In February 1994, the United Food and Commercial Workers union, Local 7, got a second chance. The previous spring the state’s largest labor organization had made a bid to unionize the Alamosa City Market’s one hundred or so grocery workers. But Local 7 had lost the 1993 campaign for new…

Life has just gotten even more difficult for local residents who need non-emergency medical care and who have the bad fortune to be uninsured. Because of a wave of funding cuts from University Hospital to the community health centers serving the metropolitan area’s poorest patients, those safety-net clinics have been…

Stephen Goodman is a hapless victim of the U.S. Postal Service’s Neanderthal personnel policies, another cog worn down and abused by an agency with a reputation for treating its career servers with the same amount of common sense found in Alice in Wonderland. Either that, or he is the employee…

Daytime-television viewers know Frank Azar as the fighting attorney who can retrieve the insurance settlement an automobile-accident victim deserves. His TV ads feature the crumpled remains of a car crash and an alchemic pledge: “Turn this wreck…into this check!” But today the promise has proven false, and Azar is furious…

Grant Ranch, a new subdivision sprouting up on the far edge of southwest Denver, has a very specific group of people in mind as potential homebuyers. “If you work for the City and County of Denver, this will hit you right where you live,” begin advertisements the developer published in…

Everyone knows lending money to a friend can be a dicey proposition. Dicier still is extending a loan to your boss. Today Emerson Holliday lives in a motel on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Until last year, though, he was a high-level government administrator, answering only to Colorado’s secretary of…

The three unmarked cars eased to a stop in front of the Frasiers’ Littleton residence around dinnertime on February 27, and five men in plainclothes got out. “They said they were here for my brother, Jamie,” recalls Robert Frasier, who answered the door. “They said they were going to arrest…

Kevin Doyle, suspected linchpin in a vast conspiracy involving the secretary of state (possibly), the Denver Broncos (sort of), lobbyist Freda Poundstone (definitely) and a Jesuit priest (at least one), leans back in his office chair and smoothes an explosive shock of frizzled hair back behind his neck. “This,” he…

You’re an ordinary person in Aspen, which is to say that at times your 15,000-square-foot rustic mountain cabin feels a little inadequate. Sadly, if you want to slap on a small addition–say, double the size of the place–you’re at the mercy of the Pitkin County Planning and Zoning Commission, a…

January 15 was a big day at the Salud Family Health Center in Commerce City, one of the government-funded, front-line primary-care clinics that treat more than a third of the state’s poor and indigent medical patients. After months of planning, the clinic was opening a new office. The expansion, which…

Good schools have always attracted parents considering a move to a new neighborhood. But suppose a developer took a more active approach–making the local schools better as a marketing tool? Tom Hannon remembers the day he convinced his boss that happy, wealthy schools could be part of a real estate…

Sometime just before midnight on December 19, 1984, the Wilberg Mine in Huntington, Utah, caught fire. Even now, investigators can’t agree on what sparked it–the best guess is either an overheated air compressor or an electrical arc on a piece of mining equipment. But the results were depressingly clear: Twenty-seven…

It was a medical problem for the ’90s: A rich benefactor offers a giant, cost-conscious health-care corporation $1 million to pay for a brand-new building–if the company agrees to use it to house a program that has lost money for the past twenty years. What to do? Several former employees…

For years, car crashes in Colorado have been big business for a handful of doctors hired to perform medical exams on people claiming to have been injured in the wrecks. Members of this small group of “independent medical examiners” were frequently retained by insurance companies hoping to prove the victims…

Margot Anderson was rear-ended while driving her car in 1989. Yolanda Martinez was hit in her car two years later. Together the two Colorado women helped change the state’s open-records laws to make it easier for the public to examine court documents once considered off limits. Their unlikely legal journey…

Glen Rains’s operation didn’t work out quite as he had hoped. “My penis is all globbed up on one side and dented on the other,” he explains slowly. “It’s out of contour. Before, it was reasonably concentric. Now there’s a divot on one side.” Not surprisingly, his wife, Kathy, is…

In the mountain town of Frisco, Bobby Gene Kelley was known as a drinker of great persistence. Soon after receiving one too many citations for driving under the influence of alcohol, he purchased a Lincoln Towncar limousine. When he felt like having a drink, he would call his driver, who…

The biggest pay-phone scam yet uncovered involved a San Diego-based company called AmTel. But Colorado has had its share, too. By 1994, eight years after it was founded, AmTel was the third-largest private pay-phone company in the country, with 8,500 phones installed–hundreds of them in Colorado–and plans for another 10,000…

Clayton Nelson very much enjoyed Unintended Consequences, a book by St. Louis stockbroker John Ross. Most of it, anyway. “It’s a hell of a good book,” says Nelson, a Gunnison gunmaker. “To a degree. It’s very anti-government and pro-gun. The hero ends up killing, by my count, 27 Bureau of…

Tom Beck began hunting forty years ago, shooting squirrels outside his tiny hometown of High Springs, in north Florida, when he was six years old. As he grew, so did his enthusiasm for hunting. This year he bought five separate bow-hunting licenses in three states, and last month he killed…

More than $5 billion worth of property in this state is exempt from taxation but still receives the services that every other piece of property does. Since you–the upstanding and law-abiding Colorado taxpayer–are bankrolling police and fire protection for these properties, you deserve to ask a few questions. Such as:…

It’s curious how the prospect of jail can make a rich man find his wallet. What’s even more curious is how Evergreen-based homebuilder Clyde Hoeldtke lost his again. This tale of a here-today-gone-tomorrow checkbook began about four years ago, when Gail Conolly, an assistant statewide prosecutor in Florida, began pursuing…