TOM ZOELLNER
Phoenix New Times
Not many people can point to bonding themselves out of jail as a moral high point. But that’s what happened when Michael Lacey, the former owner and executive editor of Phoenix New Times, walked out of the Maricopa County Jail at 4 a.m. one night back in 2007.
He had angered Sheriff Joe Arpaio with a story about questionable real estate deals, and his arrest was on the flimsiest charges imaginable: disclosing grand jury subpoenas that didn’t even exist.
“We’re being arrested for raising hell,” Lacey told a group of reporters. “It’s sort of a tradition journalism has.”
For those who knew him, this moment was quelle Lacey, the flamboyant publisher who made defiance of authority his personal brand, if not a keynote for life itself. All the way through, he talked about the First Amendment and free speech as zealously as a preacher cites 1 Corinthians.
That jubilant middle finger he gave to the establishment brought him power and money. But the same impulse, years later, has now put the 75-year-old Lacey into a legal predicament that could dog him for the rest of his life. In November, a federal jury convicted him on one count of felony money laundering for moving assets to a Hungarian bank that he earned from his now-defunct commerce site Backpage, which made hundreds of millions of dollars through sex ads after its founding in 2004. He now awaits sentencing and could face up to 20 years in federal prison.
The six-year legal soap opera stemmed from what Lacey and five co-defendants, including longtime publishing partner Jim Larkin, knew and claimed not to know about what was happening at Backpage.com, the company he created to compete with Craigslist and other online ad boards and later carved off from his chain of alternative weekly newspapers. Lacey escaped 85 other charges, many of them more criminally serious, including facilitating prostitution. The acquittals were characterized by some as an exoneration – but his legacy in Arizona, particularly in the industry he helped shape, remains a matter of fraught debate.
Lacey and his publishing partners never shied from unsavory ads at the New Times, particularly in the early days of its founding. “He was of the opinion that journalism should take people down – the powerful and the corrupt,” said one of his most vocal defenders, former New Times columnist Stephen Lemons. “They were always shooting up, not shooting down. He wanted scalps. Blood in, blood out. But he needed a way to fund that.”
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