Speaker 1: You want me to do it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that
Speaker 1: was good. That was good. You're natural, You're natural, and
Speaker 1: this is behind the bastard. Thank you, Sophie. I didn't
Speaker 1: need to hear that today. But podcast Bad People, where
Speaker 1: I get shown up at my only talent A totally
Speaker 1: introducing a podcast by today's guest, no Noah shactman of
Speaker 1: the Daily Beast soon to be of Rolling Stone. Noah,
Speaker 1: how how how was life changed for you in the
Speaker 1: last I don't know, seven minutes since we concluded part one.
Speaker 1: I ate a lot of meat with my hands. Oh,
Speaker 1: good hand meat. Yeah, everybody's good hand meat. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: now it was my wife brought back some leftovers which
Speaker 1: I shoved into my face. It was delicious. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: weigh a handmade. I drank a bunch of creed um.
Speaker 1: We're both ready to kick off and talk about Sheriff
Speaker 1: Joe R. Pio in the New Millennium. Noah, very exciting,
Speaker 1: very exciting. So Joe started off the twenty one century
Speaker 1: with a bang. In two thousand, he launched his jail Cam,
Speaker 1: one of the very first live stream websites, with the
Speaker 1: stated hope that people would see how horrible his jails
Speaker 1: were and thus avoid committing crimes. Now, why he did it.
Speaker 1: He did it as a publicity stunt. He is ahead
Speaker 1: of the eight ball on this one. You know, if
Speaker 1: you're live streaming in two thousand, you are on the
Speaker 1: ground floor. You know, that's about earlier, Mr Beast. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So by this point, Joe's deputies had already blatantly entrapped
Speaker 1: at least one person. And the degree to which he
Speaker 1: actually saw jail cam as a provincial strategy is debatable.
Speaker 1: I might argue that this was an early example of
Speaker 1: the cruelty is the point style logic and mass American politics.
Speaker 1: You know, Uh, the cameras were not there to scare criminals.
Speaker 1: They were there to entertain Americans who wanted to see
Speaker 1: people they had other rised. Joe knew this, and he
Speaker 1: knew that providing suffering porn to the masses was could
Speaker 1: be a key part of his continued relevance. The first
Speaker 1: day his jail cams went online, more than three million
Speaker 1: people tried to visit. Now, if you drop a video
Speaker 1: today that gets three million views in its first day,
Speaker 1: that's not bad in one. No, like this is two thousand,
Speaker 1: Like that's huge trip. That's the entire internet. That's the
Speaker 1: whole internet, and it's the website goes down immediately. It
Speaker 1: takes them a long time to be able to like
Speaker 1: handle that kind of strain. Initially, four cameras made up
Speaker 1: the jail Cam program, which allowed visitors to view detainees
Speaker 1: being led into jail, being fingerprinted, and being taken to
Speaker 1: their holding areas. Quite frustratingly, Joe claims that a private
Speaker 1: company paid for the project, and I have not found
Speaker 1: more information on who that was. In an interview with
Speaker 1: The New York Times shortly after the cameras were installed,
Speaker 1: Joe claimed, we get hundreds of emails from all over
Speaker 1: the world and love it and feel it's a great deterrent.
Speaker 1: When people pointed out that the folks shown on his
Speaker 1: cameras were all innocent until proven guilty, he actually had
Speaker 1: a pretty smart response. Unfortunately, quote Sheriff our Pio compares
Speaker 1: the unfiltered viewing with news photographs of crime suspects or
Speaker 1: even the televised chase involving O. J. Simpson. He wasn't
Speaker 1: even arrested yet. The sheriff said, what's wrong with it?
Speaker 1: In a jail which is fucked up moral object, but
Speaker 1: is a good response, like a smart you know, the
Speaker 1: back to the three million for a second. Maybe that's
Speaker 1: just I mean, first of all, who knows if that
Speaker 1: figure is true? And secondly, maybe you just got like
Speaker 1: a a denial of service attack. He got something awful
Speaker 1: went after it. Yeah, Like, I'm sorry, I don't think
Speaker 1: like the entirety of the two thousand Internet was like
Speaker 1: let me, I mean I was on the Internet and
Speaker 1: two thousand. Yeah. Same, You know, I don't think the
Speaker 1: entirety of the two thousand Internet was like let me
Speaker 1: check out this suffering form. That just doesn't seem true.
Speaker 1: It gets that number gets reported by a lot of
Speaker 1: news agencies covering him at the time, but I think
Speaker 1: they are relying on him for those numbers. Um, I
Speaker 1: have no way of but I have I also have
Speaker 1: no way of verifying what the real numbers were. It
Speaker 1: does seem to have been popular, um and will well,
Speaker 1: I'll explain the degree to which it was popular in
Speaker 1: just a second here. But yeah, I think you're right. Obviously,
Speaker 1: when you're only getting your only source for the number
Speaker 1: is Joe R. Pio, you have to question that source.
Speaker 1: And again, it's kind of frustrating the degree to which
Speaker 1: a lot of people don't. That said, if you're writing
Speaker 1: about if you're working with the New York Times and
Speaker 1: writing about the Internet in the year two thousand, you
Speaker 1: are probably fifty seven years old. Don't understand that about
Speaker 1: the internect So that is true. Now. That New York
Speaker 1: Times article ended with a whiff of frustration from Joe,
Speaker 1: noting that while the website had a disclaimer warning viewers
Speaker 1: that they might see extreme and disturbing situations, what happened
Speaker 1: on camera was mostly boring paperwork. Joe seems to have
Speaker 1: been frustrated by this, and he discussed wanting to add
Speaker 1: audio and expand the reach of the cameras to make
Speaker 1: it more interesting, and he did. In two thousand one,
Speaker 1: cameras were added to the men's and women's restroom's one right,
Speaker 1: So then it becomes literal jail porn. Yeah, yeah, that's
Speaker 1: exactly where this is headed. Noah, your instincts of people. Immediately,
Speaker 1: people with very specific fetishes realized that there were cameras
Speaker 1: in the ladies room of a jail and started linking
Speaker 1: them on porn sites like obviously, that's what's going to happen. Now.
Speaker 1: This pretty quickly became a problem for the department, and
Speaker 1: the spokesperson claimed that stated that inmates were only visible
Speaker 1: due to a misalignment, which was soon correct. They also
Speaker 1: claimed that no women could be seen using the toilet,
Speaker 1: which I find questionable at best best given the previous statement. Um.
Speaker 1: The most disturbing part of the whole saga is this
Speaker 1: line from a write up by the Los Angeles Times.
Speaker 1: Jack McIntyre and an attorney for the Maricopa County Sheriff's office,
Speaker 1: told the Arizona Republic that a short partition blocked the
Speaker 1: camera's view of the toilet itself. No juveniles would have
Speaker 1: been displayed unless quote, they look older and lie to us.
Speaker 1: So there's no child import unless a kid lies, or
Speaker 1: if they look old, maybe it's a hard fourteen. Oh god,
Speaker 1: So America's sheriff is fresh off of of of setting
Speaker 1: up a teenage pyromaniac for a fake assassination attempt. If
Speaker 1: this is in part one, haven't listen. It is now
Speaker 1: become America because sheriff has now become a child pornographer. Well,
Speaker 1: you can't prove it. No, you can't prove that any
Speaker 1: children were on those cameras, and if they were it's
Speaker 1: because they lied or they looked older. So no one
Speaker 1: committed a crime, is the important thing here? Yeah, Okay,
Speaker 1: So in two thousand four, a court ruled that Sheriff
Speaker 1: Joe's jail cameras violated the rights of pre trial detainees,
Speaker 1: who are again by definition, not criminals. Now for the
Speaker 1: last episode, obviously jail came to But he got what
Speaker 1: he wanted out of it, right, he got the pr boost, Right,
Speaker 1: he got everybody covering his jail camps. That's all this is.
Speaker 1: You know, you want to get You want to get
Speaker 1: a couple of news cycles out of it. That's all
Speaker 1: you ever hoped for. You don't care if the program
Speaker 1: gets declared illegal a couple of years later. It's the
Speaker 1: same with the assassination attempt. That guy was exonerated four
Speaker 1: years later. Our pios still got the news cycle. That's
Speaker 1: all he ever wanted. Now, for the last several years,
Speaker 1: Joe made repeated claims that he could easily become the
Speaker 1: governor of Arizona if he wanted. And I don't think
Speaker 1: this is him lying. He was, for like a decade
Speaker 1: or more, the most popular politician in Arizona. Very consistently
Speaker 1: he there's a good chance he would have been able
Speaker 1: to win the governorship if he decided to run for it,
Speaker 1: but despite solid polling in two thousand two, he decided
Speaker 1: not to run, saying I want to go out into
Speaker 1: the sunset. As a law enforcement officer. He would remain
Speaker 1: in office for fourteen more years. So I don't know
Speaker 1: why it's weird, right that he doesn't go for governor.
Speaker 1: I think it's maybe because he would have had to
Speaker 1: do ship other than just like torture people and do
Speaker 1: news interviews. No, that's the not the why I said
Speaker 1: what I said. What because he this guy was still
Speaker 1: in office till Yeah, it's fucking bonkers. My reaction, it is,
Speaker 1: it is out of its mind. How long this motherfucker
Speaker 1: is in doing his job. Like this guy has been
Speaker 1: like definitely on some like Neo Abu Grabel torturing at minimum. Yeah,
Speaker 1: then it's like there's a fake assassination plot that puts
Speaker 1: uh innocent man, you know, in these sensities for four years.
Speaker 1: Then there's like, okay, maybe it was only he was
Speaker 1: running an adult porn site. There were probably no children, photographs,
Speaker 1: maybe jail camps, and then this dude keeps going for
Speaker 1: more more than a dozen years. I can't believe it.
Speaker 1: It's it's outrageous, it's really fucked up, and I have
Speaker 1: to give credit. Like you're going to note that we
Speaker 1: have a lot of sources for this episode, Like half
Speaker 1: of them are different articles from the Phoenix New Times,
Speaker 1: who for like twentysomething years like bit onto this guy
Speaker 1: like a bulldog and and deeply reported every fucked up
Speaker 1: thing he did. Um. And eventually it did matter. It
Speaker 1: did not matter soon enough. As a journalist, you don't
Speaker 1: want to wait twenty two years or so for this
Speaker 1: to have an impact. But it does eventually breakthrough. Um.
