Speaker 1: What's torturing my people who have not, in most cases
Speaker 1: committed a crime or at least been convicted of it. Ah,
Speaker 1: Jesus ship, that was a bad introduction. Um, this is
Speaker 1: Behind the Bastards, the podcast that is incompetently introduced and
Speaker 1: competently produced by by my producer Sophie. I'm Robert Evans,
Speaker 1: the weak link in this in this chain. UM, here
Speaker 1: to talk with my guests this week. Noah shacked. Mean, Noah,
Speaker 1: how are you doing? What's up? Man? That intro really
Speaker 1: was fucking deplorable. Yeah, it was horrible. It was horrible.
Speaker 1: I was going to start with what's concentrating my camps?
Speaker 1: But I figured that I should have dove in. I
Speaker 1: should have gone for it. Come on, Noah, you are
Speaker 1: about to be fixing to be as we say. Where
Speaker 1: I come from the editor of Rolling Stone. You've been
Speaker 1: editing editor in chief the Daily East for since what
Speaker 1: two that's eighteen? Right? Um, We've used I mean we
Speaker 1: I use Daily Beast articles constantly as sources on this show.
Speaker 1: I'm a big fan of your work, have been for
Speaker 1: a while. You worked at Wired, you were embedded with
Speaker 1: the Iraqi the Bagdad bomb Squad at one point right.
Speaker 1: That was a story you did earlier. In your story,
Speaker 1: you've done a bunch of cool ship. Um, a real
Speaker 1: journalists journalist, uh, and now you're gonna sit down with
Speaker 1: me uh and talk about a real shitty person. So
Speaker 1: how how are you feeling? Noah, I'm feeling great. I'm
Speaker 1: feeling great. And I gotta say the the staff of
Speaker 1: the Daily Beast are all like collectively huge fan boys. Uh. Um,
Speaker 1: that's great to hear. Fair, we were talking about the
Speaker 1: show funck Boy Island. I feel yes, you know, the
Speaker 1: Daily be staff is itself a fun boy island behind
Speaker 1: the bastards. You could have just left it at a
Speaker 1: funck boy Island and then never explained the rest of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: can't call hrmy now I'm leaving. Motherfucker's No. How do
Speaker 1: you What do you know about a little fella fun
Speaker 1: little guy named Joe R. Pio. Oh yeah, like that's
Speaker 1: that's the right answer. Yeah, I'm like, you know, I
Speaker 1: certainly know he is uh no friend to the immigrant community.
Speaker 1: That would be a fair statement. I certainly know that
Speaker 1: he has not been a model for m police reform
Speaker 1: in this country. That would also be a fair answer.
Speaker 1: But I feel like he's always one of those guys like, Um,
Speaker 1: I knew he was bad. I would read the episodic coverage,
Speaker 1: but I always knew there was more. And uh, I thought,
Speaker 1: if only there was going to be a multipart podcast
Speaker 1: that could explain to me exactly how shitty this motherfucker was. Well,
Speaker 1: miraculously there is one, and it's it's this podcast right here.
Speaker 1: And also, my cats figured out how to open the
Speaker 1: front door to the house. I'm not sure how that happened,
Speaker 1: but that death that just occurred, Yeah, yeah, they're probably
Speaker 1: agents of the of the Merricopa County Sheriff's Department. So
Speaker 1: Joe R. Pio is interesting because he's at he's at
Speaker 1: the crossroads of a lot of things. He will claim,
Speaker 1: um that he's the guy who kind of provided the
Speaker 1: blueprints in a lot of ways for how Donald Trump
Speaker 1: organized and focused his not not not necessarily for how
Speaker 1: he uh he won election, but for how he kind
Speaker 1: of responded and used the media. Um. And I actually
Speaker 1: think our Pio is a narcissist, right like or that's
Speaker 1: not a clinical definition, but he thinks highly of himself.
Speaker 1: But I don't think that's an unfair statement. Necessarily to
Speaker 1: make You can see in a lot of the way
Speaker 1: Joe uses the media through his career, a lot of
Speaker 1: Trumpian stuff. Um. He's an interesting guy, and he's kind
Speaker 1: of also at he's he's been. This guy's a long
Speaker 1: career in law enforcement. He's the sheriff America County for
Speaker 1: the twenty four years, UM. And so he kind of
Speaker 1: straddles a few different eras in the evolution of American
Speaker 1: law enforcement to what it is today, starting with like,
Speaker 1: you know, the the horrible, horrible crime spree that we
Speaker 1: had in like that kind of reached its peak in
Speaker 1: nine that's about when he comes into office. Um. And
Speaker 1: he rides that through to the start of the War
Speaker 1: on Terror and like the big immigration panics of the
Speaker 1: of the mid aughts. Uh. And he stays in office
Speaker 1: right up until Trump's elections. So he's he's an incredibly
Speaker 1: influential guy, both in the way he uses the media
Speaker 1: as a right wing politician and in what he is
Speaker 1: what he represents as a law man. UM. So yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's there's a lot of good reasons to study
Speaker 1: to our bio um, and also just a lot of horrible,
Speaker 1: horrible stories. We're gonna try to balance the two because
Speaker 1: I don't want to just make this misery porn, but
Speaker 1: there is a lot of that in Um. Yeah, all right.
Speaker 1: So Joseph Michael R. Pio was born on June fourteenth,
Speaker 1: ninety two in Springfield, Massachusetts. His parents were Italian immigrants,
Speaker 1: and our Pio would later insist in interviews they came
Speaker 1: through Ellis Island legally. He says this a lot because
Speaker 1: he becomes a big anti immigration guy after a certain point,
Speaker 1: although not originally. Um. Now, it's true that his parents
Speaker 1: did immigrate legally into the United States, but the reality
Speaker 1: of the situation is more complex than that. His father, Cerro,
Speaker 1: fled Italy during the reign of Benito Mussolini in n
Speaker 1: three for reasons that should be obvious. Not a lot
Speaker 1: of good reasons to stay in Italy in nineteen Um,
Speaker 1: unless you're a really specific kind of dude. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: mean it's kind of ironic, right, given who who are
Speaker 1: Pio the camps? Yes, and given that a lot of
Speaker 1: the people he's locking up are people who are fleeing
Speaker 1: their own authoritarian leaders. Yeah. Um. And and Cerro comes
Speaker 1: very close to not being let in the United States.
Speaker 1: So at the time that he's immigrating to the US,
Speaker 1: we have an immigration up. And so he sets sail
Speaker 1: on a steamship that's leaving Italy alongside like ten other
Speaker 1: immigrant ships, and everyone knows when they all set sail,
Speaker 1: only the first one or two boats are going, like
Speaker 1: the only the first couple of boats, the people in
Speaker 1: them are going to be able to immigrate because then
Speaker 1: the quota will no one else is going to be
Speaker 1: allowed I legally. So that's and and like newspapers are
Speaker 1: covering the race between all these immigrant ships. Who's going
Speaker 1: to get into be citizens? Oh my god, Yeah that's
Speaker 1: the man. That's Yeah, it's a nightmare, just sitting on
Speaker 1: a boat for weeks, Like it's a steamship, it's not
Speaker 1: that fast, and just like not knowing if you're just
Speaker 1: gonna get sent back to the ocean. Um sent back
Speaker 1: to Mussolini. Yeah, it's horrifying. Um that said the President A. Wilson,
Speaker 1: which is the steamship that Zero his dad is on.
Speaker 1: Is the President Wilson? Like what it was going to
Speaker 1: appeal to? I think I think that's what the Italians
Speaker 1: were thinking. Uh yeah, we got the name of everyone's
Speaker 1: favorite president. Uh that boat did win though. It was
Speaker 1: the first of these ships into New York harbor. Um
Speaker 1: and so yeah, so they get to be citizens. So
Speaker 1: Joe's family's story here starts with a hell of a
Speaker 1: lot of luck. I mean, it's just it's just so crazy,
Speaker 1: Like you, your family comes here on the dumbest of
Speaker 1: dumb reasons, and it's like what they like happened to
Speaker 1: you know, hit a tide or hit a hit a
Speaker 1: end just right, and otherwise they'd be back in, like
Speaker 1: he's bragged, or they'd have come in illegally, right, A
Speaker 1: lot of people did do that. But he's like bragging
Speaker 1: about my family did it their right. We was like, no,
Speaker 1: your family got lucky because racists were trying to limit
Speaker 1: how many Italians could come into the country. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: Joe's mother, Josephine, was also an Italian immigrant. She taught kindergarten,
Speaker 1: and she was the daughter of the publisher of Springfield's
Speaker 1: Italian language paper. Uh Cerro met Josephine when he placed
Speaker 1: ads for his new grocery store in the paper. He
Speaker 1: starts a grocery store not long after he moves to
Speaker 1: the country. The two were married when she was twenty
Speaker 1: two and he was thirty, so he'd been in the
Speaker 1: US seven or eight years at this point, right when
Speaker 1: he gets married to this lady. They had Joe a
Speaker 1: year later, and it was a horrible, horrible labor Um.
Speaker 1: Josephine died nine days after giving birth to Joe R.
Speaker 1: Pio of a pulmonary edema. The local paper called her
Speaker 1: death sudden and obviously a horrific thing for the whole family. Um.
Speaker 1: Decades later, when he ran for governor, Joe put out
Speaker 1: a kind of a biography as a very succinct biography
Speaker 1: of himself UM on the early live section of his
Speaker 1: website Sorry when he ran for Congress, Uh, and he
Speaker 1: noted that he had a quote tough start in life,
Speaker 1: which is fair. Losing your mom at nine days old
Speaker 1: is a tough start in life, to be certain. Um.
Speaker 1: In his biography he claims that his dad owned a
Speaker 1: small grocery store in town, while the New Yorker profile
Speaker 1: claims he owned grocery stores. I'm not sure which of
Speaker 1: those is more accurate. I really have been able to
Speaker 1: find much detailed. They definitely paint somewhat different pictures of
Speaker 1: the family socio economic status, obviously. Um. Either way, Cyri
Speaker 1: was very busy with work and did not have time
Speaker 1: to take care of his son. Joe was raised by
Speaker 1: friends and family. Now Joe claims that he was an
Speaker 1: accomplished athlete and an average student, but Terry Green Sterling
Speaker 1: and Jude Joffey Block, who wrote a book about our
Speaker 1: Pio titled Driving while Brown, paint a less pleasant picture
Speaker 1: of his time in school. Quote Joe R. Pio had
Speaker 1: a difficult time in school. He struggled to get passing
Speaker 1: grades and often bore the brunt of anti immigrant taughts.
