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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioural discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Survive on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Sisters of the Underground is a podcast about fearless Dominican women who stood up against the brutal dictator Kapal Trujillo. He needs to be stopped. We've been silent and complacent for far too long. I am Daniel Ramirez, and I said Dominicana myself. I am proud to be narrating this true story that is often left out of the history books through your has blood on his hands. Listen to sisters of the underground wherever you get your podcasts. You want me to do it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Whoa, that was good. That was good. You're a natural. You're a natural. And this is behind the *******. Noah was better. Alright. Thank you, Sophie. I didn't need to hear that today, but that's right. Podcast Bad people, where I get shown up at my only talent atonally introducing a podcast by today's guest Noah Noah Shachtman of The Daily Beast, soon to be of Rolling Stone. Noah how how how was life changed for you in the last, I don't know, 7 minutes since we concluded part one, I ate a lot of meat with my hands. Oh, good hand meat. Yeah, everybody loved it. Hand meat, yeah, yeah. No, it was a my wife brought back some leftovers, which I shoved into my face. It was delicious. Yeah. You weighed hand meat. I drank a bunch of kratom. We're both ready to. Kick off and talk about Sheriff Joe Arpaio and the new Millennium Noah. Very exciting, very exciting. Yeah, so Joe started off the 21st century with a bang. In 2000 he launched his jail Cam, one of the very first live stream websites, with the stated hope that people would see how horrible his jails were and thus avoid committing crimes now. That's not why he did it. He did it for a publicity stunt. He did it as a publicity stunt. He is ahead of the 8 ball on this one. You know, if you're live streaming in 2000, you are on the ground floor. You know, that's about the earliest that could be done, Mr Beast. So by this point, Joe's deputies had already blatantly entrapped at least one person, and the degree to which he actually saw jail Cam as a prevention strategy is debatable. I might argue that this was an early example of the cruelty is the point style, logic, and mass American politics. You know, the cameras were not there to scare criminals, they were there to entertain Americans who wanted to see people they had otherized Joe knew this, and he knew that providing suffering **** to the masses was could be a key part of his continued. Relevance. The first day his jail cams went online, more than 3 million people tried to visit. Now, if you drop a video today that gets 3,000,000 views in its first day, that's not bad in 2021. No, like, this is 2000. Like, that's huge traffic. That's the entire Internet. That's the whole Internet. And it's the website goes down immediately. It takes them a long time to be able to, like, handle that kind of strain. Initially, 4 cameras made-up the jail Cam program which allowed visitors to view detainees being LED into jail, being fingerprinted and being taken to their holding areas. Quite frustratingly, Joe claims that a private company paid for the project and I have not found more information on who that was. In an interview with the New York Times shortly after the cameras were installed, Joe claimed we get hundreds of emails from all over the world and 95% love it and feel it's a great deterrent when people pointed out that the folks shown on his cameras were all innocent until proven guilty. He actually had a pretty smart response, unfortunately. Quote Sheriff Arpaio compares the unfiltered viewing with news, photographs of crime suspects, or even the televised chase involving OJ Simpson. He wasn't even arrested yet, the sheriff said. What's wrong with it? In a jail, which is ****** ** morally good, but is a good response, like a smart? You know, the vector of three million for a second. Hmm. Maybe that's just. I mean, first of all, who knows if that figure is true? And secondly, maybe you just got like a a denial of service attack. He got something awful went after him. Yeah. Like, I don't. I'm sorry. I don't think, like, the entirety of the 2000 Internet was like, let me. I mean, I was on the Internet and 2000, yeah, same. You know, I don't think the entirety of the 2000 Internet was like, let me check out this suffering **** that just doesn't seem. True it it gets that number gets reported by a lot of news agencies covering him at the time, but I think they are relying on him for those numbers. Yeah, I have no way of, but I have. I also have no way of verifying what the real numbers were. It does seem to have been popular. And it will, it will. I'll, I'll explain the degree to which it was popular in just a second here. But yeah, I think you're right. Obviously, when you're only getting your only source for the number is Joe Arpaio, you have to question that source. And again, it's kind of frustrating the degree to which a lot of people don't. That said, if you're writing about, if you're working with the New York Times and writing about the Internet and the year 2000, you are probably 57 years old, don't understand anything about the Internet, so. That is true. Very true. Yeah. Now that New York Times article ended with a whiff of frustration from Joe noting that while the website had a disclaimer warning viewers that they might see extreme and disturbing situations, what happened on camera was mostly boring paperwork. Joe seems to have been frustrated by this, and he discussed wanting to add audio and expand the reach of the cameras to make it more interesting. And he did. In 2001, cameras were added to the Mens and women's restroom. Which is what? No, right. No. So then it becomes literal jail ****. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly where this is headed, Noah. Your instincts have served you well. So people immediately, people with very specific fetishes realized that there were cameras in the ladies room of a jail and started linking them on **** sites like. Obviously that's what's going to happen now. This pretty quickly became a problem for the department, and the spokesperson claimed that stated that inmates were only visible due to a misalignment, which was soon corrected. They also claimed that no women could be seen using the toilet, which I find questionable at best, best given the previous. Statement The most disturbing part of the whole saga is this line from a write up by the Los Angeles Times. Jack McIntyre, an an attorney for the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, told the Arizona Republic that a short partition blocked the cameras view of the toilet itself. No juveniles would have been displayed unless, quote, they look older and lie to us. So there's no child **** unless the kid lies, or if they look old. Maybe it's a hard 14 OHG God so America's sheriff is fresh off of. Of setting up a teenage pyromaniac. For a fake assassination attempt. If this is in part one, you haven't listened. It is now become America's sheriff has now become a child pornographer. Well, you can't prove it, Noah. You can't prove that any children were on those cameras. And if they were, it's because they lied or they looked older. So no one committed a crime is the important thing here. Yeah. OK. So in 2004, a court ruled that Sheriff Joe's jail cameras. Violated the rights of pretrial detainees who are again, by definition, not criminals. Now, for the last episode, obviously jail candidates. But he got what he wanted out of it, right? He got the PR boost, right? He got everybody covering his jail camps. That's all this is. You know, you want to get you, you want to get a couple of news cycles out of it. That's all you ever hope for. You don't care if the program gets declared illegal a couple of years later. It's the same with the assassination attempt. That guy was exonerated four years later, Arpaio still got the news cycle. That's all he ever wanted. Now, for the last several years, Joe made repeated claims that he could easily become the Governor of Arizona if he wanted. And I don't think this is him lying. He was for like a decade or more the most popular politician in Arizona. Very consistently he there's a good chance he would have been able to win the governorship if he decided to run for it. But despite solid polling, in 2002 he decided not to run, saying, I want to go out into the sunset as a law enforcement officer, he would remain in office for 14 more years. So I don't know why. Yeah, it's weird, right? That he doesn't go for governor. I think it's maybe because he would have had to do **** other than just, like, torture people and do news interviews. No, that's the not the why I said what? I said. What? Because he this guy was still in office till 2016. 