Maybe not, if you're unconcerned with running down the actual facts.
Why would Arpaio attempt to latch his rep onto one of the most famous criminal cases of all time, especially when some of the principals are around and able to comment?
New Times photo illustration
The cover of Joe's new book (with a little creative editing).
Gene Hackman as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection.
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"You've got to remember, Joe was trained as a liar by our government," Tom Bearup observed of his former boss. "He has a history of embellishment. As a DEA agent, you have to lie to be successful in what you do. And that's carried over to his personal life."
Arpaio and Sherman's claims of a French Connection connection aside, the biggest tall tale in the book is a bogus assassination conspiracy against Arpaio, allegedly involving Phoenix immigrant rights activist Elias Bermudez, the Minutemen, and the Mexican Mafia.
As first uncovered back in October, this ludicrous plot had Bermudez, a persistent critic of Arpaio's, brokering a $3 million deal between the Meraz drug organization and the true-blue Minutemen, who supposedly wanted Arpaio offed to rally support for their cause.
The MCSO spent a half-million dollars on this embarrassing snipe hunt, dispatching deputies to Hartford, Connecticut, to interrogate a teenage girl they believed was involved in the plot, staking out a dairy ranch in the West Valley, and sending investigators to Mexico in a futile attempt to locate the so-called "green house" where money had reputedly exchanged hands in the deal.
An unnamed, paid confidential informant in Yuma apparently fabricated the story, feeding it to the MCSO until finally disappearing with the agency's cash advances. Before doing so, the informant failed a key question on his second polygraph administered to him by the MCSO.
"Have you told the truth about the plan to kill Sheriff Arpaio?" asked the examiner.
"Yes," replied the CI.
In his analysis, released by the MCSO as part of a public-records request, examiner Willis Deatherage stated: "In reference to the question regarding telling the truth about the plan to kill the Sheriff, CI states that he has been truthful but admits that he has filled in some information that was not given to him specifically."
In other words, the snitch was lying.
No wonder he disappeared shortly thereafter. But in Joe's Law, Arpaio and Sherman pass off this bag of green bologna as if it was a real threat against Arpaio. In fact, they start the book with the tale, and later, Arpaio states that the investigation into the hokey murder plot is ongoing.
"The conspiracy that I wrote about in Chapter One remains an open case," insists Arpaio. "Nobody's taken a shot, but the investigators aren't convinced it won't happen. Often in this kind of unpleasant business, you never know what's real and what isn't until you find a plan, a gun, even a body — or they find you first."
Elias Bermudez hadn't seen Joe's book when informed of that statement. Bermudez was aghast because he believed the tawdry mess — which had been roundly ridiculed when revealed last year — was long over.
"That only confirms my assumption that Joe's lost his marbles," said Bermudez.
Part of the Arpaio myth is that he's continually under death threats for his tough-on-crime, tough-on-immigration policy. But, in reality, these "threats" have amounted to penny-ante stuff, or are actually manufactured by Arpaio's public-relations machine.
In 1999, Arpaio and his minions entrapped small-time con James Saville, concocting a fake assassination plot that had Saville planting a pipe bomb under Arpaio's armored car ("The Plot to Assassinate Arpaio," August 5, 1999). Saville turned down a plea deal, waited four years for trial, and was acquitted in 2003.
Asked to produce evidence of these death threats against Arpaio, the MCSO presented New Times with a mishmash of documents. A set of them detailed how a few inmates in Arpaio's jails had somehow gotten hold of Arpaio's home phone number and prank-called him. Another incident involved Canadian Matthew Sanderson's Internet threat to harm Joe. North of the border, Sanderson was sentenced to 90 days in jail for this long-distance bluster.
And as Paul Rubin detailed in his recent New Times feature "Head on a Skewer" (March 20), the MCSO used the fact that former New Times staffer John Dougherty had mentioned Joe's home address in a column related to Joe's real estate dealings to seek a grand jury indictment of New Times and Dougherty. In his book, Arpaio fumes briefly about his address being published by New Times, though his address has long been available to anyone computer savvy enough to do a Google search.
Arpaio never mentions the massive political fallout the MCSO and County Attorney Andrew Thomas engendered because of the overbroad subpoenas from Thomas' now-disgraced former special prosecutor Dennis Wilenchik, and from the nighttime arrests of Village Voice Media executives Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin.
Co-writer Sherman argued to New Times that omissions — such as ignoring the arrests of Lacey and Larkin or the absence of discussion of major flaps in Arpaio's career, like the Scott Norberg case — are simply the prerogative of the authors.
"Don't you understand," stated Sherman, "that this is not an encyclopedia? This is someone's autobiography. I don't know if you've ever read one before. But generally speaking, they present their story, their way, their point of view."
