David Freed JOUR S-599 Capstone 26 July 2017

STRONGER TOGETHER: GROUP REPORTING AND THE PUBLIC’S RIGHT TO

KNOW

By the spring of 1976, Don Bolles had grown weary of investigative reporting. The irregular hours. The phone threats. The fear of libel suits. The indifferent and sometimes timid editors. After more than a dozen years of exposing organized crime and corruption in Phoenix for the Arizona Republic, Bolles was relieved to be finally leaving the beat, moving on to cover the state legislature. That was the anguishing irony of it, his friends and fellow reporters would lament, that someone had murdered him when he was no longer a threat.

Some said the 47-year-old journalist should have ignored the news tip that led to his assassination. But even as he sought to distance himself from his craft, Don Bolles and investigative reporting were inseparable. And so, when a man called whom he’d never met, claiming to have incriminating information about an Arizona congressman in bed with the mob,

Bolles did what he always did with potential sources. He suggested they get together face-to- face. The caller said his name was John Adamson.

The two men made plans to meet in the lobby of the upscale Hotel Clarendon (now the

Clarendon Hotel and Spa) in downtown Phoenix. Adamson, however, never showed. After waiting 15 minutes, Bolles returned to his white Datsun 710 compact. As the father of four backed out of his parking space, six sticks of dynamite taped to the car’s frame under his seat

2 detonated. Bolles would languish in agony for 11 days as surgeons amputated both of his legs and an arm in a desperate but ultimately futile struggle to save his life.

Journalists are killed gangland-style for doing their jobs in places like Russia and Latin

America, not in America. That was the perception, anyway, before Bolles was slain. Word of his death blew like a chill wind through the nation’s newsrooms. Would organized crime now declare open season on reporters? Would journalists be less willing to pursue the truth, without fear or favor, if they knew their own lives were at risk?

At Long Island’s Newsday in New York, Pulitzer Prize-winning editor and reporter Bob

Greene was determined not to let that happen. No stranger to writing powerful exposes on organized crime, the legendary Greene was determined to avenge Bolles’ murder by showing bad guys everywhere that if they killed one reporter, others would target them like heat-seeking missiles.

More than three-dozen reporters did just that in the immediate wake of Don Bolles’ death.

Greene organized an unprecedented, eclectic confederation of mostly newspaper journalists from large newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, Detroit News, and the Miami

Herald, and from tiny ones like Ohio’s Elyria Chronicle and the Washington Wenatchee World.

A sprinkling of radio and television newsmen joined as well. In all, 38 reporters from across the country would ultimately convene in Phoenix, most on unpaid leaves, with a single goal in mind:

To carry on the investigative work of a slain colleague few of them had ever met. Known as the

“The Arizona Project,” their collective efforts would give rise to a then-fledgling organization

3 called Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc., (IRE), which stands today among the nation’s foremost resources for journalists whose forte is in-depth, socially redemptive stories.

Greene and his team converted a penthouse suite in downtown Phoenix’s Adams Hotel into a makeshift newsroom. They called themselves the “Desert Rats” and embraced the motto,

“Deep and Dirty.” It was “All the President’s Men” meets “Spotlight,” with a dash of “The

Magnificent Seven” thrown in. Journalism had never seen anything like it.

I certainly hadn’t.

After Greene learned that a massive land fraud scam that my reporting partner and I were investigating in Colorado had ties to mob activities in Arizona, we were invited to join the team.

I became its youngest member, a 21-year-old rookie fresh out of college.

Nothing I had studied in journalism school could have prepared me for what I was to experience in Phoenix. I found myself in the company of hard-charging, hard-drinking, old- school newsmen straight from “The Front Page,” as caustically funny as they were shockingly unorthodox in their pursuit of the truth.

