You can add attempted bribery to the list of misconduct committed by former Deputy Chief Larry Black, one of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s closest aides, the Munnell Memo investigative report shows. A few years ago, the report states, Black offered a sheriff’s lieutenant in his agency season tickets to the Phoenix Coyotes…
Sheriff Arpaio’s disgraced chief deputy, Dave Hendershott, once told us that a stuffed rattlesnake he kept in his office was named after former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley. Maybe that’s what he told visitors, but we figured the forked-tongue serpent was his personal totem. Every new page released from…
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s media sluttiness knows no bounds and now includes exploiting abused horses in an apparent attempt to repair his image. As the walls are caving in around his corrupt command staff following the (partial) release of a report from the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office regarding misconduct…
Police in full riot gear, some tech-ed out SWAT-style with pepper-spray guns. A cop chopper overhead. Protesters locking arms to prevent police vehicles from moving. A 69 year-old activist on crutches arrested and cited, along with six others. Cops flinging demonstrators around like rag dolls.In other words, not your average…
Dave Hendershott, the former top aide for Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, s apparently was worried enough about being charged with crimes that he hired a legal firm to help him. That wouldn’t be a problem — except he may have gotten the county to pay the bills. It looks like…
Yesterday, Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu announced that after his office’s investigation into misconduct by top deputies in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, he’s determined that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio knew nothing of the misconduct.Babeu claims that Arpaio became so insulated by now-fired Chief Deputy Dave Hendershott that the…
The long-awaited report on the investigation into allegations against Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s command staff didn’t get released today, after all. True, a 1,022-page summary report was released. But about one-third of it was blacked out, and the three separate reports containing the conclusions of the investigation haven’t…
Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu said today that he’s convinced his Maricopa counterpart, Joe Arpaio, knew absolutely nothing about the misconduct of his top deputies. Babeu, speaking at a news conference at the state Capitol, said the investigation his office conducted on Arpaio’s commanders proved numerous, serious instances of misconduct and…
Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said today that he “made mistakes” in dealing with his top aide, former Chief Deputy Dave Hendershott. In an intentionally brief news conference today, Arpaio read from a prepared statement and took questions from reporters. But he didn’t really say much. Arpaio refused to…
Ethnic studies student Angelica Penaran takes a TUSD board member to the woodshedThe fight against the effort to slowly kill the Tucson Unified School District’s embattled Mexican-American ethnic studies program continues today with a TUSD board of governor’s meeting scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Last week, a TUSD vote on a proposal…
We’re down here at the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office headquarters, checking on the latest release of documents related to the Munnell Memo investigation. The docs we received last week, we found out today, weren’t part of the 1,022-page summary report that’s been sort of advertised by officials with the…
In the wake of President Barack Obama’s announcement that terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden has been killed by American forces during a firefight in Pakistan, I have a few predictions.The first is a given: traitorous right-wing nutjobs will not grant the Obama administration any credit for the kill. They also will…
With their own words and deeds, they are damned.I’m talking about what’s in the latest filings in the American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office over claims that his anti-immigrant sweeps racially and ethnically profile Latinos in Maricopa County. Both sides in Melendres vs. Arpaio have asked for…
The guy who put the ridiculous tribal tattoo on the face of former Valley resident/former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson has filed a lawsuit against the movie studio responsible for the upcoming film The Hangover 2.St. Louis tattoo artist S. Victor Whitmill has asked a federal court judge to bar Warner…
Attwood on Arpaio’s cockroachesBack in August, I wrote up my interview with former ecstasy kingpin Shaun Attwood, whose memoir Hard Time: A Brit in America’s Toughest Jail provides a harrowing account of his two years in Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s medieval prison complex.Filth, cockroaches, a cornucopia of drugs, the neo-Nazi Aryan…
From what we’ve seen so far today, the investigative report on allegations against Dave Hendershott, Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s former chief deputy, can be summed up with a cliche: Hendershott lied, cheated, and stole. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office released part of the long-awaited report today, and we just got done examining it…
Sheriff Joe Arpaio recently tweeted that he will “speaking at [Arizona State University’s] Cronkite School of Journalism” today at 3 p.m.But if you’re expecting a repeat of the debacle that occurred in 2009 when Arpaio attended a public forum at ASU’s Cronkite School in downtown Phoenix, and questions from ASU dons…
As I’ve pointed out in my cover story this week on Phoenix Law Enforcement Association president Mark Spencer and his sleazy ways, PLEA swallowed the Phoenix Police Department’s controversial kidnapping stats whole hog at one time. Long before they used them to bash ex-Police Chief Jack Harris as corrupt.Now like…
Former Chief Deputy Dave Hendershott, in a gushing, now-public goodbye to his boss, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, claims that a long-awaited report on his misconduct is “littered with hundred (sic) of flaws” and other problems. The document to which he refers is the 1,022-page report on an internal investigation into allegations by another high-ranking deputy with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, Frank…
Sheriff Joe Arpaio fired his chief deputy last week, but Dave Hendershott is being allowed to resign before the scheduled date of termination. Is that really a resignation? Typically, when someone’s forced to resign from a company or governmental agency, the boss doesn’t first state in writing that the employee…
Courtesy of the Three Sonorans, the revolution is YouTube-izedHow often have you seen students protest and commit acts of civil disobedience because they want to study something?While their peers in the rest of the country may be looking to cut class, Tucson’s students are battling to maintain ethnic studies in…
A couple of weeks back, I blogged about how Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu’s spokesman Tim Gaffney had apparently borrowed some stills of desert barricades taken by National Socialist Movement member Harry Hughes, otherwise known as the world’s “nicest neo-Nazi.” Or so I’ve dubbed him.Well, hell hath no fury like…
