first published in the Riverfront Times (St. Louis), June 11, 1997
By 11:30 a.m., as Don Bolles walked across the parking
lot of the Clarendon Hotel in Phoenix, the temperature had already begun
to climb towards a high of 101 degrees that Tuesday -- June 2, 1976.
Bolles, who had lived in the desert city for 14 years, was also accustomed
to another kind of heat. As a journalist for the Arizona Republic
, his reporting on local corruption had won him not only accolades but death
threats. When he began backing his Datsun out of its parking space, six
sticks of dynamite exploded directly below the driver's seat. Bolles died
11 days later.
Witnesses at the bomb scene told police Bolles had remained conscious long
enough to say: "They finally got me. The Mafia. Emprise. Find John
(Harvey) Adamson."
Ultimately, Adamson confessed to the murder. The former race dog breeder
admitted luring the 47-year-old Bolles to the hotel under a pretense and
then canceling the meeting. But the other two parties implicated by Bolles'
dying words were never thoroughly investigated by the Phoenix police even
though the reporter was known to have provided congressional testimony in
1972 linking organized crime to Emprise, the Buffalo, N.Y. sports concessions
conglomerate.
After more than 20 years, doubts still remain as to who instigated Bolles'
assassination. There is one certainty: the murder created a patron saint
for a generation of otherwise iconoclastic investigative reporters. Martyrdom
is not, however, the most lasting legacy that Bolles left. His work remains
a guide into the unchartered underworld, a compass pointing beyond Phoenix
to other cities, including St. Louis and Detroit.
Following Bolles' death, more than 30 journalists from the then-newly formed
Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) group arrived in Phoenix to carry
out their late colleague's work. The IRE will reconvene in Phoenix this
week for the organization's 20th annual conference. Among those expected
to attend is retired Pulitzer-prize-winning reporter Bob Greene of Newsday
, leader of the 1976 IRE team .
On their first visit, Greene and the other reporters spent a total of six
months focusing their attention on corruption in Arizona. Their cumulative
work resulted in a 23-part series -- 100,000 words in length -- which began
running in newspapers nationwide on March 13, 1977.
"I still feel very proud to have been part of it, because I don't think
it is something that will ever be done again. says Jerry Uhrammer, who took
a leave from the Eugene (Ore.) Guardian-Register to participate in
the effort. "It was unique. We were all working with a common purpose,"
says the recently retired 64-year-old reporter.
Members of the Arizona Project, as IRE dubbed it, agreed not to investigate
the Bolles murder itself in deference to the ongoing police inquiry. Instead,
the team chose to expose the kinds of corruption that garnered Bolles' interest
before his death. The laundry list included: land fraud, gambling, extortion,
drug trafficking, prostitution and the exploitation of illegal aliens.
From the beginning, the project had critics. The New York Times and
Washington Post opposed the idea, citing among other things a hesitancy
to engage in "pool journalism." Sen. Barry Goldwater, a target
of the IRE team, likened the reporters to outside agitators and refused
to be interviewed. Inside IRE itself, dissension centered on the team's
cooperative relationship with law enforcement agencies, including trading
information with the FBI and the police.
Don Devereux, another Arizona Project reporter, feels the IRE team may have
trusted the authorities too much. "We accepted very uncritically their
scenario. In retrospect, we were very naive to get lead around. It really
isn't something that we should be running around congratulating ourselves
about," says Devereux of the IRE investigation.
Devereux, who still lives in Phoenix, joined the IRE team as a stringer
for an alternative weekly in New Mexico. After the Arizona Project folded,
he spent most of the next decade digging deeper into the Bolles case as
a reporter for the Scottsdale (Ariz.) Progress. By 1980, his reporting
helped spur the Arizona Supreme Court to reverse the original convictions
of two of the men found guilty of the murder. In a subsequent retrial, one
defendant was acquitted and the other sentenced again.
"My feeling is that both of those men were patsies in this case,"
says the 63-year-old Devereux . "One guy is still in prison for the
Bolles' homicide, who I believed was framed. It perturbs some of us out
here that that kind of miscarriage of justice can continue.
"The biggest disservice we did to Bolles was not paying more attention
to him," says Devereux. "His dying words were words we should
have glommed onto a little more seriously, because when he was lying on
the pavement he said: `Adamson, Emprise, Mafia. ... Emprise was almost Bolles'
white whale. He was obsessed by them. ..."
