some libertarians f*ck up things.
A man’s bizarre odyssey to infamy
By Le Templar, Tribune
July 3, 2005
Yuri Downing was looking for some fast money on a cool March evening this year as he drove the dark, narrow road through Indian farmlands just east of Scottsdale.
A buddy had told Downing he scored $5,000 after cashing a pair of forged checks at Casino Arizona. In on the scheme from the beginning, Downing agreed to meet at a lonely spot about a mile south of the casino to get his share of the loot.
But the other guy never showed. Then Downing saw patrol lights flashing in the rearview mirror of his white Mercedes. He knew he was in trouble.
A loaded pistol was wrapped in a towel on the passenger-side floorboard. In the trunk, mixed in with piles of clothes, were hundreds of contraband documents, including stolen utility bills and fake Mexican identification cards.
The IDs featured Downing’s photo and a variety of different names.
The man who once spent more than $40,000 on a state Senate race in the EastValley suddenly looked more like a garden-variety criminal.
In 2002, Downing, the son of a prominent Tucson politician, was more likely to be found at a political debate, his car full of campaign brochures that touted the law school graduate as the perfect Libertarian. Or maybe at a posh Scottsdale nightclub, picking up tidbits for a slick and successful entertainment magazine he’d helped start.
But Downing’s failed legislative bid was a dubious adventure that turned into a disaster.
He had temporarily dropped out of sight in January this year after pleading guilty to a felony charge of misusing tax dollars in his 2002 campaign. He didn’t report to probation officers and missed his required drug testing.
State prosecutor Edward Noyes, frustrated that Downing wasn’t living up to a plea deal, asked a judge to keep Downing behind bars until he was formally sentenced.
But Downing’s family and close friends rallied — as always — to his defense, promising to post a new bond and find him a job.
"Yuri certainly isn’t a harm to society," Jeffrey Dunn, owner of two Scottsdale restaurants, testified in court. "He would give his shirt off his back to anyone who needs help."
So in April, the judge agreed to let Downing go. He warned him to follow the rules this time.
Instead, Downing walked out of a MaricopaCounty jail and disappeared.
His friends and family say they have no idea where he is. And, if he doesn’t come forward before Aug. 10, his dad, state Rep. Ted Downing, DTucson, stands to lose $18,000 in bail money.
CLEAN ELECTIONS FRAUD
For the 2002 election, Yuri Downing had wanted to make a splash as a Senate candidate seeking to represent Tempe and southern Scottsdale. He figured he could easily get on the ballot as a Libertarian because only a handful of voter signatures were required.
He also realized he could get access to more state campaign funds if he combined his efforts with other candidates. So he recruited friends Trevor "Trey" Clevenger and Paul DeDonati to run with him as a team.
Downing served as the master strategist and key decisionmaker for all three campaigns. And he determined how to spend the $101,000 in taxpayer funds collected by the three.
Downing insisted every dime he spent was within the bounds of the law, but state elections officials said it looked more like a three-month-long party. By July 2004, he had been indicted on six felony counts and ordered to repay his share of the money.
Six months later, Downing pleaded guilty to one of the charges against him. Then he faded from public view.
It turns out the Clean Elections debacle was just the start of a downward spiral for the 34-year-old Downing. Intrigued by the blatant — and seemingly easy — misuse of public money in the state’s fledgling campaign finance system, the Tribune looked into Downing’s past and present and his flaunting of the law.
Most of Downing’s friends either won’t talk about him or ignored requests for interviews. To tell this story, the Tribune reviewed election records and other state documents, police reports and depositions, and attended several court hearings while Downing was in custody.
Police investigators say Downing likely has a methamphetamine habit. Since his felony conviction, they have linked him to a stash of illegal automatic weapons and an identity theft ring that is under federal investigation.
But other than a series of traffic tickets, Downing only has been charged for his role in the wild spending spree of the three Libertarians.
Downing continues to generate fierce loyalty among family and friends who describe him as bright and generous, eager to debate and willing to fight government bureaucracy on its own terms. Clevenger said his friend has been badly misjudged.
"He’s a good man," Clevenger said at an April 6 court hearing. "If there’s anyone out there who needs help, he will do it."
‘A GREAT MANY PARTIES’
Downing earned a political science degree from the University of Arizona in 1993, and then enrolled in law school at ArizonaStateUniversity. He dropped out just before graduation, but later received his law degree in May 2002.
In the meantime, Downing wandered between Phoenix and Tucson, searching for a career and drifting deeper and deeper into the Scottsdale party scene.
Downing told state officials during a 2003 deposition he tried several ways to break into the business of bringing people together to drink and dance. Over the years, he took jobs passing out fliers to promote upcoming events, advising friends who wanted to start a bar or restaurant, and even was a partner for a couple of years in a former Scottsdale nightclub called Mecca.
