The brass at the Colorado High Schools Activities Association were worried. They professed to love Gabe Lane as much as everybody else did, and in 1996 everybody heard about Gabe, a mildly retarded boy who was ruled ineligible by the CHSAA to play football with his high-school team. His plight…
Kevin Doyle, suspected linchpin in a vast conspiracy involving the secretary of state (possibly), the Denver Broncos (sort of), lobbyist Freda Poundstone (definitely) and a Jesuit priest (at least one), leans back in his office chair and smoothes an explosive shock of frizzled hair back behind his neck. “This,” he…
Years ago, Federal Boulevard was one of the most beautiful streets in Denver. Huge elms towered over the thoroughfare, which was lined with churches, libraries and large homes. Now the City of Denver is spending $2 million to bring back some of that old glory, hoping to undo a mistake…
In the past ten years, the City of Denver has sunk more than $2 million into the old Rossonian Hotel, hoping to lure a jazz supper club into the heart of Five Points. A few weeks ago the city got its club. Only it didn’t open in the Rossonian. It…
Sam Zakhem has this to say about Steve Curtis: “I don’t think he knows the truth when he stumbles over it.” And Steve Curtis has this to say about Sam Zakhem: “He called me last week and said, ‘Either you drop out of the race, or we’re going to the…
Show me the money! Show me the money! No, that’s not Cuba Gooding Jr. you hear screaming, it’s Denver City Councilman Ted Hackworth, now engaged in a dramatic confrontation of his own over the financial condition of Denver International Airport. Specifically, Hackworth is peeved that Mayor Wellington Webb keeps claiming…
What’s prison life without Prison Life? Imagine a full-service broker without his Wall Street Journal, a Park Avenue publishing executive without her New Yorker, a latte-guzzling cyberpunk without his Wired or–egads–a capitalist tool without a single copy of Forbes to while away the lonely hours on the corporate jet. It’s…
Under a proposal making its way through the state legislature, prison guards in Colorado won’t be taking any more shit from prisoners. In one of several measures that may make prison tougher for inmates, guards would get further protection from one of the more unpalatable forms of protest launched by…
For almost three decades, if you heard that the men’s basketball coach at the University of Colorado was going to hang around for another year, it was like learning that Captain Smith was still the skipper of the Titanic. In Boulder, basketball was a minor annoyance wedged between football season…
Net Gains Regarding Alan Prendergast’s “Nightmare on the Net,” in the March 6 issue: I have been following the heavy-handed tactics of the Church of Scientology, in general and on the Internet, since 1993. I took Scientology courses and escaped with relatively little damage way back in 1974. Your article…
The town is lousy with lawyers and journalists–the two professions have a sick, symbiotic relationship–and no matter how peeved the public gets, the infestation won’t clear up anytime soon. Not given U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch’s ruling Monday. “The trial will proceed as scheduled,” Matsch announced, in response to attorney…
“Leather, it lasts,” says Manuel Montoya, who runs the repair shop at Colorado Saddlery. “A Western saddle is a beautiful thing.” It is also a remarkably durable thing. A true Western saddle’s tree is still made of Ponderosa pine covered with sewn-on rawhide; its most basic parts–horn, stirrups, cantle–are all…
In the old days, buying a house in the mountain town of Black Hawk was like moving to Appalachia. Residents lined the cracked windows of their miners’ shacks with quilts to keep out the cold. Living-room floors were made of bare dirt. Porches sagged and chimneys crumbled, and many of…
A brush with fame: In opening arguments in the criminal case resulting from the death of Greg Lopez, defense attorney Walter Gerash compared the artistic aptitude of his client, Peter Schmitz, to that of Picasso and Diego Rivera. But the appraisal of Spicer Breeden’s estate offered a more objective view…
Jim and Jamie Nesmith are grieving over the death of David Polreis, a little boy they never met but who, under different circumstances, could have become their son. They had hoped to adopt the two-year-old Russian orphan when the woman who’d brought him to this country decided, after just seven…
Richard Frajola was a bigwig in the world of stamp and coin memorabilia and an expert on Western postal history, so when he moved to Colorado from Connecticut in 1990, local dealers gave him due respect. “Richard is one of the most knowledgeable stamp experts in the country,” says dealer…
Saving already broken ground on an expansion of Denver’s light-rail line south to Littleton, the Regional Transportation District now has its sights set on another ten-mile route from downtown to the western suburbs. But some of the residents in the path of the project say they don’t want it in…
Bill Clinton, the new night clerk at Motel 6, decreed last week that for the foreseeable future, not one federal nickel will be spent on human cloning research. And he asked privately funded geneticists to voluntarily stop such tinkering down in the lab. What can the man be thinking? Just…
So I was talking with Peter Schmitz the other night after he left the courthouse, and we traded some hair-styling tips. Has anyone else noticed how, in the early days of the trial, his ponytail was slicked back with gel and looked kind of dark, but now that a witness…
Murder, Ink Westword, I’m very impressed. Karen Bowers’s stories on two Colorado death-penalty cases (“A Trust Betrayed,” February 27, and “A Fight to the Death,” March 6) were excellent pieces of reporting and writing. While Bowers’s descriptions of the murders of Ashley Gray and Lorraine Martelli were as chilling as…
Last week Karen Bowers wrote about the capital murder case of Jon Morris, a crack addict and small-time hood who prosecutors say savagely raped and killed five-year-old Ashley Gray. Morris’s trial, scheduled to begin March 3, has been postponed until May 19; it’s the first of what are likely to…
Strange things happen around Lawrence Wollersheim. His businesses collapse. His Boulder apartment gets raided by federal marshals, his computers seized. When college students offer to help him rebuild his computer bulletin-board system, they receive threatening phone calls–anonymous voices urging them to stay away from Larry. A California judge who presided…