Speaker 1: Dago wop guinea. He took it, pretended to ignore it,
Speaker 1: because that's what you did back then, he told us. So,
Speaker 1: Joe suffers a lot of they immigrant racism as a kid,
Speaker 1: which is believable. God, and the abuser the abuse becomes
Speaker 1: the abuser. Yeah, I mean that is that is the
Speaker 1: story here. Um, And it's you know, it's one of
Speaker 1: those things. Um. He's definitely by the time he's grown up,
Speaker 1: the thirties were not quite at the height of kind
Speaker 1: of anti Italian racism, but it is still like a
Speaker 1: pretty common thing. And his family is working class Italian.
Speaker 1: There's there's certainly a lot of bigotry that he's he's
Speaker 1: growing up in and around Um. When Joe turned eighteen,
Speaker 1: he joined the army. There was a draft on at
Speaker 1: the time, so this may have been more him accepting
Speaker 1: in inevitability than doing a patriotism talked to my grandpa
Speaker 1: was kind of in the same generation, and a lot
Speaker 1: of guys joined the army because it was like, well,
Speaker 1: if you join, you get to pick your branch, you
Speaker 1: have some choice in what you do is supposed to
Speaker 1: just kind of waiting for your number to come up. Um.
Speaker 1: The Korean War started immediately after he joins, and Joe
Speaker 1: later wrote quote, I wanted a piece of the Act,
Speaker 1: but his luck would have it. Instead of heading off
Speaker 1: to combat, the army saw an unusual talent in the
Speaker 1: young Joe R. Pio something other men my age knew
Speaker 1: nothing about typing some instead of issuing the off the
Speaker 1: Korean the army. But wait a minute. This like a
Speaker 1: guy who purports himself to be the tough guy of
Speaker 1: all tough guys, meaner the mean sheriff, American's toughish sheriff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's a fucking typist. He was the typest. Oh, and
Speaker 1: it's it's great there's some real questions because he brags
Speaker 1: a lot about all the gunfights he's in as a
Speaker 1: law man. Later and there's some serious questions as to
Speaker 1: whether or not he's ever seen in coming fire. Um.
Speaker 1: And this is like, obviously there's no shame in being
Speaker 1: a typist or whatever in the military, but the way
Speaker 1: he frames this is fat because he he needs you
Speaker 1: to know, because of the guy he is. He needs
Speaker 1: you to know he really wanted to fight, he wanted
Speaker 1: to see combat. But gosh, darnett, he was just so
Speaker 1: good at type um because I mean, it's America needed
Speaker 1: as the North Koreans were coming down the peninsula and
Speaker 1: one thing they needed for the Incheon landing there was
Speaker 1: one touch type mastered the Corty keyboard saved all of
Speaker 1: those Marines at the Chosen Reservoir. My grandpa was in
Speaker 1: Korea and he kind of like by surprise, he had
Speaker 1: been stationed in Korea before the fighting started and he
Speaker 1: was just there as a medic. He was there the
Speaker 1: whole war. Um, And I think would have given anything
Speaker 1: to have not had those experiences after he had them,
Speaker 1: Like it's you can tell the kind of guys who
Speaker 1: never got into it but built this image of themselves
Speaker 1: as a tough guy and really wish they'd seen something
Speaker 1: that I think had he experienced combat in Korea, probably
Speaker 1: would have wished he'd done anything else for his time,
Speaker 1: because it was a pretty horrible war. Yeah, even for
Speaker 1: wars COREA was really bad. Is that true about all
Speaker 1: these fucking yes want to be fashismo types, right, It's
Speaker 1: like none of them actually see any action. I mean,
Speaker 1: with the exception of I suppose one Austrian. But other
Speaker 1: than that, yeah, you're getting at Hitler that, but I
Speaker 1: mean they really like they never see any action. They
Speaker 1: just sit on the sidelines and and and you know, like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, totally would have done it if it
Speaker 1: wasn't from my bone spurs. He totally would have done
Speaker 1: it if it wasn't for my fucking killing typing. You know.
Speaker 1: It's it's this frustrating aspect of American of the American
Speaker 1: hawk culture, where not that you you definitely do I
Speaker 1: don't want to like paint it. There's definitely some hawks
Speaker 1: out there who saw some serious combat, but it's not
Speaker 1: most people who do that. And the ones who I
Speaker 1: think it was, I think he was Jim Jordan, who
Speaker 1: just posted a video of himself like firing a machine
Speaker 1: gun at arrange and just looking looking miserable doing it
Speaker 1: like he's got it braced in this like really like
Speaker 1: he's not. He's shooting it like somebody who's scared of
Speaker 1: the gun he's using as opposed like none of them ever,
Speaker 1: I don't know. They never pull any of this off,
Speaker 1: like they all It's like it's like Ted Cruz trying
Speaker 1: to or or Jeb Bush posing with his monogrammed handgun.
Speaker 1: It's like, you obviously don't and that's fine, you don't
Speaker 1: have to like this stuff. What stop pretending? Stop? Was
Speaker 1: Jim Jordan's in Like did he wear a jacket that
Speaker 1: one time? To machine gun? Um? Opposing what? You know?
Speaker 1: How like he never wears a jacket? Is this a thing? No,
Speaker 1: I'm not aware. I don't know much about I think.
Speaker 1: I mean it may I may be getting it wrong.
Speaker 1: It may not be Jim Jordan's um, which case I'm
Speaker 1: I'm ashamed. Um now I'm googling Jim Jordan's machine gun. Yeah, hm,
Speaker 1: I see something about machine gun Kelly boyfriend. I also
Speaker 1: think somebody has somebody backing up with a really a
Speaker 1: loud truck. Yeah, I'm sorry, I'm calling from New York.
Speaker 1: Never apolicize. Are we here to talk about trucks and
Speaker 1: machine gun Kelly? Yes, yes, yes, but so yeah, Joe,
Speaker 1: the way he frames this, he needs to let you
Speaker 1: know that he desperately wanted to fight, but he was
Speaker 1: just so good at typing. But he also wants you
Speaker 1: to know that him being in the army like equipped
Speaker 1: him with key skills that made him a badass cop.
Speaker 1: So he continues after stating that the military had preferred
Speaker 1: him typing and fighting. He goes on to write, so
Speaker 1: instead of issuing me off to Korea, the army put
Speaker 1: me in the military's Medical Detachment Division, where report writing
Speaker 1: skills and interviewing techniques were critical. And this is where
Speaker 1: we get to a really interesting discrepancy in his background,
Speaker 1: as will become clear Joe. As we've talked about Joe
Speaker 1: as a real vested interest in wanting people to see
Speaker 1: him as a warrior, but since he didn't do any
Speaker 1: cool stuff in the army. In his own bio, he
Speaker 1: uses that section to immediately pivot towards his career in
Speaker 1: law enforcement, saying, the Army never got me over to Korea,
Speaker 1: but it did get me abroad for a while. That's
Speaker 1: where I was bitten by wanderlust. Little did I know
Speaker 1: then that France would be the first of many foreign
Speaker 1: countries where I would be sent to fight crime. After
Speaker 1: getting a taste of what a cop would be like
Speaker 1: in the military, I was discharged from the Army and
Speaker 1: immediately signed up to be a streets cop in one
Speaker 1: of the toughest cities in America, Washington, d C. Now
Speaker 1: do you see the nonsense there, Because he's not being
Speaker 1: a cop in the army. He's doing medical paperwork. That's
Speaker 1: not he's not fighting crime in France. He's like filing
Speaker 1: out v A forms and which is again a necessary job,
Speaker 1: but is not anything like police work. What the fighting
Speaker 1: crime by get their doctor disappointments right to make sure
Speaker 1: that like their chlamydia gets treated in from it's very
Speaker 1: it's very funny. He wants you to like see this
Speaker 1: direct line that he's kind of like just building up
Speaker 1: to be a great, great warrior cop. So yeah, and
Speaker 1: then he goes straight to d C. Well not quite. Actually,
Speaker 1: what he doesn't say in his his sanitized biography that
Speaker 1: he wrote for his campaign is that he didn't immediately
Speaker 1: go into being a d C cop. He actually attempted
Speaker 1: to join the U. S. Border Patrol, but he flunk
Speaker 1: to the entry test for the border which is I
Speaker 1: think the test is mainly can you hold a gun
Speaker 1: in your hands? And are you angry all the time?
Speaker 1: Oh my god. Yeah, I couldn't get in. Couldn't get
Speaker 1: into the fifties border patrol. Oh my god. So this guy,
Speaker 1: who like his family is an immigrant family, gets here
Speaker 1: at a dumb fucking look. Then he can't even he
Speaker 1: types his way out of fighting in Korea and Korea. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Then he tries to kick it out on immigrants by
Speaker 1: joining the border patrol, and he can't even do that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they won't take him. He failed, he flunks out. So thankfully,
Speaker 1: if you're not good enough to be in the border
Speaker 1: patrol at this point in time, at least you can
Speaker 1: still be a DC cop. And he doesn't do this
Speaker 1: for long. In fact, over the next three years he
Speaker 1: has four different law enforcement jobs. Now, when he talks
Speaker 1: about his time as a d C cop, he consistently
Speaker 1: describes it as a black neighborhood, like he needs you
Speaker 1: to know that was that was where he patrolled in
Speaker 1: one interview, he admitted I was a pretty aggressive cop,
Speaker 1: made more arrests than anybody in the precinct. Not that
Speaker 1: I was prejudiced. I wasn't prejudiced. We got three jobs
Speaker 1: in four would you say three jobs? Three jobs in
Speaker 1: four years? I think? Yeah, four different law enforcement jobs
Speaker 1: in three years. Yeah, that's not great. That is not
Speaker 1: a sign that you are you know, Jack Webb here
Speaker 1: that you are Sherlock Holmes. No, he's He's not Holmes.
Speaker 1: On what I'm sure was a completely unrelated note, he
Speaker 1: brags that he was the department's quote most assaulted officer
Speaker 1: in nineteen A lot of people wanted to kick the
Speaker 1: shin out of me for the two months I had
Speaker 1: this job. Yeah, he was not there long. He claims
Speaker 1: that he was. He would have made detective, but quote,
Speaker 1: the promotion rolls were backed up and absolutely Joe, Yeah, totally, dude,
Speaker 1: absolutely getting your ass kicked all the time, you're definitely racist.
Speaker 1: You couldn't hear the roles were backed up. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: way back. He also says he was in constant pain
Speaker 1: from being assaulted all the time. That might be true.
Speaker 1: I do not have trouble believing he got beaten up
Speaker 1: a lot. God, I will believe that. Um, he decided
Speaker 1: to move on next to the next police department he
Speaker 1: would serve in Las Vegas. Joe's most prominent claim from
Speaker 1: this time is that he once pulled over Elvis Presley.
