As Megan Jones waited to be prepped for her double mastectomy, three people stood by her. On her left was Warren, her husband of ten years. On her right were her closest friends in America: Dianne and Gary Cushner. They were all trying to comfort the 48-year-old Australian, who just…

In 1984, then Colorado Republican Party Chairman Bo Callaway set up a charitable corporation ostensibly to fund speech contests for Colorado high school students. The board of the tax-exempt, and therefore supposedly nonpartisan, entity was made up of state GOP heavyweights: Callaway, party vice-chair Mindy Meiklejohn, party secretary Carol Beam,…

What started out as an idealistic dream of employing inner-city youths to build a sanctuary for teen mothers and their children in Five Points has turned into an ugly legal battle pitting a grassroots activist against a multinational corporation. Schuller House was to be the centerpiece of Schuller International’s “community…

John Spearing thinks Colorado needs a parents’ rights amendment because of a self-esteem test Pueblo School District No. 70 gave his then-nine-year-old daughter four years ago. The written test, administered to all third-graders in the district at the time, asked children to answer “yes” or “no” to a series of…

Denver Post columnist Chuck Green recently reported that he’s raised $39,000 from his readers to, as he puts it, “sue the creep” who poisoned two Wheat Ridge dogs last month. There’s just one problem. He doesn’t have a case. Four columns into his crusade, the cash keeps flowing into the…

Mayor Wellington Webb threw around a lot of promises during his campaign for re-election last spring. But few have turned sour as quickly as the one he made to the schoolchildren of Denver: to appoint a cabinet-level “education czar” for the city. Five months after the election and more than…

If you thought Paul Weissmann, the 31-year-old bartender candidate for U.S. Senate, was just another “Mr. Smith” trying to go to Washington, it’s probably time to take another look. Jimmy Stewart may have ended up in Washington as a stooge-turned-crusader in the 1939 film, but Weissmann is nobody’s fool. He…

Fred Kummer, the developer Denver just agreed to give $25 million to subsidize the Adam’s Mark Hotel, lost a $5 million federal racial-discrimination suit in St. Louis ten months ago. But city officials in Denver–which has one of the most prominent black mayoral administrations in the country–knew about the St…

Ann Bonnell stands in front of a rusted steel gate at the Denver Botanic Garden’s Chatfield Arboretum and stares at the No Trespassing sign. In front of her, acres of pristine Colorado prairie wash up to the base of the Dakota Hogback, a long chain of ridged slopes that run…

Even as Tom Strickland’s campaign is in its infancy, questions continue to arise over his law firm’s role as a clearinghouse for thousands of dollars in political donations. The players in the latest flap: two prominent Denver businessmen who somehow got listed in federal election records as “employees” of Brownstein…

part 1 of 2 Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Tom Strickland has an image problem. And it seems he’s not above using a little fiction to help fix it. To win the Senate seat he’s running for in 1996, Strickland has to convince voters he’s not some slick 17th Street attorney…

part 2 of 2 Strickland sits in the darkness at the Trinity Grille and shakes his head almost imperceptibly when asked about the Coelho scandal. “I’m not specifically familiar with those facts,” he says finally. “I don’t recall ever having heard of it before.” When pressed, he loses his newly…

Linda Donnelly is what you could call a lawyer cop. As head of the Office of Disciplinary Counsel for the Colorado Supreme Court, she’s charged with making sure the 20,376 attorneys who belong to the Colorado Bar are respectable, upright citizens who zealously represent their clients without robbing them blind…

Republican congressman Scott McInnis of Glenwood Springs is fond of criticizing his Washington colleagues–especially Denver’s Pat Schroeder–for their taxpayer-supported travel. So last year, after running a re-election campaign based on reforming Washington, McInnis took a trip to South Korea and found a private interest to pick up the tab: the…

Newt Gingrich’s “Earning by Learning” program caught heat recently when the Wall Street Journal reported that a close friend of the House Speaker’s pocketed fully half of the west Georgia program’s private donations for his own compensation. The criticism came in light of Gingrich’s earlier comments that all of the…

part 1 of 2 Twelve-year-old Alicia remembers the date of her entry into Denver’s juvenile court system by heart. “July 17, 1991,” she says, without having to think. On that day, the State of Colorado formally took charge of Alicia, having determined her parents were at least temporarily unfit due…

part 2 of 2 Magistrate Melvin Okamoto runs Division 6 in Denver Juvenile Court. It’s a place where families in crisis shuffle in and out, in some cases demonstrating their dysfunction in full view of everyone present. On the rare occasion where two parents exist and show up at court,…

Hold on to your TV remote: TeleCommunications Inc., the world’s largest cable company, is ready to grant you absolution. Recently, the Englewood-based cable giant–which has 11.5 million subscribers across the country–has been running late-night television commercials announcing that August is “amnesty month” for cable pirates and warning that in September…

In October 1991, Coors Field was still just a blueprint, and the talk of the town was about the lease of the unborn diamond to the Rockies ballclub. The hoopla went something like this: After taxpayers were cajoled into shouldering a $161.3 million share of the $216 million ballpark, the…

part 2 of 2 “Clare’s book is poorly named,” says Mark Everson, director of the Program on Childhood Trauma and Maltreatment at the University of North Carolina. “She calls it Children Speak for Themselves. But her approach is not to put any weight on what the child has to say.”…

part 1 of 2 The little girl on the videotape pulls on her ponytail and tries to remember all the things she misses about her Daddy’s house. After all, it’s been a year since she’s been there. “My friends, and going around the neighborhood, and saying `Hi!’ to the old…

The Wildcat, the rickety roller coaster at the old Elitch Gardens, was known for turning the world upside down–and for turning a few stomachs. Now the brewing storm over what to do with the amusement park’s abandoned northwest Denver digs promises to do the same. The Denver City Council will…