Wednesday, June 8, 2022

the ghost of Don Bolles

 


Journalism can be a dangerous profession.

         

In 2021, 55 journalists were killed, and most of them were in two regions, Asia-Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean. 90% of the killings that have taken place since 2006 are still unresolved.

         https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/01/1109232

 One killing that WAS resolved involved a reporter for the Arizona Republic named Don Bolles.

Former Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles thought the mob had its fingers in the Phoenix Greyhound Park. He pursued the story through the early 1970s and there’s reason to believe he was thinking about it when a bomb went off beneath his driver’s seat on June 2, 1976.



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After the bomb exploded under his car, as he backed out of the parking lot of the Hotel Clarendon that June day, onlookers who rushed over to help heard him say “mafia” and “Emprise,” the company that partly owned Phoenix Greyhound Park.

Time and changing social mores would eventually do what Bolles’ journalism couldn’t: turn off the cash spigot at the dog track.

Dog racing ended in 2009. Arizona law banned it years later, ensuring it would never start up again.

This February, another vestige of the dog track came down.

 



The grandstand, which promised patrons fine dining with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the racing action, was taken down by excavators that hacked away at it, leaving behind heaps of concrete and glass.

It is not known what happened to any of the building’s secrets. 

Phoenix Greyhound Park would start getting press in 1969. But not the kind they wanted. Bolles started investigating Phoenix Greyhound Park that year after an editor noted a lawsuit filed by breeders against the Funk family, which owned every dog track in the state.


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