PHOENIX (By Pat Flannery, Arizona Republic) February 20,
2004 - If headlines were cash, Fife Symington would never have had to
declare bankruptcy in 1995, so plentiful were news reports in those days
about the then-governor, his business and legal woes and his political
activities.
Yet today, as he contemplates running for the office he was forced from after his 1997 criminal trial, Symington is a new face, not old news, to many of the million-plus Arizonans who have arrived since then.
And while it seemed unlikely even to him that he would ever revive his political career, the onetime developer now says he is willing to gamble that Arizona wants to put his past behind it, just as he did.
"It must be all my ancestral genes," Symington said in an interview last week. "I embrace a challenge, and I'm not fearful of things. It's just never been in my nature. And I love a fight over ideas.
"I think the big question here is whether it can turn out at the end of the day to be a fight over ideas, or just a big smear."
It wasn't that long ago, after his 2001 pardon from then-President Clinton, that Symington dismissed any such possibility, speaking of his family's need to recover from years in the crucible of public controversy.
His criminal-fraud prosecution was behind him, and though he still faced a bitter civil fraud trial in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, he was looking ahead to opening a chef's school, which he did.
One thing certainly was not on his mind: returning to elected office. Though his pardon ensured that he could not be retried or tagged with a felony conviction that would block any aspirations, he insisted the prospect was moot.
"My political opposition is very intense, and I've had enough of that in my life," he said then.
Asked months later if he had reconsidered, he was firm:
"If there's one thing I am, I'm consistent. I haven't changed my mind. I won't be running for office."
But that was then. This is now.
And if there are a few things to know about the 59-year-old former governor, they are these: He likes the spotlight, he loves to mix it up with detractors and he harbors an unwavering confidence that his views are valuable to Arizona's future.
So those who know him best say it is no surprise that he wants back into the game.
In announcing this month his interest in a 2006 run, Symington is acting on a belief that he is one among just a handful of conservatives qualified to take on Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano. The only candidates he would step aside for, he said, are U.S. Rep. J.D. Hayworth and former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, both of whom are considering runs.
He says the state budget is growing too fast. He objects to the new system of financing public-school construction. He wants private-school vouchers for public-school students. He calls Arizona's welfare programs "a runaway train." He chides Napolitano for not using the office as a bully pulpit.
"I don't think she's a risk-taker, really," Symington says.
Napolitano and her supporters undoubtedly disagree, but those views are vintage Symington. His governance, says former House Minority Leader Art Hamilton, a Democrat, was never consensual: It was my way or the highway.
Symington's mother, Martha, was a granddaughter of Henry Clay Frick, the 19th-century industrialist remembered as a fierce union buster and a founder of U.S. Steel.
Symington attended upper-crust private schools as a youngster, and old yearbooks show that his classmates pegged him for a politician long before he ran for office. He attended Harvard University, where in 1966, as the Vietnam War heated up, he enrolled in the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps.
Upon graduating with a bachelor's degree in American history and art history, he married and got his first taste of Arizona during a two-year stint at Luke Air Force Base. By his own accounts, that's when he recognized Arizona as a land of business opportunity.
He left in 1970 for a year's tour of duty in Southeast Asia, getting a Bronze Star for his service in Thailand as a weapons controller, a job akin to a combat air-traffic controller.
Symington returned to the Valley in 1971 as a real estate agent. A year later, at age 27, he joined the board of Southwest Savings and Loan. Divorcing soon thereafter, he remarried in 1976 to Ann Pritzlaff, whose mother was heiress to the Olin Corp. chemical fortune and father was a former Arizona legislator and U.S. ambassador. In 1980, Symington launched his own real estate development business, the Symington Co.
One of the biggest battles erupted over the Esplanade at 24th Street and Camelback Road. Symington envisioned an opulent office and retail center with a grand hotel. In 1983, Southwest Savings' board voted to invest thrift money in that vision, but it wasn't until after a zoning fight that the Phoenix City Council approved a scaled-down version in 1985.
In 1987, Symington waded into the state's nastiest political fracas. Then-Gov. Evan Mecham rescinded a state holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and continued to rile the local business community and lawmakers with political missteps, odd public pronouncements and questionable Cabinet appointments. The situation worsened when one of his staff members was accused of threatening another, and word got out that Mecham had lent his car dealership money from a gubernatorial protocol fund.
