Ex-corrections officer Bill Haro thinks he knows exactly why his former employer, the Arizona Department of Corrections, suffers from a severe shortage of prison guards these days. It’s a lousy place to work, says the 16-year veteran of the Florence gulag, and it’s not because of the low pay or…
Clouds Over Sunnyslope This is the second time I ever had the dubious pleasure of reading anything you publish, and it happened this time only because a friend drew our attention to that portion of Brian Smith’s article (“Night in the City,” December 3) relating to Sunnyslope. I generally have…
Arizonans have been joking about their cultural desert for years now. But recently Dr. Robert Knight, director of the soon-to-open Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMOCA), has been putting a slightly different spin on the phrase. Ticking off the list of new or enlarged museums, theaters, sports halls and public-art…
The Baptist Foundation of Arizona recently proclaimed a banner financial year despite the fact that investigators from three different state agencies are scrutinizing the foundation’s multimillion-dollar real estate and stock transactions with insiders, New Times has learned. The Organized Crime and Fraud Section of the Arizona Attorney General’s Office, with…
Sheriff Raff The remarkable affidavit of former sheriff’s lieutenant Robert Wetherell continues to have repercussions after shaking up Sheriff Joke Arpaio and his favorite heavy, Dave Hendershott, director of the sheriff’s office. Wetherell blew the whistle on the dynamic duo, claiming that Hendershott in particular had rigged an internal investigation…
Rob Smith, head of the Sierra Club in these parts, is a mild-mannered, middle-aged man. He doesn’t look like a bomb thrower. So he was taken aback when the Phoenix police detective approached him in a courtyard at the Pointe Hilton Resort at Tapatio Cliffs, where he was awaiting the…
Out of Bounds I have been heavily involved in the issues regarding the Washington Elementary School District’s proposed new school at Seventh Avenue and Peoria, which also proposes to use city park land by joint agreement between the school district and the City of Phoenix Parks and Recreation Department. My…
Ruby, the Phoenix Zoo’s Asian elephant, died last month when her pregnancy went awry, and the city got the blues. Ruby had lived here almost 25 years–longer than most of us–and she’d become famous as one of the world’s most unlikely painters. Her works raised hundreds of thousands of dollars…
The U.S. Department of Justice is conducting criminal investigations into the deaths of county jail inmates Scott Norberg and Robert Butler. Christine DiBartolo, spokeswoman for the Justice Department’s civil rights division, confirms that both cases are being handled with help from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Criminal civil rights investigations…
About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well they understood. –W.H. Auden, Musee des Beaux Arts The Taxi Driver “Hey man, you wanna buy this gun?” says the yellowy-eyed Latino man in the back seat who has introduced himself as Hank. “For $80 it’s yours, mister. A…
Mary Corona and Nora Arbizo sit on the porch and play a morbid board game. With a cardboard box lid between them, they tally up the sick and the dead. Drawn on the lid is a crude map of their street in Hayden, Arizona, a tiny mining town 90 miles…
Hookers for the Holidays The holiday spirit has infected the Flash. Consequently, this Burst of Light is pleased to pass along the following little advice column by Sam Greene, a former cop who patrolled East Van Buren. The Flash isn’t certain, but, judging from this essay, surmises that Greene was…
Last week, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said it will look into allegations that some of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s deputies faced gestapolike tactics in Arpaio’s desire to root out dime-droppers. Those allegations surfaced in an affidavit by former lieutenant Robert Wetherell, who left the sheriff’s office in October and…
Peak Performance Michael Kiefer’s comprehensive article about the Phoenix Mountain Preserves (“Deconstructing the Phoenix Mountain Preserves,” November 26) is one of the best examples of investigative reporting I’ve seen in years! He really dug in and got an accurate and complete story about the alarming threat to our Valley’s crown…
For a one-party state, Arizona has a surprisingly split political personality. On one hand there’s proposition politics. Place a question on the ballot, and Arizona voters instantly think like Abbie Hoffman. In recent times, Arizonans have said “yes” to radical campaign finance reform and one of the country’s highest tobacco…
All these years we thought we knew them. The Phoenix Mountain Preserves used to consist of 16,500 acres of South Mountain and 7,000 more acres in the mountains up north–Shaw Butte to Squaw Peak, Shadow and Lookout Mountains. Now we’re not so sure. They were cobbled together over more than…
New revelations in the case of a fired deputy are rippling through the ranks of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office and could spark a closer look at the way Joe Arpaio runs his agency. An affidavit by former Lieutenant Robert Wetherell accuses high-ranking sheriff’s officials of gestapolike tactics in the…
Nobody from the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office has given a sworn statement in response to Robert Wetherell’s bombshell affidavit. However, an attorney representing the county has. Ronald Lebowitz has been the county’s counsel about Mark Battilana’s dismissal since September 1996. Lebowitz was in private practice when he began work on…
How do you feed a hungry man? If that ravenous fellow happens to be six-foot-one and weighs nearly 400 pounds, you don’t try to cash in on a dinner special offered by The Vine, an east Phoenix saloon. Not that Phoenix salesman Wayne Craig, the diner in question, has much…
Brothers Grim Please allow us to offer our praise to David Holthouse for the disturbing, eye-opening story of the brothers Kirkwood and the death of Michelle Tardif (“Shooting Star,” November 12). As my friends and I–each of us bearing the eternal, bittersweet moniker of “addict-in-recovery”–have read this sad and somewhat…
The Symington administration cleared out more than a year ago. Like a bad enchilada from yesterday’s lunch, however, a favor the Symingtonians laid on a friend as they left office is making a lot of government officials queasy. The dyspepsia-inducing culprit? A proposed statewide Uniform Plumbing Code. This little tempest…
John Geraghty wasn’t born in a barn. Not that he minds living in a studio apartment whose exterior looks exactly like one. “It’s kind of a kick,” says Geraghty of the 1960s global-themed apartment complex he’s called home for the last few months. After all, in the cookie-cutter world of…
