Al Yee had to make sure qi flowed smoothly before he signed the lease for the North Central Avenue headquarters of the Phoenix brokerage firm of Yee, Desmond, Schroeder and Allen. Much to the consternation of his non-Asian-American partners in that spring of 1992, Yee had already rejected a number…
The mission of the “sexual predators” part of Arizona’s year-old Community Protection Act sounds compelling: keeping the vilest, most aberrant and most dangerous sex criminals off the streets after they complete their prison terms. The predators component of the new law is set to take effect October 1. That’s when…
It was Friday night, March 22, and the big show was three hours away. Already, cars were filling the lot at Veterans’ Memorial Coliseum. Most sported Arizona plates, but some had trekked from as far away as Florida and Virginia. Auto tags bearing the handicapped symbol were everywhere. Lots of…
A dozen people, some giddy from sleep deprivation, gathered at the Tempe home of Tom Polakis on March 30 to compare notes after one of the most remarkable weeks of their lives. Comet Hyakutake, which caused only a minor stir for most Arizonans, had turned life upside down for these…
Robert Updike gets a lot of parking tickets. He even got one once while he was in court, fighting previous parking tickets. Since he’s a member of the Arizona Legislature, he decided to do something about it. House Bill 2424 would force cities to provide free parking for people who…
But Are We Ahead of Guam? Fed up with a pay scale that forces some to seek food stamps, state workers protested Governor J. Fife Symington III’s annual Employee Appreciation Day on April 9 by donning tee shirts that document their plight. The front of the gray tee shirts contains…
John Yeoman’s death last week in an automobile crash is not expected to derail a federal grand jury investigation of Governor J. Fife Symington III. “The case does not turn on Yeoman,” a source close to the grand jury probe says. “It would have been made better with him, but…
Flag Bashing Government funding for the arts is essential to the support of emerging artists; exhibitions and performances for the public; arts education; fostering creative expression as a chronicle of our times; and for this country to take its place as the most prosperous nation in the world, not only…
What began as simply another Arizona Gallery of Art exhibition on the history of fried chicken has recently sparked an unprecedented uproar on a national scale. Yet, of the numerous works on display in “Old Crispy: The American Chicken, Fried and Otherwise,” one piece in particular has fomented the fracas…
They’re Not Booing, They’re Saying “Lew!” With court employees looking on in admiration, KPNX-TV (Channel 12) newsman Lew Ruggiero helped a confused citizen find records of a 22-year-old felony. The citizen, a middle-aged man in tennis shoes and warmups, had explained to a court clerk that he wanted to buy…
Last Friday at the Phoenix Art Museum, a group of ladies on a tour stood around the infamous U.S. flag on the floor, peering over the edges, their faces frozen in smiles, looking for the emperor’s new clothes. The work in question, Dread Scott’s 1988 “What Is the Proper Way…
A recreational-drug user since the late Sixties, my friend Skippy is a man who likes his pills. So I wasn’t exactly surprised when, grinning from ear to ear, he triumphantly whipped out a bottle of the prescription muscle relaxer Soma. What did surprise me was his explanation of how he…
A woman in a long dress sat quietly on a living-room couch as the clergymen debated how to cope with Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s media machine. The subject was Arpaio’s heavily publicized chain-gangs-burying-the-indigent-and-learning-a-valuable-lesson-while-saving-taxpayer-dollars shtick. On March 14, the first such chain-gang burials had provided the sheriff with a terrific photo opportunity…
This is something you must remember: Giving plasma is a good thing. It helps people. If you are thinking of doing it, by all means, go ahead. Do not allow yourself to be dissuaded by anything that you might read in the following story, which does not stray from fact,…
Hour Misteak New Times needs to be a little bit more careful when it tries to be smug. In March 14’s Flashes, it took a snide swipe at Tom Fitzpatrick for misspelling H. Norman Schwarzkopf’s name in a column. On the same page, however, staff writer Michael Kiefer misspelled the…
Darlene and Jerry Span have suffered so, I am reluctant to write optimistically about them. I fear that if I mention the one uncontestably good thing that has happened to the Spans in the past few years, I will anger the gods of legal minutia, who might then rain dozens…
In the rarefied world of women’s high fashion, the little black dress can cost as much as $1,000, and an evening gown can run as high as $12,000. The difference between a $12,000 and a $1,000 gown is rather like the difference between a Lexus LS400 and a Nissan Sentra…
Say “Adios!” to sombreros, pinatas and tequila. In some circles, at least, the Mexican souvenirs of choice are rapidly becoming tranquilizers, amphetamines and narcotic painkillers. The weird phenomenon–the seemingly legal circumvention of laws preventing the unnecessary prescription of U.S. drugs with recreational potential–emerged from an ever-enlarging loophole in U.S. Food…
Missing documents. Misappropriation of funds. Spin control. All of these things, and more, are swirling around the Maricopa County Stadium District–an offshoot of county government entrusted with overseeing the spending of $253 million of taxpayer money on a stadium for the Arizona Diamondbacks. The problems at the district surfaced briefly…
An Interstate 17 rest stop under cloudy February skies. Tourists get out of cars to stretch their legs and buy snacks from vending machines. Others let their dogs out to squat near a scenic overlook. Nobody pays much attention to the ten militia members conferring at one of the circular…
Lombardi’s Restaurant at Arizona Center is deserted at 3:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, but David chooses a table off to the side, just to be safe. And while he doesn’t normally drink at lunch, he’s already fortified himself with a Royal and Seven. He glances around, picks up a blue…
The aggravated-assault case against 17-year-old Lynn Ivory was full of holes, not the least of which was that the Phoenix youth’s alleged victims didn’t want to testify against him. One of the victims already had recanted his original claim–that Ivory had allegedly pointed a pistol at the two men. The…
