United Airlines and Argenbright Security
It's unlikely that recently ousted United Airlines CEO James Goodwin has ever been groped by the roguish band of felons, foreigners and friskers who work for Argenbright Security, the company with whom United contracts to man the radar detectors at Denver International Airport. But that doesn't mean there aren't hundreds of thousands of United customers, unionized employees and Wall Street investors who'd like to get their hands on him. Goodwin was finally forced out of the company in late October -- trailing a $3 million golden parachute behind him -- but he left behind a list of accomplishments that includes a multitude of bitter labor negotiations with pilots, mechanics and flight attendants; a disastrously failed attempt to merge with American Airlines, which caused United's stock to plummet; a company now known as one of the worst when it comes to customer service, flight delays and cancellations; and his famously leaked October 18 memo declaring that United "will perish sometime next year," if it can't control the financial losses that built up in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks.
As for Argenbright, which was responsible for security at fourteen major airports, including all of those from which terrorists took off on September 11, the Federal Aviation Administration revealed in October that the company had a penchant for hiring felons. Then Argenbright proved it in November, when seven screeners at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport were fired after they let a man pass through security with knives and a stun gun in his carry-on luggage. Eventually, airports in Boston and Phoenix fired the company...and then Argenbright itself fired its CEO and founder, Frank Argenbright Jr.
Meanwhile, the company promised to hire 150 new employees at DIA and raise salaries to $11 an hour after wait times in Denver's security lines grew longer than three hours -- and earned the airport a reputation as the country's worst this fall.
And now that Goodwin's looking for a job...
Scott McDonald and Tom Martino
In "The Gambler," Kenny Rogers sang, "You got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away, know when to run."
Tom Martino, the self-proclaimed "Troubleshooter" on whom Coloradans have long relied to help them ferret out consumer fraud and deceit before they lay down their own money, apparently doesn't know how to do any of those things. Earlier this year, Martino was bilked out of $50,000 by his boss, then-Fox News managing editor Scott McDonald. Of course, McDonald was very good at what he did -- namely, fooling people into "investing" in glorious-sounding projects such as IPOs for National Airlines and Verizon as well as a Krispy Kreme franchise, then gambling their money away -- at least according to an eighteen-count grand jury indictment filed in July.
Unfortunately for McDonald, he fooled people who aren't used to staying quiet: namely, a varied group of high-profile media and public-relations types, including the Troubleshooter, who tipped off authorities.
Rogers's song continues: "Now, every gambler knows the secret to survivin' is knowing what to throw away, knowing what to keep. Cause every hand's a winner and every hand's a loser, and the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep." The best that McDonald, who pleaded guilty to a single count of securities fraud in November, can hope for is a clean bed at the court-mandated half-way house where he will now be living.
Ocean Journey: The Fantasy and Ocean Journey: The Reality
When Colorado's Ocean Journey opened in June 1999, it was swimming in corporate money, positive media attention and high hopes. Visitors flocked to the $93 million aquarium, the city's newest and largest attraction. Here, it seemed, was a piece of Denver's puzzling quest to become a world-class city.
But just beneath the sparkling surface, some people were already wondering how an aquarium thousands of miles from the nearest ocean, one that featured native Colorado fish species like the brown trout (fun to catch, boring to look at) and a mismatched jambalaya of tropical fish, birds, tigers and otters, was going to attract enough visitors to pay its extensive bills over the long haul. The answer? It wasn't.
Things began to get really fishy this past June, when the aquarium's new CEO, Doug Townsend, announced that Ocean Journey would do something it had vowed not to do for several more years: apply for entry into the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District, an entity that collects a 0.1 percent sales tax in the metro area and distributes millions of dollars each year to more than 320 organizations. Ocean Journey had promised two of its major corporate donors that it would wait until 2005 to apply as a condition of receiving their money; the donors didn't want the aquarium to suck up SCFD money that could be used to help other nonprofits.
