The other night we had some friends over, a couple with a fourteen-month-old daughter. Wherever Daddy went, baby followed on all fours. Whenever Daddy sat down, baby would climb into his lap. Whenever anyone else tried to hold the child–including her own mother–she’d feign sudden respiratory failure until returned to…
If you are a young nurse in a big hospital, most days have a tedious sameness. But the tension never leaves. You learn to walk fast. You rarely stop to make small talk in the hallways. There’s always too much to accomplish and not enough time. You knock softly on…
Eight-year-old Satsay Singpradith and his brothers and sisters huddled around their mom and dad shortly before going to sleep. But this was not just another bedtime story. The family had fled Laos and was living in a miserable refugee camp in eastern Thailand. Chan Singpradith, the family’s patriarch, kept promising…
Let’s condemn the Cards. And own the team ourselves. Hell, we could run it as well as Bill Bidwill. And the day may come when, if we want pro football here, we’re gonna end up as team owners. We’re talking about getting ready for the day Bill Bidwill decides the…
Michael Cooley’s nightmares began some weeks before he finally allowed a Scottsdale neurosurgeon to operate on his brain. Cooley recalls waking up from his nightmares with a sickening sense that something dreadful would happen to him in the operating room. But he also knew the surgery was necessary; the large,…
I received this letter awhile back, and the smoke still hasn’t cleared from my mailbox. Quit your bitching and be thankful you have a wife to help you out. Try being a single father. Try working full-time, in addition to being a loving, responsible father. Try putting off things like…
A. Bartlett Giamatti, baseball’s late commissioner, wrote the following words about the game while he was still teaching at Yale University: ” . . . It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling…
Arizona sinks deeper every day that Rose Mofford remains in the governor’s office. In fairness to the voters of the state, Governor Mofford should announce immediately her intention to step down at her term’s conclusion. Some truths about the state’s sinking condition cry out to be heard. After all, we…
In a Sunnyslope bedroom, beneath a map of the intended targets, the gruesome crime unfolded. As Michael Bloom plotted, his partner Carl Schall listened. The plan was to dynamite black people during church services, to kill little children at Jewish day-care centers and to slaughter impoverished Mexicans at social-service agencies…
Lillian and Al Jones were always proud that their teen-age son, Fred, was such a good Catholic. “I never had to fight him to go to Mass,” Lillian says. Fred, a student at a Catholic school, told his mother he wanted to be a priest some day. “I talked to…
The road dips into rocky washes, winds through forests of saguaros and climbs up a windswept hill to a toppled wooden cross that marks the entrance to Father George Bredemann’s twenty-acre kingdom. Father George spent practically every weekend at his “Castle.” Nestled a few miles south of U.S. 60-89, the…
Joe Lessard was already in his thirties when he started training to become a priest in the Phoenix diocese. He already had a master’s degree in psychology and had been honorably discharged from the Marines after three years of service. Other priests contacted by New Times say they remember nothing…
Everyone around the old Bisbee courthouse expected former Maricopa County Attorney Tom Collins to have a cakewalk in his first trial as rural Cochise County’s first full-time drug prosecutor. They were wrong. On its face, the marijuana-for-sale case against three Mexican men seemed open-and-shut, quite unlike the Collins-led “drug probe”…
The crisis of pedophilia in the Roman Catholic priesthood exploded in 1985, when a pasty, bespectacled Louisiana priest named Gilbert Gauthe admitted under oath that he’d sexually abused 37 young male parishioners. Gauthe was sentenced to twenty years hard labor with no possibility of parole. The Catholic Church doesn’t keep…
In its answer to the lawsuit, the diocese admits that Father George molested the children but denies negligence. Father George, who has a separate lawyer, denies he even molested the boys or that he was negligent. In his answer to the lawsuit, he asks that the case be dismissed. The…
Screening for pedophiles is nearly impossible because they often appear to be psychologically healthy people, experts say. As a result, they’ve cropped up not only in the Diocese of Phoenix, but in churches of all denominations, Indian reservation schools, Scouting groups and any other organization where there are children. And…
A VALLEY NATIONAL BANK executive recently called his company a “sleeping giant.” Hell, it’s practically comatose after last week’s frightening stock plunge onto Wall Street. Looks like VNB CEO JIM SIMMONS, one of the last surviving good ol’ boys of Arizona finance, sure has the Midas touch. He scooted out…
This Halloween, my son is demanding to be outfitted like his favorite two-bit Japanese creature-feature star, Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster, and his expectations are high. I’m sure he thinks he’ll be able to climb into the thing, fly off, barbecue cities with his multiple fire-breathing noggins, and stomp the sushi…
Mary Jo West kidnaped? . . . Yeah, right. After the first reports of the alleged abduction, the buzz on the street was that Mary Jo faked the crime. First of all, she was snatched after leaving a stress-reduction workshop. Didn’t that tell you everything you needed to know? Then…
It was the kind of press conference reporters show up for even when they’re not working. They put on their best suits and get their shoes shined. They make sure they have fresh batteries in their tape recorders. Senator John McCain had promised to give his version of Richard Nixon’s…
The long, lean black man takes a break from tinkering with a car beneath the South Phoenix sun. Drenched with sweat, he falls onto a tattered couch under a paloverde tree. “I remember sitting under a shade tree as a kid watching my dad fix a car,” the man says,…
There’s a story about the late Gilbert Cady, ASU’s long-time finance wizard, that helps explain why the campus looks the way it does today. Rudy Turk, director of the University Art Museum, tells it: “Gilbert was a delightful guy, but he was very tight with a dollar. We were in…
