“Mind if I smoke?” asks Frank Rich, Denver’s drunken ambassador. Who could mind? We’re sitting in Club 404, a 53-year-old bar in the heart of Denver, a town that’s suddenly turned into America’s new-age sin city, a place where vice is very nice — if, in fact, it qualifies as…
Back when Ivan Suvanjieff was a society columnist for exactly 87 days, Cherry Hills matrons “would rub their fake boobs on my arm,” he remembers. Today he’s rubbing shoulders with Nobel Peace Prize winners — “the Nobels,” he and partner Dawn Engle call them. As in, “The Nobels told us…
The lights dimmed, and there on the screen at the front of the room was a sight as obscene as anything that’s ever hit Judge John Kane’s court: the towering incinerator of Building 771 at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. Glowing. To FBI agent Jon Lipsky, who’d been investigating…
Plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years. By that count, the sixteen years these plaintiffs had waited for their day in court was just a drop in the leaky bucket. But by Tuesday morning, when opening arguments finally got under way in the class-action suit of about 12,000 property owners…
Pancho Villa if you don’t like this country You’re gonna stop here We don’t need your beans We don’t need your beer… While three Colorado lawmakers tour the Arizona border with the Minutemen, shooting off their mouths — but not their guns, not yet — about introducing legislation next session…
The savings of the poor are made little by little; they come out of that broken, fragmentary condition of humanity to helpfulness and self-respect. — Reverend Oscar McCullough, 1890 Denver City Council was packed Monday night, overflowing with supporters of the city’s 10-Year Plan to End Homelessness, a proposal that…
Like its commander in chief, the Air Force Academy has weathered some rough times lately. Last Thursday it hosted the world premiere of Jewel of the Rockies: The U.S. Air Force Academy’s First 50 Years, a Rocky Mountain PBS film that airs at 9 p.m. September 19. Producer Trux Simmons,…
No question, Kumbe Ginnane lied. At least twice. He lied when University of Colorado cops, and then the Boulder District Attorney’s Office, asked if he’d had sexual contact with a coed on October 19, 1990. No, he said then, he hadn’t had sex of any kind with her. He told…
I was feeling safer already. The demonstrators who’d gathered on the plaza outside of the Central Library at high noon on Monday were waving the flag and protesting a collection of novellas, not because the comic books were in Spanish — oh, no — but because they were pornographic, depicting…
One day last week, a construction crew building a behemoth in the 400 block of South Franklin Street fired up shortly after 6 a.m. According to city rules, they’re not supposed to start work until 7 a.m. — but when “Housing Goes Frothy to Flat in the Denver Area,” as…
At nineteen, Sonja DeVries had her life mapped out. She was going to go to college, become a psychologist, work with children, have children. The future looked blindingly bright. Last July 18, Sonja enjoyed a belated birthday celebration with co-workers, then put her party hat on the front seat of…
I lost a bet. That’s why I’m playing booster for a morning meeting with the marketing advisory committee of the Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau when I should be over at the Grand Hyatt, sitting in on “Arresting Computer-Assisted Reporting: Using Data to Cover Cops.” The Investigative Reporters and…
Before Donald Young was shot, before suspect Raul Garcia-Gomez got his job at the Cherry Cricket, before John Hickenlooper was elected mayor, even before Tom Tancredo was elected to Congress, Pablo came to Denver. He grew up in this city, attending elementary school here, then middle school and finally West…
Nineteen-year-old Quincy Shannon has a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But if you’re a budding broadcast journalist, as Shannon is, that puts you in the right place at the right time. On the second weekend of June last year, the place was LoDo, where…
Quincy Shannon’s journalism professor wanted him to capture some “action” on videotape. Give the kid an A for effort: His video sparked the town’s hottest story last summer. Not that Shannon got any credit for his work. No, all he got was a misdemeanor rioting charge — and a date…
Free speech doesn’t come cheap. On Tuesday evening, protesters wearing yellow, white, black and red converged on the University of Colorado from all sides. Officially a show of support for Ward Churchill and academic freedom, the Four Directions March could just as well have been a dress rehearsal for Denver’s…
The University of Colorado Alumni Association was finally fed up with the beating its alma mater had taken in the press. “CU is still about 25,000 great students: taking midterms, enduring chemistry labs, sweating through math homework, memorizing art history, examining business law and agonizing over how they can best…
The Kobe Bryant case. The University of Colorado football-recruiting mess. The Air Force Academy sex-assault scandal. “If you asked me what state all this was happening in,” says attorney Wendy Murphy, “I would put Colorado near the bottom of the list.” That’s because this state had developed a reputation as…
“If you are searching for the right place to go to college, look at the University of Colorado at Boulder,” urges CU’s website. “It’s a place of beauty and academic prominence at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. A sense of vitality and curiosity fills the campus, and yet it’s…
A year ago next week, Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell threw a big, wet blanket on the Colorado Republican Party — almost as big, and wet, a blanket as he’d thrown on Colorado Democrats nine years earlier, when the first-term senator abandoned the political party that had already seen him through…
Back in May 2003, Denver believed it had made the bling-bling bigtime when Russell Simmons, founder of Def Jam Records, stood beside then-mayor Wellington Webb and promised to bring his Hip-Hop Festival and Summit to the Mile High City. Denver’s still waiting for him to make good on that promise…
On the first day of school I awoke with a sick feeling in my stomach. It did not hurt, it just made me feel weak. The sun did not sing as it came over the hill. — Bless Me, Ultima By now, University of Colorado president Betsy Hoffman must long…
