Don Bolles: Death On Assignment The True Story Of The Journalist Who Knew Too Much Kindle Edition

Don Bolles did not stumble into danger. Don Bolles walked toward it with his eyes wide open, one story at a time, one source at a time, one published truth at a time, for more than a decade in one of the most corrupt states in America. Don Bolles was an investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic who made it his life's work to pull back the curtain on a world that very powerful and very dangerous people needed the public to know nothing about. Don Bolles investigated land fraud schemes that robbed ordinary families of their life savings. Don Bolles built a body of investigative journalism so thorough and so consequential that the people he was exposing eventually sat down together and made a decision that still echoes through American history fifty years later. On June 2, 1976, Don Bolles walked out of the Clarendon Hotel in Phoenix after being stood up by a source who had promised him information he could not ignore, got into his white Datsun, reached for the ignition, and was nearly killed by six sticks of dynamite wired to the undercarriage of his car by people who had decided that the only way to stop Don Bolles from telling the truth was to remove Don Bolles from the world entirely. He survived the explosion but lost both legs and his right arm. He lived for eleven more days, and in those eleven days Don Bolles did the only thing Don Bolles had ever known how to do. He kept talking. He kept pointing toward the truth. He whispered names from his hospital bed and gave investigators directions they needed to follow and refused, even at the very end of his life, to stop being the reporter he had always been. Don Bolles died on June 13, 1976, but the story of Don Bolles did not die with him, and that is exactly what the people who murdered Don Bolles failed to understand when they made the worst miscalculation of their lives.What happened after Don Bolles died is one of the most extraordinary chapters in the history of American journalism, and this book tells that story in full for the first time in a single definitive biography that does complete justice to the life and the legacy and the lasting impact of Don Bolles. Nearly forty journalists from news organizations all across the United States descended on Phoenix in the months following the murder of Don Bolles with one collective and deeply personal mission, to finish the investigation that had gotten Don Bolles killed and to publish what they found as a direct and defiant message to everyone who thought that murdering Don Bolles would end the story. What they uncovered was staggering. The corruption that Don Bolles had been documenting ran deeper and wider and higher than even the most informed observers had suspected, and the 23 part investigative series they produced landed like a bomb of its own across the state of Arizona and beyond. Meanwhile the legal proceedings surrounding the murder of Don Bolles ground forward through years of arrests and trials and convictions and appeals and reversals and plea deals and courtroom battles of almost unimaginable complexity, raising questions about justice and accountability and the reach of organized crime that Arizona prosecutors and the family of Don Bolles and the colleagues of Don Bolles are in some cases still wrestling with today. The men who planned the murder of Don Bolles, the men who built the bomb that killed Don Bolles, and the men who may have ordered the killing of Don Bolles moved through the American legal system in ways that produced results that satisfied almost nobody, and the question of whether the full truth about what happened to Don Bolles has ever been completely told is one that hangs over this story like the Arizona sun, inescapable and unrelenting and demanding to be looked at directly. Read more