2016? Yeah, it's ******* bonkers. That was my reaction to. It's it is it is out of its mind how long this ************ is in doing his job. Like, this guy is like definitely on some like Neo Abu Ghraib level, torturing at minimum. Yeah. Then it's like there's the fake assassination plot that puts an assist, innocent man, you know, in these ten cities for four years. Then there's like, OK, maybe it was only he was running an adult **** site. They were probably no children photographed naked, maybe jail camps. And then this dude keeps going for. And more and more than a dozen years. Yeah it's it's I can't believe it. It's it's outrageous. It's really ****** ** and I have to give credit. Like you're going to note that we have a lot of sources for this episode. Like half of them are different articles from the Phoenix New Times who for like 20 something years like bit onto this guy like a bulldog and and deeply reported every ****** ** thing he did in. Eventually it did matter. It it did not matter. Soon enough. As a journalist you you don't want to wait. 22 years or so for this to have an impact, but it does eventually breakthrough and and credit goes to them because they really like they had some people who were who stuck to him like glue. Now it's here. I should note Noah, as I talked about briefly teased really last episode in the 1990s, Joe Arpaio started a posse. Now this was what it sounds like, a group of volunteer amateurs, untrained, who were given certain law enforcement powers. And partnered off with real cops to do cop **** or at least Joe's version of that. Some of these men were allowed to carry firearms. Much of what they did was publicity driven. It became an annual spectacle for members of Joe's posse to patrol malls and shopping centers. Armed during the holiday season, Joe's Posse would Max out at about 3500 men, many of whom were taught to breach rooms and again carry weapons they're doing like armed entry trainings and ****. What the hell? This guy's whole job is to run the jail. Yeah, yeah. I mean, he's got, he's managing the Sheriff's Department, which does law enforcement **** right? Like if the a town doesn't have a cops of its own, that it's the sheriff's deputies they call, you know? Sure. But these guys weren't like basically they were. This isn't like the Phoenix PD. No, like this guy's gonna be Phoenix PD gets very angry at them in a number of occasions. These guys main gig is to run the jail, and instead he gets. 3500 volunteer who randos yeah to patrol the mall on Christmas. Don't worry, they do other ****** ** ****. In 2004, news broke about a prostitution sting carried out in November of 2003 that, in the county attorney's words, violated accepted standards of professionalism. Now, what this means in practice is that as part of one of his big ongoing media pushes, Sheriff Joe sent dozens of undercover deputies and members of his posse, 60 men in total, a mix of deputies and posse members, to do a huge bust on sex workers. They arrested almost 60. Then in 10 or so Johns at first this looked like normal Arpaio ****. He held a big press conference. There were news stories he claimed that like, this was the largest single day bust of sex workers in county history. But then the real story trickled out from the Phoenix New Times quote. The County Attorney's office said that some undercover deputies and certain posse members engaged in oral sexual contacts, breast fondling, genital contact, ************ nudity, and other behavior which is contrary to professional law enforcement and legitimate public policy. The techniques undermine prosecution by reducing the likelihood of conviction. A key factor to note is that all of that is needed to establish Commission of a crime, and a prostitution case is for two people to discuss the exchange of money for sex. No sex act need occur, nor does anyone have to remove a shred of clothing. Therefore, prostitution cases are the simplest to make virtual no brainers for cops. Here's an example of how posse member Glenn Kaufman handled an encounter with an alleged prostitute. Last October 29th, Kaufman drove to a massage parlor. And W Thomas Road and agreed to pay $40.00 for a 30 minute rub down. A woman in her early 50s told Kaufman to take off his clothes. Kauffman agreed. He then lay faced first on a massage table and the woman began massat, rubbing his back. She started to chew on my left ear, put her tongue in my ear, and whispered words to the effect of me not to be surprised if she ran her tongue over my balls and my shaft until I came all over her, Kaufman states in his signed police report. She told me that for an additional $100 she did the massage in the nude and would give me oral sex. I told her I would get $100. I got off the table, took the $100 out of my trouser pocket, and gave it to her. At this point, a crime had been committed at Kauffman, should have made the bust, but the sheriff's posse member was far from done. He continued to pay for sexual act acts from her for quite some time. The article goes into much more detail about what this posse member did and what other posse members and deputies did. I'm not going to belabor the point. The gist of it is that Arpaio's men, a mix of cops and volunteers, were straight up using prostitutes for sex and then arresting them once they got their rocks. So they didn't have to pay. That's what they were doing. Oh my God. Oh my God. So this is pretty ******* wild. That's incredible. So, OK, so this guy starts out his career in Drug Enforcement. Pretending to be a pimp. Yep. And then, like, circle babies. That may be what they they called the treatment the full circle. 50 years later, he's sending his crew out to get **** ****. And then instead of paying for them, arresting. The blow jobbers, yeah, that is ******* nuts, man. Yeah, it's it's pretty great. My God, it's so evil. The good thing is all of these women had their charges dropped like no one actually got because what the police were doing and these posse members were doing was blatantly criminal, right? Like, yeah, nobody actually got in trouble. I mean, some positive. They still probably had to wait a minute. They got the did they have to go to Arpaio's tent city? And, you know, I think 130 degree. Yeah, yeah, you know, it's like, OK, great, they got their charges dropped, but still, it ******* sucked for whatever, the 8:12, you know, 24 hours it was. Yeah, yeah. It's definitely not trained to say it was not a horribly ****** ** but at least none of these women wound up with ******* felonies, you know? But yeah, it's like just incredibly ****** **. And it shows. We're we'll talk more about his posse later. Noah, there's more to say about this posse, but like, that's the kind of **** the posse got up to. My God. Now, 2006 is the year when things really started to shift for Joe Arpaio, and he became the man we know him as today. Again, he'd started his career focusing on as sheriff, focusing on the crimes he'd gone after as a lawman, drugs and sex and violence and the like. But 2006 is when he really started to shift his focus towards immigrants. One important fact to note about Joe Arpaio is that while he's always exhibited a degree of personal racism, racism was not initially central to his political campaigns. He ran for sheriff the first time by making two points. One was that the existing sheriff was ****** and wasting money, and the other was that he could reduce crime by doing drug war ********. By the time he settled into his third term, though, the United States had gone through some pretty significant shifts. In 2001, you may remember this Noah. In 2001, the Tim Allen Movie Big Trouble debuted, and it was followed shortly thereafter by a terrorist attack on New York City, and both of these events changed our nation forever. But Tim Allen movie was the big one. Yeah. Oh yeah, totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The war. Nothing was ever the same after that. The war on Tim Allen continues until this day. Until this day. Tim Allen hiding in the mountains of Afghanistan with the Tim Allen ban. Yeah, we can. We can workshop that idea. Wow. That is a that was a. Are you a dad? That dad joke was really bad. All in band. Come on, man. I think it could be a fun ABC show. Tim Allen is like a like a like a conservative suburban dad who through some quirk of circumstance moves into Kandahar. We could we could make that work. It gives a whole new definition to tool time. So obviously, by the time Sheriff Joe is in his third term, everyone's worried about terrorism, right? Drugs are not as big a concern. You know, crime is down like 2006. Crime is down to its lowest level in generations, right? So terrorism is like the big thing everybody's freaking out over. And the right wing media is particularly warning people in the early aughts that a whole bunch of terrorists are sure any day now going to cross into the country via Mexico, despite the fact that this has never happened. My knowledge, it's a thing they keep harping over and over the next few years the number of undocumented immigrants into the United States began to rise. And by 2006 border crisis was a term Democratic and Republican politicians were dropping constantly. That year Joe Biden boasted about voting to add 700 miles to the US Mexico border fence. So the the immigration and like the border becomes a huge political hot button by 2006. And again crime itself is down really low. So the only way that. That Joe Arpaio can tickle the amygdala of his electorate and make