The sun was beginning its descent behind the mountains when Vinh Ngoc Le stepped out into the backyard of his Aurora home. He inhaled the crisp, clean air, then let it go like a prayer. Le sat down in a patch of grass, took out a pad of paper and…
Robert Brown still remembers hearing the name Christian Lawless Harper on the radio in the summer of 1995. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation agent hadn’t forgotten the day he arrested Harper more than twenty years ago for interstate transportation of stolen vehicles. When Brown heard Harper’s name on the tail…
Playboy of the Western world: Federico Pena was called many things during his eight-year tenure as mayor of Denver–but “playboy” was not one of them. That, however, was the label laid on Pena–or at least Esai Morales, who played him–in ABC’s Sunday night sobfest, Dying to Be Perfect, the story…
A federal jury took just one hour earlier this month to decide that former Denver deputy sheriff Trina Burks-Richardson should receive nothing in her wrongful-discharge suit against the city. In addition, Burks-Richardson was ordered to pay the city’s attorney’s fees. The city, however, is going to have to wait in…
Marilyn G. wants a mate who is armed with more than a smile. And she knows that there are others in the patriot movement who feel the same way. So she has become Marilyn the Patriot Matchmaker. Now her unique Colorado-based business–a worldwide newsletter full of romance ads and patriot…
Shopping for a used car? Don’t want to put up with the usual hassles? Curtis Mannisto is your man. Curtis doesn’t bend the truth, and he never high-pressures the customer. You can bargain with him–up to a point–and you can rest assured that every vehicle on his lot has been…
The Flap Over Foreskins I thought Chris LaMorte’s story on foreskin regeneration (“Boys and Their Hoods,” November 14) was wacko enough. But the letters in the last issue! These guys don’t need a foreskin. They need a life. Jan Hall Denver I began restoring in late 1985 and have reasonable…
Beverly Beuster thought she was set for life. Transferred by Martin Marietta Corp.–now Lockheed Martin–from her hometown of New Orleans to Colorado in 1984, “I planned to be with them until I decided to retire at sixty-five or seventy years of age,” Beuster says. That was another twenty years or…
Enter MRS. GILCHRIST (a middle-school drama teacher, snapping fingers in “showbiz” style). MRS. GILCHRIST: Students, wake up! I need to see action! I need to see movement! Scene: It is 7:20 a.m. at the Flood Middle School auditorium in Englewood. Rehearsal will last exactly 45 minutes. This is no time…
It took years for Mary, a native of Peru, to escape the brutality and fear that her life in Denver had become. She finally worked up the nerve two years ago, when she took her five-year-old daughter and slipped away from the house where her American husband had virtually imprisoned…
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…
Denver law enforcement authorities have long feared that the Oklahoma City bombing trial might attract riffraff, troublemakers whose presence in town would lead to friction or even violence. And the cops were right. So far, there’s been at least one adolescent shovefest, a fight over money and a threat of…
Run for your life! Coming right up on ABC this Sunday: Dying to Be Perfect, the story of marathon runner Ellen Hart Pena’s ten-year battle with bulimia, starring Wings’ Crystal Bernard as the woman who brought a touch of splash to the office of Denver First Lady long before Wilma…
Frank Rich took his first drink when he was ten years old. “My dad came home from work with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s,” Rich recalls. “He put on a Hank Williams record, poured my older brother and I a drink, and I thought to myself, ‘Today I’m a man.’…
Is it too soon to speculate that Evander Holyfield’s eleventh-round TKO of Mike Tyson on November 9 was an outright fix? Nah. Probably not. In the dank sewer of professional boxing, you hardly ever go wrong supposing that chicanery is afoot–especially when the greedy, bellowing figure of promoter Don King…
The Real Thing Regarding Patricia Calhoun’s “Real Life. Real News. Real Bad,” in the November 14 issue: Thank you, Patricia Calhoun! While zapping through the dial, I caught the “Real News” and Ms. Pujo’s Channel 7 debut. My reaction was so strongly negative that I thought, in fairness, I ought…
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…
Dr. Paul Hamilton always chose his own path. Sometimes he created one out of thin air. Or sand. His son Skip recalls one such incident more than forty years ago in Egypt. Taking his family on an adventure, the Denver physician drove a station wagon into a stretch of desert…
Contempt of her court: When Denver voters ousted Judge Lynne Hufnagel last week, they created the first vacancy on Denver District Court’s general bench in six years–which means that lawyers who think they might look good in black are polishing up their resumes. But it also means the people charged…
Denver’s Journal Graphics did a killer business last year thanks to the world’s fascination with the O.J. Simpson murder trial. But it took just one computer glitch this past summer for the local television transcription firm to lose two-thirds of its business and be forced to lay off thirty employees…
Politicians’ claims to the contrary, Colorado’s business climate isn’t all blue skies and sunshine. Just ask the folks at Juniper Valley Products, an umbrella group of production and manufacturing companies whose sprightly name dresses up the fact that its employees are prison inmates. The bottom line is that state prison…
African immigrant Tseghe Foote came to the United States and opened a small business, only to discover it’s a jungle out there. In a federal civil-rights lawsuit filed last month in U.S. District Court, the native Ethiopian accuses Denver’s Tabor Center shopping mall of trying to evict her because of…
