“I’m having a terrible life,” said Colin. The two ladies who heard his lament burst into strangled hoots. Unlike some you might point to, this pair of women were not entirely insensitive to a man’s pain. One was even his mother. But Colin is only 5 years old. Naturally he…

Like many Arizonans, I want to believe both Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and his former colleague Paul Eckstein. Each man has an almost folkloric reputation for integrity. Yet the Senate hearings that have spawned a Department of Justice probe into Babbitt’s 1995 denial of an Indian casino permit…

Commentators gnashed their teeth and wrung their hands when Governor J. Fife Symington III was convicted last week on seven felony counts, but the rest of us rather enjoyed ourselves. I mean, before Symington, who amongst us could actually say we knew a bank robber? Yet we all know the…

J. Fife Symington III’s former secretary, Joyce Riebel, offered the Rosemary Woods defense in court last week. Riebel poleaxed court observers by claiming the governor’s crooked financial statements were partly the result of her typing errors. She added that her word processor caused the banking fraud. Riebel claimed that when…

Last week, a local jury said it was not absolutely convinced that former gubernatorial aide George Leckie was a crooked moron. This was surprising news. Leckie, after all, was so intoxicated with the potential for living off the government teat that he once tried to palm off a swanky resort…

The waiting, at long last, is over. The governor of Arizona is on trial. After seven years of incriminating news reports followed by the governor’s vague denials, J. Fife Symington III now sits in front of a jury. Make no mistake. He is guilty. He swindled his mother the heiress,…

Before going to bed at night, Richie Blandon usually took his school clothes to the kitchen sink. He washed the blue slacks and the white shirt as best he could. Richie never quite got the hang of planning out how long his one set of school clothes took to dry…

In 1994, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, ignited a firestorm when he suggested that welfare reform might require a good dose of Father Flanagan’s Boys Town–in other words, institutional homes, orphanages!–to deal with the children of the poor. Gingrich’s solution was not politically adept, but…

I don’t much care for the current press frenzy about the possibility of America West Airlines jets blowing up, crashing into mountaintops, the passenger cabins cartwheeling through forests as torsos are cut in half by those stupid safety belts that are supposed to save your doomed behind when the airplane…

The 23-count federal indictment of Governor Fife Symington is a positive step for democracy in Arizona. The trial will make public, and notorious, business dealings that prosecutors have exposed in grand jury confidentiality. The only thing better than the indictment will be Symington’s conviction. Do not be misled by the…

My parents were the sort of folks, God bless them, who taught me that it is not very polite to poke a sharp stick into the eye of a handicapped person, unless of course you are jabbing a farmer or one of his kin. Dad, a suspicious, big-city greaser, didn’t…

Deborah Vasquez’s credibility was an issue from day one for anyone examining County Attorney Richard Romley’s investigation of alleged wrongdoing in the Arizona Attorney General’s Office. It was Vasquez, after all, who made many of the claims that Romley’s office spent ten months probing. Often, those claims were exaggerated or…

Attorney General Grant Woods and County Attorney Richard Romley collided at opposing press conferences last Wednesday, slamming together like a pair of sumo wrestlers with microphones sandwiched between their sweaty haunches. The sound from the slap of angry flesh inspired alarmed stories in the daily press and endless argument on…

Deborah Vasquez recently gave a television reporter the transcripts of a tape recording made during an undercover investigation by the Arizona Attorney General’s Office. Vasquez had quit her position as secretary to first assistant attorney general Rob Carey in a hotly contested dispute last May. Since then, she has been…

From the beginning of his public career, Fife Symington has managed to survive amid a morass of white-collar-fraud allegations. Though they tarnished him, all of the scandals came with bravura denials from Symington that inspired the faithful. There was always an excuse and, in the case of Richard Romley’s investigation…

Anna Ott was a youngster whose troubles nestled into the souls of friends and strangers alike. At the age of 2, her arms and legs were amputated that she might survive a rare and pernicious disease. In this precarious state, 5-year-old Anna did not even have the comfort of her…

As the stylishly draped litigator who ran Attorney General Grant Woods’ staff of 301 lawyers, Rob Carey was the most powerful prosecutor in Arizona. Carey is cocky, urbane and intellectually intimidating, attributes that might have hung more gracefully from the frame of an older, less ambitious man; having taken over…

Patrols of cheery individuals in bright blazers will soon leaflet downtown Phoenix announcing that the homeless are no longer with us. These civic boosters will be hired from a security agency and their primary purpose will be to tell potential shoppers that there is no longer a threat downtown from…

Last week, Governor Fife Symington told the howler monkeys who listen to KFYI talk radio that he was the victim of “a legal ambush” in bankruptcy court. From the governor’s tone of shock, you’d think the bankruptcy lawyers sprang upon him during his morning shower. In any case, the question…

He is beginning to act peculiar in public. Governor Fife Symington is now comparing himself to – are you sitting down? – Thomas Jefferson. On Saturday, he made the comparison in a front-page story in the Los Angeles Times, saying that both he and Jefferson were men of great political…

They nailed Al Capone on his taxes, and now the feds are taking a hard look at Governor Fife Symington’s tax returns. It makes sense, doesn’t it? Symington cheated those who banked at Southwest Savings and Loan on the $30 million Esplanade investment; he cheated the taxpayers who had to…

Le Big MacFor two years, a federal grand jury has investigated Governor Fife Symington’s business dealings. The state’s chief executive is suspected of being the Mac Daddy of phony financial statements. Financial statements are the backbone of all loans, credit lines, investments, partnerships, debt restructuring, write-downs and all the other…