it seem like he's protecting them from something is to go after immigrants. And in this case, he specifically protecting them from demographic change. Because Arizona. As this election showed, Arizona was rapidly growing less white, a fact that horrified all of these retirees who were in a lot of cases pretty racist and made-up Joe's base. He decided to use a state human trafficking law to go after smugglers who were bringing immigrants into the country. But being Joe Arpaio, he found a way to give this application of the law an added twist to make it much more harmful. From The New Yorker. The laws target is of course smugglers known as coyotes, but Arpaio and Thomas, who is the the the attorney for the state, charge undocumented immigrants. The Coyotes cargo as Co conspirators in their own smuggling. This is a Class 4 felony which makes the subjects ineligible for bonds. So they can't leave his tent jail, and is one reason why our pyos jails are so full. Maricopa is the only one of Arizona's 15 counties that interprets the law this way, and the Sheriff's Office is the only agency among the 25 in Maricopa that does so. The others figure, and a few are vocal about it, that their limited resources are better spent fighting serious crime. So, again, he's not super popular at this time with a lot of other law enforcement, because he's keeping the jails that the whole county has to use. Phoenix PD needs to use these jails too filled. With random people who are just trying to live their lives that he's charging with Class 4 felonies because they're smuggling themselves into the country. Yeah, the the using the human smuggling statute, yeah. To charge the smuggled, yeah, not the smuggler. That is some next level. Yeah, yeah, that is ******* right there. I mean, if you really wanted to get into it, you could make some you could we have a conversation about the ways in which human trafficking laws aimed at protecting sex trafficking victims are used to harm people who are themselves sex workers, and in some cases even victims of sex trafficking. This is not the only time, and he's not the only law man who's interpreted the law in this way, but he is kind of, he's on the cutting edge here, and he's not popular among cops around him for doing this. One of the people he ****** *** was George Gascon, who was the police chief in Mesa, which is basically a suburb of Phoenix. But it's a big city. It's about half a million people in Mesa. Gascon did not like Arpaio. He was brought into the job from Los Angeles in order to reduce crime, and he decided a big part of that would be to build trust with communities who traditionally did not trust the cops. This particularly included Latinos, many of whom were immigrants or had family, who were and were thus terrified of people like Joe Arpaio. Gascon told The New Yorker quote, they need to believe that your ethical and honest, that you're not the enemy. I'm not an open borders man. I believe we have a problem with illegal immigration, but I want to make sure we don't throw away the Constitution in the process of solving it. Now, I'm not, obviously, I don't think I would agree with George Gascon on much, but just the point that like other cops who are not open borders types think that, like, what Joe is doing is ****** **. And they say so at the time. Like, he's not, he's not, he's not surfing on a wave of of of only positive response. Other cops are like kind of coming after him in this. Which. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, it's like he's playing a cop on TV, right? Yeah. And so the actual. Cops are like, bro, what are you doing? Yeah, I mean, this guy failed the test to be a Border Patrol agent. Like, he literally couldn't handle it, right? And so then, you know, all these years later, he's got to pretend he's got it now, now that he's he's got some power, he's got to swing *** **** like he's like he's some cartoon version of a Border Patrol agent. Meanwhile, the guys that really need to do the gig are like, come on, man, like, you got you got to stop this. I don't know. I'm just blown away. I'm a little bit tongue tied here, but like, I just can't believe. I can't believe it. I mean, I remember hearing about it and I still can't believe it. It's outrageous. Now, when Joe Arpaio started doing, he starts, he takes his posse and he uses them to do these massive sweeps of immigrant neighborhoods. And again, he's going into other police departments turf, because he's he's the sheriff of the county, so he's not. Generally, you're not supposed to do **** unless you know Mesa or Phoenix asks you to come in, right? Like you're supposed to be focusing mainly on like, Sheriff's Department stuff. He starts sending not just his officers, but hundreds of volunteer randos. Into other people cities to do sweeps of immigrant neighborhoods they're busting into like auto shops and grocery stores, pulling people out of their jobs and taking them to spend years in his tent city. Like wait a minute, the blow people out of their yeah, the ******* guys. The ******* guys are like, OK, cool, we've we've busted we've gotten some free ******** from prostitutes, then put them in jail and then our next to destroy some families. Yeah, why God, yeah. He's an outrageous ***** ** ****. But you know who won't tear people away from their families? Noah products well. Yeah, yeah. The good news about Raytheon Noah is that they'll get you with your family. See, this is the beauty of we like to talk about hexogen on on this show here as an explosive compound. If you want to make sure that the whole family goes, you want hexogen. That's the hexogen difference, and that's the Raytheon guarantee. All right. Here's some ads. 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Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart this fall on revisionist history. Is there anything that we haven't talked about or or? Could have asked you like to add that seems relevant. You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? That's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Religious history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. We're back. And and just just having a lovely time thinking about. Joe Arpaio and the fact that he's now has gangs of goons ripping people away from their families and their jobs. Now this again, cops tend to be they're kind of like cats, right? When you you got a cat, it has a territory, you throw another cat in that territory, they're probably going to fight, right? Cops are kind of the same way. And Joe Arpaio is really ******* with other cops territory. He's coming into these communities, he's ******* things up. He's damaging, like in a lot of cases, hurting people's businesses. Is the reliant on these people so Gaskin, the, the, the, the the police chief of Mesa gets really angry about this **** and he tells the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office that these raids are not welcome in Mesa. Unfortunately, Gaskin does not have the power to stop Arpaio. See, the sheriff of Maricopa County has a wide-ranging purview. There's all these little communities without their own police forces, and state law gives Joe the power to police those towns. But his deputies can go and do law enforcement **** anywhere in the county. Even if other sheriffs or even if other like police chiefs don't want his men around. The best part of this is that, you know, police chiefs are appointed. Generally sheriffs are elected so they can't be fired. Like no matter how much he ****** people off, unless the voters kick him off, he's staying. And the voters like never or don't vote them out for years and years and years. No, they love this ****. The New Yorker wrote about a raid in October of 2008. Quote, he sent 60 detectives and posse volunteers into Mesa after midnight. The plan was to raid the Mesa City Hall and the Public Library to look for undocumented. What? Yeah, yeah, the ******* librarian. City Hall. The ******* posse? Yeah. Into the City Hall, yeah. To look for undocumented janitors, who, according to the Sheriff's Office, were suspected of identification theft. Gaskin was not notified beforehand. Arpaio claims he did inform someone at Mesa police headquarters about the raid. A Mesa police officer spotted a large group of heavily armed men and flak jackets gathered silently in a downtown bark, gasping. When I asked about, the episode took a deep breath. It was a very, very dangerous scenario, he said. If my entire law enforcement career, I have never heard of anything close to this. His officers managed to identify the armed men, but then had trouble getting a straight story from them. The rate eventually went forward, monitored by the Mesa police and resulted in the arrests of three middle-aged cleaning women. Arpaio's press release said that another 13 suspected illegal immigrants were arrested later at their homes. O what the ****? Not just like ****** ** more. Those are really reckless. Like you could have you could have had two different sets of cops shooting each other up in the City Hall over this like, Oh my God, this makes like the movie LA Confidential look like a model of of effective policing. It's hard not to look like a good cop next to