“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…
Kenneth Thompson couldn’t help but hear the taunts when he walked down Buckeye Road, past the windowless social clubs with signs that read “No One Under 21 Allowed,” past the vacant lots where men gathered beneath the Arizona ash trees and warmed their hands over fires in barrels. He heard…
Back when he was running for governor, real estate developer J. Fife Symington III refused to divulge financial details of his business empire, even though he campaigned as the guy with the “business mind” necessary to rescue Arizona from its economic crisis. His reasoning for not talking about his business…
This year, there isn’t much of a garden around the little house in the quiet northwest Phoenix neighborhood. The lone iris sprouting beneath Judy Brownstein’s bedroom window seems more defiant than beautiful. The rosebush in the driveway is a scraggly survivor. “How can I garden if I don’t know from…
Hugh Ennis likes a good joke. Especially when it has a cop theme. Take the toy police car resting near his window at the Liquor Department, for instance. Like the slapstick autos that zoom around a circus ring, this one looks as though a squad of battery-powered minicop-clowns will tumble…
The local chapter of Little Criminals Who Luck Out was inadvertently started about four years ago. It works like this: You’re a fourteen- year-old kid who burglarizes a house and gets locked up in Adobe Mountain, a state prison for juveniles. After promising to be a good kid, you’re paroled…
Eleanor Schorr’s office at the Arizona State Capitol has such a grandmotherly ambiance that a visitor half expects to be served milk and cookies. A homemade quilt hangs on one wall, a bowl of fresh fruit and an iris adorn her coffee table, and photographs of her children and grandkids…
It is midafternoon. As a shrill electric bell signals the end of another day of classes, a tall, middle-aged man in a dark blue suit and a red tie leans down to talk to the young woman walking by his side. Dr. Roger Romero, superintendent of the Wilson Elementary School…
Dressed in his pale yellow golf sweater and jogging shoes, Bob Anderson, a seventy-year-old retiree from Chicago, fits right in with the other retirees in Carefree. Like his neighbors, he has golf on his mind. But there’s a difference. In the world of Arizona water politics, the retired real-estate lawyer…
When he talks about why little children might be dying of cancer, Dr. Jonathan Buckley speaks gently, as though he’s delivering a speech about petunias to a gardening club. But Buckley’s recent speech on the mysterious Maryvale cancer cluster had a not-so-gentle message: To have credibility, a cancer study must…
When Donna Davis strolled through the secluded campus of Oak Creek Ranch School near Sedona, her heart was finally at rest. That March day in 1989, she thought she’d found a boarding school where her fifteen-year-old daughter Erin could escape all the temptations of the big-city high school she was…
For several weeks last spring, angry parents besieged radio talk shows with tearful complaints about their children having been removed from their custody. Their hysteria was directed at the Child Protective Services branch of the Arizona Department of Economic Security. It resulted in joint legislative hearings to scrutinize the inner…
If her four grandchildren ever come back from Nebraska, Lynette will be ready. She keeps a blue dirt bike propped against the wall of the back porch, and she has plastic-covered children’s books, like Peter and the Wolf and Smokey Bear, stacked in one corner of her living room. The…
It was only a few months ago that Tom Connelly’s duties as an assistant U.S. attorney in Phoenix included making appearances in federal court to prosecute white-collar fraud. These days Connelly is still summoned to federal court, but not as a prosecutor. Instead, Connelly is being sued for fraud by…
On a July morning in 1989, Dan Rivera tucked a .357 Magnum into the shoulder holster beneath his black silk double-breasted Giorgio Armani suit. He remembers every detail of that morning because it was the last time he saw his child. “I’ve got my piece, nothing can go wrong,” he…
When Margo Raczo-Miles walks out the front door in the morning, she wonders if she will be gunned down by someone hiding across the street. She checks her car for bombs and watches to make sure she’s not being followed. The 25-year-old mother of two blames Maricopa County Superior Court…
In the past two years, Arizona’s contingency of young neo-Nazis has doubled from 100 to about 200. This is according to the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, a group that monitors extremist hate groups in the United States. The ADL estimates there are some 3,000 skinheads nationwide. “Phoenix is a…
Except for the pimple-faced neo-Nazis putting together Molotov cocktails, the alley was empty. It was too dark that February evening in east Phoenix to see the shaved head of the youngest, an awkward sixteen-year-old with freckles and tattoos. One tattoo especially would have stood out had there been more light:…
It sure is sizzling over at the state liquor department. In addition to the usual stuff of keeping an eye on taverns, investigators have had to contend with the allegations of crack sales at Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley’s famous Club 902. And there’s a whole army of irate football…
Back in the days before the Federal Bureau of Investigation started snooping around, a lot of people remember that Tom Connelly and Bill Reeves were pretty good friends. The two met quite by chance four years ago, right after Connelly hired on as a criminal prosecutor at the U.S. Attorney’s…
Young is an idyllic little village perched in the central Arizona highlands just below the Mogollon Rim. It’s almost too idyllic–just the quiet, cozy sort of place Alfred Hitchcock might have used to make a scary movie about, say, grasshoppers driving the villagers mad. Well, last summer in Young, grasshoppers…
A week before Bishop Thomas J. O’Brien admitted that yet another Catholic priest in Phoenix is being investigated for sexually abusing children, the bishop issued the local Diocese’s first policy on how to handle such allegations. In a June 22 cover letter that accompanied the ten-page document, the bishop, who…
