Audio By Carbonatix
In good form: Now that you’ve filed your tax returns, maybe you can even the score with the government by trying to win local gadfly Bill Conklin’s $50,000 anti-tax reward. All you have to do is prove to Conklin that a person can file tax returns without waiving Fifth Amendment rights–and produce a statute that requires the filing of returns in the first place. Sound easy? Good luck. Famous shyster Melvin Belli once tried to claim the bounty and failed. In fact, no one’s come close to grabbing the prize–but that could be because Conklin, who generally likes to stir things up as chief “dove” of his own Church of World Peace, is the sole arbiter of who wins or loses. It’s not that he’s stingy with favors, either: He’s ordained such celebs as Manuel Noriega and Jimmy Swaggart, and he might even make you a “martyr” of his church (for a small fee). But forking over cash–assuming the low-budget spiritual leader even has the money–could be a different matter.
“Nobody will ever be able to claim that $50,000 anyway,” says the fifty-year-old Conklin. “Nobody can win. Whether I have $50,000 is not relevant. If somebody thinks they’ve won, they can sue me, but I’ll win.”
Just like Uncle Sam.
The paper chase: While longtime New York columnist Pete Hamill recalled the glory days of newspapering at the Denver Press Club last Friday, downstairs at the bar several local reporters were recalling the gory days–specifically Thursday, when the Rocky Mountain News laid off sixteen middle managers. Although none of them were from the newsroom, that area didn’t emerge unscathed–several editorial managers were demoted, with the net effect of eliminating five newsroom positions, according to publisher Larry Strutton. As he told his own paper, in response to rising newsprint costs, “we’re simply doing what every paper in the country is doing.” But it was who the News was doing it to that had colleagues crying in their beer over what one dubbed “the night of long knives.” Tom Wolfe, the paper’s quietly competent and, not coincidentally, long-suffering features editor (he took on the thankless task of coordinating the Year of the Arts campaign), resigned rather than take the offered job of assistant city editor. (His colleagues have set up a shrine at his former post, and commemorative items are added daily.) The position of state editor was dumped entirely, with Steve Campbell becoming an assistant city editor (another ACE was moved to the copy desk); the national editor slot was also eliminated, with Rob Reuteman moving to assistant business editor (and Steve Caulk moving out and back to reporter).
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Although the Denver Post has yet to make such drastic and dramatic cuts–(News editors were called into their supervisors’ offices one by one)–it’s already done some shuffling on the editorial pages that inspired Tom Gavin’s hasty “retirement” in February. “How do we use the people we have the best way possible?” mused editor Neil Westergaard at the time, contemplating what newsprint costs had done to his budget. “I’m not going to sugarcoat it.”
It was pun while it lasted: Giving up the ghost entirely is Rocky Mountain Magazine, the glossy, bossy reincarnation of a publication that gained national notoriety in the early Eighties. Cowles Media pulled the plug on the project after just four issues.