I couldn’t be more excited. I’ve been a fan of TPM for several years now and am looking forward to being part of such a talented team. It may come as no surprise that this site, Heat City, took some of its early cues from TPM’s success. Talking Points Memo began 11 years ago as a one-man blog written by Josh Marshall. Today, it’s staffed by some two dozen people and has been credited for breaking open a few of the biggest U.S. political scandals in recent years.

One of the best parts of this move is that I’ll still get to write stories about Arizona from time to time, but now for a much larger audience. I have a lot of affection for this state. I got my journalistic start here, and I’ve called it home on and off for the better part of 16 years. In the past few years alone, that’s given me a chance to cover some remarkable people and stories. I’m glad to continue writing about it. So if we’ve talked in the past or if you’ve ever sent a tip my way, please keep in touch. Your insight will be as valuable as ever.

In the meantime, I want to thank everyone who has supported my work here on Heat City. Whether through a donation to the site, a prominent link somewhere or even just a kind email, this site was able to break some pretty good stories and win some awards because of your help. So thanks. Recently, the site has grown pretty quiet, mostly because I’ve been so busy as a freelancer. I suppose that means this is also a good time to call it quits here. I will keep the site online for archival purposes. But I don’t have any plans to publish stories here anymore.

I’m looking forward to what’s next. I hope you’ll join me for it.

Click for two-page PDF.

Federal agents were warned last year that a Minuteman group was planning to shut down a large section of freeway in central Arizona in an attempt to catch smugglers crossing through the desert, according to a secret law enforcement memo leaked last week.

The April 28, 2010 memo said the U.S. Border Patrol had received information that the group, which went by the name “A Concerned Citizen,” was recruiting people to help it shut down part or all of a 30-mile stretch of Interstate 8 between Casa Grande and Gila Bend.

The group reportedly wanted to carry out the operation to show support for Arizona’s strict new immigration law, known as SB1070, which had been signed by Gov. Jan Brewer five days prior.

The document didn’t say where the Border Patrol got its information, but it was clear the agency was worried about the development. It said the “tone of this information is quite unlike” that of better-publicized operations by Minuteman groups that had patrolled the borderlands.

“If this new operation happens,” the memo said, “there could be potential for human rights violations and a possibility of violence between armed civilians and smugglers or with law enforcement.”

The memo was among more than 700 files leaked Thursday by hacker group LulzSec, which said it obtained them by breaking into the email accounts of several Arizona Department of Public Safety officers. Many of the files, like this one, were bulletins from other agencies, marked as “law enforcement sensitive” and meant to be kept secret from the public.

In a statement after the hack, DPS said none of the documents appeared to be “related to ongoing investigations or other sensitive matters.”

Still, many of the files revealed incidents or plots that were never made public previously. Another memo leaked by the hacker group, for instance, revealed that Border Patrol agents found a roadside bomb along a smuggling route in 2009. The bomb exploded while it was being investigated, but it’s unclear whether anyone was injured.

In the memo about the freeway plot, a Border Patrol analyst said such activities had been stoked by recent events in Arizona. Specifically, the analyst mentioned the disbanding of the high-profile Minuteman Civil Defense Corps and the killing of rancher Robert Krentz, whose death, the analyst said, was “being touted as the work of a drug cartel.”

“It is not surprising that another contingent of Minutemen types has come to life,” the analyst said.

In addition to the freeway shutdown, which never was carried out, the memo also mentioned a phone call that a Border Patrol agent received March 27, 2010 from a man calling himself “Daniel Webster.” The man said the he and a group of “concerned citizens” had spotted several vehicles loaded with illegal immigrants on or near Interstate 8.

Agents searched the area but were unable to find the vehicles. The memo speculated that the phone call may have been somehow connected to the group planning to shut down the freeway.

A U.S. Border Patrol agent discovered a roadside bomb planted in the dirt along a known smuggling route west of Tucson in 2009, according to a secret memo leaked during last week’s hacking of Arizona Department of Public Safety email accounts.

