James Anthony Larkin (June 16, 1949 – July 31, 2023) was an American publisher and journalist in Phoenix, Arizona, known for his influence in the alternative newspaper industry.

The U.S. Department of Justice later convened a federal grand jury to investigate the company and in April 2018, the FBI arrested Larkin, Lacey and several others on charges of facilitating prostitution, money laundering, and conspiracy, with Ferrer turning state's evidence and promising to testify against his former employers in exchange for leniency.

[11] On September 14, Brnovich granted a defense motion for mistrial, "after deciding prosecutors had too many references to child sex trafficking in a case where no one faced such a charge," according to the Associated Press.

[17] The panel wrote that "the government’s misconduct" during the trial "was not so egregious as to compel a finding" that prosecutors intended to provoke a mistrial, the legal standard for dismissal in this instance.

With Lacey not yet in Phoenix, Larkin and then-editor Geoff O'Connell decided to run the IRE report, giving their struggling paper an exclusive, routing the Republic on its own turf.

[28] As Larkin told Phoenix Magazine in 1990, he was determined to be involved in the newspaper industry from a young age "because I knew it would be fun" and because "it had a power that was exponentially greater than it should have .

"[28] The New Times editorial formula combined long-form, magazine-style, investigative and enterprise journalism with cultural criticism and food and music reporting.

[39] PNT was inspired by student protests against the Vietnam War, and throughout its history, the paper agitated on behalf of the First Amendment and even broader free speech rights.

The first edition of the paper covered an anti-war demonstration at ASU and a simultaneous counterdemonstration by construction workers, aka, "hard hats," who took offense to the students' cause.

[4][41] Larkin once described the paper's "stubborn approach to bureaucrats telling us "you can't do that" or "we're not going to allow you to do that", adding, "We knew what our rights were to distribute opinion and news".

[46][47][48] Larkin and Lacey's most storied First Amendment battle was with Sheriff Arpaio, whom the paper had covered extensively since he was first elected in 1992 to be the top lawman of the state's most populous county.

)[56] In 2007, Arpaio's political ally, County Attorney Andrew Thomas, appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the supposed violation, Phoenix attorney Dennis Wilenchik, who issued broad grand jury subpoenas seeking detailed information on anyone who had visited the PNT website since 2004, in addition to any and all documents related to stories written about Arpaio by three PNT reporters.

[57] When Wilenchik allegedly sought to have an ex parte meeting with the judge in the case, both Larkin and Lacey authored a double-bylined October 18, 2007, cover story for PNT revealing the existence of the grand jury subpoenas, a misdemeanor under state law.

[67] The following are PNT's major acquisitions from 1983 to 2005: Ultimately, the Internet devoured advertising profits, in no small part due to the rise of Craigslist, which allowed users to post most ads to its site for free.

"[103] Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster later confessed some remorse over the decision to remove the adult section, stating in an interview, "For a long time we tried to do what, in our minds, was the principled thing.

Senator, Sen. McCain supported the nominations of two persons to the federal bench who would ultimately sit on the case, U.S. District Court Judges Susan Brnovich and Diane Humetewa.

[93] Backpage used both automated and human moderation (more than 100 persons at a time) to filter for signs of possible illegal content, such as nudity or any of a list of 26,000 terms, URLs, email addresses, etc.

[125] Backpage fought back with a litany of wins in state and federal courts, while VVM's writers and editors debunked the frenzy over sex trafficking as a "moral panic", being driven by various NGOs, politicians and activists such as Cindy McCain.

In it, Conklin, Cizmar and Hinman disproved a much-repeated factoid that actor and anti-sex work activist Ashton Kutcher had recently repeated on a CNN talk show as Gospel: That there are "between 100,000 and 300,000 child sex slaves in the United States today".

The unsigned piece states: "Backpage dedicates hundreds of staff to screen adult classifieds in order to keep juveniles off the site and to work proactively with law enforcement in their efforts to locate victims.

Writing about Larkin and Lacey in an exclusive "inside look" at the federal case against them, published in August 2018, Reason senior editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown observed the following about the significance of the VVM sex-trafficking series in concert with Backpage's legal battles:"Perhaps most importantly, Lacey, Larkin, and their papers refused to sign onto the idea that America was in the midst of a child sex-trafficking epidemic or that Backpage was part of the problem.

Village Voice reporters pushed back in print against New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof's whopper-filled op-eds on Backpage, Ashton Kutcher's 'Real Men Don't Buy Sex' campaign, and emerging Super Bowl sex-trafficking myths.

[150][151][152] Judges in these cases found that Backpage was protected both by the First Amendment and by the CDA's Section 230, which largely holds interactive computer services harmless for user-generated content.

[160] The combination of the First Amendment and Section 230 seemed to offer a stalwart shield for Backpage against civil and criminal action, so much so that in July 2013, 49 state Attorneys General signed a letter to Congress, name checking Backpage and asking that Section 230 be amended "so that it restores to State and local authorities their traditional jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute those who promote prostitution and endanger our children.

"[161] In October 2016, one of the signatories to that letter, California Attorney General Kamala Harris, announced the indictment of Lacey, Larkin and Ferrer on state pimping charges, calling Backpage "the world's top online brothel".

[171] The report was released on January 10, 2017, the day that Larkin, Lacey, et al. appeared before the subcommittee, where they were harangued by angry senators (including the newly sworn in Kamala Harris) while each witness declined to answer questions based on their First and Fifth Amendment rights in the U.S.

The indictment centred on Lacey and Larkin, and accused them and other company officers of money laundering, participating in a criminal conspiracy, and facilitating prostitution.

In a Jan. 20, 2022 article in Reason, Elizabeth Nolan Brown writes: A new federal trial was supposed to start in February, but it's been postponed as the parties battle over whether the case should be totally dismissed.

Though the defendants had moved for the mistrial in 2021, their attorneys argued that the prosecution "goaded" them into doing so by engaging in intentional misconduct; specifically, by focusing too much on the subject of child sex-trafficking.

[17] Larkin died July 31, 2023, of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Superior, Arizona, eight days before his trial in federal court was to begin on charges he facilitated prostitution.