-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 ===== 10 Mafia West There has always been something about Arizona that has attracted the outlaw. Bank robbers, claim jumpers, hired gunfighters, and such famous badmen as the Hole in the Wall Gang and Butch Cassidy are synonymous with the Old West and Arizona's history. In the early days, it was the state's proximity to Mexico and its wide-open, rugged terrain that attracted the old-style hoodlums. The state had room to hide in and a foreign border to flee to should legal pursuit be too intense. In the twentieth century, crime and criminals are more sophisticated. Yet Arizona, which somehow has remained a step or two behind the rest of the country, remains equally appealing to the criminal. Mexico is no longer a sanctuary: today it is almost like a business partner for the American hoodlum, a place where the raw material—opium—comes from for the mob's main businessnarcotics. And the state's wide-open spaces, while still plentiful, are more aesthetic than protective. Instead, Arizona's chief appeal to the criminal lies in the cumulative effect of the outlaw's heritage, the attitudes and actions accepted through centuries of apathy. For the criminal, Arizona is a good place to do business. It is a state where the outlaw has always flourished. Indeed, even today, in such tourist attractions as Tombstone and Old Tucson, the outlaw is celebrated with twice-daily mock shoot-outs by actors and stunt men. The crudeness is not as blatant as it was in the old days. Phoenix and Tucson both abound in cultural activities. There are excellent local theatres, symphony orchestras, art museums. But just beneath the surface, much more obvious than in most Eastern cities, is a macho-like respect for the maverick, the man who makes his own rules, lives by his own law. The Old West is not very old in Arizona. It was that element of Arizona society that the IRE team would investigate next. What the reporters would find was that, like the old-fashioned outlaw who drifted West from back East, Arizona's new hoodlums were immigrants from elsewhere. And, like the narcotics pouring across the Arizona border, the state was being inundated with them. Wendland and Drehsler returned from Mexico to find a surprising number of new team members. The suite was crowded and the telephones so busy that it was often all but impossible to find working space. Doug Kramer, a young reporter from the Elyria Chronicle in Elyria, Ohio, had arrived for a couple of weeks' work. Jerry Uhrhammer, a forty- three-year-old, mild-mannered writer for the E ugene Register-Guard in Oregon, was there for an indefinite stay. So were Steven Wick and David Freed from the Colorado Springs Sun. Ed Rooney, a grizzled old police reporter from the Chicago Daily News, had given up ten days of his vacation to come work on the Arizona project. He also paid his own expenses. Ross Becker, a tall, gangly, bearded young reporter who joined the project in mid-November, was an anomaly among team members. He had next to no substantive journalism experience and, instead of being recruited, talked his way onto the team by simply pestering Greene. But he would be a full-time member, with the project until its completion. At twenty-four, Becker had been working out of a trailer on the 642-square-mile Zuni Indian reservation in New Mexico, covering Indian news for the Gallup (New Mexico) Independent when he heard about the IRE team and decided that he wanted to enlist. He tracked down Greene and began calling the IRE office almost daily, begging for a chance. But Greene was concerned about Becker's background. The kid had just over a year's experience in newspapering, almost all of it with small papers in remote parts of the Southwest. The Arizona project, Greene felt, would be over Becker's head. But instead of flat-out telling the persistent young reporter to get lost, Greene kept stalling him, hoping he'd get the hint. But Becker continued calling each day. Finally, after Greene began refusing his calls, Becker got up one morning at five-thirty, borrowed a girlfriend's car, and spent six hours on the road, reaching Phoenix shortly before noon. From the lobby of the Adams, he phoned the IRE office. Marge Cashel, the secretary, routinely told him Greene was tied up in a meeting and would call Becker back. "The hell he will," said Becker. "I'm downstairs and coming up to see him." They met in Greene's connecting bedroom to the IRE suite. Becker told Greene he realized his background was less than complete but vowed to make up for it by enthusiasm. He said he'd do anything, even the dirty work and errand running, he just wanted in. Each time Greene started to protest, Becker cut him short. It was a chance of a lifetime, he told Greene, and he wouldn't rest until Greene let him join. It took fifteen minutes of face-to-face badgering, but finally Greene, the tough, veteran investigative reporter from Long Island, gave in to the young, inexperienced cub from the Indian reservation. "You did it, kid," said Greene, slapping Becker on the back. "You wore me down. You're in." Becker virtually floated back to New Mexico. In mid-November, after quitting his job with the Independent, selling his own car, and taking out a $500 bank loan, he arrived at the Adams for good. He had no idea what he'd do after the project ended, and all he could do was hope that the $800 he had to live on would last. But he was in. When Becker volunteered to do the dirty work, he didn't realize that he would be taken so literally. The day Wendland and Drehsler returned from the border, they ran into a stranger on the third floor of the Adams parking garage, sorting through a huge pile of garbage that had been dumped on the floor. "Hey, there's this kid down in the garage with a pile of trash," an incredulous Drehsler told the office as they came through the door. "Yeah, that's Becker," said John Rawlinson. "He's a new reporter. He didn't have anything to do, so Greene sent him out to steal Bob Goldwater's trash and see what goodies it contained." A few minutes later, Becker, smelling of coffee grounds, came in waving Goldwater's bill for $300 from the Phoenix