Land fraud was at the heart of Bowles reporting-beat back in 1976. Forty-three years and two generations later, Forty-three years later today - and two generations later - the Maricopa County Assessor Paul Petersen is under investigation. Arizona Governor Doug Dicey has now stepped-up and interjected himself into all the negative local and national attention now spotlighting corruption is state government offices by making public assertions calling for the elected County Assessor to resign for indictable crimes. Ducey is creating his own tailor-made media-narrative to cast the emerging land fraud scandal as " once-in-a-generation situation". Trying to bury a story - just like the murder of Don Bolles was cast as an unsolved Gangland Killing.
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Land fraud is no stranger to The Great State of Arizona - "it goes with the territory". Period. No one can deny or challenge that fact from the very beginning even before statehood started officially on February 14th - "Valentine's Day" - in 1912. There's a very long history now spanning more than six generations for land fraud going way back from 'the land grab' of indigenous lands by staking-out homesteads and making claims for water-rights in the mid-1850's. Ya gotta just love it! . . . and keep in mind that the City of Mesa was officially incorporated as a municipal government on the same date for Valentine's Day before that on February 14,1878 by a band of Pioneers sent on a mission from Utah to colonize Arizona.
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It could be just a coincidence, or not, that some of those earlier settlement patterns and practices of local and Arizona leaders and elected officials never got tagged as The East Valley Mafia (to borrow a phrase coined by Rogue Columnist Jon Talton connected to the cold-blooded murder of investigative reporter Don Bowles done in broad daylight as a "Gangland Killing")
Fortunately there's a new generation of reporters writing in The Arizona Republic - among them Jessica Boehm and Robert Anglen - who are digging deeper under the surface of what's being called "adoption crimes" committed by the Maricopa County Assessor. There's a whole lot more just waiting to get brought into-the-light to provide some clear clues what the so-called 'adoption case' is all about . . .
Thanks to some very decent investigative reporting recently published two days ago by Arizona Republic news staff Jessica Boehm and Robert Anglen, we now know more details about some of his dealings in real estate:
County supervisors may suspend Paul Petersen after adoption scheme arrest
The following are selected extracts for your informed interest
- > Petersen has been in jail since Oct. 8. And an investigation by The Arizona Republic showed he has spent little time at the Assessor's Office in the past year.
- > Petersen badged into the parking garage for county government workers 53 times from Jan. 1 through Oct. 2, 2019, county records show. That's less than 30% of the available workdays.Most days that he was in the office, he spent about four hours there, records show. Petersen's taxpayer-funded salary is about $77,000 per year.
- > In regards to the human trafficking charges, Petersen has a new attorney, Kurt Altman who said Petersen has no intention of resigning from his elected position.
Altman said the charges against Petersen are allegations, and no evidence has yet been presented in court. . .
"Although sometimes forgotten, our system of criminal justice is still one in which the accused is innocent until proven guilty," he said. "To date, there has been no proof of anything.”
$508,000,000,0000 is a BIG TEMPTATION, even for "A Family Guy" who just happens to earn an annual government salary of $78,000, somehow manages to live with his family in a $600,000 house here in Mesa, owns real estate in both Arizona and Utah, and has a business partner who wired him $500,000 for 'to bail him out"
From this blog MesaZona published on 20 October 2019
Mesa-native and 'Family-Guy' Paul D. Peterson has been caught, apprehended and turned over to The Feds for the multiple-charges engaged in human trafficking, that have received the most media attention. However, his elected job as the Maricopa County Assessor poses more latter-day temptations than the $2.7M in his subpoenaed bank records
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Rogue Columnist Jon Talton was on-the-case back in 2015 Who murdered Don Bolles?
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Jon Talton also wrote a crime fiction novel about the killing _________________________________________________________________________
