The Denver Police Department has embarked on a plan to compile a high-tech database of information on kids who hang out on the 16th Street Mall, a move that civil libertarians and youth advocates warn has dangerous implications because it will open police files on kids who’ve done nothing illegal…
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…
For a fellow who’s regarded as one of baseball’s old goats, commissioner Bud Selig has been remarkably flexible when it comes to certain innovations. While he was still “acting” commissioner–an impermanence that lasted six years–Selig pushed each league to split into three regional divisions and add a wild card team,…
See Bill Run Regarding Ward Harkavy’s “Making Book on Bill Owens,” in the August 6 issue: Okay, okay! I surrender! If I promise to vote for anyone other than Bill Owens, will you quit writing is-he-or-isn’t-he stories about Owens’s supposed ties to the religious right? The only thing more boring…
Moments after the cuffs clicked shut around his skinny little wrists, Lamont knew he was in trouble. The handcuffs were a gift from his dad, a Boulder County sheriff’s deputy, who’d finally relented after months of pestering. The set was cheap, made in Japan, with flimsy alloy keys, but perfect…
Bill Owens was a most confident man and, as always, a cordial host when a reporter entered the air space of his gubernatorial campaign headquarters at I-25 and Colorado Boulevard last week. “We’ve got cold water and some warm wine–some of that wine-in-a-box,” he offers. Jesus Christ. Wasn’t he the…
When the telephone was invented in 1876, the major telecommunications issue was most likely whether “hello” or “hoy-hoy” would be the appropriate way to answer the newfangled device. These days, the telephone industry is a touch more complex, as frustrated US West customer Anna Croteau discovered during the last week…
For the moment, Sergeant Attila Denes of the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office is a prisoner of his own department’s top-notch security. He waves gamely through the glass of the county jail’s medical center, trying to signal the deputies in an electronic control booth eight feet away to open the door…
Natural bored killer: It’s taken almost twenty years, but hit man Charles Harrelson finally had his day in court–again. Convicted of the 1979 Texas murder of federal judge John H. Wood Jr., and now serving life in the federal Supermax facility in Florence, Harrelson has been angling for a new…
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…
They’re old. Starting with the left guard, who’s undergone twenty surgeries since high school, they’ve got more dents than a demolition derby. The owner has painted lurid orange flames on their new unis, so they look less like Super Bowl champs than an arena-ball club on the make. After crying…
While real-estate values soar across Denver, one neighborhood–Overland Park–has been left in the dust. A few miles down the river, the Central Platte Valley is finally fulfilling its century-old promise, transforming its gritty past into the city’s future centerpiece: already home to Coors Field, an amusement park and a children’s…
There are no farm implements left at the Clatworthy Company, the Fort Morgan business that was once the oldest International Harvester distributor in the United States. They’ve all been auctioned off. In 1990 Clatworthy decided to concentrate on automobiles instead of farm machinery. But because of the GM strike, there…
A Detoxing Situation On the behalf of every person who has ever had to deal with living institutionalized, I applaud Eric Dexheimer’s “Used and Abused,” in the July 23 issue. I was once inside our system of social services, whose greatest injustice has always been disorganization and a gross lack…
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…
Dressed in shorts and a short-sleeved golf shirt, his face flushed with sun and wind, Dave Liniger roams his Denver Tech Center offices this sultry summer morning with more than the usual bounce in his step. When you own the company, you can wear whatever you want to work, and…
Once beaten: GOP political candidate John Gonce, whose campaign for the statehouse in Denver’s District 1 gets more gonzo with his every passing utterance, told the Denver Post this month that he’s running to “champion the cause” of men falsely accused of domestic violence. Gonce said his 1989 assault conviction…
It seemed like a good idea at the time. In May, when state senator Bob Martinez stood before the General Assembly and asked lawmakers to strike Sand Creek from a state capitol statue commemorating Colorado’s Civil War battles, he was commended. After all, what happened on the banks of Big…
Beat it. That’s what the City of Denver told a group of drummers who had been gathering on summer Sundays in Cheesman Park. With their shakers, rattles, bongos and congas, the loosely organized, spiritually oriented percussionists–anywhere from five to fifty of them–tapped out rhythms they hoped would bring them closer…
A new, expensive–and largely untested –heroin detoxification technique that promises addicts relief from withdrawal symptoms “while you sleep” is getting a cool reception among state regulators and Denver’s established substance-abuse professionals. In particular, an aggressive marketing campaign promising to cure people who are already being treated in methadone clinics is…
The New York Yankees lost three times last week. You could look it up. But the rest of the picture remained pretty grim. Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter was still hitting .320 and keeping company with singer Mariah Carey. David Wells, the huge, unkempt moose of a Yankees pitcher who paid…
A Schlong Time Coming I’m as enamored of the title of Harrison Fletcher’s July 23 “The Schlong Goodbye” as I am with the copyrighted, patented and trademarked “The Penisster System” being the name of the medical prosthesis developed by Henry Badgett. The article itself is another thing. Mr. Badgett is…
