A few weeks back, Don and Bobbie Shepard were among the very few people in town actually looking forward to the arrival of April 15. And why not? As owners of a mom-and-pop iris farm in northwest Phoenix, their business was blooming and, furthermore, their stalk portfolio had never looked…
Phoenix fire captain Gary Pykare underwent his latest cancer surgery several weeks ago, just as a commission that studied the incidence of cancer in Arizona firefighters was finishing its unprecedented study. Now Pykare says he feels much better. Results from the commission’s work, on the other hand, are inconclusive. After…
Few of the 40 or so public officials gathering in a cozy auditorium last week for a half-day forum on pesticides were aware of the poisoned political air engulfing their seemingly benign gathering. Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute for Public Policy, in cooperation with the three state agencies most responsible…
To understand politics, you must first understand ambition and the thirst for power. Take the case of Rick Romley. He was an anonymous figure when he joined the County Attorney’s Office. His first supervisor was Michael Ryan, now a Superior Court judge. The two did not hit it off. Ryan…
IF JOSEPH STEDINO is telling the truth, the large man who is pulling up in a Volvo in front of Long Wong’s on 16th Street is the man whose word made AzScam happen. He is the person whom members of the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office trusted so much that they…
WHEN AND IF Oliver Stone ever signs off the Kennedy assassination, the muckraking moviemaker needn’t look far for his next conspiracy epic. Buried right in Hollywood’s own backyard is a legendary mystery that, in its own way, is every bit as Byzantine as the 1963 Dallas rub-out. Who says the…
After prison, Stedino moved to Reno. It was in Reno that he deepened his knowledge of stings in the way that allowed him later to land a job with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office. (He is really quite an expert on stings.) Approached to launder a huge quantity of drug…
Eight floors below the conference room where Governor Fife Symington delivered his diatribe last week against “out of control” state government, there is a sunless suite of rooms supplied with an institutional paint job, metal furniture and stale, reconditioned air. This basement warren in the State Capitol building on Washington…
GREG GLEBE’S airplane looks more like a dune buggy than an aircraft, a three-wheeled erector set of neon-green pipe, six feet tall and ten feet long, with a back-mounted fan you’d see on an Everglades airboat, and all of it hung from a parachute. He built it out of scratch…
The second psychological hurdle is landing, a phenomenon called ground fright.” Up high, the plane seems to move smoothly and slowly, but as it gets lower and the runway comes up closer, all movement seems to speed up, the brain starts screaming, I’m falling!” and you open the throttle to…
Dewitt Weddle works 266 acres of cotton southeast of Phoenix in Eloy, just three-quarters of a mile from the plot his father and grandfather farmed before him. My dad went broke in 1959,” he says with a drawl as hard and dry as the soil he tills. Ran out of…
Onetime real estate broker John Stetler Jack” Brown seemed to have played his legal cards like a champ. His winning run started, oddly enough, soon after he admitted to a friend and former Paradise Valley neighbor in 1987 that he was molesting her 7-year-old daughter. Brown not only wasn’t arrested…
LAST THURSDAY, Governor Fife Symington toured Arizona to tout Project SLIM. Armed with a couple of easels and a few stiff-smiling aides, he spread the gospel of what he called total quality management” at press conferences in Phoenix, Tucson and Yuma. The governor declared state government to be a Grand…
On trial was Glen McGaughey, acclaimed by his peers in the Arizona dog-racing business as the most outstanding breeder in the state. McGaughey’s dogs won the most races. He made the most money. He was the best and the brightest of the cretinous lot that claims that greyhound racing is…
Probably the most famous prank in the history of phone-foolery is a series of calls made to one Louis Red” Deutsch, the pit-bull-like proprietor of the Tube Bar saloon in Jersey City, New Jersey. Over the course of a dozen-odd calls believed to have been recorded some 15 years ago…
After somehow obtaining a secret hot-line number reserved for top station personnel, one of the craftier Interceptors made a late-night call to the deejay manning the turntable at KBUZ, a now-defunct easy-listening station. Identifying himself as general manager of the station, the prankster informed the puzzled deejay that the station…
As a boy, Tim Hilliard watched the Palo Verde nuclear power plant rise from the desert west of Phoenix, claiming the flatland where he once rode horses. Like many of his neighbors in the sparsely settled countryside, Hilliard was never fully comfortable in its looming shadow. Now, Hilliard blames the…
This is a truly memorable tale about Governor J. Fife Symington III and his dearest friend in government, the voluptuous Miss Annette Alvarez. It’s bizarre, loony, absurd-even silly. It’s also quite zany. Up to now, we’ve thought about Symington and Alvarez only in terms of romance. This latest tale adds…
HOLD THE PHONE! Was Prince Albert about to get permanently canned? For a minute there, it looked like it. But several weeks ago, following unsatisfactory negotiations with the Arizona Corporation Commission, U S West Communications put the lid on plans to market Caller ID, a controversial gizmo that enables the…
EVEN IF THE Paradise Valley police had done their job, a jury may never have convicted pro football player Marcus Cotton of raping an ASU co-ed. As in almost all acquaintance” or date” rape cases, this one may have come down to a courtroom match between two people: The woman…
NFL LINEBACKER MARCUS COTTON MAY HAVE RAPED AN ASU CO-ED. TOO BAD THE COPS We’re in a unique county in Ohio,” says Detective Franz. Anywhere else in the state, Mr. Cotton probably would have had to plead to a felony. It was a date rape, but the victim was credible…
Last June, Father Gerald Yeager of Saint Edward’s Catholic Church at 44th Street and Southern canceled the once-a-month Mass he gave in Spanish. The bishop told me I could cancel it if I could fire a cannonball down the aisle of the church,” he has said many times since. Attendance…