Speaker 1: And credit goes to them because they really like they
Speaker 1: had some people who were who stuck to him like glue. Um.
Speaker 1: Now it's here, I should note Noah, as I talked
Speaker 1: about briefly teased really last episode. In the nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: Joe R. Pios started a posse. Now this was what
Speaker 1: it sounds like, a group of volunteer amateurs, untrained, who
Speaker 1: were given certain law enforcement powers and partnered off with
Speaker 1: real cops to do cop ship, or at least Joe's
Speaker 1: version of that. Some of these men were allowed to
Speaker 1: carry firearms much of what they did was publicity driven.
Speaker 1: It became an annual spectacle from members of Joe's Posse
Speaker 1: to patrol malls and shopping centers armed during the holiday season,
Speaker 1: Joe's Posse would max out at about thirty five men,
Speaker 1: many of whom were taught to breach rooms and again
Speaker 1: carry weapons. They're doing like armed entry trainings and ship.
Speaker 1: What the hell? This guy's whole job is to run
Speaker 1: the jail. Yeah, yeah, I mean he's got he's managing
Speaker 1: the Sheriff's for partment, which does law enforcement ship right,
Speaker 1: Like if the town doesn't have a copse of its own,
Speaker 1: that it's the sheriff's deputies they call, you know, sure,
Speaker 1: but these guys weren't, like basically they were. This isn't
Speaker 1: like the Phoenix p D. No, Like this is Phoenix
Speaker 1: p D. Gets very angry at them in a number
Speaker 1: of occasions. This guy's main gig is to run the jail. Instead,
Speaker 1: he gets yeah, like volunteers, Yeah, to patrol the mall
Speaker 1: on Christmas. Don't worry, they do what they're fucked up shit.
Speaker 1: In two thousand four, news broke about a prostitution sting
Speaker 1: carried out in November of two thousand three, that, in
Speaker 1: the County Attorney's words, violated accepted standards of professionalism. Now,
Speaker 1: what this means in practice is that, as part of
Speaker 1: one of his big ongoing media pushes, Sheriff Joe sent
Speaker 1: dozens of undercover deputies and members of his posse sixty
Speaker 1: men in total, a mix of death beats and POSSE
Speaker 1: members to do a huge bust on sex workers. They
Speaker 1: arrested almost sixty women in tenor so John's At first
Speaker 1: this looked like normal are pioship. He held a big
Speaker 1: press conference, there were news stories he claimed that like
Speaker 1: this was the largest single day bust of sex workers
Speaker 1: in county history. But then the real story trickled out
Speaker 1: from the Phoenix New Times quote the County Attorney's office
Speaker 1: said that some undercover deputies and certain POSSE members engaged
Speaker 1: in oral sexual contacts, breast fondling, genital contact, masturbation, nudity,
Speaker 1: and other behavior which is contrary to professional law enforcement
Speaker 1: and legitimate public policy. The techniques undermine prosecution by reducing
Speaker 1: the likelihood of conviction. A key factor to note is
Speaker 1: that all that is needed to establish commission of a
Speaker 1: crime in a prostitution case is for two people to
Speaker 1: discuss the exchange of money for sex. No sex act
Speaker 1: need occur, nor does anyone have to remove a shred
Speaker 1: of clothing. Therefore, prostitution cases are the simplest to make
Speaker 1: virtual no brainers for cops. Here's an example of how
Speaker 1: POSSE member Glynn Kaufman handled an encounter with an alleged
Speaker 1: prostitute last October twenty nine. The Kaufman drove to a
Speaker 1: massage parlor on West Thomas Road and agreed to pay
Speaker 1: forty dollars for a thirty minute rubbed down. A woman
Speaker 1: in her early fifties told Kaufman to take off his clothes.
Speaker 1: Kaufman agreed. He then lay faced first on a massage
Speaker 1: table and the woman began rubbing his back. She started
Speaker 1: to chew on my left ear, put her tongue in
Speaker 1: my ear, and whispered words to the effect of me
Speaker 1: not to be surprised if she ran her tongue over
Speaker 1: my balls in my shaft until I came all over her,
Speaker 1: Kaufman states and his signed police report. She told me
Speaker 1: that for an additional hundred dollars, she did the massage
Speaker 1: in the nude and would give me oral sex. I
Speaker 1: told her I would get a hundred dollars. I got
Speaker 1: off the table, took the hundred dollars out of my
Speaker 1: trouser pocket and gave it to her. At this point,
Speaker 1: a crime had been committed and Kaufman should have made
Speaker 1: the bust, but the Sheriff's possemember was far from done.
Speaker 1: He contendued to pay for sexual act acts from her
Speaker 1: for quite some time. The article goes into much more
Speaker 1: detail about what this possemember did and what other posse
Speaker 1: members and deputies did. I'm not going to belabor the point.
Speaker 1: The gist of it is that our Pio's men, a
Speaker 1: mix of cops and volunteers, were straight up using prostitutes
Speaker 1: for sex and then arresting them once they got their
Speaker 1: rocks off so they didn't have to pay. That's what
Speaker 1: they were doing. Oh my god, Oh my god. So
Speaker 1: this is wild. That's incredible. So okay, So this guy
Speaker 1: starts out his career in drug enforcement pretending to be
Speaker 1: a pimp yep, and then then maybe what they called
Speaker 1: the treatment, the full circle. Fifty years later, he's sending
Speaker 1: his crew out to get blow jobs and then instead
Speaker 1: of paying for them, arresting the blow jobs. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: is my God. The good thing is all of these
Speaker 1: women had their charges dropped, like no one actually because
Speaker 1: what the police we're doing and these posss were doing
Speaker 1: was blatantly criminal, right, like, yeah, nobody actually got in trouble.
Speaker 1: I mean some possible they still probably had to send
Speaker 1: Wait a minute, they got the do they have to
Speaker 1: go to our Pio's tense city and you know, yeah
Speaker 1: I think they didn't. Yeah, you know, it's like, okay, great,
Speaker 1: they got their charges dropped, but still it fucking sucked
Speaker 1: for whatever the twelve twenty four hours it was. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's definitely not trying to say it was not horribly
Speaker 1: fucked up, but at least none of these women wound
Speaker 1: up with fucking felonies, you know. Um, but yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like just incredibly fucked up and it shows. We'll we'll
Speaker 1: talk more about his posse later, Noah, there's more to
Speaker 1: say about this posse. But like that's the kind of
Speaker 1: shift the posse got up to. Oh my god. Now,
Speaker 1: two thousand six is the year when things really started
Speaker 1: to shift for Joe R. Pio and he became the
Speaker 1: man we know him as today. Again. He'd started his
Speaker 1: career focusing on is a sheriff, focusing on the cry
Speaker 1: times he'd gone after as a law man, drugs and
Speaker 1: sex and violence in the like. But two thousand six
Speaker 1: is when he really started to shift his focus towards immigrants.
Speaker 1: One important fact to note about Joe R. Pile is
Speaker 1: that while he's always exhibited a degree of personal racism,
Speaker 1: racism was not initially central to his political campaigns. He
Speaker 1: ran for sheriff the first time by making two points.
Speaker 1: One was that the existing sheriff was shitty and wasting money,
Speaker 1: and the other was that he could reduce crime by
Speaker 1: doing drug war bullshit. By the time he settled into
Speaker 1: his third term, though, the United States had gone through
Speaker 1: some pretty significant shifts in two thousand one. You may
Speaker 1: remember this Noah. In two thousand one, the Tim Allen
Speaker 1: movie Big Trouble debut, and it was followed shortly thereafter
Speaker 1: by a terrorist attack on New York City, and both
Speaker 1: of these events changed our nation forever. Umm Allenvie was
Speaker 1: the big one. Oh yeah, totally, yeah, yeah. The war
Speaker 1: was ever the same after that. The War Tim Allen
Speaker 1: continues until this day. Until this day, Tim Allen hiding
Speaker 1: in the mountains of Afghan Stand with the Tim Ala band.
Speaker 1: Yeah we can, we can workshop that idea. Wow, that
Speaker 1: is a that was Are you a dad? That that
Speaker 1: dad joke was really him? Alan Ban? Come on man
Speaker 1: uh I think it could be a fun ABC show.
Speaker 1: Tim Allen is like a like a like a conservative
Speaker 1: suburban dad who through some quirk of circumstance moves into Kandahar.
Speaker 1: We had we didn't make that work. It gives a
Speaker 1: whole new definition to tool time. Yeah. So um. Obviously,
Speaker 1: by the time Sheriff Joe is in his third term,
Speaker 1: everyone's worried about terrorism. Right, Drugs are not as big
Speaker 1: as a concern. You know, crime is down, like two
Speaker 1: thousand six, crime is down to its lowest level in generations. Right,
Speaker 1: So terrorism is like the big thing everybody's freaking out over.
Speaker 1: And the right wing media is particularly warning people in
Speaker 1: the early aughts that a whole bunch of terrorists are
Speaker 1: sure any day now going to cross into the country
Speaker 1: via Mexico, despite the fact that this has never happened
Speaker 1: to my knowledge, it's the thing they keep harping over.
Speaker 1: And over the next few years, the number of undocumented
Speaker 1: immigrants into the United States began to rise, and by
Speaker 1: two thousand six, border crisis was a term Democratic and
Speaker 1: Republican politicians were dropping constantly. That year, Joe Biden boasted
Speaker 1: about voting to add seven miles to the US Mexico
Speaker 1: border fence. So the immigration and like the border becomes
Speaker 1: a huge political hot button. By two thousand six, um
Speaker 1: and again, crime itself is down really low. So the
Speaker 1: only way that that Joe R. Pio can tickle the
Speaker 1: amygdala of his electorate and make it seem like he's
Speaker 1: protecting them from something is to go after immigrants, and
Speaker 1: in this case he's specifically protecting them from demographic change
Speaker 1: because Arizona, as this election showed, Arizona was rapidly growing
Speaker 1: less white, a fact that horrified all of these retirees
Speaker 1: who were in a lot of cases pretty racist and
Speaker 1: made up Joe's base. Um, he decided to use a
Speaker 1: state human trafficking law to go after smuggler who were
Speaker 1: bringing immigrants into the country. But being Joe R. Pio,
Speaker 1: he found a way to give this application of the
Speaker 1: law and added twists to make it much more harmful.
