The Justice Department’s voluminous report on the joint operating agreement that will bind the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News in holy wedded monopoly, released to the public last week, isn’t exactly overflowing with surprises. The document, issued under the signature of Assistant Attorney General Joel Klein, uncovers a…
When does an athlete stop being an athlete and simply start being a lunatic? The question of where to draw the line occurred to me a few weeks ago when a friend and I drove up to Leadville late on a Saturday night to watch the finish of the Leadville…
Life Savers Family ties: I was sickened, but not surprised, to read Stuart Steers’s “Broken Trust” in the August 31 issue, about the women with disabilities who were yanked away from their makeshift family. Unless a glaring fact was omitted, the caregiver appeared to genuinely love the women in her…
Tom Horn made his name in law enforcement — even if many of his actions straddled the law. Legal or not, however, they were certainly effective, although not the sort of behavior that inspires most modern law-enforcement agents. Then again, those agents don’t have Kelly Hamilton’s job. A few years…
Last May, six homeless people sleeping outside the Denver City and County Building were awakened by the cops and arrested. They were there because city sweeps of the traditional homeless camping grounds along the South Platte River and Cherry Creek had forced them to migrate to Civic Center Park and…
In an effort to streamline what promises to be a lengthy legal process, all fourteen lawsuits filed by families of people injured or killed in the shootings at Columbine High School have been moved to federal court in Denver. But an attorney for two of the families says his clients…
The teachers and students of Columbine returned to school last month to the welcome sounds of silence. There were no news photographers to record the moment, no live cable coverage of hundreds of suburban teens streaming into the building. No pep rallies, no speeches about “taking back the school,” no…
In its short history, the City Park West Gazette has published articles condemning the temporary closing of a local liquor store due to suspension of its license, the housing crisis at East Village and what it calls Mayor Wellington Webb’s policy of “economic cleansing.” But the little monthly paper, which…
Rocky Mountain Animal Defense was out prowling again this weekend, protesting the use of dogs in labs at the University of Colorado medical school. The group had already made the papers several times this year, even convincing Nederland state representative Tom Plant to propose a bill that would ban med-school…
Writing about writing is precisely what gets writers in trouble, but I can’t resist. In fact, I can’t avoid it: There is no other way to explain how I embarked on a 200-mile drive around Denver, stumbled across both a snowboard angel and a crumpet, and discovered that a house,…
After all of the hullabaloo over media behemoth Clear Channel’s acquisition of competitor AMFM in March — not to mention the predictions of chaos the move was likely to inflict on the Denver radio scene — news that the Federal Communication Commission had signed off on the deal prompted the…
If Tiger Woods knows what’s good for him, he’ll keep an eye on the Wongluekiet twins. That’s because ten, twelve, maybe fifteen years from now, Aree Song Wongluekiet or his brother, Naree Song, might sneak up on Tiger and snatch away first-place money at, say, the $35 million Arnold Palmer…
The Mother Country Parent trap: The next time a state or county child-welfare official piously proclaims that they only take away children in cases of severe abuse, the next time they say they only do it when there is absolutely no alternative, the next time they say they wouldn’t even…
Ponciano Lazaro-Avina is a shy 26-year-old with a soft smile and an even softer voice. He works six days a week mowing grass, trimming hedges and planting flowers so that other people’s lawns will look nice. In the winter he shovels walks, blows snow and rakes away the soggy leaves…
Robert Iron needed to hit a wall. He was sitting in the passenger seat of a Suzuki Samurai cruising north up Federal Boulevard one Friday night last fall, and he wanted out. So the Samurai’s driver abruptly veered from the slow-moving parade of cars, pulling into a Circle K parking…
There were a lot of long faces dragging around the parking lot outside Bare Essence on August 18. One hundred and fifty dudes, ages eighteen through twenty, were surprised to learn that the age requirement to get into the Federal Heights strip joint had been jacked up to 21 overnight…
A key defendant in the bizarre Aspen crime spree of last summer, the first to take his case to trial, has been found guilty on two felony counts and now faces at least a ten-year prison sentence. And for two other suspects in the resort town’s violent youthquake who are…
Michael Carrier knows that asking politicians to be civil with one another is like asking lions not to chase zebras. But he just can’t help himself: His vision of politics is one with fewer carcasses on the Serengeti. That’s why Carrier, who is president of the Interfaith Alliance of Colorado,…
More than three and a half years after her murder, JonBenét Ramsey continues to make news from coast to coast. The August 28 edition of NBC’s Today opened with hype about her parents, John and Patsy Ramsey, preparing to speak with Boulder police, and the subsequent decision by the Ramseys’…
To an outsider looking in, Shane Swartz was on top of the world in the spring of 1997. Twenty-one years-old, handsome, polite, a servant of God with a body as tight as a drum skin, he was living the life he’d always been instructed to envision for himself. He’d begun…
Village Idiots Last, but not East: The first few paragraphs of T.R. Witcher’s “This Old Housing Project,” in the August 31 issue, left me confused. Was the author trying to gain sympathy for the plight of the residents by illustrating their squalid living conditions? If so, he failed. I wondered…
Oscar Paniagua is charming, articulate and personable, an immaculate dresser, the consummate salesman. Even the police say so. And over the past year, investigators estimate, the Venezuela-born Paniagua used that charisma to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars from clients who came seeking advice on marital, financial and health problems,…