The May 2009 memo, written by the Pima County Sheriff’s Department bomb squad and marked “not for public or media dissemination,” said the explosive detonated during the subsequent investigation. The document didn’t say whether anyone was hurt in the explosion.

The memo said the device appeared to be “moderately complex” in its construction. It was made out of pipe and wrapped in wires.

It was unclear to investigators at the time who planted the bomb or why. Law enforcement officers patrolling the area were told to be extra careful and to look out for similar devices. The investigation was handed off to the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as well as the FBI.

Although investigators didn’t name any suspects in the memo, white supremacist groups in Arizona have talked in the past about putting explosives along the border to hurt or kill immigrants who illegally sneak into the U.S.

A year after the explosive was discovered, neo-Nazis were spotted at a Tea Party rally in Tempe, handing out fliers calling for landmines to be placed along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Then in January of this year, a suspected neo-Nazi from the Phoenix area was accused of making improvised explosive devices to supply to border vigilantes.

The new memo was among 700 files leaked by the hacker group LulzSec, which broke into the accounts of DPS employees last week. The group claimed the hack was in retaliation for Arizona passing harsh immigration laws last year.

Click for four-page PDF.

Arizona’s state police force, the Department of Public Safety, went into something of a panic on Thursday night after a group of brazen hackers broke into the email accounts of a handful of officers and leaked secret law enforcement documents to the world.

The agency shut down its own website, froze parts of its email system and launched an investigation to try to figure out how bad the breach was and how it happened.

Yet in all the posturing and fist-pounding state officials did in the hours that followed, the question of whether Arizona has a strategy to deal with future attacks seemed to be lost in the noise.

Instead, the focus was on the seven officers, some of whom had their names, home addresses, cell phone numbers, passwords and personal financial information posted on the internet.

State Speaker of the House Andy Tobin said the officers’ lives were in danger. He dubbed the hacker group, known as LulzSec, “cyber terrorists” and called for them to be severely punished — that is, if investigators can ever figure out who they are.

Likewise, after getting its website back online, DPS posted a statement calling LulzSec a “cyber terrorism group” and saying the security of its own officers had become “the agency’s top priority.”

Gov. Jan Brewer, meanwhile, said nothing, despite her state’s own police saying they had fallen victim to terrorism.

There is no question the hacked officers are having difficulty now that anyone with an internet connection and a little savvy can download all their personal information. Some reported receiving harassing phone calls. A Phoenix TV station reported one of the officers planned to move his family out of their house for the time being.

But what officials like Tobin, Brewer and DPS Director Robert Halliday have yet to say — or perhaps realize — is that the hack shows Arizona was at least somewhat unprepared to deal this.

Put another way: If hacking seven police email accounts can send the state into a panic for a day or two and be seen as “terrorism” in the eyes of top officials, what will happen if hackers hit Arizona with an even bigger attack? Is the state ready for that?

Those are hard questions to answer without a full investigation. But LulzSec’s hack brought to light a number of surprising details, including what poor shape some of DPS’s computers are in.

In an agency memo leaked by the hackers, dated Aug. 25, 2010, Sgt. Gary Phelps of the Highway Patrol Division wrote about whether his bureau’s computers, which are scattered across offices throughout northern Arizona, were up to the task of running a new piece of training software.

One DPS office in the town of Wikieup, he wrote, “is equipped with two computers and a dial-up internet connection…One of the computers is old and can only be used as a word processor.”

An office in the town of Beaver Dam, Phelps wrote, had five computers and a faster DSL connection. But two of those computers were “older and only used for word processing.” In Springerville, two computers were OK and two were now only used as word processors. In Holbrook, two of ten computers were word processors only.

At office after office, the situation was similar. Officers were often working on computers so old as to barely function. Some DPS computers, particularly those in small towns, had the type of internet connections most users haven’t seen in almost a decade.

