Michael G. Lacey (born July 30, 1948) is an Arizona-based journalist, editor, publisher and First Amendment advocate. He is the founder and former executive editor of the Phoenix New Times, which he and his business partner, publisher Jim Larkin, expanded into a nationwide chain of 17 alternative weeklies, known as Village Voice Media (VVM).
The company focused on long-form, magazine-style journalism, and included such papers as the Village Voice in New York, LA Weekly, Miami New Times and the OC Weekly in Orange County, California, among others. Lacey's papers prized investigative reporting and set a high bar for writing. His writers won more than 3,800 writing awards, including 39 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, 67 James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards, 39 Investigative Writers and Editors awards, five finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and one Pulitzer for LA Weekly culinary scribe Jonathan Gold, the first ever for food writing. His writers focused on police misconduct, political corruption and abuse of power, and he and his reporters often became targets for retribution by political enemies and law enforcement. The most famous of these retaliatory incidents was Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's arrests of Lacey and Larkin, after the pair exposed illegal grand jury subpoenas that demanded notes and other investigative material from journalists at Phoenix New Times, as well as information on the papers' online readers.
The arrests of two prominent newspapermen caused a national outcry, and the county attorney dropped the case. Lacey and Larkin sued, eventually receiving a $3.75 million settlement. They used the settlement to create the nonprofit Frontera Fund, which donated the money to pro-immigrant organizations in Arizona.
Lacey and Larkin sold VVM to company execs in 2012, separating the company from Backpage.com, a classified listings site they created in 2004 to compete with Craigslist.org.
Backpage came under criticism from state attorneys general and nonprofits that accused the company of facilitating prostitution and sex trafficking through its adult, dating and massage sections. Backpage cooperated with law enforcement and moderated its site for illegal activity, but attorneys general and others demanded the site take down all adult-oriented ads, even though federal court rulings found the ads to be First Amendment-protected speech. The ads also enjoyed Section 230 immunity, which generally holds websites harmless for content posted by users.
In 2015, Lacey and Larkin sold the company to its CEO, Carl Ferrer.
In October 2016, then-California AG Kamala Harris had Lacey, Larkin and Ferrer arrested on pimping charges. Harris was running for U.S. Senate at the time. The pimping charges were twice thrown out based on the First Amendment, Section 230 and the AG's lack of jurisdiction, which Harris was aware of when her office filed the charges.
On April 6, 2018, the FBI raided Lacey and Larkin's homes and seized Backpage, removing it from the internet. Lacey and Larkin were arrested, held for a week, then released on $1 million bonds. They contend their prosecution is political payback for their 40-plus years in the newspaper industry, during which they made powerful enemies such as Backpage-critics Sen. John McCain and his wife Cindy.
They and four former Backpage execs face up to 100 counts of facilitating prostitution, money laundering and conspiracy. All six have pleaded not guilty. Their trial commenced on Sept. 1, 2021. After eight days and four witnesses, Judge Susan Brnovich declared a mistrial. During the trial, the judge warned the prosecution to avoid discussion of sex trafficking and child sex trafficking, which the defendants are not charged with, and to keep the focus on the actual charges of facilitating prostitution under the U.S. Travel Act. But the prosecution's opening statement and two prosecution witnesses both discussed child sex trafficking. The judge felt that the cumulative effect of the government's opening statement and the prosecution's questioning of these witnesses unfairly tainted the jury.
Brnovich scheduled a new trial for February 22, 2022. She later recused herself from the case. Federal Judge Diane Humetewa was appointed to replace her. In a Jan. 20, 2022 article in Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown reported the following: "A new federal trial was supposed to start in February, but it's been postponed as the parties battle over whether the case should be totally dismissed. In December, a district judge dismissed defendants' motion to dismiss; they responded by appealing to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals."
On September 21, 2022, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied the defendants' request that the court reverse Humetewa and dismiss the case because a new trial would violate the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on Double Jeopardy. The panel wrote that "the government’s misconduct" during the trial "was not so egregious as to compel a finding" that prosecutors intended to provoke a mistrial, the legal standard for dismissal in this instance. A new trial reportedly could take place in 2023.
Larkin committed suicide on July 31, 2023, a week before the second trial was set to begin. Humetewa rescheduled the trial to begin on August 29, 2023.
The jury returned a verdict on November 16, 2023, finding Lacey guilty of one count of international concealment money laundering and not guilty on one count of money laundering. On 84 additional counts against Lacey, the jury returned no verdict, with Humetewa declaring a mistrial on those counts. Of his four co-defendants, two were found not guilty of all charges, and two were found guilty on multiple counts.
