New Times files a prelude to a lawsuit against Sheriff Joe Arpaio, County Attorney Andy Thomas and a discredited ex-special prosecutor on behalf of its readers and the Constitution

In mid-2004, Arpaio was in the midst of a pitched and ugly primary against challenger Dan Saban, whom MCSO officers smeared with the ugly and untrue allegation that he had raped his adoptive mother, Ruby Norman. Meanwhile, New Times writer John Dougherty was making serious inquiries into various aspects of Arpaio's rule in Maricopa County. He sought public records on the Saban investigation, information on inmate deaths, personnel files on certain sheriff's deputies, and information on the sheriff's personal real estate investments.

In a July 1, 2004 column, "Sheriff Joe's Real Estate Game," Dougherty revealed that Arpaio had invested $690,000 in cash in two real estate holdings in Scottsdale and Fountain Hills. Dougherty wondered if Arpaio was hiding ill-gotten gains, because information about this commercial property was redacted under a state law aimed at protecting law enforcement officials from harm. The law was meant to allow police officers to keep their home addresses out of the public eye for obvious reasons, but Arpaio misused the statute so that it hid most information about his commercial real estate. At the same time, Arpaio's Fountain Hills home address was available on myriad public and private Internet sites.

Dougherty noted that $690,000 in cash was a lot for a public official to invest, considering that Arpaio made about $78,000 a year, along with federal Drug Enforcement Agency civil service retirement pay of about $65,000. A week later, Dougherty wrote in another column about the real estate ventures again ("Stick It to 'Em!"). At the column's conclusion, he listed Arpaio's home address to illustrate the irony of its being so readily available while his commercial property information was hidden.

Months later, New Times learned that the sheriff was seeking to have New Times prosecuted under another state law that made it unlawful to publish a law enforcement official's home address on the World Wide Web.

The law was a throwback to a time when the Internet was considered newfangled technology. While making it a Class 5 felony to reproduce such a home address on the Web, the law made no sanctions against such publication in newspapers and magazines or on TV and radio. Indeed, even putting a law officer's address on a billboard near his neighborhood would be perfectly legal.

A required element of the Internet law was that the publication of an officer's address must cause "an imminent and serious threat" that was "reasonably apparent" to the publisher.

When Arpaio first sought New Times' prosecution under the arcane statute, then-County Attorney Rick Romley declined to prosecute. There seemed to be no real threat to the sheriff — though his top deputies have been fixated on the notion that "America's toughest sheriff" could easily be the target of assassination.

It's been as though his staff believes that, without anybody trying to kill the sheriff, Arpaio's hard-on-crime policies lose credibility. So the MCSO hasn't been above manufacturing a plot to make the boss look like a tough guy.

In 1999, Arpaio and his chief deputy, David Hendershott, attempted to frame 18-year-old James Saville in a phony bomb plot supposedly aimed at Arpaio ("The Plot to Assassinate Arpaio," August 5, 1999). TV reporters were called ahead of time to chronicle the teenager's arrest outside an Italian restaurant where Arpaio was dining. Saville's lawyer noted the obvious entrapment, and Saville was unanimously acquitted by a jury after the MCSO's unscrupulous antics were aired in court.

Last year, the Sheriff's Office revealed that it had spent an estimated $500,000 investigating a bogus death threat that involved such highly improbable co-conspirators as the Minutemen, immigrants rights activist Elias Bermudez, and hit men working for the Mexican mafia. On the word of a confidential informant who failed a key question on a lie-detector test about whether or not he was telling the truth about the alleged conspiracy, the sheriff's Selective Enforcement Unit (the same group that nabbed Lacey and Larkin) staked out a dairy in Tolleson and flew to Connecticut to interrogate a teenage girl whose e-mail was linked to the pseudo-scheme.

Most recently, the MCSO trumpeted the conviction of Matthew Carl Sanderson, a native of Canada, for making an Internet threat against Arpaio. The sheriff flew to Toronto for the three-day trial. In the end, Sanderson received just three months of incarceration.