Together, we tailed mobsters, surveilled gun-runners, and met with clandestine sources in dive bars and down dark alleys. I learned by watching them the tenacity and resourcefulness demanded of the craft of reporting, our inviolate obligation to confirm the facts through multiple sources, and to reconfirm them. I learned the focus and patience required when digging through stacks of records, the polite but persistent, never-take-no-for-an-answer approach when dealing with bureaucratic file clerks, the gentle cajoling and careful building of trust in handling fearful, unwilling sources--the notion that you can catch more flies with honey than vinegar. I learned the

4 importance of transcribing and organizing my notes after an interview, so that I wouldn’t forget crucial details. More than anything, I learned never to be satisfied in my search for answers.

In the end, we produced a body of work laying bare a city and a state that, as Don Bolles had worked so valiantly to expose, was awash in corruption. We also generated no shortage of controversy.

Reporters traditionally are an independent lot, fiercely competitive in their zeal to scoop each other while furthering the public’s right to know. Some journalists who didn’t come to

Phoenix ridiculed those of us who did. They said we had threatened the very foundations of a free press by banding together. Maybe we did. All I know is that in the more than 40 years, we journalists can count on one hand the members of our tribe who’ve been murdered in the United

States for trying to tell the truth.

“It bought an insurance policy for reporters,” says Myrta Pulliam, a Pulitzer Prize- winning investigative reporter from the Indianapolis Star who was one of the original Desert

Rats. “And that was the whole idea to begin with.”

There’s little denying that American journalists are under siege today. Amid declining audiences and revenues, relatively few individual news media outlets can afford to field the kind of ambitious, spare-no-expense kind of investigative teams that were prevalent when I was starting out. Opinion polls consistently show a majority of the public views reporters with suspicion. Much of that venal sentiment is fueled by President Donald J. Trump and his supporters’ constant vilification of journalists as enemies of the people, purveyors of “fake news.” If you’re a reporter, it’s easy to feel under siege, and to embrace a circle-the-wagons mentality.

Which is why a look back at the Arizona Project and the lessons it afforded couldn’t be timelier. As more newspapers and television newsrooms shed jobs, it simply makes sense to work together, to ensure that the kind of in-depth reporting we undertook in Phoenix continues.

Little did we know back then that our unprecedented call to journalistic action would serve today as a model of sorts for partnerships like ProPublica and The New York Daily News, or the

International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, both of which won Pulitzer Prizes this year.

Investigative reporters are a proud and righteous tribe, practicing a craft that affords an essential service to a free society. They serve in essence as sheepdogs, standing watch over the opportunistic and the corrupt, barking truth to power. Don Bolles understood the role of investigative reporting as well as anyone. Those who toiled beside him and called him friend describe him as having been utterly selfless in his all-important pursuit of the truth. He would’ve been among the first, they say, to applaud the kind of collective, team journalism being practiced increasingly these days.

Detectives who investigated Bolles’ murder were confident they solved his slaying. Three suspects went to prison, including Adamson, who police said planted the bomb. Not everyone, however, is convinced that all the guilty were caught.

It is a murder mystery, some believe, that may never be solved.

***

I graduated from Colorado State University on a sunny Saturday in May 1976 and went to work the following Monday covering night cops for the Colorado Springs Sun, a feisty underdog daily in what was then a competitive, two-newspaper town. Don Bolles was blown up

6 in Phoenix less than a month later. I read on the wires how Greene was putting together a reporting team to carry on Bolles’ work, but I didn’t give it much thought at the time, immersed in my fledgling career, hoping to pass probation. That would soon change.

Neither of us can recall specifically when, but sometime that summer, my college buddy and fellow reporter at the Sun, Steve Wick, learned that Phoenix authorities had contacted detectives in Colorado Springs about a possible Colorado connection to Bolles’ death. The

Desert Southwest at the time was rife with flagrant real estate scams. Bolles had investigated and reported on many of them. According to Wick’s law enforcement source, a land sales company with rumored links to organized crime figures in Arizona was operating out of a high-rise office building south of downtown Colorado Springs.

At my prodding, Wick, then 25, persuaded our editors that he needed help on the story.

We were assigned to work together. It didn’t take long to hit journalistic pay dirt.

