Rogue Columnist

Phoenix confidential: Miranda

In our cultural memory, Ernesto Miranda was railroaded into a false confession by a thuggish and racist Phoenix Police Department. The wrong was rectified by the Supreme Court in the landmark Miranda v. Arizona lawsuit. This resulted in the Miranda Warning, especially its demand that suspects be told that they have the right to remain silent. Anyone who has watched cop shows, from Adam 12 to Law and Order knows it by heart.

The truth is far different — and more fascinating.

Miranda, who went by Ernie, was born in Mesa and mingled easily in the Anglo-dominated Phoenix of the early 1960s. His boss at United Produce in the Warehouse District praised his work ethic. All his brothers joined the armed forces, served honorably, and lived successful lives. But Ernie was in trouble in his teens, doing two stints at Fort Grant, once synonymous with the state Industrial School for Wayward Boys and Girls. In the 19th century, Billy the Kid worked as a ranch hand nearby for a time. Ernie joined the Army but was dishonorably discharged.

The cause was being AWOL multiple times — but also for being a peeping Tom. Miranda rationalized it to himself that the women wouldn't leave their curtains open unless they wanted to be watched. This compulsion — especially after he arrived back in Phoenix after a troubled wandering around the country — would turn him into a hard-core rapist (one crime as a teen had been "assault with intent to commit rape”).

Phoenix Confidential: OCB

The Organized Crime Bureau of the Phoenix Police Department was created in the 1974 when Chief Larry Wetzel sent Detective Sgt, Oscar Long to clean up the old Intelligence Bureau, full of place-holders and shady types compromised by the mob. His goal: Replace the old "subversive surveillance squad" with top investigating officers to dig into organized and white collar crime for prosecution purposes. The old squad just gathered names to put in the intelligence files. The new one intended to put made men and corrupt pols on the defensive in one of America's gangland playgrounds. Lt. Glenn Sparks requested a federal grant to fund the OCB and it was approved in a very short time.

OCB attracted some of the most gifted detectives and supervisors in the department, indeed in the nation, including Long, Sparks, Lonzo McCracken, Jim Kidd, Cal Lash and A.J. Edmondson. I leave out some names at the request of the detectives — safety is still an issue. Over the next several decades, the OCB was involved in the most important investigations in the state, from the murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles to corruption of high city officials and the depredations of the New Mexican Mafia (New Eme). Lash went on to serve as Administrative Sergeant for two police chiefs.

In a city where, as the blurb for my new novel goes, "gangsters rubbed elbows with the city’s elite amid crosscurrents of corrupt cops, political payoffs, gambling, prostitution, and murder cloaked by the sunshine of a resort city," the Organized Crime Bureau was Phoenix's Untouchables. And this was real, not fiction.

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 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.

Phoenix Confidential: the mob's master of the skim

The most notorious gangster of mid-century Phoenix was Gus Greenbaum, but most people only know the end of the story. Where, in 1958, he and his wife were cooking steaks at their Palmcroft home on Monte Vista Drive when hitmen killed both.

Greenbaum's body was found in a bedroom, nearly decapitated in having his throat slit. His wife Bess' throat was cut, too. She was on a sofa facing the fireplace in the living room, trussed from behind and badly beaten in the face with a heavy bottle. Police discovered her propped face-down on pillows, which prevented blood from dripping on the carpet. They also found evidence that the assassins stayed on that December evening and ate the steaks.

Phoenix as a back office to Las Vegas and second home for Chicago Outfit mobsters (Willie Bioff, the notorious movie-industry hustler and Mafia turncoat for example), is often traced to Greenbaum. But he was actually sent to Phoenix in 1928 to run illegal liquor and betting; the latter eventually became southwest hub of the Outfit's gambling wire service, the Trans-America Publishing and News Service (Western Union would have frowned on accepting illegal telegraphs). This proprietary circuit also gave the Outfit an edge in national bookmaking rackets over rivals in New York and Detroit.

Gambling wouldn't be legalized in Nevada until 1931. Las Vegas was a village on the Union Pacific's main line from Salt Lake City to Los Angeles, population little more than 5,000. Legalization came because Nevada, whose population was centered around Reno and Carson City, was losing people and economic power as its mines played out and were destroyed by falling demand from the Great Depression.

