DANIEL E. NOBLE was hardly a charismatic patriarch. He was bald and soft-bellied, with a thin, stiff smile. His favorite conversations centered on transistor design. Nobody paid much attention in 1949 when he opened a research lab on North Central Avenue called Motorola.” But it wasn’t long before folks renamed…
This was an estimated annual discharge rate from this facility that could have been ongoing for previous years,” the report says. Motorola admits it emitted solvents into the air-in 1987, for instance, 500,000 pounds of solvents were released. But the company won’t say for sure that during the span of…
You can watch the news and you can see Malcolm and Martin in the people they interview,” says a young black woman during a discussion following the opening of Black Theatre Troupe’s new production, The Meeting. The play could not have opened at a more apt-or a more painful-time. Last…
For almost a year, Jerry Holt has worked in bureaucratic limbo as Governor Fife Symington’s commissioner of the Arizona Department of Real Estate, running the agency and awaiting word on whether the state Senate will confirm his appointment. Now, with a hearing on his confirmation likely next week in the…
Time is running out. Unless attorney Steve Mitchell finds the woman, the murder charge against Dan Willoughby must be dropped. Without her testimony, there is no case. Yesenia Patino is her name. For months she has been on the run in Mexico since allegedly collaborating with Willoughby in the brutal…
Here’s an interesting way to begin your day. Lie awake in bed before the sun comes up thinking about explaining to the woman who cares for your 3-year-old that you are not a cocaine dealer. No matter what the morning newspaper says. Television reports had begun airing that charge about…
Cantelme’s bitter relationship with Ortega extends at least back to the Eighties, when the police administration and firefighters lined up on opposite sides of the issue of political redistricting. The hatred grew between these two and, at one point, Cantelme was the only non-police officer to march in a protest…
Pat Cantelme and Duane Pell, the firefighters whose friendship Bartlett claims has caused him to be persecuted, say that they know him only glancingly through Democratic functions, and that he was not involved as a private investigator at the time of Cantelme’s indictment. (The charges against Cantelme were dropped.) There…
A few weeks back, Don and Bobbie Shepard were among the very few people in town actually looking forward to the arrival of April 15. And why not? As owners of a mom-and-pop iris farm in northwest Phoenix, their business was blooming and, furthermore, their stalk portfolio had never looked…
Phoenix fire captain Gary Pykare underwent his latest cancer surgery several weeks ago, just as a commission that studied the incidence of cancer in Arizona firefighters was finishing its unprecedented study. Now Pykare says he feels much better. Results from the commission’s work, on the other hand, are inconclusive. After…
Few of the 40 or so public officials gathering in a cozy auditorium last week for a half-day forum on pesticides were aware of the poisoned political air engulfing their seemingly benign gathering. Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy, in cooperation with the three state agencies most responsible…
To understand politics, you must first understand ambition and the thirst for power. Take the case of Rick Romley. He was an anonymous figure when he joined the County Attorney’s Office. His first supervisor was Michael Ryan, now a Superior Court judge. The two did not hit it off. Ryan…
IF JOSEPH STEDINO is telling the truth, the large man who is pulling up in a Volvo in front of Long Wong’s on 16th Street is the man whose word made AzScam happen. He is the person whom members of the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office trusted so much that they…
WHEN AND IF Oliver Stone ever signs off the Kennedy assassination, the muckraking moviemaker needn’t look far for his next conspiracy epic. Buried right in Hollywood’s own backyard is a legendary mystery that, in its own way, is every bit as Byzantine as the 1963 Dallas rub-out. Who says the…
After prison, Stedino moved to Reno. It was in Reno that he deepened his knowledge of stings in the way that allowed him later to land a job with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. (He is really quite an expert on stings.) Approached to launder a huge quantity of drug…
Eight floors below the conference room where Governor Fife Symington delivered his diatribe last week against “out of control” state government, there is a sunless suite of rooms supplied with an institutional paint job, metal furniture and stale, reconditioned air. This basement warren in the State Capitol building on Washington…
GREG GLEBE’S airplane looks more like a dune buggy than an aircraft, a three-wheeled erector set of neon-green pipe, six feet tall and ten feet long, with a back-mounted fan you’d see on an Everglades airboat, and all of it hung from a parachute. He built it out of scratch…
The second psychological hurdle is landing, a phenomenon called ground fright.” Up high, the plane seems to move smoothly and slowly, but as it gets lower and the runway comes up closer, all movement seems to speed up, the brain starts screaming, I’m falling!” and you open the throttle to…
Dewitt Weddle works 266 acres of cotton southeast of Phoenix in Eloy, just three-quarters of a mile from the plot his father and grandfather farmed before him. My dad went broke in 1959,” he says with a drawl as hard and dry as the soil he tills. Ran out of…
Onetime real estate broker John Stetler Jack” Brown seemed to have played his legal cards like a champ. His winning run started, oddly enough, soon after he admitted to a friend and former Paradise Valley neighbor in 1987 that he was molesting her 7-year-old daughter. Brown not only wasn’t arrested…
LAST THURSDAY, Governor Fife Symington toured Arizona to tout Project SLIM. Armed with a couple of easels and a few stiff-smiling aides, he spread the gospel of what he called total quality management” at press conferences in Phoenix, Tucson and Yuma. The governor declared state government to be a Grand…
On trial was Glen McGaughey, acclaimed by his peers in the Arizona dog-racing business as the most outstanding breeder in the state. McGaughey’s dogs won the most races. He made the most money. He was the best and the brightest of the cretinous lot that claims that greyhound racing is…
