Part One: Joe Arpaio: America's Favorite Concentration Camp Operator

was fucking deplorable. Yeah, it was horrible. It was horrible. I was going to start with what's concentrating my camps? But I figured that I should have dove in. I should have gone for it. Come on, Noah, you are about to be fixing to be as we say. Where I come from the editor of Rolling Stone. You've been editing editor in chief the Daily East for since what two that's eighteen? Right? Um, We've used I mean we I use Daily Beast articles constantly as sources on this show.

I'm a big fan of your work, have been for a while. You worked at Wired, you were embedded with the Iraqi the Bagdad bomb Squad at one point right. That was a story you did earlier. In your story, you've done a bunch of cool ship. Um, a real journalists journalist, uh, and now you're gonna sit down with me uh and talk about a real shitty person. So how how are you feeling? Noah, I'm feeling great. I'm feeling great. And I gotta say the the staff of

the Daily Beast are all like collectively huge fan boys. Uh. Um, that's great to hear. Fair, we were talking about the show funck Boy Island. I feel yes, you know, the Daily be staff is itself a fun boy island behind the bastards. You could have just left it at a funck boy Island and then never explained the rest of that. Yeah, can't call hrmy now I'm leaving. Motherfucker's No. How do you What do you know about a little fella fun little guy named Joe R. Pio. Oh yeah, like that's

that's the right answer. Yeah, I'm like, you know, I certainly know he is uh no friend to the immigrant community. That would be a fair statement. I certainly know that he has not been a model for m police reform in this country. That would also be a fair answer. But I feel like he's always one of those guys like, Um, I knew he was bad. I would read the episodic coverage, but I always knew there was more. And uh, I thought, if only there was going to be a multipart podcast

that could explain to me exactly how shitty this motherfucker was. Well, miraculously there is one, and it's it's this podcast right here. And also, my cats figured out how to open the front door to the house. I'm not sure how that happened, but that death that just occurred, Yeah, yeah, they're probably agents of the of the Merricopa County Sheriff's Department. So Joe R. Pio is interesting because he's at he's at

the crossroads of a lot of things. He will claim, um that he's the guy who kind of provided the blueprints in a lot of ways for how Donald Trump organized and focused his not not not necessarily for how he uh he won election, but for how he kind of responded and used the media. Um. And I actually think our Pio is a narcissist, right like or that's not a clinical definition, but he thinks highly of himself.

But I don't think that's an unfair statement. Necessarily to make You can see in a lot of the way Joe uses the media through his career, a lot of Trumpian stuff. Um. He's an interesting guy, and he's kind of also at he's he's been. This guy's a long career in law enforcement. He's the sheriff America County for

the twenty four years, UM. And so he kind of straddles a few different eras in the evolution of American law enforcement to what it is today, starting with like, you know, the the horrible, horrible crime spree that we had in like that kind of reached its peak in nine that's about when he comes into office. Um. And he rides that through to the start of the War on Terror and like the big immigration panics of the of the mid aughts. Uh. And he stays in office

right up until Trump's elections. So he's he's an incredibly influential guy, both in the way he uses the media as a right wing politician and in what he is what he represents as a law man. UM. So yeah, there's there's there's a lot of good reasons to study to our bio um, and also just a lot of horrible, horrible stories. We're gonna try to balance the two because I don't want to just make this misery porn, but there is a lot of that in Um. Yeah, all right.

So Joseph Michael R. Pio was born on June fourteenth, ninety two in Springfield, Massachusetts. His parents were Italian immigrants, and our Pio would later insist in interviews they came through Ellis Island legally. He says this a lot because he becomes a big anti immigration guy after a certain point, although not originally. Um. Now, it's true that his parents did immigrate legally into the United States, but the reality

of the situation is more complex than that. His father, Cerro, fled Italy during the reign of Benito Mussolini in n three for reasons that should be obvious. Not a lot of good reasons to stay in Italy in nineteen Um, unless you're a really specific kind of dude. Yeah. I mean it's kind of ironic, right, given who who are Pio the camps? Yes, and given that a lot of the people he's locking up are people who are fleeing

their own authoritarian leaders. Yeah. Um. And and Cerro comes very close to not being let in the United States. So at the time that he's immigrating to the US,

we have an immigration up. And so he sets sail on a steamship that's leaving Italy alongside like ten other immigrant ships, and everyone knows when they all set sail, only the first one or two boats are going, like the only the first couple of boats, the people in them are going to be able to immigrate because then the quota will no one else is going to be allowed I legally. So that's and and like newspapers are covering the race between all these immigrant ships. Who's going

to get into be citizens? Oh my god, Yeah that's the man. That's Yeah, it's a nightmare, just sitting on a boat for weeks, Like it's a steamship, it's not that fast, and just like not knowing if you're just gonna get sent back to the ocean. Um sent back to Mussolini. Yeah, it's horrifying. Um that said the President A. Wilson, which is the steamship that Zero his dad is on. Is the President Wilson? Like what it was going to appeal to? I think I think that's what the Italians

were thinking. Uh yeah, we got the name of everyone's favorite president. Uh that boat did win though. It was the first of these ships into New York harbor. Um and so yeah, so they get to be citizens. So Joe's family's story here starts with a hell of a

lot of luck. I mean, it's just it's just so crazy, Like you, your family comes here on the dumbest of dumb reasons, and it's like what they like happened to you know, hit a tide or hit a hit a end just right, and otherwise they'd be back in, like he's bragged, or they'd have come in illegally, right, A lot of people did do that. But he's like bragging about my family did it their right. We was like, no, your family got lucky because racists were trying to limit

how many Italians could come into the country. Um. Now, Joe's mother, Josephine, was also an Italian immigrant. She taught kindergarten, and she was the daughter of the publisher of Springfield's Italian language paper. Uh Cerro met Josephine when he placed ads for his new grocery store in the paper. He starts a grocery store not long after he moves to

the country. The two were married when she was twenty two and he was thirty, so he'd been in the US seven or eight years at this point, right when he gets married to this lady. They had Joe a year later, and it was a horrible, horrible labor Um. Josephine died nine days after giving birth to Joe R. Pio of a pulmonary edema. The local paper called her

death sudden and obviously a horrific thing for the whole family. Um. Decades later, when he ran for governor, Joe put out a kind of a biography as a very succinct biography of himself UM on the early live section of his website Sorry when he ran for Congress, Uh, and he noted that he had a quote tough start in life, which is fair. Losing your mom at nine days old

is a tough start in life, to be certain. Um. In his biography he claims that his dad owned a small grocery store in town, while the New Yorker profile claims he owned grocery stores. I'm not sure which of those is more accurate. I really have been able to find much detailed. They definitely paint somewhat different pictures of the family socio economic status, obviously. Um. Either way, Cyri was very busy with work and did not have time to take care of his son. Joe was raised by

friends and family. Now Joe claims that he was an accomplished athlete and an average student, but Terry Green Sterling and Jude Joffey Block, who wrote a book about our Pio titled Driving while Brown, paint a less pleasant picture of his time in school. Quote Joe R. Pio had a difficult time in school. He struggled to get passing grades and often bore the brunt of anti immigrant taughts. Dago wop guinea. He took it, pretended to ignore it,

because that's what you did back then, he told us. So, Joe suffers a lot of they immigrant racism as a kid, which is believable. God, and the abuser the abuse becomes the abuser. Yeah, I mean that is that is the story here. Um, And it's you know, it's one of those things. Um. He's definitely by the time he's grown up, the thirties were not quite at the height of kind of anti Italian racism, but it is still like a pretty common thing. And his family is working class Italian.