Speaker 1: From the New Yorker, the law's target is, of course
Speaker 1: smugglers known as coyotes, but Opio and Thomas who is
Speaker 1: the the attorney for the state, charge undocumented immigrants the
Speaker 1: coyotes cargo as co conspirators in their own smuggling. This
Speaker 1: is a class four felity which makes the subjects ineligible
Speaker 1: for bond, so they can't leave his tent jail and
Speaker 1: is one reason why our pios jails are so full.
Speaker 1: Maricopa is the only one of Arizona's fifteen counties that
Speaker 1: interprets the law this way, and the Sheriff's office is
Speaker 1: the only agency among the twenty five and Maricopa that
Speaker 1: does so. The other's figure and a few are vocal
Speaker 1: about it that their limited resources are better spent fighting
Speaker 1: serious crime. So again, he's not super popular at this
Speaker 1: time with a lot of other law enforcement because he's
Speaker 1: keeping the jails that the whole county has to use.
Speaker 1: Phoenix p D needs to use these jails too, filled
Speaker 1: with random people who are just trying to live their lives.
Speaker 1: He's charging with class four felonies because they're smuggling themselves
Speaker 1: into the country. Yeah. The using the human smuggling statute
Speaker 1: to charge the smugg old, not the smuggler, that is
Speaker 1: some next level Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you really
Speaker 1: wanted to get into it. You could make some you
Speaker 1: could we have a conversation about the ways in which
Speaker 1: human trafficking laws aimed at protecting sex trafficking victims are
Speaker 1: used to harm people who are themselves sex workers and
Speaker 1: in some cases even victims of sex trafficking. Um, this
Speaker 1: is not the only time, and he's not the only
Speaker 1: law man who's interpreted a law in this way, but
Speaker 1: he is kind of he's on the cutting edge here,
Speaker 1: and he's not popular among cops around him for doing this.
Speaker 1: One of the people he piste off was George Gascon,
Speaker 1: who was the police chief in Mesa, which is basically
Speaker 1: a suburb of Phoenix, but it's a big city. He's
Speaker 1: about half a million people in Mesa. Gascon did not
Speaker 1: like our Pio. He was brought into the job from
Speaker 1: Los Angeles in order to reduce crime, and he decided
Speaker 1: a big part of that would be to build trust
Speaker 1: with communities who traditionally did not trust the cops. This
Speaker 1: particularly included Latinos, many of whom were immigrants or had
Speaker 1: family who were and were thus terrified of people like
Speaker 1: Joe R. Pio. Gascon told The New Yorker quote, they
Speaker 1: need to believe that you're ethical and honest, that you're
Speaker 1: not the enemy. I'm not an open borders man. I
Speaker 1: believe we have a problem with illegal immigration, but I
Speaker 1: want to make sure we don't throw away the Constitution
Speaker 1: in the process of solving it. Now I'm not obviously,
Speaker 1: I don't think I would agree with George Gascon on much,
Speaker 1: but just the point that, like other cops who are
Speaker 1: not open borders types think that, like what Joe is
Speaker 1: doing is fucked up, and they say so at the time,
Speaker 1: like he's not he's not he's not surfing on a
Speaker 1: wave of of of only positive response. Other cops are
Speaker 1: like kind of coming after him in this period, which yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, look, it's like he's playing a cop on TV, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so the actual cops are like, bro, what are
Speaker 1: you doing? I mean, this guy failed the test to
Speaker 1: be a border patrol agent, Like he literally couldn't handle it, right,
Speaker 1: And so then you know, all these years later, he's
Speaker 1: got to pretend he's got it now now that he's
Speaker 1: he's got some power, he's got to swing his dick
Speaker 1: like he's uh, like he's some cartoon version of a
Speaker 1: border patrol agent. Meanwhile, the guys that really need to
Speaker 1: do the gig are like, come on, man, like you
Speaker 1: got you gotta stop this. I'm just blown away. I'm
Speaker 1: a little bit tongue tied here, but like I just
Speaker 1: can't believe. I can't believe it. I mean, I remember
Speaker 1: hearing about it, and I still can't believe it. It's outrageous. Now,
Speaker 1: when Joe R. Pio started doing, he starts, he takes
Speaker 1: his posse and he uses them to do these massive
Speaker 1: sweeps of immigrant neighborhoods. And again he's going into other
Speaker 1: police departments turf because he's he's the sheriff of the county,
Speaker 1: so he's not generally you're not supposed to do ship
Speaker 1: unless you know Meso or Phoenix asks you to come
Speaker 1: in right like you're supposed to be focusing mainly on
Speaker 1: like sheriff's department stuff. Um, he starts sending not just
Speaker 1: his officers, but hundreds of volunteer randos into other people's
Speaker 1: cities to do sweeps of immigrant neighborhoods. They're busting into
Speaker 1: like auto shops and grocery stores, pulling people out of
Speaker 1: their jobs and taking them to spend years in his
Speaker 1: tent city like blong people out of their Yeah, the
Speaker 1: blue job guys. Blow job guys are like, okay, cool,
Speaker 1: we've we've busted, We've gotten some free blow jobs from
Speaker 1: prostitutes and then put them in jail. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: aren't time to destroy some families? Oh my god. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's an outrageous piece of ship. But you know who
Speaker 1: won't tear people away from their families? Noah? M products. Well,
Speaker 1: the good news about Raytheon, Noah, is that they'll get
Speaker 1: you with your family. See, this is the beauty of
Speaker 1: We like to talk about hexagen on on this show
Speaker 1: here as an explosive compound. If you want to make
Speaker 1: sure that the whole family goes, you want hexagen. That's
Speaker 1: the hexagen difference. And that's the Raytheon guarantee. All right,
Speaker 1: here's some ads. We're back, uh and and just just
Speaker 1: having a lovely time thinking about show our pile and
Speaker 1: the fact that he's now has gangs of goons ripping
Speaker 1: people away from their families and their jobs. Now this again,
Speaker 1: cops tend to be they're kind of like cats. Right
Speaker 1: when you you got a cat, it has a territory.
Speaker 1: You throw another cat in that territory. They're probably going
Speaker 1: to fight, right. Cops are kind of the same way,
Speaker 1: and Joe R. PIO is really fucking with other cops territory.
Speaker 1: He's coming into these communities, he's fucking things up. He's damaging,
Speaker 1: like in a lot of cases, hurting people's businesses because
Speaker 1: they're reliant on these people. So Gascon, the the the
Speaker 1: police chief of Mesa, gets really angry about this ship
Speaker 1: and he tells the Maricopa County Sheriff's office that these
Speaker 1: raids are not welcome in Mesa. Unfortunately, Gascon does not
Speaker 1: have the power to stop our Pio. See, the sheriff
Speaker 1: of Maricopa County has a wide ranging purview. Um, there's
Speaker 1: all these little communities without their own police forces, and
Speaker 1: state law gives Joe the power to police those towns.
Speaker 1: But his deputies can go and do law enforcement ship
Speaker 1: anywhere in the county, even if other sheriffs or even
Speaker 1: if O they're like police chiefs don't want his men
Speaker 1: around the best part of this is that, you know,
Speaker 1: police chiefs are appointed generally, sheriffs are elected, so they
Speaker 1: can't be fired. Like, no matter how much he pisses
Speaker 1: people off, unless the voters kick him off. He's staying,
Speaker 1: and the voters like never, don't vote him out for
Speaker 1: you know, they love this ship. The New Yorker wrote
Speaker 1: about a raid in October of two thousand eight. Quote,
Speaker 1: he sent sixty detectives and posse volunteers into Mesa after midnight.
Speaker 1: The plan was to raid the Mesa city Hall in
Speaker 1: the public library to look for undocumented Yeah. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: fucking librarian city all so he sent the blowjob posse
Speaker 1: into the city. All yeah, to look for undocumented janitors who,
Speaker 1: according to the Sheriff's office, were suspected of identification. Theft
Speaker 1: Gascon was not notified beforehand, or Pio claims he did
Speaker 1: inform someone at Mesa police headquarters about the raid. A
Speaker 1: Mesa police officers spotted a large group of heavily armed
Speaker 1: men and flak jackets silently down down bark Gascon. When
Speaker 1: I asked about the episode, took a deep breath. It
Speaker 1: was a very, very dangerous scenario, he said. My entire
Speaker 1: law enforcement career, I have never heard of anything close
Speaker 1: to this. His officers managed to identify the armed men,
Speaker 1: but then had trouble getting a straight story from them.
Speaker 1: The rate eventually went forward, monitored by the Mesa police
Speaker 1: and resulted in the arrests of three middle aged cleaning
Speaker 1: women are Pios. Press release said that another thirteen suspected
Speaker 1: illegal immigrants were arrested later at their homes. So not
Speaker 1: just like fucked up more, that was a really reckless
Speaker 1: like you could have You could have had two different
Speaker 1: sets of cops shooting each other up in the city
Speaker 1: hall for this, Like, oh my god, this makes like
Speaker 1: the movie l A Confidential, look like a model of
Speaker 1: effective policing. It is hard not to look like a
Speaker 1: good cop next to Joe r Pia, Oh my god,
Speaker 1: Like Rudy Giuliani looks all of a sudden, like you know,
Speaker 1: a model mayor and law enforcement official. Joe Rizzo in
Speaker 1: Philadelphia all of a sudden looks like, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: not a racist authoritarian, but all of a sudden a
Speaker 1: model office because they don't have just gangs of armed
Speaker 1: goons busting into city hall to arrest janitors. Like, oh god,
Speaker 1: it's so fucking bad now. That New Yorker article I
Speaker 1: found included some incredible context on the PR game. Joe
Speaker 1: had by that point gotten extremely good at playing. He'd
Speaker 1: hired an expert, Lisa Allen, who was the wife of
Speaker 1: one of his officers and someone who would prove to
Speaker 1: be an extremely savvy public relations expert. She was hired
Speaker 1: in nineteen nine, soon after Joe took office. When Joe
Speaker 1: would institute a new rule in his tin jail, it
Speaker 1: was Lisa's job to make sure that rule went viral.
