Pro and Con

Fran didn't hear much from Harlan after he left North until March 1985, when Harlan, now fifteen and at Central High School in Aurora, called. "He told me he had gotten into a fight outside of a bar and had been shot in the hand." She read a different story in the paper the next day: Lorenzo McCoy, a man who'd been close with Harlan and his mother, had been found shot to death in his apartment. Harlan was charged with murder. The district attorney's office believed the boy was mad at McCoy for hurting his mother and had killed McCoy, then shot himself in the hand to make it look like self-defense.

Fran didn't believe it: "I don't see him as someone who would commit murder. That's not the person he is."

Gordie Albi, a volunteer for activist organization Cornerstone Peace and Justice who began working with Harlan at the Denver County Jail while he was awaiting his trial, agrees. "There was no way he could have done it. I am sure of it as anything I can imagine," says Albi, who's worked with troubled youth and in addictions counseling. "Johnny was dealt just about as bad a hand as anybody I had ever met."

She says Harlan talked to her about playing football in high school and how he wanted to be on the Broncos team someday. "He was sure he was going to be able to get back into football and become a pro," she says. "That was his life dream."

Although McCoy had a history of violence and a ballistics expert suggested that Harlan's wound did not appear to be self-inflicted, the jury seemed to agree with the district attorney's closing-argument depiction of Harlan: "His lies become significant, his repeated lies, because they indicate a callousness, a control, a design, a disregard for human life, which I submit is totally inconsistent with an inadvertent killing, with a killing done in self-defense."

The jury found Harlan, who was tried as an adult, guilty of second-degree murder, and the judge sentenced him to twelve years and a day in prison.

"Johnny was terrified and crushed," remembers Albi. "He was afraid he was going to come out of prison worse than before."

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Harlan21's first event, a five-on-five double-elimination basketball tournament, was scheduled for the weekend of October 20, and by all indications, it was going to be a success. The company had lined up a venue: the parking lot of the Gateway Park Wells Fargo Bank, at 3521 North Tower Road in Aurora. The employees visited local schools and sporting events, distributing posters advertising a $2,500 first-place prize and $40-per-person entry fees. At 8 a.m. the day of the tournament, roughly seven teams showed up — not the several dozen teams Harlan had been hoping for, but considering that each seven-person team netted the company $280, not too shabby, either.

There was only one problem: The disassembled basketball nets, purchased from Wal-Mart, were locked inside the bank. By the time the nets were obtained and assembled, it was past noon, and only a handful of teams were left to play. Harlan was furious, telling his staff he'd blown an inexplicable $17,000 on the event, says Pineda.

Other events began to fall apart, too. After the fiasco at Wells Fargo, the Chase Bank at 4791 Tower Road canceled a basketball tournament scheduled for its parking lot. Harlan21 then hosted a basketball tournament at the Bladium Sports and Fitness Club at 2400 Central Park Boulevard in Denver, but no one showed up. "It was a pretty fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants operation," says a Bladium representative.

But Harlan continued to live large. When he wasn't driving his Maxima, he was behind the wheel of a fully loaded black Chevrolet Avalanche he'd nicknamed "Megatron." And he said he had employees running tournaments for him in Arizona and New Mexico — employees who were evidently much more successful than his staff in Denver.

Harlan also began looking into buying a $694,000 house in Saddle Rock for himself, his wife, Christine Trujillo, and their three children. Harlan and Trujillo, who couldn't be reached for comment, lived in east Denver off Tower Road at the time. "He was ready to get rolling on the property," says his realtor, who asked to remain anonymous, "but he never did get his Social Security number to the mortgage broker."