In Arizona, everyone seems to have a dream about buying land and making a fortune. Some do. Most don’t. Timing is an important element. Political influence is even more important. Personally, I’ve always found tales about land deals tedious. So I will keep this to a minimum. Rest assured, however,…
While Don Bolles, the Arizona Republic reporter, lay dying in the hospital, Mickey Clifton, a lawyer, hurried to see John Harvey Adamson, the man who planted the bomb under Bolles’ car. “John was in terrible shape,” Clifton said of Adamson. “He was drinking heavily. He was also on Valium. I’d…
Last year, a diminutive gray-haired bureaucrat and former housewife named Susan Smitak took over a job few would want or could stomach. She replaced Dr. Thomas Kelly as director of Maricopa County Rabies-Animal Control–the infamous county pound. It’s not the most glamorous job in the universe, but Smitak has earned…
It was early Saturday afternoon in Scottsdale Memorial-North Hospital. Saturdays are quiet times in hospitals. The operating rooms are closed down. The business office is shut. The doctors make brief morning visits. It’s a time when the real power of the hospital shifts into the hands of minor bureaucrats and…
Everything you need to know about President George Bush’s war on drugs is contained in the shameless story of the 902 saloon on West Van Buren. The 902 is a bar notorious for its crack cocaine transactions and for the “dirt bags” who drink there, according to Lieutenant Ron Hergert…
In addition to presiding as an Initial Appearance commissioner, Alan LoBue is also a part-time judge at City Court, which is in session 365 days a year. So, LoBue spent his Christmas morning in the basement of the Madison Street Jail with 27 defendants, listening to holiday tales whose themes…
The destruction of earth’s protective ozone cocoon is one of those global pollution problems that leaves the average couch potato thinking, “What the hell am I supposed to do about it?” Improbable as it may seem, four local guys have come up with a no-nonsense answer to that question. The…
Dr. Duane Wooten could have chosen a safe, cushy field of medicine. He could have become a veterinarian, for example, specializing in psychotic pit bulls or rabid Doberman pinschers. But no. This Tempe physician dedicated his professional life to the care and treatment of the wildest, most unpredictable creatures in…
The judge lights another Pall Mall and glances at the wall clock in his cramped chambers. He gulps down some coffee and flips through his docket. It’s 3:55 on a blustery winter’s morning, five minutes before court is scheduled to start. “Ah, coffee, the lifeblood of the jail,” says Judge…
Ever since she was smuggled into Arizona at the age of eleven by a Guatemalan man who abused her, Maria simply has accepted the fact that the man who feeds her, owns her. Maria’s father, a Mayan laborer, sent her to America a year and a half ago to baby-sit…
Apparently burning babies to death, through negligence or intent, is not much of a crime in Maricopa County. Allison Gail Rolland nearly killed her five-month-old infant when she abandoned the child in the family car on June 15 as scorching desert temperatures reached 108 degrees. A frantic passer-by freed the…
Even for drug-riddled Cochise County, the raid at the Hide Out Bar in Huachuca City was a doozie. Forty-five officers from eleven police agencies swooped into the bar and held 65 patrons–most of them bikers–at gunpoint for more than two hours while they searched high and low for drugs. After…
Phoenix’s dead real estate market and slowed freeway-construction schedule are, taken separately, bad enough for anyone directly affected. But when the two converge, as residents of one small north-central Phoenix neighborhood are finding out, the effect is like a hurricane sweeping in at high tide. The focal point of these…
I got to Beth Israel Cemetery an hour early. Brad Funk’s coffin was already sitting under a canopy near the main gate with an American flag draped over it. About fifteen minutes before the service was scheduled to begin, the crowd arrived. They came in flashy cars that formed a…
The way I’ve come to see it, you can’t fully qualify as a modern parent unless you bring to the job these five essential items: shelter, food, clothing, medical care and a $999 video camera with special-effects functions and a free accessories package (retail value: $150) that includes carrying case,…
Colorado developer Frank Aries had no intention of carving out another piece of ho-hum suburbia when, in 1985, he went calling on the Driggs boys, the freewheeling moneylenders at Phoenix’s Western Savings and Loan. The land sultan of Colorado Springs, fresh from a slick parceling of the old Howard Hughes…
One day, just after Christmas in 1984, Marion Bulin was driving to work through the Marina District of San Francisco. All of a sudden, she says, “I realized that I was just driving through this crop of Christmas trees.” This crop, however, was of discards, looking strangely human and sad…
Hey, dude! Wanna buy a Berlin Wall? Yep. As off-the-wall ideas go, this one was right up there. “At the time, it just seemed like a wacky thing to do.” So says Aaron DeVault, an ASU student who hopes to recoup the cost of a trip to Germany by fencing…
Submitted for your approval, one storefront greasy spoon, the kind of place most folks ordinarily wouldn’t pay no never mind to. No, sirree, ma’am. Nothin’ fancy about it, unless your idea of high-falutin’ decor runs to things like souvenir Elvis mirrors and wastebaskets, or maybe a plastic bag from the…
Attention, yuppie shoppers! Arizona’s oldest merchant family, the GOLDWATER clan, is back in business. For the first time in years and years, the family is going to use its name to sell goods. Patriarch BARRY GOLDWATER and his family, whose name was plastered across stagecoaches last century, sold their department…
Sometimes, as that popular bumper sticker so ineloquently puts it, shit happens. And sometimes, there is no one to blame. You can see it coming from fifty miles off, all flashing lights and screaming sirens. You can do everything in your power to avoid it. And then . . …
Valley autograph hounds must have thought they’d been put to sleep and gone to heaven. Simply put, the town was lousy with stars in the Eighties. And as we forge into the Nineties, it’s time to tick some of them off. Guess who came to dinner? How about Laugh-In bench-warmer…