We discovered that hundreds of tracts of windswept scrubland in the arid, anything-but- picturesque San Luis Valley of southern Colorado were being marketed nationwide as verdant, alpine home sites in magazines like Parade and TV Guide. We uncovered a false equity scheme in which the company’s salesmen suckered prospective buyers by telling them that paradise could be had for pennies on the dollar. All a purchaser need do was take over a previous buyer’s monthly payments—usually a “widow”—who had encountered financial trouble and was eager to give up her sizeable stake in the property. Raiding the company’s trash bins night after night—“dumpster diving” in the literal sense--we recovered discarded, coffee-stained copies of contracts showing the same plots of remote, windswept land were being sold over and over to unsuspecting purchasers from across the country. Salesmen were operating on the assumption that few investors would actually ever come looking. It was a huge story.

“We thought we had it all to ourselves,” Wick remembers wistfully.

We didn’t.

Several weeks into our probe, we crossed paths with Norm Udevitz, long-time chief investigative reporter for the Denver Post. Unbeknownst to us, Udevitz, who was a member of the IRE team in Phoenix, had been pursuing many of the same leads we had. Our findings, he said, led directly to the same shady characters the reporting group in Arizona was investigating in connection with Bolles’ murder.

“I can call Bob Greene right now,” Udevitz told us, “and get you guys on the team.” All we had to do, he said, was have our two newspapers join forces on the Colorado land fraud story.

Later, we would realize that Udevitz had dangled membership on the IRE team because he knew we had the journalistic jump on him when it came to our land fraud story. In that moment, however, Wick and I didn’t care. We were going to a part of history. Our careers would flourish. Both of us were sold before Udevitz was done lobbying.

Convinced that the Sun would share in the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service we were sure to win, our editors jumped at the proposed collaboration with the Denver Post and our participation on the team. They agreed to pay two weeks’ lodging for us in Phoenix, but not our salaries. We would have to take unpaid vacation time. There was no hesitation on our parts.

Within days, Wick and I were on our way to Phoenix.

The movie, “Animal House,” would not hit theaters for another two years, but that’s what the IRE’s makeshift newsroom in the Adams Hotel looked and felt like on first impression. The atmosphere was decidedly male and fraternity-like. Indeed, among the more than three-dozen

8 reporters who would eventually join the team, only two—Susan Irby from the Mississippi

Gulfport Daily Herald and Myrta Pulliam--were women.

“They wanted me to make the coffee,” Pulliam remembers. “I made the world’s worst coffee and they never asked me again.”

The place was a dump: Battered metal desks; newspapers haphazardly piled everywhere.

The air was thick with cigarette smoke and the clickety-clacking of manual typewriters. The first time I walked in, two disheveled newsmen were pointing fingers and arguing loudly with each other about something. Two others were laughing and throwing darts over the head of another reporter who had a phone tucked under his chin, trying valiantly to conduct a serious interview amid the raucous din. Nobody, as I recall, looked over to check out the new guys.

Bob Greene was hunkered throne-like behind a corner desk, shrouded as he usually was in a tobacco haze, his ashtray heaping with Pall Mall butts, perusing memos from his troops. A corpulent man with long, graying hair, he resembled less the tough, iconic journalist of his reputation than, as another team member once described him, a “human beanbag chair.”

“I remember him talking and talking,” Wick says, “and trying to light the wrong end of a cigarette, which he accidentally dropped. The cigarette slid onto his enormous legs and burned a hole in his pants and he just kept on talking. I thought, ‘Holy shit, this is gonna be a nightmare.’”

My partner’s fears of journalistic hell never materialized. Indeed, for two young reporters starting out in the news business, being on the IRE team was sheer exhilaration--so long as you disregarded the palpable fear surrounding our efforts that bordered on paranoia. Many of our colleagues were convinced that the bad guys wouldn’t stop at Bolles. Security was a constant

9 concern. We were instructed never to venture alone beyond the confines of the Adams Hotel, and even then to be constantly onguard.

“Any one of us might be next,” Greene told us with unnerving regularity.

I took him at his word.