In its postmortem of last week’s attack, DPS said its officers at exactly those types of rural outposts were the ones who fell prey to the hackers. “Because we have people stationed all over the state, not everyone is on the same password requirements,” agency spokesman Steve Harrison told the Arizona Republic. The agency, he added, was now “in the process of changing that.”

The agency also put a statement on its website listing four “safeguards” it has in place to protect its digital records. The list includes having “industry-standard” firewalls and anti-virus software as well as having digital security staffers employed at each state agency.

On his blog, information security professional Jim Lippard wrote that the list represents a “less-than-minimal set of security controls” and could indicate how little the state’s police force understands the problem.

“It’s an embarrassing list,” he wrote, “which suggests they’ve had poor information security and continue to have poor information security.”

Lippard went on to provide his own, much larger list of questions that have yet to be answered publicly in the wake of the attack.

Meanwhile, the hacker group that broke into the DPS email accounts posted a statement Saturday saying it was disbanding. However, it pointed followers to another hacker group carrying out similar operations.

Click for two-page PDF.

The top law enforcers from 21 states asked Phoenix’s Village Voice Media Holdings on Tuesday to shut down the adult services section of its popular Backpage.com, saying ads for prostitution and child trafficking “are rampant on the site.”

The call from the attorneys general comes just weeks after the online classified ad giant Craigslist reluctantly removed its own adult listings because of growing criticism from law enforcement and child advocacy groups nationwide.

“We sincerely hope Backpage, like Craigslist, will finally hear the voices of the victims, women and children, who plead with it to make this important change,” the attorneys general wrote in a letter sent to Village Voice attorney Samuel Fifer. “We believe that ads for prostitution — including ads trafficking children — are rampant on the site and that the volume of these ads will grow in light of Craigslist’s recent decision.”

Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard was not among the 21 attorneys who signed the letter.

Lawyers for Village Voice, which owns the Phoenix New Times and 13 other alternative weekly newspapers nationwide, did not respond to requests for comment from numerous media outlets.

But the company just so happened to address some of the same concerns in a statement posted to its website on Sunday. The statement focused on a lawsuit filed last week in Missouri by a girl who said she became a victim of child prostitution at age 14 thanks in part to the fact that her pimp was allowed to advertise on Backpage.com.

The newspaper chain said it cooperates willingly with law enforcement whenever the case involves minors, as it did in the case of the Missouri girl, whose pimp pleaded guilty to federal prostitution charges earlier this month.

“Backpage.com has stringent safeguards in place to ensure that only adults use the site,” the company’s statement said. “We provided the FBI with the perpetrator’s I.P. address and credit-card information.”

The company said law enforcement agencies have asked for its help in only five cases involving minors despite the fact that there have been six million adult postings on its site.

Still, the fight for Village Voice Media is a financial one, too. While most classified ads on Backpage.com are free to post, the adult services section makes advertisers pay $5 for each listing.

A report by the AIM Group, a media and advertising research firm, recently estimated the ads have brought in $17.5 million in revenue for Village Voice Media. The firm also said its research found the ads on Backpage.com were “considerably more graphic and explicit than Craigslist ads.”

The attorneys general noted the money angle in its letter to Village Voice Media.

“We recognize that Backpage may lose the considerable revenue generated by the adult services ads,” they wrote. “Still, no amount of money can justify the scourge of illegal prostitution, and the misery of the women and children who will continue to be victimized, in the marketplace provided by Backpage.”

Even as Sheriff Joe Arpaio faces the most intense scrutiny of his career from federal investigators, local authorities and his own men, records released Thursday show his 2012 re-election campaign is raising money at a faster pace than ever.

The Maricopa County sheriff hauled in more than $650,000 in less than six weeks, bringing his total grab to about $3.6 million since winning a fifth term in 2008, according to financial disclosures filed with the county elections department.

That pace, more than $100,000 a week, far exceeds what he brought in earlier this year, when he was raising money at about $50,000 a week, and shatters his 2009 rate of about $20,000 a week.