Emprise was, indeed, a big fish, with 162 subsidiaries in the United States
and abroad, employing more than 70,000 people. Formed in 1915 by the Jacobs
brothers of Buffalo, the concessions firm had expanded from selling peanuts
at baseball games to an ownership role in professional sports. Some of Emprise's
partners in these far-flung ventures had long criminal records. In Detroit,
for example, Emprise held a stake in the Hazel Park race track with known
Mafia figures.
Bolles' first brush with the Buffalo-based corporation came in 1969, after
a group of independent Arizona race-dog breeders filed suit against Funk's
Greyhound Racing Circuit, alleging that the track operators were trying
to put them out of business. The Funk family shared ownership in Arizona's
six dog tracks with Emprise and were indebted to their out-of-town partner.
Bolles found the Funks were influencing the Arizona Racing Commission. After
exposing this in a series of stories, three racing commissioners were forced
to resign. The Funks hired a private investigator to tap Bolles' telephone,
and obtain other confidential information. Both sides filed law suits: the
Funks suing the Arizona Republic and Bolles for libel, and Bolles
suing them for invasion of privacy. Despite the litigation, Bolles continued
to speak out.
By the time he testified before the House Select Committee on Crime on May
16,1972, Bolles had been researching Emprise for three years. Asked by a
congressman what he had discovered, Bolles answered:"We found there
was a continual association with organized crime figures over a 35 year
period."
In late April 1972. only a few weeks before Bolles' congressional appearance,
a federal jury in Los Angeles had convicted Emprise and fined it $10,000
for concealing the Mafia's ownership of the Frontier Hotel and Casino in
Las Vegas. Mafia figures convicted along with the concessions firm included
the late Anthony Giordano of St. Louis, and Anthony J. Zerilli of Detroit.
Although the case dates back a quarter of a century, the U.S. Attorney's
office in Detroit last year charged Zerilli and other surviving Detroit
mobsters with a multi-count racketeering indictment that includes their
illegal ownership of the Frontier and other casinos in Las Vegas.
The 1972 Emprise conviction led several states to initiate their own inquiries.
In Illinois, the racing board subpoenaed financial records of Sportservice
Inc., an Emprise subsidiary that operated concessions at Cahokia Downs race
track. In Missouri, the state liquor-control supervisor examined Sportservice's
operations in St. Louis and Kansas City. But Emprise attorneys successfully
defended the company against these charges except in Oregon, where the firm
lost its liquor license.
Following its federal conviction, Emprise Corp. dissolved, and its many
subsidiaries were placed under Delaware North Cos. Inc. The paper transfer,
however, kept the assets of the privately-held corporation in the hands
of Jeremy Jacobs, a son of one of the founders. During his reign, Jacobs
has guarded the company's reputation by suing detractors and hiring a former
FBI agent as security director. The unrelenting litigious assault against
former Rep. Sam Steiger of Arizona, the most outspoken of Emprise's critics,
eventually resulted in the congressman publicly expressing confidence in
the concessions firm.
Delaware North continues to dominate sports concessions in several major
league cities and owns numerous parimutuel horse and dog racing tracks.
In Bolles' home state, the company currently operates dog racing tracks
under the name of Arizona Greyhound Racing Inc. It also holds the concession
rights for the Phoenix Suns basketball team through Arizona Sportservice
Inc. The corporation's other interests range from ownership of the Boston
Bruins hockey team to a lucrative concessions contract with the National
Parks Service.
In St. Louis, Sportservice still holds the concessions contract at Busch
Memorial Stadium, home of the baseball Cardinals. During this year's Missouri
legislative session, the Cardinals owners lobbied successfully for the creation
of a sports authority that will examine the possibility of allowing the
baseball club and Sportservice to divert millions of dollars in taxes into
a special fund to pay for stadium upkeep. The sports authority is also expected
to look into the potential for using the same tax abatement method as a
financing mechanism for building a new ballpark sometime in the future ("Pay
Ball," RFT, April 9).
This is not the first time Sportservice's name has been mentioned in regard
to the stadium or other professional sports facilities in St. Louis. The
week before the Crime Committee heard Bolles' testimony in 1972, it listened
to Capt. Earl T. Halveland, then the commander of the intelligence unit
of the St. Louis Police Department. Halveland told how the Emprise subsidiary
originally helped finance Busch Memorial Stadium.
