ARIZONA
Dark Sky City
A crusading newspaper publisher’s descent into madness
The first suspicious fire at the Flagstaff News charred its editorial and advertising offices. Eddie Mulligan, listed as “publisher and janitor” on the alternative weekly’s masthead, wasn’t surprised by the April 1976 blaze. He’d made enemies, “hassling the local politicians and city hall.”
Few copies of the Flagstaff News exist today. I visited the Arizona State Library to review the surviving issues on microfilm. Mulligan filled the weekly with local news, syndicated columns, comics, and TV listings. Eventually, the circulation reached 10,000.
The paper’s early issues ignited small-potato controversies: demands for school zone signs, complaints about the local hospital, and questions about city vehicles. Then it reported that the city attorney lived illegally outside city limits. The editorial page began denouncing the city council’s backroom dealings and the city manager’s incompetence. Ultimately, it called for their resignations.
An editorial note in late December 1976 promised that the year’s final issue would reveal corruption by city officials. A few nights before it was released, flames again tore through the News offices. Stacked newspapers in several rooms ignited simultaneously, filling the air with the acrid odor of burnt newsprint. Investigators immediately suspected arson. They found a gas can spout and remnants of gasoline. Fifteen firefighters doused the flames, but the entire operation and all the newspapers were destroyed.
Everyone in Flagstaff speculated about who lit the fire.
In most towns, the most colorful local characters congregate at one bar. In Flagstaff, for the last century, that bar has been the Monte Vista Cocktail Lounge, often referred to as the Monte V. Originally a speakeasy, the bar was part of the Hotel Monte Vista, a four-story, brown-brick rook that anchored one corner of Flagstaff’s downtown chessboard. Wayne and I stayed cheaply at the hotel in the early 1990s on a Thanksgiving visit to his grandparents. We stopped briefly in the lounge, which gay travel guides had listed as the only gay-friendly venue in town.
When I visited this winter, Flagstaff reminded me of Boulder, Colorado. Both cities are mountain college towns that attract skiers and hikers. Flagstaff is home to Northern Arizona University, the state’s third-largest campus. Flagstaff, however, doesn’t emanate the sense of privilege I experienced in Boulder or the tension between wealth and homelessness that pervaded the Colorado city’s downtown when I visited two years ago.
Although it shimmers today, Flagstaff was a grim place in the 1970s. Retailers had abandoned downtown and moved to malls. Plywood replaced glass in many store windows. Sidewalks were crumbling, and curbs brimmed with litter. Transients and indigent residents gathered around the Hotel Monte Vista and its bar. One police officer recalled, “It wasn’t uncommon to drive into the downtown area and see people passed out on the sidewalks.”
Eddie Mulligan often hung out at the Monte V with his buddy Joe Blount on the adjacent stool. At 41, Mulligan was a thin, handsome man with a narrow head, rockabilly hair, and sideburns that reached for his chin. Mulligan had grown up in Brooklyn, the son of an elevator operator who worked a second job tending bar. As a boy, Mulligan shined shoes on a street corner and then got a job delivering the New York Daily News. He climbed his way up to a management role in the circulation department. After a stint in the Marine Corps, he married and moved to Arizona. He and Gloria had five children, and she now served as the general manager for the Flagstaff News.
Blount, 35, had served 16 years in the armed forces. He had a concave face like a crescent moon, a large nose, and a Clark Gable mustache. He’d first worked for Mulligan at the Arizona Daily Sun, the town’s main paper, where Mulligan was circulation manager until he was fired in August 1975. After endless complaining about city politics over drinks at the bar, they had decided to launch a crusading newspaper to compete with the Sun. Blount now ran the circulation department at the Flagstaff News.
But Blount had a drinking problem. And a gambling problem. One former colleague observed, “Blount was a good man when he was sober, which was very seldom.” Even on the job, Blount was often inebriated. Sometimes he took checks made out to the News and cashed them for himself without telling Mulligan. The two men fought and reconciled like characters in a zany marriage sitcom.
Mulligan first got on the wrong side of city officials when he cozied up to local firefighters. The firefighters were miffed that the Arizona Daily Sun didn’t cover their gripes about how the chief ran the department. After Mulligan printed their concerns, they rallied around him and even helped deliver the News to subscribers. Other critics of city politics, disappointed by benign, collusive reporting in the Sun, began to submit provocative letters to the News. Mulligan penned an editorial calling city appointees underworked, overpaid, and sometimes incompetent.
One city leader soon told Mulligan, “Ed, if you would kind of ease up on your editorial page, I know you would get a lot more display ads.” Mulligan declined and bragged about the criticism in the paper. Late in 1976, the paper’s editorial page included a political cartoon with city council members swimming inside a goldfish bowl. The accompanying editorial warned that city leaders would now have to “conduct business in a public fishbowl where their every action will be scrutinized.”
