Behind the Bastards - Part One: Joe Arpaio: America's Favorite Concentration Camp Operator

Episode Date: August 17, 2021

Robert is joined by Noah Shachtman to discuss Joe Arpaio.FOOTNOTES: https://archive.is/AmHdM#selection-2143.0-2177.274 https://www.nytimes.com/2000/08/24/technology/hoping-people-watch-jail-and-won-t-want-to-visit.html https://archive.is/zOUoh#selection-1343.0-1347.37 https://archive.is/nQcmL https://web.archive.org/web/20080129034231/http://www.sheriffjoe.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14&Itemid=29 http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1929920,00.html https://web.archive.org/web/20081218232929/http://www.sheriffjoe.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=22&Itemid=37 https://archive.is/g1b2z#selection-1745.0-1785.137 https://www.thedailybeast.com/before-he-was-the-bane-of-immigrants-joe-arpaio-was-an-immigrants-son https://archive.is/uk9cF https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/11/09/ariz-sheriff-joe-arpaio-ousted-by-voters-ending-the-24-year-run-of-americas-toughest-sheriff/ https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/maricopa-county-sheriff-joe-arpaios-posses-9672987 https://www.12news.com/article/news/crime/mcso-posse-members-had-sex-drug-and-domestic-violence-offenses/75-2312f62f-a964-4016-8d3e-77bc27322c93 https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/aug/21/arizona-phoenix-concentration-camp-tent-city-jail-joe-arpaio-immigration https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2017/08/25/how-ex-sheriff-joe-arpaio-wound-up-facing-jail-time-before-trump-pardoned-him/ https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/prisoners-hang-themselves-in-sheriff-joe-arpaios-jails-at-a-rate-that-dwarfs-other-county-lockups-7845679 https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/arpaios-jail-staff-cost-ambrett-spencer-her-baby-and-shes-not-the-only-one-6433038?storyPage=2 https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/in-the-crosshairs-6431626?storyPage=12 https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/a-phony-murder-plot-against-joe-arpaio-winds-up-costing-taxpayers-11-million-6629798 https://www.gq.com/story/joe-arpaio-history Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's torturing my people who have not in most cases committed a crime or at least been convicted of it? Ah, Jesus shit. That was a bad introduction. This is behind the bastards. The podcast that is incompetently introduced and competently produced by my producer Sophie.

I'm Robert Evans, the weak link in this in this chain here to talk with my guest this week, Noah Schachtman. Noah, how are you doing? What's up, man? That intro really was fucking deplorable. Yeah, it was horrible. It was horrible. I was going to start with what's concentrating my camps, but I figured that was even worse. You see now that's good. That's comedy. I should have dove in. I should have gone for it. Come on.

Noah, you are about to be, fixin' to be, as we say where I come from, the editor of Rolling Stone. You've been editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast for, since what, 2018, right? Yeah, that's right. We've used, I mean, I use Daily Beast articles constantly as sources on this show. I'm a big fan of your work, have been for a while. You worked at Wired. You were embedded with the Iraqi, the Baghdad bomb squad at one point, right? That was a story you did earlier in your career. True story. True story.

You've done a bunch of cool shit. A real journalist, journalist. And now you're going to sit down with me and talk about a real shitty person. So how are you feeling, Noah? I'm feeling great. I'm feeling great. And I got to say, the staff of The Daily Beast are all, like, collectively huge fanboys. Oh. That's great to hear. Well, Farah, we were talking about the show Fuck Boy Island.

I feel like, you know, The Daily Beast staff is, is of itself a Fuck Boy Island for buying the bastards. You could have just left it at a Fuck Boy Island and then never explained the rest of that comment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You can't call HR me now, can you? I'm leaving, motherfuckers. Noah, how do you, what do you know about a little fella, fun little guy named Joe Arpaio?

Oh. Yeah. That's the right answer. Yeah. I like, you know, I certainly know he is a no friend to the immigrant community. That would be a fair statement. I certainly know that he has not been a model for police reform in this country. That would also be a fair answer.

But I feel like he's always one of those guys like, I knew he was bad. I would read the episodic coverage, but I always knew there was more. And I thought if only there was going to be a multi-part podcast that could explain to me exactly how shitty this motherfucker was. Well, miraculously, there is one. Wow. And it's, it's this podcast right here. And also my cats figured out how to open the front door to the house. I'm not sure how that happened, but that just occurred.

Amazing. I'm sure the two are linked. Yeah. Yeah, they're probably agents of the, of the Maricopa County Sheriff's Department. So Joe Arpaio is interesting because he's at, he's at the crossroads of a lot of things. He will claim that he's the guy who kind of provided the blueprints in a lot of ways for how Donald Trump organized and focused his, not necessarily for how he won election, but for how he kind of responded and used the media. And I actually think, or Arpaio is a narcissist, right?

Like, or that's not a clinical definition, but he thinks highly of himself. But I don't think that's an unfair statement necessarily to make. You can see in a lot of the way Joe uses the media through his career, a lot of Trumpian stuff. He's an interesting guy and he's kind of also at, he's, he's been, this guy has a long career in law enforcement. He's the sheriff of Maricopa County for like 24 years. And so he kind of straddles a few different eras in the evolution of American law enforcement to what it is today, starting with like, you know, the horrible, horrible crime spree that we had in like that kind of reached its peak in 1991. That's about when he comes into office.

And he rides that through to the start of the war on terror and like the big immigration panics of the, of the mid aughts. And he stays in office right up until Trump's election. So he's, he's an incredibly influential guy, both in the way he uses the media as a right-wing politician and in what he is, what he represents as a lawman. So yeah, there's, there's a lot of good reasons to study Joe Arpaio and also just a lot of horrible, horrible stories. We're going to try to balance the two because I don't want to just make this misery porn, but there is a lot of that in this. Yay. All right.

So Joseph Michael Arpaio was born on June 14, 1932 in Springfield, Massachusetts. His parents were Italian immigrants and Arpaio would later insist in interviews. They came through Ellis Island legally. He says this a lot because he becomes a big anti-immigration guy after a certain point, although not originally. Now, it's true that his parents did immigrate legally into the United States, but the reality of the situation is more complex than that. His father, Ciro, fled Italy during the reign of Benito Mussolini in 1923 for reasons that should be obvious. Not a lot of good reasons to stay in Italy in 1923. Nope.

Unless you're a really specific kind of dude. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of ironic, right, given who Arpaio becomes. Yes. And given that a lot of the people he's locking up are people who are fleeing their own authoritarian leaders. And Ciro comes very close to not being let in the United States. So at the time that he's immigrating to the U.S., we have an immigration cap. And so he sets sail on a steam ship that's leaving Italy alongside like 10 other immigrant ships.

And everyone knows when they all set sail, only the first one or two boats are going, like the only the first couple of boats that people in them are going to be able to immigrate. Because then the quota will hit and no one else is going to be allowed in legally. And like newspapers are covering the race between all these immigrant ships. What? Who's going to get in to be citizens? Oh my God. What the fuck? What the fuck, man?

That's like a horror show. Yeah. It's a nightmare. Just sitting on a boat for weeks like it's a steam ship. It's not that fast and just like not knowing if you're just going to get sent back to the ocean. Sent back to Mussolini? Yeah. It's horrifying.

That said, the Presidente Wilson, which is the steam ship that Ciro his dad is on, is the Presidente Wilson. Like what, it was going to appeal to the US? I think that's what the Italians were thinking. Yeah. They'll let us in. We got the name of everyone's favorite president. Yeah. That boat did win though, it was the first of these ships into New York Harbor.

Yeah. So they get to be citizens. So Joe Stanley's story here starts with a hell of a lot of luck. I mean, it's just, it's just so crazy. Like you, your family comes here on the dumbest of dumb reasons. And like what they like happened to, you know, hit a tide or hit a, hit a wind just right. And otherwise, they'd be, they'd be back in Italy. Come on.

