Tucker told Babeu's detectives that, when the case kicked off, "I thought this was nothing more than mismanagement [that included] a beef with somebody."
But he and others assigned to the Dowling investigation were pressed to come up with evidence that could be used for charges.
At a December news conference, Joe Arpaio listens to questions about botched sex-crimes investigations under his watch.
![Levalya Beyart of El Mirage says that after her daughter reported being raped in 2007, the Sheriff's Office told her, "This [is] not a priority."](http://media.phoenixnewtimes.com/joe-arpaio-s-office-says-to-hell-with-the-children.7636314.40.jpg)
Jamie Peachey
Levalya Beyart of El Mirage says that after her daughter reported being raped in 2007, the Sheriff's Office told her, "This [is] not a priority."
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Arpaio, as New Times explained in "Joe Knew," is a consummate micro-manager of high-profile cases that will get him in the news. In later public-corruption cases that would be discredited, Arpaio reviewed a search warrant personally and demanded that more headline-grabbing material be added. The sheriff sat in on numerous strategy meetings for cases involving county officials and suggested tactics to be used in investigations, according to his own command staff.
In the Dowling case, Tucker explained to Babeu's investigators, Arpaio pressured him repeatedly to come up with a case against Keith and Tim Bee, who owned school-bus company Bee Line Transportation, which had a contract with the Maricopa school district overseen at one time by Dowling. In 2006, Tim Bee was the Republican majority leader in the Arizona House of Representatives.
Tucker found absolutely no evidence of any crime, though.
Arpaio "kept asking me, 'Well, where are we? Are we going to get charges on the Bees?' And I said, 'No. I mean I'm working on it, but I don't see anything here,'" Tucker said to Babeu's office.
This clearly frustrated Arpaio, Tucker said.
"Then, kind of jokingly one day, [Arpaio] said, 'Well, if you get charges on them, I'll take you out . . . You get charges on Bee, I'll take you out to a steak dinner.'"
Tucker said this made him believe the Dowling case could be politically motivated.
Tucker and up to 10 deputies at a time toiled on the Dowling matter for months, eventually submitting charges to then-Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard, who filed 25 felony charges against Dowling in November 2006.
No criminal allegation ever was lodged against the Bees. New Times called Tim Bee, now associate vice president for government relations at the University of Arizona, and his brother, Keith, responded. The brothers didn't have any relationship with Arpaio and couldn't imagine why the sheriff would be so intent on charging them, Keith Bee says.
"I would have real concern" if Tucker's story were true, Bee says. "That's amazing!"
It should be noted that there's no record of Arpaio's offering to buy anyone a steak dinner for solving rape and molestation cases.
The Dowling charges were trumped up. Maricopa Superior Court Judge Edward Burke, concerned with the shoddy investigation by the Sheriff's Office, ruled that 10 of the charges must be reheard by a grand jury, which hadn't received all the pertinent facts in the original grand jury hearings. None of the charges was refiled.
The 10 charges had to do with the most serious allegation — that Dowling had stolen $1.8 million in public funds.
Dowling hadn't stolen the money. Rather, the Board of Supervisors was concerned that the funds, which all went to Dowling's school district, had been transferred without its authority.
Every charge against Dowling was dropped except one, a misdemeanor: hiring a relative at the school district. She pleaded guilty to the charge.
Dowling filed the first of several lawsuits against the county in December 2008 — causing the Sheriff's Office to hold off on the internal investigation into the sex-crimes fiasco out of concern that it put Dowling investigator Seagraves' reputation on the line. The former schools superintendent and the county settled three of her lawsuits in November 2009.
She then filed another suit in December 2009, claiming that her constitutional rights had were violated by the county and Arpaio's office. The case is pending.
In early 2007, Joe Arpaio approved an agreement between his office and the Central American country of Honduras to help train police officers. That year, a few dozen deputies and commanders — including Chief Deputy Dave Hendershott — spent weeks on the country's Roatan Island, a popular scuba-diving destination. At least $180,000 in public funds was used for the trips during a time of extreme budget shortfalls.
Ward and Weege wrote in their letter to Babeu that one of their supervisors, Lieutenant Hank Brandimarte, told all the MCSO sex-crimes detectives that one of them would have to "volunteer" for duty in Honduras.
"It was pointed out to Brandimarte that the unit was being inundated with cases, that we were already short [on] detectives, and that we couldn't keep up with the caseload — and that this was a foreign country," they wrote.
Nevertheless, a detective agreed to go, which further crippled the unit's ability to work rape and molestation cases. The number of full-time detectives in the sex-crimes unit was back down to four in 2007.
Also in early 2007, Arpaio and his ally, former County Attorney Andrew Thomas, started a new task force that would handle cases similar to the one against Dowling. Lisa Allen, Arpaio's spokeswoman, coined the acronym "MACE," for Maricopa Anti-Corruption Enforcement.
The organization handled a few legitimate cases in 2007, but it mostly targeted Arpaio's political foes. And Thomas was more than willing to go along with the investigations.
Former Attorney General Goddard was an early MACE target, for a crime he didn't commit. The Sheriff's Office accused him of taking a payoff of $1.9 million from the state Treasurer's Office and transferring it to the Attorney General's Office in return for reducing charges against former Arizona Treasurer David Petersen, who had pleaded guilty in 2006 to knowingly filing a false or incomplete financial-disclosure statement, a misdemeanor.