There's there's certainly a lot of bigotry that he's he's growing up in and around Um. When Joe turned eighteen, he joined the army. There was a draft on at the time, so this may have been more him accepting in inevitability than doing a patriotism talked to my grandpa was kind of in the same generation, and a lot of guys joined the army because it was like, well, if you join, you get to pick your branch, you have some choice in what you do is supposed to

just kind of waiting for your number to come up. Um. The Korean War started immediately after he joins, and Joe later wrote quote, I wanted a piece of the Act, but his luck would have it. Instead of heading off to combat, the army saw an unusual talent in the young Joe R. Pio something other men my age knew nothing about typing some instead of issuing the off the Korean the army. But wait a minute. This like a guy who purports himself to be the tough guy of

all tough guys, meaner the mean sheriff, American's toughish sheriff. Yeah, he's a fucking typist. He was the typest. Oh, and it's it's great there's some real questions because he brags a lot about all the gunfights he's in as a law man. Later and there's some serious questions as to whether or not he's ever seen in coming fire. Um. And this is like, obviously there's no shame in being a typist or whatever in the military, but the way he frames this is fat because he he needs you

to know, because of the guy he is. He needs you to know he really wanted to fight, he wanted to see combat. But gosh, darnett, he was just so good at type um because I mean, it's America needed as the North Koreans were coming down the peninsula and one thing they needed for the Incheon landing there was one touch type mastered the Corty keyboard saved all of

those Marines at the Chosen Reservoir. My grandpa was in Korea and he kind of like by surprise, he had been stationed in Korea before the fighting started and he was just there as a medic. He was there the

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

wars COREA was really bad. Is that true about all these fucking yes want to be fashismo types, right, It's like none of them actually see any action. I mean, with the exception of I suppose one Austrian. But other than that, yeah, you're getting at Hitler that, but I mean they really like they never see any action. They just sit on the sidelines and and and you know, like, oh my god, totally would have done it if it wasn't from my bone spurs. He totally would have done

it if it wasn't for my fucking killing typing. You know. It's it's this frustrating aspect of American of the American hawk culture, where not that you you definitely do I don't want to like paint it. There's definitely some hawks out there who saw some serious combat, but it's not

most people who do that. And the ones who I think it was, I think he was Jim Jordan, who just posted a video of himself like firing a machine gun at arrange and just looking looking miserable doing it like he's got it braced in this like really like he's not. He's shooting it like somebody who's scared of the gun he's using as opposed like none of them ever,

I don't know. They never pull any of this off, like they all It's like it's like Ted Cruz trying to or or Jeb Bush posing with his monogrammed handgun. It's like, you obviously don't and that's fine, you don't have to like this stuff. What stop pretending? Stop? Was Jim Jordan's in Like did he wear a jacket that one time? To machine gun? Um? Opposing what? You know? How like he never wears a jacket? Is this a thing? No, I'm not aware. I don't know much about I think.

I mean it may I may be getting it wrong. It may not be Jim Jordan's um, which case I'm I'm ashamed. Um now I'm googling Jim Jordan's machine gun. Yeah, hm, I see something about machine gun Kelly boyfriend. I also think somebody has somebody backing up with a really a loud truck. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm calling from New York. Never apolicize. Are we here to talk about trucks and

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

him typing and fighting. He goes on to write, so instead of issuing me off to Korea, the army put me in the military's Medical Detachment Division, where report writing skills and interviewing techniques were critical. And this is where we get to a really interesting discrepancy in his background, as will become clear Joe. As we've talked about Joe as a real vested interest in wanting people to see him as a warrior, but since he didn't do any

cool stuff in the army. In his own bio, he uses that section to immediately pivot towards his career in law enforcement, saying, the Army never got me over to Korea, but it did get me abroad for a while. That's where I was bitten by wanderlust. Little did I know then that France would be the first of many foreign

countries where I would be sent to fight crime. After getting a taste of what a cop would be like in the military, I was discharged from the Army and immediately signed up to be a streets cop in one of the toughest cities in America, Washington, d C. Now do you see the nonsense there, Because he's not being a cop in the army. He's doing medical paperwork. That's not he's not fighting crime in France. He's like filing out v A forms and which is again a necessary job,

but is not anything like police work. What the fighting crime by get their doctor disappointments right to make sure that like their chlamydia gets treated in from it's very it's very funny. He wants you to like see this direct line that he's kind of like just building up to be a great, great warrior cop. So yeah, and then he goes straight to d C. Well not quite. Actually, what he doesn't say in his his sanitized biography that he wrote for his campaign is that he didn't immediately

go into being a d C cop. He actually attempted to join the U. S. Border Patrol, but he flunk to the entry test for the border which is I think the test is mainly can you hold a gun in your hands? And are you angry all the time? Oh my god. Yeah, I couldn't get in. Couldn't get into the fifties border patrol. Oh my god. So this guy, who like his family is an immigrant family, gets here at a dumb fucking look. Then he can't even he types his way out of fighting in Korea and Korea. Yeah.

Then he tries to kick it out on immigrants by joining the border patrol, and he can't even do that. Yeah, they won't take him. He failed, he flunks out. So thankfully, if you're not good enough to be in the border patrol at this point in time, at least you can still be a DC cop. And he doesn't do this for long. In fact, over the next three years he

has four different law enforcement jobs. Now, when he talks about his time as a d C cop, he consistently describes it as a black neighborhood, like he needs you to know that was that was where he patrolled in one interview, he admitted I was a pretty aggressive cop, made more arrests than anybody in the precinct. Not that I was prejudiced. I wasn't prejudiced. We got three jobs in four would you say three jobs? Three jobs in four years? I think? Yeah, four different law enforcement jobs

in three years. Yeah, that's not great. That is not a sign that you are you know, Jack Webb here that you are Sherlock Holmes. No, he's He's not Holmes. On what I'm sure was a completely unrelated note, he brags that he was the department's quote most assaulted officer in nineteen A lot of people wanted to kick the shin out of me for the two months I had this job. Yeah, he was not there long. He claims

that he was. He would have made detective, but quote, the promotion rolls were backed up and absolutely Joe, Yeah, totally, dude, absolutely getting your ass kicked all the time, you're definitely racist. You couldn't hear the roles were backed up. Oh yeah, way back. He also says he was in constant pain from being assaulted all the time. That might be true. I do not have trouble believing he got beaten up

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

pulled Elvis Presley over. Does not feel I can obey the rules of the road guy, But Joe R. Pio also seems like a liar. Yeah, um yeah, Now he was a Vegas cop for about six months when he signed on as an agent for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and this is the job that he would stick with

for years and years. Uh. The officer the authors of driving while Brown Right, We came to understand that our Pio learned and the small drug enforcement agency then overseen by the Treasury Department, a lot of things that would inform his tenure as Americopa County Sheriff. He learned how to assume a fictitious role. He learned how to self validate by an a serting himself in the news, and he learned how to create chaos on the United States

