Rogue Columnist

Bolles: a players guide

"They finally got me...Mafia, Emprise, Adamson...find John Adamson..." — Don Bolles

On June 2, 1976, a bomb detonated under the car of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles in Midtown Phoenix. He survived an agonizing 11 days before he died. A recent article by Bolles' colleague John Winters lays out the basics. I've written about the case before here, as well as the Phoenix underworld. The closest assassins went to prison. Yet full justice was never served. The real puppetmasters got away with it. Many in high positions wanted it to go away.

But what exactly was it? The case has been extensively covered over the years, from the Arizona Project of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) and contemporary, dogged reporting, by Republic and Phoenix Gazette reporters, including Al Sitter, Paul Dean, and Charles Kelly. New Times ran the IRE series and kept digging over the following decades, especially with Jana Bommersbach, John Dougherty, Tom Fitzpatrick and Paul Rubin. The Republic continues with retrospectives. Don Devereux, who worked for the Scottsdale Progress, still writes a blog about the case. A fascinating new book by Dave Wagner, an R&G city editor, The Politics of Murder: Organized Crime in Barry Goldwater's Arizona, makes an important contribution.

With so much having been written, so many characters and theories, one danger is becoming lost in a house of mirrors. The Bolles case would be the ultimate test of a mystery writer, were he foolish enough to try to make it into popular crime fiction. That's because in real life, the case was complex and shaded. It involved journalism and supposition, not all of the latter ultimately true. Carl Bernstein said that good journalism is the best available truth at that moment. But journalists write on history's leading edge and history is an argument without end. Law enforcement continues to debate the case, too. Files were lost or misplaced, perhaps deliberately. Among them, Phoenix Police file No. 851. In addition to the missing file, index cards for the files were also removed from the records room. Did it contain inconvenient information about Adamson, Emprise and Kemper Marley? Or more? Self-serving narratives, hidden agendas, and bad memories further blur the trail. Many questions remain. 

So my modest attempt for the 40th anniversary of the bombing is a list of the actual major players and their connection with the most notorious assassination of a reporter on American soil:

John Adamson: Don Bolles left his post covering the state Legislature to meet Adamson at the Clarendon House Hotel on June 2nd. Adamson promised a juicy tip on a land fraud involving Barry Goldwater, Harry Rosenzweig, Sam Steiger, and Kemper Marley. In reality, while Bolles waited for him in the lobby, Adamson planted the dynamite device under the driver's side of Bolles' new Datsun 710. After giving up on the meeting, Bolles returned to the parking lot, started his car, and pulled out when the bomb went off.

Usually portrayed as a small-time but menacing hood, Adamson hung out on the Central Avenue bars and the dog track. But he actually had worked his way up to being chief enforcer for land-fraud kingpin Ned Warren and had been retained by associates of Barry Goldwater for dirty business in a Navajo power struggle. He also worked as a confidential informant for someone in the Phoenix Police. Bolles identified Adamson in his famous last words. In exchange for cooperation, Adamson was given a 20-year sentence. When convictions from his testimony were thrown out, prosecutors charged him with first-degree murder. This conviction didn't stick. So after serving 20 years, Adamson entered federal witness protection, then voluntarily left it, dying in 2002. Some retired cops and journalists suspect that Adamson protected the true source of the death warrant on Bolles. In a jailhouse interview with Bommersbach and Rubin, Adamson said chillingly, "I didn't kill him for a story he'd written. I killed him for a story he was going to write."

Phoenix in the forties

In 1941, Arthur Horton, a professor at Arizona State Teachers College, the precursor of ASU, published a remarkable Survey of Phoenix and the Valley of the Sun. What makes it still valuable is that it provides us with the most authoritative examination of Phoenix in that decade, or at any time until perhaps the 1960s.

The exhaustive report is also helpful in understanding a decade that meant far more than American involvement in World War II and its effects on Phoenix (which I wrote about here). That lasted less than four years out of 10. Much more was going on.

The decade began with a strong local economy, almost entirely thanks to the New Deal’s enormous largesse toward Phoenix and Arizona. The stimulus spending worked and helped pull Phoenix out of the Great Depression. By 1940, Americans were doing better and traveling, including visiting the mostly new resorts including the Arizona Biltmore, Camelback Inn, Jokake Inn, Adobe House, Ingleside Inn, Wigwam Guest Ranch and San Marcos at Chandler, as well as Phoenix’s premier hotels. The “Valley of the Sun” tourist promotion launched by the Chamber of Commerce and the railroads was paying off. To be sure, not everyone was doing better: 10,000 in the county (population 186,000) were on relief.

