-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
The Arizona Project
Michael Wendland©1977
ISBN 0-8362-0728-9
Sheed Andrews and McMeel, Inc.
6700 Squibb Rd.
Misson Kansas 66202
276 pps. - first edition - out-of-print
New revised edition - available amazon.com
Paperback, 304pp.
ISBN: 0945165021
Blue Sky Press, Incorporated
June 1988
--[3]--
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IRE and Punishment
News reporters make enemies.. It comes with the territory. They step on toes,
malign reputations and, occasionally, write stories so sensational that
people go to jail. Investigative reporters, columnists and radio and
television commentators make more enemies than general assignment reporters.
Revenge is a constant occupational hazard and not a few journalists have been
martyred for their work.
Elijah P. Lovejoy was one of the first to die in the line of duty. Owner of
the Alton (Illinois) Observer, Lovejoy was the prototype of the crusading
editor. He began the small paper in July 1836, and soon afterwards lashed out
against slavery on his editorial page. A mob of townsfolk reacted violently.
They ransacked Lovejoy's office and tossed his printing press into the
Mississippi. Antislavery news stories incited two similar incidents, and each
time the Observer's press was destroyed. On September 20, 1837, a fourth
printing press arrived. A crowd gathered on Alton's main street as Lovejoy
and a group of thirty supporters supervised unloading and installation. The
crowd became ugly by the night of the following day and demanded that Lovejoy
leave town. He refused, vowing to continue his support for abolition. The
mayor urged him to surrender the press but he stood firm. The mob finally
stormed the Observer and burned it down. Lovejoy was shot in the chest and
died. His murderer was never discovered.
The martyrology of American journalism includes the following names:
Wesley L. Robertson, editor of the Gallatin (Missouri) Democrat, shot in 1919
by a local politician for linking him to bootleggers.
Don Mellet, editor of the Canton (Ohio) Daily News, shot in 1926 by a Canton
policeman for exposing vice payoffs to city police.
Gerald Buckley, radio commentator on Detroit's WTK, shot in 1930 by three
unknown assailants within hours after broadcasting his promise to reveal
startling facts on the city's organized crime and corruption on future
programs,
W. H. "Bill" Mason, radio commentator and sports editor of the Alice (Texas)
Echo, shot in 1949 by a deputy sheriff after announcing on the air that the
deputy's tavern doubled as a whorehouse.
Emilio Milian, the forty-five-year-old news director of Miami's
Spanish-language radio station WQBA, was luckier than Don Bolles. Six weeks
before the Phoenix incident Milian lost his legs in a similar car bombing. A
Cuban himself, he had delivered a number of scathing editorials denouncing a
rash of shootings and bombings that had terrorized southeast Florida's large
Cuban population that spring. Miami police believe that whoever booby-trapped
his car was retaliating for those radio editorials. Despite fifty thousand
dollars in reward money, the case was never solved.
Until recent years, reporters had the public image of used car salesmen.
Portrayed in movies as arrogant and compromising types with questionable
ethics, they were perceived as scoop-hungry sensationalists, never willing to
let the facts stand in the way of a good story. But then, a number of things
happened. A grubby little war that took fifty thousand Americans in Indochina
was probably the catalyst. Almost overnight the press started catching our
government telling lies. The first lies -were about the war and our conduct
of it. There was the My Lai massacre and the Pentagon Papers. Later, the lies
seemed to spread everywhere. In 1972, there was a third-rate burglary whose
cover-up was initially exposed in print; this was followed by revelations
that the FBI and the CIA were not what they should be. On the local level
hundreds of hometown reporters searched for mini-Watergates and found some.
Government chicanery and corruption, unethical business alliances, organized
crime and union racketeering were the targets of newsmen across the nation.
Investigative reporters became our new folk heroes and Don Bolles had been
one of them. His murder had scared those who practiced the craft.
On the afternoon of the bombing Arizona Attorney General Bruce Babbitt
extended the chill even further. "It's a departure from the unwritten rule of
organized crime that you don't harm members of the press, the cops or the
judges, " he said. " I suppose the message is, if it can happen to Don
Bolles, then it can happen to anyone."