Mexico border to achieve a political goal. In the early days, Our Pio dreamed up tough guy characters for his undercover work and jumped into those roles with Gusto. One of his partners in Chicago, Bill Mattingly told us he and our Pile went undercover, passing themselves off his pimps, looking for drugs to buy for their junkie whores to place again, they say, is their language nineteen fifties so sixties, I

think maybe at this point. To play these roles, the duo tooled around in fancy cars that authorities had seized from suspected crooks. Are Pio smoked a cigar and dressed in flashy sports coats. He purchased five dollar nickel bags of heroin for the whores, after which he and Mattingly placed the low level dealer into the back of the car and threatened years of prison if the dealer didn't name his supplier. This earned Our Pio the bureau nickname

of Nickel bag, Joe, that's amazing. Yeah, not necessarily. Here's the part in why the elaborate pimp car cost Like, right, you can just buy a nickel bag on the street. I bought a handful of nickel bags at no point if I been wearing a pimp costume. Like it's like when he's like the James O'Keefe of the uh of the of the Narcos, Like, yeah, dress up like a pimp in order to do it? Yeah, you get that. And I also think he wanted to he wanted to feel cool, like he wanted to drive the flashy car

dressed like a dressed like a fucking hip guy. Like. You get the feeling. This will come up later with some of his posse members. You get the feelings. Some of this is just like him wanting to have a cooler life than he did and the best way to do that is to bust people for nickel bags of heroin while driving around confiscated fancy cars and ship I feel like that's what's going on here. Wait, when you say posse members, do you mean like in the hip hop Like no, No, in the his as sheriff, we're

getting add overs. But as sheriff, he has, he establishes a posse of thousands of random people. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, no, this is quite a story. We are we're gonna have fun with this, You and I. When are they all dressed? His piers? Hundreds of people dressed his pimps were running arounds at one point, dozens at one point. Now, kind of we'll get into that in a little bit. We're a few years ahead of ourselves. So um yeah. Joe, because he talks a lot as a when he's a sheriff.

Later in a big media personality, he talks a lot about his time uh in the narcotics apartment and then the d e A. He likes to tell a lot of vague stories about traveling over the world and getting into constant gun battles. We'll discuss the truth behind that in a little bit. But he did travel around. He was stationed in a lot of far flung areas, and he busted people for drugs, although most of those busts were not the glamorous stuff that they make HBO mini

series about. That's why he was nickelbag Joe. You know, he's not not the highest man on the totem poles. Um. Joe was married to the job, but in nineteen fifty seven, he'd also gotten married to a person, Eva Lamb, a clerical worker who threw some bizarre work of fates, found Joe to be a little Italian cutie, in her words, maddeningly. Joe's partner later expressed the interviewers that he felt Joe ignored his wife and spent too much time away from her.

He recalls regularly telling his partner to go home and spend time with his wife. The couple named their first son, Rocco, after Rocky Marciano, the boxer. Joe only baby sat their kid once, and his wife says never washed a dish or made a bed. She told interviewers he was too busy, had to sleep when he was off because he did work a lot of hours. It's okay, first of all, it's babysitting. If it's your own child, it is your child. Well that she called it babysitting, but yeah, that's that

is your child, little Italian beauty. How about no, you know, I was going to large him up because I feel like Rocco is a pretty good name. Like I think Rocco ore Pio is like a legit good name and so yeah, you could see that guy running a deli oh ship, yeah, hell of it? I mean yeah, I mean I feel like in the Brooklyn of of your there might have been a bunch of Rocco or Pios running around and that would have been cool. But it would have been a good boxer name too. You could

see Roco Pio. Yeah, punch of people in a ring. I've just looked up a picture of him as young young Joe R. Pile and he is not a little Italian cutie. I'm just gonna on the record. You can take that up with his very dead wife, Sophie, dead wife, You and I need to have a conversation. Well, get the Luigi board out. So in nineteen six, like, who brags about like I never washed a dish, I never took we're saying it, yeah, I mean it is weird, right, It is weird that she because you get it, I

don't know she's she's telling my god, this poison. Hold on a second, This poor kid, this picture I just pulled pulled up. I'm sure this is the one Sophie's looking at this picture. This poor kid looks is in a is in like a v next sweater and a bow tie, and there is a look of unbearable sadness on this kid's face, like, oh God, I'm looking at it.

Yeah that is Oh that my ad is a cursed photo. Noah, oh god, my asshole pimp dressing dad is touching me on the shoulder for the first and only time, and I am gripped with unbearable loneliness knowing that this will never happen again. Yeah, this is the first time I've seen him in months. Oh God. And Mom is there in like a buffont hair do and uh and a big old belt and she's just like, if only I could murder with this man. Yeah, and he looks he's

got like a slinger vibes. He's got fucking uh Jadgar Hoover vibes. He just has that like that particular kind of uh crooked law man looked to him, just like in his it's it's amazing, what what a what a field? That is? Um God, good God. And yeah, he's just always looked the same. Um. So. In nineteen sixty one, Joe was sent to Istanbul, which was a big get

within the Bureau of Narcotics. It's a big job Turkey was the major hub of the international heroin market, and Joe was about to get his first chance to harsh a lot of people's buzzes. In nineteen sixty three, he participated in a massive one ton opium bust. He went to the media with the story and ensured it was covered as the largest bust ever made in Turkey and

one of the largest in the world. I have no idea if that was true, but that's how the media come at it, because that's what Joe told them, and they ran with the story. Uh, he was the only agent named in the article. Um. So Joe really engineers media coverage around this bust that he's one of the guys responsible for, and he makes sure that he's the only name in that coverage. Um and it goes, it goes over huge. Back home, his dad, who he's got a very strict father, is proud he gets to see

his kid in the newspaper. The newspaper gets passed all around his hometown and it's Joe are pilots first big experience in using the media to stroke his own ego and to pat his career, and he's going to get very good at this in the future. He plays the media pretty masterfully over the course of his career. UM. So, Joe was engaged in at least one gun battle during his time in Turkey, probably, And this is where we

get into a really interesting, really interesting little dissection here. Noah, the authors of the book Driving While Brown, Uh and I found actually the article that they did, like a an exerpt from their book, was published in The Daily Beast, which is where I found this. Did a really deep analysis of this, reviewing his commentary on the incident from a newspaper archive, a testimony he gave before a Senate subcommittee, and in two of his memoirs, and they note that

our Pio tells the story differently each time. His first public recollection of the event was in nineteen eighty two, near the end of his career, in about twenty years after it would have happened, if it happened, Uh, he told a Phoenix reporter that he and five Turkish cops got into a gun battle with drug dealers. Quote. Four of the Turks got away and the other was shot to death. He gave no detail on who shot the

man or the circumstances around the shooting. Joe talked about this gunfight against Seven years later, in nineteen eighty nine, during a hearing before the International Narcotics Control Caucus of the U. S. Senate, cheered by a fella you might know named Sleepy Joe Biden, in his testimony before Congress, Joe claimed to have not Biden obviously, our Pio came to have claimed to have killed two Turkish drug dealers

and a pulse pounding shootout. He made this claim while criticizing the State Department for being ineffective and supporting d e A agents. Here's what he said, quote a paradox one of my weekly gun battles in the mountains of Turkey where I killed two. Yeah, now it's weekly, weekly, weekly, Like was it said at a certain time? Was it like, okay, guys,

first time a gun battle? Uh? That sounds to me like he had a weekly like maybe training session at the at the range, Like he went to the range every Thursday at four and he had a gun battle with like a paper target. Yeah, yeah, I don't think he would have. I don't have much faith in his ability to win that gun battle. But I'm not I'm not sure he was ever in a gunfight, is what I'm going to say, but this is what he says

before Congress. So I killed two turks to dope peddlers, and I was indicted with four other police officers for murder. I sent a cable through state department channels and nothing happened. Three weeks later, they finally decided, g we had better do something. Joe. Of course, I resolved the matter. My indictment was dismissed, and the other police officers had to stand trial, but they were found not guilty. Guilty, let me add, we were in the line of duty. So

