Arpaio...
Sorry.
But Joe Arpaio.
Yeah.
Let me be clear.
Glenn Greenwald has never sent train, has never sent teams of armed Yahoos into City Hall.
That is.
And Glenn Greenwald, let me make this clear, has never sent posse in to entrap sex workers.
No, he has not.
He has not.
That is an area where Joe Arpaio has an edge on him.
I also don't think Joe Arpaio is nice to dogs, and I'm fairly certain that Glenn Greenwald is great with dogs.
So if we're being fair here, but he does have this, he has this.
I'm going to read you a quote from a 2009 New York article that I think gets at what I'm trying to say here.
There is a, there's clearly something going on to his head that I think is the result of how bad chasing fame in this viral troll way is for you, right?
It's this thing we see it in a million public people today, right?
Like basically every public person has a version of this, this going on to their brain.
But Arpaio gets it really early.
He might be the first online man, you know, like in the ways.
Yeah.
Right.
So I'm going to quote from this New Yorker article.
I think it makes the point well.
Mary Rose Wilcox, who is Latina and the only Democrat on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, remembers a quite different sheriff.
Arpaio was not like this before, she told me.
He was flamboyant, but I don't know this guy.
For Wilcox, the last straw came this February, when Arpaio marched more than 200 undocumented immigrants, shackled together, to a new tent jail, parading them before news cameras.
Arpaio had staged prisoner marches before.
In 2005, he forced nearly 700 prisoners wearing nothing but pink underwear and flip-flops to shuffle four blocks through the Arizona heat, pink handcuffed together to a new jail.
When they arrived, one prisoner was made to cut a pink ribbon for the cameras.
This elaborate degradation, which is remembered fondly by Sheriff Joe's fans, was ostensibly in the name of security.
The men were strip searched both before and after the march.
But Arpaio also told reporters, I put them on the street so everybody could see them.
He marched another 900 this April.
So I don't know.
It's interesting to me what Wilcox reports, right?
This woman who has no vested interest in making him sound good, who has been a political on the different side of the aisle for him for a while, but was friendly with him and says that, like, this changes him.
And there's another quote I'm going to read from that article about Joe Arpaio has a Colbert report appearance in 2009.
And it's kind of gross.
Yeah, I'm just going to read it.
We were in New York and he was about to be interviewed on the Colbert Report.
Is this the green room? He asked.
These walls are blue.
Are they going to powder me?
The producer, an intense young woman, persisted.
Don't try to be funny, she said.
He will be funnier than you.
Arpaio shrugged.
He wasn't familiar with Colbert's show.
I'm pretty funny, he said, from a rumpled manila envelope.
He pulled two pairs of pink boxer shorts.
I brought the underwear, he said.
The producer stared.
An assistant looked on helplessly.
Then the producer reached for the shorts.
Thanks, she said.
Do you want me?
Don't you want me to take these on the show?
No.
Arpaio looked nonplussed.
Well, at least let me sign them.
He autographed the shorts.
One pair for Colbert out of jail and one for the producer's son.
The Colbert segment was, yeah, it's just like that's something wrong with a guy, too.
Like, not that you should feel bad for this monster, but like, that's not, that's something wrong with a dude.
Right.
That is symbol of a broken brain.
Yeah, that's a broken brain.
Yeah.
You know, I was thinking earlier about Michael Flynn, the general turned Trumpist maniac.
Yeah.
And how so many people that served with him in Afghanistan and Iraq were totally baffled by who this guy had become and that, you know, he was a little bit, you know, original thinker, let's say, in the mid-2000s.
But by the time he'd gotten, you know, into the 2010s, just this guy's brain cracked in half and just became like this weird conspiracy peddling, you know, anything for fun troll.
It's so weird.
It is like you get addicted to the outrage.
You get addicted to the trolling and you start to maybe believe your own nonsense.
I don't know.
It's just, it's so weird.
And there's so many of these guys now out today that are like, you know, if they're like a Greg Kelly or a Charlie Kirk or, you know, your boy Ben Shapiro, like that are just addicted to being horrible morons.
It's crazy.
Their brains have broken.
Yeah, it's really bleak because I don't know.
You know, I've heard a number of theories about like guys like this who have this broadly normal career for a while and then like lose their mind at a certain point, seemingly.
