Don Bolles wanted to be the best reporter in Arizona. That was all he wanted. It had always been enough for him. Above all, Bolles was a shrewd reporter, a writer of cautionary tales. Suffice it to say that Don Bolles lived for little more than his work and his family. He did not die satisfactorily.

Bolles had been an investigative reporter for 14 years. He prided himself on his accuracy. It was a quality on which he placed the highest value. Since going to work for the Arizona Republic in 1962, Bolles had rapidly become the state’s leading journalist and nominated in ‘65 for a Pulitzer for his investigative work.

On Wednesday morning, June 2nd, 1976, Bolles agreed to meet an informant at the swanky downtown Phoenix Clarendon Hotel. After a no-show from the informant, Bolles got into his car to leave. Reversing a few yards, it was then that the explosion occurred.

The blast ripped the car’s four hubcaps off, and cut a 2’ hole in the floor beneath the driver’s seat. A huge cloud of white smoke billowed up from the shattered Datsun. The explosion blew open the door on the driver’s side and Bolles flopped out onto the pavement. He was semiconscious. His legs were shattered. He was trying to get up. But Bolles could not move.

Lifting up his head, his glasses gone, his face blackened from the blast, Bolles spoke his final words — “They finally got me—the Mafia, Emprise. Find John Adamson.”

Bolles was working on a story about the mob using Vegas skim money to finance a robbery ring in Arizona that was stealing millions of dollars in gold from the Motorola plant in Phoenix every month.

In a 1986 interview from death row, acclaimed journalist, Jana Bommersbach (one of our sources) asked John Adamson what story Bolles had written that led to his murder. His response was “He wasn’t killed for a story he wrote, he was killed to stop a story he was about to write.”