1895–Local curio magnate Harry Tammen and Kansas scoundrel Frederick Bonfils buy the fledgling Denver Evening Post for $12,500 and start shaping it into a lurid, red-headline scandal sheet that will rob readers from the venerable Rocky Mountain News, established on the banks of Cherry Creek in 1859. 1907–Seething over criticism…
What’s prison life without Prison Life? Imagine a full-service broker without his Wall Street Journal, a Park Avenue publishing executive without her New Yorker, a latte-guzzling cyberpunk without his Wired or–egads–a capitalist tool without a single copy of Forbes to while away the lonely hours on the corporate jet. It’s…
Sam Zakhem has this to say about Steve Curtis: “I don’t think he knows the truth when he stumbles over it.” And Steve Curtis has this to say about Sam Zakhem: “He called me last week and said, ‘Either you drop out of the race, or we’re going to the…
Saving already broken ground on an expansion of Denver’s light-rail line south to Littleton, the Regional Transportation District now has its sights set on another ten-mile route from downtown to the western suburbs. But some of the residents in the path of the project say they don’t want it in…
Strange things happen around Lawrence Wollersheim. His businesses collapse. His Boulder apartment gets raided by federal marshals, his computers seized. When college students offer to help him rebuild his computer bulletin-board system, they receive threatening phone calls–anonymous voices urging them to stay away from Larry. A California judge who presided…
For 28 years, Denver’s Police Athletic League has honed the athletic skills of inner-city youth and taught them the value of competition and fair play. But when it comes to locking up city park sites for its ballgames, PAL doesn’t mess around; the well-connected group has no interest in competing…
According to former corrections officer Sandra Haberman, the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility at Ordway was a hotbed of innuendo, threats and crude come-ons directed at female employees. Defendants in her sex-harassment suit have denied any improper comments or behavior, but jurors in the case got an earful of the kind…
From the look of things, everybody had a grand time at the farewell party held last March at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility for departing deputy warden Joe Paolino. Cake and M&Ms were in abundance, and the special tribute to Paolino, a veteran Colorado Department of Corrections official, prompted a…
When civil rights activist Judith Lee Berg had an opportunity to work in Atlanta three years ago, she didn’t think twice about renting out her Denver home and making a temporary move to Georgia. She didn’t think twice, either, about hiring A&R Transfer, a moving company a friend had recommended…
Sam Zakhem casts a hungry eye on the milling bodies in the halls of the State Capitol. The press conference room is filling up nicely, but the crowd is mostly made up of well-wishers and business associates. Where are the cameras? “Are any of the TV stations coming?” Zakhem asks…
Three days a week, the blue bus from Canon City pulls up at the corner of Smith Road and Peoria and discharges a stream of men dressed in cheap polyester suits. The men are parolees, and each one has a check for $100 and two bus tokens in his pocket…
Oscar Lopez Rivera knew what he had to do to get out of the toughest penitentiary in the entire federal system. He had to endure 22-hour-a-day solitary confinement, demonstrate “positive adjustment,” follow the rules–in short, get with the “carrot-and-stick” program. If he behaved, he was told, he could earn his…
One might suppose that Jacob Stone is the king of klutz, the big kahuna of bad luck. That would explain how, back in March 1991, he happened to drop his keys in a Denver Safeway parking lot and, while retrieving them, was struck by a car backing out of a…
Ask Sam Haigler how things are going and he’ll give you that perplexed look, the one that seems to ask: What planet are you from, pal? Twenty years of battling chronic mental illness, just how well could things be? “That’s kind of a hard question for me to answer,” he…
In past years, the Regional Transportation District board elections have had all the political excitement and heart-pounding suspense of a Ross Perot infomercial. But this fall’s slate offers more drama than most congressional races; candidates have squared off over the future of Denver’s light-rail system, swapped insults over the accomplishments…
Attorney Tom Handley remembers the case: a hand-to-hand drug deal behind Argonaut Liquors on East Colfax. Another lawyer in his office had worked out a routine plea bargain with the prosecutor that would have given their client a low-level felony conviction and probation. But before the deal could be sealed,…
Growing up in the 1950s on the outskirts of what was then east Aurora, Robert Michael Pyle discovered a child’s paradise a short walk from his home: a wide ditch brimming with muddy water, its banks covered with thick weeds and stately cottonwoods that sheltered magpies and butterflies. As a…
C. Lodge, executive director of Adult Care Management, considers himself an innovative guy. He talks about breaking away from “the patriarchal relationship between provider and consumer” in the health-care field, about “empowering the client,” about setting up “virtual offices” and flex time so that employees who are single mothers can…
Ruth Blackmore leads a few of her south Boulder neighbors on a field trip, down a path she’s taken many, many times before. The excursion begins in a vacant field a few blocks from her home, where the trail is hemmed in by knee-high weeds and skittering grasshoppers; crosses a…
Down at the Regional Transportation District’s lofty LoDo headquarters, good help has never been hard to find. The pay at the troubled transit agency is competitive, the benefits are excellent–and in some cases, there’s even a bonus for quitting. Paying employees to leave isn’t yet common practice at RTD, but…
The attorney for the plaintiff wore a khaki jumpsuit and leg irons. Most of the witnesses were merely disembodied voices in the air. The audience, made up chiefly of agents from the U.S. Marshal’s office, looked bored. But David Merritt pressed on anyway, trying to show that the nation’s most…
The Insiders The Colorado Department of Corrections has spent millions of dollars in recent years to accommodate its new crop of “special needs” inmates–youthful offenders charged as adults but deemed too green to do hard time; elderly prisoners grown fragile in the joint; and the chronically mentally ill, who now…