Guys like Flynn and stuff.
Tragic Deaths in Jail00:09:08
And I don't know.
I think the internet is doing a kind of damage to our brains that the present state of neuroscience isn't well suited towards analyzing, but we will eventually come to understand the scope in a pretty profound way.
Like there's something.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's like, forget long COVID.
It's like, there's like long Twitter brain bug.
Yeah, long Twitter brain.
Yeah.
Now that Colbert segment was brutally awkward.
And first off, it's kind of frustrating that Stephen had him on in the first place.
Arpaio did it to plug one of his memoirs and Colbert obliged him in that.
But Joel's whole, Joe's whole appearance on the show is very revealing.
The other guest that night was Ken Quinn, who was the second mate from a container ship that was famously hijacked near Somalia that April.
He was one of the guys with Captain Phillips, right?
Oh, yeah.
Captain Phillips, right?
So this guy has just gotten out of being captured and stuff.
He tells his story.
The audience is very moved.
They give him a standing ovation.
Pretty normal for a guy who's just been through like a deaf-defying experience like that.
But Joe gets really jealous because this other guy's getting like more attention than him.
So when it was his turn, he tells Stephen Colbert this.
The Republic did a poll last week.
Who's your hero?
And I beat out Tillman.
I beat all these guys.
I'm not bragging.
I'm just saying.
He's referring to Pat Tillman.
Pat Tillman.
The NFL star from the Arizona Cardinals, who then went to Afghanistan and got killed shortly thereafter.
Oh my god.
You can listen in the army.
Yeah.
Bigger hero than that guy.
Yeah, yeah.
Got way more gunfights, too.
Totally happened.
Now to Turkey.
I could out-type Pat Tillman, that's for sure.
So while Sheriff Joe, it's just such a weird brag, like, this guy just got kidnapped, man.
Let him have his moment in the sun.
Right.
Right.
He got kidnapped by the smiling pirate.
Yeah.
No big deal.
No big deal.
While Sheriff Joe enjoyed being a celebrity sheriff, doing photo ops with every major right-wing politician and showing up on TV constantly, his inmates continued to suffer.
One case study was Ambret Spencer.
In 2008, she was arrested for drunk driving.
And months later, while her case made its way through the court system, she got pregnant.
Now, at this time, when she gets pregnant, she's in treatment.
She's not drinking.
And Ambret, who is black, was eventually sentenced and was sent to Joe Arpaio's tent city to do, I think, six months or something.
So she goes through the late stages of her pregnancy in Joe Arpaio's tent city.
Doctor visits prior to her incarceration confirmed that the fetus was healthy.
But after a month in Sheriff Joe's custody, she grew terribly ill.
Now, we don't know specifically why.
That year alone, at least four other pregnant inmates reached out to the Phoenix New Times to report miscarriages or stillbirths in Arpaio's tent city, tent jail, whatever you want to call it.
They suggest a wide variety of causes.
The food Joe feeds his inmates was often rotting.
The water well was infested with mice and mice feces since 2005.
And mice carry the toxoplasma parasite that can cause birth defects.
Prenatal vitamins were also forbidden for pregnant inmates.
To cut costs, Joe made sure to avoid hiring medical staff with proper training.
The night Ambret got sick, the nurse on duty had no prenatal education.
Despite Ambrett's severe pain, the nurse decided her case was not an emergency.
An hour later, Ambret passed out.
The nurse checked her blood pressure and realized it was fatally low.
She couldn't even get an IV into the woman's arm.
By the time Spencer was finally taken to the hospital, she had been in severe pain and kept from seeing a doctor for nearly four hours.
Her child was delivered dead.
The cause was placental abruption, a condition caused by internal bleeding.
The treatment is immediate delivery, and this was a very late pregnancy.
The baby would have probably survived if she had been taken to a hospital immediately and had the baby delivered.
The most horrifying detail about that story is that for so Joe had specific policies when his inmates gave birth that they were not allowed to hold their children after birth.
It was to be taken from them immediately.
The staff violated that rule in this case to let her hold her dead child.
And directly.
Now, I'm sure that Arpaio's allies in the conservative part of Arizona, who are pro-life, of course, were outraged by this and hated him for violating their pro-life principles, right?
I don't think they there doesn't seem to have been any kind of dust up.
