Lawmakers snickered two years ago when Democratic Senator Carolyn Walker introduced a bill making it a crime for a husband to rape his wife. “Oh, you can’t rape your wife anymore, ha, ha, ha,” she remembers hearing. “You’re damn right you can’t,” she shot back. Walker says she isn’t hearing…
Postmodern paradise for yuppies and college kids, or the Valley’s version of Hell’s Kitchen? This is a question the residents and fashionable patrons of Tempe’s spiffy Old Town were asking themselves after the area was hit by a scary blitz of teen hooliganism that left several Mill Avenue fun-seekers bruised…
Lonnie Smith, 67, was working as a janitor when he heard that his wife’s ticket had won the lottery. Smith had been employed by the same Phoenix company for more than thirty years. The lottery ticket which his wife played was worth $5.8 million. “Will you retire?” I asked. “I…
The tumble-down boarding house on Third Avenue was rotting in its own grime, but Dede Devine Yazzie took one look and fell in love with it. That was eleven years ago. The daughter of the famous Notre Dame football coach Dan Devine had just arrived in Phoenix to interview for…
Twenty-two years ago, a power failure on the Colorado River Indian Reservation spirited Nelson Fernandez into the world where men pray so fervently they rip the flesh off their chests. Today, Fernandez lives in Phoenix and conducts ancient Native American rituals to help recovering junkies and alcoholics get back on…
Public men grow addicted to the cool eye of the television camera. Once stricken, they reach out desperately for any opportunity to get their faces on the nightly news. You expect this from a Terry Goddard, who grew so eager for television exposure at one time that he spent every…
Richard Romley’s cash-and-crack hypocrisy is finally facing direct assault. The county’s top prosecutor has maintained a hidden interest for five years in what has become one of the Valley’s most lawless bars. Since assuming office in January of 1988, the incidents of armed robbery, aggravated assault and the sale of…
At first, it seemed like a routine shoplifting case, recalls Phoenix police detective Larry Stubbs. “I’ve been a cop for 23 years,” says Stubbs, who investigated the case late last year, “and this is the only time I can remember a shoplifter who says he was innocent who apparently was…
“I want you all to get nice and relaxed,” Willie Smith said. “You’ll play this game of baseball a lot better that way. At least, that’s always been my philosophy.” Smith smiled down at the two dozen or so kids surrounding him on the old ballfield in South Phoenix. None…
Maglev is straight out of Dick Tracy’s comic book world–the very idea of computer-driven trains magnetically hovering above cities and zipping along noiselessly seems absurd. But what sounds like science fiction is actually being built in Las Vegas–by a company whose marketing chief, John Bivens, lives in Phoenix. In fact,…
Among the atrocities committed here recently was a vicious police public-relations ploy. Several days after Officer Jim French of the Department of Public Safety shot and killed Jeffrey Dawes, seventeen, the following things occurred. Reporters covering the story received calls from a police officer who told them he had a…
THE KID ZONE KATALOGUE Unique mail-order gifts for the wee tyke who has everything–including parents with a fistful of credit cards and no self-restraint. MUSICAL DIAPER ALARM. Is baby dry? Wet? Messy? Eliminate the guesswork with this computerized, fully electric Musical Diaper Alarm. Child’s status is signaled automatically by the…
When I’m out in public with strangers and my occupation comes up, reactions vary. Some people want to immediately start buying me flaming shots and do head butts. Some people want to tell me the secret ingredient that makes their chili so great. Some people want to know what my…
Virgil Kesterson Cooper used to be a mainstream Mormon salesman in Scottsdale with a wife, seven children and an excellent income in the computer business. Now he’s a computer virus, trying to zap his way to freedom while bugging a government he considers “a giant, colossal fraud.” Blending his personal…
The weeping Salvadoran woman recounting the bloody deaths of her relatives was most definitely not the typical corporate client who frequents Lewis & Roca’s tony law offices at 100 West Washington. But on this particular day several months ago, an offbeat softhearted 35-year-old member of the firm named Chris Brelje…
Bob Corbin still has Charlie Keating’s $50,000 political donation tucked away in his desk drawer. And like all greedy pols, Corbin doesn’t show the slightest inclination to surrender one dollar of it. A couple of years back, Keating passed the money to Corbin for a governor’s campaign that never materialized…
A funny thing happened just as soon as Maricopa County Attorney Richard Romley’s financial stake in the Valley’s most notorious crack bar was revealed. The ownership was transferred, overnight. The rushed paperwork, if approved, protects the bar’s real owner from the law. This strategy will keep Club 902 open no…
McCain was transparently nervous being on the same platform with Evan Mecham, the governor he helped to scuttle. Koory bellowed out a speech he’d obviously shouted into his bathroom mirror 78 times that morning to get it just right. It was amazing. Walking into the Republican party convention last weekend…
The Tyrannosaurus rex that’s attempting to eat my mug in the above portrait is no photographer’s prop. That toy-store carnivore has been my son’s most beloved plaything since he made the logic-defying discovery that beastly behavior in shopping malls is sometimes rewarded. The boy adores that scaly scale-model. He sleeps…
Two years ago, Denzel Washington earned an Academy Award best-supporting-actor nomination for his portrayal of South African black-consciousness leader Stephen Biko in Cry Freedom. Then he waited for the big offers to pour in. Then he waited some more. And some more . . . What about the critical acclaim,…
When Valley jeweler Rose Maxon saw the advertisement in the Pennysaver seeking new members for the Bola Tie Society of Arizona, it sounded right up her alley: “Good fellowship–Welcome. All must wear Bola Tie.” “I make bola ties and I like to wear them and look at them,” says Maxon…
On Saturday night, November 25, a crack dealer pointed his gun directly at sixty-year-old Patrick Walsh on West Van Buren in downtown Phoenix. Gunning his car’s engine, Walsh peeled out of the parking lot. As he made his escape, Walsh also tried to get the license plate number and a…