Later, Maricopa County Attorney Don Harris was even more direct. "The Bolles
bombing was done as a gesture to the news media to stop looking into this
community."
Nationwide, reporters got the message. And it made them both frightened and
furious.
Ron Koziol was late for work the morning of June 3, 1976. State construction
crews were repairing the expressway he usually traveled from his southwest
suburban home into the city and he sweltered in his Gremlin in stop-and-go
traffic all the way downtown. It was too damn hot for the first week of June
in Chicago.
As he entered the huge city room of the Chicago Tribune, he sheepishly waved
to the slot editors. The first edition deadline was over. It was time for
coffee and a breather as the reporters and editors prepared for the second
edition, three hours away.
"This ain't San Francisco, Koziol," hollered one of the deskmen, looking at
his watch. "The Hearst case is over, in case you haven't heard. You're ours
again."
Koziol thought the kidding would never end. From the time newspaper heiress
Patricia Hearst was kidnapped in February 1974, to the day she was captured
in the fall of 1975, Koziol had stayed on the story almost full time, at one
stage living in a rented apartment in Oakland for three months straight. In
all, he had made eight separate trips to California pursuing the story. His
several nationwide exclusives won him the Tribune's Edward Scott Beck Award
for outstanding domestic reporting. Though the Hearst case had ended months
before, Koziol was still razzed for his year-and-a-half on the company
expense account.
He sat down at his desk, lit the first of the twenty cigars he smoked each
day, and sipped a cup of coffee as he scanned the Trib's first editions.
"Bomb Injures Phoenix Reporter," read the headline on page three. Below was
an Associated Press account of the Bolles bombing.
"Holy shit," he muttered, spilling his coffee. Ron Koziol knew Don Bolles.
They had met in Arizona four years ago while Koziol was putting together a
series of stories on the Emprise Corporation's alleged connections to
organized crime in Illinois. Bolles was the Emprise expert, the first
investigative reporter to dig deep into the background of the sports
concession firm. He was glad to help an out-of-town reporter and saved Koziol
a lot of legwork.
The AP story quoted Bolles as saying "the mob ... Emprise got me." Koziol
felt his stomach tighten. At forty-three, Koziol was a veteran newspaperman,
who learned his business in the most competitive newspaper town in America,
covering police news for almost five years on the city's tough South Side
before launching into investigative reporting in 1972. He had been threatened
many times. But now another reporter who worked the same story he did was
mutilated in a bombing. In early 1974, Koziol disclosed that the firm held
the majority stock in a downstate Illinois racetrack. His story led to an
intensive investigation into Emprise by the Illinois Racing Board. If Don
Bolles was bombed for his reporting on Emprise, Koziol wondered whether he
might be next.
But the more he thought about it, the more he doubted whether Emprise really
had anything to do with it. It just didn't make sense. The scandal was too
old and too many other journalists were involved. Koziol figured it was more
likely that a minor hoodlum, angered by Bolles's reporting, decided it was
time to even the score. And there were plenty of hoodlums in Phoenix. To hear
Bolles tell it, half of the Chicago Mafia had moved to the sunny Southwest.
Bolles had often telephoned Koziol in Chicago, asking him to check out the
backgrounds of Illinois people who had turned up in Phoenix.
Tom Carlvin, the Tribune's assistant wire editor, tossed an updated version
of the AP story on Koziol's desk. He scanned it quickly and saw that it
contained little new information.
"You knew this Bolles guy, didn't you?"
"Yeah, I knew him," said Koziol, realizing that they were already speaking of
Bolles in the past tense. Carlvin shook his head and walked off, promising to
send all the wire copy to Koziol so he could keep informed.
