f stiff-necked, foot-shooting incident for which Arizona
politics seem famous. There was Evan Mecham, the eccentric Republican
millionaire governor who was impeached, after reducing state government
to a ludicrous shambles. Then there was the national Keating scandal,
involving Arizona savings and loans, in which both of Arizona's U.S.
senators, DeConcini and McCain, played sadly prominent roles.

And the very latest is the bizarre AzScam case, in which state
legislators were videotaped, eagerly taking cash from an informant of
the Phoenix city police department, who was posing as a Vegas mobster.

"Oh," says Thackeray cheerfully. "These people are amateurs here, they
thought they were finally getting to play with the big boys. They
don't have the least idea how to take a bribe! It's not institutional
corruption. It's not like back in Philly."

Gail Thackeray was a former prosecutor in Philadelphia. Now she's a
former assistant attorney general of the State of Arizona. Since
moving to Arizona in 1986, she had worked under the aegis of Steve
Twist, her boss in the Attorney General's office. Steve Twist wrote
Arizona's pioneering computer crime laws and naturally took an interest
in seeing them enforced. It was a snug niche, and Thackeray's
Organized Crime and Racketeering Unit won a national reputation for
ambition and technical knowledgeability.... Until the latest election
in Arizona. Thackeray's boss ran for the top job, and lost. The
victor, the new Attorney General, apparently went to some pains to
eliminate the bureaucratic traces of his rival, including his pet
group--Thackeray's group. Twelve people got their walking papers.

Now Thackeray's painstakingly assembled computer lab sits gathering
dust somewhere in the glass-and-concrete Attorney General's HQ on 1275
Washington Street. Her computer-crime books, her painstakingly
garnered back issues of phreak and hacker zines, all bought at her own
expense--are piled in boxes somewhere. The State of Arizona is simply
not particularly interested in electronic racketeering at the moment.

At the moment of our interview, Gail Thackeray, officially unemployed,
is working out of the county sheriff's office, living on her savings,
and prosecuting several cases--working 60-hour weeks, just as
always--for no pay at all. "I'm trying to train people," she mutters.

Half her life seems to be spent training people--merely pointing out,
to the naive and incre