Joe Arpaio. Oh my God. Like, Rudy Giuliani looks all of a sudden like, you know, a model of mayor and a law enforcement official. Yeah, Joe Rizzo in Philadelphia all of a sudden looks like, you know, not a racist authoritarian, but all of a sudden like a model officer. Yeah, because they don't have just gangs of armed goons busting into City Hall to arrest janitors like, Oh my God, it's so ******* bad. Now, that New Yorker article I found included some incredible context on the PR game. Joe had, by that point, gotten extremely good at playing. He'd hired an expert, Lisa Allen, who was the wife of one of his officers and someone who would prove to be an extremely savvy public relations expert. She was hired in 1993, soon after Joe took office, when Joe would institute a new rule in his tent, jail. It was Lisa's job to make sure that rule went viral. A good case study would be the pink underwear in the early. Thoughts? Joe started issuing pink underpants to all of his inmates, depending on who asked him. The purpose of this was to stop theft, to emasculate the inmates, or because the color pink has calming properties. The real purpose was spectacle, because people would make news articles about the Joe's given his pink underwear at all these hardened criminals. It was Lisa Allen's job to get the maximum spectacle out of every decision Joe made. The Phoenix New Times writes about one such moment in 2005, captured for a documentary about Sheriff Joe. She practically directs Arpaio as he overseas the media spectacle of moving about 2000 inmates to a new jail, handcuffed together and stripped to their Arpaio mandated pink underwear. I want you to look tough, Alan tells Joe as the prisoners mark passed. Just stand there and watch him tap your foot. I knew Lisa knew the the minute we put these guys in the pink underwear, that will be what goes on air, our piyo tells the film makers after the inmate parade. Do you really think that no one is going to show these guys and their pink underwear again? That's why he's doing it. And he's got this PR lady who you know, PR people are the, the, the greatest evil in the world. I'm of the opinion, but she gets, yeah. I mean she she ******* is a huge part of this, of his six. She works with them for like 20 something years. And she's constantly she's been he's in the news. How does she spin like the armed attack on City Hall in order to get a couple of janitors? We arrested a bunch of illegal immigrants. They were breaking the law. Committed felonies. Dangerous people. Gotta math. Got him off the street. My God, no tolerance. And Joe Arpaio's Maricopa County. Yeah, in 2008, Barack Obama was elected president. Joe Arpaio was not happy with this, and he immediately went on the warpath, demanding an investigation into the president's birth certificate. He eventually launched one himself through the Sheriff's Department, staffed by posse members. Bio invest, yeah, yeah. He was the OG. He was the OG birther. But he's he's he's early in that. Yeah like when Trump is starting to like whine about the birth certificate, he launches. He sees that this is the right wing cause celeb and he opens an investigation staffed by his posses for his Sheriff's Department into. So it's like OK guys, you smoked it on the on the prostitute. Entrapment. Move. You killed it on the attacking City Hall Next up. Find Barack Obama. Investigate the president's birth certificate. Oh my God. Yep. You know, my old man say is a book author and and and actually wrote a book about Obama's dad and his his trip. Yeah, here here to the United States and it's like this completely moving, amazing story. And there's no question, unlike with Joe Arpaio's family there, you know, there's no question about whether, you know, he came here legally. And it it's just it's so vile that, you know, the first black president, they just immediately try to turn them into, you know, the other. He's a dangerous foreigner. Like it's. Yeah, it's that you can't we can't say. Enough about how disgusting the whole ******* birther thing is. And Arpaio, I think the thing that's grossest to me about this is he doesn't start this. He just cashes in on it. He just sees all we can make. We can make bank on this ****. People are going to eat this up if I if I open an investigation and he knew when crime is way down, crime is way down in my. In my area, you know. Yeah, I've done. I've done every stunt in the book. Now I got one more card to play. Yep, investigate the president and God, we have some footage behind the scenes of him and Lisa Allen talking about this PR stunt. And we knew #1 Joe is the entire time bragging about how many. Donations he's going to get from racists. Like he's just laughing about how much money he's going to get sent over this, right? Like, what a what a big profit thing it's going to be for him. Lisa Allen makes fun of him because of how racist and dumb this is. In a meeting filmed for a 2014 documentary, she says you might as well go to your press conference and big old clown shoes. And a big old nose. Don't be our person. Yeah, his own PR person. In 2010, Joe started a webcast and Lisa told viewers during this like, kind of proto podcast thing, Sheriff Joe is referred to as a media hog. He's referred to as a media *****. But there's always been a reason behind it and the most obvious reason was political power. But over the years it morphed into something more for Joe. When you read enough articles about him that include interviews with people that knew and worked with him for periods of time, significant periods of time, it becomes clear. That's sometime in the mid aughts, right around when he pivoted hard on immigration, he got terminal viral brain disease, which is what happens when someone gets addicted to causing outrage online. Today, it's better known as Glenn Greenwald, Centrum, but Joe Arpaio? Sorry, but Joe Arpaio. Yeah, let me be clear. Glen Greenwald has never sent. Train has never set teams of this true. Of armed yahoos into City Hall. That is true. And and Glenn Greenwald, let me make this clear, has never sent posses in to entrap sex workers. No, he has not. He has not. That is. That is an area where Joe Arpaio has an edge on him. I also don't think Joe Arpaio is nice to dogs and I'm fairly certain that Glenn Greenwald is great with dogs. So, and if we're being fair here, but he does have this, he has this. I'm going to read you a quote from a 2009 New York article that gets it. What I'm trying to say here there is a there's clearly something going on to his head that I think is the result of how bad chasing fame in this viral troll way is for you. Right? It's this thing we see in a million public people today, right? Like basically every public person has a version of this this going on to their brain. But Arpaio gets it really early. He he might be the first online man, you know, like in the way that. Yeah, right. So I'm going to quote from this New Yorker article. I think it makes the point. Well, Mary Rose Wilcox, who is Latina and the only Democrat on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, remembers a quite different sheriff Arpaio was not like this before. She told me he was flamboyant, but I don't know this guy. For Wilcox, the last straw came this February when Arpaio marched more than 200 undocumented immigrants shackled together to a new tent jail, parading them before news cameras. Arpaio had staged prisoner marches. 24 in 2005, he forced nearly 700 prisoners wearing nothing but pink underwear and flip flops to shuffle four blocks through the Arizona heat, pink handcuffed together to a new jail. When they arrived, one prisoner was made to cut a pink ribbon for the cameras. This elaborate degradation, which is remembered fondly by Sheriff Joe's fans, was ostensibly in the name of security. The men were strip searched both before and after the March, but Arpaio also told reporters I put them on the street so everybody could see them. He marched another 900 this April. So. I don't know. It's interesting to me what Wilcox reports, right? This woman who has no vested interest in making him sound good, who has been a political on the different side of the aisle for him for a while, but was friendly with him and says that like this changes him. And there's another quote I'm going to read from that article about. Joe Arpaio has an AA Colbert report appearance in 2009. And it's. It's kind of gross. Uh, yeah, I'm just gonna read it. We were in New York and he was about to be interviewed on the Colbert Report. Is this the green room? He asked. These walls are blue. Are they going to powder me? The producer and intense young woman persisted. Don't try to be funny, she said. He will be funnier than you. Arpaio shrugged. He wasn't familiar with Colbert show. I'm pretty funny, he said from a rumpled Manila envelope. He pulled 2 pairs of pink boxer shorts. I brought the underwear, he said. The producer stared. An assistant looked on helplessly. Then the producer. Reached for the shorts. Thanks, she said. Do you want me? Don't you want me to take these on the show? No. Arpaio looked nonplussed. Well, at least let me sign him. He autographed the shorts, one pair full bears stay out of jail, and one for the