PUBLIC RECORDS PAYDAY
jamie peachey
Um, Joe Arpaio himself stops by New Times' offices to present a $40K check to former staff writer and current U.S. Senate candidate John Dougherty (middle) and Village Voice Media Executive Editor Michael Lacey.
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It's a unique day in the annals of New Times-MCSO relations when Sheriff Joe Arpaio cuts this paper a check. But that's what our geriatric top gendarme just did, to the tune of $40,000.
The check was actually for legal fees expended by New Times in the pursuit of public records requested by ex-New Times reporter John Dougherty in 2004. (And, technically, county Board of Supervisors chairman Don Stapley and clerk Fran McCarroll signed on Arpaio's behalf.)
Dougherty, now a candidate in the Democratic primary to determine a challenger for Republican U.S. Senator John McCain (assuming McCain gets past GOP rival J.D. Hayworth), left New Times in 2006.
But in 2004, he was hard on Joe's ancient heels and had submitted numerous requests to the MCSO seeking information about such matters as a jail death, jail canteen funds, and the MCSO's East Mesa facility (otherwise known as the "Mesa Hilton," for its use in housing such high-profile former offenders as Glen Campbell and the daughter of sports mogul Jerry Colangelo).
The MCSO's highly paid public relations unit, headed by Joe's top flack, Lisa Allen, and her Stepin Fetchit, the infamously aggro Lieutenant Paul Chagolla (who has since been named a deputy chief), stonewalled Dougherty's lawful inquiries.
No doubt they were annoyed by a scathing profile of Arpaio that Dougherty had just written. Arpaio actually sat for an interview for the story, but the results were hardly salutary for Joe, who was then facing a challenge in the GOP primary from former Mesa PD Commander Dan Saban, then a Republican.
Arpaio would go on to pull out a victory over Saban, getting 56 percent of the vote. At the time, Dougherty's piece hit the sheriff square in the jaw. And Dougherty was going back for second and third punches
In fact, in a separate investigation, he was also seeking records on Arpaio's land deals, the addresses for which had been blacked out on public records. The sheriff had sunk about $800,000 in cash into the purchases, a load of dough for a civil servant to be throwing around.
That inquiry would eventually spawn an MCSO investigation of New Times and Dougherty that led to the bogus 2007 arrests of the papers' founders, Village Voice Media Executive Editor Michael Lacey and CEO Jim Larkin, in a witch hunt that was dropped and repudiated by then-County Attorney Andrew Thomas less than 24 hours after they were collared.
But that was all yet to come. In 2004, Dougherty was dogging the MCSO, demanding the jail records. Days before the September 2004 primary, Dougherty ran into Lisa Allen at a downtown press event for Saban, which she evidently was monitoring for her boss.
Dougherty asked about the public records, and Allen told him that the MCSO didn't recognize New Times as a "legitimate newspaper."
When Dougherty told Allen that, under Arizona law, the MCSO had to comply, she shot back, "So sue us!"
Which shortly thereafter, New Times legal beagles Steve Suskin and Michael Meehan did, but not before Arpaio's goons got the opportunity to manhandle Dougherty. This occurred on the night of the primary at the Phoenix Civic Plaza ballroom, rented for the evening by the county elections department.
Arpaio was there, celebrating his win over Saban, and Dougherty approached him with his tape recorder at the ready, asking Joe when he planned to cough up the documents.
"Will you get rid of this guy?!" Arpaio snarled to his goon squad, whose members promptly bent Dougherty's arm behind his back and shuffled him to the door.
Outside the entrance, Dougherty immediately ran into Paul Chagolla.
"That was the first time I met him," recalled Dougherty when he came by New Times' offices for a photo shoot with an oversize replica of the $40K check. "So I go, 'You're Paul Chagolla? When are you gonna give us the records.' He turns around, and he claims that I brushed his shoulder with my tape recorder. And [the MCSO] opened a criminal investigation for assault based on that."
Though it was Dougherty who'd obviously been assaulted that night.
In any case, as you might expect, Chagolla's "investigation" came to nothing.
As for the public-records request, not long after New Times filed suit the MCSO finally began complying with the multiple requests. But because the MCSO's willful disregard of Arizona public-records law forced us to sue, New Times sought attorney fees related to the case.
The county's Superior Court ruled in the MCSO's favor in 2005. New Times appealed the decision. In 2008, a three-judge state appeals court — after receiving the lame, nonsensical excuses that Allen and Chagolla offered in depositions — found that the MCSO wrongfully denied New Times public records and remanded the case to Superior Court to determine the fees New Times had coming.
Fast-forward two years, and an evidentiary hearing on the matter was swiftly approaching. That's when New Times co-counsel Meehan gets a call from one of Arpaio's many lawyers, Michelle Iafrate, asking how much the paper would settle for.
Irony of ironies, Iafrate is the same lawyer who had a hissy fit that New Times reporter Ray Stern dared to take photos (which is absolutely legal) of some of the public documents he was examining at her offices in 2007. Iafrate whined to the MCSO, and Joe's thugs delivered a citation for disorderly conduct to Stern the same night that Lacey and Larkin were arrested.