Speaker 1: Sometimes he claims that he actually arrested Pressley and took
Speaker 1: him down to the station to meet other officers. I
Speaker 1: do not believe either iteration of this story. I think
Speaker 1: they are both lies. UM never seen any evidence that
Speaker 1: he arrested Elvis. Obviously, I think a lot of people
Speaker 1: pulled Elvis Presley over. Does not feel I can obey
Speaker 1: the rules of the road guy, But Joe R. Pio
Speaker 1: also seems like a liar. Yeah, um yeah, Now he
Speaker 1: was a Vegas cop for about six months when he
Speaker 1: signed on as an agent for the Federal Bureau of Narcotics,
Speaker 1: and this is the job that he would stick with
Speaker 1: for years and years. Uh. The officer the authors of
Speaker 1: driving while Brown Right, We came to understand that our
Speaker 1: Pio learned and the small drug enforcement agency then overseen
Speaker 1: by the Treasury Department, a lot of things that would
Speaker 1: inform his tenure as Americopa County Sheriff. He learned how
Speaker 1: to assume a fictitious role. He learned how to self
Speaker 1: validate by an a serting himself in the news, and
Speaker 1: he learned how to create chaos on the United States
Speaker 1: Mexico border to achieve a political goal. In the early days,
Speaker 1: Our Pio dreamed up tough guy characters for his undercover
Speaker 1: work and jumped into those roles with Gusto. One of
Speaker 1: his partners in Chicago, Bill Mattingly told us he and
Speaker 1: our Pile went undercover, passing themselves off his pimps, looking
Speaker 1: for drugs to buy for their junkie whores to place again,
Speaker 1: they say, is their language nineteen fifties so sixties, I
Speaker 1: think maybe at this point. To play these roles, the
Speaker 1: duo tooled around in fancy cars that authorities had seized
Speaker 1: from suspected crooks. Are Pio smoked a cigar and dressed
Speaker 1: in flashy sports coats. He purchased five dollar nickel bags
Speaker 1: of heroin for the whores, after which he and Mattingly
Speaker 1: placed the low level dealer into the back of the
Speaker 1: car and threatened years of prison if the dealer didn't
Speaker 1: name his supplier. This earned Our Pio the bureau nickname
Speaker 1: of Nickel bag, Joe, that's amazing. Yeah, not necessarily. Here's
Speaker 1: the part in why the elaborate pimp car cost Like, right,
Speaker 1: you can just buy a nickel bag on the street.
Speaker 1: I bought a handful of nickel bags at no point
Speaker 1: if I been wearing a pimp costume. Like it's like
Speaker 1: when he's like the James O'Keefe of the uh of
Speaker 1: the of the Narcos, Like, yeah, dress up like a
Speaker 1: pimp in order to do it? Yeah, you get that.
Speaker 1: And I also think he wanted to he wanted to
Speaker 1: feel cool, like he wanted to drive the flashy car
Speaker 1: dressed like a dressed like a fucking hip guy. Like.
Speaker 1: You get the feeling. This will come up later with
Speaker 1: some of his posse members. You get the feelings. Some
Speaker 1: of this is just like him wanting to have a
Speaker 1: cooler life than he did and the best way to
Speaker 1: do that is to bust people for nickel bags of
Speaker 1: heroin while driving around confiscated fancy cars and ship I
Speaker 1: feel like that's what's going on here. Wait, when you
Speaker 1: say posse members, do you mean like in the hip
Speaker 1: hop Like no, No, in the his as sheriff, we're
Speaker 1: getting add overs. But as sheriff, he has, he establishes
Speaker 1: a posse of thousands of random people. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: this is quite a story. We are we're gonna have
Speaker 1: fun with this, You and I. When are they all dressed?
Speaker 1: His piers? Hundreds of people dressed his pimps were running
Speaker 1: arounds at one point, dozens at one point. Now, kind
Speaker 1: of we'll get into that in a little bit. We're
Speaker 1: a few years ahead of ourselves. So um yeah. Joe,
Speaker 1: because he talks a lot as a when he's a sheriff.
Speaker 1: Later in a big media personality, he talks a lot
Speaker 1: about his time uh in the narcotics apartment and then
Speaker 1: the d e A. He likes to tell a lot
Speaker 1: of vague stories about traveling over the world and getting
Speaker 1: into constant gun battles. We'll discuss the truth behind that
Speaker 1: in a little bit. But he did travel around. He
Speaker 1: was stationed in a lot of far flung areas, and
Speaker 1: he busted people for drugs, although most of those busts
Speaker 1: were not the glamorous stuff that they make HBO mini
Speaker 1: series about. That's why he was nickelbag Joe. You know,
Speaker 1: he's not not the highest man on the totem poles. Um.
Speaker 1: Joe was married to the job, but in nineteen fifty seven,
Speaker 1: he'd also gotten married to a person, Eva Lamb, a
Speaker 1: clerical worker who threw some bizarre work of fates, found
Speaker 1: Joe to be a little Italian cutie, in her words, maddeningly.
Speaker 1: Joe's partner later expressed the interviewers that he felt Joe
Speaker 1: ignored his wife and spent too much time away from her.
Speaker 1: He recalls regularly telling his partner to go home and
Speaker 1: spend time with his wife. The couple named their first son, Rocco,
Speaker 1: after Rocky Marciano, the boxer. Joe only baby sat their
Speaker 1: kid once, and his wife says never washed a dish
Speaker 1: or made a bed. She told interviewers he was too busy,
Speaker 1: had to sleep when he was off because he did
Speaker 1: work a lot of hours. It's okay, first of all,
Speaker 1: it's babysitting. If it's your own child, it is your child.
Speaker 1: Well that she called it babysitting, but yeah, that's that
Speaker 1: is your child, little Italian beauty. How about no, you know,
Speaker 1: I was going to large him up because I feel
Speaker 1: like Rocco is a pretty good name. Like I think
Speaker 1: Rocco ore Pio is like a legit good name and
Speaker 1: so yeah, you could see that guy running a deli
Speaker 1: oh ship, yeah, hell of it? I mean yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean I feel like in the Brooklyn of of your
Speaker 1: there might have been a bunch of Rocco or Pios
Speaker 1: running around and that would have been cool. But it
Speaker 1: would have been a good boxer name too. You could
Speaker 1: see Roco Pio. Yeah, punch of people in a ring.
Speaker 1: I've just looked up a picture of him as young
Speaker 1: young Joe R. Pile and he is not a little
Speaker 1: Italian cutie. I'm just gonna on the record. You can
Speaker 1: take that up with his very dead wife, Sophie, dead wife,
Speaker 1: You and I need to have a conversation. Well, get
Speaker 1: the Luigi board out. So in nineteen six, like, who
Speaker 1: brags about like I never washed a dish, I never
Speaker 1: took we're saying it, yeah, I mean it is weird, right,
Speaker 1: It is weird that she because you get it, I
Speaker 1: don't know she's she's telling my god, this poison. Hold
Speaker 1: on a second, This poor kid, this picture I just
Speaker 1: pulled pulled up. I'm sure this is the one Sophie's
Speaker 1: looking at this picture. This poor kid looks is in
Speaker 1: a is in like a v next sweater and a
Speaker 1: bow tie, and there is a look of unbearable sadness
Speaker 1: on this kid's face, like, oh God, I'm looking at it.
Speaker 1: Yeah that is Oh that my ad is a cursed photo. Noah,
Speaker 1: oh god, my asshole pimp dressing dad is touching me
Speaker 1: on the shoulder for the first and only time, and
Speaker 1: I am gripped with unbearable loneliness knowing that this will
Speaker 1: never happen again. Yeah, this is the first time I've
Speaker 1: seen him in months. Oh God. And Mom is there
Speaker 1: in like a buffont hair do and uh and a
Speaker 1: big old belt and she's just like, if only I
Speaker 1: could murder with this man. Yeah, and he looks he's
Speaker 1: got like a slinger vibes. He's got fucking uh Jadgar
Speaker 1: Hoover vibes. He just has that like that particular kind
Speaker 1: of uh crooked law man looked to him, just like
Speaker 1: in his it's it's amazing, what what a what a field?
Speaker 1: That is? Um God, good God. And yeah, he's just
Speaker 1: always looked the same. Um. So. In nineteen sixty one,
Speaker 1: Joe was sent to Istanbul, which was a big get
Speaker 1: within the Bureau of Narcotics. It's a big job Turkey
Speaker 1: was the major hub of the international heroin market, and
Speaker 1: Joe was about to get his first chance to harsh
Speaker 1: a lot of people's buzzes. In nineteen sixty three, he
Speaker 1: participated in a massive one ton opium bust. He went
Speaker 1: to the media with the story and ensured it was
Speaker 1: covered as the largest bust ever made in Turkey and
Speaker 1: one of the largest in the world. I have no
Speaker 1: idea if that was true, but that's how the media
Speaker 1: come at it, because that's what Joe told them, and
Speaker 1: they ran with the story. Uh, he was the only
Speaker 1: agent named in the article. Um. So Joe really engineers
Speaker 1: media coverage around this bust that he's one of the
Speaker 1: guys responsible for, and he makes sure that he's the
Speaker 1: only name in that coverage. Um and it goes, it
Speaker 1: goes over huge. Back home, his dad, who he's got
Speaker 1: a very strict father, is proud he gets to see
Speaker 1: his kid in the newspaper. The newspaper gets passed all
Speaker 1: around his hometown and it's Joe are pilots first big
Speaker 1: experience in using the media to stroke his own ego
Speaker 1: and to pat his career, and he's going to get
Speaker 1: very good at this in the future. He plays the
Speaker 1: media pretty masterfully over the course of his career. UM. So,
Speaker 1: Joe was engaged in at least one gun battle during
Speaker 1: his time in Turkey, probably, And this is where we
Speaker 1: get into a really interesting, really interesting little dissection here. Noah,
Speaker 1: the authors of the book Driving While Brown, Uh and
Speaker 1: I found actually the article that they did, like a
Speaker 1: an exerpt from their book, was published in The Daily Beast,
Speaker 1: which is where I found this. Did a really deep
Speaker 1: analysis of this, reviewing his commentary on the incident from
Speaker 1: a newspaper archive, a testimony he gave before a Senate subcommittee,
Speaker 1: and in two of his memoirs, and they note that
Speaker 1: our Pio tells the story differently each time. His first
Speaker 1: public recollection of the event was in nineteen eighty two,
Speaker 1: near the end of his career, in about twenty years
Speaker 1: after it would have happened, if it happened, Uh, he
Speaker 1: told a Phoenix reporter that he and five Turkish cops
Speaker 1: got into a gun battle with drug dealers. Quote. Four
Speaker 1: of the Turks got away and the other was shot
Speaker 1: to death. He gave no detail on who shot the
Speaker 1: man or the circumstances around the shooting. Joe talked about
Speaker 1: this gunfight against Seven years later, in nineteen eighty nine,
Speaker 1: during a hearing before the International Narcotics Control Caucus of
Speaker 1: the U. S. Senate, cheered by a fella you might
Speaker 1: know named Sleepy Joe Biden, in his testimony before Congress,
Speaker 1: Joe claimed to have not Biden obviously, our Pio came
Speaker 1: to have claimed to have killed two Turkish drug dealers
Speaker 1: and a pulse pounding shootout. He made this claim while
Speaker 1: criticizing the State Department for being ineffective and supporting d
Speaker 1: e A agents. Here's what he said, quote a paradox
Speaker 1: one of my weekly gun battles in the mountains of
Speaker 1: Turkey where I killed two. Yeah, now it's weekly, weekly, weekly,
Speaker 1: Like was it said at a certain time? Was it like, okay, guys,
Speaker 1: first time a gun battle? Uh? That sounds to me
Speaker 1: like he had a weekly like maybe training session at
Speaker 1: the at the range, Like he went to the range
Speaker 1: every Thursday at four and he had a gun battle
Speaker 1: with like a paper target. Yeah, yeah, I don't think
Speaker 1: he would have. I don't have much faith in his
Speaker 1: ability to win that gun battle. But I'm not I'm
Speaker 1: not sure he was ever in a gunfight, is what
Speaker 1: I'm going to say, but this is what he says
Speaker 1: before Congress. So I killed two turks to dope peddlers,
Speaker 1: and I was indicted with four other police officers for murder.