As he sat there staring at the story, Koziol realized he had been talking
about Don Bolles just the week before, as he went over preparations for the
first annual convention of a group of unique journalists. In January 1975,
during the height of the Hearst case, Koziol suggested to a reporter for
Editor and Publisher, a newspaper trade magazine, that investigative
reporters around the country should get together more often as a group. As he
envisioned it, once a year investigative reporters would gather to swap story
ideas and voice common concerns in an informal atmosphere away from their
beats. There were a number of problems peculiar to their craft. Rather than
relying on public statements and on-the-record interviews, they had to
immerse themselves totally in the subject they were looking into. Confusing
public records needed to be perused, confidential and usually anonymous
sources developed. Loners by nature, often resented by their own staffs
because of their odd hours and independence from such mundane newspaper jobs
as preparing obituaries and covering routine press conferences, the
investigative reporter more often than not found himself alone on a limb. It
would be nice, thought Koziol, to meet some others perched on the same tree.
His remarks were printed in Editor and Publisher. Koziol was surprised to
find his phone at the Tribune ringing steadily from other reporters who
agreed with the idea.
There already were a number of press organizations. Sigma Delta Chi, a
fraternal group for print and electronic newsmen, is the oldest and best
known. The Reporters' Committee on Freedom of Information was recently formed
to provide legal aid to newsmen who encountered difficulty in gaining access
to public documents or who were subpoenaed to reveal the identity of one of
their sources. The Fund for Investigative Journalism, supported by grants and
donations from philanthropic foundations and civic organizations, was
established to aid underfinanced projects like Seymour Hersh's original My
Lai stories.
But those groups were rather formal. Koziol preferred a looser, more
service-minded operation.
About the same time Koziol's proposal appeared in the trade magazine, a
similar idea had arisen at the Indianapolis Star where reporters had received
a $5,000 grant from the Lilly Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the huge
pharmaceutical firm, to arrange for a caucus of investigative reporters. This
meeting was held in Reston, Virginia, the weekend of February 22 and 23,
1975. Attending were such media heavies as syndicated columnist Jack Anderson
and his associate Les Whitten; David Burnham of the New York Times; Len
Downie, metropolitan editor of the Washington Post; Jack Landau, Newhouse
Newspapers Washington correspondent; and Paul Williams, an Ohio State
University journalism professor who won the Pulitzer Prize in the early
seventies for his expose of Boys' Town. The Indianapolis Star reporters,
Harley Bierce, thirty-three, and Myrta Pulliam, twenty-eight, the daughter of
the Star's publisher and granddaughter of Nina Pulliam, the publisher of the
Arizona Republic, explained the reason for the gathering.
After a six-month investigation into Indianapolis's 1,100-man police
department, a special Star investigative team exposed widespread bribery and
extortion by Indianapolis police officers in a lengthy series of articles.
The series won the Drew Pearson Award for Investigative Reporting. But it
also suggested the need for a national network of reporters. "We found that
there were trails involving local people which we couldn't follow because
they went out of our area," explained Bierce. "Finding someone in another
city or knowing where to look in another city was strictly guesswork."
The conclave closed with an agreement and a name: the group would be known as
the Investigative Reporters and Editors Association. And the next step would
be organization. Bierce, Pulliam, Williams and Ed DeLaney, an Indianapolis
attorney who had assisted the Star reporters, were named to an executive
committee. Though Koziol was not present at the Reston meeting, his Editor
and Publisher piece had been read there. He was called during the conference
and asked to sit on the executive committee which was already being referred
to by its acronym, IRE.
The next year passed quickly for the new group. The Lilly Corporation endowed
IRE with another $20,000. Plans were drawn up for a research center, where
stories and material could be computerized for the membership. By May 1976,
IRE was an official nonprofit corporation. Koziol was elected its first
president and more than three hundred reporters from newspapers, radio and
television outlets throughout the country had joined up. Don Bolles was one
of the first members. Koziol had recommended Bolles's name to the board and
extended the invitation himself. The IRE members were busy in May planning
their first convention, a weekend-long gathering scheduled for June 19 and 20
in Indianapolis.
Just before Memorial Day, Koziol was called at the Tribune by David Offer,
investigative reporter for the Milwaukee Journal. Offer was to chair a
roundtable discussion on reporters' ethics at the convention and wanted
Bolles on the panel. Bolles was delighted by the request but explained that
he couldn't afford the trip unless the Republic paid his way. Offer then
wrote Bolles's editors to say how highly IRE regarded their employee and what
a valuable participant he would make.
