The Peter MacDonald story defies belief. Watch carefully as it unfolds. The federal courtroom in Prescott, where the former tribal chairman of the Navajo Nation is on trial for causing a riot, is silent. “Did I tell you to lie on that stand?” shouts Joe Lodge, the assistant United States…
Last month the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour devoted a segment to Arizona. The idea of the broadcast, loosely speaking, was to discuss the sheer wonder of living in a state where seemingly normal adults have actually elected into office the stunted race-baiter Evan Mecham, tsetse fly survivor Rose Mofford, a Shriners’ caravan…
In a series of incidents that strikes some of its victims as both funny and frightening, a man is stealing boots from Phoenix construction workers and then writing them detailed letters describing his sexual acts with their footwear. The one bright spot, according to a victimized worker, is that the…
What Ray Bernal saw west of Casa Grande on June 30, 1975, troubled him so much he wrote a memo to his boss. An inspector for the Arizona Corporation Commission, Bernal wasn’t strictly responsible for the public’s safety at Arizona’s railroad crossings. His job was to check on the condition…
All that remains of the mining town of Seymour is a dilapidated, one-room stone house and a turn-of-the-century millstone used to grind ore. They’re on Ed Knipp’s ranch south of Morristown, surrounded by cattle beneath the spreading shade of ancient tamarack trees that run down to the banks of the…
Friday evening at the base of Squaw Peak, cars jockey for parking places right at the trail head so their owners won’t have far to walk to their hikes. A white Toyota idles in the heat, waiting for a Volvo to back up, and as soon as it does, from…
A police investigation aimed at a family of Middle Eastern immigrants that lords over Phoenix’s sex-club scene has had an unexpected consequence. A group of prominent attorneys, irate that the cops executed search warrants at the offices of lawyers involved in the case, want the Arizona Supreme Court to approve…
I push open the heavily padded swinging doors of the aged federal courtroom in Prescott. The large, high-ceilinged room is filled with prospective jurors. They fill not only the jury box but all the pews in the courtroom, too. I sense the tension. U.S. District Court Judge Robert Broomfield, gray-haired…
Most politicians, inclined to remain politicians, prefer to have the future charted in terms of probabilities; before they get behind a cause, they want to know its probable effect. As a class, they don’t much like surprises, because surprises beget other surprises–before you know it, a vein of unpredictability seeps…
According to Estela Ruiz, she has since 1988 been receiving weekly messages from the Mother of God. In the beginning, the messages were directed at the Ruiz family: The Blessed Mother counseled Estela and her brood to study their Bibles together and to seek a spiritual adviser for the family,…
The handmade Jesus in the backyard shrine wears a heart that is sunk deeply into its plaster of Paris chest. At the flick of a switch, the heart suddenly glows the color of hot coals. Sometimes another type of light also sweeps across the lawn, as the helicopters of law…
Michael McNally, a slight, 48-year-old cabinetmaker of independent stock, was in a disconnected mood four months ago when he decided to attempt a recall of Governor J. Fife Symington III. McNally’d had a bad week, made worse by surgery on his mouth. When he turned on the radio and read…
Dan Huey’s got the chiseled features of a frontiersman and the stomach to do a job nobody wants. He pumps your septic tank when it overflows, cleans out the grease trap of your restaurant and the sand trap of your car wash. In the first six months of this year,…
I keep thinking about Charlie Keating. Right now he’s sitting alone in a jail cell near Bakersfield, California. He’s serving ten years. The other day, a federal jury in Tucson awarded $3.3 billion in damage claims against Keating for swindling thousands of investors. I wonder how Keating feels about this…
SEVEN DAYS INTO 1987, James Simmons needed to look a few people in the eye. The 62-year-old president and board chairman had spent a quarter-century building United Bank of Arizona into the state’s fourth largest bank. Now, the payoff was at hand. A new law had made it possible for…
“I LOVE WOMEN.” The afternoon sun enters Tommy Maggiore’s empty restaurant on East Camelback Road. In a few minutes, evening diners will enter, too. Tomaso’s isn’t out-of-this-world upscale, but it’s very nice. The prices are on the high end of reasonable, the service is good. Later, when wine is flowing…
They were young, they were in love and they’d just tied the knot in Las Vegas. Yet thanks to one of the ghastliest turns of events to ever occur in the glittering gambling capital, the honeymoon was over for this pair of Phoenix newlyweds almost before it began. Vows of…
We forget too soon. By now the Gulf War is but a faded memory. We’ve forgotten those days when General Norman Schwarzkopf was as popular as Johnny Carson or Michael Jordan. That was a time when President George Bush’s approval rating was at its highest and he was busily selling…
hanks, Scott I can’t go along with all the jingoism being displayed over the United States’ professional, all-star basketball team now preparing for the Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. It is a bad idea, commercially driven by the National Basketball Association to sell its product worldwide. It will backfire. It is…
Some moments freeze themselves in your mind. I remember a day in Washington, D.C., during Sandra Day O’Connor’s 1981 hearings to determine her fitness to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
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…
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,…