The cash grab took place between Aug. 5 and Sept. 13, a time when he was running television commercials in the Phoenix area that said his policies were coming “under attack” from some of his fellow Republicans.

But despite his heavy local ad buys, the records show much of his fund raising is coming from out of state, with donations arriving from as far away as New York and Washington.

Arpaio also recently hired the Virginia-based firm Eberle Associates to help raise money. The firm calls itself “America’s trusted conservative fund raiser” and boasts of clients including Americans for Tax Reform and the Linda Tripp Defense Fund.

Still, most of the fund raising to date has been handled by Arpaio’s campaign manager, Chad Willems of the Summit Consulting Group in Phoenix, who was paid almost $190,000 during the same six-week period for his efforts. Willems did not immediately respond Friday to a request for comment.

All of this comes at a time when Arpaio has come under the most intense scrutiny of his career. He and his office have been under federal criminal investigation since 2008, with a federal grand jury meeting in recent months to determine whether to charge him or his associates with abuse of power.

The financial disclosure was also filed in the same week as revelations that one of the sheriff’s own men has come forward, claiming corruption and law breaking within the highest levels of the agency.

Arpaio’s next election isn’t until 2012, but he already has opponents lining up to challenge him. Republican Mike Stauffer has been campaigning since January and Democrat Dan Saban announced earlier this week he will run for his party’s nomination.

Stauffer’s last financial disclosure on Aug. 12 showed he had raised $445. Saban has yet to file any fund raising reports.

He tried twice to unseat Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and lost both times. But former Buckeye Police Chief Dan Saban is going to try again, saying Monday he believes he can pull off an upset in his third run for the office.

Saban told Heat City he gave the county notice of his campaign last week after being overwhelmed by calls to get into the 2012 race despite losses to Arpaio in 2008 and 2004. “I just got bombarded with emails,” Saban said.

Unsure whether he would ever return to politics after the last election, Saban said he spent the first five months of this year on the Caribbean island of Trinidad, helping train the nation’s police force there. When he returned to Arizona in late May, he discovered his supporters were already organizing for a 2012 race. The momentum was too strong to pass up.

“I came back to this groundswell of support that I didn’t even know was going on,” he said, pointing to a Facebook page with more than 1,400 fans calling for him to run. “It’s a fight worth being in — trust me.”

In an email late Monday, Arpaio’s campaign manager, Chad Willems, said the sheriff welcomes all challengers to the race. “Sheriff Joe Arpaio is a strong supporter of the right to free speech and the right of those who want to enter the political process as a candidate for office,” he said.

Saban, who ran as a Republican in his first race and as a Democrat for the second, said he is sticking with the Democratic Party this time. He cited the fact that he finished with more than 550,000 votes in the last election — about 42 percent of the total — as proof of having strong support from the party as well as from other voters.

“That’s half a million people who want change,” Saban said.

But the path to victory this time, just like before, is not an easy one.

Arpaio and his fellow Republicans have savaged Saban’s reputation over the years, largely using unsupported allegations of seedy behavior to go after him.

In 2004, for example, Arpaio’s office opened up a criminal investigation into 30-year-old allegations by Saban’s adoptive mother. The case was handed over to another agency and eventually thrown out but not before it was leaked to the media by Arpaio’s office.

Saban lost the Republican primary that year, taking just 44 percent of the vote. Arpaio won with 56 percent.

Four years later, after Saban became a Democrat, the state Republican Party funded a television ad that repeated those same allegations and added a few more. One allegation was based on an investigation the Mesa Police Department launched after a friend of Saban’s told an off-color joke about him at a party. That investigation was also dropped for lack of evidence, but it was nonetheless included in the ad.

The TV spot also brought up testimony Saban gave during a 2005 lawsuit against Arpaio. In it, he admitted to masturbating at home once while on lunch break from duty as a volunteer for the sheriff’s office in the 1970s. Because of the graphic language in the ad, some TV networks would only air it after 9 p.m.

