Mike Page joined the Air Force when he was 17 years old. He stayed out of trouble, served his country, made his rank and saved a little money. By the time he was ready to retire and move to Colorado to open a hunting and fishing lodge with his new…

I’m opposed to this ordinance,” Godzich admits. He begins to roll, the timbre of his voice rising and ebbing with the elastic, jazzy rhythms of preacherspeak. And I’d like to clarify something. A radio disc jockey recently called me a `homophobic’ person and I just want to let people know…

AS HE LOOKS OUT over the 2,300 plastic and chrome chairs arranged in Phoenix Civic Plaza, the Reverend Leo Godzich’s face betrays only the blank alertness of a point guard studying the court. Tonight the city’s Human Relations Commission will be holding a public hearing on whether the Phoenix antidiscrimination…

LAST THURSDAY, Governor Fife Symington toured Arizona to tout Project SLIM. Armed with a couple of easels and a few stiff-smiling aides, he spread the gospel of what he called total quality management” at press conferences in Phoenix, Tucson and Yuma. The governor declared state government to be a Grand…

Eight floors below the conference room where Governor Fife Symington delivered his diatribe last week against “out of control” state government, there is a sunless suite of rooms supplied with an institutional paint job, metal furniture and stale, reconditioned air. This basement warren in the State Capitol building on Washington…

So the state started freeway construction in the middle of a former chemical plant without first checking to see what might lie beneath the surface of the ground. This is a remarkable oversight given the state’s own records which documented the 22-year presence of Olin Mathieson on the site. This…

When we last left temple murder suspect Mike McGraw, he had driven off into the sunset in a white Corvette with Pam, a woman he said was his longtime girlfriend. McGraw, whose apparent lies about the August 10 massacre of nine Buddhists at Wat Promkunaram landed him and three others…

He says he believes ADOT knew about the pesticides in the concrete sump and refused to settle his case in order to hold him responsible for the cleanup. He suggests that the state didn’t order the Phase II audit because it knew the study would discover problems, and that the…

But the condemnation process does not require the state to pay a landowner for a property’s potential or the dreams of grandeur harbored by a developer. Just compensation is considered the value of the property at the moment it is appraised. The state’s appraisers came onto Gabrielli’s land and saw…

A RIBBON through bleakness, the latest installment of the Hohokam Expressway snakes up from the south, fording the Salt River. It gathers momentum, sending exit ramps diving for Sky Harbor International Airport and Washington Street, and seems to promise a shot at Camelback Mountain before merging into McDowell Road. Like…

“He even said he was at the scene at the time it happened-he mentioned Alex’s name, he mentioned Rolando Caratachea,” Rowlett said. “They had gone in there for robbery purposes, to get what they wanted and leave, but one of the monks woke up, and he [Doody] didn’t want nobody…

Doody told detectives Caratachea approached him asking for help in defeating the temple’s “motion sensors”-floodlights activated by movements on the grounds. This may have been the “intrusion alert” exercise Joseph Burner said Doody told him he was going on. Earlier this month, new evidence surfaced against Caratachea when two juveniles…

PLUNGING SOUTH down Dysart Road from Glendale Avenue, into the great wide nothingness of the West Valley, everything is rubble and scorn. It is about five miles from the Circle K on Glendale Avenue to the Whataburger on Van Buren, past the faux oasis of Litchfield Park, with its palm…

At trial, Balkan will likely argue that the statements of the Tucson suspects-none of which mention Doody or Garcia or seem to describe either of the boys-are legitimate confessions. “And I think the sheriffs are going to say, `Yeah, yeah, you’re right, [the Tucson suspects] did it,'” Balkan says. “I…

And, of course, Victor was aware of the ice-pick assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in August 1940-lending grim veracity to Trotsky’s warning that “Stalin seeks to strike, not at the ideas of his opponent, but at his skull.” Even so, Victor Kravchenko appeared before the committee, speaking in…

MILES AWAY FROM asphalt, in a secluded lodge north of Lake Pleasant, the Russian blusters and frets. Mad with dislocation, he drags his prison-damaged leg from room to room, bellowing for the interpreter, sounding like a wounded bear. Valentin Bodrov, the son of a traitor, has a child’s capacity for…

For two years, Valentin says, he was unable to remember his own name. While he had once been an accomplished musician, his musicality had apparently been beaten out of him-he could no longer hold melodies in his mind; they were suddenly slippery, evasive, lost. Other parts of his personality seemed…

COPS DON’T ARREST people just because they claim to have committed crimes. There are troubled people out there who will confess to practically anything. More than 200 people tried to accept the blame for the Lindbergh baby kidnaping in the 1930s, and the six suspects who were eventually charged in…

The investigators say they were reluctant to believe McGraw at first, but at the time he was the best lead they had. McGraw listed an impressive array of hardware allegedly used by the killers, including such glamorous weapons as a plastic Glock pistol and a 9-millimeter Beretta, but none of…

All in all, it was unconvincing. The catch in Bruce’s throat seemed genuine, but there seemed to be no logic to his confession. No one had held a gun to his head, no one had slapped him around, no one had forced him to answer the detectives’ questions. In fact,…

City Councilmember Linda Nadolski is on her way out, but before she leaves, she wants to do something mildly quixotic. She wants, she says, to do the right thing: an antidiscrimination amendment that would extend protection to gays, the disabled, unmarried couples living together and people in the military. Currently,…

SHERIFF TOM AGNOS doesn’t look embattled. His August open-heart surgery, a wrongful arrest lawsuit and the occasional political obituary notwithstanding, the sheriff appears serene. Though the investigation of the murders of nine people at Wat Promkunaram, a Thai Buddhist temple in the west Valley, has been criticized by everyone from…