Country Club. All it established was that Goldwater liked to play golf and eat well. Still, it went in the Goldwater file. Meanwhile, Greene was swamped in paperwork. He spent eighteen-hour days behind his comer desk reading the reporters' memos, marking them for various files, and spotting holes that needed to be filled. Each afternoon, he would slowly nod off to sleep. One day he was rudely awakened when his hair caught fire from a cigarette he had forgotten to extinguish before resting his head in his right hand. The Buddha was the closest thing the reporters had seen to a human computer. His ability to read long, complicated financial statements and memoranda and then file them away in his memory for near total recall weeks later was amazing. He was like a master juggler, keeping the various story projects going in a dozen different directions, while always looking around for new angles. If he had one fault, the reporters felt, it was that he sometimes worked too closely with law enforcement officials. Public officials, of course, have always been major news sources. Owing to the similarities between their jobs, police and reporters often overlap on certain investigations. Confidential trade-offs sometimes occur, e.g., police provide information they have developed in exchange for some of a reporter's. It is seldom discussed, but every reporter has done it at various times. In most cases, the cooperation works to everyone's benefit. But on sensitive matters, it can become a major moral dilemma for a newsman. A reporter is only as good as his word, and many times a news source will talk only with the promise of anonymity. Often, an investigative reporter's sources are the very persons police are trying to make a case on. So trading information with the police must be weighed carefully. And Greene had been giving a lot of it away. One night in mid-November, Arizona Attorney General Bruce Babbitt came into the IRE office with a district attorney from Alaska. From conversations with Greene, Babbitt knew that the IRE team had documented several ties to Alaska by members of the Licavoli and Bonanno organized crime families in Tucson. Among other things, IRE had established Arizona mob interests in Alaskan prostitution and narcotics trafficking. Babbitt suggested that Greene share the team's intelligence with the Alaskan prosecutor. Nina Bondarook, one of the ASU student workers, was asked by Greene to Xerox the entire file on the Alaska-Arizona connection for the Alaskan prosecutor. She was going over the files when she saw that one of the team's sources was named. John Rawlinson, who had worked on the Alaskan end of the investigation, was sitting nearby. Bondarook called him over and told him what Greene intended to do. "You're shitting me," he said. Rawlinson had dealt with the source on a confidential basis. He couldn't believe that Greene would simply turn it over to Alaskan authorities without clearing it first. Rather than confronting Greene in front of Babbitt and the Alaskan prosecutor, Rawlinson put through a call to his Alaskan source, who allowed him to reveal his identity. The incident disturbed most of the reporters. Greene had been dealing closely with local and state police officials all along. Indeed, his relationships had saved reporters days of work and provided major breaks in their investigation. But along with the police assistance, each reporter had developed his own sources, some of whom would be extremely upset to know that their names were being bandied about in front of lawmen. While their memos seldom identified sensitive sources by name (a special code was used consisting of the initial of the reporter's last name followed by the letter S for source and an identifying number), the source's real name often could be easily divined by someone familiar with the subject. And Greene knew the names of many confidential sources since he usually assigned the reporter to contact the source in the first place. There was another annoying problem: the Arizona Republic Wendland's Henny Youngman source, the ex-real-estate salesman and private eye who had earned his name by spouting off a dozen news leads in one-liner fashion, kept insisting that somebody at the Republic was out to sabotage the IRE investigation. "You still don't believe me," said the source one afternoon shortly after Wendland's return from Mexico. Wendland shook his head. "Give me something specific, something I can check out. So far, all you've done is claim the Republic is double-dealing us." "I wish I could be more specific. But they're suckering you guys. They are not about to print what you come up with." Republic city editor Bob Early and reporter John Winters, the staffer assigned to work on the team, certainly gave no indication of that, Wendland thought. Indeed, Early had been up in the office several times late at night and, after going through some of the files, had had high praise for the team's work, even to the point of saying how eager he was to see it in print. "Well, all I can tell you is that I'd be damn careful of what I let them see," said Henny. "I mean, if certain people are tipped off to what you guys are looking into, they can cover certain things up before you can get to them, right? I mean look at Harry Rosenzweig. He's a very big man in this state, close to the Goldwaters and all that. And he's nervous as hell about what you guys got on Bob Goldwater and that Herb Applegate." "Go on." "That's all I know. Something about a killing up in Las Vegas. Wendland tensed. The Applegate investigation was one of the team's most closely guarded secrets. "What are you talking about?" he asked, trying to sou nd bored and irritated. "Something about a girlfriend of Applegate's and a private eye that got killed. I don't know anything more about it except that Rosenzweig's been told that you guys got the goods on Applegate and Goldwater." "I don't know what the hell you're talking about. Who told Rosenzweig what?" "The Republic. The Republic tipped him. He's worried about a bunch of personal stuff coming out about Goldwater's company, you know, sex orgies and all that." "Where the hell are you hearing all