Offer's call to Koziol was to say that he had just heard back from Bolles and
the Republic had refused to pick up the expenses.
"I really wanted him," Offer said. "He would have been perfect. That guy's
been through the wringer out there. His telephone was tapped during the
Emprise thing, he's been threatened and sued and gone through hell, and yet
he still keeps his cool. He really wanted to come, too."
The two discussed a replacement and hung up, promising to get back together
the next week.
But on Thursday, June 3, Ron Koziol was reading a page three story about Don
Bolles's being torn apart in a bombing.
Koziol rechecked the newspaper item and the wire copy. He reached for the
telephone to call Phoenix, but didn't dial. Republic reporters were probably
all working the story and he would just distract them.
Mike McGuire came over to Koziol's desk. The two were close friends: they had
started out together as general assignment reporters for the Tribune in 1961.
McGuire, after a two-year stint as bureau chief in Moscow, was now the Trib's
foreign editor.
He, too, was shocked by what had occurred to Bolles. "I'm sorry, I know he
was a friend. " Koziol shook his head. "No, I hardly knew him. We'd helped
each other out on a couple of stories. That's all. It's just that it's hard
to believe. Jesus, he was a reporter, just doing his job. I can't believe it."
McGuire agreed. "Aren't you the head of that new reporters' group?"
Koziol nodded. "Bolles was one of our members."
"You know, as an organization, maybe you people ought to do something. Send a
delegation out there. Find out what the hell happened that would cause
somebody to bomb a reporter."
McGuire left and Koziol relit his cigar. Maybe IRE could do something.
Koziol picked up the phone again. This time he called the Indianapolis Star
and reached Bierce, who had become the group's secretary-treasurer. Bierce
was aware of the bombing. It was on page one of that day's Star.
"Do you know that he's a member of IRE?" Koziol asked.
Bierce didn't.
"Shit, Harley, we should do something."
"Like what?"
"I don't know. At the convention. We should respond somehow.
Bierce said he would toss it around and be back in touch with Koziol. He,
too, felt there should be some sort of response from IRE.
Koziol's next call was to Paul Williams, the Pulitzer Prize-winning OSU
journalism professor who had been elected IRE's vice-president.
"I was just going to call you," said Williams. "Did you hear about Don
Bolles?"
Williams wanted to know what Koziol thought IRE could do. A reward offer for
information leading to those who ordered the bombing was the first
possibility, he explained. But the Gazette and Republic, the two Pulliam
papers in Phoenix, had already posted $25,000. Koziol repeated McGuire's
suggestion, that IRE send some of its people to Arizona to find out the cause
of the bombing.
" I like that idea, " Williams replied. " Let's respond as journalists, the
only way we know how. Professionally. Let's go into that state and turn it
upside down if we have to, but let's find out what the hell happened."
Nine days later, Don Bolles was dead. When the story moved across the wire
services, Williams called Koziol. "The convention is just five days off," he
said. "We've got to do something. I thought of inviting Bolles's editor, Bob
Early, to come talk to us but he's too tied up handling the story. "
"From what I've been able to find out, the cops have a pretty good hold on
the case," replied Koziol. "They've got this Adamson dude pretty cold and it
looks like the people who hired him are about to go down.
Williams agreed. "I still think we have to do something as a group. The case
itself seems pretty well wrapped up. If we still send somebody out there, I
don't think it should be just to investigate the Bolles case alone."
"What do you mean?"
"I mean that the intent should not be to bring Don Bolles's killers to
justice per se. The cops and the local papers are doing that right now.
Instead, we should go into Arizona and describe the particular climate that
caused his death. "
"In other words, we should carry on Bolles's work, do the kind of stories
that Don himself would have done if he had had the time and resources?"
"Precisely."
"The first IRE convention began on schedule. From the time newspeople began
filing into Indianapolis's Atkinson Hotel Friday night, little else was
discussed but the Bolles case. Word had spread quickly that there would be a
resolution urging some sort of action.
Williams and Koziol talked Friday night about who could handle the job of
weighing the feasibility of such a project. There was only one choice: Bob
Greene, the Suffolk County editor of the Long Island, New York, newspaper
Newsday.
