Audio By Carbonatix
Maricopa County Attorney Richard Romley should be feeling very pleased with the way AzScam has turned out so far.
For one thing, various legislators who were captured unforgettably on videotape are receiving their apparently just deserts. Sue Laybe and Chuy Higuera are spending their evenings in prison these days, and Bobby Raymond is awaiting his sentencing.
For another thing, these results have been achieved quietly. Even defendants like Jim Hartdegen, the former Casa Grande legislator whose reputation was glowing and crimes were slight, could not afford to go to trial. He leapt at the offer of a plea bargain rather than fight the charges many of his advisers thought he could beat. Although Carolyn Walker is scheduled for trial in the fall, and other defendants may follow, to date there has not been a single messy court challenge to AzScam, no ringing public testimony to throw a spotlight on the inner workings of the County Attorney’s Office. Now the difficult questions are fading–the questions Romley faced in the beginning about the million-dollar sting and the way it has brought to light the nearly unlimited powers of law enforcement in Arizona. Because life goes on, reporters all over town have turned their attention to profiling members of the returning Desert Storm militia and chronicling the surprising developments with ENSCO. Romley has done more than escape scrutiny, though. He may have been made a hero by AzScam’s most enduring legacy: the TV images of legislators fingering stacks of bills as expertly as casino cashiers. At any rate, he is basking in enough glory that he’s not engaging in positive PR. He hasn’t given detailed answers to public queries about the sting, and last week he refused an interview with New Times rather than discuss his AzScam role. He even refused to fax the official Romley biography that is usually made available.
Now that the brouhaha is dying down, some of the people who have and do work intimately with Romley are willing to fill in some of the gaps about him, though.
The colleagues who have observed him closely, who agreed to be interviewed for this article, describe Romley unanimously as an infinitely ambitious man whose insecurities and resentments toward others inspire him to seek vengeance. They say he has had difficulty confronting his detractors, a quality that is causing him to blur the lines of authority between the police department and the County Attorney’s Office in a way that provides the police with greater clout.
Both of these characteristics may have influenced the way Romley helped shape AzScam. But there is a third characteristic that may be the most important of all where AzScam is concerned: Romley’s peers say he has made many decisions in the County Attorney’s Office only according to his perceptions of how those decisions will be received by the press.
Says an insider, “He is really going to push anything that is high profile.”
If Richard Romley has gone to great lengths to promote himself, it has all come together for him in ’91, with AzScam. He can breathe easy for a while, and maybe look around for another project that will help him get wherever he’s going.
What sort of project will it be?
A HIGHLY PLACED source inside the County Attorney’s Office tells a story that he says illustrates perfectly the way Romley relates to his job. Like most of the other sources in this story, he asks not to be identified, since a county attorney’s influence is far-reaching and can affect his critics even after they have left the County Attorney’s Office.
This source says he has seen Romley continually gauge his actions as county attorney with his personal ambitions in mind. “He is a very ambitious guy,” the source says. “I think he would like to be a senator or a congressman.”
One of the first times the source realized Romley is a climber was shortly after Romley was elected, when the source sat through a meeting that was to decide the fate of the case of Milt Novkov.
Novkov, the county assessor, was accused of adjusting property valuations for his friends, and the scandal had been much ballyhooed in the press for weeks. Now the matter had been remanded back to a grand jury, and it had fallen to Romley’s office to decide whether to pursue Novkov any further.
“Normally you look at the state of the case and see whether you can prove it. You’re thinking, `What is the right thing to do?'” says the source. “But Romley’s whole thrust was, `What is the media going to do if I do this? And what is the media going to do if I do that?’ He does that constantly.”
The source goes on to compare Romley to his predecessor, Tom Collins: “Collins had a moral code that was tight and some people didn’t like it, but he was always trying to do what was right. Rick Romley doesn’t have that internal code of his own. All his values are relative.”
The source says that where AzScam was concerned, the idea was posed by the police department and it worried Romley in the beginning. “He is afraid of ever getting in a Suns situation in the media’s eyes,” says the source. He is referring to the drug bust aimed at members of the Phoenix Suns basketball team several years ago that tarnished the reputation of county attorney Collins, on account of the way the charges seemed to evaporate whenever they got too close to the light.