I mean, the Phoenix New Times made a big deal about it, but none of his voters cared.
It did not harm him in the next election.
Now, the death of Ambret Spencer's baby did not make it into any statistics about death in Sheriff Joe's tent jail.
As a rule, deaths of inmates very rarely did.
In 2015, the New Times attempted to find out how many people actually died in his jail.
They spent six months waiting for records requests from Joe Arpaio's office to no avail.
Eventually, they were forced to check other government databases where they found at least 160 reported deaths.
Quote, but that is an estimate.
160?
Yeah, is the minimum.
That's all they were able to find evidence of because, again, Joe wouldn't give them any data on this.
The Sheriff's Department has deliberately obfuscated how many people are dying in the tenth jails.
Oh, my God.
The truth is.
That seems like a very high number of people dying in.
We'll talk about how high it is.
The truth is that no outside authority keeps track of how many people die from brutality, neglect, disease, bad health, or old age in Arpaio's jails.
Federal Judge Neil Wake twice has ruled that medical care is so deficient in the jails as to be unconstitutional.
The Department of Justice supposedly monitors conditions in the jails, but has shown little or no appetite for confronting Arpaio.
What my research discovered is that people hang themselves in the jail at a rate that dwarfs other county lockups.
And many of the deaths are classified as having occurred in the county hospital or in a cell without further explanation.
People die and no one asks how.
No one asks why.
During the reign of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, research requested and provided from the coroner's office showed 157 deaths.
In and of itself, that number is not necessarily out of line with jail deaths in other jurisdictions.
But digging into this data raises troubling questions, particularly when compared with jails across America.
Suicide is an all-too-frequent consequence of incarceration.
In jailhouse deaths across the nation, the U.S. Department of Justice notes the following rates of suicide over a three-year period from 2000 to 2002.
Los Angeles jails, 11%.
New York jails, 9%.
Cook County jails, 6%.
Philadelphia jails, 14%.
Harris County jails, 13%.
Dade County jails, 6%.
Now, during that same period, the suicide rate among jail deaths in Sheriff Joe Arpaio's lockups was 24%.
Yeah.
In 2008, two reporters from the East Valley Tribune, a Maricopa County paper, did a five-part study into the MCSO's operations.
They found that, due to the sheer amount of resources Arpaio devoted to going after immigrants, response times to emergency calls to the sheriff's office had increased by a significant margin.
Arrest rates had dropped, and dozens of violent crimes had not been investigated.
The series won a Pulitzer.
Four months after it was published, Joe Arpaio won re-election.
Oh my God.
This guy really is.
He's a super villain.
He's causing more crime than he's fixing or that he's stopping.
He's getting people killed left and right.
24% suicide rate.
He's torturing these people at minimum, sending out crazy posses of armed Yahoos to terrorize these cities and neighborhoods and even its own city hall.
You know, denying pregnant women medical treatment and making them eat mouse species water.
This guy is like, what is it?
You know, he's like, you know, a saw bad guy.
He's like, he's a mustache-twirling fucking monster.
Holy shit.
Yeah.
I knew this guy was bad, but I didn't realize it was like this.
Yeah, it's, and to be clear, it's 24% of jail deaths or suicides, not 24%.
Oh, I got no idea.
Right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I just want to make that clear for listeners so people aren't like, a quarter of people are killing.
No, it's not.
That would be, that would have been quite a bit of a different story.
Podcast Sponsorship Secrets00:03:27
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Obama vs Sheriff Arpaio00:15:27
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We're back.
Okay, so in 2009, Barack Obama's Justice Department opened a massive investigation into the MCSO.
Among other things, they found that deputies had used stun guns repeatedly on prisoners who were already strapped into a restraint chair.
Two men had died, costing the county more than $14 million in settlements.
By 2009, the brutality of Joe and his deputies had cost the county more than $43 million.
Maricopa County Jail generated lawsuits at a rate that was unprecedented in the nation.
One Phoenix New Times investigation found that between 2004 and 2008, the county jails of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston, which combined hold six times as many inmates as Maricopa Jail, were sued a total of 43 times.
During the same period, Arpaio's department was sued almost 2,200 times in federal court.
What?
Yeah.
2,200!
Yeah.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
So basically, that's incredible.
Yeah, it's out of its goddamn mind.
