part 1 of 2 On a recent sunny day in the beginning of March, Donald Mack relaxes in his Greenwood Village house, a brick-and-wood affair that sprawls over a couple acres off Belleview Avenue. An Arabian mare moves slowly in the side yard (the stallion is kept in Parker). A…

part 2 of 2 Perhaps because of the company’s financial straits, Mack’s lavish lifestyle began causing some discomfort in corporate headquarters. Harold Arnold, for instance, who sold Children’s Enrichment to CCCNA and who remained on the company’s board for a short time, says Mack’s style made him uneasy. “Sometimes you…

To anyone who has ever lived in a small town, the characters are as familiar as Main Street: The judge with the smudged reputation. The curmudgeon who criticizes everyone in a public position. The inveterate writer of letters to the editor whose conspiratorial diatribes seem to contain a grain of…

In a little more than six months, a small-time thief named Everett Francis Wann is scheduled to be released from federal prison, where he has spent the past eighteen months serving time for swiping aircraft parts sent to a Continental Airlines warehouse in Denver. Although Wann’s release may hold little…

Sometime this summer, the more than 1,000 people charged with felony drug offenses each year in Denver will begin flowing into a single courtroom on the second floor of the City and County Building. There, if everything goes according to plans now being finalized, William Meyer, a wiry and intense…

For nearly a year now, Cliff and Karen Fischer have glimpsed the future of health care. They are not thrilled with the view. In recent months, the Clinton administration and Governor Roy Romer have unveiled plans to correct health-insurance woes. Although different in some respects, both strategies rely on a…

How the drugs ended up in Avila’s hands is undisputed. According to federal investigators, Phil Guerrero was driving in Louisiana on August 21, 1987, when he was pulled over by state troopers who observed him making an illegal lane change. The troopers noted that Guerrero was acting nervous, and asked…

part 1 of 2 Nick Avila’s graduation from the University of Colorado’s law school in 1976 and subsequent career, no matter how short-lived, were nothing short of a miracle. A product of the city’s lower-class Globeville neighborhood, he seemed that rare person: someone who had stuggled to make good–and then…

Back on October 3, when the Denver International Marathon was still just a race and not a synonym for negative balance sheets, Leslie Fuller, who helped organize the event, was ecstatic. “It was fantastic,” she says, recalling her feeling on the day of the race. “It was one of the…

When state officials last week rejected the plan of Tim Blixseth and Big Sky Lumber Co. to acquire the Taylor Ranch, they may have saved themselves some headaches. Blixseth, of Oregon, had announced his proposal to buy the 77,000-acre ranch in south-central Colorado, log some of it and trade the…

Call it an anti-House Beautiful. Or the evil twin of Architectural Digest. For the past four months Life on Capitol Hill, a small monthly neighborhood paper that covers goings-on along the funky streets south of 20th Avenue and east of Broadway, has devoted a half-page in each paper to “Eyesores…

When Ron Maynard announced his plans to build a new railroad repair facility just outside the tiny Weld County town of Hudson in 1988, the government couldn’t be helpful enough. Maynard’s company, Rocky Mountain Railcar Inc., received tax credits and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fixed-interest loans from state…