On June 2, 1976, a top Arizona investigative
reporter, Don Bolles, 47, was fatally mutilated when a dynamite blast
ripped his car apart. That explosion is still reverberating in
Arizona—louder than ever. It has shaken the confident, well-entrenched
Establishment to its foundation, and it has also stirred the first real
attempt at serious law enforcement since Arizona joined the union in
1912. All this is now being dramatized by an extraordinary journalistic
enterprise. Six months ago, 36 reporters from 27 news organizations,
calling themselves IRE , went to Arizona to carry on Bolles' work. Last week the
results of their investigation began appearing in a 23-part series in
newspapers across the U.S. Last Stronghold. The series must be seen against the state's background.
Arizona remains part of the last American frontier that has not quite
closed. The gun is still king, and justice is often meted out
privately. As law-abiding citizens have flocked to the good life of the
fabled Sunbelt, so too have mobsters. Mingling with the native
criminals, they have combined the worst of both worlds: Joey Gallo in a
Stetson. The rackets are flourishing, most visibly land fraud. Says
Arizona's assertive attorney general, Bruce Babbitt: “We've been
entranced by our own rhetoric about everyone's right to do his own
thing. This is the last stronghold of totally free enterprise, good,
bad or indifferent.” The members of the IRE team documented all this further. The Mafia, they
report, has staged an “invasion” of Arizona; 171 known gangsters, most
of whom have arrived in the past ten years, reside in Phoenix and
Tucson alone. They deal in prostitution, illegal gambling and narcotics
smuggling; Arizona, in fact, has become the chief corridor for
narcotics entering the U.S. now that Mexico has replaced Turkey as the
leading source of heroin. The mobsters have gone unmolested, says the
report, because “until recently the prosecutorial system has been
marked by incompetence, fuzzy or nonexistent law and brazen bribe
taking.” The first installments also single out three top figures for special
treatment: Barry Goldwater; his brother Robert, a real estate developer
who managed the family retail business until 1970; and Harry
Rosenzweig, a close friend of the Goldwaters and longtime Republican
state chairman. The report rehashed material about Barry that has been
printed before. U.S. Government investigators, who pronounced Barry
“clean” of criminal connections, feel that he is getting something of a
bum rap. Over the years, it has been reported that he occasionally
palled around with gangsters on golf courses or in gambling casinos,
and he once intervened to get a lighter sentence for a convicted
bookmaker. The series added a little new information; e.g., in 1973
Barry wrote a sponsoring letter for a man with criminal connections who
sought membership in a posh California club.