Speaker 1: I sent a cable through state department channels and nothing happened.
Speaker 1: Three weeks later, they finally decided, g we had better
Speaker 1: do something. Joe. Of course, I resolved the matter. My
Speaker 1: indictment was dismissed, and the other police officers had to
Speaker 1: stand trial, but they were found not guilty. Guilty, let
Speaker 1: me add, we were in the line of duty. So
Speaker 1: I have no idea what to make of that. Because
Speaker 1: he tells this story differently every time, you would think
Speaker 1: that the version in Congress would be the most honest.
Speaker 1: But he's also claimed you have had weekly gun battles
Speaker 1: in the mountains of Turkey, and I've never been able
Speaker 1: to find any evidence that would corroborate this. Um. No
Speaker 1: one else's stories in the d e A of that
Speaker 1: time sound like Joe would have been involved in He's
Speaker 1: painting the picture that he was at war in the
Speaker 1: mountains of Turkey for several years. Basically, and hold on,
Speaker 1: he says he was indicted for murder, like no big deal.
Speaker 1: And he had in Turkey, and he hadn't mentioned that
Speaker 1: in previous iterations of the story. Nope, Nope, I don't
Speaker 1: think so. No, I think in his h in that interview, well,
Speaker 1: in the interview he gave to that local Phoenix paper,
Speaker 1: he says that several of the cops he was with
Speaker 1: got indicted and there was a trial and they were
Speaker 1: declared innocent. But he does mentioned himself being indicted in
Speaker 1: that first interview. So you can see seven years later,
Speaker 1: the story has evolved when he tells it to Congress,
Speaker 1: and not only is it like, oh, yeah, we had
Speaker 1: this one gunfight, gunfight where a guy died, it's though
Speaker 1: this is one of my weekly gunfights. And it's you
Speaker 1: can see like the mythologizing right that he's he's going
Speaker 1: through as this happens. So when he tells d hold On,
Speaker 1: it's like, I have this awesome story. Let me tell
Speaker 1: you to Oh there's one part I forgot. Oh this
Speaker 1: is one little key detail I left out. I was
Speaker 1: indicted for murder. Yeah, I was indicted for murder. It
Speaker 1: was one of my weekly gun battles where I get
Speaker 1: incited for murder. You know, it happened to me all
Speaker 1: the time, classic d A business. And it's interesting this
Speaker 1: this this most kind of lavish version of the story
Speaker 1: in eighty nine comes out like two years before he
Speaker 1: runs for office, so you can see he's kind of
Speaker 1: starting to like build up this, um this internal mythology
Speaker 1: over like what he did as a d E A agent.
Speaker 1: And I don't think any of his true. Like I said,
Speaker 1: I don't actually know if I think Joe R. Pio
Speaker 1: was ever in a gunfight. Um, I just don't know.
Speaker 1: You know, there's also a good chance and I you know,
Speaker 1: I think you talked to people who served in the military.
Speaker 1: They all have stories of guys who came back and
Speaker 1: then started embellishing what happened, and like eventually it bears
Speaker 1: no resemblance to like, well, yeah, there's this one time
Speaker 1: we were getting shot at and then like it's turned
Speaker 1: in his head into this thing different than what it was.
Speaker 1: So it's possible that like there was a there was
Speaker 1: a gunfight of some sort that Joe was around for
Speaker 1: and he's just turned it into something completely different. We
Speaker 1: don't really know, um, but Robert you know, who definitely
Speaker 1: hasn't well, I don't know if they could possibly I'm
Speaker 1: going to guess a number of our sponsors, I would
Speaker 1: agree with that statement. I was gonna you don't move
Speaker 1: down the pills unless you're willing to like lay down
Speaker 1: some heavy long just dropping a mactin into Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: here here's the ads. So we're back, um, and we're
Speaker 1: talking about Joe in his story of this gunfight that
Speaker 1: may or may not have happened now nineties. When he
Speaker 1: tells this to Congress years later, when he's a sheriff,
Speaker 1: he writes two different memoirs. While he co writes, he
Speaker 1: hires a ghostwriter to write two different sets of memoires,
Speaker 1: and in both memoirs he repeats the story with more embellishment. Uh.
Speaker 1: In this version he ties it into Turkish politics, adding quote, uh,
Speaker 1: it's not that I was glad the dealers had been killed.
Speaker 1: I wasn't. But it happened and more often than on
Speaker 1: one occasion. So he's still adding that. Now he's saying
Speaker 1: I killed multiple people, right, like again, it keeps part
Speaker 1: of why I'm pretty. Part of why I don't know
Speaker 1: if I ever think he's ever been in a gunfight
Speaker 1: is the story evolves. So it starts there was one
Speaker 1: gunfight a guy died. We had daily gunfights and then
Speaker 1: one time, you know, I killed somebody or I killed
Speaker 1: two people, is what he tells Congress, And there was
Speaker 1: a big court case. And then the third version is
Speaker 1: I killed people on a bunch of different occasions, you
Speaker 1: know version in my daily tan war, I drove an
Speaker 1: armored personnel carrier down the streets of Istanbul mowing down bystanders,
Speaker 1: just machine gunning drug dealers. Just that's how he wants
Speaker 1: people to think about his fucking I mean, and that's
Speaker 1: that's the image he paints of himself when he's Sheriff
Speaker 1: Joe and he gets all these tanks and he's got
Speaker 1: guys with machine guns all over the place, Like he
Speaker 1: very much wants to be seen as this like wild
Speaker 1: West lawman type mother like he you know, you know,
Speaker 1: the kind of image he wants to portray it like that.
Speaker 1: He's like Charles Bronson, you know, uh yeah, he's definitely
Speaker 1: if you've never seen a Charles Bronson movie, they're all
Speaker 1: based around this like shlubby, middle aged man who just
Speaker 1: mows down drug dealers with machine guns in like New
Speaker 1: York City and yeah and grunts and sweats a lot.
Speaker 1: Charles Bronson. So uh. The authors of Driving Well Brown
Speaker 1: eventually got to interview Joe R. Pio about this purported shooting.
Speaker 1: They write, quote, we asked our Pios several times if
Speaker 1: he'd ever killed anybody. He answered, not that I know of,
Speaker 1: although in Turkey I used to have gun battles. I
Speaker 1: think one gun battle, I did hit one or two
Speaker 1: dope peddlers, only because I am the one that had
Speaker 1: the gun, A thirty eight, I guess. He added hastily
Speaker 1: that he had never killed anyone in the United States.
Speaker 1: Another time, he told us in Turkey, I've had some
Speaker 1: gun battles. I don't know who killed who, but I
Speaker 1: never killed anybody, which is different very much from his
Speaker 1: congressional festimony. So he's just a liar. He's just a
Speaker 1: big liar. Noah, he's just a big liar, I think.
Speaker 1: I I also, I like, it's not a gun battle
Speaker 1: if you're the only one with the gun, you're just
Speaker 1: you're just shooting people, bitch. Show to be a gun battle,
Speaker 1: there need to be guns on both sides. I had
Speaker 1: a gun battle. I'm going back to the paper target.
Speaker 1: I think he had a weekly gun battle with a
Speaker 1: paper might have shot somebody while he was trying to
Speaker 1: hit a paper target. Yeah. Uh so I know. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We spent a lot of time in analysis on this,
Speaker 1: but it's hugely important to his his image in public
Speaker 1: speeches and books aimed at his fan base when becomes
Speaker 1: a politician, Joe would talk about these weekly gunfights in
Speaker 1: the mountains of Turkey and his like far flung career
Speaker 1: killing bad guys all around the world. Uh. And this
Speaker 1: is how he portrays himself when he's giving speeches and
Speaker 1: when he's writing his own books. But when he's pressed
Speaker 1: by serious reporters, he backs down and he provides a
Speaker 1: much more grounded story. And I think it's because he
Speaker 1: knows that they can check up on elements of his story.
Speaker 1: And at the end of this, again, I have no
Speaker 1: idea if I believe Joe R. Pio has ever heard
Speaker 1: incoming Fire. Now, after Turkey, Joe was sent to d
Speaker 1: C where he participated in Operation Intercept, a Nixonian plan
Speaker 1: to blockade border crossing stations with Mexico in order to
Speaker 1: stop drugs from entering the US. This may have been
Speaker 1: This seems to have been partly Joe's idea, and Nixon
Speaker 1: really liked it. It was a big publicityploy. Nixon was
Speaker 1: trying to bully Mexico into letting the U. S arially
Speaker 1: spray pesticides on marijuana fields. Uh. And basically we were
Speaker 1: threatening the Mexican government by shutting down border crossing stations
Speaker 1: and causing a huge amount of economic damage. One aspect
Speaker 1: of the blockade that Joe personally oversaw was that immigration
Speaker 1: and narcotics officers individually searched four point five million civilians
Speaker 1: over a three week period. This included a lot of
Speaker 1: strip searches, um, a lot of people being detained. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it was economically devastating to people who lived in
Speaker 1: the region on both sides of the border. But it
Speaker 1: gave Dick Nixon an excuse to act like he was
Speaker 1: tough on drugs and make political Hey, Joe Arpio gotten
Speaker 1: close with Nixon as a result of this. He spent
Speaker 1: during this operation. Ar Pio was flying around in a
Speaker 1: helicopter with Spiro Agnew monitoring like the shutdown of the border. Um.