They'd be back in it. Like he's bragging or they'd have come in illegally, right? A lot of people did do that. Sure. But he's like bragging about my family did it the right way. I was like, no, your family got lucky. Because racists were trying to limit how many Italians could come into the country. Now Joe's mother, Josephine was also an Italian immigrant.

She taught kindergarten and she was the daughter of the publisher of Springfield's Italian language paper. Ciro met Josephine when he placed ads for his new grocery store in the paper. He starts a grocery store not long after he moves to the country. The two were married when she was 22 and he was 30. So he'd been in the U.S. seven or eight years at this point, right? When he gets married to this lady. They had Joe a year later and it was a horrible, horrible labor. Josephine died nine days after giving birth to Joe Arpaio of a pulmonary edema.

The local paper called her death sudden and obviously a horrific thing for the whole family. Decades later, when he ran for governor, Joe put out a kind of a biography, a very succinct biography of himself on the early life section of his website, sorry, when he ran for Congress and he noted that he had a quote tough start in life, which is fair. Losing your mom at nine days old is a tough start in life to be certain. In his biography, he claims that his dad owned a small grocery store in town. While the New Yorker profile claims he owned grocery stores. I'm not sure which of those is more accurate.

I really haven't been able to find much detail. They definitely paint somewhat different pictures of the family socioeconomic status, obviously. Either way, Ciro was very busy with work and did not have time to take care of his son. Joe was raised by friends and family. Now, Joe claims that he was an accomplished athlete and an average student, but Terry Green Sterling and Jude Jaffee Block, who wrote a book about Arpaio titled Driving While Brown, paint a less pleasant picture of his time in school. Quote, Joe Arpaio had a difficult time in school.

He struggled to get passing grades and often bore the brunt of anti-immigrant thoughts. Dago, WAP, Guinea, he took it, pretended to ignore it because that's what you did back then, he told us. So Joe suffers a lot of anti-immigrant racism as a kid, which is believable. Oh, my God. And the abuser, the abuse becomes the abuser, huh? Yeah, I mean, that is the story here. Wild. And it's, you know, it's one of those things. He's definitely, by the time he's grown up the 30s, we're not quite at the height of kind of anti-Italian racism,

but it is still like a pretty common thing and his family is working class Italian. There's certainly a lot of bigotry that he's growing up in and around. When Joe turned 18, he joined the army. There was a draft on at the time. So this may have been more him accepting in inevitability than doing a patriotism. I talked to my grandpa was kind of in the same generation and a lot of guys joined the army because it was like, well, if you join, you get to pick your branch. You have some choice in what you do as opposed to just kind of waiting for your number to come up.

The Korean War started immediately after he joins and Joe later wrote, quote, I wanted a piece of the action, but as luck would have it, instead of heading off to combat, the army saw an unusual talent in the young Joe Arpaio, something other men my age knew nothing about. Typing. So instead of issuing me off to Korea, the army put. Wait a minute. This like guy who purports himself to be the tough guy of all tough guys. Yeah.

The mean sheriff. America's tough as sheriff. Yeah. He's a fucking typist. He was a typist. Oh, and it's great. There's some real questions because he brags a lot about all the gunfights he's in as a lawman later. And there's some serious questions as to whether or not he's ever seen in coming fire.

And this is like, obviously, there's no shame in being a typist or whatever in the military. But the way he frames this is fat because he needs you to know because of the guy he is, he needs you to know he really wanted to fight. He wanted to see combat. But gosh darn it, he was just so good at typing. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah.

Because if there's one thing America needed as the North Koreans were coming down the peninsula and one thing they needed for the Incheon landing. There's one touch type. Yeah. Joe Arpaio mastered the QWERTY keyboard, saved all those Marines at the chosen reservoir. My grandpa was in Korea and he kind of like by surprise, he had been stationed in Korea before the fighting started and he was just there as a medic. He was there the whole war.

And I think would have given anything to have not had those experiences after he had them. You can tell the kind of guys who never got into it but built this image of themselves as a tough guy and really wished they'd seen something that I think had he experienced combat in Korea, probably would have wished he'd done anything else for his time. Because it was a pretty horrible war. Yeah. I mean even for wars, Korea was really bad. It was a real bad one.

Isn't that true about all these fucking wannabe fechies motifs, right? It's like none of them actually see any action. I mean with the exception of I suppose one Austrian, but other than that. Yeah, you're getting a Hitler that. Yeah. But I mean they really like, they never see any action. They just sit on the sidelines and you're like, oh my god, totally would have done it if it wasn't for my bone spurs.

Yeah. I totally would have done it if it wasn't for my fucking killing typing. It's this frustrating aspect of the American hawk culture where, not all, you definitely do. I don't want to like paint it. There's definitely some hawks out there who saw some serious combat, but it's not most people who do that. And the ones who, I think it was Jim Jordan who just posted a video of himself firing a

machine gun at a range and just looking miserable doing it. Like he's got it braced in this. He's shooting it like somebody who's scared of the gun he's using. None of them ever, I don't know, they never pull any of this off. It's like Ted Cruz trying to, or Jeb Bush posing with his monogrammed handgun. You obviously don't, and that's fine. You don't have to like this stuff. Stop pretending.

Stop pretending. Was Jim Jordan in, like did he wear a jacket that one time to machine gun opposing? What? You know how like he never wears a jacket? Is this a thing maybe it was only in like... No, no, I'm not aware. I don't know much about it. I think, I may be getting it wrong.

It may not be Jim Jordan, in which case I'm ashamed. Shit. Now I'm Googling Jim Jordan machine gun. Yeah. Hmm. Hmm. I see something about machine gun Kelly. Yeah, yeah.

Fox's boyfriend. I also think somebody has somebody backing up with a really loud truck. Yeah, I'm sorry. I'm calling from New York. Never apologize. Okay. Are we here to talk about trucks and machine gun Kelly? Yes.

Yes. Yes. But so yeah, Joe, the way he frames this, he needs to let you know that he, he desperately wanted to fight, but he was just so good at typing. But he also wants you to know that him being in the army, like equipped him with key skills that made him a badass cop. So he continues after stating that the military had preferred him typing than fighting. He goes on to write.

So instead of issuing me off to Korea, the army put me in the military's medical detachment division, where report writing skills and interviewing techniques were critical. And this is where we get to a really interesting discrepancy in his background. As we'll become clear, Joe, as we've talked about, Joe has a real vested interest in wanting people to see him as a warrior. But since he didn't do any cool stuff in the army, in his own bio, he uses that section to immediately pivot towards his career in law enforcement, saying, the army never got me over to Korea, but it did get me abroad for a while.

That's where I was bitten by wanderlust. Little did I know then that France would be the first of many foreign countries where I would be sent to fight crime. After getting a taste of what a cop would be like in the military, I was discharged from the army and immediately signed up to be a street cop in one of the toughest cities in America, Washington, DC. Now, do you see the nonsense there? Because he's not being a cop in the army.

He's doing medical paperwork. He's not fighting crime in France. He's like filing out VA forms and shit, which is, again, a necessary job, but is not anything like police work. What the hell? Fighting crime by making sure guys get their doctor's appointments. Right. To make sure that their chlamydia gets treated in France.

Yeah. It's very... Wow. It's very funny. He wants you to see this direct line that he's kind of like just building up to be a great, great warrior cop. So, yeah. And then he goes straight to DC?

Well, not quite, actually. What he doesn't say in his sanitized biography that he wrote for his campaign is that he didn't immediately go into being a DC cop. He actually attempted to join the US Border Patrol, but he flunked the entry test. For the Border Patrol. Which is, I think the test is mainly, can you hold a gun in your hand? And are you angry all the time? Oh my God.