Agriculture remained the mainstay of the Salt River Valley’s economy. According to Horton, Arizona had 1.1 million grapefruit trees, 625,000 orange trees; 17,000 lemon trees; 5,000 tangerine trees, and 2,675 lime trees. Most of these were in the American Eden in and around Phoenix.

The unraveling

Matt Taibbi's column entitled "RIP, GOP: How Trump is Killing the Republican Party" is a compelling, entertaining read. He writes:

After 9/11, it felt like the Republicans would reign in America for a thousand years. Only a year ago, this was still a party that appeared to be on the rise nationally, having gained 13 Senate seats, 69 House seats, 11 governorships and 913 state legislative seats during the Obama presidency.

Now the party was effectively dead as a modern political force, doomed to go the way of the Whigs or the Free-Soilers.

But I'm not sure his argument here ultimately holds up. Nor does his premise that the Republican base has finally awoken from its trance, realized they have been sold down the river by the GOP, and are finally ready to "fight for their economic lives," if even with the incoherent [real-estate developer].

My sense of the base is that its rage is driven by that (Black) Man in the White House, people of color allegedly getting free things they don't deserve, Hispanics illegal and legal, SOCIALISM, and the usual culture war tropes from guns to, now, transgender bathrooms. And come November, every Republican from David Brooks and Paul Ryan to the red suburban precincts of Phoenix will dutifully cast their ballots for [the real-estate developer].

Phoenix Confidential: the dog track underworld

With Arizona ending live greyhound racing, it's the end of an era long coming. Where the state once had five tracks, the only one left was in poor Tucson, which couldn't even keep a slice of Spring Training. The track in Phoenix closed to live racing in 2009. Changing tastes, animal activists and, especially, the proliferation of tribal casinos did in the pastime.

But once upon a time, it was a big deal. Before Phoenix Greyhound Park became a swap meet and was painted, like so much of the town, brown, it was one of the city's premier entertainment attractions. The golden age was from the 1950s through the 1970s. Opening in 1954, Phoenix Greyhound Park at 40th Street and Washington was a neon-lit palace where middle-class couples and compulsive gamblers mixed with the city's elite — and members of its extensive population of mobsters. Betting was legal. And a pre-video-device audience thrilled to dogs racing chasing a mechanical "lure" around the track. The park promised glamor, excitement, and was highly advertised ("there goes the rabbit, rabbit, rabbit!").

The extent of organized crime's penetration of dog racing in Phoenix remains an important, and controversial, element of the mystery of the 1976 assassination of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles. After the blast and before he passed out, first responders heard Bolles say (a version of) "they finally got me...Adamson, Emprise, Mafia...find John Adamson..." Emprise was a sports conglomerate headquartered in Buffalo, N.Y. and controlled by the Jacobs family. It held a controlling interest in Arizona dog tracks.

Emprise was found to be associated with organized crime figures and convicted in Los Angeles of racketeering in 1972. The allegations involved taking a hidden interest in a Las Vegas casino to skim the profits. In Phoenix, Emprise had been a target of Bolles' investigative reporting and focus of a crackdown by the state Racing Commission in the early 1970s. Even so, the state allowed the company to keep its concessions, including at Phoenix Greyhound Park. Emprise's Phoenix partner was the Funk family And it had friendly ties to Kemper Marley, the powerful land-and-booze baron always lurking at the edge of the Bolles murder.

Jane Jacobs is dead. Long live Jane Jacobs.

May 4th marked the centennial of the birth of seminal urbanist Jane Jacobs. It has been marked by numerous articles. Some of the better ones are here, here,  here, and, for a contemporary piece of revisionist iconoclasm, here. The latter aside, Jacobs remains an important figure, perhaps the most influential voice, in explaining the value of cities, how they really worked, and the damage of the planning elite. She begins her most famous work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, bluntly: "This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding."

Written in 1961, the book was the first major refutation of the ideas that had brought urban renewal, dead housing projects, dull suburbia. Her great nemesis was Robert Moses, the powerful city planner and master builder of mid-century New York City. His hubris and the damage he did to New York are masterfully plumbed in Robert Caro's The Power Broker. Entire neighborhoods were bulldozed to make way for his freeways and his influence spread nationwide. She led the crusade that stopped Moses' Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have gutted Geenwich Village, SoHo, and Little Italy. At one point in the battle, she was accused of inciting a riot (talk about the Resistance).

Jacobs was not an ideologue. To her, ideology was poison, offering "pre-fabricated answers" that adherents always fall back on. Instead, she was an observer of cities, a chronicler of what worked and what didn't.

