Chuck Knight listened to his fellow Viper Militia defendants as they took turns discussing a plea agreement offered by government prosecutors. The 12 alleged conspirators and 11 of their attorneys sat crammed into a small room on the sixth floor of the Federal Building. They hardly fit around the room’s…
In 1995, a jury awarded Jason Scott $5 million, ruling that his civil rights had been violated during an involuntary “deprogramming” by Rick Ross, a Phoenix resident and well-known cult expert. That judgment eventually forced Ross into bankruptcy court, put an anticult group out of business and made national news…
A decade ago, it was perhaps the ultimate experience for an American Anglophile: What better way to indulge one’s fascination for things English than to join one of that country’s most storied, exclusive clubs? To become a “Name” at Lloyd’s of London–to become an investor in the 300-year-old insurance institution–gave…
Television reporters called in live broadcasts from the Durango Jail complex last Wednesday night when it looked as though a second riot at Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s famous Tent City jail had started. It was the first evening inmates were in the jail since the initial riot on Sunday, November 17…
It’s the party line since the Tent City riot: Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his detention officers blame problems in the jails on understaffing and, more to the point, underfunding by the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors. The sheriff complains that he can’t afford more $21,000-a-year detention officers; however, just weeks…
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office and its posses appear to be violating the Arizona Public Records Law by refusing to disclose information about how they handle hundreds of thousands of dollars. For more than a year, Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s 49 separate volunteer posses have raised funds by selling souvenir pink…
The friendly fat woman who brings their baby to them for a few hours each week is regaling Raul and Karla Larranaga with stories from her career saving neglected children: Kids with cigarette burns on their arms; two children left in a park on a hot day with a note…
The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office has distilled its four-month investigation of jail inmate Scott Norberg’s death into a convenient, 137-page shrink-wrapped summary, available for the asking. The concluding paragraphs of the investigation–the summing up of the summary, as it were, written by Detective Todd Bates and reviewed by Sergeant James…
Rick Ross, the Phoenix-based cult and militia expert, sat in U.S. Bankruptcy Court last week, listening as a judge revisited the facts in a 1990 Washington state “deprogramming.” In that incident, Ross had watched while three men grabbed 18-year-old Jason Scott, handcuffed him, put duct tape over his mouth and…
In the summer of 1995, the city of Phoenix was locked in a battle with an Oregon town to land the Sumitomo Sitix Corporation’s newest silicon-wafer plant. To entice the huge Japanese conglomerate, city officials offered up a smorgasbord of lucrative incentives, including an offer to build more than $8…
The silicon-wafer plant going up in northeast Phoenix has been at the center of a storm of controversy, but only after construction on it had already begun. That’s apparently just how government officials wanted it. Phoenix Mayor Skip Rimsza claims that the $400 million Sumitomo Sitix plant will anchor a…
In February, New Times reported that Sheriff Joe Arpaio had made questionable payments from state jail enhancement funds–a source of public money that normally gets little attention from the public or press. After the article appeared, County Attorney Richard Romley asked the state auditor general to look into the expenditures…
Earl Wilcox, the lanky husband of Maricopa County Supervisor Mary Rose Wilcox, walks into the offices of New Times carrying two notebooks. He’d called earlier to say that he has incriminating information about Tommy Espinoza and wanted to deliver it in person. He sits down at a table and opens…
Detention officers at Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Madison Street Jail made a grisly discovery on August 9. In the sixth-floor psychiatric ward, they found 44-year-old inmate Thomas Bruce Cooley hanging from bedsheets that he had tied to one of his cell’s air vents. Cooley was cut down and taken to Barrow…
To Ken Parker’s father, a cowboy who wrangled dudes in the 1940s, the area south of Sedona was unremarkable grazing land known as Jackass Flats. But to Parker, it was a land of opportunity, and he wanted to cash in. The time was 1979, before the crystal worshipers had begun…
Sergeant Mark Battilana found out last week that Sheriff Joe Arpaio intends to fire him. Battilana had been suspended in May and was the subject of an internal investigation for unspecified code-of-conduct violations. Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Lieutenant Tim Campbell confirms that Battilana faces a pretermination hearing on August…
It’s a familiar story: The City of Phoenix prepares to demolish an old building to make way for a new one, and preservationists take the city to court. In the case of the A.L. Moore & Sons Mortuary, however, it’s preservationists of a different sort who have gummed up the…
Over the past several months, a public drama has been played out in the Valley news media. The drama has familiar themes: the large multinational company versus local activists. A relatively small group of angry citizens assails government officials who insist they are working for the broad public good. Business…
Joe’s Kickback Style It’s August 1989, and travel agent Joe Arpaio is sweating bullets. His contract to coordinate travel for the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office is up for rebid, and Arpaio must convince a four-person panel that his company’s proposal is better than the other two finalists’. If he fails,…
The lounge at the Ritz-Carlton on a Friday night in May looks like a Phoenix version of a Jazz Age speakeasy. There’s the maitre d’ who looks you over with a scowl like he’s waiting for a password, an opulent interior with overstuffed divans, overpriced drinks, even hostesses wearing narrow…
On May 22, as he fielded questions on KFYI radio, Sheriff Joe Arpaio scoffed at accusations that his Tent City jail is inviting catastrophe. “I haven’t had any riots, I haven’t had any problems with the tents or the jails. Where are my riots?” Arpaio said. Judy Flanders couldn’t believe…
A recent New Times cover story relied on deputies’ accounts and public records to document how a massive shift of resources to the posse program had taken its toll on morale, as well as law enforcement, in the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. After the story ran, Sheriff Joe Arpaio denied…
