Cindy McCain’s wealth comes from one of the nation’s largest beer distributorships, Hensley & Co., which was founded by her father James Willis Hensley and his brother Eugene, in the 1950s.
But prior to setting up their own company, the Hensley brothers were partners in two earlier companies - United Liquor Company, and United Liquor Supply Company – with a onetime bookie named Kemper Marley. The companies, and the Hensleys, had repeated run-ins with the law.
In 1948, the brothers were convicted of falsifying records at United Liquor to conceal the illegal distribution of hundreds of cases of liquor, as detailed by the Phoenix New Times.
Marley, who was never charged himself and who bought his partners first-rate legal representation, eventually took control of the companies, which became United Liquors. Along the way, he became one of Arizona’s first mega-millionaires, with interests in ranching and racetracks in addition to liquor.
By the mid-1970s, his name was also coming up in the stories of Don Bolles, an investigative reporter for The Arizona Republic who was writing about organized crime and its penetration of the racing and liquor industries.
In June, 1976, Bolles was murdered when a remote-control bomb detonated beneath his car after he had gone to a downtown Phoenix hotel to meet a source who never showed.
John Harvey Adamson confessed to police that he had been hired to set the bomb by a wealthy Arizona contractor named Max Dunlap, and that Dunlap had orchestrated the murder at the behest of Marley who wanted to stop the reporter from writing any more damaging articles.
Adamson said that Dunlap had also hired him to kill two others, including then-Arizona Attorney General Bruce Babbitt because Babbitt had filed an antitrust lawsuit against the liquor industry.
Marley was never charged in Bolles’ murder.
Bolles’ distraught colleagues, however, who had recently formed a new group called Investigative Reporters and Editors, descended on Arizona to conduct their own investigation. The result was 23 stories that continued Bolles’ look at organized crime in Arizona, but which never directly addressed the question of who murdered him.
The series did, however, link Marley to figures in organized crime, and he sued Investigative Reporters and Editors for libel. A jury in Phoenix awarded him $15,000 for emotional distress, but found no grounds for libel or invasion of privacy.
Marley died of cancer in 1990, at the age of 83, at a home in California.
Bolles’ burned-out 1976 Datsun is on display at the newly opened Newseum in Washington DC which has an exhibit devoted to his memory.
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