I have no idea what to make of that. Because he tells this story differently every time, you would think that the version in Congress would be the most honest. But he's also claimed you have had weekly gun battles in the mountains of Turkey, and I've never been able to find any evidence that would corroborate this. Um. No one else's stories in the d e A of that time sound like Joe would have been involved in He's painting the picture that he was at war in the

mountains of Turkey for several years. Basically, and hold on, he says he was indicted for murder, like no big deal. And he had in Turkey, and he hadn't mentioned that in previous iterations of the story. Nope, Nope, I don't think so. No, I think in his h in that interview, well, in the interview he gave to that local Phoenix paper, he says that several of the cops he was with got indicted and there was a trial and they were declared innocent. But he does mentioned himself being indicted in

that first interview. So you can see seven years later, the story has evolved when he tells it to Congress, and not only is it like, oh, yeah, we had this one gunfight, gunfight where a guy died, it's though this is one of my weekly gunfights. And it's you can see like the mythologizing right that he's he's going through as this happens. So when he tells d hold On, it's like, I have this awesome story. Let me tell you to Oh there's one part I forgot. Oh this

is one little key detail I left out. I was indicted for murder. Yeah, I was indicted for murder. It was one of my weekly gun battles where I get incited for murder. You know, it happened to me all the time, classic d A business. And it's interesting this this this most kind of lavish version of the story in eighty nine comes out like two years before he runs for office, so you can see he's kind of starting to like build up this, um this internal mythology over like what he did as a d E A agent.

And I don't think any of his true. Like I said, I don't actually know if I think Joe R. Pio was ever in a gunfight. Um, I just don't know. You know, there's also a good chance and I you know, I think you talked to people who served in the military.

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

and he's just turned it into something completely different. We don't really know, um, but Robert you know, who definitely hasn't well, I don't know if they could possibly I'm going to guess a number of our sponsors, I would agree with that statement. I was gonna you don't move down the pills unless you're willing to like lay down some heavy long just dropping a mactin into Okay, Well, here here's the ads. So we're back, um, and we're talking about Joe in his story of this gunfight that

may or may not have happened now nineties. When he tells this to Congress years later, when he's a sheriff, he writes two different memoirs. While he co writes, he hires a ghostwriter to write two different sets of memoires, and in both memoirs he repeats the story with more embellishment. Uh. In this version he ties it into Turkish politics, adding quote, uh, it's not that I was glad the dealers had been killed. I wasn't. But it happened and more often than on

one occasion. So he's still adding that. Now he's saying I killed multiple people, right, like again, it keeps part of why I'm pretty. Part of why I don't know if I ever think he's ever been in a gunfight is the story evolves. So it starts there was one gunfight a guy died. We had daily gunfights and then one time, you know, I killed somebody or I killed two people, is what he tells Congress, And there was

a big court case. And then the third version is I killed people on a bunch of different occasions, you know version in my daily tan war, I drove an armored personnel carrier down the streets of Istanbul mowing down bystanders,

just machine gunning drug dealers. Just that's how he wants people to think about his fucking I mean, and that's that's the image he paints of himself when he's Sheriff Joe and he gets all these tanks and he's got guys with machine guns all over the place, Like he very much wants to be seen as this like wild West lawman type mother like he you know, you know, the kind of image he wants to portray it like that.

He's like Charles Bronson, you know, uh yeah, he's definitely if you've never seen a Charles Bronson movie, they're all based around this like shlubby, middle aged man who just mows down drug dealers with machine guns in like New York City and yeah and grunts and sweats a lot. Charles Bronson. So uh. The authors of Driving Well Brown eventually got to interview Joe R. Pio about this purported shooting. They write, quote, we asked our Pios several times if

he'd ever killed anybody. He answered, not that I know of, although in Turkey I used to have gun battles. I think one gun battle, I did hit one or two dope peddlers, only because I am the one that had the gun, A thirty eight, I guess. He added hastily that he had never killed anyone in the United States. Another time, he told us in Turkey, I've had some gun battles. I don't know who killed who, but I never killed anybody, which is different very much from his

congressional festimony. So he's just a liar. He's just a big liar. Noah, he's just a big liar, I think. I I also, I like, it's not a gun battle if you're the only one with the gun, you're just you're just shooting people, bitch. Show to be a gun battle, there need to be guns on both sides. I had a gun battle. I'm going back to the paper target. I think he had a weekly gun battle with a paper might have shot somebody while he was trying to hit a paper target. Yeah. Uh so I know. Yeah.

We spent a lot of time in analysis on this, but it's hugely important to his his image in public speeches and books aimed at his fan base when becomes a politician, Joe would talk about these weekly gunfights in the mountains of Turkey and his like far flung career killing bad guys all around the world. Uh. And this is how he portrays himself when he's giving speeches and when he's writing his own books. But when he's pressed by serious reporters, he backs down and he provides a

much more grounded story. And I think it's because he knows that they can check up on elements of his story. And at the end of this, again, I have no idea if I believe Joe R. Pio has ever heard incoming Fire. Now, after Turkey, Joe was sent to d C where he participated in Operation Intercept, a Nixonian plan to blockade border crossing stations with Mexico in order to stop drugs from entering the US. This may have been This seems to have been partly Joe's idea, and Nixon

really liked it. It was a big publicityploy. Nixon was trying to bully Mexico into letting the U. S arially spray pesticides on marijuana fields. Uh. And basically we were threatening the Mexican government by shutting down border crossing stations and causing a huge amount of economic damage. One aspect of the blockade that Joe personally oversaw was that immigration and narcotics officers individually searched four point five million civilians over a three week period. This included a lot of

strip searches, um, a lot of people being detained. Uh. And it was economically devastating to people who lived in the region on both sides of the border. But it gave Dick Nixon an excuse to act like he was tough on drugs and make political Hey, Joe Arpio gotten close with Nixon as a result of this. He spent during this operation. Ar Pio was flying around in a

helicopter with Spiro Agnew monitoring like the shutdown of the border. Um. So he's actually in pretty deep with the Nixon administration. You know, he's ag knew deep, which is uh. Yeah. So Joe was sent next to Mexico City, where he was served as the regional director for the Bureau of Narcotics. He and his wife had a second child, and in general things were going great for him. Nixon regularly sent his Deputy Attorney General down to talk with Joe about