"Sportservice Inc. purchased the concession equipment that was installed
in the stadium. This was reported to be a million dollars worth of equipment
for the concession stands," said Halveland. " (In return,) they
(Sportservice) received a 30-year contract for the concessions and guaranteed
... Civic Center Redevelopment Corp. -- which developed the stadium project
-- $400,000 (per year)." It doesn't take a fiduciary to ascertain that
the 30-year, $12 million guarantee provided a footing for the stadium's
financial structure.
One beneficiary of the Sportservice contract with Civic Center was Giordano,
the St. Louis Mafia boss, who owned Automatic Cigarette Sales Co. Sportservice
and its sister company, Missouri Sportservice, granted Automatic Cigarette
Sales the rights to place cigarette vending machines not only at the stadium
but at the municipally-owned Kiel Auditorium and the Arena, then home of
the St. Louis Blues hockey team.
In 1967, Emprise lent Sid Salomon Jr., then the owner of the Arena and the
Blues, $1.5 million, after Sportservice landed a 10-year concessions contract
at the facility. When that contract expired, Sportservice played a hand
in the complicated 1977 sale of the Arena to Ralston Purina Co., which had
bought the Blues earlier that year. As a part of the $8.8 million Arena
deal, Ralston paid off the mortgage holder and a partnership that included
Sportservice. After Ralston acquired the Arena, it leased the building back
to Dome Associates Inc., another company linked to the Buffalo-based sports
concessions firm.
By 1977, Bolles was dead, but Sportservice's liaisons in St. Louis and elsewhere
still seemed to mimic the patterns he explained to the Crime Committee five
years earlier. Bolles then recounted how he had traveled around the country
rummaging through newspaper morgues in an effort to understand the scope
of the Emprise empire. He described how Emprise loans locked professional
sports franchises into unbreakable long-term contracts. He outlined how
the Cleveland mob borrowed money from Sportservice dating back to 1937.
He explained how Moe Dalitz, a leader of the Cleveland crime organization,
reciprocated, lending Emprise $250,000 in 1958.
Bolles cautioned "that Emprise has ... had a gradual shift from a concession
to an ownership position in the tracks and elsewhere through the use of
high-interest loans. ... If they are in ownership positions, they ... are
in a position to effect the outcome of the contests. I just feel that it
is absolutely essential, with millions of dollars changing hands on private
bets and otherwise on every major sports contest in this nation, that we
be absolutely assured of the fact that we have clean, honest sports."
The reporter's caveat dovetailed with Halveland's testimony. The intelligence
unit commander told the panel that St. Louis bookmakers -- who were close
associates of Giordano -- received their daily sports betting line from
Las Vegas "at one location formerly owned by Missouri Sportservice
Inc."
More important perhaps is Halveland's theory on how Giordano bankrolled
his own move into the Las Vegas gambling scene:
"A substantial sum of money was received by Giordano ... in 1965 through
the sale of property at 508 Market St., St. Louis, Mo.," said Halveland.
"This building formerly housed a B-girl-type juice joint tavern. This
property was sold to the Civic Center Redevelopment Corp., which subsequently
constructed the St. Louis baseball stadium in this area. ... He (Giordano)
is then known to have made visits to Las Vegas, Nev., and the Frontier Hotel
incident began developing just after this time."
Halveland's testimony -- which went virtually unreported at the time --
indicates that an illegal St. Louis gambling wire service operated at a
site previously owned by an Emprise subsidiary. In addition, the St. Louis
police officer testified that Giordano may have received some of the money
he secretly invested in the Frontier by selling property to Civic Center,
the stadium developer. Emprise, who held the concessions contract with the
stadium, was convicted of shielding Giordano's and the Detroit Mafia's joint
ownership of the casino.
The St. Louis Mafia leader and heroin trafficker known used legitimate businessmen
to further his casino interests. Halveland told the Crime Committee that
"Giordano secured a loan from a St. Louis area restaurant operator."
Actually, Frank Cusumano, the St. Louis restauranteur, made three unsecured
loans to Giordano totaling $50,000 between 1964 and 1968, according to Cusumano's
testimony at the 1972 federal trial in Los Angeles. He wasn't the only St.
Louisan that provided backing for Giordano, however.
Real estate tycoon Anthony Sansone Jr. testified he had withdrawn a $150,000
investment in the Frontier, after being notified he would be required to
apply for a Nevada gaming license. Federal prosecutors alleged Sansone,
a business partner of former St. Louis Mayor Alfonso J. Cervantes, traveled
to Las Vegas with Giordano to make the investment. Sansone is the son-in-law
of the late James Michaels Sr., then the Syrian crime boss of St. Louis'
and a close ally of Giordano.
