Michael Lacey

In November 2023 a federal jury deadlocked on prostitution-related charges filed against former New Times editor Michael Lacey, but found him guilty Thursday of a financial crime related to the classified advertising website he co-founded, Backpage.com, that prosecutors said was designed to enable and profit from prostitution. The single count Lacey was convicted of involved a January 2017 transfer of $16.5 million to a bank in Hungary. The money-laundering charge, according to the indictment, said Lacey did so knowing the money represented the gains from illegal activity and that he attempted to conceal it. The deadlock on the bulk of the charges marked the second time that the federal government failed to secure a verdict against Lacey. The money laundering conviction comes with a maximum sentence of 20 years. Lacey and James Larkin originally built a small empire of alternative newspapers across the country. In 1977, the two bought out the other owners of the Phoenix New Times and began it anew with Lacey as editor and Larkin as publisher. In 1983, they acquired Westword in Denver, and over the next 15 years, added papers in Miami, Dallas, Houston, San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 2005, they bought the parent company of the venerable Village Voice in New York. Lacey and Larkin were also the subjects of a late-night raid and arrest in 2007 in what was widely viewed as a politically motivated arrest by Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s deputies after the New Times published details of a grand-jury matter. They sued and received a $3.75 million settlement from Maricopa County in 2013, and donated $2 million of that to Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. In September 2012, Lacey and co-owner Larkin agreed to sell their newspaper company to a newly created company owned by a group of the papers' editors and publishers. The men retained their interest in Backpage, a site they had founded in 2004.