It will be as tense a moment as anyone can ever remember in a Maricopa County Superior Court. The following words will be heard by the spectators crammed into Judge Frederick Martone’s courtroom on the thirteenth floor of the Central Court Building: “We now call Charles Hyder to the stand.”…
There was not a sound in the courtroom as the witness identified himself. “My name is Ron Kermit Frazier.” The prosecution has two star witnesses, one an undercover FBI agent, the other this man, a paid informant. Both infiltrated Earth First! and gathered the evidence that led to the arrests…
Almost every day there is a new development in the America West Airlines story. I discount the ones that involve Governor J. Fife Symington III’s remarks about whether he will get the state of Arizona involved. Symington has enough financial troubles of his own. His own projects are on such…
If you’re Charles H. Keating II, you’re probably tired of running into process server Paul D. Sanchez. No matter that you’re used to process servers. Even before your junk-bond-fueled empire was seized by the federal government, someone was always serving you papers. That’s the price you pay for being a…
Annette Morris could barely choke back her rage one morning last April when she saw the locked stall in the women’s rest room of the Community Legal Services building in downtown Phoenix. In the legal-aid center for poor people, poor people were locked out of one of the rest-room stalls…
The tee shirts and stickers began to appear about five months ago. The tee shirts read “I’m straight” on the front and on the back, “Not bent.” The stickers got right to the point: The words “No fags” appeared inside a circle with a slash through it. They began showing…
Craig Pletenik was standing near third base, trying to remain as calm as possible as he repeated “Mayday, mayday” into a walkie-talkie. He had exactly ninety seconds between innings at the Phoenix Firebirds game against the Calgary Cannons. Nearby stood a family looking hopefully at the left-field fence. In the…
Last week the fifteen good people in the jury box watched a parade of FBI agents step into the witness stand. This jury, like all juries, is composed of citizens who are chosen because they are like the rest of us. They do not summer in Portofino. They work for…
“I’ve been waiting two days to get on the stand,” Chuck Diettrich says. He is a husky man in a dark blue pinstripe suit. He paces slowly up and down the nearly empty corridor on the thirteenth floor of the Central Courthouse in downtown Phoenix. Diettrich, 50, is waiting to…
Kathy Gravell woke up last week in the Motel 6 on East Van Buren Street. She put on a pretty flowered dress and drove her red Toyota a few miles west to the Attorney General’s Office. Kathy admitted she was a nervous wreck. “I want to put this thing behind…
Wayne Newton lives in one of the better parts of Las Vegas, in the same neighborhood as Nancy Sinatra, Gladys Knight, and Paul Harvey’s son. Newton’s spread has strolling peacocks, air-conditioned horse barns, manmade lakes, a helipad, and, because of the tour buses, a twelve-foot wall. “It looks like something…
Even before his early-Seventies exile to Austin, Texas, Willie Hugh Nelson was an outlaw. As a member of Ray Price’s Cherokee Cowboys, Nelson tried to toe Nashville’s staid and stuffy lines. But although his red hair was neatly shorn and he wore the de rigueur gaudy rhinestone suits, the power…
“This is going to be fun,” assistant Maricopa County attorney Jessica Funkhouser promises the bleary-eyed barristers. The occasion is a three-hour seminar titled “Ethics for Public Lawyers–The Higher Standard,” part of the State Bar of Arizona’s annual convention. “The `Higher Standard’?” one local lawyer says as the 9 a.m. session…
ENSCO was the stuff of nightmares, a fuming, snorting, glowering demon that would have gorged on toxic waste, expelling its lethal scat into the air we all breathe. When it inhaled, wastes from all over the West would be sucked into Arizona. It would exhale dioxins, heavy metals and countless,…
The hottest local public relations man is not slick or manipulative. At work he wears boots and a cowboy hat instead of the usual overworked grin and slimy handshake. His client is a total beast who nonetheless has sparked an incredible buzz in the international media. The hot publicist is…
In Washington, D.C., a gentleman boards a jet and flies across the country to Arizona. This man is a lawyer from a city of lawyers. He is Mr. Daniel Fromstein, a prosecutor with the Department of Justice of the United States. Once in Phoenix, Fromstein must drive from the floor…
You have ambitions. You’ve led an army of more than 2,000 officers for more than ten years. You have more power sometimes than the president of the United States. But it isn’t enough. You’ve never been elected to public office, but you smell an opening. The guy whose office you…
It is no accident that of the dozens of published accounts on the Biosphere 2 project–practically all sympathetic–not one describes the family, friends or homes of the crew or management. An atmosphere of secrecy, almost of paranoia, begins right over the telephone. Routine press inquiries about the ballyhooed project outside…
The appointment of Ben Arredondo, a Tempe Republican, to replace Maricopa County supervisor Ed Pastor, a Phoenix Democrat, is perhaps no great surprise in the world of partisan politics. Not when three of the four people doing the choosing–Jim Bruner, Betsey Bayless, and Tom Freestone–are Republicans. What is surprising is…
FINAL VERSION For his article on Biosphere 2, Marc Cooper did not investigate science or an ecological research project–a task he has no scientific qualifications to do in any event. Instead he set out, by his own admission, “predisposed to find an eccentric group of goofballs.” What we are asked…
He loved power. Without it, Ruben Ortega was just an ordinary man. He was possessed of neither dazzling wit nor overwhelming intelligence. His clothes were nondescript. His lack of sophistication and general knowledge was surprising even for a police officer. But as chief of one of the ten largest police…
This is where you want your children to grow up. Prescott. It is clean. It is beautiful. It is peaceful. On a Sunday afternoon in Prescott, the appearance of tranquillity is everywhere. Just off the town square, the local sports tavern, Penelope Parkenfarker’s, hosts a friendly full house as the…
