Michael Lacey, 70, and his 69-year-old longtime business partner James Larkin—founders of the now-shuttered online classified ad site Backpage.com—were indicted in April, along with several other Backpage execs on a 93-count indictment accusing them of money laundering and facilitating prostitution, as well as several related conspiracy charges.
But even though their trial is not set to begin until January of 2020, and they each face what could effectively be life prison terms if convicted, Lacey and Larkin along with their Backpage underlings could now lose about $100 million in cash and property, as the feds are now “are aggressively trying to deplete resources” belonging to the Backpage founders, according to a report by the OC Weekly newspaper.
OC Weekly reporter R. Scott Moxley writes that in October 11 court filings, federal prosecutors say that “they’ve seized more than $97 million in cash from bank accounts around the world, including in the Czech Republic and Netherlands,” as well as millions more in cash and real estate in California, Arizona, and Chicago, Illinois.
In an interview in August, their only public statements since the government seized and shut down the Backpage web site in April, and arrested the site’s owners, Lacey and Larkin claimed that the case against them is the result of a personal vendetta by Arizona politicians, who were frequently the target of hard-hitting investigative reports by Lacey and Larkin’s Phoenix New Times newspaper.
“Part of the reason this has really worked is because you have Cindy and John McCain involved and they see an opportunity to even a score," Larkin sad in an interview with Reason magazine online. "We didn't really care what politicians saw in us. And that's come back to haunt us."
Critics of the government’s investigation into Backpage say that prosecutors should wait until Lacey and Larkin are convicted at trial, if indeed they are, before moving to seize their assets.
“This gives the government two shots at these funds—via civil asset forfeiture and, if this fails but the government secures convictions, via criminal asset forfeiture post-trial,” wrote Tim Cushing on the site Techdirt. “It's a Congress-ordained scam—one that separates people from the assets they need to fight criminal charges while they're still under the presumption of innocence.”
On Tuesday, The Napa Valley Register newspaper reported that feds were attempting to seize a $2.8 million mansion originally owned by Larkin and his wife in St. Helena, California. The house sits behind a gate on three-acre property.
Larkin’s wife Margaret is now the sole owner, and in April she agreed to put the property up as collateral to guarantee that her husband would show up for all of his court dates.
Photos by Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, Sacramento County Sheriff's Office