Speaker 1: So he's actually in pretty deep with the Nixon administration.
Speaker 1: You know, he's ag knew deep, which is uh. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Joe was sent next to Mexico City, where he
Speaker 1: was served as the regional director for the Bureau of Narcotics.
Speaker 1: He and his wife had a second child, and in
Speaker 1: general things were going great for him. Nixon regularly sent
Speaker 1: his Deputy Attorney General down to talk with Joe about
Speaker 1: undercover operation. He went to Chicago and San Antonio in
Speaker 1: Boston over the next few years. As his career neared
Speaker 1: its end. Of nineteen seventy eight, he chose to be
Speaker 1: stationed in Arizona. This would be Joe's last station of duty,
Speaker 1: and it was the place he and Ava decided to
Speaker 1: build their life. They bought a house in the Northeast Valley.
Speaker 1: Ava started a travel agency in Scottsdale, but all was
Speaker 1: not well Phoenix. Being Phoenix had a lot of Mexican
Speaker 1: agents and its d e a branch. Two of Joe's
Speaker 1: new colleagues felt that he was kind of racist. Phil Jordan,
Speaker 1: who ran the Phoenix office before Joe moved in, claims
Speaker 1: Joe deliberately sabotaged relationships between Mexican and American narcotics agents.
Speaker 1: In response, Joe initiated an internal probe against Jordan's claiming
Speaker 1: that he'd leaked information to a journalist and that he'd
Speaker 1: used the office copy machine to copy a cookbook for
Speaker 1: his girlfriend Dry. Joe loses his rank over this and
Speaker 1: gets pushed to a desk job. Though now there's eventually
Speaker 1: an investigation, and it founds finds that there's are not
Speaker 1: Joe UM, sorry, the other guy, Phil Jordan's um. And
Speaker 1: when the investigation includes I just love how it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: but he photocopied a cookbook. Yeah, it's an amazing allegation
Speaker 1: to throw at like and it's you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: this thing you'll see again with Joe. He gets attacked
Speaker 1: and he immediately goes after the people who attack him
Speaker 1: and and does his best to damage their career. And
Speaker 1: although there were no merits say allegations Joe made against
Speaker 1: Phil Jordan's, it still damages the guy's career for a while.
Speaker 1: Joe also had conflict with Laura Garcia, at the time
Speaker 1: the only Mexican American woman in the Phoenix d A office.
Speaker 1: She filed a complaint about explosives that the d e
Speaker 1: A had stored without proper safety procedures in downtown Phoenix.
Speaker 1: She was especially concerned about these improperly stored explosives because
Speaker 1: she was pregnant and thus particularly vulnerable to explosions a
Speaker 1: local NewSpace. That's true. I guess so every doctor is
Speaker 1: going to tell you noxplode pregnant ad for him. But
Speaker 1: she's got concerns to like they're they're not properly dealing
Speaker 1: with like the fumes and stuff coming off this like
Speaker 1: it's just a really dangerous storage situation. And a local
Speaker 1: newspaper learns about her complaint and published as an article.
Speaker 1: This infuriated our pile, and she claims he started attacking
Speaker 1: her about her ethnicity and Monday morning meetings. He had
Speaker 1: agents searcher car repeatedly and investigate her over parking tickets.
Speaker 1: At one time, he told her you should be home
Speaker 1: having babies and cooking tortillas. She eventually left the d
Speaker 1: e A over this, so he's he sucks. It's not
Speaker 1: good now. Joe retired from the d e A in
Speaker 1: nineteen two. He was fifty years old. For the next
Speaker 1: ten years, he lived the low profile life of a retiree.
Speaker 1: He worked mostly at his wife's travel agency in Scottsdale.
Speaker 1: He seems to have been very quickly bothered by the
Speaker 1: fact that he was no longer a powerful man. He
Speaker 1: wasn't interacting with elected leaders and making decisions that impacted
Speaker 1: people's lives every day. He doesn't take well to being
Speaker 1: retired quietly, so he decides to run for Phoenix City
Speaker 1: Council on a platform of forcing the homeless out of
Speaker 1: town and locking them up if they refused to leave. Yeah, wait,
Speaker 1: I want to I want to know what he was like,
Speaker 1: what kind of trips he was booking? Oh, we're about
Speaker 1: to talk about that. Noah spoilers, it's too space. So
Speaker 1: he loses that city council election, and next in nineteen five,
Speaker 1: he decides to use his talent as a huckster to
Speaker 1: sell people tickets to Space through his wife's travel agency.
Speaker 1: You're not, that's absolutely a thing he did. It's part
Speaker 1: of this I haven't. There's like a whole dig to
Speaker 1: be done here into the whole story. But basically, there
Speaker 1: was this nationwide. There's this company called Society Expeditions in
Speaker 1: Pacific American Launch Systems, and they start advertising in the
Speaker 1: eighties that by nineteen ninety two they're going to have
Speaker 1: a craft capable of vertical takeoff and landing, like a
Speaker 1: spaceship that can do vertical takeoff and landing, which we
Speaker 1: still don't have today, right, Like, that's not wasn't remotely
Speaker 1: possible in the nineteen eighties. But they're bragging that they
Speaker 1: have this, and they make deals with a bunch of
Speaker 1: travel agencies to sell people tickets on this thing. And
Speaker 1: Joe's track gets his travel his wife's travel agency involved,
Speaker 1: and they start hucking the space tickets. And I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote from a nineteen ninety six right up by the
Speaker 1: Phoenix New Times here. The price was fifty thousand dollars
Speaker 1: with a seven thousand dollar deposit and collection of the rest.
Speaker 1: Beginning in October twelfth, nineteen two, when the Phoenix was
Speaker 1: to take its first passengers into space. Um, yeah, we
Speaker 1: had people, herbub director Collette Bevis says, two fifty two
Speaker 1: people paid the seven thousand dollars, with five thousand going
Speaker 1: to a refundable escrow account and the remaining two thousand,
Speaker 1: nonrefundable going to Society Expeditions bank account. We had people
Speaker 1: taking out three mortgages on their home, she recalls, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they were Joe or Pile selling space tickets, selling
Speaker 1: space tickets. Okay, stick with me. Joe Aprile was from
Speaker 1: the future. Actually he meant it. He meant it. He
Speaker 1: wasn't trying to. He wasn't trying to, you know, a griff.
Speaker 1: He came back in time, and his him selling the
Speaker 1: tickets early is why space travel got derailed and we
Speaker 1: weren't able to get We would have been doing trips
Speaker 1: into space by a ninety two for everybody. We'd have
Speaker 1: space travel. Now, Joe r Pio ruined it by selling
Speaker 1: space tickets too early. He fucked up the dream. He
Speaker 1: came back from the future to buck up space travel.
Speaker 1: He wanted to take that from us. Yeah, he wanted
Speaker 1: Jeff Bezos to have it to himself. That's son of
Speaker 1: a bitch. Yeah, So he sold tickets to space. We
Speaker 1: don't know if any of them sold. We know that
Speaker 1: they were trying to sell them. People pay. Two people
Speaker 1: total in the country paid for this ticket. We don't
Speaker 1: know who they. So when the Phoenix New Times interviewed
Speaker 1: the lady used to work for the company, she said
Speaker 1: she couldn't access her records to confirm whether or not
Speaker 1: the r Pios sold any space junkets. And Joe just
Speaker 1: refuses to answer any questions about this. So we don't
Speaker 1: know if he sold any, but he tried to. He
Speaker 1: may have. UM, we just have no idea because I
Speaker 1: think this was all the con game from the beginning. UM.
Speaker 1: And I don't know that I believe the company ever
Speaker 1: actually had records. UM. In any case, whether or not
Speaker 1: it was a con from the beginning. In n the
Speaker 1: Challenger exploded. Uh, and that was kind of the end
Speaker 1: of anyone talking about selling tickets like this. Um, So
Speaker 1: the grift falls apart. It's just funny that they got
Speaker 1: involved with this. Joe was selling tickets to Space for
Speaker 1: a while. We don't know if he succeeded in actually
Speaker 1: getting any money, but they tried. You guys have covered
Speaker 1: like every grifter in history, right, you guys have covered
Speaker 1: ten million grifters, a lot of them. Yeah. This is
Speaker 1: like the same playbook, right Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: it's it's very much. You know. I think the thing
Speaker 1: that you see with all of the grifters that we cover,
Speaker 1: that Joe r. Pio has in spades is a a
Speaker 1: gut understanding of how to make a spectacle of the media,
Speaker 1: right because the only the thing that you're always selling
Speaker 1: is a grifter is yourself, and that's the thing Joe
Speaker 1: is always selling. That's why this story about him being
Speaker 1: in gunfights in Turkey is so important because he's got
Speaker 1: to sell himself as this desperado warrior law man, right. Um.
Speaker 1: And I think in this period after retirement, kind of
Speaker 1: the reason he's going through the city council trying to
Speaker 1: win there and an anti hunting he's then he's selling
Speaker 1: space tickets. Is he kind of loses the threat of
Speaker 1: his own story for a while. I think he's kind
Speaker 1: of lost after the d e A and it takes
Speaker 1: him a while to figure out what story he's going
Speaker 1: to sell next to people. Um. I think that's kind
Speaker 1: of the position he's in right now. So after ten
Speaker 1: years of working for his wife, he decided to get
Speaker 1: back into a spotlight. In nineteen two, he had a
Speaker 1: chance because there was a Maricopa County Sheriff's election. Um.
Speaker 1: So it just so happened that nineteen two was a
Speaker 1: great time to run for sheriff of Maricopa County. The
Speaker 1: sitting sheriff was a guy named Tom Agnos, and he
Speaker 1: was in charge during the Wattle Buddhist temple shooting, which
Speaker 1: I think may still be the largest mass shooting in
Speaker 1: Arizona history. Nine dead. It may have been beaten by
Speaker 1: now it was the largest for quite a while. Um.
Speaker 1: And it was not like, um, you know, when we
Speaker 1: say mass shooting today, you're thinking about like a guy
Speaker 1: walking into with a gun and just mowing people down.
Speaker 1: This was a robbery that went horribly bad, and these
Speaker 1: people were well being robbed executed so that they couldn't
Speaker 1: like give away the people who had robbed them basically right,
Speaker 1: like that seems to have been the actual case here.