Yeah. Couldn't get into the 50s Border Patrol. Oh my God. So, this guy who like, his family is an immigrant family, gets here at a dumb fucking lock. Then he can't even... He types his way out of fighting in Korea. In Korea, yeah. Then he tries to take it out on immigrants by joining the Border Patrol and he can't even

do that. Yeah. They won't take him. He flunks out. Thankfully, if you're not good enough to be in the Border Patrol, at this point in time at least, you can still be a DC cop. And he doesn't do this for long. In fact, over the next three years he has four different law enforcement jobs.

Now when he talks about his time as a DC cop, he consistently describes it as a black neighborhood. Like he needs you to know that was where he patrolled. In one interview he admitted, I was a pretty aggressive cop, made more arrests than anybody in the precinct. Not that I was prejudiced. I wasn't prejudiced. Wait, can we go back to three jobs in four, would you say three jobs in four years? Yeah, three jobs in four years, I think, yeah.

Or say four different law enforcement jobs in three years. Yeah, that's not great. That is not a sign that you are, you know, Jack Webb here, that you are Sherlock Holmes. No, he's not Holmesian. Yeah. On what I'm sure was a completely unrelated note, he brags that he was the department's quote, most assaulted officer in 1957. A lot of people wanted to kick the shit out of me.

For the two months I had this job. Yeah, he was not there long. He claims that he would have made detective, but quote, the promotion roles were backed up. Yeah, absolutely, Joe. Oh yeah, totally, dude. Absolutely, man. You keep getting your ass kicked all the time. You're definitely racist.

You couldn't... Yeah, sure, the roles were backed up. Yeah, oh yeah, way back. He also says he was in constant pain from being assaulted all the time. That might be true. I do not have trouble believing he got beaten up a lot. My God. I will believe that.

He decided to move on next to the next police department he would serve in, Las Vegas. Joe's most prominent claim from this time is that he once pulled over Elvis Presley. Sometimes he claims that he actually arrested Presley and took him down to the station to meet other officers. I do not believe either iteration of this story. I think they are both lies. Never seen any evidence that he arrested Elvis. Obviously, I think a lot of people pulled Elvis Presley over.

It does not seem like an obey the rules of the road guy. But Joe Arpaio also seems like a liar. Yeah, that didn't happen. Now, he was a Vegas cop for about six months when he signed on as an agent for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. And this is the job that he would stick with for years and years. The authors of Driving while Brown, right? We came to understand that Arpaio learned and the small drug enforcement agency then

overseen by the Treasury Department a lot of things that would inform his tenure as a Maricopa County Sheriff. He learned how to assume a fictitious role. He learned how to self validate by inserting himself in the news and he learned how to create chaos on the United States Mexico border to achieve a political goal. In the early days, Arpaio dreamed up tough guy characters for his undercover work and jumped into those roles with gusto. One of his partners in Chicago, Bill Mattingly, told us he and Arpaio went undercover passing

themselves off as pimps looking for drugs to buy for their junky whores. Again, this is their language, 1950s, 60s I think maybe at this point. To play these roles, the duo tooled around in fancy cars that authorities had seized from suspected crooks. Arpaio smoked a cigar and dressed in flashy sports coats. He purchased $5 nickel bags of heroin for the whores, after which he and Mattingly placed the low level dealer into the back of the car and threatened years of prison if the dealer didn't name his supplier.

This earned Arpaio the bureau nickname of Nickelbag Joe. That's amazing. Yeah, that's his certainly career. Wait a minute. Here's the part I need to understand. Why the elaborate pimp costume? I don't think those were necessary at all. Right.

You can just buy a nickel bag on the street. I bought a handful of nickel bags. At no point have I been wearing a pimp costume. It's like what he's like the James O'Keefe of the Narcos. Yeah. He's going to dress up like a pimp in order to do it. Yeah, you get that. And I also think he wanted to feel cool.

Like he wanted to drive the flashy car, dress like a fucking hip guy. You get the feeling, this will come up later with some of his posse members. You get the feeling some of this is just like him wanting to have a cooler life than he did. And the best way to do that is to bust people for nickel bags of heroin while driving around confiscated fancy cars and shit. I'm completely confused. I feel like that's what's going on here.

Wait, when you say posse members, do you mean like in the hip hop sense or like? Oh yes. No, no. As sheriff, we're getting at it. But as sheriff, he has, he establishes a posse of thousands of random people. What? Yeah. Oh yeah.

That's quite a story. We are, we're going to have fun with this, you and I. Wait a minute. Wait, are they all dressed as pimps? No. Is it hundreds of people dressed as pimps? We're running around? That'd be amazing.

Dozens at one point. Dozens at one point, no. Kind of. We'll get into that in a little bit. We're a few years ahead of ourselves. So yeah, Joe, because he talks a lot as a, when he's a sheriff later in a big media personality, he talks a lot about his time in the narcotics department and then the DEA. He likes to tell a lot of vague stories about traveling over the world and getting into

constant gun battles. We'll discuss the truth behind that in a little bit, but he did travel around. He was stationed in a lot of far flung areas and he busted people for drugs, although most of those busts were not the glamorous stuff that they make HBO mini series about. That's why he was Nickelback Joe. You know, he's not, not the highest man on the totem pole as a sheriff. Joe was married to the job, but in 1957 he'd also gotten married to a person, Eva Lam, a clerical worker who threw some bizarre quirk of fates found Joe to be a little Italian

cutie in her words. Maddeningly, Joe's partner later expressed to interviewers that he felt Joe ignored his wife and spent too much time away from her. He recalls regularly telling his partner to go home and spend time with his wife. The couple named their first son, Rocco, after Rocky Marciano, the boxer. Joe only babysat their kid once and his wife says never washed a dish or made a bed. She told interviewers he was too busy, had to sleep when he was off because he did work a lot of hours.

It's okay. First of all, it's not babysitting if it's your own child show. Yeah, it is. Right. It is your child. Well, she called it babysitting, but yeah, that's, that is your child. Little Italian cutie, how about no? You know, I was going to large him up because I feel like Rocco is a pretty good name.

I think Rocco Arpaio is like a legit good name. Oh yeah, you could see that guy running a deli? Oh shit, yeah. Yeah. Hell of a deli. I mean, I feel like in the Brooklyn of your, there might have been a bunch of Rocco Arpaio's running around and that would have been cool. But man.

Would have been a good boxer name too, you know? Hell yeah. You could see Rocco Arpaio. Yeah. Punching people in a ring, absolutely. You've just looked up a picture of him as young, young Joe Arpaio and he is not a little Italian cutie. I'm just going to, on the record.

You can take that up with his very dead wife, Sophie. Dead wife, you and I need to have a conversation. Well, get the Ouija board out. So in 1961, who brags about like, ah, I never washed a dish. I never took care of my kid once. Well, that's her saying it. Yeah. I mean, it is weird, right?

It is weird that she, because you get when, I don't know, she's telling you about this. Oh my God, this poor kid, hold on a second. This poor kid, this picture, I just pulled up, I'm sure this is the one Sophie's looking at. This picture, this poor kid looks, is in like a v-neck sweater and a bow tie. And there is a look of unbearable sadness on this kid's face. Oh no. Oh God, I'm looking at it.

Yeah, that is. Yeah. Oh, that poor boy. My asshole. That is a cursed photo, Noah. Oh God, my asshole, pimp dressing dad, is touching me on the shoulder for the first and only time, and I am gripped with unbearable loneliness, knowing that this will never happen again.

Yeah. This is the first time I've seen him in months. Oh God. God. And mom is there in like a bouffant hairdo and a big old belt, and she's just like, if only I could murder this man. Yeah, and he looks, he's got like Ann Slinger vibes, he's got fucking J. Edgar Hoover vibes, he just has that like, that particular kind of crooked law man look to him, just like

in his, it's amazing what a, what a feel that is. Oh my God. God, good God, and yeah, he's just always looked the same. So in 1961, Joe was sent to Istanbul, which was a big get within the Bureau of Narcotics. It's a big job. Turkey was the major hub of the international heroin market, and Joe was about to get his first chance to harsh a lot of people's buzzes. In 1963, he participated in a massive one ton opium bust.