undercover operation. He went to Chicago and San Antonio in Boston over the next few years. As his career neared its end. Of nineteen seventy eight, he chose to be stationed in Arizona. This would be Joe's last station of duty, and it was the place he and Ava decided to build their life. They bought a house in the Northeast Valley. Ava started a travel agency in Scottsdale, but all was not well Phoenix. Being Phoenix had a lot of Mexican agents and its d e a branch. Two of Joe's

new colleagues felt that he was kind of racist. Phil Jordan, who ran the Phoenix office before Joe moved in, claims Joe deliberately sabotaged relationships between Mexican and American narcotics agents. In response, Joe initiated an internal probe against Jordan's claiming that he'd leaked information to a journalist and that he'd used the office copy machine to copy a cookbook for his girlfriend Dry. Joe loses his rank over this and

gets pushed to a desk job. Though now there's eventually an investigation, and it founds finds that there's are not Joe UM, sorry, the other guy, Phil Jordan's um. And when the investigation includes I just love how it's like, oh, but he photocopied a cookbook. Yeah, it's an amazing allegation to throw at like and it's you know, it's it's this thing you'll see again with Joe. He gets attacked and he immediately goes after the people who attack him

and and does his best to damage their career. And although there were no merits say allegations Joe made against Phil Jordan's, it still damages the guy's career for a while. Joe also had conflict with Laura Garcia, at the time the only Mexican American woman in the Phoenix d A office. She filed a complaint about explosives that the d e A had stored without proper safety procedures in downtown Phoenix.

She was especially concerned about these improperly stored explosives because she was pregnant and thus particularly vulnerable to explosions a local NewSpace. That's true. I guess so every doctor is going to tell you noxplode pregnant ad for him. But she's got concerns to like they're they're not properly dealing with like the fumes and stuff coming off this like it's just a really dangerous storage situation. And a local newspaper learns about her complaint and published as an article.

This infuriated our pile, and she claims he started attacking her about her ethnicity and Monday morning meetings. He had agents searcher car repeatedly and investigate her over parking tickets. At one time, he told her you should be home having babies and cooking tortillas. She eventually left the d e A over this, so he's he sucks. It's not good now. Joe retired from the d e A in nineteen two. He was fifty years old. For the next ten years, he lived the low profile life of a retiree.

He worked mostly at his wife's travel agency in Scottsdale. He seems to have been very quickly bothered by the fact that he was no longer a powerful man. He wasn't interacting with elected leaders and making decisions that impacted people's lives every day. He doesn't take well to being retired quietly, so he decides to run for Phoenix City Council on a platform of forcing the homeless out of

town and locking them up if they refused to leave. Yeah, wait, I want to I want to know what he was like, what kind of trips he was booking? Oh, we're about to talk about that. Noah spoilers, it's too space. So he loses that city council election, and next in nineteen five, he decides to use his talent as a huckster to sell people tickets to Space through his wife's travel agency. You're not, that's absolutely a thing he did. It's part of this I haven't. There's like a whole dig to

be done here into the whole story. But basically, there was this nationwide. There's this company called Society Expeditions in Pacific American Launch Systems, and they start advertising in the eighties that by nineteen ninety two they're going to have a craft capable of vertical takeoff and landing, like a spaceship that can do vertical takeoff and landing, which we still don't have today, right, Like, that's not wasn't remotely

possible in the nineteen eighties. But they're bragging that they have this, and they make deals with a bunch of travel agencies to sell people tickets on this thing. And Joe's track gets his travel his wife's travel agency involved, and they start hucking the space tickets. And I'm gonna quote from a nineteen ninety six right up by the Phoenix New Times here. The price was fifty thousand dollars with a seven thousand dollar deposit and collection of the rest.

Beginning in October twelfth, nineteen two, when the Phoenix was to take its first passengers into space. Um, yeah, we had people, herbub director Collette Bevis says, two fifty two people paid the seven thousand dollars, with five thousand going to a refundable escrow account and the remaining two thousand, nonrefundable going to Society Expeditions bank account. We had people taking out three mortgages on their home, she recalls, Yeah, and they were Joe or Pile selling space tickets, selling

space tickets. Okay, stick with me. Joe Aprile was from the future. Actually he meant it. He meant it. He wasn't trying to. He wasn't trying to, you know, a griff. He came back in time, and his him selling the tickets early is why space travel got derailed and we weren't able to get We would have been doing trips into space by a ninety two for everybody. We'd have space travel. Now, Joe r Pio ruined it by selling

space tickets too early. He fucked up the dream. He came back from the future to buck up space travel. He wanted to take that from us. Yeah, he wanted Jeff Bezos to have it to himself. That's son of a bitch. Yeah, So he sold tickets to space. We don't know if any of them sold. We know that they were trying to sell them. People pay. Two people total in the country paid for this ticket. We don't

know who they. So when the Phoenix New Times interviewed the lady used to work for the company, she said she couldn't access her records to confirm whether or not the r Pios sold any space junkets. And Joe just refuses to answer any questions about this. So we don't know if he sold any, but he tried to. He may have. UM, we just have no idea because I think this was all the con game from the beginning. UM. And I don't know that I believe the company ever

actually had records. UM. In any case, whether or not it was a con from the beginning. In n the Challenger exploded. Uh, and that was kind of the end of anyone talking about selling tickets like this. Um, So the grift falls apart. It's just funny that they got involved with this. Joe was selling tickets to Space for a while. We don't know if he succeeded in actually getting any money, but they tried. You guys have covered like every grifter in history, right, you guys have covered

ten million grifters, a lot of them. Yeah. This is like the same playbook, right Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean it's it's very much. You know. I think the thing that you see with all of the grifters that we cover, that Joe r. Pio has in spades is a a gut understanding of how to make a spectacle of the media, right because the only the thing that you're always selling is a grifter is yourself, and that's the thing Joe

is always selling. That's why this story about him being in gunfights in Turkey is so important because he's got to sell himself as this desperado warrior law man, right. Um. And I think in this period after retirement, kind of the reason he's going through the city council trying to win there and an anti hunting he's then he's selling space tickets. Is he kind of loses the threat of

his own story for a while. I think he's kind of lost after the d e A and it takes him a while to figure out what story he's going to sell next to people. Um. I think that's kind of the position he's in right now. So after ten years of working for his wife, he decided to get back into a spotlight. In nineteen two, he had a chance because there was a Maricopa County Sheriff's election. Um. So it just so happened that nineteen two was a

great time to run for sheriff of Maricopa County. The sitting sheriff was a guy named Tom Agnos, and he was in charge during the Wattle Buddhist temple shooting, which I think may still be the largest mass shooting in Arizona history. Nine dead. It may have been beaten by now it was the largest for quite a while. Um. And it was not like, um, you know, when we say mass shooting today, you're thinking about like a guy walking into with a gun and just mowing people down.

