Three Backpage Owners Sentenced for Money Laundering

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

The fourth owner, 73-year-old James Larkin, committed suicide on July 31, 2023, the day before his scheduled trial.

Backpage grew out of the Phoenix New Times and other weekly newspapers, which, like many such newspapers, ran weekly “personal” ad pages. As the Internet grew, newspapers began consolidating ads and publishing them on Backpage.

State charges against Harris were dismissed in 2017, but federal prosecutors intervened and launched an investigation that ultimately led to federal money laundering charges.

“The defendants and their conspirators obtained more than $500 million by operating an online forum that facilitated the sexual exploitation of countless victims,” said Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri, head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.

Free press advocates have used various terms to characterize this endeavor.

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

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

The three were convicted Aug. 28. Michael Lacey, 76, of Paradise Valley, Arizona, was sentenced to five years in prison and three years of parole; Scott Spear, 73, of Phoenix, was sentenced to 10 years in prison and three years of parole; and John “Jed” Brunst, 72, of Phoenix, was sentenced to 10 years in prison and three years of parole. The court also ordered all defendants to report to the U.S. Marshals Service by noon Sept. 11.

A noble beginning

First Amendment advocates and many other journalists have come to the defense of New Times and other newspapers for their militant work, noting that collectively the newspapers and their staffers have been nominated for more than 1,400 national literary awards, won one Pulitzer Prize, and been Pulitzer Prize finalists six times.

Lacey and Larkin transformed the New Times from an anti-war student newspaper into a comprehensive chronicle of the culture and politics of Maricopa County.

“New Times has not shied away from honest coverage of local law enforcement and influential figures — including Sen. John McCain and his wife, Cindy — or controversial issues like abortion, immigrant rights, and the 1976 murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles,” Reason magazine wrote in a 2023 article.

Among the legal battles they fought—and won—was one in which the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio demanded data on New Times readers; Arpaio was ultimately forced to pay Larkin and Lacey $3.75 million in a settlement, which they used to start the immigrant-rights organization Frontera Fund, as noted in an article in Reason.

But prosecutors focused on the sex ads and “began to demonize Larkin, Lacey, and other Backpage executives as intentionally spreading harmful content rather than as individuals providing 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. We never have, we never wanted to,” Larkin said in 2018, according to Reason. “It’s not really — I know this is probably heresy — to me, it’s not sex work. It’s speech. Although, of course, sex workers have an absolute right to advertise under the First Amendment.”

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