He went to the media with the story and ensured it was covered as the largest bust ever made in Turkey and one of the largest in the world. I have no idea if that was true, but that's how the media covered it, because that's what Joe told them, and they ran with the story. He was the only agent named in the article. So Joe really engineers media coverage around this bust that he's one of the guys responsible for, and he makes sure that he's the only name in that coverage. And it goes, it goes over huge back home.

His dad, who he's got a very strict father, is proud. He gets to see his kid in the newspaper. The newspaper gets passed all around his hometown. And it's Joe Arpaio's first big experience in using the media to stroke his own ego and to pad his career. And he's going to get very good at this in the future. He plays the media pretty masterfully over the course of his career. So Joe was engaged in at least one gun battle during his time in Turkey, probably.

And this is where we get into a really interesting little dissection here, Noah. The authors of the book, Driving While Brown, and I found actually the article that they did like an excerpt from their book was published in The Daily Beast, which is where I found this, did a really deep analysis of this, reviewing his commentary on the incident from a newspaper archive, a testimony he gave before a Senate subcommittee, and in two of his memoirs. And they note that Arpaio tells the story differently each time. His first public recollection of the event was in 1982, near the end of his career and

about 20 years after it would have happened if it happened. He told a Phoenix reporter that he and five Turkish cops got into a gun battle with drug dealers. Quote, four of the Turks got away and the other was shot to death. He gave no detail on who shot the man or the circumstances around the shooting. Joe talked about this gunfight again seven years later in 1989, during a hearing before the International Narcotics Control Caucus of the U.S. Senate, cheered by a fellow you might know named Sleepy Joe Biden.

In his testimony before Congress, Joe claimed to have not Biden, obviously Arpaio, claimed to have killed two Turkish drug dealers and a pulse pounding shootout. He made this claim while criticizing the State Department for being ineffective in supporting DEA agents. Here's what he said, quote, a paradox. One of my weekly gun battles in the mountains of Turkey where I killed two Turks, two, yeah, now it's weekly, right? Weekly.

Weekly. Like, was it set at a certain time? Was it like, okay, guys, Thursday for a gun battle? Yeah. That sounds to me like he had, that sounds to me like he had a weekly, like maybe training session at the, at the range, like he went to the range every Thursday at four and he had a gun battle with like a paper target. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't think he would have, I don't have much faith in his ability to win that gun battle, but I'm not, I'm not sure he was ever in a gunfight is what I'm going to say. But this is what he says before Congress. So I killed two Turks, two dope peddlers, and I was indicted with four other police officers for murder. I sent a cable through State Department channels and nothing happened. Three weeks later, they finally decided, gee, we had better do something with Joe.

Of course I resolved the matter. My indictment was dismissed and the other police officers had to stand trial, but they were found not guilty. Let me add we were in the line of duty. So I have no idea what to make of that because he tells this story differently every time. You would think that the version in Congress would be the most honest, but he's also claimed you have had weekly gun battles in the mountains of Turkey and I've never been able to find any evidence that would corroborate this.

No one else's stories in the DEA of that time sound like Joe would have been involved in like he's painting the picture that he was at war in the mountains of Turkey for several years, basically. Right. And hold on. He says he was indicted for murder like no big deal and he had to mention in Turkey and he hadn't mentioned that in previous iterations of the story. Nope.

Nope. I don't think so. No. I think in his in that interview. Well, in the interview he gave to that local Phoenix paper, he says that several of the cops he was with got indicted and there was a trial and they were declared innocent. But he doesn't mention himself being indicted in that first interview. So you can see seven years later, the story has evolved when he tells it to Congress and

not only is it like, oh, yeah, we had this one gunfight, gunfight where a guy died. It's though this is one of my weekly gunfights and it's you can see like the mythologizing right that he's he's going through as this happens. So when he told my dude, I hold on, it's like, I have this awesome story. Let me tell you two. Oh, there's one part. I forgot. Oh, there's this one little key detail.

I left out. I was indicted for murder. Yeah. Yeah. I was indicted for murder. It was one of my weekly gun battles where I get indicted for murder. You know? Happened to me all the time, classic DEA business and it's interesting this this this most kind

of lavish version of the story in 89 comes out like two years before he runs for office. So you can see he's kind of starting to like build up this this internal mythology over like what he did as a DEA agent. And I don't think any of it's true. Like I said, I don't actually know if I think Joe Arpaio was ever in a gunfight. I just don't know. You know? There's also a good chance.

And I, you know, I think you talk to people who served in the military. They all have stories of guys who came back and then started embellishing what happened and like eventually it bears no resemblance to like, well, yeah, there's this one time we were getting shot at and then like it's turned in his head into this thing different than what it was. So it's possible that like there was a there was a gunfight of some sort that Joe was around for. And he's just turned it into something completely different.

We don't really know. But Robert, you know, who definitely hasn't, well, I don't know if they've been possibly gunfight. I'm going to guess a number of our sponsors have been a gunfight, so I would agree with that statement. I was going to you don't move the pills unless you're willing to like lay down some heavy weight, just dropping a Mac 10 into a OK, well, here's the ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated

the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. Because the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver.

At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and on the gun badass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't

a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the

youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the

world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. So we're back. And we're talking about Joe and his story of this gunfight that may or may not have happened. Now, 8090s when he tells this to Congress, years later when he's a sheriff, he writes two different memoirs while he co-writes.

He hires a ghostwriter to write two different sets of memoirs. And in both memoirs, he repeats the story with more embellishment. In this version, he ties it into Turkish politics, adding, quote, it's not that I was glad the dealers had been killed, I wasn't, but it happened and more often than on one occasion. So he's still adding that now he's saying I killed multiple people, right? Like, again, it keeps part of why I'm pretty, part of why I don't know if I ever think he's ever been in a gunfight is the story evolved. So it starts, there was one gunfight, a guy died.

We had daily gunfights and then one time, you know, I killed somebody or I killed two people is what he tells Congress and there was a big court case. And then the third version is I killed people on a bunch of different occasions, you know? Version four, in my daily tank war, I drove an armored personnel carrier down the streets of Istanbul, mowing down bystanders. Just machine gunning drug dealers, just to the sport of it. That's how he wants people to think about his fucking, I mean, and that's the image he paints of himself when he's Sheriff Joe and he gets all these tanks and he's got guys

with machine guns all over the place. Like he very much wants to be seen as this like Wild West lawman type mother. Like, you know, the kind of image he wants to portray is like that he's like Charles Bronson, you know? Yeah, he's definitely, if you've never seen a Charles Bronson movie, they're all based around this like shlubby middle-aged man who just mows down drug dealers with machine guns in like New York City. Yeah, and grunts to himself.

Yeah, and grunts and sweats a lot, Charles Bronson. So the authors of Driving While Brown eventually got to interview Joe Arpaio about this purported shooting. They write, quote, we asked Arpaio several times if he'd ever killed anybody. He answered, not that I know of, although in Turkey, I used to have gun battles. I think one gun battle I did hit one or two dope peddlers only because I am the one that had the gun, a 38, I guess. He added hastily that he had never killed anyone in the United States.

Another time he told us, in Turkey, I've had some gun battles. I don't know who killed who, but I never killed anybody, which is different very much from his congressional testimony. So he's just a liar. He's just a big liar, Noah. He's just a big liar, I think. I also, I like, it's not a gun battle if you're the only one with the gun. You're just shooting people, Joe, for it to be a gun battle, there need to be guns on

both sides. I had a gun battle. Yeah. I'm going back to the paper target theory. I think he had a weekly gun battle with a paper target. Might have shot somebody while he was trying to hit a paper target. So I know, yeah, we spent a lot of time and analysis on this, but it's hugely important to his image in public speeches and books aimed at his fan base when it becomes a politician.