Like, that's...
When you compare it, because like, those aren't nice jails.
It's not like the, it's not like fucking Los Angeles County lockup is the Shangri-La.
Like, that's how bad Joe Arpaio's jail is.
Wait, the LA County Sheriff's Department is notoriously fucked up.
Yeah, horribly racist.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Really bad.
Like, Sheriff's Department.
But like, dozens of people, dozens of sheriff's deputies have been charged with all kinds of nonsense.
But like 43 lawsuits, and that's New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston combined to 2,200 for Maricopa County.
Like, when you put it, it's just out of it.
It's fucking outrageous.
Also, can you imagine being like, okay, you're like, you go to law school, you study really hard, and you know, you stay up all night, you know, trying to ace those tests.
You work hard to pass the bar, and you finally get a plum gig in, you know, whatever, Phoenix or Mesa or what have you.
And, you know, it's your first job, and your job is to defend Joe Arpaio's crazy evil tent jail over and again.
It's so fucked up.
Yeah, there's not enough liquor in the damn world to do that job.
Yeah.
All right.
So, yeah, 2,200 fucking lawsuits in federal court.
The New Yorker writes, remarkably, Arpaio has paid almost no political price for running jails that are so patently dangerous and inadvertently expensive.
Indeed, until recently, there were few local or state politicians willing to criticize him publicly.
Those who have, including members of the County Board of Supervisors, which controls his budget, tend to find themselves under investigation by the sheriff's office.
Local journalists who perturb Arpaio have also been targeted.
The Phoenix New Times ran an investigation of Arpaio's real estate dealings that included Arpaio's home address, which he argued was possibly a violation of state law.
When the paper revealed that it had received an impossibly broad subpoena demanding, among other things, the internet records of all visitors to its website in the previous two and a half years.
Yeah.
Sheriff's deputies staged late-night raids on the homes of Michael Lacey and James Larkin, executives of Village Voice Media, which owns the New Times.
The deputies arrested both men, they said, for violating grand jury subpoena.
The county attorney declined to prosecute, and it turned out that the subpoenas were issued unlawfully.
Outspoken citizens also take their chances.
Last December, remarks critical of Arpaio were offered during the public comment period at a board of supervisors meeting, and four members of the audience were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for clapping.
Their cases are pinned.
Can I ask a question?
Yeah.
Where is Arizona's very popular Senator John McCain and all this?
That is a good question.
I should have looked at it.
Where is John McCain?
Holy cow, man.
Like, you know, you're the king of this shit.
Oh, they didn't seem to like each other.
Joe Arpaio wouldn't call him a hero, I guess.
Yeah, but come on.
Well, let's see.
I found an AZ Central article.
John McCain saw through Joe Arpaio's baloney.
Let's see.
I don't know if he actually did anything.
Let's see here.
It's listing all of the different...
Sorry, I'm not trying to derail your stuff, but this is a good question, though.
I wanted to.
Where is John McCain in this?
Yeah, let's see.
Where is Mr. After Trump pardoned Arpaio?
The senator issued a statement saying Mr. Arpaio was found guilty of criminal.
Okay, so yeah, I don't think he did anything he did much earlier.
After this, dude, that's way at the end.
I don't think anything.
That's way at the end.
Yeah, I don't think anything.
Yeah, I don't think.
Yeah, it seems like all of the shit that he...
Well, let's see here.
Oh, no, no.
You know what?
In 2012, it seems like he had made a number of comments in 2012 attacking Joe Arpaio.
Okay, that's still pretty late in the game.
Yeah, that's kind of the game.
Yep, yep, yep.
But definitely he did speak out against him over all of the sex, well, some of the sex crimes stuff.
Okay.
All right.
Well, maybe he was in it, but like.
Yeah.
Definitely not early on, but before the Trump years, McCain did eventually speak out against him, it looks like.
So I don't know.
I'm not going to make a comprehensive statement about it one way or the other.
Certainly, I mean, legally, obviously, a state congressman can't do anything about a sheriff, but he's still.
But you can politically, you said this guy was a political figure.
He couldn't be.
That's why he was too popular.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, and we're about to talk about why more wasn't done, because obviously a lot of Republicans let this happen, right?
And encouraged it and made hay out of it, right?
But so did Democrats.
