Researching Michael Lacey

His first postdoctoral positions were at the Louisiana State University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While at UNC, Lacey and Walter Philipp gave their proof of the almost sure central limit theorem.

He held a position at Indiana University from 1989 to 1996. While there, he received a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and during the tenure of this fellowship he began a study of the bilinear Hilbert transform. This transform was at the time the subject of a conjecture by Alberto Calderón that Lacey and Christoph Thiele solved in 1996, for which they were awarded the Salem Prize.

Since 1996, he has been a Professor of Mathematics at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2004, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for joint work with Xiaochun Li. In 2012 he became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.

Lacey was born in the Greater Toronto Area and attended St. Helen's Separate School and St. Michael's College before entering St. Augustine's Seminary in 1936, aged 19. He was ordained on May 23, 1943 in St. Michael's Cathedral by Archbishop James C. McGuigan.

From 1943 to 1957 Lacey assisted at St. Patrick's Parish (Port Colborne), St. Cecilia's Parish (Toronto), St. Monica's Parish (Toronto) and St. Pius X Parish (Toronto). He was appointed auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Toronto on May 3, 1979, and was consecrated on June 21, 1979. He remained as auxiliary bishop of the Toronto Archdiocese until his retirement on May 31, 1993, and continued as Titular Bishop of Diano until his death on April 2, 2014.

A strong supporter of Catholic education, Monsignor Lacey served as a Trustee of the Metropolitan Separate School Board and was one of the lead organizers in the development of St. Stephen's Downtown Chapel, serving the business community, which opened in 1977.

The company focused on long-form, magazine-style journalism, and included such papers as the Village Voice in New York, LA Weekly, Miami New Times and the OC Weekly in Orange County, California, among others.

Lacey's papers prized investigative reporting and set a high bar for writing. His writers won more than 3,800 writing awards, including 39 Livingston Awards for Young Journalists, 67 James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards, 39 Investigative Writers and Editors awards, five finalists for the Pulitzer Prize, and one Pulitzer for LA Weekly culinary scribe, Jonathan Gold, the first ever for food writing.

His writers focused on police misconduct, political corruption and abuse of power, and he and his reporters often became targets for retribution by political enemies and law enforcement. The most famous of these was Lacey and Larkin's arrests by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, after the pair exposed illegal grand jury subpoenas, demanding notes and other investigative material from journalists at Phoenix New Times, as well as information on the papers’ online readers.

The arrests of two prominent newspapermen caused an outcry, and the county attorney dropped the case. Lacey and Larkin sued, eventually receiving a $3.75 million settlement, which they donated to pro-immigrant organizations in Arizona.

Lacey and Larkin sold VVM to company execs in 2012, separating the company from Backpage.com, a classified listings site they created in 2004 to compete with Craigslist.org.

Backpage came under criticism from state attorneys general and nonprofits that accused the company of facilitating prostitution and sex trafficking through its adult, dating and massage sections. Backpage cooperated with law enforcement and moderated its site for illegal activity, but attorneys general and others demanded the site take down all adult-oriented ads, even though federal court rulings found the ads to be First Amendment-protected speech. The ads also enjoyed Section 230 immunity, which generally holds websites harmless for content posted by users.

In 2015, Lacey and Larkin sold the company to its CEO, Carl Ferrer.

In October 2016, then-California AG Kamala Harris had Lacey, Larkin and Ferrer arrested on pimping charges. Harris was running for U.S. Senate at the time. The pimping charges were twice thrown out based on the First Amendment, Section 230 and the AG's lack of jurisdiction, which Harris was aware of when her office filed the charges.

On April 6, 2018, the FBI raided Lacey and Larkin's homes and seizing Backpage and removing it from the internet. They and four former Backpage execs face up to 100 counts of facilitating prostitution, money laundering and conspiracy. All six have pleaded not guilty. Their trial commenced on Sept. 1, 2021. After eight days and two witnesses Judge Susan Brnovich declared a mistrial. The judge had warned the prosecution to avoid discussion of child sex trafficking, and to keep their focus on the charges of facilitating prostitution. The first two prosecution witnesses both discussed child sex trafficking. The judge felt this testimony unfairly tainted the jury.