this? You're not making sense." The source shrugged. "I told you, I can't say how I know this. I just do, that's all. Okay, so maybe I'm all wet about Rosenzweig. But you've got to believe me about the Republic." Henny Youngman couldn't provide any more details. After he left, Wendland wondered. The guy was persistent as hell. Why? Was he a plant, sent to get the various reporters on the team suspicious of each other and thus divert their energies, or was he for real, just a local guy who had seen how corrupt the state was and wanted to get even with those who had screwed him? Wendland didn't know. While he still met with the source once or twice a week, he had not yet gotten anything concrete from him. Or had he? That night, Wendland and Koziol went down to the hotel bar for a couple of drinks before turning in. Wendland told him what the informant had said about Rosenzweig's being tipped off about the Hobo Joe's investigation. They went over all the bases. Koziol and Teuscher had asked a lot of questions of a lot of people. Rosenzweig could just as easily have learned of the reporters' investigation from someone other than the Republic. But Koziol, too, had questions about the Republic's way of handling certain stories. One of his first assignments after arriving in Phoenix had been to interview Jack Karie, a former Republic reporter. It was Karie who, in the early fifties, discovered extortionist and ex-pimp Willie Bioff living in Phoenix under an assumed name and socializing with the city's elite. But when he wrote a story which exposed Bioff, the Republic killed it. The reason: Bioff had gone to his friend, Harry Rosenzweig, who in turn used his clout with Gene Pulliam, the Republic's owner. It was because of this favor that Bioff made a $5,000 campaign contribution to Barry Goldwater's first senate campaign, directed by Rosenzweig. The favor did Bioff little good. In 1955, he was blown apart in a bomb blast. Koziol found Karie, who had quit newspapering in 1963, in a makeshift gymnasium in Scottsdale where the ex-reporter taught boxing to youngsters for the suburb's recreation department. A solidly built, white-haired man of about five feet, eight inches, Karie was familiar with the IRE team and was glad to help out. Koziol asked him to talk about the Willie Bioff story. "Sure, I remember it well. A guy came up to me one day at the bar in the Arizona Club and told me that this guy we all knew as Bill Nelson was really this hood named Bioff," Karie recalled. "I went right out and started nosing around. It didn't take much to verify. So I shot a couple of pictures of his house and wrote the story. It was a damn good one, too. So I'm waiting a couple of days for the story to come out. This one afternoon I stop by a liquor store and who do I run into but this Nelson-Bioff guy. He's acting like a real smart-ass. He tells me he knows all about the story I wrote and says he's taken care of it, that it won't run. Then he threatens me, says he has a lot of powerful friends and I'd better stay off his ass or else. Well, I really got pissed off. I went storming into the office. I couldn't figure out how Bioff knew about the story. Sure enough, the editors are real wishy-washy when I start bitching. I finally am told that it was killed on orders of old man Pulliam." Karie said he went out and had a few drinks. Then he remembered seeing Rosenzweig in the office the day before, talking to Gene Pulliam. "See, you got to understand, Rosenzwieg ran that newspaper, probably still does." But Karie still thought he had a good story. And rather than let it die, he went to Tucson and called syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler. "I gave the whole thing to Pegler and he used it," Karie bragged. The ex-reporter had lots of criticism for the Republic. "They tried to break me after that. They took me off the street, tried to keep me away from my sources. I finally got so fed up that I left. You had to fight your own people." As Koziol left, Karie remembered one thing. "Hey, you know what my last assignment was before I got out?" Koziol shook his head. "I was the guy who broke in Don Bolles." Gene Pulliam, the Republic's crusty old publisher, was dead in 1976, though the paper was still controlled by editors who shared his friendships and philosophy. Koziol and Wendland had each come into contact with many of Don Bolles's closest friends. As they sipped their drinks in the Adams bar, they wondered about the Republic's integrity. For everyone who knew Bolles had said he was a disillusioned man in the months before his death. He, like Karie, had often complained about wishy-washy editors. A certain amount of griping is standard in the newspaper business, a traditional cityroom cynicism that is as much a part of newspapering as printer's ink. But wherever the IRE reporters went, they heard few good things about the Repu blic. Despite the pledges of cooperation from Early and Winters, there had been a few incidents. Most recently, IRE members had been refused access to news clippings in the Republic library by managing editor Harold Milks. Wendland finished his drink. "Shit, we're worrying about shadows. We've got enough work to do. Let's not let this get us down." Koziol agreed. They said good night and went up to their rooms. In mid-November, after miles of "deep 'n dirty" traveling about the state, Tom Renner finally showed up. The team's mystery man turned out to be a short, slightly balding fellow with an ulcer and an engaging smile. Renner had been on the road full-time since the project began, and he was beat. But he was also very pleased. He had brought in piles of information that spelled out the current activities of Joe Bonanno and Pete Licavoli, Sr. It showed that the mob was slowly but surely moving in on the Southwest, building a tightly run operation rivaling the power of the long-established New York mob. Actually, the Mafia had been in Arizona for thirty years, though Renner's files noted that it had only just begun to consolidate its strength. Joe Bonanno had come to Tucson in 1943, for the health of his eldest son, Salvatore, known as Bill, who had an ear mastoid. The best treatment for the