***

Every newcomer to the team made a pilgrimage to the parking lot where Bolles was blown up, to stand in silent reverence on the spot where the bomb went off. I couldn’t tell if the stains on the concrete were dried blood or oil spots. The visit was sobering, regardless.

We toiled seven days a week, often 14 hours a day and usually well past midnight, with a break for dinner in the hotel dining room, or at Livia’s, Greene’s favorite local Italian restaurant.

There he would chug glasses of chilled vodka like they were water and trade journalistic war stories with other veteran reporters. I sat mostly mute and soaked it all in.

A newbie with little investigative experience and few stories of my own, much of my time in Phoenix was spent mundanely running down property records at local government offices, or filling out the endless file cards that Greene required we use to index and cross-index every shred of information we unearthed—what a laptop computer would do today. Still, I was given my share of opportunities to get deep and dirty. It was heady stuff.

One night, I went out on a surveillance with Dick Levitan, a loud and completely over- the-top Boston radio reporter who seemed utterly fearless, I can’t remember who we were tailing or why. What I do recall, though, is how the subject of our interest stopped off at a local dive bar on Phoenix’s then-seedy Central Avenue. Levitan, now deceased, waited until the guy

10 disappeared inside, then pulled out of his pocket a “thumper”— a well-worn leather sap of the kind cops back in the day used to gain the cooperation of uncooperative arrestees. He hustled over to the subject’s car, busted out a taillight, then came running back to our ride.

“We can follow him easier in traffic,” an out-of-breath Levitan said as he quickly climbed in, as if committing vandalism in the name of news-gathering was perfectly kosher.

Riding shotgun on another nighttime stakeout, this one of a suspected gun runner, I watched as one of IRE’s founding members, cigar-chomping Chicago Tribune police reporter

Ron Koziol, stealthily laid a cheap wristwatch under a tire of the thug’s car. “This way,” he explained with a grin, “we don’t have to wait around all fucking night for the asshole to show.

He drives off and the car crushes the watch. We come back later and check what time he left, kapish?”

Kapish.

Over the nearly two decades I would subsequently spend as a newspaper reporter, working mostly investigative assignments, I never once pulled Koziol’s wristwatch trick or busted out anyone’s taillight, Levitan-style. That’s not the point. What I gleaned from those two reporters on those sultry exciting nights, as I did in my interactions with other, more senior members of the team, was that we were on a mission, and that that mission was sacred.

In a free society, the public has a right to know. Reporters are the purveyors of that right.

Without them, society ceases to be free. I was told in Phoenix by others who’d worked with him that Bolles took those journalistic responsibilities seriously, but that he frowned on being called an “investigative” reporter. The adjective, he said, was redundant; all reporters are investigators.

In Phoenix, I was steeped in saintly lore of the martyred crusading reporter. I was reminded at every turn how Bolles was respected among his peers for his courage, as well as his generosity of spirit, always willing to share bylines on a blockbuster story. Yet I would realize in hindsight that I left Phoenix and returned to my career understanding little of the man whose work I had ostensibly helped carry on.

The measure of any man, Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius once observed, is the worth of the things he cared about in life. Bolles was passionate about journalism, but that seemed to paint a mere one-dimensional picture of him. A good reporter cared enough about his job that he died doing it. What else did he care about? Where did he find refuge when he wasn’t fighting crime and corruption, banging out his next story?

Who was Don Bolles?

***

The oldest of four children from Bolles’ first marriage, David Bolles was 21 when his father died. He was in his office, working for the city of Phoenix as an engineering draftsman, when a co-worker took him aside and broke the news. He remembers climbing into in his own car and cruising the area, confused and angry, looking through tears for those who had fatally injured his father.

“He was Don Quixote, doing his best to rid Arizona of villains and white-collar crime,”

David Bolles, 64, says today. But, like Don Quixote, the elder Bolles “was also a slightly flawed individual, perhaps a little crazy in his own way.”

Don Bolles was literally born into the news business—his own father was an editor for the Associated Press. During the Korean War, Bolles served in the Army as a military reporter.

