Phoenix’s secret mob history: From assassinations to ecstasy rings

We’re unpacking Phoenix’s strong ties to the Mafia to explore an underworld many know little about to this day. 

When one thinks of mob cities in America, the mind usually wanders to locations like New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, or even St. Paul for those more well-read on the subject. Yet there’s a dark underbelly to many American cities that is often ignored by the general public but passed down by generational residents through oral tales and newspaper clippings. 

Phoenix is one such city. 

“You don’t have to scrape too far beneath the veneer of ‘a clean, new, well-run city’ to understand that Phoenix is perhaps historically one of America’s more corrupt, crime-run cities,” writes author and former Arizona Republic columnist Jon Talton. 

More than a place for mobsters to escape the heat of law enforcement to play golf in a dryer type of heat, Phoenix has been the site of infamous organized criminal activity, ranging from rampant land fraud to targeted attacks on the media by mafiosi. 

Below, we’ll unpack Phoenix’s strong ties to the Mafia with six of the most infamous characters, crimes, and unsolved mysteries that took place there during the 20th century. 

The assassination of Don Bolles

We’ll start with the targeted bombing of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles in 1976, as it is the incident that uncovered the seedy underbelly that had until then remained hidden in The Valley of the Sun, exposing it to the country as a whole. 

Bolles was fatally injured when a dynamite bomb exploded under his car in the parking lot of the Hotel Clarendon on June 2, 1976. He would die of his injuries 11 days later. 

The assassination was believed to be a response to two series of stories Bolles published at the Republic: 1970’s “The Menace Within” and 1973’s “The Newcomers,” both of which aimed to expose organized crime in the city. He also testified before the House Crime Committee in Washington, DC, in May 1972, when the committee was investigating alleged gangland interests in organized sports and horse racing. 

The damaged 1976 Datsun 710 in which reporter Don Bolles was fatally injured by a car bomb, on display in the since-closed Newseum in Washington, D.C. (Steve Terrell/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Who killed Bolles is still a mystery, though he himself was able to implicate a few suspects in the days before he died. He was reported as saying, “They finally got me … the Mafia, Emprise … find Adamson.” 

Emprise was a sports conglomerate headquartered in Buffalo, New York, that held a controlling interest in Arizona dog tracks. John Harvey Adamson, an ostensible source whom Bolles was meant to meet with at the Clarendon, is the man who planted the bomb under Bolles’ car. He was found guilty and sentenced to death for the crime in 1980, though no one has ever proven who hired him to do the job. 

Ironically, Bolles’ murder did almost as much as his reporting to expose organized crime in Phoenix, attracting a slate of national reporters who hunkered down in Adams Hotel and got to work finishing what Bolles had started. 

“The resulting stories showed Arizona, and especially Phoenix, as a hotbed of mobsters, illegal activities, rampant land fraud, exploitation of illegal immigrants, and the corruption of judges and other officials,” wrote Talton. 

Gus Greenbaum, another mysterious hit

When it comes to mysterious killings with suspected Mob connections in Phoenix, it would be hard to top the assassination of Don Bolles, but the case of Gus Greenbaum certainly comes close. 

Greenbaum had close ties to some of the biggest names in American Mafia history. Sent to Phoenix from Chicago by Al Capone himself to run the Outfit’s rackets in the Valley of the Sun in 1928, Greenbaum spent two decades overseeing the bookmaking racket and race wire there until a police crackdown on illegal gambling in 1948. 

During that time, he began acquiring interests in nearby Las Vegas with Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, credited with being the first Mob figure to begin developing casinos and hotels along the Strip there. After Siegel was killed for burying his flagship Flamingo project in debt, Greenbaum was tasked with taking it over for Siegel’s former partners, Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello, and was able to lead the venture to success. 

Commuted by air from Las Vegas to his home in Phoenix during this time, he was dubbed “The Mayor of Paradise,” referring to the unincorporated township in Clark County that included the Las Vegas Strip, according to The Mob Museum. Despite that, he still dealt with his share of threats from mobbed-up acquaintances, counterparts, and rivals. 

That’s where things stood on the night of December 2, 1958, when someone entered Gus Greenbaum’s home and brutally murdered him and his wife, Bess. Discovered by their maid in the morning, someone has tied Bess up, beaten her over the head with a blunt object, and slashed her throat with one of the Greenbaums’ own butcher knives from the kitchen.  

