I keep thinking about Charlie Keating. Right now he’s sitting alone in a jail cell near Bakersfield, California. He’s serving ten years. The other day, a federal jury in Tucson awarded $3.3 billion in damage claims against Keating for swindling thousands of investors. I wonder how Keating feels about this…
SEVEN DAYS INTO 1987, James Simmons needed to look a few people in the eye. The 62-year-old president and board chairman had spent a quarter-century building United Bank of Arizona into the state’s fourth largest bank. Now, the payoff was at hand. A new law had made it possible for…
“I LOVE WOMEN.” The afternoon sun enters Tommy Maggiore’s empty restaurant on East Camelback Road. In a few minutes, evening diners will enter, too. Tomaso’s isn’t out-of-this-world upscale, but it’s very nice. The prices are on the high end of reasonable, the service is good. Later, when wine is flowing…
They were young, they were in love and they’d just tied the knot in Las Vegas. Yet thanks to one of the ghastliest turns of events to ever occur in the glittering gambling capital, the honeymoon was over for this pair of Phoenix newlyweds almost before it began. Vows of…
We forget too soon. By now the Gulf War is but a faded memory. We’ve forgotten those days when General Norman Schwarzkopf was as popular as Johnny Carson or Michael Jordan. That was a time when President George Bush’s approval rating was at its highest and he was busily selling…
hanks, Scott I can’t go along with all the jingoism being displayed over the United States’ professional, all-star basketball team now preparing for the Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. It is a bad idea, commercially driven by the National Basketball Association to sell its product worldwide. It will backfire. It is…
Some moments freeze themselves in your mind. I remember a day in Washington, D.C., during Sandra Day O’Connor’s 1981 hearings to determine her fitness to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court.
On May 6, 1992, New Times published an investigative report detailing extensive groundwater pollution linked to Motorola, an $11 billion multinational electronics manufacturing company that is the state’s largest employer. Among the findings: Motorola’s two flagship plants have been linked to severe contamination of two separate aquifers in the Valley–one…
Following one of America’s largest groundwater contaminations, the government allowed the polluter, Motorola, to inform the public of the consequences. The media played along with pedestrian “parts per billion” coverage that minimized the calamity. The effect was spin-control that would have made the chamber of commerce blush. Were you aware,…
When a hospital technician attached a gizmo onto Sam’s penis to measure his responses to sexually explicit photographs, it is unlikely that he was terribly surprised. After all, 12-year-old Sam has undergone various types of “sex therapy” for half of his life. His mother molested him when he was 3…
Scottsdale seems an unlikely place to locate a band of VISTA volunteers. What acts of selflessness might these persistent do-gooders be committing in the shadow of the Galleria? Ladling out Evian to overheated tourists? Counseling the aesthetically challenged on the finer points of turquoise procurement? Created in 1964, VISTA–Volunteers in…
A FEW YEARS AGO, Wayne Dellinger decided he’d like to make a living doing impersonations of Theodore Roosevelt. Having spent some time in the banking and real estate businesses, Dellinger knew enough to do market research. His market research consisted of dressing up as TR–black cutaway coat, top hat, little…
Thinking back to the day his nose was bloodied, Jack Eason says he probably should have left the principal’s office sooner than he did. Bill Wicevich, the principal of Desert Arroyo Middle School in Cave Creek, had ordered Eason, a 53-year-old janitor and maintenance man, into his office to discuss…
Time has changed the newspaper business. Drastically. People with master’s degrees in journalism tell me it’s for the better. Why don’t I agree? There was a time when I was addicted to newspapers–all of them. Now I can take them or leave them. To me there is no bigger rip-off…
Christina the Lawyer expected there would be chilly nights. But not like this. It was, to put it bluntly, ridiculously cold. So now she is on the telephone, calling me from frigid Michigan, seeking a decent way out. Christina the Lawyer had enrolled in a class at the famous Ox-Bow…
SOPHIE KURYS does not have much good to say about today’s ballplayers. “Overpriced and overrated,” she calls them. She also thinks the ticket prices at spring training games are too high. Not to mention that baseball games these days go on too darned long. Sophie Kurys has opinions on just…
THE GOVERNMENT MAN recalls the first time he laid eyes on a Klump. “One of the brothers was riding horseback over the south side of the Dos Cabezas Mountains,” says Larry Humphrey of the federal Bureau of Land Management. “I noticed that his horse wasn’t wearing any shoes and I…
In the midst of the storm about Phoenix’s proposed gay rights amendment, perhaps the most unexpected thunderbolt was hurled by the Arizona Republic. Two days before the Phoenix City Council was to vote on the issue, William Cheshire, the newspaper’s editorial page editor, personally urged passage. In a June 14…
I walk into the small garage on Route 30, an hour’s drive south of Chicago. It’s quiet here in Chicago Heights. Many of the factories and steel mills have shut down. It’s hard times. There is only one man at work in the garage. He also pumps the gas. I’m…
Still such annoyances were to be endured as part of the desperate gamble involved in my becoming a novelist. –Ralph Ellison in his introduction to The Invisible Man I sit there waiting for Ralph Ellison to take the microphone. What will he be like, I wonder. Among writers Ellison is…
Uh-uh.” Dance-hall owner Jack Smythe shakes his head while skimming an application from a well-groomed, middle-aged woman who’d just applied for a job as a hostess at his new establishment. Forty-five-year-old men don’t want to come in here and talk to a 45-year-old woman,” says the 49-year-old Smythe. If he…
After the stunning Phoenix City Council vote on June 16 to, in effect, not vote on a controversial gay rights amendment, air horns blared and whistles blasted as supporters and opponents alike voiced their disapproval. For a moment, the two factions that nearly filled the Civic Plaza showroom seemed to…
