Head on a skewer: Joe Arpaio was so obsessed with getting a hard-charging New Times writer prosecuted that he badgered Andy Thomas into making a fool of himself

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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