And this is where it gets really frustrating.
So President Obama is in office for like the last eight years that Joe Arpaio was sheriff when he is getting repeatedly like attacked, like repeatedly shown to be breaking the law.
And Obama's Justice Department issues repeated condemnations of conditions in Arpaio's jail, but they don't do anything to him.
There are theories as to why he was allowed to thumb his nose at federal judges for so long.
One of them involves his very close relationship with Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security from 2009 to 2013.
Before that, she was the U.S. Attorney for Arizona when conditions in Arpaio's jails were investigated by the DOJ for the first time in the 1990s.
We quoted from that report in the first episode, but it was horrific, and it noted that his treatment of inmates was unconstitutional.
Despite this, Janet did very little to penalize Arpaio.
She held what the New Yorker described as a friendly press conference with him, where they announced a settlement with the county sheriff's office.
During that press conference, the Arizona Republic described her as, quote, trading compliments with the sheriff.
Napolitano later became the state attorney general, where she actively encouraged Arpaio to run his jails however he wanted.
When she ran for governor in 2002, Arpaio backed her, even though she was a Democrat.
He made a campaign commercial for her that some suggest was crucial in her narrow victory.
It was not until 2008, in her second term, that she took any kind of stance against Arpaio, ordering that $1.6 million in funding to his department be used to investigate felonies, not immigration.
Joe later got the funding reinstated.
And yeah, there's a lot of like, he's, they don't, he's not, he's treated with kid gloves, even though he's directly disobeying federal judges in a lot of cases, repeatedly refusing to fix problems with his jails.
Now, that happens.
My city police department, Portland Police Department, are like in contempt of federal courts that have like the FBI and shit have like ruled that their like their use of force policies are wildly out of whack.
They're being like way too violent in ways that are like they've been ordered to reform and they're keep refusing to.
Like, so this does happen outside of Arizona, right?
That you have a police department or a sheriff doing something that a federal judge says isn't okay and just no one does anything about it.
But Joe is like the most blatant example of that.
I don't understand.
How can you, yeah, there's like people being killed in this jail left and right, 2,200 complaints, like who, and nobody's stepping in?
Like, it's just, it's, it's wild.
Yeah, it's, um, I mean, there are like, you know, they get the cameras taken out.
There are judges who are like repeatedly ruling against him to their credit.
But who's going to force him?
Unless you send in like, I don't know, the FBI or something.
I'm guessing, I think it would be the FBI's purview, right?
Because they're the ones who are supposed to be watching this.
But like, unless you send in the feds after him, who's going to stop him?
Right.
And that's kind of nobody wanted that job.
So nobody did anything, I think is really what it comes down to.
There's an almost endless flood of horrible stories that I could tell about Arpaio's jails, but...
And have.
Yeah, and have.
I just don't want to like, you know, there's a limit to which I think that's helpful.
I've read enough, I think I've read enough for people to understand how bad his jail was.
Joe himself referred to his tent jail as a concentration camp on several occasions, and that is a fair description.
I've spent hours reading detailed reports about the original KZs, the early Nazi camps for political prisoners, and some of the stories from Joe's jail would fit into those accounts, particularly people being strapped to chairs and beaten to death.
I want to close out, though, by talking more about his posse.
In 2010, Joe created the Illegal Immigration Operations posse, giving hundreds of racists the chance to do what some of them had probably done while wearing Klan robes in earlier days.
Posse members would help sheriff deputies bust into places of businesses and homes and tear people away from their families.
Actors Steven Seagal and Lou Farigno helped out.
What?
Yeah.
Yeah, they were both big possible.
Steven Seagal.
Yeah.
Steven Seagal.
Lou Farigno?
Stephen Seagall.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They love that shit.
Stephen Seagal drove a tank through a guy's fence and allegedly killed his dog as part of one of his raids as Joe Arpaio's.
In real life?
Yeah, that happened.
That's a thing that occurred.
Joe Arpaio wrote the intro to Steven Seagal's terrible book.
His fiction novel, The Way of the Shadow Wolves.
Horrible.
Don't read it.
But listen to our episode on it.
But yeah.
I feel like I've just taken a massive and instant hallucinogen.
Yeah.
Like there was something about the way of the shadow wolf there.
Yeah.
And Stephen Seagal driving a tank over someone's dog.
