Keating’s Camelback Connection

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…

SPIES AND SAVAGES

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…

WHERE’S THE NATION’S VIDEO CAPITAL?YOU WON’T BELIEVE IT

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…

HAND IN HAND

“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…

BITTER MEDICINE

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…

SABOTAGING THE SABOTEURS

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…

SOMEWHERE, BILL LEE IS LIGHTING A VICTORY CIGAR

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…

WHO’S GONNA CLEAN THIS UP?

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…

KITTY IS DROWNING!A NEIGHBORHOOD PLAY IN FOUR ACTS

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…

VOCAL MINORITYYOU WON’T RECOGNIZE THE FACES, BUT THE VOICES ARE FAMILIAR

“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…

YOU CALL THIS GAMBLING?

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…

THE CROOKED DIGNITARY

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…

BEAUVAIS’ BUMPY RIDE

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…

OFFICE POLITICS

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…

WHEELS OF FORTUNE

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…