In the early 1990s, residents of the 1600 block of Humboldt Street–a mix of retirees, young professionals and middle-class families–fought to save the block from crime and drug traffic. Today the neighborhood, situated between downtown Denver and City Park, is flush with activity fueled by the massive redevelopment that is…

Stew Jackson’s big band is at a rehearsal hall at 20th and Lincoln. Two hours from now, they’re scheduled to go on stage behind the Supremes at Red Rocks, but they can’t decipher the music. The arrangements are a train wreck, Jackson thinks–no one has gone to the expense of…

Licensed practical nurse Velma Gilbert says that on June 20, when she began working for Caring Hands, a home-health-care company that provides services for the Cherry Oaks Retirement Community in metro Denver, she was promised a $1,500 signing bonus. She never saw the bonus. During the next six weeks, Gilbert…

The afternoon of July 24, a squad of Denver SWAT cops stormed the Walker family’s home at 2639 Humboldt Street to serve warrants on Kenneth Walker and his cousin Alvin Young for possession of a controlled substance. On Walker, they say, they recovered six-hundredths of a gram of crack cocaine…

The harassment, says Philip Moore, started soon after he became a janitor at the University of Denver. Gay-sex jokes. Racist comments. Sexual harassment. All of it, he contends, coming from his boss, Al Romero, who Moore and other former employees contend was a one-stop shop of crude behavior. Romero, says…

The camouflaged kids have taken up arms. They’re fighting to claim territory, weaving around old houses, wending their way through junked cars and trucks on this field in industrial north Denver. Phhht. A hit. The proprietor of the paintball battlefield is Floyd Samuel, and he knows all about war. He’s…

New York writer Ray Jadwick had been through a lot in his journey out West. Roswell, New Mexico: He bought a pair of rattlesnake boots from a roadside Indian who kept calling him “Bro.” Tombstone, Arizona: He ran into a guy who thought he was Johnny Ringo reincarnate–the legendary foe…

On the night of April 1, 22 members of the Mt. Gilead Baptist Church–twelve adults and ten kids–dropped by a Perkins restaurant in Aurora for some coffee and pie. When they asked to be seated together, the manager refused. When they offered to wait or break up into smaller groups,…

Crayton Jones surveys Welton Street, the spine of Five Points. Outside his C&B Cleaners at 2748 Welton, he spots four barren trees. “The trees are dead,” he says. “He’s supposed to maintain ’em all.” He’s talking about James Parker, former American Legion commander and longtime Points activist. Over the past…

Welton Street isn’t the only maintenance district facing problems. But while Welton Street’s battles are internal, the major threat to other districts is coming from the outside. Specifically, from the Denver Water Board, which is contemplating charging a retroactive “tap fee” for water lines that were installed years ago. Those…

Sheila Black was fired from her job as a Jefferson County court clerk in November 1996 after her employers accused her of stealing $79 of public money. But the Jeffco District Attorney’s Office didn’t charge her with a crime–felony embezzlement–until a full eight months later. And last month, after the…

Mike Quintana is still making headlines for spraying three graffiti taggers in the face last fall. Now he’s thinking about running for Denver City Council and has even hired a campaign manager. There’s just one problem: Quintana lives in Arvada. And his campaign manager lives in Pueblo. “I’m doing this…

Anne Sulton’s ride looks like a gangsta Rolls-Royce: gleaming silver with flared fenders, spoked wheels and a long, snout-like hood. The car is a “Phantom,” a radically modified Pontiac Firebird, and Sulton, the controversial civil-rights attorney who defended cop killer Gil Webb II last summer, doesn’t look like she should…

What happens when the city wants to evict you but your landlord doesn’t? He could lose not just a tenant, but also his property. Bob Brown owns a house at 1339 Ogden Street; for the past five years he’s rented the carriage house to Michael Pisarck. Last December Pisarck was…

Bounty hunter Duane “Dog” Chapman may be about to retire, but he still looks like a Hell’s Angel. His hair is long and blond, and his teeth look like they’ve been regularly kicked out and then put back in place. His upper canines are as big as fangs, and his…

The Urban Spectrum, Denver’s black newspaper, is no stranger to writing articles about racism and discrimination. But it now finds itself in new territory: A white male has sued the paper for failing to hire him as an editor. Jim Emery filed suit last May in U.S. District Court, claiming…

A few weeks ago, neighbors reported a fire smoldering in John McBride’s garage. Firefighters were able to save the detached structure that sits across the street from Manual High School in north Denver. But heirlooms belonging to McBride’s deceased father–a piano, furniture and some old photos–were consumed. Fire-department investigators have…

For months, someone had been tagging the city-owned west Denver boxing gym that Mike Quintana runs with his father. So when Quintana heard some kids rattling their spray cans out back one night last October, he grabbed them and called the cops. And just as the kids were about to…

Even before the accident, Mike Grainger wasn’t quite right. “We called him ‘Mike Grainger, Mike Grainger, Mike Grainger,'” remembers Barb Thomsen, one of his former co-workers at the Burlington Northern railyards in Alliance, Nebraska. “He always repeated everything. He was kind of slow in the head.” But everybody liked Mike…

Paul Stewart, founder and curator emeritus of Denver’s Black American West Museum, stands before the third group of schoolchildren he’s seen today, this time at Greenlee Elementary School, where the students are mostly Hispanic. He’s here for an assembly celebrating Martin Luther King Day, just another in a long line…

Derek Cianfrance, the local filmmaker headed for the Sundance Film Festival in a few weeks with his first feature, Brother Tied, had good reason to become unhinged during the process of making the film: At one point, his landlord locked him out of his editing room. The solution? Equally unhinged…

There are no moments of luxury in the life of a horse-abuse investigator. It’s a world of hiding in bushes with video cameras, sipping coffee and smoking cigarettes while staking out some lonely pasture, looking for signs of animal mistreatment. Danger? How about escaping from a rake-wielding horse owner or…