producer's son. The Colbert segment was yeah, it's just like. So that's something wrong with a guy too. Like, not that you should feel bad for this monster, but like, that's not that's something wrong with the dude, right? That is symbol of a broken brain. You know that? Pain. Yeah. You know, I was thinking earlier about. About Michael Flynn, the general turned Trumpist maniac. Yeah. And how so many people that that served with him in Afghanistan and Iraq were totally baffled by who this guy had become and and that, you know, he was a little bit, you know, you know, original thinker, let's say in the in the mid 2000s that but by the time he gotten, you know, into the, you know, twenty 10s, just this guy's brain cracked in half. Yeah, and just became like this weird conspiracy peddling, you know, anything for fame troll. It's so weird. It is like you get addicted to the outrage, you get addicted to the to the trolling, and you start to maybe believe your own nonsense. I don't know. It's just, it's so weird. And there's so many of these guys now out out today that are like, you know, if they're like a Greg Kelly or a or a Charlie Kirk. Or or, you know, your boy Ben Shapiro. Like that are just addicted to to being. Horrible morons. It's crazy their brains have broken. Yeah, it's. It's really bleak because I don't know. You know, I've I've heard a number of theories about like guys like this who have this broadly normal career for a while and then like lose their mind at a certain point. Seemingly guys like Flynn and stuff and. I don't know. I I I think. The Internet is doing a kind of damage to our brains that the present state of neuroscience isn't well suited towards analyzing. But we will eventually come to understand the scope, and in a pretty profound way. Like there's something, yeah, yeah, there's like, forget long COVID. It's like there's like long Twitter brain fog on Twitter. Yeah, now that Colbert segment was brutally awkward and 1st off, it's kind of frustrating that Steven had him on in the 1st place. Arpaio did it to plug one of his memoirs, and Colbert obliged him in that. But Joel's Joe's whole appearance on the show is very revealing. The other guest that night was Ken Quinn, who was the 2nd mate from a container ship that was famously hijacked near Somalia that April. He was one of the guys with Captain Phillips, right? Oh yeah, Captain Phillips, right. So this guy has just gotten out of being captured and stuff. He tells his story. The audience is very moved. They give him a standing ovation. Pretty normal for a guy who's just been through like a death defying spirit experience like that. But Joe gets really jealous because this other guy is getting like more attention than him. So when it was his turn, he he tells Stephen Colbert this the Republic did a poll last week. Who's your hero? And I beat out Tillman. I beat all these guys. I'm not bragging, I'm just saying. He's referring to Pat Tillman. Tillman. The NFL star from the Arizona Cardinals who then went to Afghanistan and got killed shortly thereafter. Ohh my. As as you can listen in, the army went to a bigger hero than that guy. Yeah, yeah, you got way more gunfights, too. Totally happened. Now it's a Turkey. I could out type Pat Tillman, that's for sure. So while Sheriff Joe, it's just such a weird brag, like this guy just got kidnapped. Man let him have his moment in the sun, right? Right. He got kidnapped by the smiling pirate. Yeah, no big deal. No big deal. Well, Sheriff Joe enjoyed being a celebrity sheriff, doing photo OPS with every major right wing politician and showing up on TV constantly. His inmates continue to suffer. One case study was ambrette Spencer. In 2008 she was arrested. Drunk driving, and months later, while her case made its way through the court system, she got pregnant. Now, at this time, when she gets pregnant, she's in treatment. She's not drinking. And Ambrit, who is Black, was eventually sentenced and was sent to Joe Arpaio's tent City to do, I think, six months or something. So she goes through the late stages of her pregnancy and Joe Arpaio's tent city. Dr Visits prior to her incarceration confirmed that the fetus was healthy, but after a month in Sheriff Joe's custody, she grew terribly ill. Now, we don't know specifically why, that year alone, at least four other pregnant inmates reached out to the Phoenix New Times to report miscarriages or stillbirths in Arpaio's tent, city tent, jail, whatever you want to call it, they suggest a wide variety of causes. The food Joe feeds his inmates was often plotting. The water well was infested with mice and mice feces since 2005, and mice carry the toxoplasma parasite that can cause birth defects. Prenatal vitamins were also forbidden for pregnant inmates. To cut costs, Joe made sure to avoid hiring medical staff with proper training. The night Ambrit got sick, the nurse on duty had no prenatal education. Despite ambrette severe pain, the nurse decided her case was not an emergency. An hour later, Ambrette passed out. The nurse checked her blood pressure and realized it was fatally low. She couldn't even get an IV into the woman's arm. By the time Spencer was finally taken to the hospital, she had been in severe pain and kept from seeing a doctor for nearly four hours. Her child was delivered dead. The cause was placental abruption, a condition caused by internal bleeding. The treatment is immediate delivery, and this was a very late pregnancy. The baby would have probably survived if she had been taken to a hospital immediately and had the baby delivered. The most horrifying detail about that story is that for so Joe had specific policies when his inmates gave birth that they were not allowed to hold their children after birth. It would be taken from them immediately. Staff violated that rule in this case to let her hold her dead child. And now I'm yeah. Now I'm sure that Arpaio's allies in the conservative part of of Arizona, who are pro-life of course were outraged by this and and hated him for for violating their pro-life principles, right. I don't think they they're there doesn't seem to have been any kind of a dust up. I mean the Phoenix New Times made a big deal about it, but none of his voters cared. It did not harm. In the next election. Now, the death of Ambrit Spencer's baby did not make it into any statistics about death and Sheriff Joe's tent jail. As a rule, deaths of inmates very rarely did. In 2015, the New Times attempted to find out how many people actually died in his jail. They spent six months waiting for records requests from Joe Arpaio's office to no avail. Eventually they were forced to check other government databases where they found at least 160 reported deaths. Quote, But that is an. 160 yeah is the minimum. That's all they were able to find evidence of because again, Joe wouldn't give them any data on this. The Sheriff's Department has deliberately obfuscated how many people are dying in the tents jails. God, the truth is seems like a very high number of people dying in. We'll talk about how high it is. The truth is that no outside authority keeps track of how many people die from brutality, neglect, disease, bad health, or old age in Arpaio's jails. Federal Judge Neil Wake twice has ruled that medical care is so deficient in the jails as to be unconstitutional. The Department of Justice supposedly monitors conditions in the jails, but has shown little or no appetite for confronting Arpaio. What my research discovered is that people hang themselves in the jail at a rate that dwarfs other county lockups, and many of the deaths are classified as having occurred in the County Hospital. We're in a cell without further explanation. People die and no one asks how. No one asks why. During the reign of Sheriff Joe Arpaio, research requested and provided from the coroner's office showed 157 deaths in and of itself. That number is not necessarily out of line with jail deaths and other jurisdictions. But digging into this data raises troubling questions, particularly when compared with jails across America. Suicide is an all too frequent consequence of incarceration and jailhouse deaths across the nation. the US Department of Justice notes the following. Rates of suicide over A3 year period from 2000 to 2002. Los Angeles jails 11%, New York jails 9%, Cook County jails 6%, Philadelphia jails 14%, Harris County jails 13%, Dade County jails 6% now, during that same. The suicide rate among jail deaths and Sheriff Joe Arpaio's lockups was 24%. Yeah. In 2008, two reporters from the East Valley Tribune America Copa County paper did A5 part study into the MCSO'S operations. They found that due to the sheer amount of resources Arpaio devoted to going after immigrants, response times to emergency calls to the Sheriff's Office had increased by a significant margin. Arrest rates had dropped, and dozens of violent crimes had not been investigated. The series won a Pulitzer four months after it was published. Joe Arpaio won reelection. Oh my God, this guy really is. He's a super villain. He's causing more crime. Ohh yeah, then he's then then he's then he's, you know, fixing or that he's, you know, stopping. He's getting people killed left and right. Would you say 24% suicide rate. He's torturing these people at minimum, sending out crazy posses of armed yahoos to terrorize these cities and neighborhoods and even their own. It's own City Hall. You know, denying pregnant women's medical treatment and making them eat mouse feces, water. This guy is like, what is it, you know? He's like, you know, a saw. A bad guy. He's like, he's a mustache twirling ******* monster. Holy ****. Yeah. I mean, this guy was bad, but I didn't realize it was like this. Yeah, it's and and to be clear, it's 24% of jail deaths are suicides, not 24. I got. No, I got right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just want to make that clear for listeners so people don't like 1/4 of people are killing. No, it's not that. That would be that would have been quite a bit of a different story. Of me is died inside listening to this. Yeah, yeah, it's it's outrageous. It's just horribly ****** **. But you know what's not horribly ****** **? It's the ads. It's the sponsors of this podcast. Knowing that that's what's. 