The Dumb Zone FREE - We recap Jake and TC's trip to the AAC with Michael Mooney and Luis Ellis | DZ 4-10-25 PREVIEW

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

Hear the entire episode of The Dumb Zone by subscribing at DumbZone.com or Patreon.com/TheDumbZoneMichael Mooney tells us the story of Backpage. ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Hey now, what you are about to hear is a free preview of one of this week's premium episodes of The Dumb Zone. If you would like to hear this program in full along with the full archive, ah shit. If you would like to hear this program in full with the archive of all of our past episodes, you can subscribe at DumbZone.com. Yeah, so what does Mike Mooney have today? So I've got some updates from a year ago when we talked about Hold Fast, the podcast, and Mike Lacey and BackPager.com.

Do you want to give the quick elevator pitch on the podcast real quick? Because it's fantastic. Thank you. OK, so the pretty short version is there was a chain of alt-weekly newspapers called New Times and later Village Voice Media, and then eventually it was called Voice Media Group,

I think, something like that. But they owned alt-weeklies all around the country, these kind of free, big newspapers that you'd find in bars and coffee shops. Was The Observer one of these? Dallas Observer was one of these. I worked at Miami New Times. The Village Voice in New and coffee shops. Was The Observer one of these? Dallas Observer was one of these. I worked at Miami New Times, the Village Voice in New York was one,

LA Weekly was one, Seattle Weekly, Phoenix New Times. And they would just cover local news really aggressively, profiles of celebrities, stories about corrupt politicians, big developments, kind of beholden to nobody, right? Like just the anti-corporate media because so much of the money in this company came from advertising and they had regular advertisements like restaurants, but they also had personal ads in the back, classified ads that were adult classifieds, often sex workers.

And for decades, these newspapers existed all across the country. It became a giant empire. Eventually a guy named Mike Lacey and his partner Jim Larkin put together like 17 of them and became very, very wealthy and started a lot of people in journalism. It launched a lot of journalistic careers, including mine.

But that kind of journalism also made a lot of enemies, very powerful enemies including like John McCain and Kamala Harris, all across the political spectrum. And ultimately when the newspaper industry began to lag, they moved some of those classifieds online to a site called backpage.com, which became pretty synonymous with sex work in America for a while. That became a target for some politicians. They got criminal charges, 100 felony charges, and a six and a half year kind of prolonged trial process that actually involved two trials.

One ended in a mistrial, one ended in a bunch of no decisions, and ultimately, and Jim Larkin ultimately killed himself in the middle of this process, and Mike Lacey was found guilty of money laundering, and that's where the podcast ended. So since then, Mike Lacey, who was 75 years old, kind of like a pirate, the show was called Hold Fast because this guy had, has knuckle tattoos across his hands and say, hold H-O-L-D F-A-S-T, which was like an old merchant Marine saying that said that you're going to hold that rope longer and harder than anybody. You'll never let it go. Everybody can rely on you. He got these tattoos on his hands when he was 48. He said he did it as a tribute to his father, who was kind

of a brawler and like a mob enforcer, because his knuckles were the part of his father that he saw the most. So that's the kind of guy Mike Lacey is. Mike Lacey did go to prison at 75 years old for a couple of months, and then he got out. I was talking to him right before he went into prison, actually. I went out to Phoenix to have dinner with him, and he was looking forward to what he called conjugal visits, which I love, and I love when somebody mispronounces something like that because that means obviously you read the word. Right, yeah.

More than you heard it. Can I ask a question? Don't really know how this actually works. Are you actually, you're having sex in prison? Like that's how it actually works? My understanding is that conjugal visits are like a reward for good behavior. You're allowed to have a loved one come for like 23 hours.

They have to do check-ins, but you have your own private space. And yeah, you can get down. It's pretty controversial because there's a lot of people who don't want anybody in prison having any good times at all. Yeah. But it seems to, like I know there's a bunch of studies

that show that it improves like the overall behavior in prisons. For sure, no, anytime you have an incentive, there's not a whole lot of things that those people are gonna live for, and that's one of them. So it makes sense, I've just never actually, I thought it might have been quicksand, or I thought, but it actually doesn't happen.

Yeah, so that's interesting, but, conjugal. So yeah, so I don't know if he ever got any of these conjugal visits. He did get, so we had a party when the podcast came out in New York and Mike Lacey came and he brought his new girlfriend who was a private investigator for the defense in the case. She was lovely. But so at a long trial, lost his best friend, lost tens of millions of dollars, lost his freedom for a while, he'd get a girlfriend out of it. Went to prison.