This was a robbery that went horribly bad, and these people were well being robbed executed so that they couldn't like give away the people who had robbed them basically right, like that seems to have been the actual case here. It's a horrible, horrible tragedy. Um. And it it got worse actually when the police got involved, um because they get a tip from a very unreliable source. Uh, and they immediately arrest five men from Tucson, Arizona based on

this tip. No one of these guys has let go after providing an alibi, but the remainder are charged after deputies coerced them in into confessing by exaggerating evidence and threatening them with the death penalty. So very sketchy behavior on behalf of the sheriff's They kind of forced these guys to confess, um, and the sheriff's department just is is very convinced that these are the guilty parties. For

about seven weeks, the Tucson for languish in jail. Uh and the Sheriff's department is adamant that these guys are absolutely guilty. And then incontrovertible evidence emerges that two completely different guys are the real killers. Um. So the Tucson four sue the state successfully, they get a bunch of money, but the Sheriff Agnos refuses to admit any wrongdoing, and

he claims the coerced confessions justified murder charges. Now nine two was still a time when being brutally bad at your job in a way that harmed people could get you fired. And Maricopa remember those days, no fondly um and Maricope account and he very rightly decided to fire Sheriff Agnos, so that Joe picks this time to run for sheriff. It's a great time to run for sheriff, because it's really easy to look good next to this

chuckle fuck. Now, at the time, the US was just one year out from the peak of the most violent crime wave, and recent history is the peak in recent memory of violent crime in the United States. So this is the year after that people are still real freaked out about this is like Charles Bronson movies, are big in this time right. Um our Pile was not at this point focused on immigration. In fact, his campaign had

nothing to do with immigrants. Instead, he focused on his history as a d e a man, and he promised to use those skills to keep people safe. He also complained about mismanagement by the old sheriff and that he was basically like, hey, he's wasting a bunch of tax money. You see this big case that went badly. We got sued for millions of dollars. Like, I'm gonna come in and clean up the sheriff's department and I'm gonna save the county a bunch of money. He also promised that

if elected, he would serve only one term. He won election handily in he was sworn in. One other elected official who was sworn in on the same day was Mary Wilcox, a Mexican American woman elected to the county Board of Supervisors, which oversaw the sheriff's department budget. On the day they met, Joe told her, you look so much like my mother and her pictures, I could never get mad at you, which is kind of a weird

thing to say. But the two of them had a good relationship actually Mary Wilcox is a Democrat, but she has Joe comes over to her family restaurant all the time, he plays with their kids. He's a very pleasant fixture in her life. And she's pretty adamant that, like, he was not this weirdo racist for the first like decade or so that she knew her. Um that there's a shift in Joe R. Pio and we're gonna talk about

that shift more in part two. Um, But he like during this period of time, she thought he was like a pretty reasonable guy, and he specifically told her he didn't want to waste department money arresting undocumented immigrants and having them deported. He wanted to deal with violent crime and his only concern was keeping the people of his county safe. So at the start, some people, at least Mary Wilcox is one of them, will say he seemed like a pretty reasonable guy. He seemed and obviously the

guy who was sheriff before was shipped. So it doesn't immediately look like Joe R. Pope is going to be a nightmare, you know. But that's not where the story ends, Noah. But the story that we're going to tell right now is the story of products and services, which is a story that never goes badly, that always leads us to more products and more services and thus to a better life.

So here's some ads. All right, we're back. So Joe is the sheriff now, um and you know in public, he almost immediately adopts the name sheriff Joe, and he clearly tried. He tries to portray himself from the start. Is kind of like an Old West style law man. That's how he wants to be seen. The only problem is that's not the job he got elected to do. Marracopa is the large just county in the US by area.

It is not in population obviously. The population is about four million, which is about the entire population of Oregon, where I live. So it is a populous county. But Maricopa is like bigger than most nations in Europe. It's a massive, massive county, um, and it includes a bunch of nowhere land like a bunch of desert with tiny little towns, but it also includes the enormous Phoenix metropolitan area.

Most of our Pio's job involved overseeing the county jail, where people arrested for minor bullshit were locked up while they awaited trial or served very short sentences. So his job is not to be the desperado law man. His job is very much to manage a jail. That's the biggest part of what he's supposed to be doing. Joe immediately saw potential in his this job where his predecessors

had not. I'm gonna quote from the New Yorker here, the voters had declined to finance new jail construction, and so in nine are Pio, vowing that no troublemakers would be released on his watch because of overcrowding, procured a consignment of army surplus tints and had them set up surrounded by barbed wire in an industrial area in southwest Phoenix. I put them up next to the dump, the dog pound, the waste disposal plant, he told me. Phoenix is an

open air blast furnace. For much of the year, temperatures inside the tents hit a hundred and thirty five degrees. Still, the tints were a hit with the public, or at least with the conservative majority that voted our pile put up more tents until Tins City Jail held twenty inmates, and he stuck a neon vacancy sign on the tall guard tower. It was visible for miles. His popularity grew. What could he do next? Are Pio ordered small, heavily

publicized deprivations. He banned cigarettes from his jails, skin magazines, movies, coffee, hot lunches, salt and pepper. Are Pile estimated that he saved taxpayers thirty thousand dollars a year by removing salt and pepper. Meals were cut to to a day, and our Pile got the cost down, he says, to thirty cents per meal. It costs more to feed the dogs than it does the inmates. He told me. Jail our Bio likes to say, is not a spa, it's punishment. He once in mates whose keenest wishes to never get

locked up again. He limits their television. He told me to the Weather Channel, c SPAN, and just to aggravate their hunger, the Food Network. For a while, he showed them new to Gingrich speeches. They hated him, he said, cheerfully. Why the Weather Channel? A British reporter once asked, so these morons will know how hot it's going to be

while they're working on my chain gangs. So, my god, this motherfucker so this guy who is two years out of selling space tickets is now who the U. S. Military's greatest typist of of the Korean War, has now decided that he's going to take his rage at being so impotent out on these guys who what like, we're busted for a dime bag, a dime bag, you know.

They they have expired letta, they didn't pay a parking ticket, right, and they get a warrant out like all sorts of ship um and a lot of them are people who are accused of crimes. And again, as a general jail, there's two kinds of people in a in a in a city jail, right. There's people who have been convicted of a crime, but it's usually under a year in sentence, so they're doing like three to six months or something

to go to prison. Yeah, Or it's somebody who has been arrested and is accused of a crime but has not been convicted. A significant, if a majority, generally people into jail are people who are legally innocent, right because they have not been proven guilty. And that's the way the system works. But Joe's whole thing is is punish them and and do it in a very showy way. And he's not doing this because it's good for anything.

