Putting Heat on the Sunbelt Mafia

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 (Investigative Reporters and Editors Association), 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.

The charges against Robert Goldwater were much the same; the reports detailed some of the sizable gambling debts he had run up at casinos. The case against Rosenzweig was considerably more serious. "He had nurtured prostitution and gambling in Phoenix for years," declared the report. Rosenzweig once owned apartments that were rented out to prostitutes whom he supplied to visiting businessmen. References to him as the "Diamond Man" were found in prostitutes' "trick books." Last year, said the report, he guaranteed a $25,000 loan to an associate of mobsters to start a private club in Phoenix. Rosenzweig does not plan to respond to the charges until the articles are completed.

The series was carried by many dailies around the country, but several papers delayed running it or published it in abbreviated form, including the New York Times and Washington Post, which had declined to participate in the group effort. Bolles' own paper, the Arizona Republic, did not run the series on the ground that it was inadequately documented. Barry Goldwater, who had refused to be interviewed for the series, responded with outrage and hinted at the "biggest ever" libel suit in U.S. history. He also challenged Robert Greene, the Newsday editor who directed the investigative group, to name one gangster living in Arizona. Greene quickly responded with the name of Joe Bonanno, who lives in Tucson, and he said he could produce another 199.

Atmosphere of Arrogance. Professional journalists generally give the IRE team high marks for thoroughness. Facts were accumulated on some 40,000 file cards; they were checked and double-checked and challenged by three lawyers. Future installments will include an examination of Arizona Governor Raul Castro's activities and an analysis of the traffic in drugs and stolen goods. Bill Hazlett, an investigative reporter for the Los Angeles Times, says of the series so far: "The writing is kind of hack and it has a screaming or vigilante tone to it that detracts from the fine work the group has done. Their real purpose is not to say Barry Goldwater is a crook but to show the atmosphere of arrogance and poor regard for the law."

Goldwater aside, there is no question that crime can be traced to the highest levels in the state. Bolles' killer, a small-time hoodlum named John Adamson, turned state's evidence to avoid first-degree murder charges. He implicated a land developer and a plumber in the plot and said that the man who ordered the murder was Kemper Marley, 70, a cattle and liquor baron who looks as if he just stepped out of the pages of Zane Grey. Crusty and brusque, Marley has a reputation for getting what he wants any way he wants. He was the biggest contributor ($19,000) to Governor Castro's election campaign. While serving as an Arizona state highway commissioner in 1942, he was arrested for ordering a state-owned truck engine installed in one of his own vehicles. He was subsequently acquitted. By recalling the incident in a newspaper article, Bolles forced Marley to resign from a coveted seat on the state racing commission. For this reason, Adamson was told by the land developer, Marley wanted Bolles killed. So far, Marley, who divides his time between homes in Arizona and Mexico, has not been arrested because of lack of evidence. The state is hoping that Adamson's testimony will eventually be corroborated by the land developer or the plumber, who are scheduled to go on trial in May.

Public Pressure. Embarrassed Arizonans insist that the state's criminals are a minority (a truism anywhere) and that a genuine housecleaning has begun. "Two years ago," says tough Attorney General Babbitt, "I walked into this office to find that it carried no criminal jurisdiction. It was that bad." He finally obtained authority from the legislature to set up a statewide grand jury and funding for a prosecution effort. Criminal laws are being strengthened, and the legislature is expected to approve a bill outlawing the practice of investing proceeds from the rackets in legitimate businesses. Public pressure is mounting on the state regulatory agencies to crack down on fraudulent land schemes. A task force of FBI agents, postal fraud inspectors and SEC investigators has begun to probe. Says Babbitt: "Right now we are about two years into what I think is a minimum five-year job."

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