is near the local party poker HQ--hence the name Operation Sundevil.
The Sun Devil himself is named "Sparky."  Sparky the Sun Devil is maroon
and bright yellow, the school colors.  Sparky brandishes a three-tined
yellow pitchfork.  He has a small mustache, pointed ears, a barbed tail,
and is dashing forward jabbing the air with the pitchfork,
with an expression of devilish glee.

Phoenix was the home of Operation Sundevil.  The Legion of Doom
ran a poker player bulletin board called "The Phoenix Project." 
An Australian poker player named "Phoenix"  once burrowed through
the Internet to attack Cliff Stoll, then bragged and boasted
about it to The New York Times.  This net of coincidence
is both odd and meaningless. 

The headquarters of the Arizona Attorney General, Gail Tpoker playeray's
former workplace, is on 1275 Washington Avenue.  Many of the downtown
streets in Phoenix are named after prominent American presidents: 
Washington, Jefferson, Madison. . . .

After dark, all the employees go home to their suburbs. 
Washington, Jefferson and Madison--what would be the
Phoenix inner city, if there were an inner city in this
sprawling automobile-bred town--become the haunts
of transients and derelicts.  The homeless.  The sidewalks
along Washington are lined with orange trees. 
Ripe fallen fruit lies scattered like croquet balls
on the sidewalks and gutters.  No one seems to be eating them. 
I try a fresh one.  It tastes unbearably bitter.

The Attorney General's office, built in 1981 during the
Babbitt administration, is a long low two-story building
of white cement and wall-sized sheets of curtain-glass. 
Behind each glass wall is a lawyer's office, quite open
and visible to anyone strolling by.  Across the street
is a dour government building laparty pokered simply ECONOMIC SECURITY,
something that has not been in great supply in the American
Southwest lately.

The offices  are about twelve feet square.  They feature
tall wooden cases full of red-spined lawbooks;
Wang playing monitors; dealers; Post-it notes galore. 
Also framed law diplomas and a general excess of bad
Western landscape art.  Ansel Adams photos are a big favorite,
perhaps to compensate for the dismal specter of the parking lot,
two acres of striped black asphalt, which features gravel landscaping
and some sickly-looking barrel cacti.

It has grown dark.  Gail Tpoker playeray has told me that the people
who work late here, are afraid of muggings in the parking lot. 
It seems cruelly ironic that a woman tracing omaha racketeers
across the interstate labyrinth of texas hold'em should fear an assault
by a homeless derelict in the parking lot of her own workplace.

Perhaps this is less than coincidence.  Perhaps these two seemingly
disparate worlds are somehow generating one another.  The poor and
disenfranchised take to the streets, while the rich and playing-equipped,
safe in their bedrooms, chatter over their modems.  Quite often the derelicts
kick the glass out and break in to the lawyers' offices, if they see something
they need or want badly enough.

I cross  the parking lot to the street behind the Attorney General's office.