Backpage.com founders continue to wait for a trial date not scheduled until next year, when they will face charges of facilitating prostitution and money laundering, according to a 93-count indictment handed down last year, as AVN.com reported. But in a new, in-depth report published Tuesday by the venerable cyber-culture magazine Wired, the pugnacious, 70-year-old Michael Lacey and his Backpage co-founder James Larkin, 69, say they plan to fight the federal government on what they say are false charges.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Lacey told Wired reporter Christine Biederman. “I didn’t do what they say. And if they think they’re gonna punk me, they got the wrong fucking guy.”
The Wired article may be accessed in full at this link.
Biederman’s investigation, however, paints a more ambiguous picture of the Backpage case, diving into a trove of emails released by Backpage in 2016 under an order from the United States Supreme Court. The emails appear to portray the site managers attempting to cover up the possibility that classified ads on the site were trafficking in underage prostitutes.
The site put algorithms in place to automatically remove “problematic” terms from ads, such as “lolita,” “rape,” “fresh,” and “little girl.” The site would then inform advertisers which terms had been removed, a step that a 2016 U.S. Senate report characterized as “coaching its customers on how to post ‘clean’ ads for illegal transactions.”
Biederman’s report also details Lacey and Larkin’s defense strategy, which largely revolves around blaming any illegalities on their Chief Execitive Officer Carl Ferrer—who in April of 2018, about a week after Backpage was “seized” by federal agents and its founders and top executives arrested, “flipped” and agreed to cooperate with federal investigators, as AVN.com reported. in exchange for entering a guilty plea to significantly reduced charges.
“We had lawyers telling us how to do this,” Lacey told Wired. “The only way this was going to blow up was if Carl was doing something he shouldn’t have.”
One source who has worked for two decades with Ferrer told Wired that Ferrer was willing to cooperate with federal investigators because, as Biederman puts it, he “never shared Lacey’s and Larkin’s disdain for cops.”
Also, the source adds of Ferrer, Larkin “was never all that nice to him.”
At the same time, Biederman reports, the government appears to be turning the prosecution of Lacey and Larkin into an “asset forefeiture” case, which requires a lower standard of proof. Federal prosecutors may freeze a defendant’s financial assets based only on “probable cause” that a crime has been committed, with no requirement that the defendant actually be convicted of that crime.
Lacey and Larkin are not scheduled for trial until January of 2020, but in October of last year, as AVN.com reported, court documents revealed that the government had already seized more than $100 million in assets, including from multiple overseas bank accounts, from Lacey, Larkin, and other top Backpage execs, in what Biederman says is an effort to force the pair into taking a plea deal.
“The strategy is simple: No money? No lawyers. QED,” Biderman wrote.
Photos by Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, Sacramento County Sheriff's Office