“He never spoke about the war,” his son says, “but I know it left deep scars…He had to write what they told him to write. He hated that with all his heart and vowed never to be subjected to censorship ever again in his life.”

After a stint as an AP sports reporter and rewrite man, Bolles in 1962 moved from New

Jersey to Phoenix, where he joined the staff of the Republic. Within a year, he was breaking award-winning stories, exposing graft among state officials, and shining light on land fraud schemes, which by then had become a growth industry across Arizona. The hours were long and the stress intense, but he still managed to find time for family.

He accompanied David on Boy Scout camping trips, built his own stereo from a kit, and played classical music after Sunday morning church services with the volume turned up. His father, David says lovingly, was a “terrible” fisherman and a good tennis player who relished attending stage plays. Sometimes he drank too much and sucked down too many Marlborough cigarettes, but gave up smoking cold turkey a few years before he died and took up jogging after a doctor showed him X-rays of his polluted lungs. More than anything, according to his son,

Bolles enjoyed hiking and riding horses in the Arizona desert, especially in the Superstition

Mountains.

He also enjoyed his work. As his son remembers it, Bolles loved playing detective with a notebook as much as he hated the liars and cheats he investigated, even if he became one himself.

“My father was a bit vain and a bit of a flirt,” David says. “He had some affairs. He disliked himself sometimes because, at his core, he knew his philandering was counter to his own deep-held beliefs about right and wrong.”

Shortly before David began high school, his parents divorced. The breakup was ugly.

Bolles’ children found themselves “somewhat abandoned,” David says, especially after his father subsequently remarried and started a new family. Money was tight. Bolles’ ex-wife, an obstetrical nurse, struggled to pay the bills and wasn’t hesitant to vilify her former husband in front of their kids.

“We had a weekend dad and, honestly, it was not great,” David says, “but he tried to be good about it.”

Other reporters who worked with Bolles say that one reason he wanted off the investigative beat was to spend more time with his children, especially Diane, his daughter from his second marriage, who was born deaf.

Bolles’ widow, Rosalie, who was also a nurse, remembers the reporter as “incredibly handsome and very funny,” always quick with a pun. They met at a party when she was 28. He would prove to be a “marvelous” family man, she says, wholly devoted to her and their child.

“We laughed a lot,” she says, laughing herself.

In the eight years they were married, they went camping in Yellowstone, Yosemite, and on the beach in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico. Bolles helped his new wife lobby Arizona state legislators to improve educational opportunities for special needs children like their daughter.

Rosalie says she was all too aware of the anonymous phone threats her husband would sometimes receive at home, and of what he felt increasingly was a lack of support from his editors at the Republic for his hard-hitting style of reporting. She says he that at the time of his death he was considering taking a journalism job in Tucson and dreamed of someday retiring to

Mexico to write fiction. On the day he died—their wedding anniversary—Bolles had intended that evening to take Rosalie to the movies. They were going to see “All the President’s Men.”

“And then,” she says, “our world blew up.”

***

For five months, reporters rotated in and out of Phoenix, contributing what they could to the IRE team by way of work before returning to their regular jobs. We weren’t cops, Greene told us. Our purposes was to shed light on the lawlessness that Bolles had struggled to expose, not the lawless men who’d killed him. Still, it was hard not to connect the two.

Rumors persisted that Kemper Marley, Sr., one of Arizona’s wealthiest residents, was the money man behind Bolles’ murder. John Adamson, a racing dog owner, former tow truck operator, and small-time hood, told authorities that he’d been paid $10,000 by Max Dunlap, a

Phoenix contractor and close friend of Marley, to murder Bolles for exposés the reporter had written that embarrassed Marley. Bolles’ articles had accused the millionaire rancher, philanthropist and liquor distributor of graft and nepotism while serving years earlier on the

Arizona State Fair Commission. The coverage forced Marley, the son of a pioneer family who’d worked hard burnishing a rough-and-tumble, John Wayne-like persona, to resign as a newly appointed member of Arizona’s horse and dog racing commission.