Greene was the undisputed expert on team reporting. An obese, grey-haired man
of forty-seven, he was one of the nation's most respected investigative
reporters. He came to Newsday in 1967, after sleuthing for the old U.S.
Senate Rackets Committee and the New York City Crime Commission. His first
investigation for the paper was into payoffs of various Long Island zoning
officials. Three years later, the exposes of "Greene's Berets," as the team
was known, had resulted in twenty-one indictments and the resignations of
nearly three dozen public officials. Newsday won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for
meritorious public service.
Four years later, another Greene team was awarded a second Pulitzer for an
unprecedented year-long investigation into the way heroin reached the United
States. He and his reporters worked in Istanbul, Vienna, Munich and Paris.
They were the first journalists to watch the harvest of poppy fields, observe
the clandestine laboratories of Marseilles. The series, called "The Heroin
Trail," later became a primer for U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents
in Europe.
In between his two Pulitzers, Greene and his team produced a
seventy-thousand-word series on former President Richard Nixon's questionable
real estate dealings through his pal, Bebe Rebozo. Greene's prize was a spot
on the White House enemies list and an audit of his tax returns. After his
return from Europe in 1973 he had spent most of his time as a deskbound
editor, contributing heavily to various seminars on investigative reporting
but doing little himself. So Paul Williams figured Bob Greene was just
itching to get back on the streets.
The possibility of sending an IRE member to Phoenix was broached officially
at a Saturday afternoon meeting of the board of directors to which Greene had
recently been elected. After preliminary business, Paul Williams brought up
the idea of the Arizona project.
Koziol was watching Greene carefully for his reaction. Greene was seated to
the left, his huge frame supported by a small metal folding chair that looked
to Koziol as if it might collapse at any moment. A tight smile briefly
crossed Greene's face and he rolled his eyes as Williams finished the
presentation. Would he take the job and go to Phoenix for a quick feasibility
study?
Greene said he wasn't sure; he would have to think about the idea a little
more. He promised an answer by the next day. The meeting went on to other
matters.
Later, before gathering for drinks in the hotel bar, Williams approached
Koziol in a hallway.
"Well?"
"Prepare the resolution, Paul. He'll take it. It's too good a story for a guy
like him to turn down."
By Sunday morning, the IRE delegates spoke of nothing else. While most
reporters favored this direct response to the Bolles killing, a handful of
others were strongly opposed, claiming that it was nothing more than
exploitation of the reporter's death. Some contended that a collective effort
by journalists from competing papers would never work, that editors would
never release a reporter for such a time-consuming project in another state,
even if he was writing for just his own paper.
Williams's resolution "to redouble our efforts to keep open the channels of
communication to the people" in the wake of Bolles's death passed the board.
"We are outraged at the apparent motives for Bolles's death and the obvious
efforts to stifle and intimidate the free flow of information to the American
people," it read.
Greene would go to Phoenix and see what could be done.
Back at Newsday, he conferred with his own editors and outlined the proposal.
If there was to be a full-scale probe into Arizona, it would involve a number
of newspapers which would have to put aside their natural competitiveness and
work together on an identical story which would appear simultaneously in the
participating papers. To be sure, nothing like this had ever been tried in
the history of journalism in the United States. But if it worked, it would
write a new chapter in newsgathering and be taught in journalism schools
forever. Closer to home, such a project would give Newsday's reputation a
badly needed shot in the arm. Since Greene had gone on the desk after the
heroin series, the paper's investigative efforts had been spotty and produced
little national impact. Greene was sure to head such a team, giving Newsday
an edge over the other papers in controlling the story.
His editors liked the idea and on June 29, nine days after the Indianapolis
resolution was passed, Greene was in Phoenix.
He spent two full days there, talking mostly with Republic city editor Bob
Early and Early's key reporters. "This is your story," Greene told him. "We
are here to offer you our help, not to take the story away from you. If you
don't want us, we'll stay away. It's your decision. "
Early had his doubts. Greene and his recruits would be outsiders.