Asked why he would want to open himself up to the same kinds of attacks for a third time, Saban waved off any concern. He said he hoped to make the race about issues, not innuendo.

“He’s never once attacked me on my professional experience,” said Saban, who spent more than 30 years in law enforcement, most of it at the Mesa Police Department.

Perhaps an even bigger problem for any challenger, however, is the reality that Arpaio has become a campaign fund-raising powerhouse since winning his fifth term in 2008 with 55 percent of the vote.

With two years until the next election for sheriff, Arpaio has already shattered every fund-raising and campaign spending record in Maricopa County history. He has put together at least $3 million and already spent more than $1 million of it to raise more cash and try to help his allies in this year’s elections.

This year alone, the sheriff has been raising money at a pace of more than $50,000 a week. By comparison, Saban raised a total of about $160,000 for his 2008 run.

But all is not rosy for the sheriff, either. He has come under criminal investigation by a federal grand jury looking into allegations that he abused his position as sheriff for political gain.

The investigation stems from a long-running feud between the sheriff and numerous officials in Maricopa County leadership. At one point in December 2009, Arpaio’s office was investigating all five elected county supervisors, the top two appointed county administrators and at least three judges, all of whom had other conflicts with the sheriff.

Arpaio’s popularity rating dipped as low 39 percent in January as a result of the feud. But it appeared to pick up later in the year as immigration become the state’s top issue and he contemplated running for governor.

For Saban, however, the fund raising and past polls mean very little. He is confident voters will see him as the right candidate for the job this time.

He is already starting to raise seed money and plans to have his campaign fully operational within the next several weeks.

“I can fix this mess,” Saban said. “He obviously underestimates my resolve.”

There’s only one company allowed to decide which businesses are the “Best of Phoenix.” At least that’s the message the Phoenix New Times is sending to anyone hoping to use the trademarked name of the newspaper’s annual list of what’s hot in town.

The alternative weekly and its parent company, Village Voice Media Holdings, filed their second federal lawsuit in less than a week on Wednesday against someone who owns a website domain name using the phrase “best of Phoenix,” which the newspaper trademarked back in 1997.

This time, the suit was brought against a Rochester, N.Y. man named Jeff Rogers, who operates the website thebestofphoenix.org.

According to the lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court of Arizona, Rogers was using the site as a directory of top-rated businesses in Phoenix and asking companies to pay an annual fee to be on it.

Lawyers for the Phoenix New Times claim in the lawsuit that this violates the company’s 13-year-old federal trademark on the term “Best of Phoenix,” which it uses as the title of an annual issue highlighting outstanding businesses, people and events in the area.

Under the registration through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office [pdf], Village Voice Media has the exclusive right to use the phrase in connection with lists of businesses and services.

The newspaper and VVM are demanding that Rogers take down his website, give them any profits he made off of it and pay as much as $100,000 in damages.

At least the first of the newspaper’s demands may have already happened.

On Friday morning, Rogers’ website was fully functional. It told visitors to nominate companies for the list by sending an email. “The Best of Phoenix site was designed to give you listings of the best services in Phoenix from reputable companies,” it said.

But then Heat City sent Rogers an email asking for comment on the lawsuit.

Twenty-nine minutes later, he responded with a short message: “I don’t have any comments on it, but to the best of my knowledge, there is no such site active at this time.”

Sure enough, the website had been taken down. Before it was pulled, however, Heat City was able to take a screen grab of the home page.

In subsequent emails, Rogers said he removed the site when he found out about the trademark.

“We are a very small business,” he said in an email, “and once I found it (sic) that it was trademarked and may be illegal, I made them take it down. We wont be reactivating the site at all. On to other projects for us.”

The lawsuit, however, shows that Rogers likely knew about the trademark more than a month ago. He was contacted on July 26 by a lawyer from Village Voice Media, telling him that the site was breaking the law and demanding it be taken down.

The home page for Rogers’ company, Webniche Marketing, shows that it operates other similar sites such as thebestofsyracuse.org and thebestofalbany.org. None of those websites appear to be in cities that have other Village Voice newspapers.