Did I just witness the original Incredible?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was because he was, yeah, he was, I mean, he, he filmed a reality show.
Think his episodes, because there used to be a show called Steven Seagal Lawman.
Because he just got to be a cop for some, and it's always for like a shady sheriff somewhere in the south who's like, Yeah, let's bring in, let's let Stephen Seagal beat people up as a cop.
Um, or for Putin, yeah, yeah, but uh, they were filming, they filmed a season that didn't air that was supposed to be in um uh Maricopa County, but uh, it got shut down in part because they were like doing some like he drove a tank through a guy's fence and killed his dog like some shit went wrong.
Yo, we gotta, we gotta find that tape, yeah, those tapes.
We gotta, we have to find the lost Steven Seagal drugs.
The lost pilot episodes, they've gotta be out there somewhere.
Oh, my God.
100% out there.
So, in a statement of interest in a case against the MCSO, the Department of Justice described the decision to use untrained volunteers to search vehicles, transport arrested immigrants, and carry out work site raids.
They noted, quote, MCSO provides insufficient supervision and oversight to ensure that volunteer posse members taking part in immigration enforcement activities do so without engaging in unlawful discrimination.
After the Sandy Hook massacre, Arpaio sent armed posse members to patrol elementary schools, even though they were not certified peace officers.
The New Times sent a correspondent along one of these rides.
Quote, The one-time Detroit cop explains that he'd rather be in Arpaio's posse.
In this case, that involves driving around 15 miles per hour around Diamond Canyon Elementary School and through all the dead silent residential streets that provide access to the school's property.
That's his definition of a hobby, he explains.
And these are the kind of like weirdos who want this gig, right?
Like it's this very bizarre mix of people who had been cops and missed feeling like, you know, important and people who could never be cops because they were in some cases dangerous criminals but wanted to play at being a cop and Joe would let them do it if they'd work for him for free.
They were all bad at their job.
The commander of his executive posse, who was also the former chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party, owned a warehouse that was used for his auto parts business and in 1996 was used to make campaign signs for Arpaio's re-election campaign.
In 1997, it was found that a massive marijuana smuggling network had been using the warehouse to move millions of dollars in pot.
They liked the location because there were always patrol cars parked outside, which scared off competitors.
Now, I mean, I got to ask, are we sure that this guy wasn't?
We absolutely are not sure of that.
We are in no way sure of that.
He hasn't been charged with it, as far as I'm aware, but we are not sure of that.
So, in 2019, three years after Arpaio left office, an audit was carried out that investigated the posse.
I'm going to quote from 12 News, a local network here.
The Posse Audit Findings00:12:35
An MCSO audit found poor record keeping had resulted in some unqualified individuals being allowed to continue participating in posse activities.
For example, individuals with prior arrests and or convictions for domestic violence, drug offenses, sex offenses, and other criminal activity.
Those individuals have been removed from the posse.
Former Sheriff Joe Arpaio spoke up for the group of MCSO volunteers Tuesday in a phone interview with 12 News.
We did background checks on them, Arpaio said, adding, any big organization is bound to have a couple problems, but all in all, it was a great program.
We saved the county millions of dollars every year.
Now, the new audit information came nearly two weeks after the temporary suspension of the posse program by Sheriff Paul Penzone when he dropped this bombshell at a press conference.
Only four of the posse's 235 members cleared to carry guns were actually qualified to do so.
That's the rate of armed posse members have actually legally qualified to carry a gun.
Four out of 235.
Yeah.
That's bad.
That is a very bad ratio.
That's really a bad ratio.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, the good old 2% rule.
Yeah.
Nice.
During my research into this, I found a fascinating article in the Ottavist about a police about a police impersonator named Steve Farzam and his best friend, who was a security guard who also pretended to be a cop and eventually ratted Farzam out to the feds for dozens of felonies.
Farzam was illegally impersonating FBI agents to access sealed records.
He was owning, he owned and sold restricted uniforms and machine guns illegally.
He was just criming all hardcore.
Now, Farzam was not a member of Joe's posse, but his friend was, and the two were working together on getting Farzam membership when their friendship fell apart and one of them ratted the other out.
And these are both guys that like dressed up as cops all the time, like drove around LA with like police lights pretending to be officers illegally carrying like they're that kind of dude.
