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 built an elaborate and expensive instrument for betrayal around him.
Because of him, seven political careers have ended, and Arizona was held up again in the national spotlight as a land of near-constant political scandal. His name is Gary Bartlett.
Of course, Joseph Stedino, an undercover agent for the county attorney, is a thrice-convicted felon whose entire life story is one of gambling and making book with organized crime figures who has admitted under oath that he's good at lying.
On the other hand, if Bartlett is telling the truth, Stedino is lying, and the County Attorney's Office engineered the sting without any reason to believe Arizona state legislators could be bribed. In that case, the County Attorney's Office engaged in entrapment.
This is the story: According to the AzScam transcripts and further details provided by undercover agent Joseph Stedino during depositions, it was Bartlett, a state hearing officer and glad-hander in the Democratic party, who first told Stedino that certain legislators' votes on the issue of legalized gambling were available for a price. Further, Bartlett said that, with his connections, he was the man capable of fingering vulnerable legislators and luring them into Stedino's sticky net. He said, `There are plenty of legislators down there that I can buy,'" Stedino has testified to Murray Miller, the lawyer for indicted ex-legislator Carolyn Walker.
According to Stedino, it was solely on the strength of Bartlett's word that AzScam was created.
Whom should you believe? Does anything that is known about Stedino inspire confidence? Can Bartlett, a controversial figure in Arizona since the Seventies, be trusted?
In this, his first in-depth interview since AzScam broke last year, Bartlett would like you to believe he can.
He says he didn't do anything wrong. The unholy mess that is still being played out downtown in the form of former Senator Walker's and lobbyist Ron Tapp's trial-well, it isn't his fault. Bartlett wants it on the record that everything Stedino has said about him is a lie that serves the political interests of the County Attorney's Office.
In order for AzScam to be a clean investigation and not entrapment, someone had to turn Stedino on to the fact that there were legislators that would take a bribe," he says, referring to the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that requires government sting operations to prove predisposition to commit a crime. (Under the new ruling, the county attorney may have engaged in entrapment even if Bartlett did identify bribable legislators. Nothing has surfaced in the transcripts or anywhere else to suggest that Bartlett had knowledge of specific legislators who'd accepted bribes before; he surmises to Stedino only that he thinks they can be bought. This sort of conjecture doesn't necessarily prove a predisposition to crime.)
Bartlett says it is the need to prove predisposition that has caused Stedino to fabricate Bartlett as a culprit; upon closer examination, all the agent's proof" falls apart.
Ask Stedino to show you a videotape of me telling him legislators can be bribed!" Bartlett cries. The audio tapes can't be trusted, he explains, because they are badly transcribed-many of the comments attributed to Bartlett were actually spoken by someone else-and because key conversations between himself and Stedino are missing. My notes show 200 conversations with Stedino and he said there were 30. Sometimes he called me eight or ten times a day. Where are the other calls?" Bartlett wants to know. ÔI am going to be able to prove at my trial that Stedino himself came up with the idea of bribing legislators." (Bartlett is indicted on three felony counts as a result of AzScam, and he will be tried sometime after the trial of Walker and Tapp has ended.)
Not only did he not originate the idea of bribery, but he opposed it morally when it arose, Bartlett says. He describes his brief tenure as Stedino's lobbyist, wherein he agreed to streamline the issue of legalized gambling through the Arizona State Legislature in exchange for $125,000 a year, as a period of time when Stedino was the corrupter and Bartlett was Arizona's very own and indignant straight arrow. Stedino suggested to me that he wanted to influence public officials and I refused. He never even used the word `bribe' around me; he knew I wouldn't deal with it. If I knew someone was being bribed, I would take action to prevent it. Every time Stedino suggested anything improper, I said I would resign."
He points out that he has been credited as the original source on AzScam for Arizona Republic reporters Randy Collier and Charles Kelly: I am the guy who broke the story to the R&G. Does that sound like a guy who was out to bribe legislators?
I defy them to prove I said it!" he almost shouts, presumably in the direction of the County Attorney's Office. I challenge them and call them to their faces a bunch of goddamn liars!"
He has a great deal more to say; he is like a pricked balloon. And in the beginning, his flood of inciting words fits in fairly neatly with the many other incredible details of AzScam's inner workings that have leaked over the past year onto the public record. It is only later that he seems to be performing solely for effect.
He marvels at the wads of bills Stedino carried with him, shakes his head over the amount of money Stedino spent renting and furnishing offices out of which to run the sting-by some accounts, more than $36,000. He declares that, according to the terms of Stedino's contract with the County Attorney's Office, Stedino will be specially rewarded for his lavish ways. (Stedino constantly pressured me to accept more money, gifts, clothes. The more money he spent the more he got back on his percentage.") He elaborates on Stedino's documented drug use that, for years, has had the agent popping sedatives to control a panic disorder. (The guy didn't know where he was most of the time, he was so screwed up on drugs. His ability to think was tremendously impaired.")
Most of all, Bartlett fires scattershots into the halls of law enforcement, alleging that, like others before him, he is a victim of County Attorney Richard Romley's and former Phoenix police chief Ruben Ortega's determination to ruin with the sting some members of the community against whom they bore grudges. In particular, he says that he was targeted because of his association with two firefighters turned politicians whose enmity with Ortega is well-documented. I think it was a setup from the very beginning," he says of the way he was recruited for involvement in the sting. I think the real reason [Stedino sought me out] is being a Democrat, a judge, and being closely allied with Pat Cantelme and Duane Pell."