boy was to sit in the sun and let the ear drain, said Bonanno's New York doctors. So Bonanno came west and settled into a comfortable house on Tucson's East Elm Street. The next year, he was joined by an old friend, Detroit mobster Pete Licavoli, Sr., who purchased a sprawling ranch outside of town. This westward migration did not put an end to either mobster's crime activities. Bonanno continued to run his New York family. Licavoli, taking advantage of the then-emerging gambling in Las Vegas, set up his own gambling wire for horse and dog results. Bonanno, of course, found that his reputation had preceded him. But in the Western tradition, he was received by the Tucson citizenry openly and with no prejudice. Soon Bonanno was parlaying some of the profits from his New York earnings into large land holdings in Arizona, appearing at the right parties, keeping a low profile, and donating time and money to his church. Just how well established he had become was made evident in 1954 when federal officials tried to strip away his U.S. citizenship. At his deportation hearing, Bonanno lassoed a passel of Arizona pioneer family members as character witnesses, among them U.S. Representative Harold "Porque" Patten, Roman Catholic Bishop Francis J. Green of the Tucson diocese, and Evo DeConcini, a former state supreme court judge and a man of enormous political influence whose son, Dennis, was elected a U.S. senator in Arizona's 1976 elections. His influence continued to grow. Augustus "Gus" Battaglia, a man without a criminal record but an old friend of Bonanno's from the New York days, moved to Arizona in the mid-fifties, building a giant cotton farm midway between Tucson and Phoenix and soon becoming a powerful figure in state politics, famous for hosting lavish parties. Renner obtained a guest list from one of those parties, held in 1959. Among those attending were the Arizona governor, the state's attorney general, the Pima County sheriff, two of the state's congressmen, the heads of most of Arizona's major regulatory agencies, and Joe Bonanno. Bonanno, however, couldn't leave well enough alone. While forming new alliances and planting roots in Arizona, he was still very much active in the administration of the New York mob. In the early sixties, he began a series of moves aimed at consolidating his interests back east. His big mistake was in calling for the assassination of mob chieftain Carlo Gambino. Gambino's well-organized family nipped the plan in the bud, snatching Bonanno off a New York street during one of his frequent visits home. He was to be killed. But because the Bonanno kidnapping was drawing an incredible amount of newspaper coverage and police heat, the ten-member mob ruling council stepped in. If Bonanno were eliminated, a major gang war was sure to follow. And Bonanno was a native Mafia son, one of the original founders of the American Cosa Nostra. He was not simply a cocky street soldier or an informer. His life would be spared, but only if he would agree to "retire" back to Arizona and stay out of the New York mob's affairs. >From 1965 to the mid- 1970s, Bonanno did just that. But then a number of lesser mob figures, realizing the enormous potential in Arizona, began moving into the state, carving off territories in prostitution, gambling, and loan-sharking. They began fighting among themselves. Sitting in Tucson, Bonanno knew opportunity when he saw it. He had promised the Mafia council to stay away from New York, a promise he had pretty much kept. But it was a different matter in his new home state. He began meeting with the other newcomers, expanding his influence and cementing working relationships. Arizona was a jewel in the desert and Bonanno began polishing it. But with Arizona came other areas. Colorado, with a growing population and no real organized mob, was another plum waiting to be picked. Using the alias "Mr. Veccio," Bonanno made at least two trips to Colorado Springs in 1974 for organizational meetings with his new associates. Since his two sons, Bill and Joe Junior, were already established in Southern California, the old man began moving in there, too. Federal officials noted that after each Bonanno visit, his sons would fan out in meetings with local mobsters, passing the information they had received from the father. Carmine Galenti, who in the fall of 1976 was vying for control of the East Coast mob after the death of Bonanno's old nemesis Gambino, flew to California for a meeting with Bonanno, apparently giving East Coast approval to an organizing drive in the West. Joe Junior, the old man's second son, had not escaped legal difficulties himself. In fact, a 1972 case against young Joe was probably one of the most bizarre examples of Arizona justice encountered by the IRE reporters. It was a conspiracy case. Joe Junior and a friend, Arthur Grande, Jr., were convicted in the Phoenix courtroom of U.S. District Judge Walter E. Craig of taking part in a murderfor-hire conspiracy. Five codefendants had previously pled guilty before Bonanno and his friend found a similar fate at the hands of a jury whose members unanimously agreed that the old mobster's son had tried to hire a hit man to kill a Phoenix hotel owner he was not getting along with. The unusual aspect of the case came on June 19, some six weeks after the conviction, when Judge Craig suddenly reversed the jury's verdict. In a seventy-minute, early-afternoon hearing, the judge declared that he thought the jury had convicted because it believed Bonanno and Grande to be guilty of a shakedown attempt, which had come out in trial testimony, but not of the murder conspiracy. It is highly unusual for a judge to toss out a jury verdict, especially more than a month after the verdict has been handed down. It is likewise virtually unprecedented for a judge to do so without first polling the jury as to why they convicted. But that was precisely what Judge Craig did. He simply assumed that he knew what the jury's thought process had been without talking to its members. Then he arbitrarily freed the defendants. IRE reporters decided to go back and talk to some of the principals in the case. John Rawlinson, the Tucson Daily