Speaker 1: A good case study would be the pink underwear. In
Speaker 1: the early aughts, Joe started issuing pink underpants to all
Speaker 1: of his inmates. Depending on who asked him, the purpose
Speaker 1: of this was to stop theft, to emasculate the inmates,
Speaker 1: or because the color pink has colmbing properties. The real
Speaker 1: purpose was spectacle, because people would make news articles about
Speaker 1: the Joe's He's given his pink underwear all these hardened criminals. Uh.
Speaker 1: It was Lisa Allen's job to get the maximum spectacle
Speaker 1: out of every decision Joe made. The Phoenix New Times
Speaker 1: writes about one such moment in two thousand five, captured
Speaker 1: for a documentary about Sheriff Joe, she practically directs our
Speaker 1: Pio as he oversees the media spectacle of moving about
Speaker 1: two thousand inmates to a new jail, handcuffed together and
Speaker 1: stripped to their are Pio mandated pink underwear. I want
Speaker 1: you to look tough, Alan tells Joe as the prisoners
Speaker 1: mark past. Just stand there and watch him tap your foot.
Speaker 1: I knew, Lisa knew the minute we put these guys
Speaker 1: in the pink underwear, that will be what goes on
Speaker 1: air our Pio tells the filmmakers after the inmate parade.
Speaker 1: Do you really think that no one is going to
Speaker 1: show these guys in their pink underwear? Again? That's why
Speaker 1: he's doing it. And he's got this PR lady who
Speaker 1: you know, PR people are the greatest evil in the world.
Speaker 1: I'm of the opinion, but she gets yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: she she fucking is a huge part of this of
Speaker 1: his six she works with them for like twenty something years, um,
Speaker 1: and she's constantly he's in the news. How does she spin?
Speaker 1: Like the armed attack on city Hall in order to
Speaker 1: get a couple of janitors. We arrested a bunch of
Speaker 1: illegal immigrants. They were breaking the law, committed felonies, dangerous people.
Speaker 1: Got him off, got him off the street. No tolerance
Speaker 1: and Joe R. Pio's Americopa County. Yeah. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight, Barack Obama was elected President. Joe R. Pile
Speaker 1: was not happy with this, and he immediately went on
Speaker 1: the war path, demanding an investigation into the president's birth certificate.
Speaker 1: He eventually launched one himself through the sheriff's department staffed
Speaker 1: by POSSE members. Postea, he was the O G. Here's
Speaker 1: the O G. Not but he's he's he's early in that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like when Trump is starting to like whine about the
Speaker 1: birth certificate, he launches he sees that this is the
Speaker 1: right wing caused celeb and he opens an investing gation
Speaker 1: staffed by his posses for his sheriff's department into So
Speaker 1: it's like, okay, guys, you smoked it on the on
Speaker 1: the prostitute and entrapment. Uh move, you killed it on
Speaker 1: the attacking city hall. Next up, find Barack Obama, instigate
Speaker 1: the president certificate. Oh my god. You know, uh, my
Speaker 1: old man Say is a book author and uh actually
Speaker 1: wrote a book about Obama's dad uh and his his
Speaker 1: trip uh here to the United States. And it's like
Speaker 1: this completely moving, amazing uh the story and uh there's
Speaker 1: no question, unlike with Joe Pio's family there, you know,
Speaker 1: there's no question about whether you know he came here legally,
Speaker 1: and it's just it's so vile that, you know, the
Speaker 1: first black president, they just immediately try to turn him
Speaker 1: into you know, the other he's a dangerous foreigner. Like yeah,
Speaker 1: it's that. You can't we can't say enough about how
Speaker 1: disgusting the whole fucking berther thing is and our PIO.
Speaker 1: I think the thing that's grossest to me about this
Speaker 1: is he doesn't start this. He just cashes in on it.
Speaker 1: He just sees, oh, we can make we can make
Speaker 1: bank on this ship. People are ready to eat this
Speaker 1: up if I if I open an investigation and and
Speaker 1: he knew, and crime is way down, crime is way
Speaker 1: down in my uh in my area. You know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've done I've done every stunt in the book. Now
Speaker 1: I got one more card to play, investigate the president.
Speaker 1: And we have some footage behind the scenes of him
Speaker 1: and Lisa Allen talking about this PR stunt and we
Speaker 1: knew Number one, Joe is the entire time bragging about
Speaker 1: how many UH donations he's going to get from racists,
Speaker 1: Like he's just laughing about how much money he's going
Speaker 1: to get sent over this, right, Like what a what
Speaker 1: a big profit thing? It's going to be for him.
Speaker 1: Lisa Allen makes fun of him because of how racist
Speaker 1: and dumb this is. In a meeting filmed for a
Speaker 1: two thousand and fourteen documentary, she says, you might as
Speaker 1: well go to your press conference in big old clown
Speaker 1: shoes and a big old nose. Um. Yeah, his own
Speaker 1: pr person. In two thousand ten, Joe started a webcast
Speaker 1: and Lisa told viewers during this like kind of proto
Speaker 1: podcast thing, sheriff. Joe is referred to as a media hog.
Speaker 1: He's referred to as a media whore. But there's always
Speaker 1: been a reason behind it, and the most obvious reason
Speaker 1: was political power. But over the years and morphed into
Speaker 1: something more for Joe. When you read enough articles about
Speaker 1: him that include interviews with people that knew when worked
Speaker 1: with him for periods of time, significant periods of time,
Speaker 1: it becomes clear that sometime in the mid odds, right
Speaker 1: around when he pivoted heart on immigration, he got terminal
Speaker 1: viral brain disease, which is what happens when someone gets
Speaker 1: addicted to causing outrage online. Today it's better known as
Speaker 1: Glenn Greenwaltz syndrome. But Joe R. Pile, I'm sorry, but
Speaker 1: Joe R. Pilot. Yeah, let me be clear, Glenn Greenwald
Speaker 1: has never sent train has never set teams. This true
Speaker 1: of armed Yahoo's into city all that is. And and
Speaker 1: Glenn Greenwald, let me make this clear, has never sent
Speaker 1: posses into entrap sex workers. No, he has not. He
Speaker 1: has not. That is that is an area where Joe R.
Speaker 1: Pio has an edge on him. Um. I also don't
Speaker 1: think Joe R. Pio is nice to dogs, and I'm
Speaker 1: fairly certain that Glenn Greenwald is great with dogs, so
Speaker 1: we're being fair here. But he does have this, he
Speaker 1: has this. I'm gonna read you a quote from a
Speaker 1: two nine New York article, and I think gets what
Speaker 1: I'm trying to say here. There is a there's clearly
Speaker 1: something going on to his head that I think is
Speaker 1: the result of how bad chasing fame in this viral
Speaker 1: troll way is for you. Right, It's this thing. We
Speaker 1: see it in a million public people today, right, Like
Speaker 1: basically every public person has a version of this this
Speaker 1: going on to their brain. But our pile gets it
Speaker 1: really early. He might be the first online man, you know, like, right,
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna quote from this New Yorker article. I
Speaker 1: think it makes the point well. Mary Rose Wilcox, who
Speaker 1: is Latina and the only Democrat on the Maricopa County
Speaker 1: Board of Supervisors, remembers a quite different sheriff. Our pile
Speaker 1: was not like this before. She told me he was flamboyant.
Speaker 1: But I don't know this guy. For Wilcox, The last
Speaker 1: straw came this February, when our pile marched more than
Speaker 1: two hundred undocumented immigrants shackled together to a new tent jail,
Speaker 1: parading them before news cameras. Our pile had staged prisoner
Speaker 1: marches before. In two thousand and five, he forced nearly
Speaker 1: seven hundred prisoners wearing nothing but pink underwear and flipflops,
Speaker 1: to shuffle four blocks through the Arizona heat pink handcuffed
Speaker 1: together to a new jail. When they arrived, one prisoner
Speaker 1: was to cut a pink ribbon for the cameras. This
Speaker 1: elaborate degradation, which is remembered fondly by Sheriff Joe's fans,
Speaker 1: was ostensibly in the name of security. The men were
Speaker 1: strip searched both before and after the march, but our
Speaker 1: Pile also told reporters I put them on the streets
Speaker 1: so everybody could see them. He marched another nine hundred
Speaker 1: this April. So I don't know. It's interesting to me
Speaker 1: what Wilcox reports. Right, this woman who has no vested
Speaker 1: interest in making him sound good, who has been a
Speaker 1: political on the different side of the aisle for him
Speaker 1: for a while, but was friendly with him, and says
Speaker 1: that like this changes him. And there's another quote I'm
Speaker 1: going to read from that article about Joe ore Pio
Speaker 1: hasn't a Colbert Report appearance in two thousand nine. Um,
Speaker 1: and it's it's kind of gross. Uh yeah, I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna read it. We were in New York and he
Speaker 1: was about to be interviewed on the Colbert Report. Is
Speaker 1: this the green room? He asked? These walls are blue?
Speaker 1: Are they going to powder me? The producer, an intense
Speaker 1: young woman, persisted, try to be funny. She said, he
Speaker 1: will be funnier than you are. Pile shrugged. He wasn't
Speaker 1: familiar with Colbert Show. I'm pretty funny, he said. From
Speaker 1: a rumpledmanilla envelope, he pulled two pairs of pink boxer shorts.