Speaker 1: It's a horrible, horrible tragedy. Um. And it it got
Speaker 1: worse actually when the police got involved, um because they
Speaker 1: get a tip from a very unreliable source. Uh, and
Speaker 1: they immediately arrest five men from Tucson, Arizona based on
Speaker 1: this tip. No one of these guys has let go
Speaker 1: after providing an alibi, but the remainder are charged after
Speaker 1: deputies coerced them in into confessing by exaggerating evidence and
Speaker 1: threatening them with the death penalty. So very sketchy behavior
Speaker 1: on behalf of the sheriff's They kind of forced these
Speaker 1: guys to confess, um, and the sheriff's department just is
Speaker 1: is very convinced that these are the guilty parties. For
Speaker 1: about seven weeks, the Tucson for languish in jail. Uh
Speaker 1: and the Sheriff's department is adamant that these guys are
Speaker 1: absolutely guilty. And then incontrovertible evidence emerges that two completely
Speaker 1: different guys are the real killers. Um. So the Tucson
Speaker 1: four sue the state successfully, they get a bunch of money,
Speaker 1: but the Sheriff Agnos refuses to admit any wrongdoing, and
Speaker 1: he claims the coerced confessions justified murder charges. Now nine
Speaker 1: two was still a time when being brutally bad at
Speaker 1: your job in a way that harmed people could get
Speaker 1: you fired. And Maricopa remember those days, no fondly um
Speaker 1: and Maricope account and he very rightly decided to fire
Speaker 1: Sheriff Agnos, so that Joe picks this time to run
Speaker 1: for sheriff. It's a great time to run for sheriff,
Speaker 1: because it's really easy to look good next to this
Speaker 1: chuckle fuck. Now, at the time, the US was just
Speaker 1: one year out from the peak of the most violent
Speaker 1: crime wave, and recent history is the peak in recent
Speaker 1: memory of violent crime in the United States. So this
Speaker 1: is the year after that people are still real freaked
Speaker 1: out about this is like Charles Bronson movies, are big
Speaker 1: in this time right. Um our Pile was not at
Speaker 1: this point focused on immigration. In fact, his campaign had
Speaker 1: nothing to do with immigrants. Instead, he focused on his
Speaker 1: history as a d e a man, and he promised
Speaker 1: to use those skills to keep people safe. He also
Speaker 1: complained about mismanagement by the old sheriff and that he
Speaker 1: was basically like, hey, he's wasting a bunch of tax money.
Speaker 1: You see this big case that went badly. We got
Speaker 1: sued for millions of dollars. Like, I'm gonna come in
Speaker 1: and clean up the sheriff's department and I'm gonna save
Speaker 1: the county a bunch of money. He also promised that
Speaker 1: if elected, he would serve only one term. He won
Speaker 1: election handily in he was sworn in. One other elected
Speaker 1: official who was sworn in on the same day was
Speaker 1: Mary Wilcox, a Mexican American woman elected to the county
Speaker 1: Board of Supervisors, which oversaw the sheriff's department budget. On
Speaker 1: the day they met, Joe told her, you look so
Speaker 1: much like my mother and her pictures, I could never
Speaker 1: get mad at you, which is kind of a weird
Speaker 1: thing to say. But the two of them had a
Speaker 1: good relationship actually Mary Wilcox is a Democrat, but she
Speaker 1: has Joe comes over to her family restaurant all the time,
Speaker 1: he plays with their kids. He's a very pleasant fixture
Speaker 1: in her life. And she's pretty adamant that, like, he
Speaker 1: was not this weirdo racist for the first like decade
Speaker 1: or so that she knew her. Um that there's a
Speaker 1: shift in Joe R. Pio and we're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: that shift more in part two. Um, But he like
Speaker 1: during this period of time, she thought he was like
Speaker 1: a pretty reasonable guy, and he specifically told her he
Speaker 1: didn't want to waste department money arresting undocumented immigrants and
Speaker 1: having them deported. He wanted to deal with violent crime
Speaker 1: and his only concern was keeping the people of his
Speaker 1: county safe. So at the start, some people, at least
Speaker 1: Mary Wilcox is one of them, will say he seemed
Speaker 1: like a pretty reasonable guy. He seemed and obviously the
Speaker 1: guy who was sheriff before was shipped. So it doesn't
Speaker 1: immediately look like Joe R. Pope is going to be
Speaker 1: a nightmare, you know. But that's not where the story ends, Noah.
Speaker 1: But the story that we're going to tell right now
Speaker 1: is the story of products and services, which is a
Speaker 1: story that never goes badly, that always leads us to
Speaker 1: more products and more services and thus to a better life.
Speaker 1: So here's some ads. All right, we're back. So Joe
Speaker 1: is the sheriff now, um and you know in public,
Speaker 1: he almost immediately adopts the name sheriff Joe, and he
Speaker 1: clearly tried. He tries to portray himself from the start.
Speaker 1: Is kind of like an Old West style law man.
Speaker 1: That's how he wants to be seen. The only problem
Speaker 1: is that's not the job he got elected to do.
Speaker 1: Marracopa is the large just county in the US by area.
Speaker 1: It is not in population obviously. The population is about
Speaker 1: four million, which is about the entire population of Oregon,
Speaker 1: where I live. So it is a populous county. But
Speaker 1: Maricopa is like bigger than most nations in Europe. It's
Speaker 1: a massive, massive county, um, and it includes a bunch
Speaker 1: of nowhere land like a bunch of desert with tiny
Speaker 1: little towns, but it also includes the enormous Phoenix metropolitan area.
Speaker 1: Most of our Pio's job involved overseeing the county jail,
Speaker 1: where people arrested for minor bullshit were locked up while
Speaker 1: they awaited trial or served very short sentences. So his
Speaker 1: job is not to be the desperado law man. His
Speaker 1: job is very much to manage a jail. That's the
Speaker 1: biggest part of what he's supposed to be doing. Joe
Speaker 1: immediately saw potential in his this job where his predecessors
Speaker 1: had not. I'm gonna quote from the New Yorker here,
Speaker 1: the voters had declined to finance new jail construction, and
Speaker 1: so in nine are Pio, vowing that no troublemakers would
Speaker 1: be released on his watch because of overcrowding, procured a
Speaker 1: consignment of army surplus tints and had them set up
Speaker 1: surrounded by barbed wire in an industrial area in southwest Phoenix.
Speaker 1: I put them up next to the dump, the dog pound,
Speaker 1: the waste disposal plant, he told me. Phoenix is an
Speaker 1: open air blast furnace. For much of the year, temperatures
Speaker 1: inside the tents hit a hundred and thirty five degrees. Still,
Speaker 1: the tints were a hit with the public, or at
Speaker 1: least with the conservative majority that voted our pile put
Speaker 1: up more tents until Tins City Jail held twenty inmates,
Speaker 1: and he stuck a neon vacancy sign on the tall
Speaker 1: guard tower. It was visible for miles. His popularity grew.
Speaker 1: What could he do next? Are Pio ordered small, heavily
Speaker 1: publicized deprivations. He banned cigarettes from his jails, skin magazines, movies, coffee,
Speaker 1: hot lunches, salt and pepper. Are Pile estimated that he
Speaker 1: saved taxpayers thirty thousand dollars a year by removing salt
Speaker 1: and pepper. Meals were cut to to a day, and
Speaker 1: our Pile got the cost down, he says, to thirty
Speaker 1: cents per meal. It costs more to feed the dogs
Speaker 1: than it does the inmates. He told me. Jail our
Speaker 1: Bio likes to say, is not a spa, it's punishment.
Speaker 1: He once in mates whose keenest wishes to never get
Speaker 1: locked up again. He limits their television. He told me
Speaker 1: to the Weather Channel, c SPAN, and just to aggravate
Speaker 1: their hunger, the Food Network. For a while, he showed
Speaker 1: them new to Gingrich speeches. They hated him, he said, cheerfully.
Speaker 1: Why the Weather Channel? A British reporter once asked, so
Speaker 1: these morons will know how hot it's going to be
Speaker 1: while they're working on my chain gangs. So, my god,
Speaker 1: this motherfucker so this guy who is two years out
Speaker 1: of selling space tickets is now who the U. S.
Speaker 1: Military's greatest typist of of the Korean War, has now
Speaker 1: decided that he's going to take his rage at being
Speaker 1: so impotent out on these guys who what like, we're
Speaker 1: busted for a dime bag, a dime bag, you know.
Speaker 1: They they have expired letta, they didn't pay a parking ticket, right,
Speaker 1: and they get a warrant out like all sorts of
Speaker 1: ship um and a lot of them are people who
Speaker 1: are accused of crimes. And again, as a general jail,
Speaker 1: there's two kinds of people in a in a in
Speaker 1: a city jail, right. There's people who have been convicted
Speaker 1: of a crime, but it's usually under a year in sentence,
Speaker 1: so they're doing like three to six months or something
Speaker 1: to go to prison. Yeah, Or it's somebody who has
Speaker 1: been arrested and is accused of a crime but has
Speaker 1: not been convicted. A significant, if a majority, generally people
Speaker 1: into jail are people who are legally innocent, right because
Speaker 1: they have not been proven guilty. And that's the way
Speaker 1: the system works. But Joe's whole thing is is punish
Speaker 1: them and and do it in a very showy way.
Speaker 1: And he's not doing this because it's good for anything.
Speaker 1: And he's not even doing this. No, no, sorry, an
Speaker 1: I mean interrupt, but look, I'm just as somebody who
Speaker 1: lived through that time. This was also the peak of
Speaker 1: like drug war, super predator hysteria, you know what i mean. Exist.
Speaker 1: This was like the time when you know, uh, you
Speaker 1: were not that people vital the law. We're not criminals.
Speaker 1: There are animals and and you know that's when you
Speaker 1: get Joe Biden's crime bill. Uh that's where here in
Speaker 1: New York you get Giuliani time, you know, and all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, people were getting busted, some people that
Speaker 1: may even be on this podcast right now. We're getting
Speaker 1: busted for very any crimes. But at least when they
Speaker 1: threw theoretically this person into the you know, midtown south
Speaker 1: Um holding cell, they just help me there for a
Speaker 1: couple of hours and then you know, let me walk,
Speaker 1: not kept me in a fucking blast furnace. Yeah, where
Speaker 1: they feed you rotting food. Generally, it's it's said to
Speaker 1: be rotting food twice a day. The cheapest worst ship
Speaker 1: they can no salt. And again he brags about saving
Speaker 1: the city thirty dollars a year on salt and pepper.
