Once a top prospect in the Republican Party, Symington is on the verge of losing it all. First, the onetime land developer went broke. Then the Feds indicted him on 23 counts of fraud and extortion, charging that he lied to get loans for his construction projects. In two weeks Symington will go on trial in the federal courthouse a few blocks from his capitol office. But in case anyone thought this might be the end of Fife Symington, the intensely proud governor says that if he doesn’t go to jail, he’ll run for a third term next year. His campaign pitch is likely to echo his courtroom defense: J. Fife Symington III–heir to the Frick steel fortune–is just a little guy getting pushed around by big government. It’s a hard sell, but no one’s counting Symington out. After all, this is Arizona, where scandal is a tradition and hating the Feds a way of life.
To hear his supporters tell it, Symington is a self-made man who arrived in Arizona with nothing but sweat and a saddlebag. That’s a mirage. Taunted by one critic as “the hardscrabble son of the Maryland hunt country,” Symington is the great-grandson of the union-busting magnate Henry Clay Frick; the governor’s cousin, Sen. Stuart Symington, challenged JFK for the White House. Fife studied at Baltimore’s elite Gilman School and at Harvard, where he earned his degree in 17th-century Dutch art. He won the Bronze Star in Vietnam before settling in Phoenix in 1972. He had grown up steeped in money and politics; Symington came West looking for more of both.
It didn’t hurt when he soon divorced his first wife and married into a wealthy, well-connected Arizona family. Then he started building. By the mid-1980s, Phoenix was booming, and citizen Symington was its Donald Trump. His crowning achievement: the city’s premier retail space, boasting Macy’s, Planet Hollywood and the Ritz Carlton. But the overblown market crashed. Symington was elected in 1991 after leading the drive to recall the then Gov. Evan Mecham, who was impeached for corruption. But by then, Symington himself was under investigation. Federal regulators sued him unsuccessfully but referred the case to the FBI, which spent six years combing through truckloads of paper the governor had amassed before he took office. Prosecutors say Symington, reeling from the collapse, pretended to be flush in order to get some loans as he claimed massive debts to avoid paying others. After he became governor, they say, he tried to use his influence to make a creditor ease up. Then Symington went bankrupt, saying he owed $24 million.
Symington denies the charges. A ruthless competitor who mountain-climbs in the dark each morning, the 51-year-old governor insists he doesn’t worry about jail. “It’s in God’s hands,” he told NEWSWEEK. He’s been barred by a judge from talking about the case–but his handlers haven’t. They say the Feds are punishing an ordinary guy like Symington rather than tangle with the banks that caused the crash. Symington, they say, is just “the little fish in the pond.”
It’s a strategy that galls Symington’s foes. “There’s a chasm the size of the Grand Canyon between what he is and what he says he is,” says Art Hamilton, the top Democrat in the state legislature. It may not matter. True, Symington isn’t a very convincing Everyman: saying he wanted a car of the people, he once traded in his official town car for a fully loaded Suburban with grille lights and tinted windows. Symington’s approval rating has fallen to 30 percent, and many establishment Republicans have had enough. But he’s cut taxes and passed popular reforms in welfare, school funding and teen sentencing. Rural voters are still with him. “Nobody’s proved a damn thing,” says Duke Ortmann, 65, swigging a beer in the trailer-park town of Apache Junction.
Symington’s national prospects may be history–aides say it was a “crushing blow” when the party refused to let the indicted governor speak at the 1996 convention–but he’ll probably reject any plea bargain that would force him from office. Maybe he’s in denial. Or maybe he’s thinking about Arizona’s first governor, who refused to leave office after losing the 1916 election–and was rewarded with four more terms. If Fife Symington is guilty, he may have picked the right place to do wrong.