Eventually he was losing weight and his lawyers appealed the decision against him. And so they let him out, which was really rare. The guards at the prison, when he told them he was getting out, like mocked him. They're like, nobody's getting out, you know, whatever. But then a couple days later, they came and got him and he is under house arrest in Phoenix now.

As of what, like a few months? Yeah, so I think he did like four or five months in prison and he's been out for a couple of months. months in prison and he's been out for a couple of months. And I don't know the exact limitations of what he's allowed to consume and what he's not. I'm assuming he's still doing some urine tests periodically. And he's not allowed to have the kind of good times that he would probably prefer to have because this guy used to drink an insane amount. But he did say, I'm under house arrest, but I do love my house, because he's got a $4 million

mansion right at the foothills of the beautiful mountains and outside Phoenix. The Epstein deal. Yeah, so if you're gonna be under house arrest, wonderful architect design mansion is probably pretty good. But it's still kind of hanging over his head. They don't know what's going to happen with the other charges. They don't know what's going to happen with the appeal. They don't know if the Department of Justice is going to come after him

the way that they did for years. Because now there's other things going on in the federal government. Some new projects going on. And my favorite part, I think, which is what I texted you, at some point Backpage.com, the domain, went up for sale. And I really wish that I had thought about this and bought the domain because that seems like a pretty valuable domain you could buy pretty cheap. Now if you go to that site, Backpage.com, for a long time, if you went to it, it just said, the site just said it was seized by the federal government and had like the logos of the FBI and the DEA. Now if you go to that site it redirects to milfs.com. That's who would have the money to buy something like that. Because we were buying our website and there are

certain websites that they do just view as, like I think even if trying to buy dztv.com, that's listed as a premium thing, maybe because it's TV or something. Who decides that? I don't know. That's what I don't know. But there are other ones that get, you know, bought up by people that can hoard them

and try to hold you up. We were trying to buy thedumbzone.com and the guy wanted 25 grand. And I negotiated him down, I think, to like 19 grand, but he wouldn't do it. So we have dumbzone.com. Forgive me for not knowing this. What exactly is the nature of the business conducted

by milfs.com? Is it a porn site? I honestly don't know. I actually didn't spend too much time on it because the second my phone got there. See, that's research. Yeah. That's perfect.

Hold on. We're here for funs. We got the writer for that. Well, in theory, if you can get there in Texas, and you don't have to sign in, I don't know. I know that there's a couple of sites that kind of skirt the law a little bit. I don't know if Ken Paxton is a regular listener.

Yeah, I don't know what this world that you live in where you think that I'm logging into the internet from Texas is, but it's not the one I live in. Yeah, fair enough. Let's see here, is it with an I or a Y, MILF? I think it's an I. Traditionalmilfs.com. It's a porn site, straight up porn site here.

Okay. But did you type in backpage.com? No, I did that a minute ago, but I was on the Fox WiFi and it blocked it. Yeah, it redirects to milfs.com. And just like a, what like a? Although you know what, I'm not positive these are, do you say these might be escorts actually.

They seized that from Mike Lacey? Yeah. Or are they mothers? So it's somehow. They actually seized the domain. I think technically the domain just, the contract probably just ran out. Okay, I think these are like cams.

Is that a thing people still do? So somehow this went back even further than, like this is like early 2000s porn? It's not that different from that, yeah. Very weird. So is it like a, so he in all likelihood it has nothing to do with this, right? Right.

Okay, is it somebody? Yeah, some other site that just bought the. Like they did with Infowars. Yes. I like it. I wonder if it was Government Se like it I wonder if it was government sees where I wonder if it was auctioned off like yeah isn't that the way the police do it with whatever paraphernalia they gather yeah I wonder were there other porn sites around with bidding like was it like a quiet demure like little paddles in the air you hold up yeah yeah I'm 74k from ifs.com.

Yeah, that's a crazy story. I guess for me, I've always been, you know, it's the whole, I feel like it should probably be legal for two adults to have these arrangements. But explicitly in the ad, there's actually nothing illegal happening, right? Most of the time. Once in a while, they had, some ads got through that were pretty explicit,

but they had filters and filters got more intense over the years. And so, and some of these ads were for totally legal behavior, right? Yeah. Hiring a stripper is a totally legal behavior. I've always wondered about that. Like if you're Rex Ryan and you, you, no, I'm serious. If you hired a woman, you said I'll pay $500 to massage my feet. But for you, your feet is like a sexual pleasure. Is that prostitution?