And he's not even doing this. No, no, sorry, an I mean interrupt, but look, I'm just as somebody who lived through that time. This was also the peak of like drug war, super predator hysteria, you know what i mean. Exist. This was like the time when you know, uh, you were not that people vital the law. We're not criminals. There are animals and and you know that's when you

get Joe Biden's crime bill. Uh that's where here in New York you get Giuliani time, you know, and all of a sudden, people were getting busted, some people that may even be on this podcast right now. We're getting busted for very any crimes. But at least when they threw theoretically this person into the you know, midtown south Um holding cell, they just help me there for a couple of hours and then you know, let me walk, not kept me in a fucking blast furnace. Yeah, where

they feed you rotting food. Generally, it's it's said to be rotting food twice a day. The cheapest worst ship they can no salt. And again he brags about saving the city thirty dollars a year on salt and pepper. We'll talk about how much lawsuits of his jail cost the city. But like the real the point is the real purpose of this. It's not to save money. He's doing that because it's a good when he talks about saying when he's doing that, because it's a good campaign

thing to say. Right, and in general, the more outlandish things he can force inmates to do, the more press he gets, right, trolls go with all of this isn't even necessarily to punish the prisoners as much as it is to get attention from the media because of how he's punishing, right, and to and to build support because a lot of specifically I can say from this, Uh, you know, my Joe R. Piot was very popular with members of my family, you know, because of because he

was seen as like putting these putting these dangerous criminals in their places and like saving you know, people money and not doing any of this bullshit. Uh, we're too easy on dangerous criminals in this country kind of ship. Yeah, you know it almost it's like a troll, right, Yeah, Actually he's actually like he's trolling the media in this way that like now we totally get right, Like, you know, Trump is ship bag X says in order to provoke this,

you know, pearl clutching outrage from from the media. But back then, you know, it was like him doing it, you know, in the jails, and I guess it was kind of like a Rush Limball move. Um uh, you know, a Rush Limball analog. It was just a way to troll people into coverage. It's fucking nuts somehow. Yeah, And but that's what I mean when I say there there's an element of him that is he will claim you know that he would kind of blaze the trail for

Donald Trump. And there's obviously he's not the only guy who was, but he was a very prominent person who was figuring out how to use the media in the in the same way that kind of every every guy who's in that space on the that troll space and the right does today. He was kind of he was very early in that um and he's very early in using the Internet. We're gonna talk about that in a

little bit too. But people love Sheriff Joe. He is incredibly popular right away because of this stuff, and as a result, every news report on his jail did really good. The numbers were always good, so outlets kept sending reporters his way. He was a big hit with the foreign press. The British and the Japanese and everyone else would send TV crews all around the world would come to report

on his tense city and to film it. To keep them interested, he regularly developed new methods of punishing and humiliating inmates. He put them in black and white striped uniforms. He started putting them into chain gangs, a practice that had ended everywhere else in the country. In nineteen fifty five, to make more headlines, Joe created female chain gangs, to which he bragged were the first in the history of the world. I don't know if that's true, but that's

what he bragged. And then his next big innovation was to start chain gangs for children. What so some kid is like accused of what like stealing ant or some ship, you know, fucking Elina car or something, and yeah, then they put the child on a chain gang. Putting a kid in a chain gang, so you can get another Swedish film crew to ask you to film your juvenile

chain gang. Yeah, Now his chain gangs did work. One of the most popular jobs was burying dead homeless people in the county cemetery, but Joe was clear from the jump that their main purpose was to be a spectacle. Quote. I put them out there on the main streets, so everybody sees them out there cleaning up trash, and parents say to their kids, look, that's where you're going if you're not good, just like we'll lock you up in a chain gang if you're a bad kid. Oh my god,

right wing media went ape ship for this. Oh my god. Rush Limbaugh couldn't get enough Joe R. Pio. He was repeatedly praised on air, and before his first term was done, Poles showed that Joe R. Pyle was the most popular politician in Arizona. The state Democratic Party didn't even try to run a candidate against him in nine Joe was very open about the fact that his success had everything to do with the way he had gotten the media

to cover his antics. He told the Phoenix New Times quote, since the day I got elected, I've been giving speeches. I'm going constantly. Everybody who wants me to talk, I talk. I feel I'm the elected sheriff. I deserve to go directly to the people. You can't rely on the press the media to tell the truth my name idea is like that isn't just because they see me on television.

I'm out there talking to people constantly. But television was the vast majority of his publicity, and in two thousand four, The Phoenix New Times wrote more than of the events appearing in his daily duty calendar are related to stoking his public image. His only regular work related duties, according to the calendar, are two weekly staff meetings and speaking

to classes of graduating detention officers and deputies. For a cop who loves to brag about his gun battles with drug dealers in Turkey, South America, and Washington, d C. During his thirty two years with the Federal Drug Enforcement Agency, our PIO spends no time at the firing range practicing his gun slinging skills. So of his jot time on the job is press related. So he's putting kids to work.

Would you say like burying bodies? Uh? Yeah, some of his chain gangs are burying the corpses of of of of poor people. I don't know if the child child changangs are doing that. They also pick up trash and stuff Okay, So even if the kids are only picking up trash in the and ten degree heat while he's in his air conditioned trailer giving press interviews nine times a day. Yeah, yeah, that's his job. He's a he's

a lovely man. Yeah. So there is some evidence that Joe's attention seeking behavior was not all the result of callous political calculu lation. A lot of it seems rooted in insecurity. When he first took office, he would spend months going around and asking strangers, do you know who I am? So he was he was really the fact that he brags litter about his name recognition. That was something he was like deeply insecure about from the beginning,

is that people wouldn't know him. So he's there's an element of this that is just like craven opportunism, and there's an element of this that's kind of sad. From the beginning, Joe's attention seeking antics came with a horrific human cost. The first clear example of this came in nineteen ninety six with the death of Scott Norberg in detention. The Phoenix New Times wrote quote Norberg died of asphyxia after he was tackled by fourteen detention officers and strapped

into the restraint chair. His head was then pressed forward against his chest and a towel was placed over his face. An autopsy report showed that he sustained numerous contusions and lacerations to his head, face, neck, and limbs. He had been stunned, gunned more than twenty times. There were burn marks up and down his body. Norberg's death triggered worldwide

criticism of the Sheriff's office. The London based human rights group Amnesty International conducted a review of the incident and issued a nine report that states, although Norberg was reportedly uncooperative and engaged in bizarre behavior, his behavior in initial passive resistance does not appear to have warranted the extreme degree of force used, especially as he already had his hands handcuffed behind his head and was lying on his

stomach on the ground when dragged by officers from his cell. They later find that he had been wow restrained, tasted at least fourteen times, and had his larynx crushed like his esophagus was literally crushed. When they eventually like find out like he's he's beaten to death while he is he is tied to a chair, right, so this is

straight up murder. Yeah, this is this is like you read stories about the wild concentration camps which were before they established like the actual like physical camps, like the permanent camps and stuff in the early days of the Nazi regime. This is like the way they would get rid of people. You know, you you have a group of goons beat them to death with sticks, like it's that kind of ship. This guy was strapped to a chair, Yeah, tazed fourteen times, even strangled to death, well, beaten, and

his throat got crushed in the beating at least o god. Yeah, it's bad. It's bad stuff. Joe our Pile and his employees denied any wrongdoing. One of his top aids told The New Times that the restraint used by deputies was actually so appropriate that it's set a new standard for how to tension off officers would perform their duties in the future. Ye, that hold just killed somebody. We're gonna keep doing it. Our Pile claimed to be proud of

how the situation was handled by his men. Maricopa County, however, paid eight point to five million dollars in a wrongful death suit to his family. And this gets to an important point because Joe would brag about stuff like how he saved the county thirty dollars by kind of out salt and pepper. But all of the brutality suits against his men called eventually tens of millions of dollars. So would you say eight million? Yeah for this one death

bragging about thirty dollars in salt and pepper. Yeah, and his deputies beat a restrained man to deaf and it cost the county eight point five million. Good mathematics, good math, Yeah, makes sense. Now, this in no way harmed Joe's popularity. He won re election handily, and his second term contained more of the same antics. On July nine, he launched his boldest pr move yet, framing a teenager for trying to murder him. James Saville. Yeah, he frames a teenage

boyfriend murder well for us an attempted murder. Yeah, go on. James Saville eighteen was a pyromaniac with prior felony convictions and a clearly tenuous hold on reality. This is a mentally ill kid with a record. Joe R. Pyle wanted something to burnish his tough guy wild West sheriff credentials. Since his day job was just talking to cameras and dreaming up new ways to make inmates miserable, he didn't get a lot of opportunities to look like an actual badass.

