Last spring, the state’s largest daily newspaper launched an expensive legal challenge to force the federal Resolution Trust Corporation to unseal hundreds of pages of documents filed in its $217 million lawsuit against Governor J. Fife Symington III and other officials of the failed Southwest Savings and Loan. Over the…
You may know that Tiny Tim was one of the most aberrant things to emerge from the Sixties. You may know that two and a half decades ago, he took his long hair, ukulele and piercing falsetto to international prominence, that he married a 17-year-old named Miss Vicky on The…
First things first about Cop Shoot Cop. The band’s name is not some sort of white-boy take on Ice-T anger. And it’s not a pithy stage direction from an old Keystone Kops flick. At least not according to Tod A., Cop Shoot Cop’s lead howler. “We used to have a…
I rang the doorbell at Senator Alston’s house in the 4100 block of West Cheery Lynn Road the other day, and was greeted by the tumultuous sounds of three dogs, two of them quite small but all yapping away at a great rate. Promptly, the door was opened by one…
After a certain age, you don’t get weepy over country-music laments or wonder at the integrity of politicians. But even if you’ve got the digestive system of a boa constrictor, it is difficult to swallow the level of distortion, the high-finance perversion of facts and the bald-faced lying that is…
It’s 3 a.m. What were only minor problems in the daylight are nightmares in the dark. Who can sleep with thoughts closing in like tarantulas stepping across my pillow? What if as a child I’d been adopted by Mia Farrow? Or, even worse, what if Carl Kunasek is elected to…
I knew I wanted to be a sportswriter when I was 14 years old. I had discovered Mark Harris’ Bang the Drum Slowly in the library . . . —Ron Rapoport of the Los Angeles Daily News in the introduction to A Kind of Grace: A Treasury of Great Women’s…
As election day nears, so dawns the realization that by this time next week, we might not have Governor J. Fife Symington III to kick around anymore. As a public service befitting the gravity of the occasion, New Times has marshaled its vast resources to reflect on what we and…
U.S. Senator Larry Craig, a conservative Republican from Idaho, came to Phoenix a couple of weeks ago to lunch at the Arizona Biltmore and stump for GOP Senate hopeful Jon Kyl. Kyl’s opponent, Democrat Sam Coppersmith, celebrated the Idaho senator’s visit by faxing around a newspaper clipping that quotes Craig…
In Tim Burton’s recent big-screen biography of Ed Wood, actor Johnny Depp re-created key scenes from several of that Grade Z movie director’s masterworks from the 1950s: In the climactic flying-saucer attack that highlights Plan 9 From Outer Space, flaming paper plates dangling from fishing poles strafe a papier-mch model…
Basically, Debra Colbert and Joanne Lee got tired of waiting until February. February is Black Heritage Month, and that’s when most of the bookstores would bring out the stuff by current African-American authors other than Toni Morrison and Terry McMillan and Alice Walker and Bebe Moore Campbell. There’d be little…
Rudman Flees, Sparks Fly Anyone who has driven through east Phoenix in the last year has seen Roger Rudman’s handiwork. He’s the guy who posted those horrendous signs urging voters to “Recall Rebecca Macbeth.” Macbeth is a justice of the peace and Rudman’s estranged lover. Rudman put up the signs…
“Ah, Phoenix,” a New York contractor told a Valley colleague during a professional conference last year. “Nice place. But don’t drink the water.” Phoenix’s water system, it seems, is the talk of bored water and waste-water contractors everywhere. The Best Run City in the World is also the last major…
It’s Friday night at Scottsdale Stadium. Michael Jordan walks up the dugout steps at 6:41 p.m. As he reaches the top step, Jordan looks around the stands as if to count the house. When Jordan ruled the National Basketball Association and led the Chicago Bulls to three consecutive titles, he…
While Tempe attorney Barbara Ross was preparing to represent a client in a civil trial, her former husband was busy, too. He was quietly convincing a Maricopa County Superior Court judge that Ross had suffered a serious relapse of mental illness. She was, the ex-husband contended in mid-July, unfit to…
Jane White’s house is a noisy place, and not just because of the cars zipping past on the new, improved Pima Road, barely 50 feet from her front door. The phone rings constantly, and the caller is usually somebody with something to tell her about freeways, or about meetings about…
Several victims of the Valley’s fallen “King of Probate” may get some financial satisfaction in the next several weeks. Bonding companies are expected to cut checks totaling about $800,000 to the heirs of 14 estates that were plundered by Mesa attorney Wayne Elmer Legg and his sidekick, Webber Mackey. The…
Tried earlier this year for pruning her spouse’s privates with a carving knife, Lorena Bobbitt was found not guilty by reason of insanity. But thanks to a just-released porno docudrama inspired by the case, it’s husband John Wayne Bobbitt who’s not exactly playing with, ahem, a full dick. “Now, for…
Here are some things you ought to know about Congressman Jon Kyl, that passionless and aloof candidate of the Republican ultraright, before you vote to send him to the United States Senate. Kyl represents everything that is detestable about the current political state of affairs in Washington, D.C. Like his…
The cars seem remarkably new for a university parking lot. There are no bikes or beaters, no VW buses with bumper stickers that read “Honk if something falls off.” These are shiny Tauruses and Sentras, the sensible cars of people with jobs. The cars’ owners are middle-aged middle managers, white-collar…
Benita Venegas shuts her dark eyes and considers something for several seconds. The 16-year-old fixes her inquisitor with a mournful expression. Suddenly, she pounds her left fist into her chest and releases a haunting, high-pitched wail. She whirls to face her foster mother, Ellen White, a Paradise Valley woman in…
It’s less than a month before the election. Do you know who your school-board candidates are? While the silver-spoon governor and the chubby grocer are busy trying to be “the education candidate” and former state senators Lela Alston and Lisa Graham battle for the primarily bureaucratic position of state superintendent…