Speaker 1: I brought the underwear, he said. The producer stared. An
Speaker 1: assistant looked on helplessly. Then the producer reached for the shorts. Thanks,
Speaker 1: she said, do you want me? Don't you want me
Speaker 1: to take these on the show? No, our pile looked nonplussed. Well,
Speaker 1: at least let me sign him. He autographed the shorts,
Speaker 1: one pair bear out of jail and one for the
Speaker 1: producer's son. The Colbart segment was, Yeah, it's just like
Speaker 1: that's something wrong with a guy too, Like not that
Speaker 1: you should feel bad for this monster, but like that's
Speaker 1: not that's something wrong with a dude. Symbol of a
Speaker 1: broken brain. Yeah, your brain. Yeah, you know, I was
Speaker 1: thinking earlier about um, about Michael Flynn, the general turn
Speaker 1: trumpst maniac, and how so many people that served with
Speaker 1: him in Afghanistan interact were totally baffled by who this
Speaker 1: guy had become and that you know, he was a
Speaker 1: little bit uh you know, you know, original thinker. Let's say,
Speaker 1: uh in the in the mid two thousand's that but
Speaker 1: by the time he had gotten uh you know, into
Speaker 1: the tens, just this guy's brain cracked in half and
Speaker 1: just became like this weird conspiracy peddling you know, anything
Speaker 1: for filing troll. It's so weird. It is like you
Speaker 1: get addicted to the outrage, you get addicted to the
Speaker 1: to the trolling, and you start to maybe believe your
Speaker 1: own nonsense. I don't know, it's just it's so weird.
Speaker 1: And there's so many of these guys now out out
Speaker 1: today that are like, you know, if they're like Greg
Speaker 1: Kelly or Charlie Kirk or or you know, your boy
Speaker 1: Ben Shapiro like that are just addicted to being horrible morons.
Speaker 1: It's crazy their brains have broken. Yeah, It's it's really
Speaker 1: bleak because I don't know, you know, I've heard a
Speaker 1: number of theories about like guys like this who have
Speaker 1: this broadly normal career for a while and then like
Speaker 1: lose their mind at a certain point, seemingly, um, guys
Speaker 1: like Flynn and stuff. And I don't know, I I
Speaker 1: think the Internet is doing a kind of damage to
Speaker 1: our brains that the present state of neuroscience isn't well
Speaker 1: suited towards analyzing, but we will eventually come to understand
Speaker 1: the scope in a pretty profound way. Like there's something yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's like forget long COVID. It's like there's like long
Speaker 1: Twitter brain. Yeah, long Twitter brain. Yeah. Um, now that
Speaker 1: Cold Bear segment was brutally awkward and first off, kind
Speaker 1: of frustrating that Steven had him on in the first place.
Speaker 1: Our Pio did it to plug one of his memoirs,
Speaker 1: and Colbert obliged him in that. But Joel's Joe's whole
Speaker 1: appearance on the show is very revealing. The other guests
Speaker 1: that night was kin Quinn, who was the second mate
Speaker 1: from a container ship that was famously hijacked near Somalia
Speaker 1: that April. He was one of the guys with Captain Phillips. Right,
Speaker 1: so this guy has just gotten out of being captured
Speaker 1: and stuff. He tells his story. The audience is very moved.
Speaker 1: They give him a standing ovation, pretty normal for a
Speaker 1: guy who's just been through like a deft defying spirit
Speaker 1: experience like that. But Joe gets really jealous because this
Speaker 1: other guys getting more intention than him. So when it
Speaker 1: was his turn, he tells Stephen Colbert this, the Republic
Speaker 1: did a poll last week Who's your hero? And I
Speaker 1: beat out Tillman. I beat all these guys. I'm not bragging.
Speaker 1: I'm just saying. He's referring to the NFL star from
Speaker 1: the Arizona Cardinals, who then went to Afghanistan and got
Speaker 1: killed shortly thereafter. You can listen in the Army hero
Speaker 1: than that guy gotten wayboard gun fights to totally happened Turkey.
Speaker 1: I could out type Pat Tillman, that's for sure, So
Speaker 1: well Sheriff, It's just such a weird brag, like this
Speaker 1: guy just got kidnapped. Man, let him have his moment
Speaker 1: in the sun, right right, he got kidnapped by the
Speaker 1: smiling pirate. No big deal, No big deal, well Sheriff.
Speaker 1: Joe enjoyed being a celebrity sheriff, doing photo ops with
Speaker 1: every major right wing politician and showing up on TV constantly.
Speaker 1: His inmates continued to suffer. One case study was Ambrett Spencer.
Speaker 1: In two thousand eight, she was arrested for drunk driving,
Speaker 1: and months later, while her case made its way through
Speaker 1: the court system, she got pregnant. Now at this time,
Speaker 1: when she gets pregnant, she's in treatment, she's not drinking.
Speaker 1: And Brett, who was black, was eventually sentenced and was
Speaker 1: sent to Joe R. Pios Tent City to do I
Speaker 1: think six months or something. So she goes through the
Speaker 1: late stages of her pregnancy and Joe R. Pios Tent
Speaker 1: City doctor visits prior to her incarceration confirmed that the
Speaker 1: fetus was healthy, but after a month in Sheriff Joe's custody,
Speaker 1: she grew terribly ill. Now we don't know specifically why.
Speaker 1: That year alone, at least four other pregnant inmates reached
Speaker 1: out to the Phoenix New Times to report miscarriages or
Speaker 1: still births in our pios, tent city, tin jail, whatever
Speaker 1: you wanna call it. They suggest a wide variety of causes.
Speaker 1: The food Joe feeds as inmates was often trotting. The
Speaker 1: water well was infested with mice and mice feces since
Speaker 1: two thousand five, and mice carry the toxoplasma parasite that
Speaker 1: can cause birth defects. Prenatal vitamins were also forbidden for
Speaker 1: pregnant inmates. To cut costs, Joe made sure to avoid
Speaker 1: hiring medical staff with proper training. The night Ambrett got sick,
Speaker 1: the nurse on duty had no prenatal education. Despite ambrett
Speaker 1: severe pain, the nurse decided her case was not an emergency.
Speaker 1: An hour later, Ambrett passed out. The nurse checked her
Speaker 1: blood pressure and realized it was fatally low. She couldn't
Speaker 1: even get an ivy into the woman's arm. By the
Speaker 1: time Spencer was finally taken to the hospital, she had
Speaker 1: been in severe pain and kept from seeing a doctor
Speaker 1: for nearly four hours. Her child was delivered dead. The
Speaker 1: cause was placental abruption, a condition caused by internal bleeding.
Speaker 1: The treatment is immediate delivery, and this was a very
Speaker 1: late pregnancy. The baby would have probably survived if she
Speaker 1: had been taken to a hospital immediately and had the
Speaker 1: baby delivered. The most horrifying detail about that story is
Speaker 1: that for so Joe had specific policies when his inmates
Speaker 1: gave birth that they were not allowed to hold their
Speaker 1: children after birth. It was to be taken from them immediately.
Speaker 1: The staff violated that rule in this case to let
Speaker 1: her hold her dead child. Um and direct and now
Speaker 1: I'm sure that are Pio's allies in the conservative um
Speaker 1: part of of Arizona who are pro life. Of course,
Speaker 1: we're outraged by this, uh and and hated him for
Speaker 1: for violating their pro life principles. Right, I don't think they.
Speaker 1: There doesn't seem to have been any kind of dust stop.
Speaker 1: I mean, the Phoenix New Times made a big deal
Speaker 1: about it, but none of his voters cared. Um it
Speaker 1: did not harm him in the next election. Now, the
Speaker 1: death of Ambrett Spencer's baby did not make it into
Speaker 1: any statistics about death in Sheriff Joe's tin jail. As
Speaker 1: a rule, deaths of inmates very rarely did. In two
Speaker 1: thousand fifteen, The New Times attempted to find out how
Speaker 1: many people actually died in his jail. They spent six
Speaker 1: months waiting for records requests from Joe R. Pio's office
Speaker 1: to no avail. Eventually, they were forced to check other
Speaker 1: government databases, where they found at least a hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty reported deaths. Quote, but that is an yeah is
Speaker 1: the minimum. That's all they were able to find evidence of,
Speaker 1: because again, Joe wouldn't give them any data on this.
Speaker 1: The Sheriff's department has deliberately obfuscated how many people are
Speaker 1: dying in the tents jails. Oh God, the truthless seems
Speaker 1: like a very high number of people dying in we'll
Speaker 1: talk about how high it is. The truth is that
Speaker 1: no outside authority keeps track of how many people die
Speaker 1: from brutality, neglect, disease, bad health, or old age in
Speaker 1: our pios jails. Federal Judge Neil Wake twice has ruled
Speaker 1: that medical care is so deficient in the jails as
Speaker 1: to be unconstitutional. The Department of Justice supposedly monitors conditions
Speaker 1: in the jails, but has shown little or no appetite
Speaker 1: for confronting our pile. What my research discovered is that
Speaker 1: people hang themselves in the jail at a rate that
Speaker 1: dwarfs other county lockups, and many of the deaths are
Speaker 1: classified as having occurred in the county hospital or in
Speaker 1: a cell without further explanation. People die and no one
Speaker 1: asks how, no one asks why. Ring the reign of
Speaker 1: Sheriff Joe R. Pio, research requested and provided from the
Speaker 1: Corners Office showed a hundred and fifty seven deaths in
Speaker 1: and of itself. That number is not necessarily out of
Speaker 1: line with jail deaths and other jurisdictions, but digging into
Speaker 1: this data raises troubling questions, particularly when compared with jails
Speaker 1: across America. Suicide is an all too frequent consequence of
Speaker 1: incarceration in jailhouse deaths across the nation. The U. S
Speaker 1: Department of Justice notes the following rates of suicide over
Speaker 1: a three year period from two thousand to two thousand
Speaker 1: two Los Angeles jails eleven percent, New York jails nine percent,
Speaker 1: Cook County jails six percent, Philadelphia jails fourteen percent, Harris
Speaker 1: County jails percent, Dade County jails six percent. Now, during
Speaker 1: that same period, the suicide rate among jail deaths and
Speaker 1: Sheriff Joe R. Pio's lock ups was twenty four percent. Yeah.
Speaker 1: In two thousand eight, two reporters from the East Valley
Speaker 1: Tribune Americopa County paper did a five part study into
Speaker 1: the CSOs operations. They found that due to the sheer
Speaker 1: amount of resources are Pio devoted to going after immigrants,
Speaker 1: response times to emergency calls to the Sheriff's office had
Speaker 1: increased by a significant margin, arrest rates had dropped, and
Speaker 1: dozens of violent crimes had not been investigated. The series
Speaker 1: won a Pulitzer four months after it was published. Joe R.