Joe would talk about these weekly gunfights in the mountains of Turkey and his like far-flung career killing bad guys all around the world. And this is how he portrays himself when he's giving speeches and when he's writing his own books. But when he's pressed by serious reporters, he backs down and he provides a much more grounded story. And I think it's because he knows that they can check up on elements of his story. And at the end of this, again, I have no idea if I believe Joe Arpaio has ever heard Incoming

Fire. Now after Turkey, Joe was sent to DC, where he participated in Operation Intercept, a Nixonian plan to blockade border crossing stations with Mexico in order to stop drugs from entering the U.S. This may have been, this seems to have been partly Joe's idea and Nixon really liked it. It was a big publicity ploy. Nixon was trying to bully Mexico into letting the U.S. aerially spray pesticides on marijuana fields.

And basically we were threatening the Mexican government by shutting down border crossing stations and causing a huge amount of economic damage. One aspect of the blockade that Joe personally oversaw was that immigration and narcotics officers individually searched 4.5 million civilians over a three-week period. This included a lot of strip searches, a lot of people being detained, and it was economically devastating to people who lived in the region on both sides of the border. But it gave Dick Nixon an excuse to act like he was tough on drugs and make political hay. Joe Arpaio got close with Nixon as a result of this.

He spent, during this operation, Arpaio was flying around in a helicopter with Spiro Agnew monitoring like the shutdown of the border. So he's actually in pretty deep with the Nixon administration, you know? He's Agnew deep, which is, yeah. So Joe was sent next to Mexico City where he was served as the regional director for the Bureau of Narcotics. He and his wife had a second child and in general things were going great for him. Nixon regularly sent his deputy attorney general down to talk with Joe about undercover

operations. He went to Chicago and San Antonio in Boston over the next few years. As his career neared its end in 1978, he chose to be stationed in Arizona. This would be Joe's last station of duty, and it was the place he and Ava decided to build their life. They bought a house in the Northeast Valley. Ava started a travel agency in Scottsdale. But all was not well.

Phoenix, being Phoenix, had a lot of Mexican agents in its DEA branch. Two of Joe's new colleagues felt that he was kind of racist. Joe Jordan, who'd ran the Phoenix office before Joe moved in, claims Joe deliberately sabotaged relationships between Mexican and American narcotics agents. In response, Joe initiated an internal probe against Jordan, claiming that he'd leaked information to a journalist and that he'd used the office copy machine to copy a cookbook for his girlfriend. How dare he?

How dare he? Joe loses his rank over this and gets pushed to a desk job, though. Now there's eventually an investigation, and it finds that there's, or not Joe, sorry, the other guy, Phil Jordan. And when the investigation concludes. I just love how it's like, oh, I may be racist, but he photocopied a cookbook. Yeah, it's an amazing allegation to throw at. And it's this thing you'll see again with Joe.

He gets attacked and he immediately goes after the people who attack him and does his best to damage their career. But although there were no merits to the allegations Joe made against Phil Jordan, it still damages the guy's career for a while. Joe also had conflict with Laura Garcia, at the time the only Mexican-American woman in the Phoenix DEA office. She filed a complaint about explosives that the DEA had stored without proper safety procedures in downtown Phoenix.

She was especially concerned about these improperly stored explosives because she was pregnant, and thus particularly vulnerable to explosions. A local newspaper, that's true, I guess so. Every doctor is going to tell you, no, don't explode pregnant, it's bad for them. But she's got concerns too, like they're not properly dealing with like the fumes and stuff coming off this, like it's just a really dangerous storage situation. And a local newspaper learns about her complaint and publishes an article. This infuriated Arpaio and she claims he started attacking her about her ethnicity and Monday

morning meetings. He had agents search her car repeatedly and investigate her over parking tickets. At one time he told her, you should be home having babies and cooking tortillas. She eventually left the DEA over this. So he's... He sucks. Not good. Terrible.

Now, Joe retired from the DEA in 1982. He was 50 years old. For the next 10 years he lived the low profile life of a retiree. He worked mostly at his wife's travel agency in Scottsdale. He seems to have been very quickly bothered by the fact that he was no longer a powerful man, he wasn't interacting with elected leaders and making decisions that impacted people's lives every day. He doesn't take well to being retired quietly.

So he decides to run for Phoenix City Council on a platform of forcing the homeless out of town and locking them up if they refuse to leave. Yeah. Wait, I want to know what kind of trips he was booking. Oh, we're about to talk about that, Noah. Spoilers, it's to space. So he loses that city council election and next in 1985 he decides to use his talent as a huckster to sell people tickets to space through his wife's travel agency.

Wait, you're not kidding. No, that's absolutely a thing he did. What? It's part of this. I haven't, there's like a whole dig to be done here into the whole story, but basically there was this nationwide, there was this company called Society Expeditions and Pacific American Launch Systems, and they started advertising in the 80s that by 1992 they're going to have a craft capable of vertical takeoff and landing, like a spaceship that

can do vertical takeoff and landing, which we still don't have today, right? Like that's not, wasn't remotely possible in the 1980s, but they're bragging that they have this and they make deals with a bunch of travel agencies to sell people tickets on this thing. And Joe gets his travel, his wife's travel agency involved and they start hucking these space tickets. And I'm going to quote from a 1996 write up by the Phoenix New Times here, the price was $50,000 with a $7,000 deposit and collection of the rest beginning in October 12, 1992,

when the Phoenix was to take its first passengers into space. Um, yeah, we had people, program director Colette Bevis says 252 people paid the $7,000 with 5,000 going to a refundable escrow account and the remaining 2,000 non-refundable going to Society Expeditions bank account. We had people taking out three mortgages on their home, she recalls. Oh my God. Yeah. And they were...

Okay, wait a minute. Yeah. Joe Arpaio. Selling space tickets. Selling space tickets. Okay, stick with me. Joe Arpaio was from the future. He actually, he meant it, he meant it.

He wasn't trying to, he wasn't trying to, you know, pull a grip on anything. He came back in time and his, him selling the tickets early is why space travel got derailed and we weren't able to get, we would have been doing trips into space by 92 for everybody. We'd have mass space travel now. Joe Arpaio ruined it by selling space tickets too early. He fucked up the time stream. He came back from the future to fuck up space travel. Oh, he wanted to take that from us.

Yeah. He wanted Jeff Bezos to have it to himself. That's son of a bitch. Yeah. So, uh... Wait a minute. He sold tickets to space. We don't know if any of them sold.

We know that they were trying to sell them. Wait, I thought you said like 250 people paid 7,000 bucks. 252 people total in the country paid for this ticket. We don't know who they... So, when the Phoenix New Times interviewed the lady who used to work for the company, she said she couldn't access her records to confirm whether or not the Arpaio sold any space junkets and Joe just refuses to answer any questions about this. So we don't know if he sold any, but he tried to.

He may have. We just have no idea because I think this was all the con game from the beginning and I don't know that I believe the company ever actually had records. In any case, whether or not it was a con from the beginning, in 1986 the Challenger exploded and that was kind of the end of anyone talking about selling tickets like this. So, the grift falls apart. It's just funny that they got involved with this. Joe was selling tickets to space for a while.

We don't know if he succeeded in actually getting any money, but they tried. You guys have covered like every grifter in history, right? You guys have covered 10 million grifters. A lot of them, yeah. This is like the same playbook, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's very much, you know, I think the thing that you see with all of the grifters that we cover that Joe Arpaio has in spades is a gut understanding of how to make a spectacle

of the media, right? Because the thing that you're always selling as a grifter is yourself and that's the thing Joe is always selling. That's why this story about him being in gunfights in Turkey is so important because he's got to sell himself as this desperado warrior lawman, right? And I think in this period, after retirement, kind of the reason he's going through the city council, trying to win there and an anti-hunting, then he's selling space tickets is he kind of loses the thread of his own story for a while.