Adamson would plead guilty in 1977 to second-degree murder for having constructed and planted the bomb that killed Bolles. Dunlap and James Robison, a plumber who Adamson said detonated the bomb using a remote-control, model airplane radio receiver, would be convicted that same year of manslaughter.

Our stories linked Marley to mobsters, organized crime and other nefarious activities, but authorities concluded there was insufficient evidence to charge him in any way with Bolles’ death. He would later spend what he said was more than $300,000 in legal fees to sue the IRE, alleging that stories the team produced were libelous and had invaded his privacy. A jury would rule against him on both counts, awarding him $15,000 instead for “emotional distress.” When the IRE countersued, Marley dropped the case. He never collected a dime of the court judgement he’d won and would die in 1990 at 83, leaving behind a fortune reportedly worth more than $47 million.

In 1978, Dunlap and Robison were released from custody after an appeals court ruled that procedural errors had occurred during their trials. When Adamson refused to testify a second time against the pair, he was tried on for first-degree murder, found guilty, and sentenced to death, but that conviction also was later reversed on technical grounds. All three men who’d been accused of killing Don Bolles might well have remained free had it not been for the persistent work years later of one of the Arizona Project’s original members, George Weisz.

Weisz had been a graduate student at the University of Arizona, studying organized crime for a master’s degree in criminal justice, when Bob Greene invited him to join the reporting team. Bolles had agreed to meet with Weisz, to share what he knew about mob activities in

Arizona, but was killed a week before they were to get together.

More than a decade later, working as a special agent for Arizona’s attorney general, it was Weisz who would lead an effort to reopen the investigation of Bolles’ murder. Adamson,

Dunlap and Robison as a result were all subsequently re-prosecuted and eventually returned to custody. Dunlop would die behind bars in 2009. Adamson, who agreed to testify once more against his co-defendants after expressing initial reluctance, would be released from prison in

1996 after serving 20 years and placed in the federal witness protection program. He died in

2002 at an undisclosed location. Robison died last year in California. He insisted all along that he’d been framed, and had spent five years behind bars after pleading guilty to charges that he’d tried to have Adamson murdered for testifying against him.

If anyone has kept alive embers of the Arizona Project, it has been Weisz. At 66, he maintains its voluminous archives at his home in suburban Phoenix while remaining an outspoken champion of team reporting. He questions why there hasn’t been another Arizona-like

Project in Mexico where, according to the nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists, nearly 100 news gatherers have died violently since 1994 amid that nation’s notorious narcotics wars.

“What saddens me and what I don’t understand,” Weisz says, “is why the entire journalism community doesn’t rise up like we did, and rip those places apart? Our whole point was not to solve a murder, but to tell the bad guys, ‘Don’t hurt any of us or we’re gonna come there in en masse.’ It worked before. It can work again.”

IRE team member Lowell Bergman, a Pulitzer-winning reporter for the New York Times who would achieve fame as a CBS 60 Minutes producer (actor Al Pacino played Bergman in the

1999 film, “The Insider”), doesn’t disagree with Weisz. Bergman says he believes that alliances forged between different news media outlets may offer the only economically viable future for investigative journalism. It is a concept that he practices these days as a producer and correspondent for PBS’ “Frontline,” a program that routinely collaborates with other news organizations, from the Times to NPR to the Spanish-language network, Univision.

The trick, says Bergman, will be to convince other media outlets in the future that real reporting is less about profits than servicing the public good.

“What makes this model important,” he says, “is the focus on the story—the quality of the storytelling combined with the dedication, not to competition….but presenting the best available version of the truth.”

We live today in a world in which the president of the United States and his supporters regard “the mainstream media” as an untruthful, nefarious collective of sorts, bent on furthering a singularly destructive liberal message. Would the prospects of more media outlets banding together to better tell complex stories further that conspiratorial belief? Patrick Plaisance, an associate professor of journalism at Colorado State University who studies media ethics and journalism values, says no.

“Sometimes, the story is bigger than one news organization alone can handle,” Plaisance says. “The potential of harnessing the power of multiple agencies far outweighs the potential of confirming somebody’s suspicions that the media is monolithic. People are going to believe what they want to believe, regardless.”