An assassination attempt would solve that problem nicely, making the case, just ahead of his third reelection campaign, that Joe R. Pio was the kind of badass crime foe who risked his life for the safety of his community. James was arrested by heavily armed sheriff's deputies flanked by local news teams with cameras who had been informed that there was

an assassination plot against the sheriff ahead of time. It was front page news all across Phoenix from another article by the New Times quote, they got what they wanted. Images of gun wielding deputies swooping into a parking lot and taking a bewildered and unarmed civil into custody filled the airwaves. News anchors gushed about how they were thankful that Saville's despicable plot had been foiled by vigilant deputies and that the brave art Pio had averted yet another

a serious attempt on his life. Well, we took this guy off the street. Are Pio bragged and his best John Wayne inflection to a television news station after going home to comfort his wife in the cold the alleged foiled assassination attempt. He's back in prison where he belongs. Now, what the funk? How does nobody see through this? It's that's really frustrating question to ask, isn't it, Noah, Because it's obvious from the beginning almost that this is that

this is sketchy. Um well, not to dumb people. I guess a lot of people buy the end of this because they buy into this like war on crime, that like crime is an organized force that's always trying to just murder as many cops as possible as opposed to crime being a pretty disorganized, decentralized, just thing that happens generally as a result of unmet needs, and that it's actually pretty rare, for example, a sheriff to be assassinated. M yeah, that's but yeah, he wants to be Batman, right,

It's like, oh, he's foiled as too many times. Let's send the teenage eighteen year old boy. Now, our pios claim was that Seville had been building a bomb in order to kill him. As is usually the case, the people who were helping him build that bomb were undercover officers. Now, this sort of thing happens a lot, right and Seville and his family claim that they were entrapped by the mcs O, by the by the Sheriff's office. This happens a lot with people who are charged with crimes like this.

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

It's fuzzy, is what I'm saying. You often find a lot of sketchy details, but almost never do those people win with entrapment defenses because it is extremely hard to win. To actually win with an entrapment defense, it happens almost never because the actual the threshold is very high. You have to show that the idea for whatever a league, a plot was being carried out originated with law enforcement, and that the person being charged would not have had that idea or would not have tried to do that

crime without the help and encouragement of law enforcement. Um so you have to show basically they had the idea, they pressured the defendant into carrying it out, and that he was not predisposed to do it. Otherwise that's a high bar. Right. You can get away with a lot of kind of sketchy behavior without crossing that line. James Saville's attorney, a guy named Farragut, proves all those things in court. He succeeds in an entrapment James get like

this very rarely happened. That is the level of factory that the Americopa County Sheriff's engaged in. He wins on an entrapment defense. That does not happen often. Just cloud Yeah, right, I mean, like there's been a million cases where an FBI agent has suggested pushed along some kind of wanna

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

And they do in this like as an example of how of how egregious they're being. Um Now, despite the fact that he was totally innocent the entire time and was completely exonerated. Um And yeah, I mean basically I'm actually gonna quote from that article. And after the trial, jurors told Farragut, the defense lawyer, they were convinced that Seville had been a pawn and an elaborate media ploy. Our Pio had cameras out there waiting to film the arrest.

Farregut says, the jurors indicated that this was clearly a publicity stunt. Now that's the best case scenario if you're this kid, right, you had completely exonerated. He still spends four years in Joe R. Pio's tent jail because, yeah, he gets denied bond because he's a terrorist. Who tried to assassinate the sheriff. Now, he and his family did win a one point one million dollars settlements. I don't know that that makes up for four years of hell

like this. Um, not not at all. Uh. News articles published at the time suggested this could be a turning point in Joe's career, the moment when people finally saw who he was and turned against him. Um. It's true that the state Republican Party did briefly declined to endorse him for reelection, and that a number of former backers pulled away from him, but the voters did not abandon Sheriff Joe as a result of this, and in the end, he was re elected to a third term. The way

he saw it, he was just getting started. And that's where we're gonna end for part one. Noah, Um of the Tale of shaff Joe, you just killed me in the gut. Yeah. That that was the big one for me. Was like, he faked an assassination plot. He locked a teenage boy up for four years over a fake bomb plot. Are you fucking kidding me? In his own no salt, no pepper, eat food, too nasty for dogs. Tent City that I mean, he thinks he's Batman, but that's like

some super villain stuff. That is some super villain shit. And for the record, I don't think one point one millions enough for that kid. Could should have gotten like three or four million for that kind of ship. Honestly, if I'm like something, I don't want him money. I think Joe should then do a day for every day. He should do a day in his own uh city

for every day I did one. That seems like the more fair recompense if that's the way we handled it when police uh lied or falsified evidence to get people convicted, Um, I think that would happen less. But I'm a child of Dallas, which had a big fake crub scandal that definitely impacted my feelings on law enforcement as a young man. So UM, good shit, good ship. Um, No, you got any pluggables to plug before we sail out? For the rest for this episode, you can find me on on

the twitters at Noah Shackman um. And you can find my my publication at at rolling stone dot com. How do you spell r O L L something like that? Yeah, something like that. UM. Check out Noah's work when he starts at the Rolling Stone obviously, check out The Daily Beast, who continuously do some of the best reporting on the hell world. Um, particularly a lot of like really good Q and on stuff, a lot of yeah, um will summer right is uh yeah, it doesn't actually get to

beat once we're doing a Belling Cat workshop. Yeah oh yeah, yeah, and you know, amazing stuff. His book on quans coming out soon. Yeah, that's coming out soon. Um, you should check out my man, Spencer Ackerman's new book, Reign of Terror, which is coming out really soon. And speaking of former Daily Pace, uh folks, now we got the Daily Pas has an incredible crew. I'm so super proud of them. Um, you know you should go visit that website, Rolling Stone.

I've heard they've done a good story or two uh once or twice in their fifty some years of publication, and figure we'll do one or two more. Yeah, yeah, it seems it seems like a good goal, one or two every fifty four years. Yeah. Man, um, noah, thank for being on the show. It has been a pleasure. And we will uh well, well people will be hearing our next episode in a couple of days, but you and I will immediately tear into another chapter in the life of Sheriff Joe. Um and just have a miserable

time with it. So oh god, I thought this is where he's all going to turn happy, this is where he decides to dedicate his life to charity. No, there's no happy ending to the Sheriff Joe's story. No, I mean no, because he's still fucking alive. Man. It's crazy how long this guy goes without dying. Very Yeah, he's really still alive. Yeah, he's like ninety, he's pushing ninety at least. What the funk? He's like Emperor Palpatine. Yeah, he does look more like Palpatine every year. Um, he

does not meet the high moral standards. He is a youthful unlimited power. Yeah, there's more accountability, uh in in the Imperial justice system. I think he's a ut nine years old. Yeah, spry al right, Episode one over h