J. Fife Symington III’s former secretary, Joyce Riebel, offered the Rosemary Woods defense in court last week. Riebel poleaxed court observers by claiming the governor’s crooked financial statements were partly the result of her typing errors. She added that her word processor caused the banking fraud. Riebel claimed that when…
Ire and Brimstone The article “In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Wholly Owned Subsidiary” (Terry Greene Sterling, May 22) was very slanted and misleading. I am an heir to the equity of my mother’s life estate, which she knowingly purchased in 1985 from the Conservative…
Randy Setzer pads out of the bedroom in his stocking feet, plops down onto a couch, tucks his camouflaged battle-dress uniform into his boots, zips them up and stands. Suddenly, he’s a soldier again. “It feels sorta weird putting this on,” Setzer says of his fatigues. “It’s been a while.”…
An examination of the Amber Bass case by New Times indicates it’s possible prosecutors could file charges under Arizona’s child-abuse laws. The crime? Hastening Amber’s death by failing to monitor and administer the child’s heart medications. To prove that occurred, prosecutors would have to follow the lead of county medical…
Santa Rosa We will not be fainthearted in our search for the truth. I shall plant a rosebush of gentle radiant amber. I will patiently care for it until we find out what happened. For now the answer is denied by guilty silence. –Tascha Boychuk, 1996, on the unsolved death…
What follows are excerpts from Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s April 21 deposition. Joel Robbins: In terms of your knowledge of the jails and the violence that goes on there, you don’t have any knowledge of it independently of your staff, correct? Arpaio: Well, I’m probably the first sheriff in history around…
Faced with a series of trials, an Arizona official turns up the public relations machine to full tilt, launching a string of populist initiatives meant to soften his image. Governor J. Fife Symington III? No, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. In recent weeks, Arpaio has announced such innovations as a…
The heart of Governor J. Fife Symington III’s criminal defense has been punctured by his own jottings. It would seem that only an emergency transplant by Symington’s defense team can save him now. But if the defense team, led by John Dowd, must continue to rely on compromised witnesses such…
Fife and Bum Corps Fife Symington and his illegitimate fiefdom are taken to task thanks to Michael Lacey and John Dougherty (“Ode to Joyce,” Michael Lacey; “A Colossal Liar,” John Dougherty, May 15). Symington is just a microcosm of the malaise since the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. He is…
Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth. Not only because I do not have Lou Gehrig’s disease, but because it has been my privilege and pleasure for the last 90 weeks to write the column that you are now reading. All of that will…
Leopard skins, tikis, martinis. In its day, Scottsdale’s Safari resort was the big bwana of Valley luxe. Under the hotel’s imposing porte-cochere, valets dodged lethal tail fins as they struggled to keep up with an endless stream of late-model gas guzzlers. In the resort’s continental-style restaurant, fashionably dressed guests oohed…
Iolanda and Pasquale Ranalli immigrated to New York from Italy in 1953. Middle-aged and poor, they had modest aspirations–to raise their three children, and then to save enough money for a happy retirement in America. But life in America was more of a struggle than they had envisioned. Unable to…
Developer wants to build some homes. Neighbors want a say in how development will look. So do city planners, who say developer is asking for too much. Developer winds up getting everything he asks for. Allegations of cronyism ensue. The tiff is typical of the give-and-take that goes on each…
Governor J. Fife Symington III’s criminal case may be decided as much by the type of cars and window shades jurors prefer as by the labyrinth of financial statements and bank memos that the jurors will see. Symington’s defense team has gone to great lengths and expense to develop a…
Sheriff Joe Arpaio loves to point out that his fame has spread beyond the United States, but increasingly, that international scrutiny is less than complimentary. New Times earlier described a London magazine cover story which ridiculed “the Lion of Metz” for his self-promoting (Arpaio brags that he served in the…
No Mercy Arizona was scheduled to execute a mentally retarded man last night. Ramon Martinez-Villareal, found guilty for the 1982 shooting death of two men, was scheduled to die by lethal injection in the wee hours of May 21. A Mexican citizen, Martinez-Villareal suffers from mental retardation and severe mental…
Are Maricopa County’s jails so barbaric that a foreign nation could refuse to give up fugitives bound for Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s gulag? That could be the result when a court in Iceland rules on the extradition case of Connie and Donald Hanes, who are wanted on a charge of felony…
I expected to find standing room only, but there are plenty of empty seats. It’s the day after the trials officially start, but in reality nothing much will happen for a few days. The jury is still being selected. But when the man in the chair is the governor, it’s…
Last week, a local jury said it was not absolutely convinced that former gubernatorial aide George Leckie was a crooked moron. This was surprising news. Leckie, after all, was so intoxicated with the potential for living off the government teat that he once tried to palm off a swanky resort…
KJ’Accuse New Times is cruel and unfair to exploit Kevin Johnson’s life and career with an unproved accusation (“The Summer of ’95,” Paul Rubin, May 8). And to imply that KJ’s career as a mentor to children was nothing but a sick game is ignorant. It is his right to…
Carol Zraket welcomes visitors to her Scottsdale home with a broad smile and the weary words, “He’s in the war room.” But before she can turn to call him, her husband, George, appears carrying copies of the faxes, memos, letters, lawsuits and petitions that have been his chief arsenal in…
Journalist Michael Lewis may be the supreme cynic in an age of press cynicism. His aloofness for political hoopla set the tone of his coverage of the 1996 presidential race in the New Republic. He waxed diffident about candidate Lamar Alexander’s nervous tics, Bob Dole’s vanity and his fellow journalists’…
