Turns Out Working for a Criminal Enterprise Makes for Great Journalism

When Mike Lacey’s newspaper company hired me as a reporter in 2003, I had no idea that one hot morning 20 years later he and I would be visiting his probation officer together.

Last April I was in Phoenix to visit Lacey, the godfather emeritus of the New Times chain of alternative weekly newspapers, and interview him for a documentary podcast series my fellow creators and I named after the faded blue ink of the tattoos on his knuckles: HOLD FAST. The old editor was regaling us over lunch-hour whiskeys when he got an email from the courts. After five years of wearing an electronic tracking gadget on his ankle—an extraordinary length of time, during which his felony case and a botched first trial wound through the federal courts—he was cleared to have it removed. The court trusted he would arrive at his trial a few weeks later. Monday morning, we went to the courthouse. He took a piss test, signed a few forms, and soon he was taking a long-delayed dip in his pool.

That was the most freedom Lacey had felt since the spring of 2018, when the FBI entered his home with Glocks drawn to arrest him, as his friends and family were arriving to celebrate his latest wedding. The breath of freedom was, as it turned out, short-lived. Lacey’s trial ended with a jury finding him guilty on a money-laundering charge related to his other company, the online classifieds site Backpage. That company grew out of New Times’ need to adapt to the internet, to keep paying for the reporting in its newspaper portfolio: Phoenix New Times, Miami New Times, Denver Westword, SF Weekly — and soon, after a merger, LA Weekly and the Village Voice, among a dozen others.

No matter your age, if you’ve been in journalism for more than six weeks, you know the lament: The economic models are all broken. Maybe your living will come from newsletters, a precarious salary at a traditional media outlet, or the bento box of odd jobs freelancers undertake. But for a very long time—pretty much the entire 20th century, until Craigslist expanded to cities beyond the Bay Area—the classified ad was king. Daily and weekly papers made staggering fortunes by running hundreds of these ads in each issue. Before Facebook Marketplace or Monster or Twitter or Tinder or LinkedIn or Autotrader or eBay, there were classifieds. They built fortunes and sustained newsrooms. Since the internet siphoned them away from journalism, the industry has scrambled to figure out a replacement. Meanwhile, some 3,000 American papers have shuttered in the past 20 years.

Founded in 2004, Backpage was conceived as a way to beat the web at its own game: a classifieds site built by newspaper executives, to pay for newspaper operations. Millions of people placed ads there. Many of those ads were sexual in nature, and eventually Backpage became known as the world’s biggest online red-light district. Politicians, police, and activists denounced the site for what they saw as overly permissive, perhaps even criminal support for prostitution and alleged sex trafficking.

Lacey and his longtime business partner Jim Larkin rose to the fight, claiming the ads were protected by the First Amendment. The feds eventually arrested them in 2018 and threw the book at them, charging them with facilitating prostitution and money laundering. They steadfastly maintained that they did nothing wrong.

As I write this, Lacey is scheduled to be sentenced in June. He could be sent to prison for 20 years. Lacey is 75 years old.

Larkin died by suicide a few days before the trial started. He drove an hour east of Phoenix through a gorgeous national forest of cacti, wandered around a favorite botanical garden and renewed his annual membership, returned to his car, drove up the road a piece, and turned a gun on himself.

Lacey and Larkin’s demise, gradual and then sudden, deserves a place alongside Peter Thiel’s legal hit job on Gawker Media as death knells for a certain school of knives-out reporting and writing. When media reporters like Max Tani lament the gutless temperament of American journalism—the dearth of “gleefully revelatory magazine exposés, aggressive newspaper investigations, feral online confrontations, and painstaking television investigations”—we have to count the prosecution of Lacey and Larkin among the contributing factors. With them passes, once and for all, the age of the alternative newspapers that for decades served as a sort of minor leagues for some of the top news organizations in the country, and which inspired fear and revelry in their home cities. They spent their careers savaging the most powerful people they could find, and were, after everything, not entirely shocked to find their enemies outnumbered their allies.

For us reporters who got to work under the skull-and-crossbones banner of a New Times paper (or Village Voice Media, as it recast itself after buying the Voice chain in 2005), the low-grade sense of a piratical venture provided a source of swagger. Who else would let writers take risks the way we did, if they weren’t prepared to menace someone on our behalf? “We turn loose a pack of fucking hounds to roam the goddamn city,” is the way Lacey put it to us last year.

(A screenshot of backpage dot com)

The stories we turned up were lurid, pulpy, confrontational, intricate. To cite just three among thousands: Isiaiah Thompson of Miami New Times won an IRE Award for breaking the story of formerly incarcerated sex offenders living under bridges in Miami. David Holthouse of Westword wrote about plotting to kill the man who molested him as a child, a saga he later adapted into a play. In LA Weekly, Christine Pelisek notified the world that the LAPD knew a long-dormant serial killer was on the loose in the city, a story that coined a lasting nickname: The Grim Sleeper. (The work wasn’t all so glum. Jonathan Gold won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about Los Angeles food trucks and restaurants in strip malls. And, hell, I won a Sigma Delta Chi at the Fort Lauderdale paper for a profile about a South Florida competitive eater whose specialty was wolfing down conch fritters.)

“We were given the freedom and the support to get the most powerful stories we could in our communities,” is how former Miami New Times reporter Tristram Korten put it in the Columbia Journalism Review. Pirates produced good journalism, as it turned out. Mainstream advertisers often quailed at the confrontational tone and counterculture stance of the weeklies. Undeterred, Lacey and Larkin pushed boundaries in business, to keep the ad money flowing.

Even if you never used Backpage, you probably knew it by reputation. The bright side for Lacey and Larkin, for years, was a cash stream beyond their imaginations. The federal indictment against them and other Backpage associates claimed the company raked in north of $500 million over its 14 years.

For Lacey, I can only imagine the rush. He started New Times as a student protest paper during the Vietnam War and sold plasma to scrape by in the early years. Eventually his newspaper empire made him a rich man. When New Times and the Voice chain merged, their combined revenue approached $200 million a year. Even amid those numbers, Backpage was an absolute gusher. Before it drew the scrutiny of activists, journalists, and lawmakers, Backpage was how Lacey and Larkin intended to defy the dead-end economics of running newspapers. That is, they paid their pack of hounds—us reporters—with the spoils of red-light advertising.

In the government’s closing argument in the case against Lacey and his co-defendants, I watched a prosecutor remind the jury emphatically that Lacey was no longer a newspaperman, and instruct them to ignore in their deliberations his long record as a journalist. In truth, I doubt a snapshot of a New Times classified ad window would’ve exonerated their newspaper days. Picture a line of women outfitted in day-glo Spandex, paying by the line for black-and-white ads in the back of the paper. 

We alt-weekly reporters always knew our workplaces weren’t fully on the up-and-up. If anything, the constant crackle of the illicit only emboldened us. It wasn’t until jurors returned their verdict in late 2023 that it became official: We had been working for a criminal enterprise all along. That’s not ideal, I grant you. But it sure beats not working at all.

Sam Eifling is a co-creator of the Audible Original podcast series “Hold Fast: The Unadulterated Story of the World’s Most Scandalous Website.” He lives in Brooklyn.