Dave Knutson must have looked out of place at the Aspen Correctional Facility in Phoenix, compared to the inmates and corrections officers working on renovations at the facility. The inmates wore their dirty prison blues, covered with the dust and grime of the work they were doing. The officers wore…
Bear the front door of his northeast Phoenix home, Richard Aiello has screwed a small brass plaque to the stuccoed wall. It reads: NEVER MIND THE DOG–BEWARE THE OWNER. On the roof at the back of the neatly maintained home he shares with his wife, Helen, and his 4-year-old daughter,…
For Steve, a Door? In recent days, Arizona Republic managing editor Steve Knickmeyer has busied himself doing in-house damage control. By the end of last week, he was spinning from desk to desk in the newsroom, struggling to dispel rumors that ranged from his termination to upper management’s call for…
Trailer Thrash “Journalist” Barry Graham insulted a lot of good people when he characterized Joe Arpaio as being “low-class. He’s one step from the trailer park” (“Waiter, There’s a Lie in My Soup,” November 6). I would judge that the 500 or so grandmothers and grandfathers living at the “trailer…
Like many Arizonans, I want to believe both Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt and his former colleague Paul Eckstein. Each man has an almost folkloric reputation for integrity. Yet the Senate hearings that have spawned a Department of Justice probe into Babbitt’s 1995 denial of an Indian casino permit…
Hoot Gibson was spending a few days at his vacation condo near San Diego when he got the call that changed his life–and ignited a controversy that still smolders between the Phoenix Fire Department and City Hall. For 36 years, ever since he was 24 years old, Robert “Hoot” Gibson…
Samaritan will be the pre-eminent nonprofit healthcare system in the Southwest. –from Samaritan Health System’s Mission Statement The right to be free from misappropriation of funds, and from medical, psychological or physical abuse. –Number 14, Good Samaritan Care Center Residents’ Rights Jafet Coronado worked as a certified nursing assistant at…
Putting the “X” in Xmas J. Fife Symington III–bankrupt fraud and disgraced former governor–must have been looking forward to one last starring appearance before his February sentencing in federal court. But his swan-song social event–one of Phoenix’s most festive Christmastime gatherings of the rich and powerful–has been canceled. Probably just…
Several months ago, after writing a column about a black motorist who claimed he had been harassed by two Scottsdale police officers, I received a letter from the Scottsdale Police Department. The document was offered as “an open letter to your readers.” In the interest of furthering relations between police…
No Gold Stars Did it strike anyone else as funny that Barry Graham, Moe and Curly had to impersonate reporters to get into Joe Arpaio’s fund raiser (“Joe, Jane & John,” Barry Graham, October 30)? Come to think of it, that’s what they do for a living. Such prose! “Arpaio…
Drew Nolan sets down his briefcase before he reaches out for a handshake. “Always have to have one hand free,” he says with a smile. It’s a statement he makes only partly in jest. He is armed, and after spending more than a year crisscrossing the country to keep from…
Tom Bearup was once one of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s most trusted aides, a political operative who, until his fall from grace earlier this year, played a key role in creating the myth of the self-proclaimed “America’s Toughest Sheriff.” Bearup now regrets taking part in that project, which he…
April 1964: I’m a junior at Mohave County Union High School (nickname “Mucous”). My mother is driving me to Vegas to go see a skin doctor. I hear a song on the radio called “Time Is on My Side.” The DJ says it’s by a new group called the Rolling…
The federal government followed up its two-year investigation of Maricopa County’s jails Friday by filing a lawsuit realleging inmate abuse and official indifference to that abuse. That lawsuit will be dropped if Sheriff Joe Arpaio abides by a settlement agreement which calls for a new use-of-force policy, new guidelines on…
News You Can Uzi The 10 p.m. October 30 newscast produced by KPNX-TV Channel 12 sunk to new lows in already murky depths of the Marianas Trench where local TV news resides. Arizona’s News Station brought on a surprise guest, Sheriff Joke Arpaio. By the time the newscast began taking…
Too bad Fife Symington peaked early. He could have used State of Emergency, a political potboiler published in October by G.P. Putnam’s Sons, as his own Mein Kampf. The novel is right up Fife’s alley, brimming with babes and bureaucrats and right-wing ideology all rendered in a florid style. Fed…
Party Hardly Oh, Jane, why hast thou forsaken us? Being a retired employee of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, I maintain a passing interest in the goings-on of its beloved leader, cultural shockmeister and all-around inept buffoon Joe Arpaio. I have to admit, however, that even I was shocked by…
October 28 at Che Bella restaurant in Phoenix’s Biltmore Fashion Park. It’s “celebrity waiter” night, to benefit children’s charities. When I get there, there’s only one “celebrity” whose face I recognize. But that’s okay; he’s the one I’ve come to meet. My companion and I are shown to our table…
Seventeen-year-old organist Arthur “Buddy” Strong II is ready to lift the congregation of the Faith Tabernacle Church to a higher place. The setting for this musical levitation is South 24th Street, between Broadway and Roeser. The neighborhood is commonly considered among the Valley’s most dangerous, but all the madness temporarily…
“I call this Poseyland,” city council candidate Phil Gordon says, pointing to two pink pushpins on a wall map. The pins impale neighborhoods in north central Phoenix, wealthy enclaves where Gordon’s opponent Posey Moore Nash polled well in a September 9 general election. Other pins radiate out from Poseyland and…
The City of Phoenix has found a cheap and efficient way to quantify the interplay between social forces and social services in the public schools within city boundaries. There are 292 schools in Phoenix in 25 elementary and high school districts, districts whose boundaries overlap the city boundaries, zip code…
Hamlet Beats Rap Visitors to the Orpheum on October 25 were witness to what surely must have been one of the most surreal evenings in the history of Arizona theater, or of Arizona law–the single performance of Hamlet on Trial. The Great Dane, played by Valley actor Matthew Mazurowski (probably…
