Lemons waited, but Maupin never produced a videotape. Or e-mails.
How could he? There was no videotape, and there were no e-mails. There couldn't be: There was no underage boy!
Courtesy of the Goldwater Institute
Abigail Brown is flanked by attorneys Thomas Loquvam (left) and Clint Bolick.
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But Maupin wanted badly to believe there was. He was being strung along by a low-level staffer in Councilman Michael Nowakowski's office, a shady guy Nowakowski was about to fire for shaking down a developer. The guy, Gregory Coleman, would later tell sheriff's deputies that he was testing Maupin by promising some sort of dirt on Gordon. And Maupin fell for it — hook, line, and sinker.
And so, for a while, did the sheriff.
No one's talking about this one. (Through a spokesman, Gordon declined comment; the Sheriff's Office did not return repeated calls for comment.) The case ended in embarrassment: Maupin was lying, as the FBI realized when briefed on the case, and it began investigating him for making a false report.
But it's truly interesting to read the sheriff's file on the case, a giant pile of records that New Times obtained via a public-records request.
The records show that the MCSO worked the case hard. High-level investigators met with Maupin, and Maupin told them he'd actually watched the videotape. He thought he could get it from his source for $2,000. When Maupin's attempts to get the video fell short, investigators met with an acquaintance of Maupin's, a guy Maupin claimed had also seen the videotape. (Turns out, the guy hadn't.) They met with Maupin's assistant/wife, because she might have seen the videotape. (She hadn't, either.) Finally, the sheriff's investigators called Mayor Gordon (on a Saturday, no less) to ask whether he knew anyone fitting Maupin's description of the guy on the tape. (He didn't.)
They were desperate to prove the impossible. After all, there wasn't a videotape, or an underage boy, or a tawdry love affair. But these guys really, really wished there were.
So they subpoenaed Gregory Coleman's cell phone records and executed a public-records search for his e-mails. (Soon thereafter, they asked for Mayor Gordon's e-mails, too.) They even had Jarrett Maupin wear a wire so he could sit down with Coleman and get to the bottom of the mystery.
At one point, after a sheriff's officer called Gordon and warned him that he was potentially under investigation, Gordon's attorney, former U.S. Attorney Paul Charlton, gave the officer a call.
Charlton declined comment to New Times.
But, according to transcripts, Charlton told the MCSO investigator that the mayor had nothing to hide. But Charlton said he was concerned that it was the Sheriff's Office doing the investigating — especially since Gordon had taken such a public stance against the sheriff just one month before.
The officer said he didn't know where the case was going, not just yet.
"Okay, well, here's the other question," Charlton said. "Why is this case being worked so aggressively on a Saturday?"
"We . . . on a Saturday?" Officer M. DeSimone replied. "I'm just doing what I'm told. And, honestly, it's not being worked aggressively on a Saturday. If it was 'aggressively,' I'd be out in the field and not just making a phone call."
Charlton knew better than that.
"I was in law enforcement for 18 years," Charlton said, "and I have a sense of how these things go . . . And it's unusual to be calling a mayor of the city of Phoenix on a Saturday."
Ultimately, the sheriff's departmental report on Maupin's crazy allegation weighed in at 900-plus pages.
Ultimately, it concluded with what any sane observer would have suspected all along.
There was no videotape. There was no underage boy.
The whole thing was the product of Maupin's bitter machinations — and, apparently, Sheriff Arpaio's personal interest in nailing Phil Gordon.
Can you imagine how differently things would have turned out had the Sheriff's Office investigated the Moon Valley High School rape with such intensity?
Earlier this year, Jarrett Maupin pleaded guilty to one felony count of making a false report to law enforcement. He admitted that he'd believed Coleman's lies and then embellished them in hopes of getting the Sheriff's Office to lower the boom. Despite what Maupin initially promised his handlers at the MCSO, he never saw any videotape or e-mails.
Yet the Sheriff's Office wasted hours on this one — far more than they gave 14-year-old Abigail Brown.
What the fuck ever, dude.
