Deadline Arizona

The true story of the only car-bomb assassination of an American journalist—and the unprecedented army of reporters who risked everything to finish the story his killers tried to bury.

When Arizona Republic investigative reporter Don Bolles staggered from the wreckage of his bomb-shattered car in Phoenix in 1976, he left behind three cryptic clues: “The Mafia . . . Emprise . . . Find John Adamson.” His murder was meant to silence his exposé on organized crime, land fraud, and political corruption at the highest levels of Arizona power. Instead, it ignited the most ambitious collaborative effort in American news history.

Timed to the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark Arizona Project, when nearly forty journalists led by Newsday editor Bob Greene descended on Arizona to complete Bolles’s unfinished investigation, Deadline Arizona combines the propulsive true-crime storytelling of Killers of the Flower Moon, the investigative depth of Say Nothing, and the institutional intrigue of All the President’s Men in a gripping account of murder, corruption, and the fight for journalistic truth.

Drawing on newly uncovered archives, FBI files, court records, and interviews with surviving participants, bestselling author Thomas Maier reconstructs the murder itself and the extraordinary investigation that followed. What the Arizona Project uncovered was a sprawling web of mob influence, political malfeasance, business fraud, and powerful figures who believed themselves untouchable, including allies of conservative icon Barry Goldwater.

The resulting Arizona Project transformed investigative journalism forever and established the principle that you can kill the reporter, but you cannot kill the story.