Following one of America’s largest groundwater contaminations, the government allowed the polluter, Motorola, to inform the public of the consequences. The media played along with pedestrian “parts per billion” coverage that minimized the calamity. The effect was spin-control that would have made the chamber of commerce blush. Were you aware,…
On May 6, 1992, New Times published an investigative report detailing extensive groundwater pollution linked to Motorola, an $11 billion multinational electronics manufacturing company that is the state’s largest employer. Among the findings: Motorola’s two flagship plants have been linked to severe contamination of two separate aquifers in the Valley–one…
La Ciudad de los Mojados-the City of the Wetbacks-is what hundreds of illegal immigrants from Mexico call their community of rundown houses and apartments near 16th Street and Van Buren. And Maria Robles and her 13-year-old granddaughter, Elizabeth Robles, know practically everyone in that community because Robles owns Kuki’s Store…
This was an estimated annual discharge rate from this facility that could have been ongoing for previous years,” the report says. Motorola admits it emitted solvents into the air-in 1987, for instance, 500,000 pounds of solvents were released. But the company won’t say for sure that during the span of…
DANIEL E. NOBLE was hardly a charismatic patriarch. He was bald and soft-bellied, with a thin, stiff smile. His favorite conversations centered on transistor design. Nobody paid much attention in 1949 when he opened a research lab on North Central Avenue called Motorola.” But it wasn’t long before folks renamed…
¯ Oh, brother. We definitely drank it. There’s no doubt,” says Lisa McNamara, who lived just four doors down from the Motorola plant. It just makes me sick that the city didn’t start testing the wells earlier.” Lisa McNamara has reason to be angry. Various members of her family have…
Jeanine herself got cancer in her late 40s. Before she died in 1989, she told her daughter Lisa that she suspected that living near the plant had a lot to do with the family’s illnesses. Then Jeanine’s husband, Tom, got cancer. Next, Lisa got cancer. Now 31, Lisa thinks a…
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…
When a position opened up in January 1989, she applied. She scored 90 out of 100 on a test to get her old job back. But she was told that now she needed a law enforcement background. Diggs filed a complaint with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging she…
LIKE A CHILD hiding a caramel from a playmate, Jim Cryer conceals the plastic key chain with puckish delight. He is about to tell what he calls a nasty joke.” ²In his native Tennessean twang, he begins with what seems like a well-rehearsed question: Have you ever been on Mission…
Like any successful merchant, Mike Vito gets a lot of satisfaction from the well-stocked shelves in his stores. And so do his customers. Most Phoenix retailers may have had a puny Christmas season, but the seven adult bookstores in the Valley owned by Bookcellar Incorporated, of which Mike Vito is…
The Christmas party of 1986 is still a bitter memory for Liz Thornton and her co-workers at Southwest Savings and Loan. It was at that party that the thrift’s executives announced that times were tough and there would be no Christmas bonuses. Each employee was given a cheap teddy bear…
BILLY CLARK SEEMED like the kind of all-American kid every mother secretly hopes for when she rocks her baby to sleep. Athletic, popular and handsome, Billy graduated in 1989 from a Lutheran high school in Phoenix, where he’d been a soccer star and student-body president. After high school, he joined…
What’s it gonna be today? A stabbing, maybe? Or a bloody spat between crackheads and hookers in nearby University Park? These are the sorts of things Cindy Myers thinks about often when she arrives at the Phoenix Museum of History at 1001 West Van Buren. And the executive director of…
On October 4, Governor Fife Symington’s official press secretary lied to New Times and the governor’s law firm released a misleading document to the newspaper in an apparent 11th-hour attempt to discredit federal reports that Symington in 1983 had violated banking law. Did Doug Cole, the Governor’s press secretary, deliberately…
MARK HOLLANDER WAS on top of the world when he reported for his first day of work at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 1989. The 24-year-old Hollander could hardly believe the senior lawyers’ plush offices, with window views of the White House and…
As government bureaucracies go, the Arizona State Legislature is usually an open book. You want public records? Just ask. Unless you’re a legislator. Eleanor Schorr, a Tucson Democrat in the Arizona House, is embroiled with House Speaker Jane Hull, a Phoenix Republican, over access to public information that even lowly…
Joanna Wray didn’t have anything to do one night in October 1987, so she tagged along with a friend to hear a seminar given by Wade Bruce Cook, lecturer, writer and self-professed real estate wizard. For several months Wray had listened to her friend rattle on and on about Cook’s…
A Mesa veterinarian is being investigated by the state for alleged incidents of animal abuse, including the mysterious death of a chow puppy. The vet, William T. Gray of Sysel Animal Hospital in Mesa, denies he’s an animal abuser and blames a former employee’s spite. Late last month, the former…
Annette Morris could barely choke back her rage one morning last April when she saw the locked stall in the women’s rest room of the Community Legal Services building in downtown Phoenix. In the legal-aid center for poor people, poor people were locked out of one of the rest-room stalls…
If the old wives are right and bad news really does come in threes, then Tom Connelly is due for some good news very soon. In the past year, the former federal prosecutor has had a run of terrible luck. First, he resigned from the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Phoenix…
It was bad enough that a jury found a partnership of nine East Valley doctors guilty of defrauding a California couple in a catastrophic real-estate deal in Mesa. The doctors practically went into cardiac arrest when, based on the jury’s verdict, they were found guilty of racketeering. Maricopa County Superior…