Speaker 1: Pio one reelection, Oh my god, this guy really is.
Speaker 1: He's a supervillain. He's causing more crime than he's then
Speaker 1: then he's uh, then he's you know fixing or that
Speaker 1: he's you know stopping. He's getting people killed left and right,
Speaker 1: which just uh suicide rate. He's torturing these people at
Speaker 1: minimum sending out crazy posses of armed yahoo's to terrorize
Speaker 1: these cities and neighborhoods, and even then its own city hall,
Speaker 1: you know, denying pregnant women medical treatment and making them
Speaker 1: eat mouse species water. This guy is like what is it?
Speaker 1: You know, he's like, you know, a psalm Uh. Bad guy.
Speaker 1: He's like he's a mustache twirling fucking monster. Holy shit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean this guy was bad, but I didn't realize
Speaker 1: it was like this. Yeah, it's and and to be clear,
Speaker 1: it's of jailed deaths or suicide. It's not right. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I just want to make that clear for listeners. So
Speaker 1: people aren't like a quarter of people are killing No,
Speaker 1: it's not that that would be that would have been
Speaker 1: quite a bit of a different story. Um to a
Speaker 1: quarter of me has died inside listening to this. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's outrageous. Um, it's just horribly fucked up. But
Speaker 1: you know what's not horribly fucked up. It's the ads.
Speaker 1: It's the sponsors of this podcast. No that that that's
Speaker 1: what's fine and dandy. We're back. Okay. So in two
Speaker 1: thousand nine, Barack Obama's Justice Department opened a massive investigation
Speaker 1: into the mc s O. Among other things, they found
Speaker 1: that deputies had used stunned guns repeatedly on prisoners who
Speaker 1: were already strapped into a restraint chair. Two men had died,
Speaker 1: costing the county more than fourteen million dollars in settlements.
Speaker 1: By two thousand nine, the brutality of Joe and his
Speaker 1: deputies had cost the county more than forty three million dollars.
Speaker 1: Merricopa County Jail generated lawsuits at a rate that was
Speaker 1: unprecedented in the nation. One Phoenix New Times investigation found
Speaker 1: that between two thousand four and two thousand eight, the
Speaker 1: county jails of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Houston,
Speaker 1: which combined holds six times as many inmates as Maricopa Jail,
Speaker 1: were sued a total of forty three times. During the
Speaker 1: same period, our PIOS department was sued almost twenty two
Speaker 1: hundred times in federal two hundred. Yeah. M oh my god, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's incredible. Yeah, it's it's it's out of it's goddamn mind.
Speaker 1: Like that's when you compare, because like those are nice jails.
Speaker 1: It's not like that. It's not like fucking Los Angeles
Speaker 1: County Lockup. Is the Shangri law. Like that's how bad
Speaker 1: Joe hard Bios jail is. The l A County Sheriff's
Speaker 1: department is notoriously fun horribly racist. Yeah, really bad like
Speaker 1: Sheriff's department. But like dozens of people, dozens of sheriff's
Speaker 1: deputies have been charged with all kinds of nonsense. But
Speaker 1: like forty three lawsuits and that's New York, Chicago, Los Angeles,
Speaker 1: and Houston combined to twenty two hundred for Americo paccaunty.
Speaker 1: Like when you put it, it's just out it's a
Speaker 1: fucking outrageous. Also, like you imagine being like, okay, you're
Speaker 1: like you go to law school, you study really hard,
Speaker 1: and you know, you you stay up all night, you know,
Speaker 1: trying to race those tests. You work hard to pass
Speaker 1: the bar, and you finally get a plumb gig in
Speaker 1: you know whatever Phoenix or Mas or what have you,
Speaker 1: and you know it's your first job, and your job
Speaker 1: is to defend Joe R. Pios crazy evil ten jail
Speaker 1: over over and over and over and over and over again.
Speaker 1: It's so yeah, there's not enough liquor in the damn
Speaker 1: world to do that job. Yeah all right, so yeah,
Speaker 1: lawsuits in federal court, The New Yorker rights. Remarkably, our
Speaker 1: Pio has paid almost no political price for running jails
Speaker 1: that are so patently dangerous and inadvertently expensive. Indeed, until recently,
Speaker 1: there were few local or state politicians willing to criticize
Speaker 1: him publicly. Those who have, including members of the county
Speaker 1: Board of Supervisors, which concrols his budget, tend to find
Speaker 1: themselves under investigation by the Sheriff's office. Local journalists superturb
Speaker 1: our Pio have also been targeted. The Phoenix New Times
Speaker 1: ran an investigation of our Pio's real estate dealings that
Speaker 1: included our pios home addressed, which he argued was possibly
Speaker 1: a violation of state law. When the paper revealed that
Speaker 1: it had received and impossibly brought subpoena demanding, among other things,
Speaker 1: the internet records of all visitors to its website in
Speaker 1: the previous two and a half years, Sheriff's deputies staged
Speaker 1: late night raids on the homes of Michael Lacey and
Speaker 1: James Larkin, executives of Village Voice Media, which owns The
Speaker 1: New Times. The deputies arrested both men, they said, for
Speaker 1: violating grand jury subpoena The county attorney declined to prosecute,
Speaker 1: and it turned out that the subpoenas were issued unlawfully.
Speaker 1: Outspoken citizens also take their chances. Last December, remarks critical
Speaker 1: of our pile were offered during the public comment period,
Speaker 1: and a board of supervisors, eating and four members of
Speaker 1: the audience were arrested and charged with disorderly conduct for
Speaker 1: clapping their cases are pin he can I ask you
Speaker 1: a question, where is Arizona's very popular Senator John McCain
Speaker 1: and all this? That is a good question. I should
Speaker 1: where is John McCain, holy cow man? Like you know,
Speaker 1: you're the You're the king of this ship. They didn't
Speaker 1: seem to like each other. Joa. Pio wouldn't call him
Speaker 1: a hero. I guess, yeah, but come on, let's see.
Speaker 1: I found it. I found an easy Central article John
Speaker 1: McCain saw through Jora Pios Bologny. Um, let's see. I
Speaker 1: don't know if he actually did anything. Let's see here. Um,
Speaker 1: it's listing all of the different Sorry, I'm not trying
Speaker 1: to derail your stuff, but I'm just like, this is
Speaker 1: a good question. Though, I wanted where is John McCain
Speaker 1: in this? Yeah? Where after Trump pardoned our Pio. The
Speaker 1: Senator issued a statement saying Mr. A. Pile was found
Speaker 1: guilty of Chris and Okay, so yeah, I don't think
Speaker 1: he did anything. He did much earlier. I don't think
Speaker 1: any at the end. Yeah, I don't think anything. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: I I don't I don't think. Yeah. It seems like
Speaker 1: all of the ship that he uh he well let's
Speaker 1: see here, Oh no, no, you know what in two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve. Um, it seems like he had made a
Speaker 1: number of comments in two thousand twelve attacking Jo R. Pio. Okay,
Speaker 1: that's still pretty late in the game. Yeah, that's kind
Speaker 1: of um yeah, ye, but definitely he did. He did
Speaker 1: speak out against him over all of the sex well
Speaker 1: some of the sex crimes stuff. Um, okay, all right,
Speaker 1: well maybe yeah, I definitely not early on, but he
Speaker 1: he before the Trump years, McCain did eventually speak out
Speaker 1: against him. It looks like, so, I don't know, I'm
Speaker 1: not going to make a comprehensive statement about it one
Speaker 1: way or the other. Certainly, I mean, legally, obviously, he
Speaker 1: state congressman can't do anything about a sheriff, but he
Speaker 1: can politically. You said this guy was a political figure.
Speaker 1: He couldn't be. That's why he was. He was he
Speaker 1: was too popular. Yeah. Well, and we're about to talk
Speaker 1: about why more wasn't done because obviously a lot of
Speaker 1: Republicans let this happen, right, and encouraged it and made
Speaker 1: hay out of it, right, But so did Democrats. And
Speaker 1: this is where it gets really frustrating. So President Obama
Speaker 1: is in office for like the last eight years that
Speaker 1: Joe R. Pio was sheriff, when he is getting repeatedly
Speaker 1: like attack like, repeatedly shown to be breaking the law,
Speaker 1: and Obama's Justice Department issues repeated condemnations of conditions in
Speaker 1: our Pious jail, but they don't do anything to him.
Speaker 1: There are theories as to why he was allowed to
Speaker 1: thumb his nose at federal judges for so long. One
Speaker 1: of them involves his very close relationship with Janet Napolitano,
Speaker 1: the Secretary of Homeland Security from two thousand nine to
Speaker 1: two thousand thirteen. Before that, she was the U S
Speaker 1: Attorney for Arizona. When conditions in Our Pios jails were
Speaker 1: investigated by the d o J for the first time
Speaker 1: in the nineteen nineties, we quoted from that report in
Speaker 1: the first episode but it was horrific, and it noted
Speaker 1: that his treatment of inmates was unconstitutional. Despite this, Janet
Speaker 1: did very little to penalize our Pile. She held what
Speaker 1: the New Yorker described as a friendly press conference with him,
Speaker 1: where they announced a settlement with the county sheriff's office.
Speaker 1: During that press conference, the Arizona Republic described her as
Speaker 1: quote trading compliments with the sheriff. Napolitano later became the
Speaker 1: state attorney general, where she actively encouraged our Pio to
Speaker 1: run his jails however he wanted. When she ran for
Speaker 1: governor in two thousand two, our Pile backed her even
Speaker 1: though she was a Democrat. He made a campaign commercial
Speaker 1: for her that some suggest was crucial in her narrow victory.
