The trading floor starts filling up fifteen minutes before the opening bell. But these aren’t stockbrokers wearing three-piece suits and chomping on antacid tablets. They’re mostly middle-aged men in golf-casual clothes. Above them are four clocks: London, New York, Denver and Tokyo. They stare intently at stock charts and listen…

They met in an Internet chat room. She sent him a school picture so he would know what she looked like. After a couple of weeks, he told her that he loved her. They set up a date to meet at the Westminster Mall for a Coke. But there were…

There have been several recent John L. Morris sightings up in the Fryingpan Valley, a remote area northeast of Aspen in the wilds of Pitkin County. Locals have seen Morris driving his sport utility vehicle up the valley and hanging around his three-cabin compound just outside Basalt. But what everybody…

Ken Storch and LJ Dalicandro are on a case, the case of a lifetime. They pick an isolated booth in the corner of a suburban Denny’s, light up thin cigarillos and give the restaurant the once-over before they start talking. When coffee arrives, Dalicandro whips out a buck knife to…

If you were to speculate about the people who do business in the downtown US West office building based on the cars parked immediately around it, you’d think that 64 percent of them were physically disabled. On a recent business day, an average of 14 of the 22 available metered…

It’s the beginning of summer for many high-school kids, but a group of gangly teenage girls files into a Thornton school gymnasium one May evening for a different type of summer school. Each of them carries athletic bags and half-gallon Thermoses full of ice water. Once inside the gym, some…

Jose Luis Olivas and Fernando Torres Hernandez were hanging out in the alley off 27th and Larimer at about noon on April 10, sharing a quart of beer, when a white pickup truck pulled up to them. The man inside the truck gestured at them with his hands, but his…

The 140 firefighters of the Castlewood Fire Department protect some of metro Denver’s ritziest homes, including those of several Denver Broncos celebrities. Now the firefighters are getting in a few hits of their own, using a controversial pay-incentive program as a rallying cry to try to oust the existing fire-district…

Kelly Zielbauer says she wasn’t concerned about the health dangers she faced while working in the Colorado Department of Agriculture’s Standards lab, despite the fact that she handled lethal chemicals daily. But when clumps of her hair fell out and she started getting headaches, she asked to be reassigned to…

A fundraising event for a kidney transplant ended up feeling like a kidney punch to its organizers. On March 23, Regas Christou, owner of The Church nightclub, at 1160 Lincoln Street, held a benefit for one of his former employees who needs money for a new kidney. The event and…

Neighbors of the old Lowry Air Force Base are teed off over a proposed golf course that would locate several holes on top of an abandoned landfill there. And while the Lowry Redevelopment Authority has signed off on plans to build the course, which is supported by hundreds of senior…

For such a high-stakes game, not many people knew about it. After years of struggle, a cowboy named Glenn Miller and a ragtag assortment of investors lost a potential pot of gold to lawyers bankrolled by the giant Vail ski resort. If it had been a poker game, Glenn Miller…

Three Lakewood police cars and a K-9 unit responded to a call from the Cherry Bomb Lounge at around 1 a.m. on February 8. The cops were tipped off by someone at the West Sixth Avenue bar who said there was a wanted woman inside. She had been eluding Arapahoe…

The first volley of bullets smacked into police chief Kris Monson’s parked squad car at 1:30 a.m., while he was sitting behind the wheel in downtown Olathe, doing paperwork. The windshield shattered into a spider web, and the young Western Slope lawman hit the floor. He felt a sharp pain…

Denver may soon be the last city in the metropolitan area where you can legally buy a one-on-one table dance from a stripper and hand a tip directly to her. With the help of a religious-right legal foundation based in Arizona, virtually all of Denver’s neighboring cities have adopted ordinances…

The hearing has dragged on for two days of testimony from police officers, a special-education teacher and Division of Motor Vehicles investigators. Now it’s time for yet another expert witness: a forensic document examiner who’s been trained by the FBI. He explains how to use infrared lasers to analyze handwriting,…

Writers for Soldier of Fortune magazine probably don’t complain too much when editor/publisher Robert K. Brown monkeys with their stories. After all, how many editors keep a pair of Soviet assault rifles next to their desks? Brown grabs the rifles to emphasize a point. “The anti-gun forces are fucking irrational,…

An unusual marriage of convenience between a northern Colorado environmental group and loggers could end in divorce quicker than you can say “Timber!” For the moment, however, the two sides, which have butted heads many times in the past, are united in protest against the way the U.S. Forest Service…

The only person charged by police in connection with last summer’s “Ghost Bridge” crash in rural Arapahoe County that killed two young girls has become something of a phantom herself. When 21-year-old Jennifer Lynn Wambeke, whose younger sister was one of the two killed in the June 21 accident, failed…

Boulder law enforcement agencies neglected to take care of their Christmas shopping early last year, and rampaging students at the University of Colorado made them pay for it. When riots broke out last May in the area known as The Hill in Boulder, local cops felt they didn’t have enough…

A lawsuit filed by a Colorado state agency against the U.S. Department of Defense to try to force removal of unexploded munitions from the former Lowry Bombing Range could send shock waves throughout the West. Officials of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment say they were forced to…

If you see the guy in the next cubicle typing frantically during his lunch break, it may not be because he’s trying to meet an important deadline. He may just be hooked into a worldwide sex network based in a drab suburban Denver office building. Men from around the world…