Despite the drama, the subscription base, and a fair amount of advertising, the paper struggled financially. Employees quit when their paychecks bounced. Mulligan strained to pay his printing bills. Blount took on an editorial role, but some weeks he received just $15 or $20 pay. Without a steady paycheck, he couldn’t afford rent, “and in the end,” he said, “I slept on the floor in the office.”
Perhaps beginning to get paranoid, Mulligan believed one of his employees was selling confidential business information to the competing Sun. He filed an antitrust suit to stop the Sun from putting him out of business, and he looked for a buyer for the paper. Mulligan promised to give Blount $10,000 from the proceeds to open a tavern, but he couldn’t find a buyer, so it was all theoretical, like many of their barroom conversations.
A few weeks before the December 1976 fire, a police officer pulled Mulligan over for a broken headlight. He then failed a field sobriety test. At the police station, a Breathalyzer indicated a .07 blood-alcohol level. Though that was below the legal limit, Mulligan admitted he’d also consumed the narcotic Percodan for back pain. He was charged with driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs. Around the same time, Mulligan’s oldest son, a high school senior, was charged with reckless driving and fleeing the scene of an accident. Mulligan believed the police department was harassing his family, and he threatened to get retribution through his newspaper.
Back in business in late 1977, Mulligan printed the story he’d promised the week of the fire ten months earlier. The article alleged that a Flagstaff police officer had raped a hitchhiker and deposited her in tears at the town’s bus station. The department then covered up the crime. Mulligan explained, “The policeman resigned, but they didn’t prosecute him. That was concealing a felony as far as the police department goes.” He noted that the fire destroyed his offices immediately after he’d promised to print the story the first time. He also asserted that police officers had stolen the layout pages for a recent edition and, in a phone call, told his son, “We’re going to kill your father.”
The Flagstaff police chief downplayed Mulligan’s allegations. “He got two things mixed up together. This bus depot incident was a separate thing altogether. There was no policeman involved in it.” Yes, he acknowledged, an officer was dismissed for having extramarital sexual relations, but no policemen were connected to the rape. The chief added, “I think the guy has problems. He publishes all this bullshit, but he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about.”
In response, Mulligan asked the state’s Department of Public Safety to investigate the Flagstaff police department. DPS assigned an agent from Tucson, who had no local relationships, to examine his allegations about the fires, the rape, and the theft. Mulligan professed limited expectations. “As far as a cop investigating another cop, it just doesn’t go down well.”
As Mulligan expected, the DPS agent cleared the police of any wrongdoing in the rape and theft cases. Interviewing him about the arson, the agent found Mulligan surprisingly evasive. Mulligan then refused to take a lie detector test, saying his prescription drugs might impact the results.
The agent looked deeper into the circumstances surrounding the second fire. He discovered that a vertical reproduction camera Mulligan had claimed as a total loss to his insurance company was in use at a Phoenix print shop. Several other allegedly destroyed items also still existed; others he’d never owned.
Many of the receipts submitted with the insurance claims came from one store: Yolanda’s Nogales Imports. What that store sold were Mexican sombreros, embroidered dresses, pottery, and leather goods. What that store didn’t sell was the office equipment and furniture listed on the receipts.
Soon it was Joe Blount’s turn to get a DUI. To avoid prosecution, he came clean about everything he and Mulligan had been up to the past year.
Flagstaff was the world’s first dark-sky city. Home to the Lowell Observatory, which discovered Pluto in 1930, the city began instituting ordinances to control light pollution in the 1950s. When I visited, the city’s low-pressure sodium vapor lamps cast a pumpkin glow onto the asphalt. Along dim streets and under dark skies, Mulligan and Blount had concocted a year’s worth of mischief. Like those of bored teenagers on Halloween, their playfully risky reveries mutated into foolish actions with disastrous consequences.
Blount revealed to prosecutors that he and Mulligan arranged both fires at the Flagstaff News. In early 1976, they had jokingly chatted over drinks about an article on arson for profit. Maybe that was the answer, they bantered, to the paper’s impossible financial situation. Over the months, their conversations grew more serious. At Mulligan’s request, Blount and another man set the April 1976 fire using charcoal lighter fluid. The insurance proceeds funded the newspaper’s operations for a few months, and Mulligan gave Blount $1000 from the payoff. When the paper’s bank balance resumed its decline, the topic came up again. Mulligan significantly increased his insurance coverage and this time promised to pay half the proceeds to Blount.
