The lieutenant wrote that Arpaio had advised him that "due to his years as head of the DEA in the Middle East (some of these countries are now terrorist states)" he had made a load of enemies.
"Now they can access his home address as well," Jones wrote, as if publication on New Times' Web site was the only place on the Net to learn where the sheriff resides.
Former New Times reporter John Dougherty
Joe Arpaio's director of communications, Lisa Allen, confronted John Dougherty outside a county jail in 2004. "So sue us!" she said when he asked about public records the MCSO was illegally withholding.
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(Arpaio, incidentally, was known as "Nickel Bag Joe" inside the DEA because of the small-time busts he'd favored.)
"It is believed that John Dougherty has an obsession towards Sheriff Arpaio," Jones concluded. "[His] commentaries in his articles about the Sheriff are damaging in nature."
The lieutenant said it was "reasonable to assume that Dougherty himself knew that by disclosing the Sheriff's address and all of the derogatory remarks he has written about the Sheriff, that the articles may incite some people to become so incensed that they may resort to some type of retaliatory attacks on Sheriff Arpaio and his family."
Prosecutor Liz Gilbert asked investigator Stolze to check the Web for any personal information under Joe Arpaio's name. According to Stolze's report, "I located numerous documents that contain Sheriff Arpaio's personal residence address."
On April 18, 2005, Stolze phoned Dougherty. The paper's legal counsel, Steve Suskin, returned the call, saying he had advised Dougherty not to talk.
The Incident Review Board meeting was scheduled for early May.
But Stolze's supervisors wanted more facts before moving forward. The aforementioned interview with the Arpaios was a must, and the panel's meeting was postponed until that August.
That gave Ron Lebowitz, then the sheriff's legal point man on the "Dougherty matter," more time to compose the first of dozens of memos he would send about the case to prosecutors in two jurisdictions over the next year and a half.
Ron Lebowitz has had a long legal career in Phoenix, where he has been practicing since 1973.
As a private attorney, he defended New Times in a 1981 libel allegation by then-Arizona Republic Publisher Darrow "Duke" Tully, who resigned in disgrace a few years later after he was exposed as having lied about serving as a pilot in Korea and Vietnam.
Lebowitz's reputation for courtroom bombast has rivaled that of his better-known (these days) peer Dennis Wilenchik. Maybe that's why he and Joe Arpaio connected in the late 1990s, when Lebowitz was working as a deputy county attorney.
In May 1999, Superior Court Judge Gregory Martin dismissed some criminal charges against an infamous Phoenix slumlord because of then-prosecutor Lebowitz's "intentional, in bad faith, and grossly improper" conduct.
Lebowitz went to work for Arpaio full time after that.
He was present on June 13, 2005, when John Stolze and Deputy County Attorney Jonell Lucca interviewed Ava and Joe Arpaio, one at a time.
Word that their home address had been published "made my blood pressure go up," Ava Arpaio said in her brief interview. "I was very, very nervous and have been, and I still am very worried about it."
Stolze, who died of heart failure in December 2006, played it as straight as his stellar reputation suggested he would.
In a report on his interview with Ava Arpaio, he wrote, "It should be noted that towards the end of this interview, Mr. Lebowitz wrote something on a piece of paper and attempted to show it to Mrs. Arpaio. This note was taken by deputy county attorney Lucca before Mrs. Arpaio could see it, and she informed Mr. Lebowitz, 'We're not going to prompt the witness.'"
Interviewed after his wife, the self-described "toughest sheriff in America" told Stolze that his staff immediately had placed extra patrols around his residence after Dougherty's column.
The investigator asked why Arpaio had taken so long to officially lodge his complaint.
"I was in a Catch-22, if you want to use that phrase," the sheriff said. "It was a political year, and I was being blasted every week with slander and threatening news articles by Dougherty. I knew there would be a new county attorney coming in, and I felt that if I reported it during the election year that would be the first allegation — that I was doing this to shut the mouth of the reporter.
"The other reason was that I wasn't sure that [Rick Romley] would pursue it, and number three, if he did, he may have held it anyway for the new county attorney to take office."
Arpaio conceded that he wasn't as worried about his home address being available on the Internet as he was about its being on the New Times Web site.
"I'm more concerned about the New Times and the mindset of Dougherty knowing that this could be a threat to me," he said. "Also, when you look at the clientele of the New Times, those are people that have the propensity to do harm to this sheriff."
Arpaio then launched into a riff:
"Everybody knows me around this world, there's no doubt about that. I go back to being the director of Mexico and South America with the federal drug enforcement. I go back to Turkey, the Middle East, being head of that operation . . . People still remember me from my drug background, but they sure remember me from my sheriff's background, and I do get a lot of nasty, nasty television and commentary from foreign countries. So my name, my address being on this World Wide Web makes me very, very concerned."