I think he's kind of lost after the DEA and it takes him a while to figure out what story he's going to sell next to people. I think that's kind of the position he's in right now. So after 10 years of working for his wife, he decided to get back into the spotlight. In 1992, he had a chance because there was a Maricopa County sheriff selection. So it just so happened that 1992 was a great time to run for sheriff of Maricopa County. The sitting sheriff was a guy named Tom Agnos and he was in charge during the Waddell Buddhist Temple shooting, which I think may still be the largest mass shooting in Arizona history.

Being dead, it may have been beaten by now. It was the largest for quite a while and it was not like, you know, when we say mass shooting today, you're thinking about like a guy walking in with a gun and just mowing people down. This was a robbery that went horribly bad and these people were well being robbed, executed so that they couldn't like give away the people who'd robbed them basically, right? Like that seems to have been the actual case here. It's a horrible, horrible tragedy and it got worse actually when the police got involved

because they get a tip from a very unreliable source and they immediately arrest five men from Tucson, Arizona based on this tip. Now one of these guys is let go after providing an alibi, but the remainder are charged after deputies coerced them in into confessing by exaggerating evidence and threatening them with the death penalty. So very sketchy behavior on behalf of the sheriffs. They kind of forced these guys to confess and the sheriff's department just is very convinced that these are the guilty parties.

For about seven weeks, the Tucson four languish in jail and the sheriff's department is adamant that these guys are absolutely guilty and then incontrovertible evidence emerges that two completely different guys are the real killers. So the Tucson four sue the state successfully. They get a bunch of money, but the sheriff Agnos refuses to admit any wrongdoing and he claims the coerced confessions justified murder charges. Now 1992 was still a time when being brutally bad at your job in a way that harmed people could get you fired and Maricopa County and Maricopa County very rightly decided to fire

sheriff Agnos. So Joe picks this time to run for sheriff. It's a great time to run for sheriff because it's really easy to look good next to this chuckle fuck. Now at the time the US was just one year out from the peak of the most violent crime wave in recent history 1991 is the peak in recent memory of violent crime in the United States. So this is the year after that people are still real freaked out about this is like Charles Bronson movies are big in this time right.

Our pile was not at this point focused on immigration. In fact, his campaign had nothing to do with immigrants. Instead he focused on his history as a DEA man and he promised to use those skills to keep people safe. He also complained about mismanagement by the old sheriff and that he was basically like hey he's wasting a bunch of tax money see this big case that went badly we got sued for millions of dollars like I'm going to come in and clean up the sheriff's department and I'm going to save the county a bunch of money.

He also promised that if elected he would serve only one term. He won election handily in 1993 he was sworn in. One other elected official who was sworn in on the same day was Mary Wilcox a Mexican-American woman elected to the county board of supervisors which oversaw the sheriff's department budget. On the day they met Joe told her you look so much like my mother in her pictures I could never get mad at you which is kind of a weird thing to say but the two of them had a good relationship actually. Mary Wilcox is a Democrat but she has Joe comes over to her family restaurant all the

time he plays with her kids he's a very pleasant fixture in her life and she's pretty adamant that like he was not this weirdo racist for the first like decade or so that she knew her that there's a shift in Joe Arpaio and we're going to talk about that shift more in part two but he like during this period of time she thought he was like a pretty reasonable guy and he specifically told her he didn't want to waste department money arresting undocumented immigrants and having them deported he wanted to deal with violent crime and his only concern was keeping the people of his county safe so at the start some people at least Mary Wilcox is one of them will say he seemed like a pretty reasonable guy he

seemed and obviously the guy who was sheriff before was shit so it doesn't immediately look like Joe Arpaio is going to be a nightmare you know yeah but uh that's not where the story ends Noah but the story that we're going to tell right now is the story of products and services which is a story that never goes badly that always leads us to more products and more services and thus to a better life so here's some ads. During the summer of 2020 some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way. And nasty sharks.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. And Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back.

So Joe is the sheriff now. And in public, he almost immediately adopts the name Sheriff Joe, and he clearly tries to portray himself from the start as kind of like an old West style lawman. That's how he wants to be seen. The only problem is, that's not the job he got elected to do. Maricopa is the largest county in the US by area. It is not in population, obviously. This population is about 4 million, which is about the entire population of Oregon where

I live. So it is a populous county. But Maricopa is like bigger than most nations in Europe. It's a massive, massive county. And it includes a bunch of nowhere land, like a bunch of desert with tiny little towns. But it also includes the enormous Phoenix metropolitan area. Most of our Pio's job involved overseeing the county jail, where people arrested for minor bullshit were locked up while they awaited trial or served very short sentences.

So his job is not to be the desperado lawman. His job is very much to manage a jail. That's the biggest part of what he's supposed to be doing. Joe immediately saw potential in this job, where his predecessors had not. I'm going to quote from the New Yorker here. The voters had declined to finance new jail construction. And so, in 1993, Arpaio, vowing that no troublemakers would be released on his watch because of overcrowding, procured a consignment of army surplus tents and had them set up, surrounded

by barbed wire in an industrial area in southwest Phoenix. I put them up next to the dump, the dog pound, the waste disposal plant. He told me, Phoenix is an open air blast furnace for much of the year. Temperatures inside the tents hit 135 degrees. Still the tents were a hit with the public, or at least with the conservative majority that voted. Arpaio put up more tents until Tent City Jail held 2,500 inmates, and he stuck a neon vacancy sign on the tall guard tower.

It was visible for miles. His popularity grew. What could he do next? Arpaio ordered small, heavily publicized deprivations. He banned cigarettes from his jails, skin magazines, movies, coffee, hot lunches, salt and pepper. Arpaio estimated that he saved taxpayers $30,000 a year by removing salt and pepper. Meals were cut to two a day, and Arpaio got the cost down, he says, to $0.30 per meal.

It cost more to feed the dogs than it does the inmates, he told me. Jail Arpaio likes to say, is not a spa, it's punishment. He wants inmates whose keenest wish is to never get locked up again. He limits their television, he told me, to the Weather Channel, C-SPAN, and, just to aggravate their hunger, the Food Network. For a while, he showed them Newt Gingrich speeches. They hated him, he said cheerfully. Why the Weather Channel, a British reporter once asked, so these morons will know how

hot it's going to be while they're working on my chain gangs. Oh my god, this motherfucker. So this guy, who was two years out of selling space tickets, is now who, the US military's greatest typist of the Korean War, has now decided that he's going to take his rage at being so impotent out on these guys who, what, like were busted for a dime bag? A dime bag, you know, they have expired, the tag they didn't pay a parking ticket, right, and they get a warrant out, like all sorts of shit, and a lot of them are people who are accused of crimes, and again, as a general rule, jail, there's two kinds of people in

a city jail, right? There's people who have been convicted of a crime, but it's usually under a year in sentence, so they're doing like three to six months or something, so they're not going to go to prison, yeah. Or it's somebody who has been arrested and is accused of a crime, but has not been convicted. A significant, a majority generally, people in a jail are people who are legally innocent, right, because they have not been proven guilty, and that's the way the system works. But Joe's whole thing is, is punish them, and do it in a very showy way, and he's not

doing this because it's good for anything, and he's not even doing this, hmm. No, sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but look, I'm just, as somebody who lived through that time, this was also the peak of like drug war, super predator hysteria, you know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely. This was like the time when, you know, you were not, that people who violated the law were not criminals, they were animals, and you know, that's when you get Joe Biden's crime bill, that's where here in New York, you get Giuliani time, you know, and all

of a sudden people were getting busted, some people that may even be on this podcast right now were getting busted for very petty crimes, but at least when they threw theoretically this person into the, you know, Midtown South holding cell, they just held me there for a couple of hours, and then, you know, let me walk, not kept me in a fucking blast furnace. Yeah, where they feed you rotting food, generally it's said to be rotting food twice a day, the cheapest worth shit they can, no salt, and again, he brags about saving the city $30,000 a year on salt and pepper. We'll talk about how much lawsuits of his jail cost the city, but like the real, the

point is the real purpose of this, it's not to save money, he's doing that because it's a good, when he clocks about saving money, he's doing that because it's a good campaign thing to say, right? And in general, the more outlandish things he can force inmates to do, the more press he gets, right? Joe's goal with all of this isn't even necessarily to punish the prisoners as much as it is to get attention from the media because of how he's punishing these people, right? And to build support because a lot of specifically, yeah, I can say from this, you know, Joe Arpaio

was very popular with members of my family, you know, because of, because he was seen as like putting these, putting these dangerous criminals in their places and like saving, you know, people money and not doing any of this bullshit, we're too easy on dangerous criminals in this country kind of shit. Yeah, you know, it almost, it's like a troll, right? Yeah. He's actually like, he's trolling the media in this way that like now we totally get, right?