The source says Romley became reassured that any charges resulting from the AzScam scheme would stick when he gave the reins to deputy county attorney Jim Keppel, a competent trial attorney who was so hands-on throughout the sting that he advised undercover agent Joe Stedino over the telephone during Stedino’s conversations with legislators. “I think Romley thought Keppel was his insurance, that he would do a good job, that they would get everything on videotape, and the risk would be low,” says the source.
(This charge of testing the wind and other charges contained in this article were faxed to Romley, but he did not respond.)
Other insiders agree that Romley is a climber and that his climb within the County Attorney’s Office began in ’84, when he took over as the head of the troubled family support unit from career prosecutor Jim Braden. Romley volunteered for the post, which was both an unenviable one and a position where for the first time he attracted considerable attention from his superiors.
Family support was charged with particularly messy tasks, such as establishing paternity and collecting payments from delinquent fathers, and the division was in such disarray that there once were rumors of sanctions from the federal government. Insiders say that county attorney Tom Collins and his chief deputy, Norm Keyt, gave the job to Romley because no one else wanted it, and because Romley had some prior business experience as the owner of a clothing store in Sun City. They thought Romley might be able to beef up collections.
He did beef them up, but former colleagues at family support say his staff paid the price in terms of morale. Where workers had operated with some sense of mission under Braden, they felt that Romley was a numbers cruncher who only wanted his employees to make him look good personally. “Braden made you think the women needing child support were our clients, that we were out there working for these people, that you should take pride in your position of customer service,” says a former employee. “Rick was: `I want my office to be more efficient. I want better numbers. What will it take to get more work done for me?’ Nothing else would ever be taken into consideration if your collection numbers were too low. People in the office felt he was just self-serving.”
People in the office also felt that they were turned against one another in the name of Romley’s personal ambitions. One former employee remembers hearing from her peers that they had been asked to spy on her because Romley was looking for reasons to get her out of the office. Another recalls that co-workers were pitted against one another, and that jobs were repeatedly threatened. “You consistently felt like Big Brother was watching over you,” a former administrator remembers. “He claimed the office worked together as a team, but everybody was terribly afraid they wouldn’t do their job right. They were consistently looking for reasons to blame someone else.” Other former employees say more simply that Romley managed through fear.
He had, apparently, a few fears of his own, and one of them concerned his predecessor, Braden, who by all accounts had accomplished some important overhauls in child support before he lost interest and Romley replaced him. Colleen Schorr, who worked for Braden and later became Romley’s chief assistant in the unit, says that Romley was a dedicated and competent supervisor who worked long hours, but that his effectiveness was weakened by his resentment that Braden’s staff still felt great regard for its former boss. “Rick felt there was absolutely no loyalty for him,” says Schorr. Although he didn’t know Braden personally, Schorr says, Romley “has had a vendetta since Day One” against Braden, one rooted in jealousy.
She remembers that he acted it out in dramatic ways. He harped to his employees about the tangled department he’d inherited from Braden. And there was something worse: Schorr recalls a day when Braden appeared on an errand of mercy on the floor in the Luhrs Building where the family support unit was housed. On the elevator, he’d met a couple confused by the bureaucracy and had brought them to a former co-worker who understood their problem. To Schorr’s great surprise, Braden’s mere presence down the hall caused Romley to spin into a rage.
She recounts that Romley became so overwrought that a vein on his forehead popped out. “He came flying into my office, saying, `I know that Jim is your friend, but tell him to get off this floor!’ He would not have confronted Jim himself because he would not have been able to handle himself. I had never seen anyone blow up like that! He ranted and raved and hollered and screamed.”
Others who observed Romley’s exposed nerve about Braden were not surprised when, after Romley was elected county attorney, Braden resigned from the County Attorney’s Office under pressure. From the family support unit, Braden had returned to criminal trial work and made a tragic error there: He mistakenly allowed a case to be dismissed against a jailed probation violator who then immediately murdered someone. The dreadful gaffe occurred at least in part because of an overburdened court system that allows attorneys who may be uninformed to stand in for their colleagues, but Romley didn’t blame the system. He blamed Braden, and Braden buckled.
Braden has accused Romley of a personal vendetta and has said the county attorney was just looking to force him out of the office. Sources close to Braden say he resigned because he figured that, even if he fought Romley and survived in the department, Romley would continue to make his life miserable.