Speaker 1: We'll talk about how much lawsuits of his jail cost
Speaker 1: the city. But like the real the point is the
Speaker 1: real purpose of this. It's not to save money. He's
Speaker 1: doing that because it's a good when he talks about
Speaker 1: saying when he's doing that, because it's a good campaign
Speaker 1: thing to say. Right, and in general, the more outlandish
Speaker 1: things he can force inmates to do, the more press
Speaker 1: he gets, right, trolls go with all of this isn't
Speaker 1: even necessarily to punish the prisoners as much as it
Speaker 1: is to get attention from the media because of how
Speaker 1: he's punishing, right, and to and to build support because
Speaker 1: a lot of specifically I can say from this, Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, my Joe R. Piot was very popular with
Speaker 1: members of my family, you know, because of because he
Speaker 1: was seen as like putting these putting these dangerous criminals
Speaker 1: in their places and like saving you know, people money
Speaker 1: and not doing any of this bullshit. Uh, we're too
Speaker 1: easy on dangerous criminals in this country kind of ship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know it almost it's like a troll, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Actually he's actually like he's trolling the media in this
Speaker 1: way that like now we totally get right, Like, you know,
Speaker 1: Trump is ship bag X says in order to provoke this,
Speaker 1: you know, pearl clutching outrage from from the media. But
Speaker 1: back then, you know, it was like him doing it,
Speaker 1: you know, in the jails, and I guess it was
Speaker 1: kind of like a Rush Limball move. Um uh, you know,
Speaker 1: a Rush Limball analog. It was just a way to
Speaker 1: troll people into coverage. It's fucking nuts somehow. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: but that's what I mean when I say there there's
Speaker 1: an element of him that is he will claim you
Speaker 1: know that he would kind of blaze the trail for
Speaker 1: Donald Trump. And there's obviously he's not the only guy
Speaker 1: who was, but he was a very prominent person who
Speaker 1: was figuring out how to use the media in the
Speaker 1: in the same way that kind of every every guy
Speaker 1: who's in that space on the that troll space and
Speaker 1: the right does today. He was kind of he was
Speaker 1: very early in that um and he's very early in
Speaker 1: using the Internet. We're gonna talk about that in a
Speaker 1: little bit too. But people love Sheriff Joe. He is
Speaker 1: incredibly popular right away because of this stuff, and as
Speaker 1: a result, every news report on his jail did really good.
Speaker 1: The numbers were always good, so outlets kept sending reporters
Speaker 1: his way. He was a big hit with the foreign press.
Speaker 1: The British and the Japanese and everyone else would send
Speaker 1: TV crews all around the world would come to report
Speaker 1: on his tense city and to film it. To keep
Speaker 1: them interested, he regularly developed new methods of punishing and
Speaker 1: humiliating inmates. He put them in black and white striped uniforms.
Speaker 1: He started putting them into chain gangs, a practice that
Speaker 1: had ended everywhere else in the country. In nineteen fifty five,
Speaker 1: to make more headlines, Joe created female chain gangs, to
Speaker 1: which he bragged were the first in the history of
Speaker 1: the world. I don't know if that's true, but that's
Speaker 1: what he bragged. And then his next big innovation was
Speaker 1: to start chain gangs for children. What so some kid
Speaker 1: is like accused of what like stealing ant or some ship,
Speaker 1: you know, fucking Elina car or something, and yeah, then
Speaker 1: they put the child on a chain gang. Putting a
Speaker 1: kid in a chain gang, so you can get another
Speaker 1: Swedish film crew to ask you to film your juvenile
Speaker 1: chain gang. Yeah, Now his chain gangs did work. One
Speaker 1: of the most popular jobs was burying dead homeless people
Speaker 1: in the county cemetery, but Joe was clear from the
Speaker 1: jump that their main purpose was to be a spectacle. Quote.
Speaker 1: I put them out there on the main streets, so
Speaker 1: everybody sees them out there cleaning up trash, and parents
Speaker 1: say to their kids, look, that's where you're going if
Speaker 1: you're not good, just like we'll lock you up in
Speaker 1: a chain gang if you're a bad kid. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: right wing media went ape ship for this. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Rush Limbaugh couldn't get enough Joe R. Pio. He was
Speaker 1: repeatedly praised on air, and before his first term was done,
Speaker 1: Poles showed that Joe R. Pyle was the most popular
Speaker 1: politician in Arizona. The state Democratic Party didn't even try
Speaker 1: to run a candidate against him in nine Joe was
Speaker 1: very open about the fact that his success had everything
Speaker 1: to do with the way he had gotten the media
Speaker 1: to cover his antics. He told the Phoenix New Times quote,
Speaker 1: since the day I got elected, I've been giving speeches.
Speaker 1: I'm going constantly. Everybody who wants me to talk, I talk.
Speaker 1: I feel I'm the elected sheriff. I deserve to go
Speaker 1: directly to the people. You can't rely on the press
Speaker 1: the media to tell the truth my name idea is
Speaker 1: like that isn't just because they see me on television.
Speaker 1: I'm out there talking to people constantly. But television was
Speaker 1: the vast majority of his publicity, and in two thousand four,
Speaker 1: The Phoenix New Times wrote more than of the events
Speaker 1: appearing in his daily duty calendar are related to stoking
Speaker 1: his public image. His only regular work related duties, according
Speaker 1: to the calendar, are two weekly staff meetings and speaking
Speaker 1: to classes of graduating detention officers and deputies. For a
Speaker 1: cop who loves to brag about his gun battles with
Speaker 1: drug dealers in Turkey, South America, and Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: During his thirty two years with the Federal Drug Enforcement Agency,
Speaker 1: our PIO spends no time at the firing range practicing
Speaker 1: his gun slinging skills. So of his jot time on
Speaker 1: the job is press related. So he's putting kids to work.
Speaker 1: Would you say like burying bodies? Uh? Yeah, some of
Speaker 1: his chain gangs are burying the corpses of of of
Speaker 1: of poor people. I don't know if the child child
Speaker 1: changangs are doing that. They also pick up trash and
Speaker 1: stuff Okay, So even if the kids are only picking
Speaker 1: up trash in the and ten degree heat while he's
Speaker 1: in his air conditioned trailer giving press interviews nine times
Speaker 1: a day. Yeah, yeah, that's his job. He's a he's
Speaker 1: a lovely man. Yeah. So there is some evidence that
Speaker 1: Joe's attention seeking behavior was not all the result of
Speaker 1: callous political calculu lation. A lot of it seems rooted
Speaker 1: in insecurity. When he first took office, he would spend
Speaker 1: months going around and asking strangers, do you know who
Speaker 1: I am? So he was he was really the fact
Speaker 1: that he brags litter about his name recognition. That was
Speaker 1: something he was like deeply insecure about from the beginning,
Speaker 1: is that people wouldn't know him. So he's there's an
Speaker 1: element of this that is just like craven opportunism, and
Speaker 1: there's an element of this that's kind of sad. From
Speaker 1: the beginning, Joe's attention seeking antics came with a horrific
Speaker 1: human cost. The first clear example of this came in
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety six with the death of Scott Norberg in detention.
Speaker 1: The Phoenix New Times wrote quote Norberg died of asphyxia
Speaker 1: after he was tackled by fourteen detention officers and strapped
Speaker 1: into the restraint chair. His head was then pressed forward
Speaker 1: against his chest and a towel was placed over his face.
Speaker 1: An autopsy report showed that he sustained numerous contusions and
Speaker 1: lacerations to his head, face, neck, and limbs. He had
Speaker 1: been stunned, gunned more than twenty times. There were burn
Speaker 1: marks up and down his body. Norberg's death triggered worldwide
Speaker 1: criticism of the Sheriff's office. The London based human rights
Speaker 1: group Amnesty International conducted a review of the incident and
Speaker 1: issued a nine report that states, although Norberg was reportedly
Speaker 1: uncooperative and engaged in bizarre behavior, his behavior in initial
Speaker 1: passive resistance does not appear to have warranted the extreme
Speaker 1: degree of force used, especially as he already had his
Speaker 1: hands handcuffed behind his head and was lying on his
Speaker 1: stomach on the ground when dragged by officers from his cell.
Speaker 1: They later find that he had been wow restrained, tasted
Speaker 1: at least fourteen times, and had his larynx crushed like
Speaker 1: his esophagus was literally crushed. When they eventually like find
Speaker 1: out like he's he's beaten to death while he is
Speaker 1: he is tied to a chair, right, so this is
Speaker 1: straight up murder. Yeah, this is this is like you
Speaker 1: read stories about the wild concentration camps which were before
Speaker 1: they established like the actual like physical camps, like the
Speaker 1: permanent camps and stuff in the early days of the
Speaker 1: Nazi regime. This is like the way they would get
Speaker 1: rid of people. You know, you you have a group
Speaker 1: of goons beat them to death with sticks, like it's
Speaker 1: that kind of ship. This guy was strapped to a chair, Yeah,
Speaker 1: tazed fourteen times, even strangled to death, well, beaten, and
Speaker 1: his throat got crushed in the beating at least o god. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's bad. It's bad stuff. Joe our Pile and his
Speaker 1: employees denied any wrongdoing. One of his top aids told
Speaker 1: The New Times that the restraint used by deputies was
Speaker 1: actually so appropriate that it's set a new standard for
Speaker 1: how to tension off officers would perform their duties in
Speaker 1: the future. Ye, that hold just killed somebody. We're gonna
Speaker 1: keep doing it. Our Pile claimed to be proud of
Speaker 1: how the situation was handled by his men. Maricopa County, however,
Speaker 1: paid eight point to five million dollars in a wrongful
Speaker 1: death suit to his family. And this gets to an
Speaker 1: important point because Joe would brag about stuff like how
Speaker 1: he saved the county thirty dollars by kind of out
Speaker 1: salt and pepper. But all of the brutality suits against
Speaker 1: his men called eventually tens of millions of dollars. So
Speaker 1: would you say eight million? Yeah for this one death
Speaker 1: bragging about thirty dollars in salt and pepper. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: his deputies beat a restrained man to deaf and it
Speaker 1: cost the county eight point five million. Good mathematics, good math, Yeah,
Speaker 1: makes sense. Now, this in no way harmed Joe's popularity.
Speaker 1: He won re election handily, and his second term contained
Speaker 1: more of the same antics. On July nine, he launched
Speaker 1: his boldest pr move yet, framing a teenager for trying
Speaker 1: to murder him. James Saville. Yeah, he frames a teenage
Speaker 1: boyfriend murder well for us an attempted murder. Yeah, go on.
Speaker 1: James Saville eighteen was a pyromaniac with prior felony convictions
Speaker 1: and a clearly tenuous hold on reality. This is a
Speaker 1: mentally ill kid with a record. Joe R. Pyle wanted
Speaker 1: something to burnish his tough guy wild West sheriff credentials.