***

When the IRE’s reporting in Phoenix was done, Bob Greene divided up the writing among the more senior of his Desert Rats. Together, they would produce a 23-part, 80,000-word series that debuted on a Sunday in March 1977 in newspapers across the country. The subject matter was as massive as the word count: Land fraud; drug-smuggling; the influence of organized crime on Arizona’s criminal justice system; the systemic abuse of the state’s migrant farm workers, the many questionable ties between Kemper Marley and Raul Castro, Arizona’s governor at the time. That I didn’t have a hand in writing any of the stories mattered little to me.

My bragging rights were secure; I had been there. I’d been a part of history.

Yet for all its promise to carry on Bolles’ work and expose Arizona’s dark underside, the

IRE’s effort proved largely fruitless. Nobody went to prison as a direct consequence of our reporting. Nobody resigned from government office. Nobody won a Pulitzer. Many leading newspapers, meanwhile, including The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and

Washington Post, barely made mention of our efforts, turning up their collective noses at group journalism as an affront to independence of their respective newsrooms. The Wall Street Journal went one step further. In February 1977, weeks before the series was to run, the Journal’s Jim

Drinkhall, a former IRE board member, published a front-page story exposing questionable donations the IRE had received from a mob lawyer and a convicted securities broker. Perhaps most distressingly, Bolles own newspaper, which had assigned two of its best reporters to the team, Chuck Kelly and John Winters, also declined to run a word of the series.

Some have alleged that the Republic’s late publisher, Nina Pulliam, the grandmother of team member Myrta Pulliam, demurred for fear of embarrassing her wealthy, Arizona society friends, some of whom were implicated by name in the IRE’s investigation. However, Kelly, who helped write the series, believes otherwise. Allegations of systemic wrongdoing raised in the stories were stated as fact, he says, and, in many instances, less thinly attributed than the typical Arizona Republic investigative piece. Moreover, the stories, says Kelly, were vetted before publication not by Nina Pulliam’s libel lawyers, but by the IRE’s attorneys, all of which gave his publisher pause.

“A lot of people think the Republic was corrupt and chickened out, but that wasn’t my view,” he says today. “It was really sort of a problem with communications and style. Her ass was on the line and she really didn’t know who to trust.”

While the series may have lacked corrective impact in the short-term, it was the effort itself that made a lasting impression on Don Bolles’ colleagues like Winters. At 76, Winters still marvels that so many reporters who never knew Bolles cared enough about what had happened to him to come to Phoenix and carry on his mission.

“Just the solidarity,” Winters, 76, says. “That was the best thing.”

From George Weisz’s perspective, Bolles’ death represented a high-water mark in

Arizona’s history. The negative press state officials and mobsters alike received courtesy of the

IRE compelled many of them, he believes, to begin cleaning up their acts. Before Bolles was slain, Arizona clung proudly to much of its lawless, wide-open, frontier history. These days,

Phoenix and its 1.6 million residents constitute the fifth most-populous and second fastest- growing city in the United States. Financial, health care and high-tech giants employ tens of thousands of workers. The Mafia-influenced government graft and corruption that were Bolles’ stock and trade are now, Weisz asserts, largely relics of the state’s not-too-distant notorious past.

“There have been a lot of reforms as a result,” he says of the spotlight the IRE aimed at

Arizona. “It’s a better place today.”

David Bolles wouldn’t know. He left the state years ago. These days, he splits time between vacation homes in Bali, Maui and Park City, Utah. If his father’s murder taught him anything, he says, it’s that life is uncertain and every day is meant to be enjoyed. It’s why he sold the successful but stress-filled computer company he’d built from the ground up and “semi- retired” at age 40 to design vacation villas. He will always be grateful, he says, for the work the

IRE did in Phoenix.

“They kept the memory of my father alive,” David Bolles says, “and showed the world that this type of violence against reporters is unacceptable.”

