PHOENIX — A federal judge in Arizona has sentenced former Backpage.com co-owner Michael Lacey to 60 months in prison, plus a $3 million fine on Wednesday, in the latest development in the protracted case launched against the website operators by the Justice Department in 2018.

The sentence was issued by U.S. District Judge Diane Humetewa after a two-day hearing.

Federal prosecutors had recommended last week that the three remaining defendants in the Backpage.com case — Lacey and executives Scott Spear and John Bruns — be sentenced to 20 years in prison each.

During the second day of the hearing, prosecutors reportedly referred to Lacey as the “Don of a criminal family” and “the same as a drug kingpin,” and asked the judge to order their immediate surrender to marshals because they represented a “risk of flight by suicide.”

As XBIZ reported, in April, Humetewa acquitted Lacey and his two co-defendants of 63 out of the 84 counts remaining from the case, launched against the website operators by the Justice Department in 2018.

Humetewa eliminated those counts after the jury in the first federal retrial of the case deadlocked on prostitution-related charges against Lacey in November 2023, though it found him guilty on one count of international concealment money laundering related to the operation of Backpage. Spear and Brunst were convicted of multiple counts.

Although today’s sentencing was supposed for those few remaining charges that resulted from the controversial, years-spanning prosecutions —  which led to one mistrial for prosecutorial misconduct — Humetewa initially “said that she will use even counts that the defendants were acquitted of to determine their sentence,” according to Arizona journalist Stephen Lemons, reporting from the hearing via X.com.

Lemons reported that after the lunch recess, Humetewa “seemed to reverse herself” on considering the acquitted counts in sentencing the defendants.

The judge also allowed victims’ statements from individuals and relatives that alleged they had beed trafficked through Backpage, even though the sentencing was only for the contested money laundering charge. No testimony was offered by any individuals affected by the supposed money laundering. 

“Essentially, the feds want Lacey, a longtime free speech advocate, to die in prison,” Lemons, the foremost authority on the case, wrote for Front Page Confidential, a Lacey-aligned online publication, in April. “They’ve already caused the death of Jim Larkin, Lacey’s longtime business partner, fellow newspaperman and co-defendant in the Backpage case.”

Larkin committed suicide in July 2023. He was reportedly exhausted by the financial burden imposed on his family by the federal authorities’ unusually lengthy and persistent campaign against him and the other Backpage.com principals.

Mike Lacey’s Courthouse Statement

Lacey issued the following statement from the courthouse immediately after the sentencing:

For over 50 years, Jim Larkin was my friend and business partner. His suicide is the tragedy of this prosecution. Larkin consulted with the nation’s finest first amendment attorneys throughout the history of Backpage and I believe he always followed the advice of the lawyers. That’s just who Jim was.

Law enforcement testified in court that they could not arrest anyone based upon the ads in Backpage. Nonetheless, within the 30 million ads annually, there are people with stories that are difficult to hear without heartache.

It is also true that I made no decisions regarding Backpage. It was a business and I did not work in business. I ran the journalists and editors. I wrote a considerable amount of columns and articles. Our writers won more than 3,800 awards, including a Pulitzer.

Much has been made that I opened a trust in Europe for my children. These funds were transferred at the suggestion of attorneys when FBI agents intimidated American bankers from doing business with me.

I was found guilty on one count of concealment. This is simply a mistake. Nothing was concealed. My lawyers filed a notice (an FBAR) annually with the same federal government that is now prosecuting me. The government knows exactly how much money is in the account and where the account is.

I have known fellow defendants Scott Spear and Jed Brunst for decades and know them to be both honest and honorable. The accusations against them are astonishing and flat wrong.”

The case against Backpage — dubbed by politicians from both parties “an online brothel” — was a central issue in the passing of the controversial FOS

Lacey, Spear and Brunst had requested probation in their sentencing memorandums, with Lacey contending that his only felony conviction was for a “financial crime that he purportedly committed upon the idea and advice of two credentialed lawyers, wherein all reporting rules were followed.”

Spear’s memorandum noted, “The government wants this court to believe that Backpage.com is akin to the worst pimp in the nation. Mr. Spear and his co-defendants wrongly became the scapegoats in a time of unprecedented hysteria surrounding sex trafficking.”

Journalist Who Exposed Arizona’s All-Powerful McCain Family Punished by Their Protégée

Lemon and others familiar with Arizona and Phoenix-area politics have noted the long-time animosity of the McCain political clan against Mike Lacey and his publications, due to in-depth reporting about alleged scandals and misdeeds over the years.

As XBIZ reported, Humetawa is notable in Arizona judicial politics as one of John McCain’s protégées.

Before being appointed to the federal bench, Humetewa served as counsel to the U.S. Senate Indian Affairs Subcommittee, then chaired by Sen. McCain. Upon McCain’s passing, Humetewa published an almost hagiographic tribute to the veteran Arizona politician and erstwhile Republican presidential candidate.

“I am among a privileged few who witnessed his work first-hand on behalf of Indian Country,” Humetewa wrote. “I feel compelled to write this because, as a tribal citizen, my life and the lives of my family and tribe were directly affected by the Senator’s work and will continue to be. What is more, I’m certain that my professional life would be quite different had our lives not intersected.”

Lacey and Larkin’s New Times “wrote critically about John McCain from the beginning of his career in Arizona, first as a Congressman, then a Senator,” Lemons reported in the same alt-weekly in 2018. “In the late ’80s, New Times columnist Tom Fitzpatrick skewered McCain as ‘the most reprehensible’ participant in the Keating Five scandal, wherein McCain and four other Senators attempted to influence government regulators in favor of real-estate swindler Charles Keating — one of McCain’s most influential financial backers.”

Operating in the relatively small, interconnected world of Phoenix politics and political journalism, Lacey and Larkin also greenlit articles detailing the outlaw origins of Cindy McCain’s family fortune — liquor bootlegging during the Depression — and her struggle with opiate addiction, all of which made them a target for the wrath of the political machine controlled by the McCain family.

Humetewa’s bio published alongside her tribute to McCain, proudly revealed she was one of the pallbearers at McCain’s memorial service in Phoenix.