Speaker 1: It was not until two thousand eight, in her second term,
Speaker 1: that she took any kind of stance against our Pio,
Speaker 1: ordering that one point six million dollars in funding to
Speaker 1: his department they used to investigate felonies, not immigration. Joe
Speaker 1: later got the funding reinstated. And yeah, there's a lot
Speaker 1: of like he's they don't he's not. He's treated with
Speaker 1: kid gloves, even though he's directly disobeying federal judges in
Speaker 1: a lot of cases repeatedly refusing to fix problems with
Speaker 1: his jails. Now that happens my my city police department
Speaker 1: in Portland police department are like in contempt of federal
Speaker 1: courts that have like like the FBI and SHIP have
Speaker 1: like ruled that they're like their use of force policies
Speaker 1: are wildly out of whack, there being like way too
Speaker 1: violent in ways that are like they've been ordered to
Speaker 1: reform and they keep refusing to. Like, so this does
Speaker 1: happen outside of Arizona, right that you have a police
Speaker 1: department or a sheriff doing something that a federal judge
Speaker 1: says isn't okay, and just no one does anything about it.
Speaker 1: But Joe is like the most blatant example of that.
Speaker 1: I understand. How can you? Yeah, there's like people being
Speaker 1: killed in the strail left and right, twenty two complaints
Speaker 1: like who and nobody's step in, Like it's just it's
Speaker 1: it's wild, Yeah, it's um, I mean there are like
Speaker 1: you know, they get the cameras taken out. There are
Speaker 1: judges who are like repeatedly ruling against him to their credit. Um,
Speaker 1: but who's going to force him unless you send in
Speaker 1: like I don't know the FBI or something. I'm guessing
Speaker 1: I think it would be the FBI's purview, right, because
Speaker 1: they're the ones who're supposed to be watching this. But like,
Speaker 1: unless you send in the FEDS after him, who's gonna
Speaker 1: stop him? And and that's kind of nobody wanted that job. Um,
Speaker 1: so nobody did anything, I think, is really what it
Speaker 1: comes down to. There's an almost endless flood of horrible
Speaker 1: stories that I could tell about our pios jails, but yeah,
Speaker 1: and have I just don't want to, Like, you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's a there's a limit to which I think
Speaker 1: that's helpful. Um, I've read enough. I think I've read
Speaker 1: enough for people to understand how bad his jail was.
Speaker 1: Joe himself referred to his tent jail as a constant
Speaker 1: ration camp on several occasions, and that is a fair description.
Speaker 1: I've spent hours reading the tale reports about the original cazes,
Speaker 1: the early Nazi camps for political prisoners, and some of
Speaker 1: the stories from Joe's jail would fit into those accounts,
Speaker 1: particularly people being strapped to chairs and beaten to death.
Speaker 1: I want to close out, though, by talking more about
Speaker 1: his posse in two thousand ten, Joe created the Illegal
Speaker 1: Immigration Operations POSSE, giving hundreds of racists the chance to
Speaker 1: do what some of them had probably done while wearing
Speaker 1: clan robes in earlier days. POSSE members would help sheriff
Speaker 1: deputies bust into places of businesses and homes and tear
Speaker 1: people away from their families. Actor Steven Seagal and lou
Speaker 1: Ferrigno helped out. Yeah, yeah, they were both. Yeah, Steven Seagal,
Speaker 1: Stevens the original. Yeah, yeah, they they they love that ship.
Speaker 1: Steven Seagal drove a tank through a guy's fence and
Speaker 1: allegedly killed his dog as part of one of his
Speaker 1: raids as out. Yeah, that happened. That's a thing that occurred,
Speaker 1: wrote wrote to Steven Seagal's terrible book. They're like fiction novel,
Speaker 1: The Way of the Shadow Wolves horrible. Don't read but
Speaker 1: listen to our episode on it. But yeah, I feel
Speaker 1: like I've just taken a massive instant hallucinogen. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: there was something about the Way of the Shadow Wolf there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and Steven Seagal driving a tank over someone's dog? Did
Speaker 1: I just with the original? Incredible? Yeah? Yeah it was
Speaker 1: because he was Yeah, he was I mean he he
Speaker 1: filmed a reality show. I don't think his episodes because
Speaker 1: they used to be a show called Steven Seagal law
Speaker 1: man um because he he just got to be a
Speaker 1: cop for some and it's always for like a shady
Speaker 1: sheriff somewhere in the South who's like, yeah, let's bring in,
Speaker 1: let's let Steven Seagal beat people up as a cop
Speaker 1: um or for prutent. Yeah, but they were filming. They
Speaker 1: filmed a season that didn't air, that was supposed to
Speaker 1: be in um Maricopa County, but it got shut down
Speaker 1: in part because they were like doing some real like
Speaker 1: he drove a take through a guy's fence and killed
Speaker 1: his dog, like some ship went wrong. We gotta we
Speaker 1: gotta find that tape. Yeah, those teams, we gotta we
Speaker 1: have to find the lost Stevenstology episodes. They've got to
Speaker 1: be out there, somewhere out there. So. In a statement
Speaker 1: of interest in a case against the MCSO, the Department
Speaker 1: of Justice described the decision to use untrained volunteers to
Speaker 1: search vehicles, transport arrested immigrants, and carry out work site raids.
Speaker 1: They noted, quote MCSO provides insufficient supervision and oversight to
Speaker 1: ensure that volunteer POSSE members taking part in immigration enforcement
Speaker 1: activities do so without engaging in unlawful discrimination. After the
Speaker 1: Sandy Hook massacre, are PIO sent armed POSSE members to
Speaker 1: troll elementary schools, even though they were not certified peace officers.
Speaker 1: The New Time sent a correspondent along one of these rides.
Speaker 1: Quote the one time Detroit cop explains that he'd rather
Speaker 1: be in our pios posse in this case that involves
Speaker 1: driving around fifteen miles per hour around Diamond Canyon Elementary
Speaker 1: School and through all the dead, silent residential streets that
Speaker 1: provide access to the school's property. That's his definition of
Speaker 1: a hobby, he explains. And these are the kind of
Speaker 1: like weirdos who want this gig right like. It's this
Speaker 1: very bizarre mix of people who had been cops and
Speaker 1: missed feeling like, you know, important, and people who could
Speaker 1: never be cops because they were in some cases dangerous criminals,
Speaker 1: but wanted to play it being a cop. And Joe
Speaker 1: would let them do it if they'd work for him
Speaker 1: for free. They were all bad at their job. The
Speaker 1: commander of his executive posse, who was also the former
Speaker 1: chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Party. The warehouse that
Speaker 1: was used for his auto parts business and in nineteen
Speaker 1: was to make campaign signs for a PIOS reelection campaign.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seven, it was found that a massive marijuana
Speaker 1: smuggling network had been using the warehouse to move millions
Speaker 1: of dollars in the pot. They liked the location because
Speaker 1: they were always patrol cars parked outside and scared off competitors.
Speaker 1: M H, I mean, I gotta ask, are we sure
Speaker 1: that this guy wasn't We absolutely are not sure of that.
Speaker 1: We are in no way sure of that he hasn't
Speaker 1: been charged with it as far as I'm aware, but
Speaker 1: we are not sure of that. So in two thousand nineteen,
Speaker 1: three years after a Pile left office, an audit was
Speaker 1: carried out that investigated the POSSE. I'm going to quote
Speaker 1: from twelve news a local network here. An MCSO audit
Speaker 1: found poor record keeping had resulted in some unqualified individuals
Speaker 1: being allowed to continue participating in POSSE activities, For example,
Speaker 1: individuals with prior arrests and our convictions for domestic violence,
Speaker 1: drug offense, sex offenses, and other criminal activity. Those individuals
Speaker 1: have been removed from the POSSE. Former Sheriff JR. Pio
Speaker 1: spoke up for the group of MCSO volunteers Tuesday in
Speaker 1: a phone interview with twelve News. We did background checks
Speaker 1: on them, are Pio said, adding any big organization is
Speaker 1: bound to have a couple of problems, but all on all,
Speaker 1: that was a great program. We saved the county millions
Speaker 1: of dollars every year. Now. The new audit information came
Speaker 1: nearly two weeks after the temporary suspension of the POSSE
Speaker 1: program by Sheriff Paul Pinzone when he dropped this bombshell
Speaker 1: at a press conference. Only four of the posse's two
Speaker 1: five members cleared to carry guns were actually qualified to
Speaker 1: do so. That's that's the rate of armed possy members
Speaker 1: had actually legally qualified to carry a gun. Four out
Speaker 1: of Yeah. That's bad, very bad, bad ratio. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: During my research into this, I found a fascinating article
Speaker 1: in the audivist atavist out a police ativist about a
Speaker 1: police impersonator named Steve Farzam and his best friend who
Speaker 1: is a security guard who also pretended to be a
Speaker 1: cop and eventually ratted Farzam out to the fence for
Speaker 1: dozens of felonies far Zem was illegally impersonating FBI agents
Speaker 1: to access sealed records. He was owning, He owned and
Speaker 1: sold restricted uniforms and machine guns illegally. He was just
Speaker 1: criming all hardcore. Now, Farzan was not a member of
Speaker 1: Joe's posse, but his friend was, and the two were
Speaker 1: working together on getting far Zan membership when their friendship
Speaker 1: fell apart and one of them ratted the other out.
Speaker 1: And these are both guys that like dressed up as
Speaker 1: cops all the time, like drove around l A with
Speaker 1: like police lights, pretending to be officers illegally carrying out
Speaker 1: like that. They're that kind of dude um, And they're
Speaker 1: the kind of people who loved to be a Joe
Speaker 1: O Pilos posse. And the article gives a description of
Speaker 1: both men that I think does a good job of
Speaker 1: explaining the kind of people who volunteered for the posse. Generously,
Speaker 1: you could call them police wannabes, guys who longed to
Speaker 1: be associated with, or better yet mistaken for, officers of
Speaker 1: the law. Dancel and Farsim spent years obsessing over police culture.
Speaker 1: They became fluent in the lingo from copy in place.
Speaker 1: If I understand to the numbered codes cops used when
Speaker 1: speaking over radios. A favorite is four seventeen, which means
Speaker 1: I'm armed. They accumulated dozens of certificates and skills like
Speaker 1: handling firearms, picking locks, losing, using tasers, and responding to accidents.