Less than a year into his term, Mecham had become the target of a national economic boycott, and state government was grinding to a halt. Symington called publicly for his fellow Republican's resignation, donating money to a recall campaign. In early 1988, Mecham was impeached and removed from office. Symington's political stock was on the rise.
But his finances were not. Federal tax policies that encouraged real estate investment had changed. Project capital dried up. Values plunged in an overbuilt market. High-flying developers, including Symington, found themselves overextended.
Symington scrambled to meet his obligations. Court testimony later showed that he was constantly seeking new lenders to maintain the cash flow that kept his developments afloat.
Southwest Savings' own books were heavy with real estate deals. In 1989, it was declared insolvent, the Esplanade conspicuous among projects in its deflated portfolio.
"I was on a crusade to get the state back on its feet economically and to lower taxes to create the right environment for people to move here and invest their future in the state," Symington says now.
He also closed one more deal: a $10 million loan from a union pension fund to finance construction of the downtown Mercado at Seventh and Van Buren streets. His partnership guaranteed the note.
Symington beat Goddard in a race so close that it required a runoff. Once in office, he surrounded himself with business chums and GOP moderates who had aided his campaign. But that would change. Several of his closest confidants were soon snared in controversies over bloated travel budgets, questionable spending and general mismanagement.
Symington launched Project SLIM, a program to downsize state agencies. When his own accounting firm won the contract to oversee it, some in his administration suspected a fix was in.
Bidding irregularities led to the 1996 indictment of Symington's accountant and one of his aides. The accountant died before trial, and his aide was acquitted. But various other state and federal investigations eventually cost the accounting firm more than $4 million to settle.
As the debacles sapped his administration's credibility, Symington transitioned to a staff of conservative political pros experienced in governmental wrangling. He also shifted to the right politically, and his administration began flexing its muscle.
His agenda focused on tax cuts; get-tough-on-crime measures, like truth in sentencing and revisions to the juvenile justice system; education reforms, like charter schools and open enrollment; and sparring with the federal government over control on issues from prisons to welfare.
Despite a tough re-election campaign against grocer Eddie Basha in 1994, Symington maintained that focus.
"His scrappiness was surprising to me, given his upbringing," former aide Chuck Coughlin says. "He was not afraid of debates. He likes to have great debates, often publicly."
Jay Heiler, a confidant and former aide, says Symington was a quick study who "knew when to fold his cards and when to let someone else have a win."
But Hamilton, the former lawmaker, sees it differently. Hamilton says Symington rarely took to heart the arguments of those who disagreed with him. He tended to be dismissive, relishing a fight instead of diplomacy.
"He loves the game, the rougher, the better," Hamilton says. "If he had a choice between boxing gloves and bare knuckles, I think he'd use bare knuckles every time."
Major tax cuts
Symington helped gain passage of a 1992 ballot measure requiring a two-thirds majority of both legislative houses to raise taxes. Then, as state revenues picked up steam, he cut taxes by increasingly larger amounts. One study estimated the cuts amounted to more than $2 billion.
His allies say those policies fueled the growth that kept state coffers full during much of the '90s. His critics suggest he simply took office as a natural economic-growth cycle began, a luxury that allowed him to cut taxes.
"He enjoyed a fairly good economy," says Rob Melnick, who directs Arizona State University's Morrison Institute for Public Policy.
Melnick adds, however, that when the economy slowed and state revenues waned toward the end of the decade, Symington's permanent tax cuts left little room for lawmakers to maneuver, forcing program cuts.
Hamilton says he had urged Symington during those tax-cutting years to offer taxpayer rebates rather than permanently altering the tax code, which might have averted later revenue crunches. Symington wouldn't hear of it, Hamilton says, because "philosophically, he wanted to cut government."
Melnick calls Symington's policy "good politics, though economically it was debatable."
Still, loyalists see that single-mindedness as Symington's strength. Where detractors see a stubborn lack of comprise, loyalists see conviction and principle. Where detractors see combativeness, loyalists see perseverance.
Whatever it is called, it also served Symington outside politics, where his financial and legal troubles snowballed.
By 1991, several developments had become public failures, and federal investigators started probing Southwest Savings' collapse. Symington and other Southwest board members were sued for negligence by the Resolution Trust Corp. The case settled for $12.1 million, though Symington did not admit wrongdoing or pay damages.
