Inside Backpage.com’s Vicious Battle With the Feds (2024)

In Michael Lacey’s younger and more vulnerable years, his father gave him this advice: “Whenever someone pokes a finger in your chest, you grab that finger and you break it off at the knuckle.” Lacey grew up in the 1950s as a bright, bookish boy. His father, a sailor turned enforcer for a New York construction union, had little use for his son’s intellectual gifts. If Lacey lost a fight at school, he says, his dad “came home and beat me again.” But the boy toughened up, and he carried the lessons he’d learned into adulthood. He became a newspaper editor and earned a reputation as a down-and-dirty First Amendment brawler. Early on in his career, he struck up a partnership with James Larkin, a publisher whose sensibilities matched his own. Together, they built the nation’s largest chain of alternative newsweeklies.

Lacey and Larkin were heroes to many—micks from the sticks who made a fortune thumbing their shanty-Irish snouts at authority. Their papers went after mayors and police chiefs, governors and senators, Walmart and the Church of Scientology. They provoked outrage with their business practices too, by setting up Backpage.com, a kind of red-light district for the internet. As attorney Don Moon, the pair’s longtime adviser, puts it: “Their brand was always ‘f*ck you. We don’t have friends. We have lawyers.’ ” That approach served them well for 45 years, right up until the morning Michael Lacey found himself staring into the barrel of a Glock.

A few minutes before 9 am on April 6, 2018, a fleet of unmarked vehicles with government plates rolled up in front of Lacey’s multimillion-dollar compound in Paradise Valley, a few miles outside of Phoenix. These weren’t the guests he’d been expecting. The 69-year-old divorced father of two had recently gotten remarried, and he was preparing to host a lavish party to celebrate his vows. Tents were pitched on his lawn; retired journalists and overworked lawyers were winging their way into town. FBI agents informed the groom that he was being arrested on charges of money laundering and facilitating prostitution. They cuffed him, then subdued the home’s other occupants, including Lacey’s 76-year-old mother-in-law, whom they ordered out of the shower at gunpoint.

For the next six hours, the lawmen tossed the compound looking for, among other things, “evidence of wealth.” They seized art, cash, computers, even the bride’s wedding ring. Meanwhile, at the Phoenix airport, federal marshals awaited a 747 inbound from London. When it touched down, the flight crew made an announcement: Police would be boarding, so passengers must stay put. “I wondered who they were there for,” recalls Larkin, then 68, who was seated beside his son in business class. “I quickly figured out it was me.” (The Department of Justice declined to comment on the arrests.)

Partygoers soon received a cryptic text message. Owing to “unforeseen circ*mstances,” it said, the wedding celebration had been “postponed.” A notice went up on Backpage, explaining that the website had been seized “as part of an enforcement action.” More than a few guests completed the journey to Phoenix anyway; reporters can’t resist a story, and Lacey had already paid for a block of rooms at the Hotel Camby. They gathered at various local watering holes, offering what one attendee describes as “toasts to the accused,” and pieced together a gripping narrative—a tale of free-speech crusaders crossed over to the dark side, dedicated news­hounds become digital pimps.

Backpage, the domain that brought the federal government down on Lacey and Larkin’s heads, wasn’t much to look at—a bare-bones interface wrapped in Facebooky blue, similar to Craigslist in both form and function. Its name alluded to the old days of print publishing, when classified ads, especially ads for topless bars, escort services, and other sexually oriented businesses filled the final pages of alt­-weeklies and provided much of their revenue. Visitors to the site were greeted with several columns of links, which directed them to listings for various metropolitan areas around the country. From there, they could reply to ads or write their own.

Many of the ads—for auto parts, part-time gigs, vacation rentals, and so on—were free to publish. But the lewd stuff, listed under the adult section, cost money. For as little as $2 a day, users could post in such categories as “body rubs” and “dom & fetish.” The site’s terms of use prohibited any content that could be considered “unlawful,” “harmful,” or “obscene.” To gain access to the adult section, all users had to do was click a link confirming they were 18 or older. Once inside, they saw an endless scroll of titles, some laden with innuendo (“Cum lay your hotdog on my bun for memorial day”), others more explicit (“Three holes anything goes $90”).

As in the print days, these adult ads reigned supreme. In 2011 they accounted for 15 percent of Backpage’s listings but generated more than 90 percent of its revenue. By the time the Feds pulled the plug on the site, it was operating in 97 countries and was valued at more than half a billion dollars. People called it the Google of commercial sex ads, a platform that dominated its market as thoroughly as Facebook dominated social networking or Amazon did online retail.

The government indictment that triggered Lacey and Larkin’s arrests, United States v. Lacey, et al., includes 17 “victim summaries”—stories of women who say they were sexually exploited through Backpage. Victim 5 first appeared in an ad on the platform when she was 14; her “customers” made her “perform sexual acts at gunpoint, choked her to the point of having seizures, and gang-raped her.” Victim 6 was stabbed to death. Victim 8’s uncle and his friends advertised her as “fetish friendly.” The indictment accuses Backpage of catering to sexual predators, of essentially helping pimps better reach their target audiences.