Every tenant leaves a mess. Sometimes it’s a dirty oven. Sometimes it’s a stain on the carpet. Sometimes it’s forty tons of hazardous waste and tanks filled with 20,000 gallons of cyanide-laced water. Every day, Don DeSanti parks his 1982 Toyota in the shadow of four imposing black tanks. He…
Why was this guy knocking on my door at nine o’clock on a Sunday night? I warily peeked out my living-room window. He looked like a jogger. I asked him what he wanted. “There’s a cat across the street,” he said, “and it’s drowning! I was jogging by and I…
“Gimme a bray-ay-ay-ay-ake! Gimme a bray-ay-ay-ay-ake! No-oh-oh-oh!” Standing alone in a soundproof room, a grown man is imitating a sick car. Other adults watch through a small window, listening, coaching, judging. The five people assembled in the small recording studio and control room are making a sixty-second radio commercial for…
Old joke: After he gets pulled over for speeding, a guy tries to talk his way out of the ticket by telling the traffic cop that he’s almost home. The cop doesn’t buy it. “Don’t you realize that most accidents occur within five miles of the home?” he asks as…
It is difficult to imagine a contrast greater than the Colorado River as it roars through the Grand Canyon and that same river a hundred miles downstream as it flows tamely past Bullhead City and Laughlin. Within the Grand Canyon, the Colorado has an almost religious presence, as if it…
Jim Meredith, the former Republican majority leader of Arizona’s House of Representatives, is obviously a man without shame. If I were given the chance to pick the single AzScam defendant slick and duplicitous enough to merit stuffing into a hole in the Arizona state prison at Florence, Meredith would be…
Maricopa County Attorney Richard Romley should be feeling very pleased with the way AzScam has turned out so far. For one thing, various legislators who were captured unforgettably on videotape are receiving their apparently just deserts. Sue Laybe and Chuy Higuera are spending their evenings in prison these days, and…
I wanted to make sure I’d get a seat at the America West Airlines stockholders meeting. For this reason, I drove down I-10 to the Pointe at South Mountain an hour early the other day. The parking lots were already filled. A crowd that would total more than 1,000 moved…
Every Arizona politician elected this year, from Governor Fife Symington down, claims to support education. And an upcoming public-interest lawsuit, aimed at helping impoverished areas build decent schools, will give these politicians a chance to put their money where their mouths are. Underneath the warm and fuzzy rhetoric, however, a…
WASHINGTON–Poor Morris Udall. It’s not just his previous wife’s 1988 suicide, or the Parkinson’s disease robbing him of a body to match his sharp mind, or the injuries from a fall that have kept the Arizona congressman in hospital beds since January. A photograph sums up Udall’s situation; taken a…
David Spade is hot and his mom is pleasantly surprised. “Everybody who was close to him knew that he thought funny thoughts,” says Spade’s mother, Judy Todd. “He was very funny in the house, but real quiet. I don’t think anybody expected him to do this.” Spade left Arizona State…
Bicycles had been around, in one form or another, since the early nineteenth century, when there was a contraption called the hobby horse–a simple rolling device with two equal- size wheels but no pedals. They were more of a curiosity than anything else, but the idea of a human-propelled vehicle…
Frank Mineo was walking through the Biltmore Fashion Park when chance brought him into Antiquities, a second-floor shop that sells memorabilia from the 1950s. There, looking as fresh if it had just come off the assembly line, was a Schwinn Black Phantom bicycle. It was red, black and loaded. Frank…
You unenlightened souls probably took one look at the new McDowell Arch at 16th Street (imagine driving under a picket fence), shook your heads and muttered, “This is the limit.” But when it comes to the cutting edge, the McDowell curio can’t hold a candle to what the country’s Next…
Odd as it was, the caller’s request didn’t shock Leigh Wilson. “This woman on the other end said she had plenty of money and that she wanted a certain person killed,” says Wilson, a 48-year-old Scottsdale businessman. “This may sound crazy, but I’m one of the few people in the…
Attorney General Grant Woods has a grudge against the bar exam and, if he carries through on his plan to see it abolished for in-state law graduates, the Arizona Bar itself may have a grudge against him. Woods hated the test when he took it in 1979 after graduating from…
This is a brief account of a Maricopa County deputy sheriff’s overreaction and stupidity. During the sentencing of state Senator Jesus “Chuy” Higuera, I arrived early and took a seat in the front row, near the side door of the courtroom. A court employee came in the side door and…
DAY ONE 3:36 p.m.: We arrive at our campsite. Bonzo thinks he sees a wolf and refuses to get out of the car. 4:13 p.m.: I realize that the six-person, two-room tent I purchased for this little outing requires six people, power tools and a building permit to assemble. I…
His appearance in the courtroom was a shock. We all remembered him as belligerent and fearless during the impeachment trial of Evan Mecham. In those days, state Senator Jesus “Chuy” Higuera brandished a microphone in his hand as though it were the Sword of Damocles. Through sheer ferocity, Higuera was…
We are too hard on Dan Quayle. We should accept the heir to the Pulliam fortune for what he is rather than fret about his becoming president. Detractors say Quayle is more suited to becoming president of the Paradise Valley Country Club than moving into the White House. What’s wrong…
Claude Olney achieved the American Dream–the acquisition of vast wealth without a whole lot of labor–by turning his underachieving son into a gold mine. Almost everybody has seen Olney’s “infomercial,” a thirty-minute television commercial with 1970s sitcom star John Ritter. And almost everybody knows somebody who owns Olney’s best-selling video,…
How does a debt-ridden electric company with some of the highest rates in the nation and a long rap sheet of safety violations transform itself into one of the country’s top utilities? Officials at Arizona Public Service Company have the answer: Issue a press release. APS President and CEO Mark…