Speaker 1: And it's that's like the it's cop want to be
Speaker 1: weirdos um who can't do the job because like they're
Speaker 1: dangerously unhinged in a lot of cases like far As,
Speaker 1: it was like selling machine guns to people and stuff,
Speaker 1: like they're where they've gotten major felony arrest themselves. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think a lot of these guys did, and
Speaker 1: they want to they want to carry guns, but they
Speaker 1: can't legally qualify to. And he just gave them this
Speaker 1: gray area for all of these really dangerous people in
Speaker 1: a lot of cases. So it's it's giving felons a
Speaker 1: chance to do cop cosplay. Yes, this cosplay is real,
Speaker 1: and you can go in and you know, rip off
Speaker 1: hookers and mowdown neighborhoods and ataxity all. Yeah, and that
Speaker 1: felons usually, but a lot of them had some sort
Speaker 1: of I mean some of them were felons, yes, so
Speaker 1: ex felons whatever you want. I mean, or you know,
Speaker 1: some proportion, but I mean it sounds like there's a
Speaker 1: lot more people with records than there were people qualified
Speaker 1: to do the job. Yes, absolutely, um And because yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's not a job for people who are qualified
Speaker 1: to do it. It's a job for people who want
Speaker 1: an excuse to be a big man and ideally do
Speaker 1: some violence with the States backing. So. The case that
Speaker 1: would eventually lead to shaff Joe's criminal conviction happened in
Speaker 1: two thousand seven. It started with a traffic stop of
Speaker 1: a Mexican man with a valid tourists visa. Joe's deputies
Speaker 1: arrested him and held him illegally for nine hours. The
Speaker 1: man sued, alleging racial profiling, and the suit turned into
Speaker 1: a class action for all Latino motorists in Maricopa County.
Speaker 1: Joe lost the case, and the judge ordered our pile
Speaker 1: to stop detaining anyone not suspected of a crime. And
Speaker 1: being in the US illegally is not a crime. It
Speaker 1: is a civil violation. It is not something normal cops
Speaker 1: are supposed to be able to do. Ship Over That
Speaker 1: was two thousand eleven. For the next half decade, multiple
Speaker 1: federal judges found Our Pile in blatant violation of the injunction.
Speaker 1: He repeatedly showed up on Fox News to say he
Speaker 1: would not abide by it. He also lied under oath
Speaker 1: in an attempt to obstruct further inquiries. After twenty one
Speaker 1: days of hearings in two thousand fifteen, he was found
Speaker 1: in civil contempt. The judge in that case was so
Speaker 1: frustrated by Our Pile that he referred him to another
Speaker 1: judge for criminal contempt of court. Joe was convicted, and
Speaker 1: he could have faced six months in jail, but the
Speaker 1: National Center for Police Defense sent forty thousand petitions to
Speaker 1: the Justice Department, and with Donald Trump in office, there
Speaker 1: was never any chance that Joe was going to serve time.
Speaker 1: Trump pardoned Our Pile when he never served a day
Speaker 1: in prison. The good news is his political career is
Speaker 1: pretty dead at this point, although he unfortunately is not.
Speaker 1: He lost reelection in two thousand and sixteen due to
Speaker 1: a mix of demographic change. There weren't as many old
Speaker 1: white people in Amercope as there had been, and due
Speaker 1: to the fact that by this point vast mountains of
Speaker 1: lawsuits against his brutal jail had cost the county more
Speaker 1: than a hundred and forty million dollars just on a
Speaker 1: conservative small government thing. I can't overstate how expensive it
Speaker 1: is to have Joe R. Pio is your sheriff. Paul
Speaker 1: pinzoned the new sheriff, beat our Pile, largely on a
Speaker 1: platform of cleaning up the MCSO and making it less
Speaker 1: brutal and thus less expensive. In two thousand eighteen, Joe
Speaker 1: our Pile ran for Senate and a bid to replace
Speaker 1: Jeff Flake, and more than anything, a bid to return
Speaker 1: to political and cultural relevance. The eighty six year old
Speaker 1: law man slash criminal wound up dead last and to
Speaker 1: an twenty. He ran for sheriff again, but lost his
Speaker 1: primary bid to Jerry Sheridan, who basically promised to be
Speaker 1: Joe R. Pio but less old and disgraced. Sheridan went
Speaker 1: on to lose badly to the incumbent pen Zone and
Speaker 1: that's where things stand today. Jesus, I can't I keep
Speaker 1: thinking about this guy who would literally uh pick up
Speaker 1: people for the crime of driving while Mexican and put
Speaker 1: him in his like torture chambers, his own concert, and
Speaker 1: put him in a concentration camp by his own admission.
Speaker 1: Would then was then free to go on Fox News
Speaker 1: and say funk off to a federal judge. And you know,
Speaker 1: it's like he he felt not wrongly, that he was
Speaker 1: like allowed he could continue his criming and his flaunting
Speaker 1: these the law as long as he wanted. And he could,
Speaker 1: he and his team of armed Yahoo's could pick up
Speaker 1: whoever they wanted, treat him however they want, with no
Speaker 1: indications they did any crimes whatsoever. Yep, yep. And Donald
Speaker 1: Trump loved this guy. We didn't even I feel like
Speaker 1: we didn't even get into that. But I mean that
Speaker 1: part I remember it is Donald Trump like praise this guy.
Speaker 1: You know, Seven Ways of Sunday. Yeah, it's uh, it's horrible.
Speaker 1: It's just incredibly frustrating. I think probably I don't know
Speaker 1: if he if. I'm more frustrated by his partner, Maniforts parton.
Speaker 1: They're both pretty awful. But yep, yeah, pretty bad guy.
Speaker 1: No kind of sucks, Joe Pious. This was not the
Speaker 1: uplifting episode, you promise me. Yeah, I apologize. I had
Speaker 1: to lie to get you in the chair talking about
Speaker 1: Pio famed philanthropists. It's like he doesn't, I mean, and
Speaker 1: the come up and is like Okay, great, he like
Speaker 1: got charged with criminal contempt of court like six you know,
Speaker 1: after six straight years of ignoring don't don't detain people
Speaker 1: for no reason like ignoring everything else. Yeah, it's wild.
Speaker 1: And you know, the people that enabled him are are
Speaker 1: on the hook for this, for his crimes too. Let's
Speaker 1: be clear about that. If you if you kept voting
Speaker 1: for this guy time after time after time, you're on
Speaker 1: the hook for it. If you were a politician, it
Speaker 1: sounds like democrat. Some democrats democrats for sure. Yeah, you're
Speaker 1: you enabled that ship and you are part of You
Speaker 1: are part of it, and this there has to be
Speaker 1: the conversation to the there's a lot of media that
Speaker 1: are complicit. Oh my, if you if you were, you know,
Speaker 1: buying into this guy's you know, suffering porn, you know,
Speaker 1: you were part of the problem. And you know, I
Speaker 1: like not to get too meta, but I feel like
Speaker 1: his story is like just a story about how fucked
Speaker 1: up our entire political media criminal justice ecosystem is right
Speaker 1: now and how easy it is for like a bad
Speaker 1: actor to exploit yep. As if we needed another lesson,
Speaker 1: because if we don't have a lesson after lesson every day.
Speaker 1: But here's another one. Here is another one, and a
Speaker 1: particularly horrifying one for sure. Um and like and like
Speaker 1: his ability to wiggle into the like you know, like
Speaker 1: parasitically wiggle into the cerebellum of America and and be
Speaker 1: unable to for to be cast out is just it's wild.
Speaker 1: Like his the length of of his criminal service is
Speaker 1: is incredible. Yep, yeah, it's I mean, he's in there
Speaker 1: for so fucking long. Um, And I'm sure there's more.
Speaker 1: I just haven't found a ton of granular detail about
Speaker 1: his time, you know, in the Bureau of min Narcotics
Speaker 1: and then the d e A. But I'm sure there's
Speaker 1: fucked up ship that we we we don't get from
Speaker 1: that period, just knowing the kind of guy that he is, right, Um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I did have one thought about that though,
Speaker 1: about the Elvis thing. Remember, um, how Elvis like got
Speaker 1: a badge to be a fake narcotics asan Oh yeah
Speaker 1: he didn't do that. Huh Maybe maybe maybe you know,
Speaker 1: that's the sheriff Joe connection, that's the shared Joe connection. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that I might. I might believe that at then actually
Speaker 1: I might believe that. Then then everything else is all good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: mind sure, if Joe, if you got Elvis his badge,
Speaker 1: if you got narc yeah, it's all good, dude. Um okay,
Speaker 1: so uh no, uh you got any got any plug doubles,
Speaker 1: don't any pluggables, nothing really a plug. But you can
Speaker 1: find me at Noah Shackman. That's n O H s
Speaker 1: h A h t A man now Ah Shackman on Twitter.
Speaker 1: I'll be starting my new job at Rolling Stone Magazine
Speaker 1: real soon, and uh we're gonna have some fun uh
Speaker 1: causing trouble uh for the ship bags of the world.
Speaker 1: Looking forward to it. Yeah, well, good luck doing that. Um, thankfully.
Speaker 1: It looks like you won't have Joe on your roster
Speaker 1: because my god, he can't possibly win election again for anything.
Speaker 1: He's too old and he's he's too failed. At this point,
Speaker 1: it has to be the end, right, This has to
Speaker 1: be the end of him. Have you never heard before? God? Yeah,
Speaker 1: he just totally he becomes presidents somehow, it's going to
Speaker 1: be Joe versus Joe. At least nobody can make jokes
Speaker 1: about Joe Biden being old. Yeah, that that would be
Speaker 1: the I thought you would think that, given Trump's age,
Speaker 1: that wouldn't have happened this election either, but nobody, nobody
Speaker 1: gives a ship about anything anymore. It's amazing and nothing
Speaker 1: at all matters. Uh Noah, thank you for coming on
Speaker 1: the show, um, thank you for talking with me about
Speaker 1: Sheriff Joe, and thank all of you for listening to
Speaker 1: a tale that I hoped made everyone's life a little
Speaker 1: bit worse. Just a little bit worse we tried to
Speaker 1: do in the past. Dudes, Oh God, all right bye
Speaker 1: MH