So much happened here. And now the grass bordering the headquarters of Charlie Keating’s American Continental Corporation at 2735 East Camelback is burned out. The trees should be trimmed. The yellow awnings are faded. Some are torn to shreds. They haven’t been replaced. The place is run-down and seedy. I…
The arrest of the militant environmentalists of Earth First! on May 30, 1989, included charges of terrorism directed at nuclear power plants in the West. The foundation for the alarming headlines that announced the bust is contained in government files. Those files detail an undercover FBI probe that began in…
Never mind a car in every garage and a chicken in every microwave. Where in these United States is the couch-potato Utopia that has a videocassette recorder in virtually each and every home? Incredibly, the answer is Flagstaff. That’s what Arbitron, the national rating service that is one of the…
Phoenix residents who still may be intoxicated by the sweet smell of victory over a proposed hazardous-waste incinerator fifty miles to the southwest may soon be inhaling emissions of a slightly different sort. Even as toasts were poured to celebrate the demise of the wildly unpopular ENSCO project, two proposed…
“YOU BOND TO THE TORTOISES YOU FIND.” On the edge of Little Shipp Wash in west-central Arizona, the Sonoran Desert is settling in for the night. But the people inside a small trailer ignore the rattling call of a frog in a nearby acacia tree, the scent of moss and…
It was bad enough that a jury found a partnership of nine East Valley doctors guilty of defrauding a California couple in a catastrophic real-estate deal in Mesa. The doctors practically went into cardiac arrest when, based on the jury’s verdict, they were found guilty of racketeering. Maricopa County Superior…
That rarest commodity, a saboteur with a sense of humor, wrote the Arizona media in the second week of November 1987. A letter claiming credit for vandalizing ski lifts at Flagstaff’s Snow Bowl arrived on editors’ desks from a group calling itself the Evan Mecham Eco Terrorist International Conspiracy, EMETIC…
These are truly dark days for sportswriters covering the Chicago Cubs. The sacking of Don Zimmer, a popular manager, is a comparatively minor source of the discontent. More and more, the total environment for the writers keeps evolving for the worse. There was a time when covering the Cubs was…
Evan Mecham was back. And even though he still sported that same crooked grin, this was a new Mecham. No longer Arizona’s governor, he’s in the process of transforming himself into a newspaper publisher. Mecham stood behind a lectern in a meeting room at the Sheraton Hotel downtown. He looked…
Every tenant leaves a mess. Sometimes it’s a dirty oven. Sometimes it’s a stain on the carpet. Sometimes it’s forty tons of hazardous waste and tanks filled with 20,000 gallons of cyanide-laced water. Every day, Don DeSanti parks his 1982 Toyota in the shadow of four imposing black tanks. He…
Why was this guy knocking on my door at nine o’clock on a Sunday night? I warily peeked out my living-room window. He looked like a jogger. I asked him what he wanted. “There’s a cat across the street,” he said, “and it’s drowning! I was jogging by and I…
“Gimme a bray-ay-ay-ay-ake! Gimme a bray-ay-ay-ay-ake! No-oh-oh-oh!” Standing alone in a soundproof room, a grown man is imitating a sick car. Other adults watch through a small window, listening, coaching, judging. The five people assembled in the small recording studio and control room are making a sixty-second radio commercial for…
Old joke: After he gets pulled over for speeding, a guy tries to talk his way out of the ticket by telling the traffic cop that he’s almost home. The cop doesn’t buy it. “Don’t you realize that most accidents occur within five miles of the home?” he asks as…
It is difficult to imagine a contrast greater than the Colorado River as it roars through the Grand Canyon and that same river a hundred miles downstream as it flows tamely past Bullhead City and Laughlin. Within the Grand Canyon, the Colorado has an almost religious presence, as if it…
Jim Meredith, the former Republican majority leader of Arizona’s House of Representatives, is obviously a man without shame. If I were given the chance to pick the single AzScam defendant slick and duplicitous enough to merit stuffing into a hole in the Arizona state prison at Florence, Meredith would be…
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…
I wanted to make sure I’d get a seat at the America West Airlines stockholders meeting. For this reason, I drove down I-10 to the Pointe at South Mountain an hour early the other day. The parking lots were already filled. A crowd that would total more than 1,000 moved…
Every Arizona politician elected this year, from Governor Fife Symington down, claims to support education. And an upcoming public-interest lawsuit, aimed at helping impoverished areas build decent schools, will give these politicians a chance to put their money where their mouths are. Underneath the warm and fuzzy rhetoric, however, a…
WASHINGTON–Poor Morris Udall. It’s not just his previous wife’s 1988 suicide, or the Parkinson’s disease robbing him of a body to match his sharp mind, or the injuries from a fall that have kept the Arizona congressman in hospital beds since January. A photograph sums up Udall’s situation; taken a…
David Spade is hot and his mom is pleasantly surprised. “Everybody who was close to him knew that he thought funny thoughts,” says Spade’s mother, Judy Todd. “He was very funny in the house, but real quiet. I don’t think anybody expected him to do this.” Spade left Arizona State…
Bicycles had been around, in one form or another, since the early nineteenth century, when there was a contraption called the hobby horse–a simple rolling device with two equal- size wheels but no pedals. They were more of a curiosity than anything else, but the idea of a human-propelled vehicle…
Frank Mineo was walking through the Biltmore Fashion Park when chance brought him into Antiquities, a second-floor shop that sells memorabilia from the 1950s. There, looking as fresh if it had just come off the assembly line, was a Schwinn Black Phantom bicycle. It was red, black and loaded. Frank…
