Word: arizona
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...PHOENIX, Arizona--The large crimson-colored bloodstain is gone now, an uncomfortable memory from the past that most Arizonans would prefer to forget. It's been more than two years since investigative reporter Don Bolles was blown up in his white Datsun while trying to uncover the activities of organized crime in Arizona, and like the blood-stained pavement where he was killed, his memory has now begun to fade as well. Two years later, the asphalt where Bolles was murdered has been repaired, and the Clarendon Hotel, in whose parking lot the bomb blast occurred, has commemorated the event...
Such superficial changes have typified Arizona's reaction to the unpleasantness of Don Bolles' violent death. Despite the massive publicity given to a team of investigative reporters who vowed in the aftermath of the murder to avenge their slain colleague by going into Arizona to "turn it upside down," the state has changed very little from the kind of place Don Bolles tried to clean up. Arizona politicians, while trying to eliminate the most visible signs of organized crime, have done so without seriously threatening the pervasive corruption and underlying institutions that led to Bolles' murder. Although small reforms have...
...sure, Bolles' death and the ensuing investigation by the newly-formed Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. has resulted in some positive, if limited, improvements in Arizona. The state's governor, Raul Castro, although ostensibly for other reasons, resigned after the IRE team uncovered consistent misbehavior on Castro's part--including charges of using state police guards as servants, pressuring state officials to give building contracts to political cronies, and befriending and accepting campaign contributions from reputed mobsters and the millionaire liquor dealer suspected ot engineering Bolles's murder. In contrast, the state's new governor, 40-year-old Bruce Babbitt...
...most part, reforms in Arizona have been the exception rather than the rule. And those changes which have occurred have largley been cosmetic, offering the appearance but not the reality of reform...
...corruption Don Bolles tried to stop, responded in suddenly-reverential fashion by enacting well-publicized legislation to combat organized crime. But what finally emerged was a watered-down version of a more stringent anti-crime bill, one that contained the very same discriminatory provisions that have for years made Arizona's penal system one of the most backward in the nation--stiff, mandatory sentences for blue-collar crime and lax provisions for organized, white-collar crime. The legislature also established a special task force to investigate organized crime, but the panel was given no force of law or full power...