That Emprise was convicted with Mafiosa from both St. Louis and Detroit
is probably not a coincidence. Three of Giordano's sisters married Detroit
Mafia members, according to Halveland's testimony. But organized crime ties
linking the two cities with Arizona date back even further.
During Prohibition, Peter and Thomas (Yonnie) Licavoli, Joseph Bommarito
and other St. Louis gangsters migrated to Detroit to act as gunmen for the
Purple Gang, a group of notorious Jewish bootleggers. Later, Peter Licavoli
moved to Tucson in 1944 at the request of mobsters Bugsy Siegel and Moe
Dalitz. At the time of Bolles' death, Peter Licavoli Sr. shared power in
Arizona with Joe Bonanno, the exiled boss of one of New York's ruling Mafia
families.
This is the milieu Bolles inhabited by the mid-1970s.
Profits from illicit alcohol sales during Prohibition helped establish a
new multi-ethnic criminal cartel in the U.S. After repeal in 1933, the same
crime groups began financing the nascent casino industry in Las Vegas, and
dominating other rackets throughout the Southwest, often with the paid cooperation
of local politicians and law enforcement authorities.
Beginning in 1946, Licavoli, the Arizona mob boss, operated an illegal gambling
wire service with Kemper Marley Sr., the wealthiest liquor distributor in
the state. Later, Marley's United Liquor Co. supplied Emprise dog tracks
with 10 percent of their alcoholic beverages. During the 1974 Arizona gubernatorial
race, Marley was the biggest contributor to Gov. Raul Castro's campaign.
After the election, the Castro administration appointed Marley to the state
racing commission, but he was forced to resign because of adverse publicity
from stories written by Bolles.
The Phoenix police theorized that Marley wanting revenge enlisted the help
of local contractor Max Dunlap. Dunlap then allegedly hired Adamson to carry
out the bombing. Adamson claimed that plumber James Robison assisted him.
Over the years, Dunlap and Robison have maintained their innocence. Dunlap
remains incarcerated. Although, Robison gained acquittal in a retrial, he
is still awaiting release from prison on a related charge. Meanwhile, the
state paroled Adamson last year, and he disappeared into the federal witness
protection program.
he Phoenix police never even arrested Marley, who died in 1990.
Devereux, the Scottsdale Progress reporter who covered the case,
believes Adamson falsely implicated Dunlap and Robison as a part of a plea
bargain to lessen his own sentence. The police hastily granted Adamson associate
Neal Roberts, an attorney, immunity in the case for his cooperation. Roberts
promulgated the theory that Marley, a friend of Dunlap's, was behind the
murder. During the trial, Dunlap testified that he had unwittingly delivered
$5,800 to Adamson at the request of Roberts. The Arizona Supreme Court overturned
the original trial court's convictions because defense attorneys weren't
allowed to cross-exam Adamson, denying the defendants their constitutional
right to confront their accuser.
In short, the police investigation and the state's prosecution both missed
the mark. "I don't think it was incompetence," says Devereux.
"I think this was a deliberately misdirected investigation and prosecution.
And I think the press ... bought into it. Not out of any corruption on their
part, just out of naivete." The state's case was handled by the office
of then Arizona Attorney General Bruce Babbitt, who would later ascend to
the governorship and is now the Secretary of the Interior in the Clinton
administration.
"We made assumptions that Bruce Babbitt and the leadership of the Phoenix
police department were in fact honest people," says Devereux. "I
think we were mistaken."
Devereux places the blame for the murder on the late Bradley Funk, a close
friend of Roberts, the immunized attorney. Funk was one of the local partners
in Emprise's Arizona dog track operations. "Bolles was using Bradley
Funk's ex-wife as one of his key information sources on the dog tracks,"
says Devereux. "As a consequence of the divorce from Bradley, she was
going to court every two years to adjust child support payments. ... Bolles
would give her lists of things that he wanted to get in the ways of documents,
and she would add them to her (legal) motions. ... I think Bradley got tired
of his ex-wife and Bolles playing this game with him."
No one really knows for sure what transpired excect perhaps Adamson, the
only person who ever admitted having anything to do with Bolles' murder.
The reporter's confessed killer lives somewhere now under a new identity
with federal protection. More than likely he is far from dry winds that
descend from the Superstition Mountains across the parking lots of Phoenix
and all those glinting windshields and scorching vinyl seats.