As the centerpiece of a high-profile investigative series, the Arizona Republic published a story suggesting Arizona Boys Ranch employees had mistreated and later murdered a troubled black teenager. The story was wrong. In compiling the story, two Republic reporters doctored quotes, failed to interview key witnesses and ignored contradictory information…
Just a couple of miles north of Interstate 8, where the freeway cuts through some of southwest Arizona’s harshest desert, lies a narrow ribbon of riverfront property that is one of the most productive farming areas in the world. A relatively few farmers there–perhaps 125–like to brag that they can…
As election day nears, so dawns the realization that by this time next week, we might not have Governor J. Fife Symington III to kick around anymore. As a public service befitting the gravity of the occasion, New Times has marshaled its vast resources to reflect on what we and…
Last spring, the state’s largest daily newspaper launched an expensive legal challenge to force the federal Resolution Trust Corporation to unseal hundreds of pages of documents filed in its $217 million lawsuit against Governor J. Fife Symington III and other officials of the failed Southwest Savings and Loan. Over the…
While Tempe attorney Barbara Ross was preparing to represent a client in a civil trial, her former husband was busy, too. He was quietly convincing a Maricopa County Superior Court judge that Ross had suffered a serious relapse of mental illness. She was, the ex-husband contended in mid-July, unfit to…
These are troubled times for University of Arizona astronomers. Their 15-year effort to build a $200 million, seven-telescope observatory atop Mount Graham in southeastern Arizona is in jeopardy. Environmentalists hope to prevail soon in a long and bitter battle to keep the project out of 470 acres of old-growth spruce…
“Here we go!” exclaims Phoenix Mayor Thelda Williams, cutting a yellow ribbon and watching it flutter to her feet. Ribbon cuttings come with the mayoral turf, but Williams’ wielding of the ceremonial scissors last Saturday at a north Phoenix manufacturing plant was spiced with irony. For the past six months,…
The calls started rolling in early last Thursday morning. CIGNA employees were calling to say that someone had emptied the New Times rack outside their Seventh Street and McDowell office and tossed all the newspapers into a nearby Dumpster. The employees said they wanted to read New Times’ cover story,…
La Donna Sell was talking to her son when she set down the phone to answer the door. Suddenly, she fell to the floor, as one spasm after another surged through her body. Writhing in convulsions, she lost consciousness. She had been struck by a grand mal seizure. La Donna’s…
Guided by moonlight, we easily slide through a seam in the chain-link fence surrounding the property and head for the back door of the grand old house. Built by Tempe’s only mayor of Hispanic descent in 1883, the now-battered brick-and-adobe home has become a tombstone marking the death of Tempe’s…
John Thul walks to the back of his nearly completed $8 million sheet-metal-stamping plant and gazes at the undeveloped rangeland stretching for miles to the north. His face fills with the distressed look of a man who’s been had. Thul points to a lone creosote bush, about 150 feet away…
It was New Year’s Eve 1991. And Dean Brewer wanted a little cash. Like he had so many times before, Brewer tapped into Charter Title Agency escrow trust funds at the Bank of America. And he simply transferred other people’s money–money held in trust for real estate transactions–into his personal…
Towering trees line the twisting country lane leading to the top of Seminary Ridge in the horse country of Lutherville, Maryland. At the crest of the hill, where Mays Chapel Road bears sharply to the left, lies an old wooden post marking the entrance to one of Baltimore County’s few…
Arizona Public Service Company is quietly laying off hundreds of workers at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station and replacing 200 union tradesmen with nonunion workers. APS, which manages the nation’s largest commercial nuclear power plant for a consortium of seven utilities, plans to eliminate at least 497 positions at…
When it comes to collecting samples of airborne radioactive dust, more is not merrier for the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station. Internal documents discarded at an abandoned workers’ dormitory in Tonopah (Secrets of the Palo Verde Inn,” June 1) indicate that Arizona Public Service Company concluded in 1985 that a…
Operating problems continue to mount at the Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station. It seems Arizona Public Service Company engineers have had a difficult time keeping a diesel electric generator running, let alone all three nuclear reactors at the power plant. APS manages the plant for a consortium of utilities. The…
Early last Wednesday morning, a determined caravan of workers from Arizona Public Service Company trundled into the dusty, decrepit desert town of Tonopah on a special mission. The crew, led by the utility’s cellular-phone-toting public relations chief, had been urgently dispatched to retrieve thousands of internal APS documents that the…
A management crisis is sweeping the rank and file at the state Department of Environmental Quality. Unfortunately, it has nothing to do with keeping the air clean, busting corporate polluters and making sure drinking water doesn’t contain too many strange chemicals. Instead, the agency–which was roundly criticized by state auditors…
Early last year, then-Maricopa County manager Roy Pederson found himself sitting across the table from two men who are not easily lost in the labyrinths of government budgets. Newly elected County Treasurer Doug Todd is a crusty pro who previously helped craft the state’s multibillion-dollar budgets as chair of the…
An illustration of an atom is one of the four symbols emblazoned on Maricopa County’s official government seal. It is there to reflect the importance of nuclear energy to the county, home of the nation’s largest nuclear-powered electrical generating facility. And that facility is especially important to the financial well-being…
Prescott is in an uproar because its own Chamber of Commerce motto, “Everybody’s Hometown,” is coming to pass. The problem is, not all residents are willing to share their hometown with everyone. The battle lines are drawn: Pro-growthers versus anti-growthers. The tactics are ugly. The outcome is uncertain. City Council…
Last October was crunch time for the North American Free Trade Agreement. Ross Perot had been babbling about sucking sounds. No one knew whether NAFTA could pass Congress. A golden opportunity to cut political deals was at hand. Deals were being struck not just in Washington, D.C., but in Mexico…
