Flying for Dollars Thanks to Michael Lacey for his excellent column pointing out how William Franke, CEO of America West Airlines, tried to cover up how his firing of 500 mechanics led to his airline repeating the same errors in handling oxygen tanks that led to the ValuJet crash (“Deception…
Over the past two years, New Times has published a lengthy series of news stories on what appeared to be ethical and legal lapses by Governor J. Fife Symington III. Some of these articles have been honored in major journalism competitions. Others have sparked law enforcement investigations into the governor’s…
Arizona is a hang-’em-high state, and its political leaders are death-penalty poster boys. Governor Fife Symington publicly blasted the courts for granting a stay of execution. Sheriff Joe Arpaio commended a journalist who witnessed a lethal injection for coming “to see what we do to murderers.” Attorney General Grant Woods,…
The Gang Squad team members of Dauer and Puskar introduce themselves to the driver of an illegally parked car. It’s almost midnight on a humid Saturday in September, in the mazelike, crime-heavy southeast Phoenix subdivision known as the Townhouses. The cops step out of their car–a ratty-looking Chevy with 115,000…
What do high-profile political campaigns and misplaced luggage have in common? Nothing–and that’s why Griffin Merkel is smiling. In September 1994, Merkel’s political consulting firm, Griffin and Associates, helped manage the campaigns of three congressional candidates, a Phoenix mayoral hopeful, and bids for the Arizona Corporation Commission and state Legislature…
In Mesa, Catholics who burn incense in religious ceremonies and actors who smoke onstage are violating the city’s new antismoking ordinance and must pay up to $200 each time they do either, according to a lawsuit filed against the city. The Superior Court lawsuit was filed in August by three…
The Hard Cellulose The Flash lives for motion pictures at a Harkins luxury cinema. One recent eve, The Flash stops by the full-service concession stand and orders some Gobstoppers and a small popcorn. “For a dollar more, you get twice as much popcorn in the medium,” the clerk intones. “What’s…
He Ain’t Heavy In his review of Heavy (“Chunk Style,” September 19), M. V. Moorhead says that writer-director James Mangold “opens the book.” Mangold has indeed opened a book: John Gardner’s novel Nickel Mountain, from which Heavy filches its setting, premise and even the name of its leading female character…
Right now, I am alive. I enjoy many things: eating, sleeping, joshing with friends, talking on the phone, contemplating truths. But someday, like all of us, these activities will be taken from me, on the day I die. What will happen then? My spirit may pass down a black corridor…
Highs and lows; peaks and valleys; you win some, you lose some. That’s how Marlene and Charlie remember the past eight years. It all began when the elderly Phoenicians sustained neck and back injuries in an auto accident and failed to recover sufficient insurance money to pay medical expenses. After…
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 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…
Wayne Legg and his wife live inside the gated community known as the Phoenician II at 65th Street and Camelback. Ordinarily, someone with the 66-year-old Legg’s credentials–longtime partner in a respected law firm, former Republican party county chairman, former chief counsel to Arizona State University–would be reaping the benefits of…
An accounting firm hired to administer a state fund to clean up leaky underground fuel tanks has been padding its pockets at taxpayers’ expense, according to a woman who until earlier this month was charged with overseeing the cleanup effort. Tara E. Roesler made the allegation in a four-page September…
Last Friday’s settlement between the Big 6 accounting firm of Coopers & Lybrand and federal prosecutors delivers a powerful legal blow to Governor J. Fife Symington III. What Coopers & Lybrand disclosed in a remarkable six-page press release, which was jointly prepared with federal prosecutors, is devastating to Symington’s defense…
Recently, I met two men. One man had a round, pink face. The other man’s face was tan and thin. The men are leaders that many of us look up to. The pink-faced man had a lot of white hair. The thin-faced man had hair that was a few different…
Jailhouse Rock Head New Times’ editor’s note added to the letter about “Hangin’ With Sheriff Joe” Arpaio proves that New Times continually applies “electric shock” techniques of its own to the “genitals of this community” all the time to try to press its agenda of liberalism and socialism (Letters, September…
I don’t much care for the current press frenzy about the possibility of America West Airlines jets blowing up, crashing into mountaintops, the passenger cabins cartwheeling through forests as torsos are cut in half by those stupid safety belts that are supposed to save your doomed behind when the airplane…
Volunteers: Expect to spend 5 plus hours/day radio-tracking and 8 hours searching for (rattle)snakes. Field conditions and work loads are exceptionally harsh. You will live two miles from the nearest trail/road in a large canvas tent w/cots/tables/cook stove and few comforts. Water is extremely limited . . . There is…
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…
The Gripes of Sal Readers who know Cesar Chavez isn’t that guy with the burro in the Colombian coffee commercials should appreciate this. Last week, Councilman Sal DCCO asked a “simple question” of the council subcommittee on Family, Education and Culture, which he chairs. The topic: Cesar Chavez Plaza, a…
The cottage industry that is Dr. Park Elliott Dietz swept into Phoenix September 12 to discuss stalkers, famed serial murderers and other assorted bad guys. Dietz spoke to a rapt group of mental-health professionals, police officers and attorneys during a seminar at the downtown Hyatt Regency. Others in attendance included…