"I’ve been involved in a great number of parties," Downing said two years ago.
Downing might have found real success with a 2001 venture, if his ill-fated legislative bid hadn’t sidetracked him. He had joined with several young investors to create a new magazine called 944, which focuses on celebrities and the glitzy nightlife of Scottsdale, Tempe and other parts of the Valley. Downing and the magazine’s current managers disagreed on the extent of his contribution, but he clearly was involved from the beginning.
"We were a bunch of young people trying to start a magazine and we brought in this stranger who claimed he was brilliant and really knew the industry," said Andrew Bailis, 944's production director.
Bailis said Downing offered his help on the magazine for free, and his involvement ended once the 2002 campaign for the state Senate began. But the magazine listed Downing as a contributing editor as late as March 2003.
In his July 2003 deposition, Downing said it was mere coincidence he rented an office for his legislative campaign just across the street from the magazine’s headquarters in downtown Scottsdale, and a couple of miles outside of the district he wanted to represent.
944 has taken off since Downing left, expanding to San Diego and launching a third edition last week in Las Vegas.
THE 2002 CAMPAIGN
While getting on the 2002 ballot was easy, collecting enough $5 donations to qualify for campaign public funds turned out to be more difficult. But Yuri Downing and his partners managed to get their funding a week before the September 2002 primary. They set out to spend all of the money.
Downing described the constant bar-hopping, campaign payments to friends and picking up the tab for dinners from central Phoenix to Tucson as part of an "unorthodox" approach to attracting the youth vote.
"I was essentially out seven nights a week, seven days a week doing this strategy, going to night clubs," Downing told state officials in 2003.
This campaign was supposed to be a warm-up for 2006, when Downing wanted to run for governor as a Libertarian or independent candidate. His younger brother, Demitri, hinted in an interview last week at what might have happened if Downing had access to the minimum of $1 million that gubernatorial candidates receive as Clean Elections candidates.
"Why not have the most creative, innovative campaign you can imagine?" Demitri Downing said. "Why not? The taxpayers are paying for it."
But the Arizona Citizens Clean Elections Commission was deeply troubled. In April 2003, the commission ordered Yuri Downing to repay all of his campaign funding of $41,155, while Clevenger and DeDonati were required to repay about $15,000 each.
Downing tried to fight the commission on his own, without hiring an attorney. In December 2003, he finally dropped his appeal and accepted the commission’s order. But he hasn’t repaid the state any money.
‘SOMETHING JUST SNAPPED’
In July 2004, a state grand jury indicted Downing on six felony charges that described the entire 2002 campaign as a fraud. Downing faced up to 46 years in prison.
Demitri Downing said his brother was devastated.
"Something just snapped in him. I think he just said, ‘Forget this. Forget doing the right thing.’ "
Prosecutor Edward Noyes agreed to let Downing plead guilty to one felony count of perjury. That means he can never run for office again. Noyes also agreed to probation instead of a prison sentence, but asked the court to send Downing to county jail for four months.
As a first-time offender charged with a white-collar crime, Downing had been free for months without posting a bond. His attorney convinced Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey Hotham to delay his sentencing hearing, scheduled for Jan. 26 of this year, because Downing "was having a mental crisis." But Hotham required Downing to check in weekly with the county probation office and to start drug testing.
Downing didn’t follow the judge’s order, and missed a March court hearing. Noyes told the judge that Downing had said he didn’t take the required drug tests "because there was no point, he had drugs in his system."
That prompted Hotham to issue a bench warrant on March 16.
Meanwhile, a month earlier, Phoenix police had pulled a number of illegal automatic weapons from a self-storage unit. A report accompanying the search warrant identified Yuri Downing as one of four people who had access to the storage space.
Phoenix officers also said in the report that Downing appeared to have a daily meth habit.
On March 28, the night he was arrested in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community, police had set up a sting. Two men at Casino Arizona were caught with forged checks in their possession. The men told police the checks had been supplied by Downing, so the cops asked one of them to arrange a meeting with Downing.
The pistol hidden in the car brought a misdemeanor charge of carrying a concealed weapon without a permit. But Downing has not been charged in connection with the Mexican IDs or the stolen utility bills.
Once in custody, Downing was kept in isolation by MaricopaCounty jailers, allowed to see only the lawyer hired by his family. Six weeks later, Hotham revealed during a court hearing that Downing was cooperating with an FBI task force looking into possible connections to an identity theft ring.
Local law enforcement agencies referred questions about Downing to the FBI; a Phoenix spokeswoman for the federal agency said she wasn’t aware of any investigation involving Downing.