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Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint Mobile. Com slash behind my name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with Spreaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker. But that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love. With speaker from iheart this fall on revisionist history, is there anything that we haven't talked about or or that I should have asked you or you'd like to add that seems relevant? You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Revisionist history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. We're back. OK, so in 2009, Barack Obama's Justice Department opened a massive investigation into the MCS O. Among other things, they found that deputies had used stun guns repeatedly on prisoners who were already strapped into a restraint chair. Two men had died, costing the county more than $14 million in settlements. By 2009, the brutality of Joe and his deputies had cost the county more than $43 million. Maricopa County Jail generated lawsuits at a rate that was unprecedented in the nation. One Phoenix New Times investigation found that between 2004 and 2008, the county jails of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston, which combined holds six times as many inmates as Maricopa jail, were sued a total of 43 times. During the same. Arpaio's department was sued almost 2200 times in federal court. 2200, yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. So basically, yeah, that's incredible. Yeah, it's it's it's out of. It's got damn mind. Like, that's when you compare because, like, those aren't nice jails. It's not like that. It's not like ******* Los Angeles County lockup is the Shangri-La. Like, that's how bad Joe Arpaio's jail is. The LA County Sheriff's Department is notoriously ****** ** horribly racist. Yeah. Yeah. Really bad jacket. Like Sheriff's Department. But like dozens of people, dozens of sheriff's deputies have been charged with all kinds of nonsense. But like, 43 lawsuits, and that's New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston and combined to 2200 for Maricopa, gaping like when you put it, it's just out. It's ******* outrageous. Also, like, Can you imagine being like, OK, you're like, you go to law school, you study really hard and. You know, you you you stay up all night, you know, trying to ace those tests. You work hard to pass the bar, and you finally get a plum gig in, you know? Whatever Phoenix or Mesa or what have you, and you know it's your first job. And your job is to defend Joe Arpaio's Crazy Evil 10 jail over and over and over and over and over and over again. So ****** **. Yeah. There's not enough liquor in the damn world to do that job. Yeah. All right, so. Yeah, 2200 ******* lawsuits in federal court, The New Yorker writes. Remarkably, Arpaio has paid almost no political price for running jails that are so patently dangerous and inadvertently expensive. Indeed, until recently, there were few local or state politicians willing to criticize him publicly. Those who have, including members of the county Board of Supervisors, which controls his budget, tend to find themselves under investigation by the Sheriff's Office. Local journalists who perturb Arpaio have also been targeted the Phoenix New Times. Made an investigation of Arpaio's real estate dealings that included Arpaio's home address, which he argued was possibly a violation of state law. When the paper revealed that it had received an impossibly broad subpoena demanding, among other things, the Internet records of all visitors to its website and the previous 2 1/2 quarters, yeah, sheriff's deputies staged late night raids on the homes of Michael Lacey and James Larkin, executives of village Voice Media, which owns the New Times. The deputies arrested both men, they said, for violating grand jury subpoena. The County Attorney declined to prosecute, and it turned out that the subpoenas were issued unlawfully. Outspoken citizens also take their chances. Last December, remarks critical of Arpaio were offered during the public comment period at a Board of Supervisors meeting, and four members of the audience were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for clapping. Their cases are pinned. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. Where is arizonae's very popular? Senator John McCain and all this? That is a good question I should have. Where is John McCain? Holy cow, man. Like. You know. You're the you're the king of this ****. Yeah, they didn't seem to like each other. Joe Arpaio wouldn't call him a hero, I guess. Yeah, but come on. Well, let's see. I found it. I found an easy central article John McCain saw through Georgio's Boloney. Let's see. I don't know if he actually did anything. Let's see here it's listing all of the different. Sorry, I'm not trying to derail your stuff, but I'm just like, this is a good question, though. I I want to where is John McCain in this? Yeah, where is Mr? After Trump pardoned Arpaio, the senator issued a statement saying Mr Arpaio was found guilty of criminal. OK, so, yeah, I don't think he did anything he did much earlier. I don't think any that's way at the end. Yeah, I don't think anything. Yeah, I I don't. I don't think. Yeah, it it seems like all of the **** that he he. Well, let's see here. Nope. Nope. No. You know what? In 2012? Is it? Seems like he had made a number of comments in 2012 attacking Joe Arpaio. OK, that's still pretty late in the game. Yeah, that's kinda Mack. Yep, Yep, Yep. But definitely he did. He did speak out against him over all of the sex. Well, some of the sex crimes. Stuff. OK. All right. Well, maybe it was in it, but like, yeah, definitely not early on. But he he before the Trump years, McCain did eventually speak out against him, it looks like. So I don't know. I'm not going to make a comprehensive statement about it one way or the other, certainly. I mean legally, obviously, he state congressman can't do anything about a sheriff, but he but you can politically. You said this guy was a political figure. He couldn't be, that's why. Who's he? He was too powerful proof. Yeah, well, and we're we're about to talk about why more wasn't done. Because obviously a lot of Republicans let this happen, right? And encouraged it and made hay out of it, right? But so did Democrats. And this is where it gets really frustrating. So President Obama is in office for like, the last eight years that Joe Arpaio was sheriff when he is getting repeatedly like attack, like repeatedly shown to be breaking the law. And Obama's Justice Department issues repeated condemnations of conditions in Arpaio's jail. They don't do anything to him. There are theories as to why he was allowed to thumb his nose at federal judges for so long. One of them involves his very close relationship with Janet Napolitano, the Secretary of Homeland Security, from 2009 to 2013. Before that, she was the US attorney for Arizona when conditions in Arpaio's jails were investigated by the DOJ for the first time in the 1990s. We quoted from that report in the first episode, but it was horrific, and it noted that his treatment of inmates was unconstitutional. Despite this, Janet did very little to penalize Arpaio. She held what The New Yorker described as a friendly press conference with him, where they announced a settlement with the County Sheriff's Office. During that press conference, the Arizona Republic described her as quote trading compliments with the sheriff. Napolitano later became the state attorney general where she actively encouraged Arpaio to run his jails however he wanted. When she ran for governor in 2002, Arpaio backed her. Even though she was a Democrat. He made a campaign. Commercial for her that some suggest was crucial in her narrow victory. It was not until 2008, in her second term, that she took any kind of stance against Arpaio, ordering that $1.6 million in funding to his department. They used to investigate felonies, not immigration. Joe later got the funding reinstated. And yeah, there's a lot of like, he's. Here they don't. He's not. He's treated with kid gloves, even though he's directly