"Well, Andrew Thomas has no desire to do that."
AP/Wide World
Sheriff Joe Arpaio enjoys getting his face on TV, when the spin is positive.
Matt York/AP Images
Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas has formed an alliance with Arpaio. Wags in his office now refer to him as "Little Joe."
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Thomas' spokeman, Barnett Lotstein, is himself a holdover from the Romley administration. In an e-mail, he says that criticism of Thomas as distant is "incorrect" and praises his top-level appointments as "seasoned criminal prosecutors with extensive prosecutorial and trial experience."
And Lotstein defends his boss' relationship with Arpaio.
"During the administration of former County Attorney Rick Romley, the Sheriff and County Attorney were continually at odds with each other," he writes. "The media regularly criticized them for their lack of cooperation and public bickering. Now that County Attorney Andrew Thomas has ended this lack of cooperation with the Sheriff's Office, he is being criticized by some for fostering good relationships. How disingenuous." (View Lotstein's complete statement here.)
But considering some of the shenanigans that Arpaio has engaged in, cooperation hardly seems prudent. That became startlingly clear in the aftermath of the sheriff's smearing of his 2004 rival, Dan Saban.
Saban had been a respected cop in Mesa, and he'd won endorsement from several GOP insiders and law enforcement agencies. It was the toughest challenge the sheriff faced in years.
If Arpaio was worried about his opponent, the e-mails from Ruby Norman must have seemed like manna from heaven. Norman said she had dirt on the sheriff's opponent. And when Arpaio's aides called her back, even they must have been shocked by just how filthy the dirt was: Norman said she was Saban's adoptive mother and that he'd raped her.
The alleged rape had happened nearly 30 years earlier, years past the statute of limitations. An accusation that old was problematic, and it didn't help that Norman proved to be remarkably fuzzy on details. She didn't even know how old she'd been when the alleged assault took place.
Nevertheless, the threat squad was sent to Apache Junction to take Norman's testimony. The squad was instructed to write a report for the sole purpose of creating a written record that Dave Hendershott — yes, that Dave Hendershott — could give to a reporter at Channel 15. As it turns out, Hendershott alerted the reporter to the story before the threat squad even interviewed Norman.
Channel 15 aired the story, and Saban, not surprisingly, lost the election. But because Norman's allegation turned out not to be true, Saban sued Arpaio and Hendershott for libel.
It's the county attorney's job to represent the sheriff in civil matters. But rather than put one of his employees on the job, Thomas appointed his former boss to handle the case. Dennis Wilenchik is both a skilled trial lawyer and an expensive one. (His firm has already been paid at least $255,000 for the Saban case, and more is sure to come.)
Wilenchik didn't just offer a defense in the courtroom. In the months before the trial, Wilenchik wrote a series of letters to the governor, the attorney general, and the agency that licenses police officers. The letters demanded that Saban be stripped of his law enforcement certification and be fired from his job.
Not to be outdone, Hendershott filed no fewer than three bar complaints against Saban's lawyer, Joel Robbins.
In all three cases, the State Bar of Arizona found "insufficient evidence to support an ethical violation," a Bar spokeswoman says.
In January 2007, Joe Arpaio and Andrew Thomas made their boldest move yet. They announced the formation of an anti-corruption task force, Operation MACE, to root out abuses of the public trust.
They told reporters that they'd seized hundreds of boxes of records from the Maricopa County Community Colleges. Money, they said, appeared to be missing.
Three months later, the pair announced the task force's first indictment, which had nothing to do with the community colleges and not much to do with corruption. A state representative from Yuma, Russ Jones, had signed his 2006 re-election petitions, saying he was the "circulator" who witnessed their signatures. But Thomas told reporters that Jones was really in Phoenix while the petitions were signed in Yuma.
Jones' opponent had made the same complaint during the campaign, and the petitions in question had been thrown out via a lawsuit. (The Arizona Supreme Court had ruled that the mistakes didn't rise to the level of petition forgery.) Jones had enough good petitions to make it on the ballot, but he ultimately lost the election.
Thomas indicted Jones on nine felony counts of "presenting a false object for filing" and one felony count of "willfully concealing his activities."
That could have meant 10 years in prison — for petitions that made no difference in the election.
Jones' lawyer, Jim Belanger, believes the pair just needed a Republican. "Russ Jones was a politically opportunistic target," he says. "He was an out-of-county, out-of-office Republican."
After all, in the same month Jones was indicted, Thomas and Arpaio announced they were investigating Democratic Attorney General Terry Goddard.
The Goddard case also seemed a huge stretch. Goddard had been investigating Republican State Treasurer David Petersen for a host of violations, but charged him only with a misdemeanor as part of a plea agreement.
Just before Petersen left office, his second-in-command had approved a fat payment for the attorney general's work representing the office on an unrelated civil matter. Thomas and Arpaio questioned whether the payment had influenced Goddard's acceptance of the plea bargain.