Not once is Phoenix mentioned in Jacobs' first book, even though it was a big city by 1961. Still, I suspect she would have found much to like in the old Phoenix, where there was a "ballet of the streets" downtown and much of the city was focused on use by people instead of automobiles. This was before the freeways, before the teardowns. If she were alive today (she died in 2006), Phoenix would represent every horror she could imaging befalling a city. The Papago Freeway inner loop is classic Robert Moses vandalism. Her critique would include a lack of safety, for she documented how much more crime occurred in "thinned out" Los Angeles than in dense New York.

Next on the chopping block: Macayo's Central

With Circles partially demolished and tagged and being held hostage by the developer comes news of another Central Avenue icon facing the bulldozer. 

The Macayo's restaurant that has stood for decades at Central and Indianola is facing demolition. In its place would be some 225 "residential units" in 65-foot building (this being Phoenix, of course, that is a big maybe). The developer is requesting a zoning change to "walkable urban."

One astounding thing is that "walkable urban" would require "only" 256 parking spaces (!). But the developer wants 369. "Free" parking is never free and Phoenix has way too much of it. Real urbanism would take down the number of spaces substantially. But, hey, WBIYB and the project (if it really happens) would be on light rail.

The really good news is that Macayo's intends to move to the south and stay in business.

The heat is on

As you can see, our Front Page Editor is not shy about his opinions as we head into the general election race. I don't share them but he takes a better photo than your humble columnist. He also represents a not insubstantial portion of Bernie-struck progressives. Now that [the real-estate developer] has made his nomination virtually inevitable, I do have a few observations.

1. It's amusing seeing the pearl-clutching, "how could we have been so wrong?" musings of the pundit class. See the New York Times' Nate Cohn here. If you want further laughs, there's always Thomas Friedman, sans taxi driver. As someone rightly tweeted, "@tomfriedman wrong on every single thing he writes, every day of his life, & it will not in any way jeopardize him."

Even a simple, small-town boy from Phoenix could tell that Trump was formidable from the get-go. He is a reality TV star in Moronistan. He doesn't give a damn about "conservative" dogma, but knows how to push just the right buttons with the real conservative base in today's America. He was facing nullities as opponents. Time magazine anointed Marco Rubio as "the Republican savior," among a host of covers crowning Chris Christie, Rand Paul et al. As commenter Concern Troll would say, "lol lol."

2. Neither "conservatism" nor the Republican Party are dead. They have merely taken off their human suits, shucked off the last of William F. Buckley intellectual respectability, seen their Gingrich Revolutionaries tote each other to the guillotine, and found their true north in [the real-estate developer].

There was not, as George Wallace would say, a dime's bit of difference between the creepy Ted Cruz and the pleasant John Kasich. All were in thrall of the nostrums of The Party That Wrecked America. The Party of Lincoln and TR, even a mass American political party, had been dying for some time. But don't be under any delusions.

The same political savants now predicting mass defections are wrong. When they get to the polling place, they will vote for [the real-estate developer]. Unlike the most fervent backers of Sen. Sanders, they know there's a huuuuge! difference between him and Hillary. More significantly, they will continue to vote Republican down-ticket. This will especially matter if Democratic fratricide continues.

What's in a name?

I don't want to be too hard on Banner Health considering the outfit placed its headquarters in a Midtown skyscraper. But a year after it changed the nearly century-old name of Good Samaritan Hospital to Banner-University Medical Center Phoenix, I am still thinking, huh?

There's no university there on east McDowell. Indeed, it was Banner and CEO Peter Fine that torpedoed plans to relocate the county hospital to a new building on the Phoenix Biomedical Campus, with the medical and nursing schools, where the "bench-to-bedside" vision of T-Gen's Jeff Trent could have been realized. This action in the 2000s showed Banner at its very worst.

The "university" part comes from Banner's $1 billion takeover of the University of Arizona's medical center and a satellite clinic in Tucson. More about that in a moment. 

To be sure, names change. The old Scottsdale Baptist Hospital changed its affiliation and became Scottsdale Memorial Hospital in the 1970s. It was where I trained to be a paramedic. When I returned in 2000, it was something called Scottsdale Healthcare Osborn, sounding more like a doctor's office than a hospital, much less a Level 1 trauma center. Now it's HonorHealth Scottsdale Osborn Medical Center (how much did some consultant get paid to slam the two words together?).

St. Joe's has somehow kept its original, historic name even if it was excommunicated by the bishop, so to speak. Smaller St. Luke's is still there, too, under control of the unfortunately named IASIS Healthcare (when acronyms go bad!). John C. Lincoln Hospital also has the HonorHealth mashup in front of its name but at least kept its identity.