Sign up for the daily CJR newsletter.
On June 13, 1976, a source invited Don Bolles, an investigative reporter who covered crime, corrupt politicians, and the Mafia, to a meeting in a Phoenix hotel. The source didn’t show up. When Bolles got back into his car and turned the key, his vehicle exploded. He died in the hospital eleven days later.
Jeremy Duda, a reporter for Axios Phoenix, has long been interested in the case. “But I was surprised to find that there’d never been anything resembling a comprehensive history of it written,” Duda told me. “Probably the most comprehensive history was one published in the late 1970s, not too long after the bombing.” Conspiracy theories about the case abound. Some think that John Adamson, a thirty-six-year-old racing dog owner who was convicted of the murder, was covering for the real killers; some even think the police and the Arizona attorney general’s office were in on it. In his new book, Murder in the Fourth Estate, Duda dispels those notions. “I uncovered information, some of which had been made public years ago, and was mostly just forgotten, and some of which had never really been made public, that I found really surprising,” Duda told me. “I ended up writing the book I wanted to read.” Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
CAG: When did you first come across Bolles’s story, and how would you tell the story to someone who hadn’t heard it before?
JD: Don Bolles is such a well-known name here in Phoenix, and his story is really a part of the state’s collective memory. Anyone who has been out here a long time is familiar with the story, but it’s something journalists especially are very aware of.
I would say that Don Bolles was a longtime investigative reporter for the Arizona Republic and that, in June 1976, he was covering the state capitol when he was lured to a central Phoenix hotel by a source who promised information about political corruption. Then, when Bolles got to the hotel lobby, the source called him and said the meeting was off. As Bolles got into his car to leave, a dynamite bomb underneath his car, on the driver’s side, exploded. He survived the initial blast. When medics came to his aid at the scene, he was trying to tell them what happened, and at the very end, he said something that became a pretty famous quote. He told them, “They finally got me.… Emprise…the Mafia…John Adamson. Find him.”
Emprise was a massive sports concessions company that Bolles had investigated for years. They’re called Delaware North now. John Adamson was the name of the man who had lured him to the hotel with the fake meeting. Adamson eventually took a plea deal and claimed that he’d been hired to kill Bolles by a Phoenix contractor named Max Dunlap, who had hired Adamson to kill Bolles over his coverage of a man named Kemper Marley, who Dunlap was very close with.
Marley was one of the wealthiest people in Arizona, a big liquor distributor. He had been nominated to the state racing commission by the governor earlier that year, but he’d ended up having to resign the position due to a bunch of negative information and publicity, some of which came from Bolles’s reporting. Marley was never charged with anything. Dunlap was, along with a suburban plumber named Jimmy Robinson, who Adamson claimed had helped build the bomb and then detonated it.
Why do you think it took so long for someone to write about this?
I think, in part, it was a daunting task. When I started the attorney general’s case file, which is in the state archives, the part that’s available for review was about a hundred and fifty Bankers Boxes’ worth of documents: individual, firsthand interviews, news coverage, lots of other sources. It took years and years to go through all this material.
Tell me more about that process.
I spent a lot of time—God, if you add it all up, probably a couple of months’ worth of time at the state archives with a digital camera taking pictures of court transcripts, police reports, attorney general’s memos, thousands and thousands of pages. It’s mostly old papers, so you can’t xerox them. I had to take pictures, take them home, go through the files and take notes, and then use those notes to piece together this narrative, along with old newspaper coverage and interviews with the surviving people who were involved in the case in one way or another. It was fifty years ago, so many of the important players in the case were dead, and some of them unfortunately passed while I was doing my research and before I got a chance to talk to them. But there was a lot of material to go through, a lot of people to talk to.