Present-day photo of the Phoenix house where Gus Greenbaum and his wife were murdered. (Chloe93/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Gus’ body was found 50 feet away in the bedroom, his head bashed in with two brutal blows and his throat slashed nearly to the point of decapitation. 

It’s still unknown whether one or two suspects carried out the killings, though cigarette ashes and footprints by the garage led police to believe that two men had lay in wait for Bess to drive the maid home on the previous night, then entered the home without needing to break in. 

Investigators suspected Mob vengeance to be a key factor in the slayings, though other motives did exist. One prime suspect was 60-year-old Milner Jarvis, whom Greenbaum had sent to prison in 1948 for stealing $45,000 of Greenbaum’s money when Jarvis was working as a clerk at The Flamingo. 

There’s also the robbery motive, which could overlap with Jarvis’ known criminal tendencies, as thousands of dollars worth of cash and jewelry were stolen from the scene of the murders. That is not as strong, however, as the suspects also left behind $5,700 worth of furs and jewelry. 

Gus and Bess Greenbaum lie buried within a few feet of each other inside twin bronze caskets at Phoenix’s Beth Israel Cemetery. Their killers were never caught. 

‘Papa Joe’ and other underworld characters and connections

The Phoenix Mafia never had a Godfather, but they did have a “Papa Joe.” Joseph “Papa Joe” Tocco is believed to have directed the Chicago Mob’s organized-crime syndicates in Arizona from the 1960s to the 1980s. 

Brother to Albert “Caesar” Tocco, mob boss of Chicago Heights, the southern suburbs of Chicago, and parts of northern Indiana, Papa Joe was sent down by the Chicago Outfit to run its Phoenix operations after the death of Gus Greenbaum. 

“But even Papa Joe didn’t wield total power,” explained Jon Talton in his Rogue Columnist write-up on the local underworld. “Phoenix was considered open, neutral territory by the Mafia.” That meant anyone could work in the city to carve out their own piece of the pie. 

According to Talton, the so-called “straight players” in power were also more than willing to play along. The slate of national reporters who flocked to Phoenix in the wake of Don Bolles’ killing uncovered what many locals already knew: Sen. Barry Goldwater, a presidential candidate in 1964, and brother Robert were believed to not only condone but have ties with organized crime in Arizona. 

Goldwater isn’t the only name that’s recognizable in both organized crime and major national political circles. Liquor magnate James Hensley, one of the most powerful businessmen in Arizona through the second half of the 20th century, formed a relationship early in his career with Kemper Marley, Sr., a purported Mob boss believed to be the prime suspect in Bolles’ killing. 

Working under Marley at United Sales Incorporated in Phoenix and United Distributors Incorporated in Tucson, Hensley was convicted of falsifying liquor records and served six months probation, according to the Center for Public Integrity. Five years later, he was charged with falsifying records again but acquitted. 

In 1955, Hensley landed a lucrative distribution deal with Anheuser-Busch, a deal to which the Hensleys owe their success and wealth—also one that it has long been rumored Marley had a major hand in.

Hensley’s daughter, Cindy, would go on to marry John McCain, who, in part thanks to large donations from Hensley, would serve in US Congress for more than 35 years. 

As for Papa Joe, he died in a Phoenix prison in 1995 while serving the tail end of a 15-year sentence for controlling an illegal enterprise, witness tampering, obstruction of a criminal investigation, extortion, prostitution, filing false tax returns, fraud, robbery, and conspiracy to commit burglary and theft.

Sammy the Bull does the suburbs

Most folks with an interest in the Mob are familiar with Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, the former underboss of the Gambino crime family who famously became a government witness in 1991 and implicated boss John Gotti along with 28 other mobsters. 

What isn’t such a familiar story was Sammy’s second go at a life of crime—at least until the release of the documentary “Sons of Ecstacy” in late 2024. The documentary follows a rivalry at the center of the Arizona ecstasy trade in the 1990s between British stockbroker Shaun Attwood and Gerard Gravano, Sammy’s son.

Arrest photo of Sammy Gravano taken by the FBI. (FBI/Public domain)

Having left the witness protection program and moved to Arizona in 1995, Sammy opened Uncle Sal’s restaurant in Scottsdale and launched a pool installation business, becoming a familiar figure around the East Valley.

When his son Gerard tried to take over Arizona’s ecstasy scene in the late ’90s, his former hitman father got involved in the turf war against Attwood. Before he knew it, he was back in front of a judge and then back in prison. In 2002, Sammy was sentenced to 20 years. He was released in 2017 and still lives in the Valley to this day.

This article first appeared on Good Info News Wire and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.