Star reporter, interviewed jury member Robert W. Clark. Four years later Clark was still furious about the judge's unexplained reversal. He had been so angry at the time that he had written letters of complaint to the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst, and Senator Barry Goldwater, charging that Craig's conduct during the trial had been "anything but impartial." "Just what do you mean by that?" Rawlinson asked. "His reaction to various witnesses and their testimony left little doubt as to what he thought of them," said Clark. "When witnesses hostile to the defendants were on the stand, Craig would get these incredulous looks on his face. I remember he kept making noises, shaking his head and looking in disbelief every time somebody said something against Bonanno." Clark said he had sat on a number of juries before and had never seen a judge behave like that. Rawlinson had an exact copy of the judge's words in overturning the decision. Said the judge: "I think what may have happened to the jury in this case was that they, at least the majority of them, felt that they could not sustain a conviction on Count Eight [conspiring to hire a hit man] and that they ultimately compromised because they did not like what possibly has transpired in the two defendants getting away with $5,000 [from the shakedown]." Rawlinson asked whether the judge might have been right. "No way. There was no such action on the part of the jury. We reached a very honest and unanimous decision. We believed that the evidence proved them guilty, and that judge's speculating as to how and why we reached the verdict was just not true." The foreman of the jury was Jerry Boyd, a Phoenix gas station owner. Rawlinson asked him the reaction to Craig's sudden reversal of their guilty verdict. "We were flabbergasted," said Boyd. "I mean it was a real insult to us. How could he know what we were thinking? The whole jury was absolutely convinced of their guilt." Boyd said he had been told by several jurors that they had received threatening phone calls during the trial and that one of the male jurors had been followed home after court one day. "Then something real peculiar happened," said Boyd. "The morning after we found the Bonanno kid guilty, I come into my gas station and I find that someone had shot a large hole in the front window. Now I've been in the same location for twenty years and never had vandalism problems. But that's not all. That very same morning, Valona Hughes—she was on the same jury with me—she comes into my station. Now normally, she'd just stay in the car while I filled the car. Well, fortunately, this time she gets out to go in for a pack of cigarettes or something. Anyway, seconds after she gets out of her car, this huge lumber truck comes careening into the station and smashes into her car. Well, all hell breaks loose. The driver of the truck says he's hurt and an ambulance suddenly shows up. Then the police come. A couple of days later, I find out from the cops that the truck was stolen and they were never able to find the driver or the ambulance." Boyd said he reported the incident to the FBI but that nothing ever happened. "I'll tell you this much," he told Rawlinson. "Those things were much too coincidental. They scared hell out of me. I figured they must have had something to do with the trial." Ann Bowen was the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted young Bonanno. A small, intense woman, she too was incensed by Craig's handling of the case. It was almost as if the judge deliberately attempted to scuttle the trial himself, she felt. When she questioned witnesses, said Ms. Bowen, the judge buried his face in his hands. Often, at key moments in the middle of tough questioning, he would openly laugh. She remembered him mimicking one of her witnesses in a falsetto voice and ridiculing her by gesturing and rolling his eyes throughout her presentation. Like the jurors, Ms. Bowen tried to do something about Craig's actions. She wrote a lengthy memorandum, citing numerous examples of his judicial indiscretion. She asked her superiors to appeal the case. It never was. The same day that Judge Craig announced his decision to toss out the jury's guilty verdict, another interesting development occurred in Tucson, a two-hour drive south from Phoenix. IRE had come up with some solid information from federal sources that sharply illustrated old man Bonanno's concern for his son's legal problems. The gov-ernment had learned that a week or so after his son's conviction, the old man, who had showed up as a spectator each day of his son's trial, told a close associate that he needed to come up with a large sum of money to "get my son off the hook." Bonanno said he needed cash that he would not have to account for later on and that it would have to come from someone else. Exactly what, if anything, was worked out that day was unclear. But on June 16, Bonanno's longtime friend Pete Licavoli, Sr., deposited $25,000 in his personal account at Southern Arizona Bank in Tucson. And early on the morning of June 19, Licavoli went to a branch office of the bank and tried to write himself a check for $25,000 cash. But the bank didn't have that much money on hand so early in the morning. Licavoli then went to the main office downtown, where he was described by federal agents as nervous, sweating, and obviously in a hurry. He was given the $25,000 as requested, in $100 bills. Nobody knew where he went after rushing out of the bank. Just after noon that day, Craig overturned the conviction against Joe Bonanno, Jr. In his previous interviews with IRE reporters, Craig denied any knowledge of the Tucson transactions. That was in 1972. And in 1976, the old man, at seventy-two and still in excellent health, continued to be a very busy man. Renner had gone to Bonanno's new home in North Tucson one morning in November to watch the old man for himself. About ten, Bonanno stepped out the back door of his unpretentious brick house, situated on a well-landscaped, curving suburban street with a breathtaking view of Mount Lemon. His silver hair gleamed in the sun as Bonanno called over his Doberman, Greasy, who prowled