Margarite Faras tried to fight the endemic corruption in the tribal government of the San Carlos Apache. For her effort, her political enemies began a campaign late last year to strip her of her tribal council seat, destroy her reputation and run her out of business.They held rallies outside her…

As one of Arizona’s most influential lobbyists and business leaders, Marty Shultz isn’t accustomed to getting his political butt kicked. In 1995, Shultz was asked by Arizona’s Supreme Court justices to lead a high-powered commission to reform Arizona’s limited-jurisdiction courts, the bottom tier of Arizona’s judicial pyramid where more than…

Nikos Michas was only 5 when his father left town. From then on, it was just Nikos and his mother Alyce against the world.Alyce spent as much time as possible with her son while working strange hours to meet the bills. It was a tough grind, but when Nikos graduated…

Rayann could stay mad at anybody in her life except Brandon O’Bier. Brandon had this sweet cowboy plain talk and unbowable optimism and screwball humor that let him hover above bad days or sidestep his occasional naughtiness. Besides, she had seen his good heart too often. She would get mad…

If the alt-fuel program is the great hurricane of bureaucratic snafus, the state’s on-call employment policy is at least a tropical storm.Still, this little piece of employment-manual small print is quietly causing major headaches for some state agencies and could cost those agencies, and ultimately taxpayers, somewhere between $20 million…

Hitmen hurriedly stabbed Jaime Sanchez four times, then dashed for anonymity among the other inmates on the sixth floor of Madison Street Jail. Then Sanchez waited, and waited, and waited some more. Twelve minutes later, detention officers were finally able to secure the scene. As is increasingly common, the jail…

Joe Arpaio has been trying to shut Jim Cozzolino up for the last two years. Last week, the sheriff finally found a way to do it.On March 7, Judge William Anderson granted Arpaio an injunction prohibiting Cozzolino from getting near Arpaio or “by means of telephone, e-mail or other medium,…

The three fundamental C’s of Arizona — copper, cotton and cattle — have a new partner. California power. Twenty massive power plants are under construction or in the planning stages in Arizona. The bulk of the power from those plants, as much as 15,000 megawatts, will be sold to California…

Accusations of subterfuge and sabotage are once again swirling around proposed legislation to improve Arizona’s whistle-blower protection for its 43,000 state and university employees (“Committing the Truth,” Robert Nelson, July 13).Three bills before the Arizona House of Representatives proposed changes in laws that protect whistle-blowers from retaliation by their employers…

Arizona’s first merchant plant will fire up this summer near Kingman. If this plant is any indicator of things to come, Arizona is in deep trouble.Mohave County is on the verge of bankruptcy, thanks, critics say, to incentives and tax breaks given to the new Griffith power plant. The county’s…

The San Carlos Apache Tribal Council, famous throughout Indian country for the frequency of its political meltdowns, has apparently started the new year with yet another battle threatening the tribal government’s ability to operate.In December, New Times documented the vicious and apparently illegal removal from the council of reformer Margarite…

ASU’s Manzanita residence hall is a 15-story salute to the wondrous versatility of duct tape.The tape is two and three layers thick on ducts located in the bowels of this 37-year-old modernist nightmare. Electrical and plumbing machinery and conduits are cobbled snarls of gray tape, red rust and black muck…

Being a responsible college student, Larsh Kellogg generally avoided getting drunk before noon on weekdays. But really special occasions warranted really special drinking. For a few days in late January, Kellogg would dash back from his morning class at Arizona State University, load up a car with a few buddies…

In the drug trade, the Sinaloan Cowboys are said to be the kings of the stone-cold killers. In fact, though, when the Sinaloans need an unsavory hit, they call the hillbillies from Michoacán. “The guys from Michoacán are known in Sinaloa for not losing any sleep over anything,” says a…

San Carlos — Margarite Faras sits at her dining room table weighing the cost/benefits of her weaponry. The old snub-nose .38 is handy but about as accurate as a blunderbuss. The high-powered rifle is deadly beyond 30 yards but worthless in close quarters. A sawed-off 12-gauge would be best, but…

North Buckeye — There’s nothing to see here but high-voltage lines and empty highway heading nowhere between ho-hum Sonoran mountain and bone-dry gulch. You are way west of Phoenix without the vision of Robert Burns. In 1986, at the height of the Arizona Land Rush, Burns, a young, brash, multimillionaire…

In late 1998, former Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office Lieutenant Robert Wetherell, who had led Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s internal affairs division, admitted directing a terror campaign against MCSO employees whom Arpaio and his chief deputy, David Hendershott, believed to be critics and “dime-droppers.”According to Wetherell’s sworn testimony, Arpaio especially wanted to…

All the goofball publicity antics of “America’s Toughest Sheriff” would be really funny, all the strange, mean, paranoid maneuvers in this cage match of a sheriff’s race would be really funny, if amid all the madcap mayhem you didn’t have to read letters like this one from Catherine Smith: “I…

Dr. Marguerite Kay, the besieged University of Arizona Alzheimer’s researcher, has won two more battles in her attempt to get her lab back and her name cleared (“Committing the Truth,” Robert Nelson, July 13).On July 24, the three-member Arizona Court of Appeals reversed an earlier ruling by Pima County Superior…

A great measure of competence is how much your nearest competitor fears and loathes you. Freedom Communications, which took control of the East Valley Tribune last week from Thomson Newspapers, is best known for its flagship paper, the 368,000-circulation Orange County Register. The Register does battle against a zoned edition…

The county jail at Dysart and Bell roads in Surprise hadn’t seen an inmate since 1994. Sheriff Joe Arpaio closed the small facility that year because it was inefficient. He was short on detention officers and he didn’t want to waste the taxpayers’ money. But five years later, for just…

All whistleblowers are not created equal. Both reformers and administrators agree that for every whistleblower case that is a legitimate case of retaliation, there are about three of questionable merit. According to former state assistant attorney general Tom Rogers, it is these “whistleblowers from hell” who have top administrators afraid…