Blount bought drinks for a disgruntled former fireman and asked how to start a major fire. The firefighter didn’t want to be involved, fearing his former colleagues could get injured, but he was willing to make some suggestions, including how to trigger a natural gas explosion. However, the newspaper’s building also housed a Social Security office. Somehow, Mulligan and Blount retained enough clear-headedness to realize they needed a more contained approach that wouldn’t invite an FBI investigation.
With money from Mulligan, Blount bought a gas can thirty miles away in Williams, where no one would recognize him. He struggled to siphon the sweet-smelling but foul-tasting gasoline from Mulligan’s car and then switched to a company truck. “I swallowed a lot of it,” he admitted.
On the night of the fire, Mulligan shopped for Christmas gifts with his family in Phoenix. Blount began his night as he usually did, getting drunk at downtown bars. He entered the newspaper offices, broke a window to suggest a break-in, poured gasoline around the furniture, and struck a match. “I wasn’t a very good arsonist,” Blount later reflected. The flames jumped back at him, lit his clothes on fire, and singed his eyebrows, hair, and mustache.
Blount then obtained the book of blank receipts from Yolanda’s Nogales Imports, which Mulligan used to falsify his insurance claims. Blount reported that Mulligan had induced him to provide a false deposition in the paper’s antitrust claim against the Sun. Blount also revealed that the allegedly purloined newspaper layout sheets had never existed. “The night before, we couldn’t get the pages done, so we more or less quit and said the pages were stolen.”
A perception of victimization had triggered most of Mulligan’s schemes. Now, after all the skulduggery, his martyrdom grew into selfish recalcitrance. He refused to hand over Blount’s share of the insurance company’s $68,000 payment, feeling he alone had suffered the loss. Furious, Blount decided to spill the beans. The DUI arrest gave him his opportunity.
The county grand jury indicted Mulligan on fraud and arson charges. Blount received immunity from prosecution in exchange for his testimony. Mulligan called the indictment a political stunt and pleaded not guilty. He then proceeded to delay the trial for as long as he could.
Mulligan’s limited funds and irascibility complicated his hiring of an attorney. He tried to engage John J. Flynn, the famous Phoenix attorney who had won the Miranda case (which I wrote about here), but they couldn’t agree on terms. Then Mulligan, just 44, suffered a minor stroke. After his four-month recovery, he got a doctor to declare that his back ailment meant that sitting through a trial could threaten his life. Another two-month delay provided time for a spinal tap and convalescence. The judge then insisted the case move forward and appointed a legal advisor to sit at Mulligan’s side as he represented himself.
Mulligan routinely violated the judge’s instructions, asking impermissible questions and raising extraneous matters. The judge chastised him for having nothing more than “paranoid suspicions” when he tried to impeach the prosecution’s witnesses by alleging, without evidence, that they had committed crimes themselves. “I think you’d love to create a mistrial,” the judge blurted at one point. “I don’t want to have to go through this trial again except in my nightmares.”
In his defense, Mulligan claimed no prior knowledge of the fires. He argued that Blount had either acted of his own accord or in cahoots with the Arizona Daily Sun or hostile members of the police department. But Mulligan’s accusations never coalesced into a believable alternative explanation. The jury convicted Mulligan on all counts.
Just before sentencing, Mulligan confessed to the crimes. Though the charges could have resulted in a term of 15 years, the judge sentenced him to three. The judge had cited Mulligan for contempt five times during the trial, including one instance where Mulligan misled the judge about his financial situation. The judge imposed a fine to defray the cost of the court-appointed advisor and an additional 15-day jail term. Mulligan later sued the county attorney, saying the lien placed on their home to cover the court costs constituted harassment. He argued that the official possessed a “blind desire to get even on a personal basis.” But that phrase described Mulligan better than it did his antagonists.
Mulligan benefited from an early-release program that addressed prison overcrowding and served only five months. His parole requirements forbade him from spending time in Flagstaff. Tracing his census records, I found that he moved his family to Tucson and then Oxnard, California, and held various newspaper advertising jobs. He retired in Pensacola, Florida, and died in 1999.
Eddie Mulligan seemed to be of sound mind when he launched his crusading newspaper in 1975, but politics can make sane people crazy. It’s easy to become righteously indignant when others thwart efforts to illuminate their misbehavior. Mulligan’s umbrage melded into his sense that the world owed him something. He arranged a fire that he blamed on his enemies and tricked his insurance company into paying more than he lost.
I suspect it was exasperation that led him down this path. Perhaps he believed a larger financial cushion would sustain his journalistic mission. Alcohol and Percodan can make fantasies more compelling and hopelessness more desperate.
Copyright © 2024 Lou Schachter • All rights reserved