But Ocean Journey's really big splash came in July. That's when Townsend declared that the place was just about out of money and planned to default on $57 million in bonds and a $6.1 million loan backed by the City of Denver. The organization subsequently laid off twelve employees and accepted the resignation of its founder, Judy Peterson Fleming. By the end of the year, with attendance down by nearly 30 percent, it was crystal clear that the aquarium will need a serious life preserver and a major bailout to remain afloat. Whether that help will come from the city -- and thus the taxpayers -- remains to be seen.
In the meantime, those circling fins in the Central Platte Valley aren't making us feel very secure.
Doug Dean and Gloria Sanak
As the young and fiery Speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives, Colorado Springs Republican Doug Dean was definitely going places. But nobody knew it would be over a fence and through a jimmied-open basement window of the home he'd shared until very recently with his fiancée, Gloria Sanak.
Once mentioned as a likely gubernatorial candidate, Dean took a sledgehammer to his political aspirations in the wee hours of May 10, when he used a screwdriver to break into the house and then hid in a darkened bedroom. When Sanak, who'd broken up with Dean earlier that night and changed the locks, returned and found him lurking in her bedchambers, she called 911 in a panic and fled to a neighbor's house -- followed closely by the agitated Speaker, who'd just marked the end of the legislative session a few hours before.
Despite a Colorado law Dean helped pass that says police must make an arrest if there is any indication of domestic violence (see Colorado Avalanche goalie Patrick Roy, who was inducted into the Hall of Shame last year), no charges were filed against Dean. And although Sanak, a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, subsequently filed a restraining order against him, she soon withdrew it. And within a few days, the couple appeared together at a press conference, acting like there was nothing wrong between them and blaming the media for Dean's troubles.
After a follow-up investigation, Denver DA Bill Ritter concurred with the lack of charges against Dean. Nevertheless, the Speaker announced that he'll retire from politics when his term expires next year. He said he made the decision prior to his little domestic dust-up. And in September, a reunited Dean and Sanak were married in a small, unpublicized ceremony at her home.
The window had no doubt been fixed by then.
Jake Jabs and Dean Singleton
His animal instincts may have crowned him the king of Denver's furniture-store jungle, but Jake Jabs -- and his poofy white hairdo -- came off looking like the court jester when he sued the Denver Newspaper Agency two months after the U.S. Justice Department approved the agency's existence as the business arm of the newly merged Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News. The American Furniture Warehouse magnate, whose ubiquitous TV commercials and full-page newspaper ads have made him a metro-area household name, claimed -- correctly -- that his ad rates were going to skyrocket as a result of the merger. But he also accused Post publisher and DNA chairman Dean Singleton of having lied to him about how much.
Jabs blustered his way through a March 30 press conference, lined up a few like-minded business owners around his rustico war table and blew legal smoke. Luckily for the spectating public, Singleton took the bait. And for a few choice days, these two powerful and egotistical bullies traded barbs like a couple of schoolkids at recess. Some of Singleton's best comments, as quoted in the two papers he runs, included "[Jabs has] terrorized both newspapers for 25 years"; "Jake Jabs would have to get on his knees to run ads in The Denver Post"; and "I am not afraid to call Jake a bully, a liar and a deceptive businessman. I am looking forward to a Denver Post and a Rocky Mountain News with no American Furniture ads." Jabs took Singleton up on that, pulling the $3 million he'd been spending annually on the two dailies and promising not to return.
By mid-April, however, it became clear that Jabs's strong-armoired tactics weren't going to work, especially after U.S. District Judge John Kane denounced the lawsuit faster than newlyweds drop $599 on a dinette set. Jabs, who'd had months to protest the JOA to the Justice Department before it signed off on the joint operating agreement, then dropped his case. Oh, and he resumed advertising with the dailies at the end of July. "As CEO of this company, I have to make decisions that are best for this company," he said. "I have to swallow my pride."
Too little too late for the ottoman empire.
The Denver Post and Invesco Funds
On July 1, Denver Post sports columnist Woody Paige wrote about a chance meeting with an inebriated executive from Invesco Funds, the company that had paid $120 million to put its name on Denver's new stadium. According to Paige, the fellow said that he and his colleagues had taken to calling the oddly shaped arena "The Diaphragm." And with that, Paige's column started one of the most idiotic chapters in the history of Denver journalism.