In January 2024, federal prosecutors filed notice of their intent to retry Lacey on the outstanding 84 counts on which the jury was hung. In April 2024, Humetewa ruled on an outstanding defense motion made at trial, acquitting Lacey of 50 counts of those 84 outstanding counts, citing "insufficient evidence" to support convictions. The maximum sentence for Lacey's one money laundering conviction is 20 years in prison. Lacey was sentenced on August 28, 2024, to five years in prison and three years of supervised release.
On Sept. 11, 2024, Lacey turned himself in to U.S. Marshals at the federal courthouse in downtown Phoenix to begin serving his five-year sentence. Lacey's attorneys had already filed a notice of appeal and later asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to release Lacey pending the outcome of his appeal, which could take 2–3 years.
After several weeks in federal detention, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Lacey released while his appeal plays out, finding that Lacey was not a flight risk nor a danger to others.
The Ninth Circuit noted and that “his appeal raises a 'substantial question' of law or fact that is 'fairly debatable' and that, if determined favorably to him, is likely to result in reversal on the single count of conviction.”
Early life Michael Lacey was born in Binghamton, New York. His father was a sailor-turned construction worker. His mother was an opera singer and registered nurse. Lacey attended Essex County Catholic grade schools in Newark, New Jersey. In 1966, he graduated from Arts High School, an integrated public school in Newark, where he was a member of the student council.
Lacey credited his father for his early interest in journalism, saying his dad made him read the New York Journal-American newspaper on a daily basis. Lacey also started a newspaper in grade school.
He grew up as a "bright, bookish boy" who toughened up with age. On Lacey's knuckles are tattooed the words "Hold Fast," a famous sailor's motto that was also tattooed on his father's fingers.
After graduation from high school, Lacey moved to Tempe, Arizona to attend Arizona State University. He took one journalism class before dropping out to start his own student newspaper, which would eventually become the Phoenix New Times.
In response to the 1970 Kent State massacre and the U.S. incursion into Cambodia during the Vietnam War, Lacey helped organize a student demonstration on campus, demanding the U.S. flag at the university be flown at half-staff in honor of the four people killed at Kent State. Then-Arizona Gov. Jack Williams ordered the flag be defended "with whatever force necessary," but the head of campus security lowered the flag briefly to placate the students.
Lacey and other anti-war activists were angered by the Arizona Republics hostile editorial view of student demonstrators. The Republic's political cartoonist Reg Manning depicted them as "campus terrorists", showing a disheveled, long-haired student with a torch in one hand and a bloody knife in the other, and the words, "Hang ivy on me – and call me a student."
In a 2005 New York Magazine profile, Lacey said of the paper's founding: "We didn't want to burn down the ROTC building, we just wanted to lower the flag because it was the right thing to do. Somehow, we thought we needed to start a newspaper to get the nuances of that point across. And to have a little fun. Throw a little spirit of Mad Magazine into the debate."
A former employee of Lacey's wrote, "Mike Lacey was a Vietnam protester, an Irish kid from Jersey who'd dropped out of Arizona State." As an alternative to the ultra-conservative Arizona Republic, he started a paper that "would cover politics, culture and music for the sex-drugs-rock'n'roll generation."
Newspaper career
Founded by Lacey and several others, Phoenix's first weekly alternative newspaper was called the Arizona Times. The aspiring journalists behind it blew their first deadline, eventually publishing on June 9, 1970, with 16,000 copies, featuring a lead story by Lacey about a demonstration to honor Kent State's victims at ASU's Goodwin Stadium.
In the beginning, the paper's "office" was in a closet-like space adjacent to a dress shop in an area where ASU students lived in off-campus housing. There, Lacey and other early contributors could be seen pasting up the paper's contents "on white boards for offset printing." Lacey first sold blood then plasma to keep the paper going. The publication quickly made a name for itself by punching above its weight, with investigative pieces from Lacey about the details of Republican U.S. Senator Paul Fannin's arrest for DWI, and how the Arizona Republic quashed a story about a rising Republican star's secret files on local precinct committeemen.
Soon rechristened New Times, the paper was initially organized as a collective, with each person having an equal say in how the paper was run. The women's movement was ascendant, and women played a key role in the paper's content, contributing cover stories on the powerful old-boys club known as the Phoenix 40. There were also pieces on women's health and how to obtain an abortion in nearby California, where abortion was legal, unlike Arizona, where it was not before the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Roe v. Wade.
One of New Times''' early legal battles involved ads for a referral service for abortion providers in California. The City of Tempe sued New Times over the ads, which were illegal under state law. New Times lost the first round, but the Arizona Court of Appeals overturned the conviction and invalidated the law in question in the wake of Roe v. Wade.