In 1992, his business activities became the subject of a deeper criminal investigation. Within a year, he told reporters his net worth had plummeted to "zero." The downtown Mercado was sold at auction because his partnership couldn't repay its debt. Then a federal grand jury began looking into his affairs.
Symington filed personal bankruptcy in 1995, triggering a legal battle with his Mercado lenders that wasn't settled until six years later. In June 1996, a 23-count federal indictment accused him of fraud, lying under oath and extortion.
Though sentenced to 30 months in a federal prison camp, Symington remained free while his case was appealed. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his conviction in 1999, ruling that a juror sympathetic to his case had been wrongly dismissed during deliberations.
Prosecutors were negotiating with Symington on a single-felony plea deal when Clinton granted his pardon in 2001.
Though a fraud judgment in Bankruptcy Court later forced him into a financial settlement on the Mercado loan, Symington feels vindicated. He now wants to pick up where he left off, saying issues facing the state are largely the same.
His behind-the-scenes involvement against in last fall's Proposition 400 transportation-funding campaign only whetted his political appetite, and Heiler says his old boss has put his past behind him.
"There's an indefatigable aspect to his nature," Heiler says. "You can't keep him down for long, no matter what."
Symington also says he's changed.
"I think you would be surprised at how different I would be once in office," he says. "Not in terms of, necessarily, my core beliefs, but just in terms of how I would operate with people. I mean, I've had some life experiences that most people never had and wouldn't want to have."
But he understands the likelihood that old wounds will be reopened:
"If I get in (to the race), it's going to be guns blazing, and I'll get a lot of help from the outside world. I don't have any illusions or stars in my eyes . . . it's just absolute, all-out war."
Yet today, as he contemplates running for the office he was forced from after his 1997 criminal trial, Symington is a new face, not old news, to many of the million-plus Arizonans who have arrived since then.
And while it seemed unlikely even to him that he would ever revive his political career, the onetime developer now says he is willing to gamble that Arizona wants to put his past behind it, just as he did.
"It must be all my ancestral genes," Symington said in an interview last week. "I embrace a challenge, and I'm not fearful of things. It's just never been in my nature. And I love a fight over ideas.
"I think the big question here is whether it can turn out at the end of the day to be a fight over ideas, or just a big smear."
It wasn't that long ago, after his 2001 pardon from then-President Clinton, that Symington dismissed any such possibility, speaking of his family's need to recover from years in the crucible of public controversy.
His criminal-fraud prosecution was behind him, and though he still faced a bitter civil fraud trial in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, he was looking ahead to opening a chef's school, which he did.
One thing certainly was not on his mind: returning to elected office. Though his pardon ensured that he could not be retried or tagged with a felony conviction that would block any aspirations, he insisted the prospect was moot.
"My political opposition is very intense, and I've had enough of that in my life," he said then.
Asked months later if he had reconsidered, he was firm:
"If there's one thing I am, I'm consistent. I haven't changed my mind. I won't be running for office."
But that was then. This is now.
And if there are a few things to know about the 59-year-old former governor, they are these: He likes the spotlight, he loves to mix it up with detractors and he harbors an unwavering confidence that his views are valuable to Arizona's future.
So those who know him best say it is no surprise that he wants back into the game.
In announcing this month his interest in a 2006 run, Symington is acting on a belief that he is one among just a handful of conservatives qualified to take on Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano. The only candidates he would step aside for, he said, are U.S. Rep. J.D. Hayworth and former Maricopa County Attorney Rick Romley, both of whom are considering runs.
He says the state budget is growing too fast. He objects to the new system of financing public-school construction. He wants private-school vouchers for public-school students. He calls Arizona's welfare programs "a runaway train." He chides Napolitano for not using the office as a bully pulpit.
"I don't think she's a risk-taker, really," Symington says.
Napolitano and her supporters undoubtedly disagree, but those views are vintage Symington. His governance, says former House Minority Leader Art Hamilton, a Democrat, was never consensual: It was my way or the highway.
Patrician background
Symington's ideas are forged by who he is, and J. Fife Symington III is nothing if not a patrician. He was raised amid wealth and privilege in the Maryland foxhunt country, his paternal grandfather was an investment banker and his father, John Fife Symington Jr., a Pan American Airlines executive and prominent Baltimore Republican.Symington's mother, Martha, was a granddaughter of Henry Clay Frick, the 19th-century industrialist remembered as a fierce union buster and a founder of U.S. Steel.