Speaker 1: Since his day job was just talking to cameras and
Speaker 1: dreaming up new ways to make inmates miserable, he didn't
Speaker 1: get a lot of opportunities to look like an actual badass.
Speaker 1: An assassination attempt would solve that problem nicely, making the case,
Speaker 1: just ahead of his third reelection campaign, that Joe R.
Speaker 1: Pio was the kind of badass crime foe who risked
Speaker 1: his life for the safety of his community. James was
Speaker 1: arrested by heavily armed sheriff's deputies flanked by local news
Speaker 1: teams with cameras who had been informed that there was
Speaker 1: an assassination plot against the sheriff ahead of time. It
Speaker 1: was front page news all across Phoenix from another article
Speaker 1: by the New Times quote, they got what they wanted.
Speaker 1: Images of gun wielding deputies swooping into a parking lot
Speaker 1: and taking a bewildered and unarmed civil into custody filled
Speaker 1: the airwaves. News anchors gushed about how they were thankful
Speaker 1: that Saville's despicable plot had been foiled by vigilant deputies
Speaker 1: and that the brave art Pio had averted yet another
Speaker 1: a serious attempt on his life. Well, we took this
Speaker 1: guy off the street. Are Pio bragged and his best
Speaker 1: John Wayne inflection to a television news station after going
Speaker 1: home to comfort his wife in the cold the alleged
Speaker 1: foiled assassination attempt. He's back in prison where he belongs. Now,
Speaker 1: what the funk? How does nobody see through this? It's
Speaker 1: that's really frustrating question to ask, isn't it, Noah, Because
Speaker 1: it's obvious from the beginning almost that this is that
Speaker 1: this is sketchy. Um well, not to dumb people. I
Speaker 1: guess a lot of people buy the end of this
Speaker 1: because they buy into this like war on crime, that
Speaker 1: like crime is an organized force that's always trying to
Speaker 1: just murder as many cops as possible as opposed to
Speaker 1: crime being a pretty disorganized, decentralized, just thing that happens
Speaker 1: generally as a result of unmet needs, and that it's
Speaker 1: actually pretty rare, for example, a sheriff to be assassinated.
Speaker 1: M yeah, that's but yeah, he wants to be Batman, right,
Speaker 1: It's like, oh, he's foiled as too many times. Let's
Speaker 1: send the teenage eighteen year old boy. Now, our pios
Speaker 1: claim was that Seville had been building a bomb in
Speaker 1: order to kill him. As is usually the case, the
Speaker 1: people who were helping him build that bomb were undercover officers. Now,
Speaker 1: this sort of thing happens a lot, right and Seville
Speaker 1: and his family claim that they were entrapped by the
Speaker 1: mcs O, by the by the Sheriff's office. This happens
Speaker 1: a lot with people who are charged with crimes like this.
Speaker 1: And if you look at FBI RSS of you know,
Speaker 1: Muslim guys who were going to build a bomb, you
Speaker 1: often find some sketchy details, right like that seem oh,
Speaker 1: I don't know, this might cross the definition of entrapment
Speaker 1: for me. It's the same thing with those Boogloo boys
Speaker 1: who were trying to kidnap Governor Whitmer. Like you look
Speaker 1: into that case, there's some like I don't know if
Speaker 1: this this may cross my mental threshold of entrapment. Thing.
Speaker 1: It's fuzzy, is what I'm saying. You often find a
Speaker 1: lot of sketchy details, but almost never do those people
Speaker 1: win with entrapment defenses because it is extremely hard to win.
Speaker 1: To actually win with an entrapment defense, it happens almost
Speaker 1: never because the actual the threshold is very high. You
Speaker 1: have to show that the idea for whatever a league,
Speaker 1: a plot was being carried out originated with law enforcement,
Speaker 1: and that the person being charged would not have had
Speaker 1: that idea or would not have tried to do that
Speaker 1: crime without the help and encouragement of law enforcement. Um
Speaker 1: so you have to show basically they had the idea,
Speaker 1: they pressured the defendant into carrying it out, and that
Speaker 1: he was not predisposed to do it. Otherwise that's a
Speaker 1: high bar. Right. You can get away with a lot
Speaker 1: of kind of sketchy behavior without crossing that line. James
Speaker 1: Saville's attorney, a guy named Farragut, proves all those things
Speaker 1: in court. He succeeds in an entrapment James get like
Speaker 1: this very rarely happened. That is the level of factory
Speaker 1: that the Americopa County Sheriff's engaged in. He wins on
Speaker 1: an entrapment defense. That does not happen often. Just cloud Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, like there's been a million cases where an
Speaker 1: FBI agent has suggested pushed along some kind of wanna
Speaker 1: be terrorist, wanna be bad guy. There's I mean like
Speaker 1: terms really like literally several times a week you see
Speaker 1: cases or at least did see cases like this, and
Speaker 1: and I mean, there's hundreds of them, and I've never ever,
Speaker 1: never heard of an entrapment defense. Yeah, working even as
Speaker 1: you say, there's a lot of times that there's some
Speaker 1: pretty sketchy behavior, but by the cops, it is hard.
Speaker 1: It is hard as a cop to actually get to
Speaker 1: actually cross the line to where you lose an entrapment case.
Speaker 1: And they do in this like as an example of
Speaker 1: how of how egregious they're being. Um Now, despite the
Speaker 1: fact that he was totally innocent the entire time and
Speaker 1: was completely exonerated. Um And yeah, I mean basically I'm
Speaker 1: actually gonna quote from that article. And after the trial,
Speaker 1: jurors told Farragut, the defense lawyer, they were convinced that
Speaker 1: Seville had been a pawn and an elaborate media ploy.
Speaker 1: Our Pio had cameras out there waiting to film the arrest.
Speaker 1: Farregut says, the jurors indicated that this was clearly a
Speaker 1: publicity stunt. Now that's the best case scenario if you're
Speaker 1: this kid, right, you had completely exonerated. He still spends
Speaker 1: four years in Joe R. Pio's tent jail because, yeah,
Speaker 1: he gets denied bond because he's a terrorist. Who tried
Speaker 1: to assassinate the sheriff. Now, he and his family did
Speaker 1: win a one point one million dollars settlements. I don't
Speaker 1: know that that makes up for four years of hell
Speaker 1: like this. Um, not not at all. Uh. News articles
Speaker 1: published at the time suggested this could be a turning
Speaker 1: point in Joe's career, the moment when people finally saw
Speaker 1: who he was and turned against him. Um. It's true
Speaker 1: that the state Republican Party did briefly declined to endorse
Speaker 1: him for reelection, and that a number of former backers
Speaker 1: pulled away from him, but the voters did not abandon
Speaker 1: Sheriff Joe as a result of this, and in the end,
Speaker 1: he was re elected to a third term. The way
Speaker 1: he saw it, he was just getting started. And that's
Speaker 1: where we're gonna end for part one. Noah, Um of
Speaker 1: the Tale of shaff Joe, you just killed me in
Speaker 1: the gut. Yeah. That that was the big one for me.
Speaker 1: Was like, he faked an assassination plot. He locked a
Speaker 1: teenage boy up for four years over a fake bomb plot.
Speaker 1: Are you fucking kidding me? In his own no salt,
Speaker 1: no pepper, eat food, too nasty for dogs. Tent City
Speaker 1: that I mean, he thinks he's Batman, but that's like
Speaker 1: some super villain stuff. That is some super villain shit.
Speaker 1: And for the record, I don't think one point one
Speaker 1: millions enough for that kid. Could should have gotten like
Speaker 1: three or four million for that kind of ship. Honestly,
Speaker 1: if I'm like something, I don't want him money. I
Speaker 1: think Joe should then do a day for every day.
Speaker 1: He should do a day in his own uh city
Speaker 1: for every day I did one. That seems like the
Speaker 1: more fair recompense if that's the way we handled it
Speaker 1: when police uh lied or falsified evidence to get people convicted, Um,
Speaker 1: I think that would happen less. But I'm a child
Speaker 1: of Dallas, which had a big fake crub scandal that
Speaker 1: definitely impacted my feelings on law enforcement as a young man.
Speaker 1: So UM, good shit, good ship. Um, No, you got
Speaker 1: any pluggables to plug before we sail out? For the
Speaker 1: rest for this episode, you can find me on on
Speaker 1: the twitters at Noah Shackman um. And you can find
Speaker 1: my my publication at at rolling stone dot com. How
Speaker 1: do you spell r O L L something like that? Yeah,
Speaker 1: something like that. UM. Check out Noah's work when he
Speaker 1: starts at the Rolling Stone obviously, check out The Daily Beast,
Speaker 1: who continuously do some of the best reporting on the
Speaker 1: hell world. Um, particularly a lot of like really good
Speaker 1: Q and on stuff, a lot of yeah, um will
Speaker 1: summer right is uh yeah, it doesn't actually get to
Speaker 1: beat once we're doing a Belling Cat workshop. Yeah oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, amazing stuff. His book on quans coming
Speaker 1: out soon. Yeah, that's coming out soon. Um, you should
Speaker 1: check out my man, Spencer Ackerman's new book, Reign of Terror,
Speaker 1: which is coming out really soon. And speaking of former
Speaker 1: Daily Pace, uh folks, now we got the Daily Pas
Speaker 1: has an incredible crew. I'm so super proud of them. Um,
Speaker 1: you know you should go visit that website, Rolling Stone.
Speaker 1: I've heard they've done a good story or two uh
Speaker 1: once or twice in their fifty some years of publication,
Speaker 1: and figure we'll do one or two more. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems it seems like a good goal, one or
Speaker 1: two every fifty four years. Yeah. Man, um, noah, thank
Speaker 1: for being on the show. It has been a pleasure.
Speaker 1: And we will uh well, well people will be hearing
Speaker 1: our next episode in a couple of days, but you
Speaker 1: and I will immediately tear into another chapter in the
Speaker 1: life of Sheriff Joe. Um and just have a miserable
Speaker 1: time with it. So oh god, I thought this is
Speaker 1: where he's all going to turn happy, this is where
Speaker 1: he decides to dedicate his life to charity. No, there's
Speaker 1: no happy ending to the Sheriff Joe's story. No, I
Speaker 1: mean no, because he's still fucking alive. Man. It's crazy
Speaker 1: how long this guy goes without dying. Very Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: really still alive. Yeah, he's like ninety, he's pushing ninety
Speaker 1: at least. What the funk? He's like Emperor Palpatine. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he does look more like Palpatine every year. Um, he
Speaker 1: does not meet the high moral standards. He is a
Speaker 1: youthful unlimited power. Yeah, there's more accountability, uh in in
Speaker 1: the Imperial justice system. I think he's a ut nine
Speaker 1: years old. Yeah, spry al right, Episode one over h