Mud wrestling: Politics has taken a nasty turn in Glendale since the combative Tea Party won three city council seats last spring and proceeded to demolish the unpopular strip-club restrictions pushed by Mayor Joe Rice. Rice and the Party faithful have duked it out over taxes, lobbyists and such consuming…
What would you do with $300 million? If you were a member of the feuding Magness clan, you might decide to build a casino in Black Hawk or even launch a new career as a caterer. Never mind that much of the money from the estate of cable pioneer Bob…
A Life or Death Matter Regarding Steve Jackson’s “The Final Judgment,” in the May 27 issue: While there is no question that Brandy DuVall would most likely still be alive if she had been home the evening she was abducted, I still do not believe that state-sponsored blood sport in…
Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive. This story is not about money. How could it be, when Adelaide de Menil and her husband, Ted Carpenter, have so much that it’s falling from the sky–or, technically, the beams of their eighteenth-century Long Island farmhouse,…
Hal Sargent takes a last glance at his notes before looking up at the panel of judges. Two years of prosecuting members of the Deuce-Seven Bloods gang for the May 1997 rape and murder of fourteen-year-old Brandy DuVall are nearly at an end. This is not the time to falter…
Linda McLaughlin sits on an examining table in the blood- and marrow-transplant unit of Rocky Mountain Cancer Centers. Though she’s a heavyset woman, there’s a fragility about her. Her voice, sweet and light like a child’s, trembles between exultation and grief and sometimes explodes in a mini-burst of laughter. She…
Life hasn’t been the same for J. Stewart Jackson IV since 1996, when he sold Denver Burglar Alarm, the business his family had run since 1917 (“Who Stole Denver Burglar Alarm?” September 17, 1998). An effort to start a new company last summer–Jackson Burglar Alarm–has resulted in a lawsuit filed…
Each time a neighborhood dispute breaks out in Denver and city officials throw up their hands in despair, they call one man to solve the problem: Steve Charbonneau. Perhaps it’s because Charbonneau’s nonprofit agency, Community Mediation Concepts, is easy to reach. One of its two offices is located inside city…
Getting soaked: The socialite crowd attending Ocean Journey’s pre-opening gala last weekend had to be nimble to dodge the wet weather, but it’s the general public that’s going to get hosed when they hit the ticket windows next month. No expense was spared in building the much-hyped, special-effects-laden mega-aquarium, and…
At the end of a narrow lot lined with semi trailers, Bob Eason peers through a chain-link fence separating him from the one and a half acres of land he once owned. Just off Arapahoe Avenue near 63rd Street and north of a posh housing development in Boulder, the property…
Once upon a time there was a game called baseball. This game was played, at the highest professional level, by young men of normal height, weight and ambition, in large American cities situated next to significant bodies of water. The object of the game was to hit a white ball…
His Girlish Figure Hey, Dan: I’m a 28-year-old woman. My husband is 30. We’ve been married four years and dated three years before getting married. We have a three-year-old child. Sexually, I’m of the “I’ll try anything once” school. We’ve experimented a lot over the last seven years, trying bondage,…
Little Grouse on the Prairie High school is indeed hell, as Patricia Calhoun points out in her May 20 column, “Pomp and Circumstances.” Although nothing excuses the shootings at Columbine, I am sure that that high school, like Kiowa High School and all other high schools, had no shortage of…
Over two decades after his death, everyone remains obsessed with Elvis Presley. Not to be fascinated with the man seems downright un-American. But our fascination has elicited so many facts about the King that these days it’s nearly impossible to be an Elvis generalist. The field is too crowded with…
Abigail needs all ten fingers to count the drugs she’s done in her seventeen years. “So I went from pot to alcohol…but then in the course of like two years, I started going into crystal meth, cocaine, ecstasy, GHB…What else have I done?” “Special K?” Her boyfriend, Reid, prompts her…
Indiana Jones sits at a desk in his Evergreen home, typing his memoirs. In this particularly outrageous and harrowing chapter, he is chasing illegal duck hunters through soup-thick fog in a small boat, when unexpectedly–crash! He hurtles into the side of a larger vessel. He’s thrown backward into the water,…
With John Elway finally acknowledging that he’s become too creaky for football, the Broncos find themselves in the unfamiliar position of having to gamble on a new quarterback. It won’t be the first time that Pat Bowlen has tried his hand at a game of chance. But here’s hoping the…
Westword writers and editors took home 31 writing awards–eleven of them first-place prizes–from last week’s Colorado Society of Professional Journalists banquet. The SPJ contest is the only one in the state in which Westword is allowed to compete against Colorado’s largest dailies. “Hitting Them Where They Live,” Westword’s series on…
Bob Appel is an early-morning kind of guy. A two-time state truck-driving champion who’s been hauling freight for Roadway Express for nineteen years, he usually slips behind the wheel of his orange-and-blue semi a little after 3 a.m. On this morning, April 15, a monsoon of snow is falling, the…
By far, attorney Kenneth S. Kramer was the best-dressed man inside Denver’s small-claims court on May 12. Wearing a finely tailored brown suit with crisp lines and sharp corners, the bespectacled Kramer sat high in his chair and waited patiently. Behind him sat a lanky cowboy in faded blue jeans…
Outside the St. Francis Center, a day shelter a few blocks from Coors Field, it seems as if the Colorado Rockies are drafting employees from the area’s minor leagues. Among the crowd of down-on-their-lucks milling around out front, a handful are resplendent in the green-and-purple windbreakers that have been the…
Pointing the finger: Since Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold rudely took their own lives after mowing down twelve other students and a teacher at Columbine High, thereby denying Americans of their right to revenge, it seems that everyone is looking for someone or something to hold responsible. The blame game…