the front and back yards during the night. Bonanno put the dog in the house and got into his brand-new silver Cadillac Fleetwood. Renner was familiar with the routine. His sources told him that Bonanno would drive a half-dozen blocks to the Lucky Wishbone, a small, neat' restaurant which specialized in takeout fried chicken. Bonanno seldom went into the restaurant. Instead, he carefully closed himself in a telephone booth out front, fished a handful of quarters from his pocket, and dropped one into the slot. Renner's sources had watched him make over a dozen calls. That was Joe Bonanno's office. The reporter's law enforcement sources had told him that the phone booth routine occurred each day, though the old man changed booths every couple of weeks. Exactly what Bonanno, said was usually known only to him and the person he was talking to. He spoke only in Sicilian. Renner looked at police surveillance reports indicating that Bonanno entertained a number of visitors in his home. Some were prominent and came in through the front door, as evangelist Billy Graham had a couple of years before. Others, however, were strictly backdoor visitors. Federal agents once watched Bonanno's longtime bodyguard, Peter Notaro, meet four well-known mobsters at Tucson's International Airport, place them in the back of a station wagon, cover them up with carpeting, and then drive them to Bonanno's house, where they quickly unloaded around the back. That Joseph Bonanno—whose New York crime family designed the infamous "French Connection" for Turkish heroin—was now involved with Mexican drug dealers was well established by lawmen. Among the pilgrims to Bonanno's was Hector Mar Wong, a Chinese-born drug wholesaler who operated one of Mexico's biggest heroin smuggling rings. And on March 1, 1976, Bonanno was observed flying in a private plant to Culiacan, Mexico's main drug processing center, where he was met by Victor Savela, the brother of one of Mexico's top heroin suppliers. From the Culiacan airport, Savela drove Bonanno to the Camino Real Hotel in nearby Mazatlan, where he met with Demetri Alonzo, of Bogota, Colombia, a major South American cocaine merchant. After a four-hour meeting, Bonanno returned to Tucson. Bonanno had to be careful with Peter "Horseface" Licavoli, his old hoodlum friend from Detroit who had come to Arizona the year after he did. It did not look well for the two to be seen together too often. Their carefully nurtured images of "retired businessmen" would crumble were their real associations out in the open. But Licavoli was still very much in business as well. At seventyfour, suffering from cancer, Licavoli was in big trouble with the law in the fall of 1976. He was scheduled to go on trial in December on federal charges of receiving a stolen painting and offering to sell it to an undercover FBI agent from the art gallery he ran from his eightyacre Grace Ranch. Licavoli was later found guilty and sentenced to serve eighteen months in prison. But stolen paintings weren't Licavoli's only criminal activity. IRE reporters had obtained wiretaps and tape recordings which implicated Licavoli in the sale of stolen Israeli machine guns and counterfeit money. The first tape was made two days after Christmas in 1973 by an undercover informant of the U.S. Treasury's Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Division. Licavoli met the ATF informant, who was wearirIg a hidden body bug, near the American Airlines counter at Phoenix's Sky Harbor Airport and took him outside to an automobile. Inside the car, the gray-haired, ruddy-faced Licavoli produced nine forged twenty-dollar bills and a single fifty-dollar note. The bills were excellent counterfeits. "I can get you up to twenty million dollars' worth of these bills," boasted Licavoli, who believed the informant was an organized crime figure from the East. Licavoli would sell the counterfeit bills for twenty-five percent of their face value. The aging mobster also had other merchandise for sale, in particular, some 200 Uzzi machine guns, manufactured in Israel, available with or without silencers. "Open the glove compartment," Licavoli instructed the informant. Inside, there was a .22 caliber Baretta, equipped with an elaborate silencer, which Licavoli said was representative of the quality of the merchandise he was selling. It was Licavoli's own personal weapon, he said. The meeting ended with Licavoli promising to locate three telephone booths in Phoenix, which he would use to communicate with the informant as they conducted future negotiations. Another meeting was held two weeks later. Again the informant was wired as Licavoli took him to Applegate's Olde English Pub in Phoenix, owned by restaurateur and longtime Licavoli pal Herb Applegate. Inside, there was a long line of luncheon customers. Licavoli was immediately recognized by the hostess and was ushered ahead of the waiting diners to a secluded table. During lunch, Licavoli again spoke proudly of his ability to provide the stolen machine guns, though the conversation was frequently interrupted as some twenty different persons-lawyers and prominent Phoenix businessmen-recognized the hoodlum and came over to his table to exchange greetings. Licavoli seemed proud of the attention and boasted to the informant about how well connected he was. He even said he had a "twist" on Senator Barry Goldwater through his association with Herb Applegate, the business partner of the senator's brother. The tapes underscored facts already uncovered by IRE reporters Koziol and Teuscher in their investigation of Applegate's chain of Hobo Joe's restaurants, information which established $2,500-a-month payoffs to Licavoli. In 1969, a widely traveled Arizona contractor, a man who served on the loan clearance board of a Phoenix bank, told the FBI that he "had taken nine million dollars to the Bank of Tokyo and deposited it for Licavoli. IRE reporters had documented Licavoli's financial interest in an Arizona race track, millions of dollars in secret real estate holdings, and hidden ownership in a score of restaurants and parking lots. He was a very wealthy man. And he had done it all. In the thirties, Licavoli had been