Gus Greenbaum, a protege of the infamous Meyer Lansky, was 34. In Phoenix, he found a city of almost 48,000 and wide open. Gambling and prostitution flourished, with city commissioners and detectives taking a cut. The police department was deeply corrupt. Rail connections to Chicago were plentiful on the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific. Before the end of Prohibition, liquor was plentiful, too, thanks to Al Capone. Rising local leaders such as the Goldwater and Rosenzweig brothers and contractor Del Webb befriended Greenbaum. No wonder the Outfit thought it was the ideal home for Trans-America.

Phoenix Confidential: Frenchy

The 1944 murder of Phoenix Police Officer David "Star" Johnson by Detective "Frenchy" Navarre is well-known to regular readers here (if you're new, you can read this real-life-pulp-fiction tale here). For years, the police department and city tried to forget the incident — and subsequent retribution by Johnson's partner in killing Navarre — not least because of its racial component. Johnson and his partner, Joe Davis, were black. Navarre was white.

Now that it's more in the open, Johnson deserves to be recognized by the department as an in-the-line-of-duty death.

But mysteries continue to linger about the shooting on May 2, 1944 in the Deuce, and the cascade effect it had, resulting in two trials, Navarre's acquittal, and Davis taking revenge inside police headquarters. For example, how did Navarre post bail of $10,000 after his arrest on a city detective's modest pay?

A big part of the answer is that Navarre was friends with Gus Greenbaum, the high-ranking member of the Chicago Outfit who had been posted to Phoenix in 1928 and later became infamous at Las Vegas casinos and the victim of a high-profile assassination in Palmcroft in 1958.

The murder of 'Star' Johnson

In this circa 1942 photo of the force, "Star" Johnson is in the middle of three black officers in the fourth row. To his right is his partner, Joe Davis. On the left is Joe Island. In uniform in the second row, behind and to the right of the man in suit and fedora, is Detective "Frenchy" Navarre.

Earlier this year when a Phoenix Police detective was killed in a shootout, the Arizona Republic ran a sidebar listing all the officers killed in the line of duty. The information came from a list kept by the police department. The trouble is that the list is incomplete. It omits the in-the-line-of-duty murder of David Lee "Star" Johnson in 1944.

He was killed by another cop.

I've told an abbreviated version of this event in another column, how it was a searing experience for a small but ambitious city. I've even used elements of it in my fiction. In this column, I want to tell the entire story based on the best research available. This true tale involves corruption, racism, betrayal and revenge in young Phoenix. It also is a powerful reminder that PPD should officially honor Johnson as an officer lost in the line of duty.

 

Phoenix Underworld

The scene after Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles was fatally injured when a bomb went off in his car in 1976.

You don't have to scrape too far beneath the veneer of "a clean, new, well-run city" to understand that Phoenix is perhaps historically one of America's more corrupt, crime-run cities. It didn't get a great city in exchange for its corruption, as with Chicago. And being crime-run isn't the same as being crime-ridden, so whatever statistics the boosters pull out to show community safety are really beside the point.

It's long been this way. When I was a child, Phoenicians sniffed that Tucson was the Mafia town, with Joe Bonanno, Pete Licavoli Sr., and company. Yet the FBI estimated that in the 1960s Phoenix had more mobsters per capita than New York City. I grew up just a few blocks from the house where, in 1958, Gus Greenbaum and his wife had their throats slit in retaliation for Gus' skimming from the casino tills in Vegas (and, local lore has it, the hitmen then ate the steaks the Greenbaums had just cooked). Phoenix was full of bars (Rocky's Hideaway, the old Blue Grotto, Ivanhoe, the Clown's Den, etc.) frequented by made men and the wanna-bes.

This was not the result, as some would have it, of "the Wild West atmosphere." Rather, it was the interface between a city growing too fast with few rules or institutional checks and the migration of Midwestern gangsters to exploit the situation (or, later, to be relocated by the feds). And an establishment willing to look the other way, or join in the "business." A culture of fraud built on successive real-estate booms, or scandals such as the collapse of Arizona Savings in the early 1960s, also made the city a magnet for criminals. The most prominent figure in this was Ned Warren (aka Nathan Waxman), the Kingpin of Arizona Land Fraud. He figured in the Bolles bombing.