The new lawsuit comes on the heels of a similar suit filed by the newspaper a week ago. In that case, the New Times accused a former employee of buying the domain names bestofphoenix2011.com and bestofphoenix2012.com and attempting to sell them back to the newspaper for a higher price, a practice known as cybersquatting.

Both lawsuits land just weeks before the newspaper is scheduled to publish its 2010 edition of its Best of Phoenix list, which it is already heavily promoting with billboards and other ads.

The annual publication is a lucrative one for the newspaper, with the print edition packed thick with ads from local companies. The same formula, complete with trademarked names and branded websites, is used by Village Voice-owned newspapers all across the nation.

Contacted by phone on Friday, New Times attorney Steve Suskin said “the lawsuit speaks for itself.” He declined to comment further, but when asked whether the newspaper planned to file lawsuits against anyone else in the near future, he replied: “Not to my knowledge.”

Sheriff Joe Arpaio has apparently changed his mind about a candidate he recently spent big bucks trying to defeat.

Last month, the Maricopa County sheriff was dishing out hundreds of thousands of dollars to attack Tom Horne, a Republican running in the Arizona attorney general’s race.

Arpaio, a fellow Republican who wanted instead to see his ally Andrew Thomas win the GOP nomination, paid an estimated $300,000 for television ads linking Horne to Democratic President Barack Obama, accusing him of unethical behavior and saying he favors amnesty for illegal immigrants.

Horne, however, ended up winning the nomination anyway. He beat Thomas by 899 votes.

Now, the sheriff has changed his tune about the Republican who could become the top law enforcement officer in Arizona if he beats Democrat Felecia Rotellini in November.

Arpaio announced Tuesday he is endorsing Horne for attorney general. He now says he believes Horne, the current superintendent of Arizona’s public schools, is “the best candidate for this important job.”

He also said he believes Horne opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants, a full reversal of what he said in his attack ads.

The ads, which began airing in late July, were explicit about what Arpaio believed was Horne’s position on giving citizenship to illegal immigrants.

“Tom Horne favors amnesty for illegal immigrants, which would cost taxpayers billions,” the narrator said with a grainy black and white photo of the candidate plastered on the screen. The ad also said Horne had “falsely and unethically accused the sheriff of political retaliation.”

But when Horne released word of the endorsement on Tuesday, Arpaio’s was saying almost exactly the opposite thing.

“Tom Horne will enforce our laws against illegal immigration, will oppose amnesty and support SB 1070,” Arpaio’s written statement said. ” I strongly encourage voters throughout the state to join me in voting for Tom Horne for attorney general.”

Horne did not return a call seeking comment on the discrepancy. But he has denied in the past that he supports granting citizenship to illegal immigrants as part of any immigration reform plan.

In fact, Horne felt so strongly that his position was being skewed that he sued Arpaio two weeks before the Aug. 24 primary, saying the sheriff was breaking the law by airing the ads.

Horne said he believed the spots amounted to a back-door campaign contribution for his opponent. He estimated the sheriff spent $317,000 on them while contributions were limited to $140. “That is patently illegal,” Horne said in documents he filed Aug. 10.

The damage would be severe, Horne pleaded to the judge. He could lose the election because of it.

But Maricopa County Superior Court Judge John Buttrick declined to pull the ads from the air, saying they plainly also asked people to vote for Arpaio in his re-election campaign in 2012. Therefore, the judge said, the sheriff was free to attack Horne or anyone else. He threw out the lawsuit two days after it was filed.

Arpaio’s campaign manager, Chad Willems, told Heat City on Wednesday that Arpaio and Horne met sometime last week after a winner was declared in the GOP race. They sat down, talked and agreed to end their feud.

“Oftentimes in campaigns, there are misunderstandings,” Willems said. “And they got that cleared up.”

Willems pointed to a 2007 newspaper article in which Horne was quoted as saying he “would have no objection” to a plan giving citizenship to illegal immigrant students who graduate from high school and pass an extra test.