You know, Trump is shitbag X says, in order to provoke this, you know, pearl clutching outrage from, from the media, but back then, you know, it was like him doing it, you know, in the jails. And I guess it was kind of like a Rush Limbaugh move, you know, or Rush Limbaugh analog. It was just a way to troll people into coverage. It's fucking nuts, man. Yeah. And that's what I mean when I say there's an element of him that is, he will claim

him, you know, that he would kind of blaze the trail for Donald Trump. And there's obviously, he's not the only guy who was, but he was a very prominent person who was figuring out how to use the media in the same way that kind of every, every guy who's in that space on the, that troll space in the right does today. He was kind of, he was very early in that. And he's very early in using the internet. We're going to talk about that in a little bit too. But people love Sheriff Joe.

He is incredibly popular right away because of this stuff. And as a result, every news report on his jail did really good. The numbers were always good. So outlets kept sending reporters his way. He was a big hit with the foreign press, the British and the Japanese and everyone else would send TV crews all around the world would come to report on his tent city and to film it. To keep them interested, he regularly developed new methods of punishing and humiliating inmates.

He put them in black and white striped uniforms. He started putting them into chain gangs, a practice that had ended everywhere else in the country in 1955. To make more headlines, Joe created female chain gangs too, which he bragged were the first in the history of the world. I don't know if that's true, but that's what he bragged. And then his next big innovation was to start chain gangs for children. Oh, what?

So some kid is like accused of what? Like stealing an apple from? Yeah. Pot or some shit, you know? Fucking stealing a car or something. And yeah, then they put the child on a chain gang, putting a kid in a chain gang so you can get another Swedish film crew to ask you to film your juvenile chain gang. Oh, yeah.

Now his chain gangs did work. One of the most popular jobs was burying dead homeless people in the county cemetery. And Joe was clear from the jump that their main purpose was to be a spectacle. Quote, I put them out there on the main streets so everybody sees them out there cleaning up trash and parents say to their kids, look, that's where you're going. If you're not good, we'll lock you up in a chain gang if you're a bad kid. Oh my God. Right when media went apeshit for this, oh my God, Rush Limbaugh couldn't get enough

Joe Arpaio. He was repeatedly praised on air and before his first term was done, polls showed that Joe Arpaio was the most popular politician in Arizona. The state Democratic Party didn't even try to run a candidate against him in 1996. Joe was very open about the fact that his success had everything to do with the way he'd gotten the media to cover his antics. He told the Phoenix New Times, quote, since the day I got elected, I've been giving speeches. I'm going constantly.

Everybody who wants me to talk, I talk. I feel I'm the elected sheriff. I deserve to go directly to the people. You can't rely on the press, the media, to tell the truth. My name ID is like 99%. That isn't just because they see me on television. I'm out there talking to people constantly. But television was the vast majority of his publicity.

And in 2004, the Phoenix New Times wrote, more than 90% of the events appearing in his daily duty calendar are related to stoking his public image. His only regular work-related duties, according to the calendar, are two weekly staff meetings and speaking to classes of graduating detention officers and deputies. For a cop who loves to brag about his gun battles with drug dealers in Turkey, South America and Washington, D.C. during his 32 years with the Federal Drug Enforcement Agency, Arpaio spends no time at the firing range practicing his gunslinging skills. So 90% of his time on the job is press-related.

So he's putting kids to work, what'd you say, like burying bodies? Yeah, I mean, some of his chain gangs are burying the corpses of poor people. I don't know if the child chain gangs are doing that. They also pick up trash and stuff. Okay. So even if the kids are only picking up trash in 110-degree heat, while he's in his air-conditioned trailer giving press interviews 90 times a day, about how tough he is, fuck this guy. Yeah, he's a lovely man.

So there is some evidence that Joe's attention-seeking behavior was not all the result of callous political calculation. A lot of it seems rooted in insecurity. When he first took office, he would spend months going around and asking strangers, do you know who I am? So the fact that he brags later about his name recognition, that was something he was like deeply insecure about from the beginning, is that people wouldn't know him. So there's an element of this that is just like craven opportunism, and there's an element

of this that's kind of sad. From the beginning, Joe's attention-seeking antics came with a horrific human cost. The first clear example of this came in 1996, with the death of Scott Norberg in detention. The Phoenix New Times wrote, quote, Norberg died of asphyxia after he was tackled by 14 detention officers and strapped into the restraint chair. His head was then pressed forward against his chest and a towel was placed over his face. An autopsy report showed that he sustained numerous contusions and lacerations to his

head, face, neck, and limbs. He had been stunned gunned more than 20 times. There were burn marks up and down his body. Norberg's death triggered worldwide criticism of the sheriff's office. The London-based human rights group Amnesty International conducted a review of the incident and issued a 1997 report that states, Although Norberg was reportedly uncooperative and engaged in bizarre behavior, his behavior and initial passive resistance does not appear to have warranted the extreme degree of force

used, especially as he already had his hands handcuffed behind his head and was lying on his stomach on the ground when dragged by officers from his cell. They later find that he had been well-restrained, tased at least 14 times, and had his larynx crushed. Norberg was literally crushed when they eventually find out he's beaten to death while he is tied to a chair. Right, so this is straight-up murder. This is straight-up murder.

This is like you read stories about the wild concentration camps, which were before they established the actual physical camps, like the permanent camps and stuff in the early days of the Nazi regime. This is like the way they would get rid of people. You have a group of goons beat them to death with sticks, like it's that kind of shit. This guy was strapped to a chair, tased 14 times, and then strangled to death. Well beaten and his throat got crushed in the beating, at least. Oh my god.

Yeah, it's bad. It's bad stuff. Joe Arpaio and his employees denied any wrongdoing. One of his top aides told the New Times that the restraint used by deputies was actually so appropriate that it set a new standard for how detention officers would perform their duties in the future. That hold that just killed somebody? That's how we're going to keep doing it.

Arpaio claimed to be proud of how the situation was handled by his men. Maricopa County, however, paid $8.25 million in a wrongful death suit to his family. And this gets to an important point, because Joe would brag about stuff like how he saved the county $30,000 by cutting out salt and pepper. But all of the brutality suits against his men cost eventually tens of millions of dollars. Right. So would you say eight million? Yeah.

For this one death. Okay. So this guy is bragging about $30,000 in salt and pepper. Yeah. And his deputies beat a restrained man to death and it cost the county $8.25 million. Yeah, good. That's some good mathematics. Good math, yeah.

Makes sense. Now, this in no way harmed Joe's popularity. He won re-election handily and his second term contained more of the same antics. On July 9th, 1999, he launched his boldest PR move yet, framing a teenager for trying to murder him. James Seville, yeah, he frames a teenage boy for murder. Well, for attempted murder. Yeah.

Go on. James Seville 18 was a pyromaniac with prior felony convictions and a clearly tenuous hold on reality. This is a mentally ill kid with a record. Joe Arpaio wanted something to burnish his tough guy Wild West Sheriff credentials. Since his day job was just talking to cameras and dreaming up new ways to make inmates miserable, he didn't get a lot of opportunities to look like an actual badass. An assassination attempt would solve that problem nicely.