The whole proposal seemed like a journalistic gang bang, a posse of Eastern
reporters riding into Arizona intent on doing the work the Republic itself
should be doing. On the other hand, Early admitted that he needed help. His
staff was good but small. Digging sixteenhour days seven days a week since
the bombing, they had so many leads to pursue that it would take years to run
them down. Then there was the family connection. Myrta Pulliam, of the
Indianapolis Star, was not only a founder of IRE but the granddaughter of the
Republic's publisher Nina Pulliam, as well as the daughter of the publisher
of the Indianapolis Star. Such ties could not be ignored.
Early voiced his support and tentatively pledged his paper's cooperation.
Republic staffers would continue to work the Bolles case independent of any
team effort by other newspapers. But as far as a broader investigation into
the corruption and fraud of the state went, it would work hand-in-glove with
the team.
That was good enough for Greene, who immediately dipped into the Republic's
files, familiarizing himself with every aspect of the Bolles case and the
problems of the state.
He quickly learned that Republic staffers felt Robert Goldwater, the brother
of Senator Barry Goldwater, and Harry Rosenzweig, the former GOP boss in the
state, were the secret power brokers behind most of the land fraud and
political alliances in the state. Greene was amazed to find that despite
these strong suspicions the Republic had never assembled a dossier on the
backgrounds and business dealings of the two.
Greene also learned that federal, state, and local law officials held a
don't-rock-the-boat attitude, probably stemming, Republic reporters thought,
from the Goldwater-Rosenzweig friendship with former U.S. Attorney General
Richard Kleindienst, himself an Arizonan. Again, there had been no
investigations into law enforcement corruption by the Republic.
On organized crime, Republic staffers readily confessed that they were not
too familiar with the modus operandi of the mob in Phoenix, though they were
sure it flourished. The newspaper did not even know the hierarchy of its
hoodlums though a virtual immigration of Mafiosi from Chicago, Detroit, and
New Jersey had hit their city. They suspected that Phoenix was closely tied
to the mob in Tucson, some 160 miles to the south, where the dominance of
Peter "Horseface" Licavoli, head of the old Detroit Purple Gang, and Joseph
"Joe Bananas" Bonanno, the transplanted New York Mafia don, had long been
established. Greene could not believe that a similar structure did not exist
in Phoenix.
There were plenty of fertile areas to plow, Greene concluded. The next
question was where to set camp for the team. The obvious location would be in
the Republic itself. Early offered facilities but Greene decided it would be
better to maintain separate headquarters. The management of the Adams Hotel,
a large and comfortable downtown hotel just two blocks from the Republic
office, volunteered cooperation. The Adams agreed to supply rooms at $500 a
month each, considerably below its $34 daily rate. Most of the cost would be
picked up by the reporters' own newspapers. A minimum of four automobiles
would be required, office furniture and typewriters would have to be rented,
telephones installed and a full-time staff of at least two secretary-
stenographers would have to be hired. Greene guessed that extra help from
college graduate students could be obtained free from the state's two
journalism schools. Total office costs to be borne by IRE would be close to
$25,000. The entire project would take a minimum of ninety days, maybe
considerably longer. Persuading newspapers to pay the out-of-town expenses of
their reporters for so long would not be easy.
On June 30, he returned to Long Island. Twenty days later he submitted his
five-page feasibility study to the IRE board. It would be difficult, he
wrote, but the success probability was better than 50 percent. He reiterated
the purpose of the probe-to uncover the intertwined political corruption,
land fraud and organized crime activities that existed in Arizona.
"The idea is to exert heavy pressure on every possible pocket of corruption
whether it directly relates to the Bolles murder or not," Greene proposed,
comparing the project to the response of law enforcement to a cop killing.
"The minimum effect then, would be to give heavy exposure to the corrupt
element in a community in which an investigative reporter has been murdered.
The community and other like communities would reflect on what has happened,
and hopefully would think twice about killing reporters. For all of
usparticularly newspapers with high investigative profiles-this is eminently
self-serving. We are buying life insurance on our own reporters. If we
accomplish only this, we have succeeded."
IRE's effort would be essentially punitive, he noted. "It would be a
concerted statement by the press of America and working newspaper people that
the assassination of one of our own results in more problems than it is
worth."
