Like Rottweilers, Pam Swift and Teri Johnson fight with a deep, dark instinct. Sometimes, you wonder why these two west Phoenix environmentalists don’t shut up. Other times, you can’t help but admire them for fighting battles somebody’s got to fight. One of them always seems to be on TV, marching…
Law professor Jack J. Rappeport was once famous on the University of Arizona campus for his knowledge of contracts. He was lesser known for teaching domestic-relations law. That’s changing rapidly. These days, Rappeport is noted in legal circles for his wild stories about how his cleaning lady got impregnated with…
Mobile isn’t the only place in Arizona where the words “hazardous waste” can set off a riot. Just last week, a Scottsdale businessman decided to withdraw a proposal to construct a $7.5 million recycling plant in Guadalupe because a group of angry citizens in the tiny, impoverished, industry-starved Yaqui Indian…
This April Fools’ Day, Diana Wiley watched Tyrone Childs fall on his knees and collapse in a dusty, littered backyard in Ajo, Arizona. She remembers thinking the pistol that Pima County sheriff’s deputy Mark Penner fired at her lover must have had fake bullets. Why else would the .45- caliber…
Lobbyist Alfredo Gutierrez still winces when he remembers the dark, dark days ten years ago when the United States government tried to sabotage its own census. At least that’s how Gutierrez, then a state legislator, looked at increased raids by federal immigration agents against undocumented Hispanic workers in Phoenix. Despite…
For doctors, there’s nothing like a pop medical malady to make the big bucks. Back in the Seventies, hypoglycemia, or low blood sugar, was the fad of the day. Ten years later, many a physician got that second Benz as yuppies everywhere fell prey (or thought they did) to Epstein-Barr…
As a video camera whirred away one afternoon last June, a nine-year-old boy popped his gum and accused his mother of sexually abusing him. He said his mother, Wanda C., molested him when he was five. And he said she continued molesting him even after he’d been put in foster…
Pedophile priest George Bredemann, currently serving a year in jail after he admitted molesting three boys, reportedly has been bounced out of the Roman Catholic priesthood. But the Diocese of Phoenix won’t comment on the strong rumors circulating around the controversial priest, and one of Bredemann’s closest friends, Fred Noll,…
Distressed that her baby was born minus an ear and with a disfigured skull, a mother went to court in 1982. She sued her former employer, Research Chemicals, claiming the company caused the birth defects by exposing her to dangerous workplace chemicals while she was pregnant. For 24 years, the…
Harvey McElhanon has put a lot of change in his jeans with his famous Arizona institution: the necktie-slashing western steakery in North Scottsdale known as Pinnacle Peak Patio. Since the 1950s, it’s been a regular on the tourist circuit, pulling in busloads of folks from all over the world who…
Twenty-two years ago, a power failure on the Colorado River Indian Reservation spirited Nelson Fernandez into the world where men pray so fervently they rip the flesh off their chests. Today, Fernandez lives in Phoenix and conducts ancient Native American rituals to help recovering junkies and alcoholics get back on…
The tumble-down boarding house on Third Avenue was rotting in its own grime, but Dede Devine Yazzie took one look and fell in love with it. That was eleven years ago. The daughter of the famous Notre Dame football coach Dan Devine had just arrived in Phoenix to interview for…
The weeping Salvadoran woman recounting the bloody deaths of her relatives was most definitely not the typical corporate client who frequents Lewis & Roca’s tony law offices at 100 West Washington. But on this particular day several months ago, an offbeat softhearted 35-year-old member of the firm named Chris Brelje…
Last year, a diminutive gray-haired bureaucrat and former housewife named Susan Smitak took over a job few would want or could stomach. She replaced Dr. Thomas Kelly as director of Maricopa County Rabies-Animal Control–the infamous county pound. It’s not the most glamorous job in the universe, but Smitak has earned…
Ever since she was smuggled into Arizona at the age of eleven by a Guatemalan man who abused her, Maria simply has accepted the fact that the man who feeds her, owns her. Maria’s father, a Mayan laborer, sent her to America a year and a half ago to baby-sit…
In Arizona, convicted child molesters are required by law to register with the local sheriff. The sheriffs then turn in the names to the Arizona Department of Public Safety, which maintains a computerized registry of all convicted child molesters who live in Arizona–including people who were convicted in other states…
How can you tell if your nine-year-old is a pre-Crip? Elementary school kids are more likely to be flashing their colors a few years down the road if they have a lousy family life, beat up classmates, flunk or cut classes, have a relative in a gang, come home to…
If you’re planning on getting a federal loan to help you through college, you may have to submit to random drug testing. At least, that’s how a student-advocacy group in Arizona sees things in the wake of the knee-jerk Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988. The new law demands that students…
The scandal of pedophile Catholic priests in the Diocese of Phoenix has distressed Bishop Thomas O’Brien so much that he no longer will talk publicly about it–except to excoriate reporters for writing about the topic. But there was no escaping from the topic earlier this month, when O’Brien and his…
Phoenix’s embattled inner-city high schools faced their biggest crisis ever last summer, when a short, round, hyperactive Irishman named Timothy Dyer announced that he planned to resign as superintendent of the Phoenix Union High School District. The leprechaunesque Dyer, who cooked up the South Mountain Plan, has been a successful…
Emery Johnson sauntered into South Mountain High School this fall wearing his shades and his Attitude. He fit right in with all the other gangly, streetwise kids who sure as hell didn’t need to be bothered with school. He started ditching classes almost immediately. He decided he’d rather spend his…
In these days of ravaged rain forests, a tattered ozone layer, nuclear weaponry and global overpopulation, the cause that Doris Daniel has taken on may seem, well, a bit quixotic–unless you’re an oldster who shops at Park Central Mall. About two months ago this spunky, raspy-voiced 64-year-old grandmother launched a…
