One Sunday last October, when the Reverend Tommy Barnett passed the plate to boost an anti-abortion initiative, he failed to follow the letter of the law. The First Assembly of God Church minister did not keep track of the individual donors so their names and other information could be reported…
The shameless selling and shilling of Shaquille O’Neal by the NBA is the clearest indication of panic I have yet seen by the men who run professional sports. Phineas Taylor Barnum at the peak of his promotional powers did not blow as many horns nor crash as many cymbals to…
I’m having breakfast in the cafeteria on the main floor of the Maricopa County Courthouse. Since I’m going to the Suns game that night, I’m sitting there checking the box scores of the previous night’s NBA games in USA Today. Al Sitter, for 20 years an investigative reporter for the…
Mention the words “savings and loan failure,” and most people think about the Charles Keatings of the world, the crooks and highfliers who knowingly bilked the poor depositors and left the federal government with an estimated $500 billion tab. But for every out-and-out thief, there were perhaps nine or ten…
If one of King Lear’s daughters ever made it to Phoenix, she’d probably be an attorney for the state. It was Lear who said, “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.” Lear’s problems were over his kingdom. But closer to home, a 53-year-old grandmother…
Last summer, Don Engler of Schuff Steel took a proposal to the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community for a machine that reduces the volume of garbage by 90 percent. The process, “destructive distillation,” can transform even medical waste and discarded tires into a sterile charcoal and a volatile gas that…
Chuck Daly, who won two NBA titles with the Detroit Pistons, once said he always felt he had a three-day contract written in ice. On the other hand, his players were wealthy young men with long-term contracts worth millions of dollars. “But sometimes you’ve got to scream at them,” Daly…
Before the trial is over, defense attorney Murray Miller must convince the jury that the guilty man is not Max Dunlap but a sinister, alcohol-deranged lawyer named Neal Roberts. All of this will take more than three months in the courtroom of Judge Norman Hall. Prosecuting attorneys Fred Newton and…
A little boy rings a hand bell; the school day begins. Uniformed children assemble in a classroom. They sit in neat rows, the smallest ones in front. A life-size statue of Jesus stands at the front of the room, palms raised. The principal stands at the rear of the room…
While Scottsdale Mayor Herb Drinkwater boldly led the fight to keep Tiffany’s Cabaret from opening its second “gentlemen’s club” in the former Windmill Theater, a partnership that includes the mayor’s son, Mark Drinkwater, may have been negotiating to buy the same property to open its own topless club. The latest…
Freshly returned from a vacation in Mexico two weeks ago, Governor J. Fife Symington III summoned reporters to an airport news conference to confirm that his once-extensive real estate holdings are wiped out. The governor, who had campaigned for office on his business prowess, estimated that he lost between $10…
A man called and asked if I wanted an exclusive interview with Max Dunlap. The conditions were unusual. I would meet with Dunlap, but I was not to tell anyone that he had talked to me. This was in 1990, during the waning days of Bob Corbin’s reign as Arizona’s…
Pssst! Wanna buy some dirty pictures? About 1,400 of em? Actually, dirty pictures were the last things on the minds of George Hall and Bob Martinique as they browsed through a Prescott antique store one weekend last October. But upon learning that the two men were photography buffs interested in…
The irate caller to KTAR’s Talk to the Governor radio show last November 24 sounded a bit like Dustin Hoffman doing “Tootsie.” “Hello, Governor,” the man said in a kind of Southern accent, after introducing himself as “Bill from District 18.” “I’m calling about the criminal bill. . . …
On the first day of March in 1985, the woman they all called “Mrs. Wright”–Oglivanna was the third wife of Frank Lloyd Wright, but the only one any of the Taliesin West Fellows ever knew–suffered a heart attack. Though she was 87 years old and recovering from a flu that…
As nightclubs go, Nino’s in Tucson was one of a kind. Loosely defined as a steak house, the club’s food was an afterthought, being both cheap and bad. But no one went to Nino’s for the food. What drew people was music. A crazy idea–booking bands in a checkerboard-floored side…
Officers Ruben Ortega and Ralph Milstead walked into the Bridge Tavern one afternoon to arrest a small-time addict for a burglary he had committed to finance his habit. In years to follow, Ortega and Milstead would become two of the most powerful law enforcement figures in Arizona, heading the Phoenix…
Hunter S. Thompson has been, until now, larger than biography. Chief American chronicler of the days when drugs were fun, Thompson has produced two classic books (Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), one near-classic (Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail 72)…
One day last October, Robin Asaki spent the better part of an afternoon frantically racing around Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport looking for an air-sickness bag. Not just any air-sickness bag, mind you. The bag had to be unused, which was understandable enough. Not so understandably, the bag also had…
The biggest challenge the prosecution faces in pursuing the Don Bolles murder case is that time may have finally drained all passion from what was a shocking crime. Nevertheless, prosecutors Fred Newton and Warren Granville have been working through mountains of documents and interrogating hundreds of witnesses for two years…
Basketball is the most difficult of the traditional American sports to write about. The ball moves too fast to describe. There are not just a half-dozen important plays; there are hundreds. Sometimes, dazzling bits of showmanship follow each other in a breathtaking series of acrobatic events that shifts constantly from…
I have to hand it to him. All these years, I thought Fife Symington was just another low-level hustler with an Ivy League veneer. I never figured him to possess either the gall or the imagination to become a real character. Now my hat’s off to him. J. Fife Symington…
