On pages 4 and 5 of Newsletter #31 I made reference to some entities and individuals without actually identifying them. Let me do so now.
“Entity A” refers to Associates Financial Institutions Community Bank in Los Angeles and Union Bank, later Inter-West Bank, in Tucson.
“Mr. B” is Charles Cook.
“Entity C” is Gemini Industries of Santa Ana, California.
“Mr. D” is Dominic Balzano.
“Mr. E” is H. H. Corbin.
“Mr. F” is Ed Reu-Ben.
As a reminder, Dominic Balzano and his brother Robert Balzano operated the Mesa Metals salvage yard in Mesa, Arizona, where gold diverted from a Motorola plant in Phoenix first was taken. Dominic also ran Gemini Industries in Santa Ana, California, a reclamation company where the gold was processed into standard commercial ingots.
Both Dominic and Robert were Chicago-mob associated transplants to the Phoenix area, both listed in the index of the Chicago Crime Commission. Shortly after he arrested Max Dunlap and Jim Robison in January 1977 for the June 1976 car-bombing of Don Bolles, Arizona Attorney General Bruce Babbitt acquired a house from Dominic Balzano at 308 West Lamar in Phoenix as documented in an earlier piece on this website concerning, “A Case of Curious Coincidences.”
Besides, like Ed Reu-Ben, being involved somehow in black market sales of precious metals, all that I heard from one source about H. H. Corbin was that he was a very heavy-set fellow with, “suits made by Omar the Tent Maker.” Both Reu-Ben and Corbin show up in early notes of Bolles on that gold diversion in Phoenix and in Charles Morgan’s Tucson records of the early 1970s regarding gold sales.
I also mentioned on page 6 of Newsletter #31 that, “some of Bolles’ interview and research notes for the last six months of his life appear to have vanished at the time of his death.” Actually, according to former Arizona Republic investigative reporter Jerry Seper, most are missing for the last six years.
Seper has been among a sizeable number of Arizona Republic journalists who don’t buy the “official” theory in the Bolles case, believing instead that it was Brad Funk, not Max Dunlap, who paid for the Bolles homicide. In addition to Seper, these others have included Jana Bommersbach, Robert Kaiser, Paul Dean, and Tom Sanford.
Before he left the Arizona Republic for reasons related to the Bolles case, Seper gave me copies of some of Bolles’ hand-written notes going back to 1970 or so. A gold-related note containing the names of Reu-Ben and Corbin also included the name of Mafia figure Carl Verive who, in other pieces on this website, I have identified as Bolles’ likely killer in 1976. A copy of that note is appended.
Flying in the face of that “official” theory that Jim Robison detonated the car-bomb even though he was acquitted in a 1993 re-trial, my Phoenix colleague, filmmaker, and researcher Nick Bartlett recently has come across a 1979 FBI document, copy also appended, in which a Bureau source also speaks of Verive as, “an organized crime figure in the Phoenix area who was involved in the murder of Don Bolles.”
Unless it was entirely redacted at the time, I never saw that document among the FBI documents I acquired in the 1980s after I took the Bureau to U.S. District Court in Phoenix to compel its reluctant release of Bolles homicide-related records. I also don’t remember seeing it among any of the exculpatory materials released to defense attorneys for Dunlap and Robison in 1993, a serious “Brady” issue in all of the Bolles-related trials.
More to follow.
Don Devereux
Yountville, California
October 30, 2026
♦♦♦
Copyright © 2026 Don Devereux, All Rights Reserved
Journalists, historians, teachers, and students are free to quote from any of this material in writings of their own, provided that they do so with proper attribution and acknowledgement of applicable copyrights.