the head of Detroit's so-called Down River Gang, a powerful branch of the Motor City's old Purple Gang. He had been a suspect in a half-dozen murders, including the 1930 killing of Detroit radio newsman Gerald Buckley, and had served prison time for everything from bribing a Customs official to income tax evasion. But perhaps the most bizarre thing that Licavoli ever tried took place in the fifties. That's when he attempted to purchase an entire town. Tom Renner had found a Tucson attorney, who confirmed the incident. The lawyer said he was approached by Martin Fenster, a known front man for Licavoli, who wanted him to form several corporations which would hide Licavoli's involvement. Then the corporations would completely buy the little border town of Lukeville. Lukeville wasn't ever much of a town, situated on sixty-seven acres of barren desert land about fifty miles southwest of Tucson. Permanent residents had never totaled more than sixty, and there was nothing to the real estate but a cantina, a gas station, a trailer court, and a small motel. It was an extremely isolated spot where water had to be trucked in and normal amenities like electricity and telephones cost dearly. But Licavoli wanted it. The one thing Lukeville had going for it was its location. It was the only border crossing along a barren 250-mile stretch of desert between Nogales on the east and San Luis Rio Colorado on the west. More than half a million tourists annually crossed at Lukeville, most of them headed for Mexico's Puerto Penasco and the rich sport fishing waters of Cholla Bay. As such, Lukeville was a natural crossing point for drug smugglers as well. The Tucson attorney said he had refused to go along with the secret maneuver to buy the town up for Licavoli and didn't know what the man had tried next. Further research led Renner to one Stan Tanner, who quietly took title to the town in 1962. Tanner had been a friend of Licavoli's since the mid- 1940s. Contacted by IRE reporters, he said he had no idea that his pal Licavoli was ever interested in Lukeville. "Isn't that something?" he said with a smile. In 1967, public records showed, Valley National Bank in Phoenix foreclosed on a loan to Tanner, and the town was sold to a man named Alfred Gay, a wealthy ex-con who owned an Alaskan flying service. Meanwhile, reporters learned about other Licavoli associates, suspected by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration as up-and-coming smugglers who operated a prostitute, narcotics, and stolen goods ring between Mexico and Anchorage, Alaska. Interviews with law enforcement and underworld sources indicated that the old man was passing on the family business to the associates, who were frequently seen all over the Southwest in the company of known organized crime figures. The team had established that the Mafia was very much present in Arizona, prospering and expanding like a conglomerate. Over Thanksgiving, the office fell into a slump. The reporters were overwhelmed with work. As Phoenix went about decorating its downtown streets with papier-mache Santa Clauses wearing Mexican sombreros, the reporters missed their families back East. Then Nina Bondarook, the ASU student volunteer, burst in Saturday afternoon with twenty-five dollars' worth of garland and tinsel and Christmas candy canes that she strung up all across the office. It was a bit too gaudy, but it cheered everyone up. No sooner did one reporter leave than he was replaced by new recruits. Dave Overton, a tall, bearded newsman from KGUN-TV in Tucson, arrived the first week of December. So did David Offer, a thirty-five-year-old investigative specialist from the Milwaukee Journal. Both would be with the project through the end of January, when most of the reporting was expected to be wrapped up. There was one more permanent addition. He was Dick Cady, a slightly built man in his early thirties who came from the Indianapolis Star. Cady would be Greene's assistant, assigned to play vulture with the files, to pick them apart for accuracy and to detail where more work needed to be done. He knew his job. Back home, Cady was head of the three-man investigative team whose probe into police corruption won a 197 5 Pulitzer Prize. Along the way, however, Cady and another Star reporter had been indicted in a police setup aimed at discrediting the newspaper's investigation. The charges of attempting to bribe a police officer were dismissed after Cady's team continued its work, unintimidated by the pressure. Besides the Pulitzer, journalism's most coveted award, the Star team also won the Drew Pearson Award for Investigative Reporting. It took Cady more than three weeks of sixteen-hour-a-day reading just to get through the massive files already compiled by the team. When he did so, he was asked what he thought. "Fantastic," he grinned. His opinion was shared by Tony Ansolia, a managing editor of Newsday, who flew out in early December for a week's reading. Ansolia was one of the most skilled editors in the business. He would spend the entire month of February in Phoenix, editing the dozens of stories which would finally be written. Originally, Greene had expected no more than eight to ten stories to emerge from the project. The whole investigation was not expected to stretch beyond the end of December. Now, it looked like the earliest the team could finish would be the end of February. Ansolia, Cady, and Greene saw over fifty individual news stories that could be written from the files. Bob Weaver, a short, quiet, forty-one-year-old reporter from the San Jose Mercury in California spent two weeks in early December working on the team. His paper paid for one week, the other week was his vacation. He took the bus to Phoenix to save expenses and, despite chronic high blood pressure and a slight heart condition, Weaver worked fifteen-hour-a-day stints, mostly in the office, where he did eye-straining record research into the giant Goldmar and Del Webb Corporations. This labor was bound to catch up with him. One night, ten days after his arrival, he began to feel dizzy. He figured it was because he had been neglecting the long walks prescribed by his doctor back in