“There was some confusion in the air about the comments that Tom had made two, three years ago,” Willems said. But Horne and Arpaio now “see eye to eye on the issue.”

And as for the idea that Horne had accused the sheriff of political retaliation, Willems said: “They’ve aired that out, too.”

The primary battle between Horne and Arpaio’s ally Andrew Thomas was one of the nastiest in recent Arizona history. And the sheriff spent at least $400,000 in advertising during the primary, Willems said, though he wasn’t sure how much of that went to the ads involving Horne.

But that’s all water under the bridge now, Willems said. “He won. It couldn’t have hurt him that bad.”

The Phoenix New Times is well on track to publishing its Best of Phoenix 2010 issue later this month, with billboards and ads already heralding its arrival. But it turns out the next two years of the newspaper’s annual hot list have already hit a road block.

The alternative weekly and its parent company, Village Voice Media Holdings, filed a federal lawsuit Friday against one of the newspaper’s former employees, accusing him of Internet piracy and trademark violations for cybersquatting on the website domain names bestofphoenix2011.com and bestofphoenix2012.com.

The newspaper is demanding that the ex-worker, Ty Liebig of Phoenix, surrender the domain names and pay them as much as $200,000 in damages for refusing to give up the URLs when asked.

In an email late Monday, Liebig said, “I’m not aware of any lawsuit against me at this time.” He did not comment any further. He also has not responded to the lawsuit in court.

At stake for the newspaper and its parent company is a formula that has been successful for years.

The annual Best of Phoenix list, which highlights outstanding businesses, people and events throughout the Phoenix area, is a financial boon for the paper, with its printed version packed thick with ads from companies that are either on the list or hope to be someday.

The strategy for Village Voice Media, a Phoenix-based company that owns the largest chain of alternative weekly newspapers in the U.S., has been so successful that it replicates the list at its publications all across the nation.

As part of the local strategy, the Phoenix New Times buys specific, branded URLs to promote its annual issue and get readers to vote for their favorite businesses and people. This year, for example, the company has been pointing people to bestofphoenix2010.com. Last year it was bestofphoenix2009.com.

According to the lawsuit, Liebig likely recognized the success during the brief time he worked at the newspaper in 2008.

Though the lawsuit didn’t say exactly what position he had there, it did say Liebig worked at the newspaper from May 1 until Aug. 11 of that year, a little more than three months in all. It was during that short stint, the company alleges, that Liebig purchased the two Best of Phoenix domain names for himself.

Later, when the newspaper went to buy domain names through the year 2020, it discovered Liebig already owned them for 2011 and 2012.

Now, the newspaper claims it has a right to the website URLs that Liebig purchased because it owns the federal trademark for the term “Best of Phoenix,” which it was awarded back in 1997.

Liebig’s position is simple, according to the lawsuit: He wants to get paid.

As part of the suit, the company produced a series of emails sent between Liebig and Village Voice Media corporate staffers in early August.

“VVM aggressively defends its right to the exclusive use of this mark, and it would be compelled to take legal action against anyone infringing on this mark,” corporate executive administrator Elissa Blabac wrote in one of the emails on Aug. 3.

She went on to say that the value of the domain names was “less than zero” to anyone except the newspaper and its parent company because anyone else could be sued for violating the trademark.

Blabac demanded that Liebig turn over the domain names within 48 hours or face the consequences.

Liebig responded the next day: “I am open to and willing to sell those domains,” he wrote. “I still have not received an offer or what you said you considered ‘fair value.'”

A month later, the lawsuit was filed.

John Hay, the lawyer representing Village Voice Media, had little to say about the matter when he was reached on Monday. “The lawsuit basically speaks for itself,” he said.

He declined to comment about whether the company expected to win as much as $200,000 in damages it was demanding from Liebig. He said it would be up to the judge whether to award any money.

“It happens,” Hay said. “But what we’re really looking for is to get those websites back.”