Seems like a very subjective thing to kind of guess at. I mean, obviously we know the parts of our body where the stuff comes out. That one's pretty obvious. But the rest of it, like what if that's your thing? Somebody really loves ear massages or something. Yeah, somebody really loves just having your elbow kissed,

and I'm gonna pay $1,000 for that, and you advertise it on Backpage. So that's interesting to me, and then the other is, it's just sad, I mean, you've read manufacturing consent over here. Yeah. It's just very funny. The first chance there is for there to be a media arm in the country that is not

needing the support of massive capital, they just do the first thing they can to kneecap it. Yeah. To immediately be like, how can I cut off your revenue streams? Because you're asking questions I don't want to answer. And I typically don't have to ask, answer these questions cause the people are asking them are usually on my payroll. And so many politicians have long memories and hold grudges

and like John McCain and his entire family never forgot the stories that they ran about Cindy McCain and John McCain's, you McCain's corruption allegations. It was years, decades, that the first opportunity they got, John McCain's committee in the Senate, is the one that brought these guys in. And as I recall, they also kind of had to fake things up, right? They had to say this was sex trafficking. This wasn't just prostitution. Yeah, that's a popular one. It was trafficking minors, it was trafficking,

we can't be selling people. And the site was so big, it was 30 million ads like a month at one point. So there were people who were trafficked on this, right? It did happen to some degree, pretty small numbers and the organizations that NICMEK and the organizations that kind of care about this the most were on the side of the back page guys.

The law enforcement people got no better aid than the back page people because if there was a bad ad or if there was somebody who had committed a crime, back page turned that info over to law enforcement very quickly. And a lot of the sites, especially like offshore sites, didn't do that. So the Backpage guys got an award from the FBI at one point for like their help with ending these kinds of things.

But when you want to make a political, when you want to put somebody in prison, accuse them of child sex trafficking, right? And the government wasn't even allowed to say that during the case. And actually the first time that they went to trial, it was ruled a mistrial because the prosecutors said sex trafficking too often. That they said it was gonna bias the jury.

So, you know, but, you know, accuse somebody of sex trafficking in America today, that's going to cause a real disruption in their business model. Kamala used them as an example during one of her campaigns, right? Yeah, when she was the AG in California, she and Craigslist had the same things on their site. They had, you know, personal ads for people to meet up that were very clearly for sex work and Craigslist ultimately decided to just pull that entire section of their website voluntarily. And Kamala Harris was like,

Craigslist did the right thing, why isn't Backpage doing the right thing? And she used that sound clip and she put these guys, she pulled them, arrested them, brought them to Sacramento, and put them in orange jumpsuits in the court right before her run for the Senate. That was like October 2016, and the election was November 2016. Little grandstand. Little grandstand. Little photo op. Yeah.

She was always a cop. Did that work? I mean, she was a senator. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, and your main point on this whole big thing is just the oddity that shutting down backpage.com, ostensibly to stop us from having any sex trafficking, has actually hurt journalism quite a bit. Yeah. I mean it's hurt the entire country, right? When you don't have a robust free press who doesn't answer to some conglomerate

or some billionaire who has his or her own interests, you lose a lot in a democracy, right? You don't know exactly where the truth is gonna come from. Yeah, very early on, I remember just one of those basic thoughts of like, the news has like ads. So how does that work? Yeah. They pay for it, what if they wanna trash the company?

And it just, it's like, well this is just the way it is. Yeah, this company is dumping waste. I mean, even just reading yesterday, I mean, I guess it's not a politician, but like, Dumont bought the paper in Las Vegas. That was like his first big Adelson family transaction, like brokered a $150 million deal to buy the paper in Las Vegas,

which is just the thing you did in 1925. Like, all right, well, I'm a local tycoon, I'll just buy the newspapers. And journalists there immediately quit when they did that. And then it didn't take long before the coverage of that newspaper is now slanted of whether we're covering the Adelson family the same way, whether we're covering the laws around gambling

the same way, lobbying in Nevada. Owning a newspaper is still pretty good powerful weapon, a tool you can use any way you'd like. And look, Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin did that to a small degree, especially when they kept getting accused of sex trafficking. They would do stories about how the numbers that we hear about sex trafficking are often insanely inflated. But they would also just, you know, if you, they would run a review of a restaurant that trashed the restaurant right next to an ad for that restaurant. Yeah. They had no qualms about that.

And they thought it kind of made them cooler and it made their ads more expensive because more readers knew that they were going to get the truth, that they were going to get something sometimes more interesting than just a good review next to an ad. That's all of a sudden now a bad review is almost always more interesting to read anyway.