The story is important because it suggests the way Romley will lash out at those he perceives to be enemies, and because lashing out has been a frequent theme of the sting. Indicted legislators have wondered aloud whether they were “targeted” by undercover agent Stedino, who was coached by Romley’s office, because they had made known their willingness to reconsider parts of the state’s stringent criminal code that favored law enforcement.
In particular, former legislator Jim Hartdegen has recounted that last year he found himself shouting at Romley over the telephone about the unrestricted funds that are confiscated during drug busts and then funneled into the County Attorney’s Office–money that helped make operations like the sting possible. Hartdegen has remarked that sting transcripts suggest Stedino was unusually eager to involve him in AzScam despite the number of times that Hartdegen rebuffed him. The implication has been that the yelling match might have inspired Romley to retaliate, although it has been hard to imagine that such a small thing as a difference of opinion would have riled a grown man.
If Romley’s colleagues are on the money about the thinness of the county attorney’s skin, it is less hard to imagine.
Former colleagues in family support also remember the way that Romley transitioned himself out of their department by appointing Schorr as acting department head and involving himself more and more in his role as the head of Collins’ brand new war on drugs, the cause celebre of the hour. “He really wanted the drug job because he would be in the press more and he would look good,” says a former colleague in family support.”He had finally realized that nobody was going to look good in family support.”
One colleague also speculates that, ultimately, Romley saw AzScam mainly as another opportunity to look good. “I imagine the thing he would have thought about in connection with AzScam is, `I will be on the tip of everybody’s tongue,'” she says.
Finally, the members of the family support staff recall that, when the decision to close their division altogether was reached in ’87, Romley did not inform the 74 people working for him that their jobs were disappearing the next Monday. Every member of the department had to hear on the radio that their livelihoods were ending. As cheap as his lack of forthrightness was, his employees found Romley’s unwillingness to confront them very consistent with the way he ran the office.
Others suggest that Romley’s inability to confront directly may be causing him, as county attorney, to cave in to the demands of the police department. The charge represents a dangerous trend if it’s true, since the County Attorney’s Office is intended to serve as a check and balance on the powers of the boys in blue. This arm’s length relationship may be breaking down because of something called the “complaint department.” Under Romley’s predecessors, the attorney who would prosecute a case in court also decided whether to file the original charges; under Romley, one group of lawyers–the “complaint department”–decides only about filings and other attorneys are assigned to prosecutions.
Observers suggest that a filing system characterized by a “complaint department” works against the autonomy of a leader like Romley who deals poorly with criticism, since the police will always pressure him for more filings. Rather than standing up to this griping, it is a simple matter for Romley to discipline or replace one small group of lawyers whose filing practices don’t please the police, according to insiders. “It is easier for Romley just to go along with the police and file everything,” says one insider. “Then he gets the Sun City folks cheering him on.”
Says another source, “We are getting a lot of bad cases filed now.”
And a third, a prosecutor who quit under Romley, is worried that a feeling of increasing influence within the County Attorney’s Office may cause cops to behave more aggressively in the community, since they feel less scrutinized. “The last several years I was in the prosecutor’s office, I began to be disturbed by the way the police officers do business,” he says. “They have more and more power. They used to go in to keep the peace and see that nobody got hurt. Now they go in with their guns drawn.” If Romley is cozying up to the police department, his motives may be another variation on the theme of personal ambition and not solely a lack of spine. Observers point out that a county attorney concerned with re-election alienates the police at his peril, a lesson that was learned in spades by Chuck Hyder, who served a single term as county attorney during the Seventies.
Hyder insisted upon a published set of standards for filing charges that the police understood and his attorneys adhered to. He also made certain that all police shootings were investigated independently by the County Attorney’s Office and was, in short, a tremendous thorn in the police department’s side. “My perception and the feedback I got from law enforcement people that were my friends was, `The cops don’t like you, you are too strong,'” says Hyder. Come election time, he paid for it, too: He lost and the police had helped, having come out publicly against him, he says.
Romley’s peers think it’s not a risk he wants to take. “Romley’s whole thrust was, `What is the media going to do if I do this? And what is the media going to do if I do that?'”
People in the office felt that they were turned against one another in the name of Romley’s personal ambitions.
Braden’s mere presence down the hall caused Romley to spin into a rage.
“I imagine the thing he would have thought about in connection with AzScam is, `I will be on the tip of everybody’s tongue.’