And they're the kind of people who love to be in Joe Arpaio's posse.
And the article gives a description of both men that I think does a good job of explaining the kind of people who volunteered for the posse.
Generously, you could call them police wannabes, guys who longed to be associated with or better yet mistaken for officers of the law.
Dansel and Farzam spent years obsessing over police culture.
They became fluent in the lingo, from copy and place of I understand to the numbered codes cops use when speaking over radios.
A favorite is 417, which means I'm armed.
They accumulated dozens of certificates and skills like handling firearms, picking locks, using tasers, and responding to accidents.
And it's that's like the it's cop wannabe weirdos who can't do the job because like they're dangerously unhinged in a lot of cases.
Like Farzam is like selling machine guns to people and stuff.
Like they're right, or they've gotten major felony arrests themselves.
Like these other people.
Yeah, and I think a lot of these guys did and they want to they want to carry guns, but they can't legally qualify to.
And he just gave them this gray area for all of these really dangerous people in a lot of cases.
So it's giving felons a chance to do cop cosplay.
Yes.
This cosplay is real and you can go in and, you know, rip off hookers and mow down neighborhoods and attack city hall.
Yeah.
Now, and not felons usually, but a lot of them had some sort of crime.
I mean, some of them were felons, yes.
Ex-felons, whatever you want.
I mean, or, you know, some portion.
But I mean, it sounds like there's a lot more people with records than there were people qualified to do the job.
Yes, absolutely.
And because, yeah, it's not a job for people who are qualified to do it.
It's a job for people who want an excuse to be a big man and ideally do some violence with the state's backing.
So the case that would eventually lead to Sheriff Joe's criminal conviction happened in 2007.
It started with a traffic stop of a Mexican man with a valid tourist's visa.
Joe's deputies arrested him and held him illegally for nine hours.
The man sued, alleging racial profiling, and the suit turned into a class action for all Latino motorists in Maricopa County.
Joe lost the case, and the judge ordered Arpaio to stop detaining anyone not suspected of a crime.
And being in the U.S. illegally is not a crime.
It is a civil violation.
It is not something normal cops are supposed to be able to do shit over.
That was 2011.
For the next half decade, multiple federal judges found Arpaio in blatant violation of the injunction.
He repeatedly showed up on Fox News to say he would not abide by it.
He also lied under oath in an attempt to obstruct further inquiries.
After 21 days of hearings in 2015, he was found in civil contempt.
The judge in that case was so frustrated by Arpaio that he referred him to another judge for criminal contempt of court.
Joe was convicted and he could have faced six months in jail.
But the National Center for Police Defense sent 40,000 petitions to the Justice Department.
And with Donald Trump in office, there was never any chance that Joe was going to serve time.
Trump pardoned Arpaio and he never served a day in prison.
The good news is his political career is pretty dead at this point, although he unfortunately is not.
He lost re-election in 2016 due to a mix of demographic change.
There weren't as many old white people in Maricopa as there had been.
And due to the fact that by this point, vast mountains of lawsuits against his brutal jail had cost the county more than $140 million.
Just on a conservative small government thing, I can't overstate how expensive it is to have Joe Arpaio as your sheriff.
Right.
Paul Penzone, the new sheriff, beat Arpaio largely on a platform of cleaning up the MCSO and making it less brutal and thus less expensive.
In 2018, Joe Arpaio ran for Senate in a bid to replace Jeff Flake, and more than anything, a bid to return to political and cultural relevance.
The 86-year-old lawman/slash criminal wound up dead last.
In 2020, he ran for sheriff again, but lost his primary bid to Jerry Sheridan, who basically promised to be Joe Arpaio, but less old and disgraced.
Sheridan went on to lose badly to the incumbent Penzone.
And that's where things stand today.
Jesus, I can't, I keep thinking about this guy who would literally pick up people for the crime of driving while Mexican and put them in his torture chambers, his own concentration, and put them in a concentration camp by his own admission, was then free to go on Fox News and say, fuck off to a federal judge.
And it's like he felt, not wrongly, that he was like allowed, he could continue his criming and his afflaunting the noose of the law as long as he fucking wanted.
And he could, he and his team of armed Yahoos could pick up whoever they wanted, treat them however they want, with no indications they did any crimes whatsoever.
