It might have made lively theatre of the absurd, if it hadn’t been so boring and stupid and real. First, the lady with the semi-bouffant hairdo–imagine a cross between Mary Poppins and the Church Lady–thanked the 14 people at the conference table for participating in the Task Force. Next, the…
Murderers’ Row Dr. Daniel Georges-Abeyie’s bridge to a “brave new world” would be paved with the families of torture/murder victims (“A Quiet Voice Against the Death Penalty,” Michael Kiefer, October 3). The kin of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims twisted in the wind while Dahmer got several thousand dollars from “well” wishers…
The mood was surly in a dressing room inhabited by the Deftones, the ninth of ten bands scheduled to play at the 1996 U-Fest, an annual rock festival that erupted into a riot, causing a reported $150,000 in damage to Desert Sky Pavilion on October 5. The Deftones, a rap-flavored…
The story sounds diabolical. For more than a decade, a Tucson nonprofit drug-treatment center called Amity, Inc., had slowly developed a glowing international reputation for helping drug addicts. Amity’s apparent success was cited in a 1995 front-page story in the New York Times. Walter Cronkite waxed eloquent about the program…
Rick Ross, the Phoenix-based cult and militia expert, sat in U.S. Bankruptcy Court last week, listening as a judge revisited the facts in a 1990 Washington state “deprogramming.” In that incident, Ross had watched while three men grabbed 18-year-old Jason Scott, handcuffed him, put duct tape over his mouth and…
Jerry’s Pen Is Active In its October 3 edition, the Arizona Republic dropped all pretense of objectivity on Jerry Colangelo and had Big Jer (or his spin docs) actually write a column about how wonderful downtown Phoenix has become now that he is set to get gloriously rich there, thanks…
Phoenix resident Donald Campbell was fed up with neighborhood dogs using his front lawn as their personal rest room. First, he posted a sign asking passers-by to pick up after their pets. When that didn’t do the trick, Campbell took more extreme measures. In February 1994, according to police reports,…
Marchelo Bresciani found himself running, literally and figuratively. Last year, when he was 13, he joined the track team at Shea Middle School in north Phoenix, and suddenly found himself running ahead of the pack in track meets against other middle schools. By the end of the school year, he…
It takes a certain brand of optimism and foresight to make a small-market concept work, a certain drive and, of course, the essential ability to recognize a need and fill it. Before a savvy, upward mover even begins to address such concepts as outsourcing, retrenchment and severe lower-pricing to shed…
Flying for Dollars Thanks to Michael Lacey for his excellent column pointing out how William Franke, CEO of America West Airlines, tried to cover up how his firing of 500 mechanics led to his airline repeating the same errors in handling oxygen tanks that led to the ValuJet crash (“Deception…
Over the past two years, New Times has published a lengthy series of news stories on what appeared to be ethical and legal lapses by Governor J. Fife Symington III. Some of these articles have been honored in major journalism competitions. Others have sparked law enforcement investigations into the governor’s…
Arizona is a hang-’em-high state, and its political leaders are death-penalty poster boys. Governor Fife Symington publicly blasted the courts for granting a stay of execution. Sheriff Joe Arpaio commended a journalist who witnessed a lethal injection for coming “to see what we do to murderers.” Attorney General Grant Woods,…
The Gang Squad team members of Dauer and Puskar introduce themselves to the driver of an illegally parked car. It’s almost midnight on a humid Saturday in September, in the mazelike, crime-heavy southeast Phoenix subdivision known as the Townhouses. The cops step out of their car–a ratty-looking Chevy with 115,000…
What do high-profile political campaigns and misplaced luggage have in common? Nothing–and that’s why Griffin Merkel is smiling. In September 1994, Merkel’s political consulting firm, Griffin and Associates, helped manage the campaigns of three congressional candidates, a Phoenix mayoral hopeful, and bids for the Arizona Corporation Commission and state Legislature…
In Mesa, Catholics who burn incense in religious ceremonies and actors who smoke onstage are violating the city’s new antismoking ordinance and must pay up to $200 each time they do either, according to a lawsuit filed against the city. The Superior Court lawsuit was filed in August by three…
The Hard Cellulose The Flash lives for motion pictures at a Harkins luxury cinema. One recent eve, The Flash stops by the full-service concession stand and orders some Gobstoppers and a small popcorn. “For a dollar more, you get twice as much popcorn in the medium,” the clerk intones. “What’s…
He Ain’t Heavy In his review of Heavy (“Chunk Style,” September 19), M. V. Moorhead says that writer-director James Mangold “opens the book.” Mangold has indeed opened a book: John Gardner’s novel Nickel Mountain, from which Heavy filches its setting, premise and even the name of its leading female character…
Right now, I am alive. I enjoy many things: eating, sleeping, joshing with friends, talking on the phone, contemplating truths. But someday, like all of us, these activities will be taken from me, on the day I die. What will happen then? My spirit may pass down a black corridor…
Highs and lows; peaks and valleys; you win some, you lose some. That’s how Marlene and Charlie remember the past eight years. It all began when the elderly Phoenicians sustained neck and back injuries in an auto accident and failed to recover sufficient insurance money to pay medical expenses. After…
The silicon-wafer plant going up in northeast Phoenix has been at the center of a storm of controversy, but only after construction on it had already begun. That’s apparently just how government officials wanted it. Phoenix Mayor Skip Rimsza claims that the $400 million Sumitomo Sitix plant will anchor a…
In the summer of 1995, the city of Phoenix was locked in a battle with an Oregon town to land the Sumitomo Sitix Corporation’s newest silicon-wafer plant. To entice the huge Japanese conglomerate, city officials offered up a smorgasbord of lucrative incentives, including an offer to build more than $8…
Wayne Legg and his wife live inside the gated community known as the Phoenician II at 65th Street and Camelback. Ordinarily, someone with the 66-year-old Legg’s credentials–longtime partner in a respected law firm, former Republican party county chairman, former chief counsel to Arizona State University–would be reaping the benefits of…
