Deadline Arizona

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

When Arizona Republic investigative reporter Don Bolles staggered from his bomb-shattered car in 1976, he left behind three dying-breath 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 an unprecedented act of journalistic defiance.

Timed to the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark Arizona Project, Deadline Arizona follows in cinematic detail nearly forty journalists led by Newsday editor Bob Greene who descended on Arizona to finish Bolles’s investigation—stepping into a murder scene while the killers remained at large and another car bomb seemed a real possibility. Combining 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, bestselling author Thomas Maier has penned a gripping account of murder, corruption, and the fight for journalistic truth.

Through newly uncovered personal archives, FBI files, court records, and interviews with surviving participants, Maier reconstructs the murder and the extraordinary investigation that followed. The Arizona Project uncovered a sprawling web of mob influence, political malfeasance, and business fraud reaching into the circle of conservative icon Barry Goldwater.

The story climaxes in the multimillion-dollar libel trial brought against the journalists by wealthy rancher and liquor baron Kemper Marley, widely suspected of masterminding Bolles’s murder. Goldwater himself took the stand to defend Marley—the man many believe got away with murder.

Facing legal warfare, political intimidation, and the threat of violence, the Arizona Project transformed investigative journalism forever and established the principle that you can kill the reporter, but you cannot kill the story.