By August, the IRE board had approved the project. It would begin in late
September or early October. Meantime, Greene began assembling files and
choosing his team.
His first selection was Tom Renner, an old friend and a veteran of other
Greene-led teams: At forty-eight, Renner was one of the American press's
leading experts on organized crime and the Mafia. He had written three books
on the mob. His police and underworld informants were distributed from coast
to coast and his incredibly detailed files were as complete as most police
agencies. Though Renner had recently been ill with a stomach ulcer, he
readily agreed to Greene's solicitation.
The Arizona Republic assigned a full-time reporter and The Arizona Daily Star
in Tucson detailed two of its best people. Myrta Pulliam from the
Indianapolis Star would be available for several weeks of labor; Koziol from
the Chicago Tribune could be counted on for help, and the University of
Arizona (Tucson) and Arizona State University in suburban Phoenix agreed to
create special intern programs which would free competent journalism students
for minor team work. As publicity about the project appeared in Newsweek
magazine and the various journalism journals, offers of help from two dozen
newspapers poured into Greene's Newsday offices. While most could not send
reporters to Arizona, they were willing to gather pertinent information in
their own cities.
Slowly, the files thickened. Renner was sent out on the road for eight days
in late August, picking up information from police and organized crime
sources in a half-dozen states that pointed to a virtual mob fiefdom in
Arizona, ruled primarily by the Bonanno family in Tucson. There were also
strong indications that mob money was heavily invested in the
multi-million-dollar agri-business in southern California and Arizona. Other
files detailed Arizona's sudden emergence as the country's major narcotics
corridor (via Mexico) and pointed to the involvement of some of the state's
most prominent businessmen.
"I am convinced that before we leave for Arizona we could literally write a
major series of the crime takeover in that state," Greene reported to the IRE
board in early September.
Meanwhile, Renner was doing some recruitment of his own. One of his
on-the-road forays had taken him to Michigan where he had gathered files on
the background of racketeer Pete Licavoli, Sr., who migrated to Tucson in the
1940s from Detroit. While there, he telephoned Mike Wendland, an
investigative reporter for the Detroit News, America's largest evening
newspaper. Wendland was out of town on assignment for his paper, so Renner
left a message to telephone him back at Newsday. The two were friends, though
they had never met in person. At thirty, Wendland had specialized in the mob
and government corruption stories since the early 1970s. As frequently
happens with reporters, he and Renner had met over the telephone while
chasing identical leads on the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa during the fall
of 1975.
When Wendland returned the call, Renner mentioned the Arizona Project.
Wendland was interested because he too had benefited from Bolles's
generosity. In 1972 he had spent ten days in Arizona inivestigating land
fraud and had called on Bolles, who characteristically provided several leads.
"How tied up are you for the rest of the year?" Renner asked.
Wendland was swamped. Besides his investigative reporting, he also wrote, on
his own time, a column on the Citizens Band radio craze which was sweeping
the nation. Syndicated in nearly two hundred newspapers across the country,
the column led him to write one book on the hobby the previous spring. He was
in the midst of completing his second book when Renner called.
"You've got to be kidding, " he said. "Maybe I could get away for a week or
two but that would be it."
Renner suggested Wendland think it over. After they hung up, Wendland opened
one of his file drawers and pulled out a manila envelope marked "Arizona." He
reread his old clippings on land fraud and his research notes, which
reflected his contact with Bolles. Then he read the clippings he had kept on
the Bolles bombing. Like the other reporters, he felt rage over the tragedy.
That night, he broached the subject with his wife, Jennifer. She was less
than thrilled. The Hoffa-Teamsters case had kept him out of town for weeks;
he was almost a stranger to their three young children. He gave her several
articles about the Bolles killing. When she finished reading-them she told
him there was really no choice.
The next day, he cleared the idea with his editors and called Renner.
"I'm in," he said.
"I already knew," replied Renner. "In fact Greene already has you budgeted.
Plan on three months. It's going to be a bitch, but it's good stuff."
The project would commence the first week of October.
pps. 23-36
--{cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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