disobeying federal judges in a lot of cases, repeatedly refusing to fix problems with his jails. Now that happens. My my city Police Department, Portland Police Department are like, in contempt of federal courts that have like, like, the FBI and **** have, like, ruled that they're like their use of force policies are wildly out of whack. They're being, like, way too violent in ways that are like, they've been ordered to reform and they're keep refusing to, like so. This does happen outside of Arizona, right? That you have a Police Department or a sheriff doing something that a federal judge says isn't OK and just no one does anything about it. But Joe is like the most blatant example of that. I don't understand. How can you? Yeah, there's like people being killed in this jail, left and right, 2200 complaints. Like who? And nobody stepping in like it's just, it's it's wild. Some, I mean, there are like, you know, they get the cameras taken out. There are judges who are like repeatedly ruling against him to their credit. But who's gonna force him? Unless you send in like, I don't know, the FBI or something, I'm guessing. I think it would be the FBI's purview, right? Because they're the ones who supposed to be watching this. But like, unless you send in the feds after him. Who's gonna stop him? Right. And and that's kind of wild. Nobody wanted that job. So nobody did anything I think is really what it comes down to. There's an almost endless flood of horrible stories that I could tell about our pyos jails. But and have yeah. And have. I just don't want to like, you know, there there's, there's a there's a limit to which I think that's helpful. I've read enough. I think I've read enough for people to understand how bad his jail was. Joe himself referred to his tent jail as a concentration camp on several occasions, and that is a fair description. I've spent hours reading detailed. Reports about the original cases, the early Nazi camps for political prisoners, and some of the stories from Joe's jail would fit into those accounts, particularly the people being strapped to chairs and beaten to death. I want to close out, though, by talking more about his posse. In 2010, Joe created the illegal Immigration Operations Posse, giving hundreds of racists the chance to do what some of them had probably done while wearing Klan robes in earlier days. Posse members would help Sheriff deputies bust into places of businesses and homes and tear people away from their families. Actor Steven Seagal and Lou Ferrigno helped out once. Yeah, yeah, they were both big possible, yeah. Steven Seagal, yeah, Steven Seagal. Ferrigno. Steven Seagal. Original hosties yeah, yeah, they they they love that ****. Steven Seagal drove a tank through a guy's fence and allegedly killed his dog as part of one of his raids. Is Joe Arpaio's real life. Yeah, that happened. That's a thing that occurred. Jar No wrote the intro to Steven Seagal's terrible book. They're like fiction novel the way of the shadow wolves. Horrible. Don't read it, but listen to our episode on it. But yeah, I feel like I've just taken a massive and instant hallucinogen. Yeah, like. There's something about the way of the shadow wolf there. Yeah. And Steven Seagal driving a tank over someone's dog did I just with. Yes. The original Incredible Hulk. Yeah. Yeah, it was because he was. Yeah, he was. I mean he he filmed a reality show. I don't think his episodes because there used to be a show called Steven Seagal lawman. Because he he just got to be a cop for some. And it's always for like a shady sheriff somewhere in the South who's like, yeah, let's bring in, let's let Steven Seagal beat people up as a cop. Or for Putin. Yeah, yeah, but they were filming. They filmed a season that didn't air. That was supposed to be in Maricopa County, but it got shut down, in part because they were like, doing some. Like he drove a a tank through a guy's fence and killed his dog. Like some **** went wrong. We gotta, we gotta find that tape. Yeah. With those tapes, we gotta, we have to find the lost Steven Seagal drawpile reality episodes. They've gotta be out there somewhere. I haven't looked into it 100% out, 100% out there. So in a statement of interest in a case against the MCS, the Department of Justice described the decision to use untrained volunteers to search vehicles, transport arrested immigrants, and carry out work site raids. They noted, quote MCO provides insufficient supervision and oversight. Ensure that volunteer posse members taking part in immigration enforcement activities do so without engaging in unlawful discrimination. After the Sandy Hook massacre, Arpaio sent armed posse members to patrol elementary schools even though they were not certified peace officers. The new time sent a correspondent along one of these rides, quote the one time Detroit Cop explains that he'd rather be in Arpaio's posse. In this case that involves driving around 15 mph around Diamond Canyon Elementary School and through all the dead silent residential. Streets that provide access to the school's property, that's his definition of a hobby, he explains. And these are the kind of, like, weirdos who want this gig, right? Like, it's this very bizarre mix of people who had been cops and missed feeling like, you know, important, and people who could never be cops because they were, in some cases, dangerous criminals but wanted to play it being a cop. And Joe would let them do it if they'd work for him for free. They were all bad at their job. The commander of his executive posse, who was also the former chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party, owned a warehouse that was used for his auto parts business and in 1996 was used to make campaign signs for Arpaio's reelection campaign. In 1997, it was found that a massive marijuana smuggling network had been using the warehouse to move millions of dollars in pot. They liked the location because they were always patrol cars parked outside, which scared off competitors. I mean, I gotta ask, are we sure that this guy wasn't he? Absolutely are not sure of that though. We are in no way sheriff that he hasn't been charged with it as far as I'm aware, but we are not sure of that. So in 2019, three years after Arpaio left office, an audit was carried out that investigated the posse. I'm going to quote from 12 News a local network here. An MCS O audit found poor record keeping had resulted in some unqualified. Individuals being allowed to continue participating in posse activities, for example, individuals with prior arrests and or convictions for domestic violence, drug offenses, sex offenses and other criminal activity. Those individuals have been removed from the posse. Former Sheriff Joe Arpaio spoke up for the group of MCS volunteers Tuesday in a phone interview with 12 news. We did background checks on them, Arpaio said, adding any big organization is bound to have a couple of problems. But All in all, it was a great program. We saved the county millions of dollars every year. Now, the new audit information came nearly two weeks after the temporary suspension of the posse program by Sheriff Paul Penzone when he dropped this bombshell at a press conference. Only four of the posses, 235 members cleared to carry guns, were actually qualified to do so. That's the rate of armed posse members had actually legally qualified to carry a gun 4 out of 435. Yeah, that's bad. That is very bad. Really bad ratio. Yeah, yeah, the good old 2% rule. Yeah. Nice, nice. During my research into this, I found a fascinating article in the atavist activist about a police activist about a police impersonator named Steve Farzam and his best friend who is a security guard who also pretended to be a cop. And eventually ratted Farzam out to the feds for dozens of felonies. Farzam was illegally impersonating FBI agents to access sealed records he was owning. He owned and sold restricted uniforms and machine guns illegally. He was just criming all ********. Now, Farzam was not a member of Joe's posse, but his friend was, and the two were working together on getting farzam membership when their friendship fell apart and one of them rated the other out. And these are both guys that, like, dressed up as cops all the time. Like, drove around. LA with like, police lights pretending to be officers illegally carrying that, like, they're that kind of dude. And they're the kind of people who love to be in Joe Arpaio's posse. And the article gives a description of both men that I think does a good job of explaining the kind of people who volunteered for the posse generously. You could call them police wannabes, guys who long to be associated with or better yet, mistaken for officers of the law. Dansel and Farzam spent years obsessing over police culture. They became fluent in the lingo. From copy and place of, I understand to the numbered codes cops use when speaking over radios. A favorite is 417, which means I'm armed. They accumulated dozens of certificates and skills like handling firearms, picking locks, losing using Tasers, and responding to accidents. And it's that's like the it's cop wannabe weirdos who can't do the job because, like, they're dangerously unhinged in a lot of cases. Like, far