Yep.
Yep.
And Donald Trump loved this guy.
We didn't even, I feel like we didn't even get into that, but I mean, that part I remember is Donald Trump like praise this guy, you know, seven ways a Sunday.
Yeah, it's horrible.
It's just incredibly frustrating.
I think probably, I don't know if I'm more frustrated by his pardon or Manafort's pardon.
They're both pretty awful.
But yeah, pretty bad guy, Noah.
Kind of sucks.
Joe Arpaio.
Not great.
This was not the uplifting episode you promised me.
Yeah, I apologize.
I had to lie to get you in the chair.
Gonna talk about Joe Arpaio, famed philanthropist.
It's like he doesn't, I mean, and the comeuppance is like, okay, great.
He like got charged with criminal contempt of court like six, you know, after six straight years of ignoring don't don't uh detain people for no reason.
Like ignoring everything else.
Yeah, it's wild.
And you know, the people that enabled him are on the hook for his crimes, too.
Let's be clear about that.
If you kept voting for this guy time after time after time, you're on the hook for it.
If you were a politician, sounds like Democrat, some Democrats, too.
Some Democrats, sure, for sure.
Yeah.
You enabled that shit, and you are part of it.
And I, you know, this there has to be the conversation, too.
There's a lot of media that are complicit in sharing.
Oh, my God.
100%.
Absolutely.
If you were buying into this guy's suffering porn, you were part of the problem.
And not to get too meta, but I feel like his story is just a story about how fucked up our entire political media criminal justice ecosystem is right now and how easy it is for like a bad actor to exploit it.
Yep.
As if we needed another lesson.
As if we don't have lesson after lesson every day.
But here's another one.
Here is another one and a particularly horrifying one for sure.
And like and like his ability to wiggle into the like, you know, like parasitically wiggle into the cerebellum of America and be unable to for to be cast out is just it's wild.
Like his the length of of his criminal service is incredible.
Yep.
Yeah.
It's I mean, he's in there for so fucking long.
And I'm sure there's more.
I just haven't found a ton of granular detail about his time, you know, in the Bureau of Narcotics and then the DEA.
But I'm sure there's fucked up shit that we don't get from that period, just knowing the kind of guy that he is, right?
Right.
But yeah.
I did have one thought about that, though, about the Elvis thing.
Remember how Elvis got a badge to be a fake narcotics agent?
Oh, yeah, he did do that, huh?
Maybe, maybe, maybe, you know, that's the Sheriff Joe connection.
That's the Sheriff Joe connection.
Yeah, I might believe that then, actually.
I might believe that then.
Ah, then fuck it.
Everything else is all good.
Yeah.
Never mind.
Sheriff Joe, if you got Elvis his badge, if you got it.
Fucking narc.
Yeah.
It's all good, dude.
Okay.
So, Noah, you got any pluggables?
Got any pluggables?
I don't have any pluggables.
Nah, nothing really a plug, but you can find me at Noah Shackman.
That's N-O-H-H-S-H-A-C-H-T-M-A-N.
Noah Shackman on Twitter.
I'll be starting my new job at Rolling Stone magazine real soon.
And we're going to have some fun causing trouble for the shitbags of the world.
I'm looking forward to it.
Yeah.
Well, good luck doing that.
Thankfully, it looks like you won't have Joe on your roster because, by God, he can't possibly win election again for anything.
He's too old and he's too failed at this point.
It has to be the end, right?
This has to be the end of him.
Dude, have you never heard of Jinxes before?
God, yeah.
You just totally jinxed it.
He becomes president somehow in 2020.
Oh, yeah, 100%.
It's going to be Joe versus Joe in the 2024 election.
Future Plans at Rolling Stone00:03:22
Well, at least nobody can make jokes about Joe Biden being old.
Yeah, that that would be the although you would think that given Trump's age, that wouldn't have happened this election either, but that's fair.
Nobody, nobody gives a shit about anything anymore.
It's amazing.
Nothing matters.
Yeah, nothing at all matters.
Noah, thank you for coming on the show.
Thank you for talking with me about Sheriff Joe.
And thank all of you for listening to a tale that I hoped made everyone's life a little bit worse.
Just a little bit worse.
That's all we try to do here behind the bastards.
God.
All right.
Bye.
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