The Plot To Assassinate Arpaio

The 67-year-old sheriff rehearsed the lines he uses to buff his image as the self-proclaimed "America's Toughest Sheriff." He reminisced about his federal Drug Enforcement Administration days and his "gun battles in Turkey and all that" before segueing into the subject at hand -- the countless death threats he's received.

"I'm getting so many of these. It's really the ones you don't know about that I worry about," Arpaio said.

"How do you feel?" the KTVK-TV Channel 3 reporter asked on the evening of July 9.

"I feel great," the sheriff said.

"Really?" the reporter asked. Even in the wake of the arrest of 18-year-old James Brian Saville, who just hours earlier had allegedly plotted to put a pipe bomb on your armored car?

"I don't like it, but I'm used to these threats," said Arpaio. "At least we knew who this one was."

The sheriff amplified his tough-guy act, using his best John Wayne inflection to describe the televised arrest of Saville in an elaborate sting operation that culminated that afternoon in the parking lot of the Roman Table Restaurant. Arpaio was inside, sipping tea, when the bust went down.

"Well, we took this guy off the street," Arpaio said of Saville, who was released from prison the day before his arrest. ". . . So we got him. That's what I'm happy about. He's back in prison where he belongs."

Actually, Saville was in Arpaio's jail as a criminal suspect, not in prison. But that such distinctions are lost on Arpaio has been clear for some time.

In any case, Arpaio was just getting warmed up. He said Saville's alleged murder attempt and similar such threats don't intimidate him. He promised to keep walking tall in the face of mortal danger.

"And the day that comes when I can't go to the public, that I'm afraid to talk to the public, is the day I leave this job," he said.

"So that's not going to happen. I'm still going to the public. If they think they are going to scare me away with bombs and everything else, it's not going to bother me."

Saville's arrest made great television footage for the 5 p.m. news. The Sheriff's Office actually tipped off KSAZ-TV Channel 10, which was rolling tape as sheriff's deputies swooped in to arrest Saville at 3 p.m.

The arrest was followed at 4:15 p.m. by a news conference held by MCSO chief deputy David Hendershott. TV news reporters worked on a very tight deadline. The bomb Saville allegedly had built was displayed, as were drawings allegedly confiscated from Saville's prison cell and undercover video footage of Saville building the device.

"This subject is predisposed to make explosive devices to kill people," Hendershott announced.

Hendershott, the No. 2 official at the Sheriff's Office, was so interested in Saville's arrest that he was at the scene, wielding a gun, long after the unarmed suspect had been taken away.

News of the attempted assassination sent reporters scurrying to interview Arpaio, who had returned to his Scottsdale home to "comfort his wife," according to Hendershott.

Channel 10 repaid the Sheriff's Office for being invited along for the bust, airing an interview with the sheriff and his wife, with news anchor John Hook commenting on Arpaio's bravery.

Channel 3's interview with Arpaio ended with the sheriff extolling the virtues of his $70,000 armored car, which, he boasted, "is supposed to be missile proof, bomb proof and gun proof."

"I took some criticism [for] using dope-peddlers' money to buy that armored car," he says incredulously. "Criticism. Even if the bomb did go off . . . I presume I would have been protected in that car. Isn't that great timing? No pun intended."

Score another media coup for the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, whose primary and enduring mission has become to generate the most publicity possible for Arpaio -- local, national and international -- at any cost.

Even if it requires setting up a troubled, impressionable and scared kid who was recruited by a mentally ill prison snitch and coached into committing a "newsworthy" crime that could bring a life sentence.

As Channel 3 wrapped up its interview with Arpaio, a few miles across town, Maricopa County sheriff's detective Antone Jacobs was conducting a three-hour interrogation of Saville.

About halfway through the interview, Saville had had enough.

"Shit, man, where's the fucking lawyer?" Saville asked.

Jacobs ignored Saville's request for an attorney -- his constitutional right -- and plowed forward.

Seconds later, Saville began to weep, saying he never intended to kill anyone but that he's a "pyromaniac" who built a contraption based on a design he drew up after watching a television show.

Saville told Jacobs he never intended to complete the bomb, which he says was never armed with explosives. He agreed to the idea after a sheriff's undercover officer offered him $4,000 to build it, including a $2,000 payment before the weapon was even complete.

Instead of the cold-hearted killer described by Hendershott, transcripts of Saville's interrogation portray a deeply insecure kid who literally cries out for psychiatric help. A tearful Saville tells Jacobs he believes he belongs in "a mental institution." He admits he'd rather serve prison time than face the temptations that come with probation.

New Times' review of hundreds of pages of police reports, court documents and undercover transcripts reveals a troubling series of events that led to Saville's arrest just one day after he was released from the Arizona State Prison-Perryville, including:

• In setting up the assassination plot, MCSO relied almost exclusively on a prison snitch who has been diagnosed as mentally ill and dying of AIDS. The snitch, a white-collar criminal whose cooperation in other cases has helped him get reduced sentences, met at least four times with sheriff's detectives, who told him what to say to Saville.

• The crucial letter the snitch wrote to sound the alarm about Saville barely mentions Arpaio. Instead, the snitch wrote, Saville had told him he wanted to kill the judge and prosecutor who had sent him to prison.

• Once the snitch's letter was given to the Sheriff's Office, "upper management" became "very interested" in the case, state Department of Corrections records show.

• Hendershott told reporters that Saville's written "game plan" to kill the sheriff had been seized. Records reveal no such "game plan" to kill anyone.

• Sheriff's detectives grew frustrated when Saville rarely mentioned Arpaio during six days of taped conversations between the snitch and Saville. They encouraged the snitch to get Saville to talk about his supposed plan to kill Arpaio. At one point, the snitch told Saville: "You want to kill Joe."

• The snitch gave Saville the phone number of an undercover sheriff's officer and urged him to call before he was released from prison. The officer, posing as a Mafia hit man, offered Saville $4,000 to build a bomb.

• After Saville's release, the undercover officer gave him $200 to buy parts for the weapon, drove Saville around town to purchase the parts, rented a hotel room where the device could be partially assembled and drove Saville to the Roman Table -- though the "bomb" remained in the hotel room. Saville told Jacobs he was scared to back out of the deal because he thought the undercover officer might be a mobster who might kill him or his family if he did.

"I think that once all this stuff comes out, it's going to show this kid was set up," said Saville's public defender, Ulises Ferragut Jr. "He was not predisposed to kill the sheriff, and we'll be showing that."

The Arizona Attorney General's Office will prosecute Saville, who was indicted by a grand jury on July 23 for conspiracy to commit murder and weapons charges.

Arpaio appears to be obsessed with the possibility of martyrdom. In addition to his expensive armored car, Arpaio and his wife, Ava, have given many interviews discussing the subject of his personal safety. The MCSO Web site tells of a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of someone who allegedly threatened Arpaio in May 1998.

In April, a bomb squad was called to the sheriff's home after a metal spider sculpture turned up in front of his house. No explosives were found in the sculpture.

The Snitch

Events that led to James Saville's arrest began with a June 23 letter from Perryville prison inmate Mike Burrows (not his real name) to a Sun City spiritual adviser.

"I have recently learned of a plot to kill a superior court judge and a prosecutor," Burrows wrote in the second paragraph. Burrows said the plot centered on Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Paul Katz and prosecutor Jim Blake.

Burrows claimed an unidentified fellow inmate had given him "explicit details on how he was going to do it." He wrote that the man was "quite knowledgeable" about bombs and would get out of prison soon.