Bill Boyle and Jeff Miller wheeled into one of South Phoenix’s meanest neighborhoods looking to score cocaine. The friends–both white men–had snorted coke earlier that night at the office. Now, they wanted more, and they knew where to get it. Lino Josytewa had been hanging out that evening, December 21,…
Sandy Tolan has been seeking the story beneath the story since he and a partner founded Desert West Research and Information in Flagstaff in 1982. Through his independent news agency, Tolan has done numerous stories for National Public Radio and other outlets over the years, especially shining with long-time partner…
Karen Ann Law didn’t know she had a “namesake” in Phoenix until last July. But this is not a cute, heartwarming story about two pals with the same name. It’s a tale of giving credit where credit should not have been due. Karen Law’s discovery has led to a War…
“When I got out of the army, I was working as a bouncer at a club back home. My family knows the Crowders, and I seen Crowder’s dad at K mart. He told me about this place out here. We hooked up, and Crowder asked me if I wanted to…
At first, it seemed like a routine shoplifting case, recalls Phoenix police detective Larry Stubbs. “I’ve been a cop for 23 years,” says Stubbs, who investigated the case late last year, “and this is the only time I can remember a shoplifter who says he was innocent who apparently was…
When Valley jeweler Rose Maxon saw the advertisement in the Pennysaver seeking new members for the Bola Tie Society of Arizona, it sounded right up her alley: “Good fellowship–Welcome. All must wear Bola Tie.” “I make bola ties and I like to wear them and look at them,” says Maxon…
The judge lights another Pall Mall and glances at the wall clock in his cramped chambers. He gulps down some coffee and flips through his docket. It’s 3:55 on a blustery winter’s morning, five minutes before court is scheduled to start. “Ah, coffee, the lifeblood of the jail,” says Judge…
In addition to presiding as an Initial Appearance commissioner, Alan LoBue is also a part-time judge at City Court, which is in session 365 days a year. So, LoBue spent his Christmas morning in the basement of the Madison Street Jail with 27 defendants, listening to holiday tales whose themes…
Even for drug-riddled Cochise County, the raid at the Hide Out Bar in Huachuca City was a doozie. Forty-five officers from eleven police agencies swooped into the bar and held 65 patrons–most of them bikers–at gunpoint for more than two hours while they searched high and low for drugs. After…
Former U-Haul technical writer Russ Korne has no quarrel with drug-testing in the workplace. “Hey, there’s a big problem in this country with drugs,” Korne says. “We have to do something. In my case, the worst thing they’d ever get out of me was last night’s Genuine Draft. And I…
The Hualapai tribal elder summons what strength is left in his failing body, and gets right to the point. “If my people don’t watch out, it’s gonna get a lot worse,” says 76-year-old Rupert Parker, his once-resonant baritone reduced to a whisper. Parker is confined to a bed in his…
Charlie Hoover seemed to be at the top of his game in early 1984. The big-money Phoenix attorney had just concluded a massive deal on behalf of First Federal Savings and Loan (now MeraBank). It was the bank’s largest deal ever–a $400 million loan to the Marriott Hotel chain for…
Let’s condemn the Cards. And own the team ourselves. Hell, we could run it as well as Bill Bidwill. And the day may come when, if we want pro football here, we’re gonna end up as team owners. We’re talking about getting ready for the day Bill Bidwill decides the…
Eight-year-old Satsay Singpradith and his brothers and sisters huddled around their mom and dad shortly before going to sleep. But this was not just another bedtime story. The family had fled Laos and was living in a miserable refugee camp in eastern Thailand. Chan Singpradith, the family’s patriarch, kept promising…
Everyone around the old Bisbee courthouse expected former Maricopa County Attorney Tom Collins to have a cakewalk in his first trial as rural Cochise County’s first full-time drug prosecutor. They were wrong. On its face, the marijuana-for-sale case against three Mexican men seemed open-and-shut, quite unlike the Collins-led “drug probe”…
The long, lean black man takes a break from tinkering with a car beneath the South Phoenix sun. Drenched with sweat, he falls onto a tattered couch under a paloverde tree. “I remember sitting under a shade tree as a kid watching my dad fix a car,” the man says,…
The man charged with the brutal murder last spring of a twenty-year-old woman was mistakenly released from jail only three days before the murder because of a flagrant error by Maricopa County prosecutors, New Times has learned. No one in the County Attorney’s Office is contesting that “The Screw-up,” as…
Many a fried Phoenician has stood under Payson’s Ponderosa pines and marveled at their majesty. There still are thousands of pines to gape at in the town of 8,000 about an hour and a half northeast of Phoenix. But these days, “progress”–most recently in the shape of a sprawling Wal-Mart…
No one bothers Socorro Bernasconi anymore as she stands with her protest sign near the Pointe at South Mountain. On most afternoons, the long-time Guadalupe activist and mother of eight stands near Pointe entrances holding a hand-painted sign that says, “Dead Spirits in Live Bodies Build the Pointergeist. A Development…
Lawman Ralph Andrew Lawrence was primed to kill on that spring evening in 1986. In his mind, his enemies had conspired to ruin him–starting with waitress Sharma Bethel, an ex-girlfriend from the southeastern Arizona town of Willcox. Lawrence had figured his troubles with Bethel were ancient history. That stuff had…
When Fat Albert is working, he floats on a tether 10,000 feet above the border. But he’s more of a buffoon than a balloon. A few months ago, a Sierra Vista cop was driving over the San Pedro River on Arizona 90 when he saw a low-flying airplane zigzagging into…
Border Patrol agent Gary Patrick Callahan has had a reputation in Cochise County as a anti-Communist, drug-hating survivalist during his nearly twenty years on the southeast Arizona frontier. Now Callahan’s really got a reason to hate drugs. Paradise Valley dentist Bill Bartel, who is accused of trying to peddle 81…