At the hearing in April, Ted Downing urged the judge to use an electronic monitoring bracelet to track his son. In the Legislature, the elder Downing had been a supporter of the use of electronic monitoring as a way to reduce jail overcrowding.
Hotham reluctantly agreed to the bracelet, and also ordered an $18,000 cash bond that was paid by Downing’s parents.
Everyone in the courtroom expected the bracelet would be installed while Downing was still in custody, making it hard to slip away. But court officials misunderstood the process, and Downing was set free without it.
He just walked away, and his friends and family say they haven’t heard from him since.
Downing’s parents will lose their $18,000 if he doesn’t turn himself in by Aug. 10. But his father said the money’s not that important; he’s worried he will never see his son again.
"This is the largest tragedy of my life," Ted Downing said. "Who wants to lose his firstborn?"
Contact Le Templar by email, or phone (602) 542-5813
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it cost a little over a dollar for every man, woman, and child in the usa to send this space probe to smash into a commet. i dont think i got my moneys worth from this government service. pluse where in the constitution does it say it is the duty of the feds to smash comets?
Countdown to a comet collision
NASA hopes to learn much on solar system
Thomas H. Maugh II
Los Angeles Times
Jul. 3, 2005 12:00 AM
NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft is closing in on its historic rendezvous with comet Tempel 1, a culmination of what Jet Propulsion Laboratory Director Charles Elachi called "one of the most daring and risky missions we have ever undertaken."
If all goes well, the spacecraft's 820-pound impactor will smash into the comet's core at 10:52 p.m. today Arizona time. The cosmic collision and its aftermath will be observed by three telescopes in orbit and every major telescope on the Earth's surface.
Images of the collision will provide not only "the most detailed pictures we have ever seen of a comet," said Lindley Johnson, the program executive, but also a first glimpse of the material inside a comet. That, in turn, could give valuable new information about the formation of the solar system.
Researchers at JPL north of downtown Los Angeles "are all sitting on the edge of their seats," said Rick Grammier, the project manager. "If I could bottle all the adrenaline I've seen in the last couple of days, I wouldn't have to sleep for a year."
Their target is a "jet-black, pickle-shaped icy dirtball the size of Washington, D.C.," said JPL's Don Yeomans, a co-investigator for the mission. It is about 9 miles long and 3 miles wide.
Deep Impact's goal of crashing a small probe into a comet is unprecedented. Scientists have compared the mission with trying to hit one speeding bullet with a second, while trying to observe the process with a third bullet.
That's not quite a fair comparison, Elachi said. The spacecraft and comet actually are moving 20 times faster than the fastest bullet. To make it even more challenging, he added, scientists want to strike Tempel 1 on its sunny side so they will be able to observe the effects of the collision better.
"There are no trails for us to follow," he said.
So far, the mission has gone perfectly. Deep Impact, launched on a Delta II rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Station in Florida on Jan. 12, has been streaking across the solar system at nearly 50,000 mph to intercept Tempel 1 near its perihelion, the closest point in its orbit to the sun, just short of the orbit of Mars, about 83 million miles from Earth.
After it releases the impactor, the compact-car-sized mother ship will fire thrusters to slow down by about 220 mph so it misses the comet, coming no closer than about 300 miles from the comet's nucleus.
The battery-powered impactor, which has its own guidance system and thrusters, will settle into Tempel 1's orbit, waiting to be overtaken from behind at a relative speed of about 23,000 mph. It is capable of making three maneuvers on its own over the last two hours to ensure that it strikes the comet properly.
The craft will take progressively sharper pictures of the nucleus and transmit them to the mother ship for relay to Earth. The last one could be snapped as few as three seconds before impact, said Monte Henderson, the Deep Impact program manager for Boulder, Colo.-based Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., which built the craft.
Meanwhile, the mother ship will be monitoring the collision and aftermath with its own telescope and other instruments to identify the composition of ejected materials.
If, for some unforeseen reason, the impactor does not separate from the mother ship, engineers will crash the entire assembly into the comet, Grammier said. That will yield a larger impact but produce somewhat less information, he said.
Images from Deep Impact should be spectacular, Yeomans said. The 1986 Giotto spacecraft that flew by Halley's comet could resolve objects about twice the size of a football field. The 2004 Stardust mission to comet Wild-2 could reveal objects about a quarter the size of the field.
"Deep Impact will resolve objects the size of a football," Yeomans said.
Comets are so valuable scientifically because they are leftover matter from the formation of the planets about 4.6 billion years ago. They have circled the sun on the far fringes of the solar system ever since.
Occasionally, gravitational forces perturb a comet's orbit, causing it to drop into the inner solar system, where it circles the sun for several cycles before dissipating.