CRIME: 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.