Hell to the Chiefs

The first volley of bullets smacked into police chief Kris Monson’s parked squad car at 1:30 a.m., while he was sitting behind the wheel in downtown Olathe, doing paperwork. The windshield shattered into a spider web, and the young Western Slope lawman hit the floor. He felt a sharp pain…

Caution: Judge on Board

Denver drunk-driving lawyer Brent M. Martin is on a collision course with justice. Make that with a judge. Attorney Martin, who regularly defends people accused of driving under the influence, is scheduled to appear in Denver County Court February 26 to face charges that he got liquored up last summer…

Off Limits

Belly up to the barbecue: Three years after local uranium magnate turned po’ boy Oren Benton first filed for bankruptcy, lawyers and accountants still have their snouts buried in his estate. And, man, is the eatin’ good. Featuring hundreds of millions of dollars in debts and an international cast of…

Worse Than a Pledge Drive

A three-acre plot of land along Leetsdale Drive has become a major headache for nonprofit KRMA-TV Channel 6, which has been battling neighbors over its proposed profit-making commercial projects on the property it’s owned for the past decade. A recent proposal to build a 24-hour Amoco station and a Grease…

Warning Signs

Somewhere in there, in the dense limbo of the classified section, somewhere between “Beautiful Russian Ladies Want to Meet YOU!” and “Improve Your Sex Life With Penile Enlargement” and “Wendelstedt Umpire School,” you’ll almost always find the shimmering promise that you, too, can feel like a real major-leaguer. Or feel…

Artsbeat

Take one: When the curtain goes up at the Academy Awards next month, Denver filmmaker Donna Dewey will be there–nominated for her documentary A Story of Healing. The 28-minute film–which follows a California medical team, Interplast, on a volunteer mission through Vietnam in January 1997–has gotten raves since it premiered…

Power Rangers

The Team knows how to tantalize a twelve-year-old. “Don’t be trying any of this at home, kids. What you are about to see is very, very dangerous. We don’t even do what Trey Tally does–breaking concrete and ice with his head! So don’t you try it!” Trey Tally’s nickname is…

Letters

Babes in Royland Regarding Patricia Calhoun’s “Strange Bedfellows,” in the February 19 issue: Roy Romer proved himself a serial liar and a man without honor. Making a total ass of himself and exposing his wife to the cruelest kind of public humiliation, he cast off the last rags of any…

The Unusual Suspect

A year ago, Boulder police chief Tom Koby faced the cameras and promised that “our guy won’t walk.” Since then, of course, the JonBenet Ramsey murder investigation has limped along. Thus far, the only arrests remotely related to the case have been that of a friend of the Ramseys who…

Fallout in the Family

There are peaceful uses for atomic energy, and then there’s the Steen family, blown apart by the biggest uranium bonanza in American history. Shreds of memories and court documents now litter the landscape of what started out as one of the century’s most inspiring success stories. Charlie was the indomitable…

Off Limits

Better homes and stadiums: Since Pat Bowlen wants taxpayers to build him a $320 million home for the Broncos (see story at left), we’re sure he won’t mind if we take a peek at his own crash pad, a three-story brick beauty (latest assessed value: $1,971,580) that overlooks the tenth…

A Whole New Ballgame

Following the Denver Broncos’ Super Bowl win last month, Denver’s movers and shakers tripped over themselves in a rush to endorse a new taxpayer-financed stadium for the team. Mayor Wellington Webb, Governor Roy Romer and the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce all gave high-profile endorsements to the stadium proposal, even…

Justice Misplaced

Last Christmas wasn’t merry for Arlee Martin and her daughter Rose Warren. A teenage employee of Foley’s Cherry Creek department store not only refused to wait on the pair but allegedly spewed racial slurs at them and attacked Warren. The two black women were so shaken by the encounter that…

Life’s a Pitch

You know those moments when all your senses open like a flower? Picture this: West Palm Beach Municipal Stadium in mid-March, a tidy little ballpark, swept and green and balmy. Nolan Ryan is on the hill wearing that gruesome blaze of Astro orange and yellow across his chest, and he’s…

Strange Bedfellows

“Bill becomes law if governor sins.” –typo in the 1998 Colorado Legislature’s pamphlet How a Bill Becomes a Law Does abstinence make the heart grow fonder? If so, then the folks calling for Roy Romer’s head should be anointing it instead. The alleged personalities at KNUS radio, chief among them…

Seeing Red

It was a small thing, really, just a signature on the back of a plain manila application card. At the time she endorsed it, in 1942, she had no way of knowing it would get her fired, arrested, thrown in jail and forced into hiding. But on the day she…

Letters

An Affair to Dismember Patricia Calhoun’s “Sealed With a Kiss,” in the February 12 issue, was superb–simply wonderful! It was the ultimate Calhounism. She hit the proverbial nail on the head at every turn. She drove the nails through Governor Romeo’s glib talk and feckless conduct. Romer does not realize…

Artsbeat

What’s your sign? The Denver Performing Arts Complex has some snappy new signage, part of a $1.5 million improvement project now under way. By June the area should have two more electronic marquees (the first three were installed in December), as well as banners on 14th and Arapahoe streets, new…

Fly Boys

When Andy Parks was growing up, once or twice a year his family would leave their home in Parker and fly to California or Florida or New York or Germany. Parks’s father, James, a busy obstetrician and gynecologist, was flexible on these vacation destinations. Anywhere was fine with him–with one…

Profits of Doom

The first time Russell Welty heard about the Year 2000 Problem–also known as the Millennium Bug or, in programmer jargon, Y2K–it sounded simple. Too simple. The problem, stripped down to its essentials, is this: Most computers on the planet are programmed to calculate dates in a two-digit format–for example, 02/14/98…

Naked Oppression

Denver may soon be the last city in the metropolitan area where you can legally buy a one-on-one table dance from a stripper and hand a tip directly to her. With the help of a religious-right legal foundation based in Arizona, virtually all of Denver’s neighboring cities have adopted ordinances…

Off Limits

Rocky mountain hype: Little could Fort Collins fourth-grader Kari Neuman have known when she proposed making John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” the official state song that she was putting a match to a powderkeg of positive karma just waiting to explode all over Colorado. In recent days, the Denver Musicians…