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

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
What's torturing my people who have not, in most cases
committed a crime or at least been convicted of it. Ah,
Jesus ship, that was a bad introduction. Um, this is
Behind the Bastards, the podcast that is incompetently introduced and
competently produced by by my producer Sophie. I'm Robert Evans,

(00:25):
the weak link in this in this chain. UM, here
to talk with my guests this week. Noah shacked. Mean, Noah,
how are you doing? What's up? Man? That intro really
was fucking deplorable. Yeah, it was horrible. It was horrible.
I was going to start with what's concentrating my camps?
But I figured that I should have dove in. I

(00:48):
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

(01:10):
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

(01:31):
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

(01:51):
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

(02:17):
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.

(02:39):
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,

(03:01):
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

(03:22):
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

(03:44):
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

(04:06):
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

(04:28):
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,

(04:48):
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

(05:10):
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

(05:30):
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

(05:53):
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

(06:14):
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

(06:36):
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

(06:59):
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

(07:24):
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

(07:49):
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

(08:12):
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.

(08:34):
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

(08:54):
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

(09:16):
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

(09:38):
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,

(09:58):
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

(10:19):
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

(10:41):
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

(11:02):
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,

(11:27):
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

(11:48):
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

(12:10):
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

(12:31):
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

(12:53):
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,

(13:16):
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.

(13:37):
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

(13:58):
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.

(14:19):
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,

(14:41):
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

(15:04):
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

(15:27):
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

(15:49):
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

(16:11):
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

(16:33):
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

(16:55):
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

(17:16):
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

(17:40):
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

(18:04):
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

(18:26):
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

(18:46):
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

(19:08):
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,

(19:35):
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

(20:01):
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

(20:22):
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

(20:45):
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,

(21:07):
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

(21:27):
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

(21:48):
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

(22:09):
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

(22:29):
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

(22:53):
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

(23:13):
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.

(23:35):
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

(23:57):
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

(24:19):
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

(24:40):
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

(25:01):
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

(25:21):
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

(25:42):
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

(26:04):
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.

(26:26):
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

(26:47):
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

(27:11):
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,

(27:34):
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

(27:55):
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

(28:18):
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

(28:38):
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

(29:00):
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,

(29:21):
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,

(29:43):
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

(30:04):
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

(30:29):
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,

(30:51):
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

(31:11):
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

(31:31):
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,

(31:54):
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

(32:14):
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

(32:35):
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

(32:56):
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

(33:19):
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

(33:41):
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

(34:04):
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,

(34:25):
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

(34:45):
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,

(35:08):
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,

(35:29):
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.

(35:50):
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

(36:13):
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

(36:34):
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

(36:55):
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

(37:17):
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

(37:39):
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

(38:00):
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

(38:20):
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.

(38:41):
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

(39:02):
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

(39:23):
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

(39:44):
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,

(40:06):
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

(40:27):
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

(40:51):
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.

(41:14):
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

(41:35):
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

(41:57):
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

(42:25):
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

(42:46):
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

(43:08):
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.

(43:30):
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

(43:50):
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

(44:11):
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

(44:33):
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

(44:56):
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

(45:16):
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

(45:37):
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

(45:58):
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,

(46:18):
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

(46:39):
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

(46:59):
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

(47:21):
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,

(47:41):
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

(48:04):
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

(48:25):
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

(48:47):
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

(49:08):
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

(49:29):
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

(49:51):
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

(50:13):
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

(50:34):
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

(50:55):
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.

(51:16):
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

(51:41):
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.

(52:02):
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.

(52:25):
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

(52:47):
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.

(53:07):
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

(53:29):
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

(53:51):
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

(54:12):
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.

(54:38):
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,

(55:01):
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

(55:21):
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.

(55:42):
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

(56:02):
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

(56:27):
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

(56:49):
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

(57:09):
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

(57:29):
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

(57:50):
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

(58:12):
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

(58:33):
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

(58:55):
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

(59:16):
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

(59:38):
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

(01:00:01):
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

(01:00:23):
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

(01:00:44):
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

(01:01:05):
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

(01:01:26):
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

(01:01:49):
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

(01:02:11):
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

(01:02:33):
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

(01:02:55):
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,

(01:03:16):
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

(01:03:39):
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

(01:04:01):
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

(01:04:22):
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

(01:04:43):
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

(01:05:03):
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

(01:05:23):
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,

(01:05:46):
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

(01:06:07):
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

(01:06:29):
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

(01:06:52):
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.

(01:07:14):
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.

(01:07:36):
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

(01:07:58):
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

(01:08:19):
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.

(01:08:43):
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,

(01:09:06):
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

(01:09:28):
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.

(01:09:51):
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

(01:10:12):
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

(01:10:32):
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

(01:10:56):
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

(01:11:16):
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

(01:11:40):
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

(01:12:02):
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

(01:12:23):
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

(01:12:45):
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

(01:13:05):
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

(01:13:27):
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.

(01:13:53):
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

(01:14:14):
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

(01:14:39):
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

(01:15:03):
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

(01:15:23):
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

(01:15:45):
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

(01:16:07):
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

(01:16:31):
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

(01:16:53):
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

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Behind the Bastards News

Follow Us On

Host

Robert Evans

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season

Dateline NBC

The Bobby Bones Show

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: Joe Arpaio: America's Favorite Concentration Camp Operator