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…
Probably the most famous prank in the history of phone-foolery is a series of calls made to one Louis Red” Deutsch, the pit-bull-like proprietor of the Tube Bar saloon in Jersey City, New Jersey. Over the course of a dozen-odd calls believed to have been recorded some 15 years ago…
After somehow obtaining a secret hot-line number reserved for top station personnel, one of the craftier Interceptors made a late-night call to the deejay manning the turntable at KBUZ, a now-defunct easy-listening station. Identifying himself as general manager of the station, the prankster informed the puzzled deejay that the station…
As a boy, Tim Hilliard watched the Palo Verde nuclear power plant rise from the desert west of Phoenix, claiming the flatland where he once rode horses. Like many of his neighbors in the sparsely settled countryside, Hilliard was never fully comfortable in its looming shadow. Now, Hilliard blames the…
This is a truly memorable tale about Governor J. Fife Symington III and his dearest friend in government, the voluptuous Miss Annette Alvarez. It’s bizarre, loony, absurd-even silly. It’s also quite zany. Up to now, we’ve thought about Symington and Alvarez only in terms of romance. This latest tale adds…
HOLD THE PHONE! Was Prince Albert about to get permanently canned? For a minute there, it looked like it. But several weeks ago, following unsatisfactory negotiations with the Arizona Corporation Commission, U S West Communications put the lid on plans to market Caller ID, a controversial gizmo that enables the…
EVEN IF THE Paradise Valley police had done their job, a jury may never have convicted pro football player Marcus Cotton of raping an ASU co-ed. As in almost all acquaintance” or date” rape cases, this one may have come down to a courtroom match between two people: The woman…
NFL LINEBACKER MARCUS COTTON MAY HAVE RAPED AN ASU CO-ED. TOO BAD THE COPS We’re in a unique county in Ohio,” says Detective Franz. Anywhere else in the state, Mr. Cotton probably would have had to plead to a felony. It was a date rape, but the victim was credible…
Last June, Father Gerald Yeager of Saint Edward’s Catholic Church at 44th Street and Southern canceled the once-a-month Mass he gave in Spanish. The bishop told me I could cancel it if I could fire a cannonball down the aisle of the church,” he has said many times since. Attendance…
Over a period of time, I have become more than just skeptical of County Attorney Richard Romley and his partner in the AzScam sting, then-Police Chief Ruben Ortega. Nothing personal. It’s just that after years of covering these two, it is my opinion that both Romley and Ortega are more…
A RIBBON through bleakness, the latest installment of the Hohokam Expressway snakes up from the south, fording the Salt River. It gathers momentum, sending exit ramps diving for Sky Harbor International Airport and Washington Street, and seems to promise a shot at Camelback Mountain before merging into McDowell Road. Like…
But the condemnation process does not require the state to pay a landowner for a property’s potential or the dreams of grandeur harbored by a developer. Just compensation is considered the value of the property at the moment it is appraised. The state’s appraisers came onto Gabrielli’s land and saw…
He says he believes ADOT knew about the pesticides in the concrete sump and refused to settle his case in order to hold him responsible for the cleanup. He suggests that the state didn’t order the Phase II audit because it knew the study would discover problems, and that the…