Possibly one of the most interesting things I came across was that, in the early 1980s, there was a Mafia hitman who had become a federal witness, and he testified to a grand jury that he and his partner, in Chicago, had been offered the original contract to kill Bolles. They came out to Phoenix, kind of scouted things out, and decided not to take it for a couple of reasons. They didn’t want to use a bomb—the people who were hiring them insisted it should be a bomb—and they were also concerned that whoever took the job was going to end up being hung out to dry and kind of taking the fall. And they said, “Now we don’t want anything to do with this.” But I think kind of, in the broader sense, what’s really surprised me is how much people don’t know for what a well-known story it is in Phoenix. People out here know Bolles went to the Clarendon Hotel, lured there by a source; that his car blew up; he blamed Emprise, the Mafia, and John Adamson. They know Max Dunlap hired him over Bolles’s coverage of Kemper Marley. And that’s kind of the story that is ingrained in people’s memory out here, but that’s really just the beginning of the story. It goes in so many different directions from there: there are so many different court cases, so many different theories, so many different figures, and so many twists and turns. That’s really the historical record that I felt needed to be filled in, especially as the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing approaches, in less than two months.
Journalists are seldom killed by car bombs in the US, but attacks on the press—of various kinds—have increased in recent years. Did you see parallels between your reporting on the Bolles case and the present day?
Any working journalist in this country knows very well that there’s just a lot more general hostility towards us, towards our profession, out there today. And of course there’s always been people who don’t like reporters, who don’t like the press. But in 1976, the notion that somebody would go after a reporter was pretty unheard of. Bruce Babbitt, who was the Arizona attorney general at the time, said, “This has always been an unwritten rule with the Mob: you don’t go after journalists, cops, or judges.” And that rule was broken—if you think it was the Mob that killed Bolles, which is obviously a disputed notion still today.
I researched this probably for the better part of a decade, and one thing that stood out was how different the media landscape was back then: how many more reporters were really out there covering everything. Bolles was someone who’d spent much of his career very cognizant of the possibility that he could be targeted because he had spent so much of his time digging into organized crime, into Mafia infiltration in Phoenix. He’s a guy who used to put a piece of Scotch tape on the hood of his car so he could check it and see if anyone had tampered with it while he was away. The Arizona Republic a few years ago uncovered a bunch of old tapes in a file cabinet of interviews that Bolles had done. There’s one in which a source said, “Hey, I saw you out in the street the other day, and you were checking under your car. Are you worried?” And Bolles said, “I do stuff like that all the time. I know what I’m up against.”
But he also said—and I actually used this as the title of the prologue—“They wouldn’t dare.” As concerned as he was, and as much as he took the possibility that someone might come after him seriously, he still seemed pretty confident that it wouldn’t actually happen. When it did happen, he’d been off the investigative beat. He hadn’t really been doing Mafia, land fraud—the stuff that he really made his name covering. He was at the state capitol, covering the legislature and the governor. It’s the place I’ve spent the bulk of my career here in Arizona covering, too, and I’ve never worried about any of the folks at the state capitol coming after me like that. They may yell at me on social media or in person, but I never worried that, you know, state legislators—or anyone, any politicians—were going to come after me like that.
What insights did you glean about Bolles as a person, and about reporters and their psychology in general?
He was dedicated to what he did. He understood the risks. He was constantly aware of them: he got threatening phone calls at his house, he was used to checking his car, but he still did it. As a profession, many of us are fortunately never going to have to deal with physical threats, threats of death, and that kind of thing. But most of us who do this job do view it as a calling. We play an extraordinary role in society, and we take that pretty seriously. I don’t think most of us have any desire to put ourselves in harm’s way, the way that Don Bolles did for years, but it is still kind of easy to see how someone like Don could just forge ahead and say, “This is what I do,” to borrow the title of Lynsey Addario’s book.
Things tend to fade from public view and memory with the passage of time. And I think in a place like Arizona, where we’re very well-known to be a state of transplants, where there perhaps isn’t as much institutional knowledge or collective memory, it’s important to keep the memory of what happened to Don Bolles alive. He gave his life for this calling, for this very important role that journalists play in society. We owe it to him to remember what happened.
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
