Bolles’ legacy

The story made headlines across America for several days earlier this month: At least 34 journalists were targeted and killed worldwide this year in retaliation for their work, joining 18 others in 2017, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

This year’s total of six dead for the first time placed our nation in the top five deadliest for journalists. Four were slain by a gunman in a June attack on the Capital Gazette in Maryland where another employee also was slain. Two others died while covering a storm.

While most readers probably found the story interesting, it registered in a personal sense with me by triggering a wave of memories dating back 32 years. That’s when I left my job investigating statewide corruption and wrongdoing for the Arkansas Democrat to head the investigative team at the Arizona Republic in Phoenix.

That was a decade after a car bomb had taken the life of my predecessor in that job, 48-year-old Don Bolles, who had gone to the Hotel Clarendon on June 2, 1976, to meet a source.

The veteran investigative reporter, who’d been with the paper since 1962, had parked in the hotel lot that day and waited in the lobby for a man who’d called earlier to say he had information about a story Bolles was pursuing. When the source didn’t show, Bolles returned to his car and backed up slightly when six sticks of dynamite exploded beneath his seat.

The devoted father of seven died 11 days later in the hospital missing an arm and both legs. His typewritten note about that Clarendon meeting left at the paper implicated John Harvey Adamson by name.

A group of 38 journalists representing papers across the nation quickly descended on Phoenix and spent months digging into the stories Bolles was pursuing as well as other corruption statewide. Their well-publicized efforts on behalf of a fallen fellow journalist became known as “The Arizona Project.”

Their message was simple enough: You might kill the reporter, but you won’t kill the story.

Adamson, a racing-dog owner, pleaded guilty in 1977 to seconddegree murder. Adamson testified against two other men, Max Dunlap and James Robison, both of whom were convicted of first-degree murder, but saw those convictions overturned.

Adamson was re-tried and convicted of first-degree murder in 1980 after refusing to testify again, and sentenced to death, which later was overturned on appeal. In 1990, Dunlap was re-charged and was found guilty of first-degree murder in 1993. Dunlap died in an Arizona prison in 2009.

Adamson got a reduced sentence because of his cooperation. He was released from prison in 1996 and remained in the federal witness protection program until dying at age 58 in 2002.

When the Republic decided to re-establish its investigative team in and came recruiting in 1986, I was fully aware of the risks involved with trodding on big feet in that hardball environment. Still in my late 30s, I was nonetheless impressed with the paper’s renewed commitment to informing its readers of the activities of corrupt Arizona interests with money and influence.

As with others worldwide I saw the Oct. 2 murder of Saudi citizen, American resident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi inside Saudi Arabia’s Turkish embassy as shocking and terrible. He was writing columns critical of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, that many believe cost Khashoggi his life.

Bolles, honored as the Arizona Press Club’s Newsman of the Year in 1974, also was slain because of his digging for truth, which included a racing/concessions corporation then called Emprise, as well as organized crime and corruption in Arizona that included land fraud, topics which often enraged various Arizona power brokers.

One difference in the two victims was that Bolles, born in New Jersey, had survived the bombing to spend almost 11 days of physical and mental suffering before his life mercifully ended.

Evidence of the slender, bespectacled journalist’s abbreviated life endures in a bronze bust inside the Clarendon Hotel, and with Bolles’ badly damaged car. His white late-model Datsun was recovered from a Phoenix storage lot and placed inside the Newseum in Washington, D.C., as a reminder and testament to the evil to which some people will resort to silence truth.

You may wonder how things went for me at the paper during my three years there. Well, I was allowed to hire two reporters to join the team. One was a veteran investigative reporter named Chuck Cook, who has since died, and Mark Trahant, a fearless younger Navajo journalist who was a fast learner.

Together we picked up pretty much where Bolles had left off, investigating land fraud and GOP Gov. Evan Mecham (political affiliation mattered not a whit to us), who was later impeached.

We also undertook exhaustive projects, one of which exposed massive fraud and corruption in federal Indian programs. The other revealed how widespread the flagrant mismedication of the elderly with mind-numbing antipsychotic medications had become in nursing and care homes.

RIP, Don Fifield Bolles. Sure wish we could have compared war stories over a beverage.