The Larkins put in a call to the Paradise Valley police and would not open the door until they arrived.
"I wanted some real cops there," said Larkin.
Michael Lacey's Sheriff's Office booking photos.
AP/Wide World
Despite his assaults on the First Amendment, Sheriff Joe Arpaio insists hes the victim in the New Times matter.
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As soon as the Paradise Valley officers arrived, Larkin opened the door and the sheriff's deputies slapped cuffs on him, reluctantly allowing him to put on shoes and pants before hauling him off in an unmarked car with Mexican plates. There were four MCSO undercover deputies, no warrant was presented, and the deputies flashed their badges only after Larkin demanded to see identification.
Larkin described the MCSO cops as "physically intimidating." At one point, they even threatened to take his wife into custody.
"She was up in their face, and they didn't like that," he stated. "She wanted to see more ID, and she didn't like the [unmarked] car I was getting into."
The undercover agents, believed to be members of Arpaio's Selective Enforcement Unit (charged with protecting Arpaio from alleged threats) first took Larkin to the MCSO's Mesa unit, then hauled him all the way down to the Fourth Avenue Jail, where he sat in a holding tank for an hour with about 20 other men. Then he was dragged in handcuffs before the sheriff's Sergeant Mike Traverse, who seemed to be in charge of the operation. Traverse lectured him sternly on the importance of grand jury secrecy and how Larkin had somehow endangered the process of arresting real criminals.
"I just sat there and took it," said Larkin. "I didn't want to argue with him. I think the First Amendment trumps grand jury secrecy."
Lacey was still awake at his house near Bethany Home Road and 12th Street when the knock on his door came about 9:30 p.m.
"My girlfriend says, 'It's the cops!'" recounted Lacey. "I go to the door, and there's a guy in plainclothes showing me his badge. He said, 'Are you Mike Lacey?' I said, 'Sure.' He said, 'You're under arrest for revealing grand jury documents.'"
Later, outside the Fourth Avenue Jail, Lacey joked that he was processed along "with all the other New Times readers."
They took his fingerprints, his mugshot, screened him medically, and took his belt (the usual procedure). Before he was transferred to a single cell — "and not the Glen Campbell cell," he said — Lacey spent about half an hour in the holding tank, where he engaged his fellow inmates in idle conversation.
"There are a lot of folks in there with a variety of issues," Lacey related. "One guy said, 'What are you in for, DUI?' I said, 'Nah, I'm in here for writing.' It was like all jail or prison situations — very noisy."
Once transferred to the solitary cell, he had access to his own pay phone and toilet. Neither of them worked. Nor was there room to lie down, so he sat it out, waiting for the lawyer representing New Times in the grand jury subpoena case, Tom Henze, to make the $500 bail for the minor offense.
Outside the jail, a crowd of reporters and TV news crews awaited Lacey's release. Close to 4 a.m., he finally emerged. The 59-year-old executive editor of Village Voice Media then answered queries in front of the jail, as he tucked in his shirt and put his belt back on.
Lacey compared Arpaio's 15-year tenure as sheriff to "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride." He then delivered a discourse on the importance of the First Amendment fight over the grand jury subpoena.
"The problem is that it takes me being arrested for you guys to show up," he told the assembled media. "This is a story we're all involved in. Those subpoenas are what you should be writing about. The sources they want from us on all of these stories are what you should be writing about. The fact that they want to have the identity, the browsing habits, the buying habits, what shopping carts people have filled, what sites people have visited on the Web before they came to us, what sites they visited after they left us. The fact that they have subpoenaed that kind of information — all of which is in our paper and on our Web site — is what the story's about. It's not about me getting out of jail at four in the morning."
Lacey reviewed the history of how an article more than three years ago had come to this point, discussing how New Times columnist John Dougherty was, at that time, looking into Arpaio's personal land transactions and questioning how a civil servant on an income of then-$72,000 a year, plus a federal pension, could afford to sink close to a million dollars in cash into commercial real estate.
It was because Arpaio was stonewalling Dougherty and because the sheriff had hidden information from the County Recorder's files about his land holdings, Lacey reminded, that Dougherty had revealed Arpaio's home address. Dougherty's point was that if Arpaio was so afraid of harm, why did he redact information on his commercial property and let his home address remain on multiple Internet sites, including those of the Recorder and the state Corporation Commission?