as, like, selling machine guns to people and stuff. Like, they're right where they've gotten major felony arrests themselves, like these other. Yeah. And I think, yeah, a lot of these guys did, and they want to, they want to carry guns, but they can't legally qualify to. And he just gave them this Gray area for all of these really dangerous people. In a lot of cases. So it's it's giving felons a chance to do cop cosplay. Yeah, this cosplay is real. And you can go in and, you know, rip off hookers and mow down neighborhoods and Attack City Hall. Yeah, and that felons usually, but a lot of them had some sort of cream. Some of them were felons, yes, but yeah. So ex felons, whatever you want. I mean, or, you know, some portion. But I mean it sounds like there's a lot more people with records than there were people qualified to do the job. Yes, absolutely. And because, yeah, it's it's not a job for people who are qualified to do it. It's a job for people who want an excuse to be a big man and ideally do some violence with the states backing. So the case that would eventually lead to Sheriff Joe's criminal conviction happened in 2007. It started with a traffic stop of a Mexican man with a valid tourist visa. Joe's deputies arrested him and held him illegally for 9 hours. The man sued, alleging racial profiling, and the suit turned into a class action for all Latino motorists in Maricopa County. Joe lost the case and the judge ordered Arpaio to stop detaining anyone not suspected of a crime. And being in the US illegally is not a crime, it is a civil. Violation. It is not something normal cops are supposed to be able to do **** over. That was 2011. For the next half decade, multiple federal judges found Arpaio in blatant violation of the injunction. He repeatedly showed up on Fox News to say he would not abide by it. He also lied Underoath in an attempt to obstruct further inquiries. After 21 days of hearings in 2015, he was found in civil contempt. The judge in that case was so frustrated by our Arpaio that he referred him to another judge for criminal contempt of court. Joe was convicted, and he could have faced six months in jail. But the National Center for Police Defense sent 40,000 petitions to the Justice Department, and with Donald Trump in office, there was never any chance that Joe was going to serve time. Trump pardoned Arpaio when he never served a day in prison. The good news is his political career is pretty dead at this point, although he unfortunately is not. He lost reelection in 2016 due to a mix of demographic change. There weren't as many old white people in Maricopa as there had been. And due to the fact that by this point, vast mountains of lawsuits against his brutal jail had cost the county more than $140 million. Just on a conservative small government thing, I can't overstate how expensive it is to have Joe Arpaio as your sheriff. Paul Penzone, the new sheriff, beat Arpaio largely on a platform of cleaning up the MCSO and making it less brutal and thus less expensive. In 2018 Joe Arpaio ran for Senate in a bid to replace Jeff Flake and more than anything a bid to return to political and cultural relevance. The 86 year old lawman slash criminal wound up dead. Last and 2020, he ran for sheriff again, but lost his primary bid to Jerry Sheridan, who basically promised to be Joe Arpaio. But less old and disgraced, Sheridan went on to lose badly to the incumbent Penzone, and that's where things stand today. Jesus, I can't. I keep thinking about this guy who would literally pick up people for the crime of driving while Mexican and put them in his like torture chambers, his own content and put him in a concentration camp. By his own admission would then was then free to go on Fox News and say **** *** to a federal judge and it you know, it's like he. He felt, not wrongly, that he was like allowed. He could continue his criming and his flaunting the nose at the law as long as he ******* wanted. And he could. He and his team of armed yahoos could pick up whoever they wanted, treat him however they want. With no indications they did any crimes whatsoever. Yep, Yep. And Donald Trump loved this guy. We didn't even. I feel like we didn't even get into that. But I mean, that part I remember was Donald Trump. Like, yeah, praise this guy, you know, seven ways to Sunday it's. It's horrible. It's just incredibly frustrating. I think probably. I don't know if he if I'm more frustrated by his partner Manafort's pardon. They're both pretty awful. But wow, dude, Yep. Yeah, pretty bad guy. Noah kind of sucked. Joe. Joe Arpaio's not great. Not the uplifting episode you promised me. Yeah, I I I apologize. I had to lie to get you in the chair. You promised me you are apayo famed philanthropist. Huh? It's like, you know, I mean, and the comeuppance is like, OK, great, he, like, got charged with criminal contempt of court. Like. Six, you know, after six straight years of of ignoring, don't don't detain people for no reason. Like ignoring everything else? Yeah, it's wild. And you know, the people that enabled him are. Are on the hook for this for for his crimes too. Let's be clear about that. If you if you kept voting for this guy time after time after time, you're on the hook for it. If you were a politician, sounds like Democrat. Some Democrats too. Democrats, sure. For sure. You enabled that **** and you are part of you are part of it. And I like this. There has to be the conversation, too. There. There's a lot of media that are complicit in shahd, my God, 100% if you were, if you were, you know, buying into this guys, you know, suffering **** you know, you were part of the problem and, you know, like, not to get too meta, but I feel like his story is like just a story about how ****** ** our entire political media criminal justice ecosystem is right now. And how easy it is for like, a bad actor to exploit it? Yep. As if we needed another lesson, yeah. As if we don't have lesson after lesson every day. Yeah, but here's another one. Here is another one, and and a particularly horrifying one for sure. And like and like his ability to wiggle into the like you know like parasitically wiggle into the the cerebellum of America and and be unable to. For to be cast out is just it. It's wild like his the the length of of his criminal service is is incredible. Yep. Yeah, it's. I mean, he's in there for so ******* long. And I'm sure there's more. I just haven't found a ton of granular detail about his time, you know, in the beer, Hoffman, Arctics and then then the DEA. But I'm sure there's ****** ** **** that we we we don't get from that. Just knowing the kind of guy that he is, right? But yeah, I did have one thought about that, though. About the Elvis thing, remember? So Elvis, like, got a badge to be a fake narcotics agent? Oh yeah. He didn't do that. Huh? Huh? Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. You know, that's the Sheriff Joe connection. That's the Sheriff Joe connection. Yeah, that I I might. I might believe that then. Actually, I might believe that. Then I didn't. **** it. Everything else is all good. Yeah, never mind. OHS forgiven Sheriff Joe if you got Elvis his badge. If you got the other stuff. ******* narc. Yeah, it's all good, dude. OK, so, Noah, you got any, got any plegables? Got any plugs and plug Gables? No, nothing really a plug, but you can find me at Noah Shachtman. That's NOH TMN Noah Shachtman on Twitter. I'll be starting my new job at Rolling Stone magazine real soon, and we're going to have some fun. Causing trouble for the ship bags of the world. Looking forward to it. Yeah, well, good luck doing that. Thankfully, it looks like you won't have Joe on your roster because by God, he can't possibly win election again for anything. He's too old and he's he's too failed at this point. It has to be the end, right? This has to be the end of him. Dude, have you never heard of jinxes before? God, yeah, you just totally jinxed it. He becomes president somehow in 2021 hundred percent 100, it's going to be Joe versus Joe in the 2024 election. Well, at least the people can make jokes about Joe Biden being old. Yeah, that that would be the. I thought you would think that given Trump's age, that wouldn't have happened this election either. But that's fair. Nobody nobody gives a **** about anything anymore. It's amazing. Nothing matters. Yeah, nothing at all matters. Ah, Noah, thank you for coming on the show. Thank you for talking with me about Sheriff Joe, and thank all of you for listening to a tale that I hope made everyone's life a little bit worse. Just a little bit worse. What we try to do here find the ********. Oh God, all right. Bye. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees, the four O months the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Sisters of the Underground is a podcast about fearless Dominican women who stood up against the brutal dictator Rafael Trujillo. He needs to be stopped. We've been silent and complacent for far too long. I am Daniel Ramirez, and as a Dominicana myself, I am proud to be narrating this true story that is often left out of the history books through your husband, blood on his hands. Listen to sisters of the underground wherever you get your podcasts.