Arpaio shows us who he really is: A bully with a badge

It seemed fitting somehow that Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s unmasking last week came on the anniversary of Senate Bill 1070. On the day that marks a largely irrelevant law that was mostly struck down as unconstitutional, Arpaio took his own giant step toward irrelevance on Thursday. America’s scariest sheriff admitted that he’d hired an investigator to look into the Department of Justice, which at the time was investigating him and his top deputies for abuse of power. And he admitted that his attorney hired an investigator to learn about the wife of the federal judge who nailed the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office for engaging in widespread racial profiling of Latino drivers.

The same judge who is now considering whether to refer Arpaio to prosecutors for criminal contempt charges.

Generally speaking, it’s not nice to try to intimidate federal authorities. But then again, intimidation has been the name of Arpaio’s sleazy game for years.

Just ask Dan Saban, who ran against Arpaio in 2004 and found himself the subject of a rape investigation. Arpaio opened a criminal investigation in a 30year-old allegation that Saban, then 17, had raped his adoptive mother. Saban claimed he was the victim. Regardless, the statute of limitations had run out, but not the statute of intimidation. Saban lost the election. He sued for defamation and lost, but it cost us well over $800,000 to defend Arpaio.

Just ask former Maricopa County Schools Superintendent Sandra Dowling, whose home was invaded in 2006 by the sheriff’s SWAT team, in search of evidence that she’d been stealing, basically, from homeless children. She was later convicted of a misdemeanor, for giving her daughter a summer job. That one cost us $250,000.

Just ask Phoenix New Times founders Michael Lacey and Jim Larkin, arrested in 2007 in the dead of night after writing a piece critical of Arpaio’s sidekick, then-Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas. That one cost us $3.75 million.

Just ask former Maricopa County

See ROBERTS, Page 13A