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When schoolteachers Walter and Maureen Keller bought a dilapidated mansion in a dicey northwest Denver neighborhood two years ago and then borrowed more than half a million dollars to transform it into a posh hotel, their friends and relatives told them they were making a big mistake. They may have…

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…

When he arrived in court for sentencing, Alex Woods Jr. had a firm grip on his public image–innocent, though proven guilty. Dressed in a well-cut black suit, blond, handsome and only 24 years old, he stood calmly as Denver District Judge Doris Burd gave him “generally the sentence that is…

Undress for success: As the ludicrous trend toward “dress-down” or “casual” days catches on, the clothing industry has spun off entire lines of pricey, Friday-appropriate duds for those folks whose actual casual attire doesn’t cut the corporate mustard, and personnel directors are keeping themselves busy writing memo after memo banning…

Terrified by the wave of child sex-abuse scandals that has American religious institutions awash in lawsuits, Denver’s churches are doing everything they can to screen pedophiles from the pool of workers staffing their preschool, Sunday school and daycare facilities. But critics say a number of local churches are taking this…

Talkin’ Trash Regarding Patricia Calhoun’s “The Art of the Deal,” in the July 12 issue: Patricia Calhoun has a lot of nerve to even talk about anyone else’s artistic taste. Her paper looks like trash, reads like trash, and is trash. Josie Paul Denver Thank you, thank you, thank you,…

Is the State of Colorado losing several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of real estate to a developer of plush Summit County mountain homes? The developer says no, but the current owner of the land–the Colorado Department of Transportation–says it isn’t so sure and that it will delay turning over the…

It’s impossible to tell which will last longer: the plutonium released from Rocky Flats, which remains radioactive for 24,000 years, or the argument over plutonium in nearby Standley Lake. Now the dispute has reached Olympian heights. Three U.S. Olympic Festival boating competitions are scheduled this week and next on the…

At 5 a.m., the green foothills near Fort Collins look spongy in the early light. Along a wide residential street of Laporte, a farming town turned suburb, a yellow windbreaker bobs in the distance. Shane Swartz, the national amateur middleweight boxing champion, has six 200-yard sprints to do. His back…

part 2 of 2 Oscar Lopez Rivera arrived at ADX in January. He says his first two months there were the hardest time he’s ever done. At first he was aware of only three other prisoners on his tier; two of them he recognized from Marion. Both had histories of…

part 1 of 2 Raymond Luc Levasseur arrived at his new Colorado home in February. Shackled and under heavy guard, accompanied by one other prisoner, he stepped off a government plane and was whisked to America’s high-tech version of a gulag archipelago: the Federal Correctional Complex, two miles outside the…

The last train to Clarksburg: The good folks of Clarksburg, West Virginia, never really knew what hit them. Late last year former Denverite JT Colfax, who dumped his given name of James Michael Thompson and took on the name of his favorite street when he moved to New York City…

When a book about Wellington Webb’s 1991 campaign for mayor of Denver hit local bookstores in April, a number of Webb’s political foes were certain something fishy was going on. After all, the author of To Make a Mayor is Deborah Tucker, who handled public relations for Webb when he…

Another rum-and-Coke order at the Mercury Cafe. Bartender, brace yourself: Chances are good the customer will take a sip, look confused and say, “This tastes really funny.” “It’s not even close to perfect yet,” admits Marilyn Megenity, owner of the restaurant/dance hall at 22nd and California streets. “It’s the soda…

A statewide program that pays for medication needed by people with AIDS recently dropped a drug, ganciclovir, that prevents blindness. The Assistance for AIDS-Specific Drugs (AASD) program was established in 1989 to give Colorado’s AIDS patients quick access to some medicines, eliminating much of the paperwork and many of the…

The dry-cleaning industry has been hit hard by the popular passion for saving the environment. While some shop owners have undertaken expensive renovations to reduce pollution caused by toxic chemicals, others have been socked with huge cleanup fees. Now dry cleaners are complaining that they can’t bear the costs alone…

For Pete’s Sake Karen Bowers’s “Mannix Depressive,” in the July 5 issue, while well-written, factually on the mark, entertaining and even illuminating in many respects, at first troubled me. It did not seem to expose R.W. “Pete” Peterson’s excesses so much as it may have served him yet one more…

part 1 of 2 Deadline-grabbing private eye R.W. “Pete” Peterson fits all the requirements of a media darling. He’s glib, likable, quotable and presentable in a slick-haired kind of way. And due to a few high-profile cases (the Denver investigator is credited with locating the daughter that TV star Roseanne…

part 2 of 2 In the years since Peterson had worked for Marvin Davis and John Masek to find out who was pilfering oil from their pipelines, the business partners had been involved in an acrimonious parting of the ways. As is often the case in such disputes, they devoted…

part 2 of 2 Concerned about the massive erosion washing billions of tons of soil off private lands each year, Congress in 1985 enacted several sweeping conservation measures. CRP was by far the biggest. The idea was simple. In exchange for taking “highly erodible” cropland out of production, the government…