Symington attended upper-crust private schools as a youngster, and old yearbooks show that his classmates pegged him for a politician long before he ran for office. He attended Harvard University, where in 1966, as the Vietnam War heated up, he enrolled in the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps.
Upon graduating with a bachelor's degree in American history and art history, he married and got his first taste of Arizona during a two-year stint at Luke Air Force Base. By his own accounts, that's when he recognized Arizona as a land of business opportunity.
He left in 1970 for a year's tour of duty in Southeast Asia, getting a Bronze Star for his service in Thailand as a weapons controller, a job akin to a combat air-traffic controller.
Symington returned to the Valley in 1971 as a real estate agent. A year later, at age 27, he joined the board of Southwest Savings and Loan. Divorcing soon thereafter, he remarried in 1976 to Ann Pritzlaff, whose mother was heiress to the Olin Corp. chemical fortune and father was a former Arizona legislator and U.S. ambassador. In 1980, Symington launched his own real estate development business, the Symington Co.
Picking up steam
Throughout the 1980s, as Symington's company developed strip centers and office buildings, his political activities picked up steam. From 1982 to 1984, he was Republican Party finance chairman. He started to mix it up with municipal officials, particularly when it affected his developments.One of the biggest battles erupted over the Esplanade at 24th Street and Camelback Road. Symington envisioned an opulent office and retail center with a grand hotel. In 1983, Southwest Savings' board voted to invest thrift money in that vision, but it wasn't until after a zoning fight that the Phoenix City Council approved a scaled-down version in 1985.
In 1987, Symington waded into the state's nastiest political fracas. Then-Gov. Evan Mecham rescinded a state holiday honoring the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and continued to rile the local business community and lawmakers with political missteps, odd public pronouncements and questionable Cabinet appointments. The situation worsened when one of his staff members was accused of threatening another, and word got out that Mecham had lent his car dealership money from a gubernatorial protocol fund.
Less than a year into his term, Mecham had become the target of a national economic boycott, and state government was grinding to a halt. Symington called publicly for his fellow Republican's resignation, donating money to a recall campaign. In early 1988, Mecham was impeached and removed from office. Symington's political stock was on the rise.
But his finances were not. Federal tax policies that encouraged real estate investment had changed. Project capital dried up. Values plunged in an overbuilt market. High-flying developers, including Symington, found themselves overextended.
Symington scrambled to meet his obligations. Court testimony later showed that he was constantly seeking new lenders to maintain the cash flow that kept his developments afloat.
Southwest Savings' own books were heavy with real estate deals. In 1989, it was declared insolvent, the Esplanade conspicuous among projects in its deflated portfolio.
Wins in a runoff
That same year, Symington threw his hat in the ring, squaring off against Democrat Terry Goddard, Arizona's current attorney general, in a tight gubernatorial race. While Symington positioned himself as a moderate who would bring business acumen to state government, Goddard sounded warnings that Symington's business empire was crumbling. In fact, Symington borrowed more than $1 million from family members to finance his campaign."I was on a crusade to get the state back on its feet economically and to lower taxes to create the right environment for people to move here and invest their future in the state," Symington says now.
He also closed one more deal: a $10 million loan from a union pension fund to finance construction of the downtown Mercado at Seventh and Van Buren streets. His partnership guaranteed the note.
Symington beat Goddard in a race so close that it required a runoff. Once in office, he surrounded himself with business chums and GOP moderates who had aided his campaign. But that would change. Several of his closest confidants were soon snared in controversies over bloated travel budgets, questionable spending and general mismanagement.
Symington launched Project SLIM, a program to downsize state agencies. When his own accounting firm won the contract to oversee it, some in his administration suspected a fix was in.
Bidding irregularities led to the 1996 indictment of Symington's accountant and one of his aides. The accountant died before trial, and his aide was acquitted. But various other state and federal investigations eventually cost the accounting firm more than $4 million to settle.
As the debacles sapped his administration's credibility, Symington transitioned to a staff of conservative political pros experienced in governmental wrangling. He also shifted to the right politically, and his administration began flexing its muscle.
His agenda focused on tax cuts; get-tough-on-crime measures, like truth in sentencing and revisions to the juvenile justice system; education reforms, like charter schools and open enrollment; and sparring with the federal government over control on issues from prisons to welfare.