Rosalie Bolles, 77, also professes gratitude for the work the IRE did, but confides that she never got along with Bob Green, who died at 78 in 2008 of congestive heart failure. The IRE team leader’s blunt-spoken, abrasive style, she says, rubbed her the wrong way. He lacked empathy and seemed not to understand the debilitating grief she suffered in the wake of her husband’s death.

Long since retired, Rosalie eventually remarried and relocated to Pittsburgh. She lives today in a small town in South Carolina, close to her daughter, Diane, and 11-year-old grandson.

Each month, she receives a $178 check in the mail from the Arizona Republic—her late husband’s pension. She says she’s arranged to have her cremated ashes interred next to his in

Phoenix when she passes on. She apologizes for not remembering with greater clarity how Don

Bolles lived and how he died.

“I’m sorry,” she tells me over the phone, “but I’ve spent 40 years trying not to think about all these things you want to know.”

***

Ten men were indicted as a direct result of the Colorado land fraud story Steve Wick and

I worked on before and after joining the Arizona Project. Two of those men went to prison. Our stories prompted the Federal Trade Commission to order what was at the time the largest consumer redress action in U.S. history. The FTC demanded that 3,000 people who’d been duped into buying virtually worthless acreage be refunded approximately $10 million. Our editors nominated us for a Pulitzer. Other journalists, meanwhile, pilloried us.

During our reporting, Wick and I realized that we’d uncovered signed and dated contracts criminally implicating the companies we were investigating. We also realized that statutes of limitation would expire before we could complete our reporting and wrangle the story into print.

After much debate among our editors, we decided to forward copies of the incriminating documents we’d uncovered to federal authorities, weeks before we went to press. Indictments soon followed, and so did complaints from other reporters. We’d overstepped our roles as journalists, they said. We’d acted as agents of law enforcement. Their criticism had legs.

In 1987, on the tenth anniversary of the Arizona Project, the IRE held its annual national conference at a resort hotel in Phoenix. I was working as a staff writer for The Los Angeles Times by then and attended as a guest panelist. The subject of my talk was, “Unfamiliar faces, unfamiliar places: Figuring out the score when you’re the new player in town.” I have zero recollection of that subject being discussed on that stiflingly hot day. What I do remember with great clarity, though, is how the conversation turned to my Colorado land fraud story, and the decision my newspaper made to cooperate with law enforcement. Several of my fellow reporters expressed outrage. I’d denigrated our craft, they said. That I was one of the venerated original

Desert Rats seemed to matter not at all.

I’d be lying if I said their condemnations didn’t sting. Still, if I had it to all over again, in all truth, I would change nothing. I would turn over those incriminating documents to the feds as we did, rather than let the bad guys get away. The best journalism is often like police work. Both are about public service. It was in that belief Don Bolles tilted at windmills, as all dedicated reporters do. It was in that same belief I and others went to Arizona to further the cause.

The newspaper I worked for back then folded long ago. Many of the newsmen I was fortunate enough to work beside and learn from in Phoenix also are gone. Dick Levitan, who’d

22 made his mark reporting on the Boston Strangler in the early 1960’s, died in 1991 following heart transplant surgery. He was 58. Ron Koziol, who’d covered everything from serial killer

John Wayne Gacy to the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst, succumbed a year after Bob Greene died of the same disease. He was 74.

Steve Wick so impressed Greene while we were in Phoenix that Greene offered him a full-time at Newsday. Wick, 65, would spend four decades there, sharing in two Pulitzers for local reporting, before recently assuming executive editorship of three small Long Island newspapers.

Today, about 5,500 journalists are paying members of IRE. Many of them, says the organization’s executive director, Doug Haddix, have never heard the story of Don Bolles—a paradox considering the modern rise of collaborative reporting among once-adversarial media outlets.

“Look at the Panama Papers,” Haddix points out. “The biggest and most effective journalistic collaboration in history. It had the spirit of the Arizona Project--journalists putting aside individual interests and working toward a greater good.”

Those who follow in the murdered reporter’s footsteps may not recognize his name,

Haddix says, but the seminal lesson of his death endures:

You can kill the storyteller, but never the story.