Three Backpage website owners convicted of money laundering

Kamala Harris and later the federal government called Backpage a “prostitution website.” The owners said it was a platform for classified ads. The government won, and the three remaining owners were sentenced to prison earlier this week.

A fourth owner, James Larkin, 73, committed suicide on July 31, 2023, the day before he was to go on trial.

Backpage grew out of the Phoenix New Times and other weekly publications that, like many such newspapers, ran pages of “personal” ads each week. With the growth of the Internet, newspapers began to consolidate their classified ads and place them on Backpage.

Charges against Harris were dropped in 2017, but federal prosecutors stepped in and launched an investigation that eventually led to federal money laundering charges.

“The defendants and their conspirators made more than $500 million by operating an online forum that facilitated the sexual exploitation of countless victims,” said Nicole M. Argentieri, principal deputy assistant attorney general and chief of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

Advocates of the free press used various terms to characterize the enterprise.

Bruce B. Brugmann, publisher of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, described the aesthetic (of the papers) as “desert libertarianism on the rocks.” The publishers expanded their alternative weekly empire nationwide, eventually issuing 17 free papers, including the Miami New Times, Westword, the Dallas Observer and The Village Voice.

But in November 2023, a federal jury in Phoenix convicted three of the site’s executives on money laundering and related charges.

The three were sentenced on August 28. Michael Lacey, 76, of Paradise Valley, Arizona, was sentenced to five years in prison and three years of supervised release; Scott Spear, 73, of Phoenix, was sentenced to 10 years in prison and three years of supervised release; and John “Jed” Brunst, 72, of Phoenix, was sentenced to 10 years in prison and three years of supervised release. The court also ordered all defendants to report to the U.S. Marshals Service no later than noon on September 11.

A noble beginning

First Amendment advocates and many other journalists defended New Times and the other papers for their combative work, noting that the papers and their staffs collectively had been nominated for more than 1,400 national writing awards, had won one Pulitzer, and had been a Pulitzer finalist six other times.

Lacey and Larkin grew New Times from an anti-war student magazine into a comprehensive account of Maricopa County culture and politics.

“New Times didn’t shy away from reporting honestly on local law enforcement and power figures, including Sen. John McCain and his wife Cindy, or on controversial issues like abortion, immigrant rights or the 1976 murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles,” Reason magazine said in a 2023 article.

One of the lawsuits they fought—and won—was one involving notorious sheriff Joe Arpaio, who demanded data on New Times readers. Arpaio was ultimately forced to pay Larkin and Lacey a $3.75 million settlement, which they used to found the immigrant rights organization Frontera Fund, the Reason article noted.

But prosecutors focused on the sex ads and “began to demonize Larkin, Lacey and other Backpage executives as willful purveyors of harmful content rather than as people who provided a platform for the speech of millions of individual users, most of whom engaged in protected speech,” as Reason put it.

“We have never, ever broken the law. Never did, never wanted to,” Larkin said in 2018, according to Reason . “This isn’t really about sex work, I know that’s probably heresy. This is about speech. Although sex workers of course have an absolute First Amendment right to place ads.”

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The author of this article wrote regularly for Phoenix New Times in the 1970s.