He adds feelingly that the persecution has continued. Since slightly before the sting broke in the newspapers, Bartlett also has been fighting criminal charges that relate to filing late state income-tax returns. Despite the fact that, according to the calculations of the accountant who finally prepared the returns, Bartlett was owed a refund for the years in which he filed late, he was convicted on tax charges earlier this year, and the state has asked Maricopa County Superior Court Judge E.G. Noyes to sentence him to prison for four to seven years. Bartlett is convinced-and transcripts of court proceedings bear out that Judge Noyes is concerned as well-that the harsh sentencing request is a prosecutor's attempt to pressure Bartlett to cop a plea on the AzScam charges, something that he has refused to do.
Prosecutors are suffering from acute short-man syndrome beneath balding pates. We should quit calling them prosecutors and call them what they are-pricks," he says bitterly of his recent court experiences.
Never did I dream that filing my taxes late would be a criminal matter. I wake up sometimes and have a hard time believing that this is not going to go away," he says. But in the end, he has decided he needs to come forward to warn others that, when it comes to crossing the County Attorney's Office, they had better watch their backs. I am going to prison," he opines. What I care about is that it not happen to anybody else.
We are living the effects of legislative overkill and prosecutorial abuse! Arizona is a police state!"
He is raving now, he's on a roll. He could be alone. He's a shaggy man with a smooth voice and a notebook propped open on the table in front of him from which he has begun to read, filling the dark restaurant with rumbling prose he says he is penning in preparation for the book he will write on AzScam one day. Yes, he is reading quotes from himself: `I love the law and I was faithful to it. I have not knowingly or intentionally violated the trust placed in me as a member of the judiciary.'"That is how he often refers to himself, as a member of the judiciary" and also as Judge Gary Bartlett," although his judicial appointments have been as the town magistrate in Guadalupe, charged primarily with hearing curfew and traffic violations on a part-time basis, and as a state hearing officer at the Fire Marshal's Office who resolves, among other things, landlord-tenant disputes and disputes with manufacturers for people living in mobile homes. Even his business card still reads Judge Gary Bartlett," despite the fact that he may never be allowed to judge anything again.
He likes to ruminate upon his days as a judge"; perhaps he thinks his past accomplishments make Stedino's version of Bartlett's part in AzScam even more unbelievable. Perhaps he just likes to reminisce. He says, I certainly did not deserve to be a judge. It was something beyond my wildest expectations. It was the most humbling thing that ever happened, when you wake up in the morning and put on a robe and you sit a little bit higher than everybody else and you see the fear in their eyes, even the prosecutors.
They will never prove that I abused the public trust that was placed in me. I can live with myself in prison."
He has a few other credentials he wants the public to know about, credentials much like those that, according to police transcripts, he touted to Stedino about his qualifications for lobbying. He thinks they prove he should be taken seriously when he insists that Stedino lied.
I like Dennis DeConcini, I like Susie DeConcini, and I like to think that they are friends of mine," he says. Talk to Judy Lieby in DeConcini's office about me: She used to be my campaign manager." (Bartlett ran for state treasurer in 1978, and later entered a couple of races for justice of the peace.)
Senator Alan Stephens used to be a campaign manager of mine. Ask him whether it hadn't been an ambition of mine to get into lobbying long before I even met Joseph Stedino.
I consider Rose Mofford a personal friend and I have for many years. I treat the word `friendship' delicately. I do not have that many friends. But when I say someone is a friend, I say they are more than an acquaintance. She has assisted me. She has worked in my campaigns.
My court chamber is next door to Duane Pell's at the Fire Marshal's Office. I received [firefighter union president] Pat Cantelme's endorsement in all my campaigns for public office. I am very closely allied with the firefighters." He reveals that, when Cantelme was indicted on cocaine charges in the early Eighties, Bartlett was the private investigator on his behalf, something that Bartlett also told Stedino.
Name the Democrats! At one time they were all on the Bartlett bandwagon.
I am very confident with the friends I have. I believe I have a broad base of support, not only in Maricopa County but statewide."
After about four hours of this, he lumbers away, unburdened.
Over the next few days Bartlett's references" are checked and his credibility disappears. The broad base of support" he refers to is barely aware of him, and the friends" he claims have stood by him or have managed his campaigns have never done so.
Is he saying I was his campaign manager?" asks Senator Alan Stephens, his usually unrevealing voice straying as far in the direction of sheer disbelief as it ever will. That is bizarre. I used to see him periodically at meetings of justices of the peace and that is all."
Judy Lieby, the director of constituent services for Senator Dennis DeConcini, is also nonplussed to hear that she is credited with managing a Bartlett campaign. I was working on two campaigns in '78, but not his," she says. I knew him not really very well. And I have known Dennis and Susie for 17 years and I know 99 percent of their friends. I know that he and Dennis are not friends and never have been."
part 1 of 4
THERE GOES THE "JUDGE" DID AZSCAM RUIN ... v4-29-92