San Jose. About eight o'clock, he left the office and headed for the street. He was sure he'd feel better if he could walk around in the fresh air. He had gotten no further than the downstairs lobby when the dizziness, now accompanied by chest pains, overcame him. He made it to the house phone and called upstairs. Jerry Uhrhammer rushed down to help his stricken colleague, whose face had turned a pasty white. Weaver thought he was having a heart attack. The other reporters put him in his room and tried to locate a doctor. The Adams had no house physician, and a Phoenix medical referral service had no one on call. Meanwhile, Weaver thought he was feeling better. He tried to sit up in bed, but the chest pains returned again. He attempted to hide the discomfort, but his appearance convinced his friends that he needed immediate medical attention. Wendland rushed downstairs to get a car out of the hotel garage while Dick Cady, Uhrhammer, and Carol Jackson, a student volunteer, helped an unsteady Weaver out of his room and into the elevator. Wendland picked the group up in front of the hotel and drove to St. Luke's Hospital, which specializes in coronary care. It took about two hours to run a battery of tests. Fortunately, Weaver had not suffered a heart attack. His problem was fatigue, brought on by overwork and stress, which had caused an imbalance in the various medicines he was taking for the high blood pressure. The emergency room doctor suggested a couple of days' rest and a return to his normal exercise. "The main thing is to take it easy," he said as Weaver was dressing to go. "You're exhausted. Get some rest." The next day, Weaver was back in the office at noon. When his coworkers protested, he said he had slept in an extra two hours and was just fine. He had several more days to stay in Phoenix, and he didn't plan to spend them in bed. There was work to be done. While Renner was documenting the activities of the Bonanno and Licavoli crime families, John Rawlinson and Norm Udevitz headed northwest to the Arizona-California border and the bustling desert spa of Lake Havasu City, an entirely new town built in 1963 on 14,000 acres of rocky and and Mohave County wilderness by the giant McCulloch Corp. It had grown to quite a resort, permanently occupied by nearly 15,000 'snowbirds," or retired Midwesterners glad to exchange their frigid winters back home for Arizona's fabled climate, and thousands of tourists and would-be residents who came to partake of the community's golf courses, recreational amenities, and a tour of the London Bridge, which McCulloch purchased in the late sixties and had shipped to the desert as a promotion gimmick. The reporters spent several days in Lake Havasu City, returning to Phoenix with still another example of the mob's presence in the state. For what they found was, in the words of Joe Chapin, an investigator for the Mohave County sheriffs department, "almost a complete transplant of the Rochester, New York, chapter of the Mafia." "We're just a small sheriff's office," Chapin insisted. "We don't have the manpower or the equipment to know what the hell these people are up to. But we know they are here." Mohave County was one of Arizona's least populated counties. All but 10,000 of its 25,000 residents lived in the brand-new city of Lake Havasu. It was an unincorporated city, with no police force of its own. The only lawmen for miles around came from the office of county sheriff David Rathbone, who talked with the steel-jawed cowboy twang made famous in the old Western movies. "I'm no good on them eye-talian names," Rathbone drawled. "But we sure got us a lot of Mafia types around here." One of the county's most prosperous businessmen was Edward Eugene Frederico, Jr., a darkly handsome forty-two-year-old who, among other things, owned the area's only asphalt and concrete plants, which held million-dollar subcontracts with the Lake Havasu Irrigation and Drainage District to build city streets. Frederico, who moved west in 1973, was a native of Rochester. In Lake Havasu, he was the head of the hundred-member Italian-American Antidefamation League. "Just because I'm Italian and grew up with the Mafia back in Rochester and a lot of my friends are mobsters doesn't mean that I am," he told Rawlinson and Udevitz. Frederico apparently did not hold membership in the mob against his friends. Among the incorporators, officers, and key employees of his two firms, Rawlinson and Udevitz found Quinto Leo Polidori, an enforcer for the Rochester mob convicted in 1975 of beating a delinquent loan-shark victim, and Joseph Vincent Sciolino, a soldier for the Rochester family convicted with Polidori in the 1975 incident as well as on a federal charge of dealing in stolen checks. Two other once-prominent Rochester natives had also moved to the booming new Arizona resort. William Hamill, Rochester's former deputy police commissioner came out about the same time as Frederico. He left the city's police department under the cloud of a grand jury indictment accusing him of leaking evidence in a major gambling case against a notorious Rochester mobster. Hamill's background came to light when he applied for a job with the Mohave County sheriff's reserve. He did not get it. The Rochester fire department was also represented in Lake Havasu. Joseph Nalore, formerly the fire chief of Rochester, emigrated to Arizona and tried to get a job with the Lake Havasu fire department. He, too, was turned down because of a grand jury indictment. Nalore was accused of arson, i.e., of showing certain Rochester mobsters how to make fires appear as accidents. He was also accused of torching seven Rochester buildings for insurance proceeds. And the reporters had learned of a dozen more Mafiosi who kept popping up in town to soak up a little sun, visit old friends, and play some golf. It was an interesting place. The Rochester mob was loyal to Joe Bonanno. And its growing presence in Lake Havasu illustrated another phase in Bonanno's move to consolidate the Southwest into a single organized crime family. pps. 167-186 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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