Making the case just ahead of his third re-election campaign, the Joe Arpaio was the kind of badass crime foe who risked his life for the safety of his community. James was arrested by heavily armed sheriff's deputies, flanked by local news teams with cameras who had been informed that there was an assassination plot against the sheriff ahead of time. It was front page news all across Phoenix. From another article by the New Times, quote, they got what they wanted, images of gun-wielding deputies swooping into a parking lot and taking a bewildered and unarmed Seville into custody

filled the airwaves. News anchors gushed about how they were thankful that Seville's despicable plot had been foiled by vigilant deputies and that the brave Arpaio had averted yet another as serious attempt on his life. Well, we took this guy off the street, Arpaio bragged in his best John Wayne inflection to a television news station after going home to comfort his wife in the wake of the alleged foiled assassination attempt. He's back in prison where he belongs.

Now- What the fuck? How does nobody see through this? It's a really frustrating question to ask, isn't it, Noah, because it's obvious from the beginning almost that this is sketchy. Well, not to dumb people, I guess. A lot of people buy the end of this because they buy into this war on crime, that crime is an organized force that's always trying to just murder as many cops as possible as

opposed to crime being a pretty disorganized, decentralized thing that happens generally as a result of unmet needs. It's actually pretty rare, for example, a sheriff to be assassinated. Oh, what? They think there's Batman? Yeah. But yeah, he wants to be Batman. Right.

It's like, oh, he's foiled this too many times. Let's send the teenage pyro man to go. Let's send this 18-year-old boy. Now, Arpaio's claim was that Seville had been building a bomb in order to kill him, as is usually the case. The people who were helping him build that bomb were undercover officers. Now, this sort of thing happens a lot, right? And Seville and his family claim that they were entrapped by the MCSO, by the sheriff's

office. This happens a lot with people who are charged with crimes like this. And if you look at FBI arrests of Muslim guys who were going to build a bomb, you often find some sketchy details, right? Like that seem, oh, I don't know, this might cross the definition of entrapment for me. It's the same thing with those Boogaloo boys who were trying to kidnap Governor Whitmer. Like you look into that case, there's some like, I don't know if this may cross my mental threshold of entrapment thing.

It's fuzzy is what I'm saying. You often find a lot of sketchy details, but almost never do those people win with entrapment defenses because it is extremely hard to win, to actually win with an entrapment defense. It happens almost never because the actual, the threshold is very high. You have to show that the idea for whatever illegal plot was being carried out originated with law enforcement and that the person being charged would not have had that idea or would not have tried to do that crime without the help and encouragement of law enforcement. So you have to show basically that they had the idea that they pressured the defendant

into carrying it out and that he was not predisposed to do it otherwise. That's a high bar, right? You can get away with a lot of kind of sketchy behavior without crossing that line. James Seville's attorney, a guy named Farragut, proves all those things in court. He succeeds in an entrapment defense. James get like, this very rarely happened. That is the level of fuckery that the Maricopa County Sheriff's engaged in. He wins on an entrapment defense.

That does not happen often. Yeah. And just clownishness. Yeah. Right? Yeah. Like there's been a million cases where an FBI agent has suggested, pushed along some kind of want-to-be terrorist, want-to-be bad guy.

Yeah. There's, I mean, like tons of them. Literally, several times a week, you see cases, or at least did see cases like this and, I mean, there's hundreds of them. And I've never, ever, never heard of an entrapment defense working, even as you say, there's a lot of times that there's some pretty sketchy behavior by the cops. It is hard. It is hard as a cop to actually get, to actually cross the line to where you lose an entrapment

case. And they do in this. Like, as an example of how egregious they're being. Yikes. Now, despite the fact that he was totally innocent the entire time and was completely exonerated. And yeah, I mean, basically, I'm actually going to quote from that article, and after the trial jurors told Farragut, the defense lawyer, they were convinced that Seville had

been a pawn in an elaborate media ploy. Arpaio had cameras out there waiting to film the arrest, Farragut says. The jurors indicated that this was clearly a publicity stunt. Now that's the best case scenario. If you're this kid, right, you get completely exonerated. He still spends four years in Joe Arpaio's tent jail because, yeah, he gets denied bond because he's a terrorist who tried to assassinate the sheriff. Now he and his family did win a one point one million dollar settlements.

I don't know that that makes up for four years of hell like this. No, no, not at all. News articles published at the time suggested this could be a turning point in Joe's career, the moment when people finally saw who he was and turned against him. It's true that the state Republican Party did briefly decline to endorse him for reelection and that a number of former backers pulled away from him. But the voters did not abandon Sheriff Joe as a result of this. And in the end, he was reelected to a third term.

The way he saw it, he was just getting started. And that's where we're going to end for part one, Noah, of the tale of Sheriff Joe. You just kicked me in the gut. Yeah, that was the big one for me was like, he faked an assassination plot. He locked a teenage boy up for four years over a fake bomb plot. Are you fucking kidding me? In his own no salt, no pepper, food too nasty for dogs, tent city. Yeah.

That, I mean, he thinks he's Batman, but that's like some supervillain stuff. That is some supervillain shit. And for the record, I don't think one point one million is enough for that kid. It could have gotten like three or four million for that kind of shit. Honestly, if I'm like something, I don't want any money. I think Joe should then do a day for every day. He should do a day in his own city for every day I did one. That seems like the more fair recompense.

If that's the way we handled it when police lied or falsified evidence to get people convicted, I think that would happen less. But I'm a child of Dallas, which had a big fake rub scandal that definitely impacted my feelings on law enforcement as a young man. Good shit. Good shit. Noah, you got any pluggables to plug before we sail out for the rest for this episode? You can find me on the Twitters at Noah Shacklin and you can find my publication at rollingstone.com.

How do you spell it? R-O-L-L? I-N-G-S? Yeah, yeah. Something like that? Yeah, something like that. Check out Noah's work. When he starts at the Rolling Stone, obviously check out The Daily Beast, who continuously

do some of the best reporting on the hell work, particularly a lot of really good QAnon stuff. A lot of, yeah, Will Sommer, right, is a, yeah, The Daily Beast. Will Sommer is, yeah, does incredible work. I actually got to meet once we were doing a Bellingcat workshop, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Great. Amazing stuff.

His book on QAnon's coming out soon, yeah. That's coming out soon. You should check out my man Spencer Ackerman's new book, Rain of Terror, which is coming out really soon. And speaking of former Daily Beast folks, the Daily Beast has an incredible crew. I'm so super proud of them. You should go visit that website, Rolling Stone. I've heard they've done a good story or two once or twice in their 50-some-eyed years

of publication, and I figure we'll do one or two more. Yeah, yeah. That seems like a good goal. One or two. Thanks. One or two stars. Yeah. Every 54 years.

Noah, thank you for being on the show. It has been a pleasure, and we will, people will be hearing our next episode in a couple of days, but you and I will immediately tear into another chapter in the life of Sheriff Joe and just have a miserable time with it. Oh, God. I thought this is where it was all going to turn happy. This is where he decides to dedicate his life to charity. No.

No. There's no happy ending to the Sheriff Joe story? No. I mean, no, because he's still fucking alive, man. It's crazy how long this guy goes without dying. Fairies. Eesh. Yeah.

Wait, he's really still alive? Yeah. He's like 90. He's pushing 90, at least. What the fuck? He's like Emperor Palpatine. Yeah. He does look more like Palpatine every year.

He does not meet the high moral standards of Emperor Palpatine. Excuse me. He's a youthful 89. Unlimited power. Yeah, there's more accountability in the imperial justice system, I think. Oh, God. That's terrible. He's a youthful 89 years old.

Yeah. Spry. All right. Episode one over. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns.

But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space?

Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.