Invesco's CEO, Mark Williamson, was so incensed by the column that he accused Paige of having made up the executive's very existence, not to mention the conversation, and threatened to sue both the columnist and his employer -- for what, we're still not sure. A day or two later, Williamson acknowledged that the conversation had taken place and backed down from his threats. (Almost no one pointed out that the stadium looks nothing like a diaphragm.) The matter might have died down and blown away at that point, except that someone at the Post came up with the harebrained idea to stop calling Invesco Field at Mile High by its real name. Instead, the paper -- as announced in a story and in an editorial -- would refer to the place only as "the new Mile High stadium."
Was it revenge for the threatened lawsuit? No, the Post said. Was it shameless pandering intended to garner subscriptions? Of course not, the Post insisted. Was it just plain stupid, and a violation of the basic tenets of journalism? Yes. On August 9, the same day the Post made its announcement, it ran a front-page photo of the stadium's real name as displayed in a logo over the main gates, with a caption below featuring the stadium's made-up Post name.
As we all know, a picture is worth a thousand words.
David Schultheis, John Andrews, Mark Paschall
What's this? A threesome in a Hall of Shame dedicated to couples? Well, why not? This trio of legislators loves to tell us what to do with our personal lives -- and wastes countless hours doing so. Now it's our turn to honor them for a truly shameful little ménage à trois.
Representative Dave Schultheis gets the first nod. He's the Colorado Springs Republican (surprise, surprise) who introduced a bill that would have forced all couples considering a divorce to undergo a year of counseling. And as if the measure weren't ridiculous enough on its own merits -- invoking the rage of both liberals, who felt it was an insult to women, and conservatives, who want less government intrusion, not more -- Schultheis then invited homophobic, morally pejorative Dr. Laura Schlessinger to testify in favor of it. In the end, though, the "doctor" was only able to send a supportive letter, and the bill was overwhelmingly defeated. (A fun sideshow to this controversy, which brought lots of embarrassing attention to Colorado, occurred when Schultheis aide Dave Crater was forced to resign his job after lawmakers realized he had been lobbying for the bill before a committee, a violation of House rules.)
John Andrews, the Republican Senator from Centennial, also pushed a couple of resolutions that would have been sure to get Dr. Laura's approval -- if only he'd asked her. The first would have honored former president Ronald Reagan on his ninetieth birthday in February; the second would have congratulated the Boy Scouts for their Supreme Court victory allowing them to bar gays from joining the organization. Neither passed, but discussion on both managed to waste quite a bit of time that could have been spent discussing the little things -- you know, like children's welfare, education and sprawl. Don't worry, though: Andrews had the kiddies in mind when he proposed a measure that would have required a mandatory censor on all computers in state school libraries. It also failed.
And then there was Republican representative Mark Paschall of Arvada, who surely had children's best interests at heart when he used one of the sneakiest procedural loopholes available to kill a bill -- put forward by one of his own GOP colleagues -- that would have created a state registry to help parents and doctors track children's immunizations. The move infuriated the bill's sponsor and pols on both sides of the aisle. One fellow Republican called Paschall "slick and sleazy," adding that she wouldn't trust him with her dog.
Why did Paschall do it? Maybe it was the pot. Oops, no, that wouldn't be right. Paschall hasn't gone near the stuff, at least not since December 15, 1972, the day he was busted by Aurora cops for possession at a party. (Paschall says he was merely sleeping in the basement of the party pad, where he'd been stranded without a car.) The arrest came to light after Paschall took a group of lawmakers on a field trip to Colorado Bureau of Investigation headquarters and volunteered to have his own record called up by the agency's computer. Double oops.
Other Paschall highlights during the past year included his failed attempt to block cities and counties from receiving cigarette-tax revenues if they offer benefits to same-sex partners of city employees, as well as the revelation that he'd spent $6,500 of his campaign funds without itemizing the expenditures, a big no-no.
Who needs a circus when the clowns are already in town?
