Hey! You! Get off of my cloud!
Joe Arpaio, the 80-year-old lawman who brands himself “America’s toughest sheriff,” is smiling like a delighted gnome. Nineteen floors above the blazing Arizona desert, the Phoenix sprawl ripples in the heat as Arpaio cues up the Rolling Stones to welcome a reporter “from that marijuana magazine.”
Hey! You! Get off of my cloud!
The guided tour of Arpaio’s legend has officially begun. Here, next to his desk, is the hand-painted sign of draconian rules for Tent City, the infamous jail he set up 20 years ago, in which some 2,000 inmates live under canvas tarps in the desert, forced to wear pink underwear beneath their black-and-white-striped uniforms while cracking rocks in the stifling heat. HARD LABOR, the sign reads. NO GIRLIE MAGAZINES!
From behind his desk, Arpaio pulls out a stack of news clips about himself, dozens of them, featuring the gruff, no-frills enforcer of Maricopa County, whose officers regularly round up illegal immigrants in late-night raids, his 60th made only a few days ago, at a local furniture store. “Everything I did, all over the world,” he crows, flipping through the stories. “You can see this week: national magazine of Russia... BBC... Some people call me a publicity hound.”
“My people said, ’You’re stupid to do an interview with that magazine,’” says Arpaio, talking about Rolling Stone, “but hey, controversy – well, it hasn’t hurt me in 50 years.”
Arpaio is an unabashed carnival barker. And his antics might be amusing if he weren’t also notorious for being not just the toughest but the most corrupt and abusive sheriff in America. As Arizona has become center stage for the debate over illegal immigration and the civil rights of Latinos, Arpaio has sold himself as the symbol of nativist defiance, a modern-day Bull Connor bucking the federal government over immigration policy. As such, he’s become the go-to media prop for conservative politicians, from state legislators to presidential candidates, who want to be seen as immigration hard-liners. “I had Michele Bachmann sitting right there,” says Arpaio, pointing to my chair. “All these presidential guys coming to see me!”
The commercial highlights one of the 432 sex crimes cases MCSO failed to properly investigate and puts the blame squarely on Sheriff Arpaio.
The ad isn’t being released by a Political Action Committee but rather a single individual: local artist and longtime critic of Sheriff Arpaio, Devin Fleenor.
Fleenor is the creator and administrator of the popular People Against Sheriff Joe Arpaio Facebook page, which boasts more than 118,000 members.
“I wanted to hit Arpaio hard with this ad. I hope he winces when he sees it.”