Despite a tough re-election campaign against grocer Eddie Basha in 1994, Symington maintained that focus.
"His scrappiness was surprising to me, given his upbringing," former aide Chuck Coughlin says. "He was not afraid of debates. He likes to have great debates, often publicly."
Jay Heiler, a confidant and former aide, says Symington was a quick study who "knew when to fold his cards and when to let someone else have a win."
But Hamilton, the former lawmaker, sees it differently. Hamilton says Symington rarely took to heart the arguments of those who disagreed with him. He tended to be dismissive, relishing a fight instead of diplomacy.
"He loves the game, the rougher, the better," Hamilton says. "If he had a choice between boxing gloves and bare knuckles, I think he'd use bare knuckles every time."
Major tax cuts
Symington helped gain passage of a 1992 ballot measure requiring a two-thirds majority of both legislative houses to raise taxes. Then, as state revenues picked up steam, he cut taxes by increasingly larger amounts. One study estimated the cuts amounted to more than $2 billion.
His allies say those policies fueled the growth that kept state coffers full during much of the '90s. His critics suggest he simply took office as a natural economic-growth cycle began, a luxury that allowed him to cut taxes.
"He enjoyed a fairly good economy," says Rob Melnick, who directs Arizona State University's Morrison Institute for Public Policy.
Melnick adds, however, that when the economy slowed and state revenues waned toward the end of the decade, Symington's permanent tax cuts left little room for lawmakers to maneuver, forcing program cuts.
Hamilton says he had urged Symington during those tax-cutting years to offer taxpayer rebates rather than permanently altering the tax code, which might have averted later revenue crunches. Symington wouldn't hear of it, Hamilton says, because "philosophically, he wanted to cut government."
Melnick calls Symington's policy "good politics, though economically it was debatable."
Still, loyalists see that single-mindedness as Symington's strength. Where detractors see a stubborn lack of comprise, loyalists see conviction and principle. Where detractors see combativeness, loyalists see perseverance.
Whatever it is called, it also served Symington outside politics, where his financial and legal troubles snowballed.
By 1991, several developments had become public failures, and federal investigators started probing Southwest Savings' collapse. Symington and other Southwest board members were sued for negligence by the Resolution Trust Corp. The case settled for $12.1 million, though Symington did not admit wrongdoing or pay damages.
In 1992, his business activities became the subject of a deeper criminal investigation. Within a year, he told reporters his net worth had plummeted to "zero." The downtown Mercado was sold at auction because his partnership couldn't repay its debt. Then a federal grand jury began looking into his affairs.
Symington filed personal bankruptcy in 1995, triggering a legal battle with his Mercado lenders that wasn't settled until six years later. In June 1996, a 23-count federal indictment accused him of fraud, lying under oath and extortion.
Convicted of fraud
Prosecutors said in Symington's 1997 trial that he lied to lenders about his net worth, inflating it when he needed loans and deflating it when he needed repayment concessions. Symington conceded that he had made mistakes but insisted none had been made with criminal intent. On Sept. 3, 1997, a jury convicted him of seven fraud counts. He resigned his office an hour later, with Secretary of State Jane Hull taking over.Though sentenced to 30 months in a federal prison camp, Symington remained free while his case was appealed. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned his conviction in 1999, ruling that a juror sympathetic to his case had been wrongly dismissed during deliberations.
Prosecutors were negotiating with Symington on a single-felony plea deal when Clinton granted his pardon in 2001.
Though a fraud judgment in Bankruptcy Court later forced him into a financial settlement on the Mercado loan, Symington feels vindicated. He now wants to pick up where he left off, saying issues facing the state are largely the same.
His behind-the-scenes involvement against in last fall's Proposition 400 transportation-funding campaign only whetted his political appetite, and Heiler says his old boss has put his past behind him.
"There's an indefatigable aspect to his nature," Heiler says. "You can't keep him down for long, no matter what."
Symington also says he's changed.
"I think you would be surprised at how different I would be once in office," he says. "Not in terms of, necessarily, my core beliefs, but just in terms of how I would operate with people. I mean, I've had some life experiences that most people never had and wouldn't want to have."
But he understands the likelihood that old wounds will be reopened:
"If I get in (to the race), it's going to be guns blazing, and I'll get a lot of help from the outside world. I don't have any illusions or stars in my eyes . . . it's just absolute, all-out war."
