HIGH FLYING AT DIA

Chicago-based aviation consultant that was awarded two lucrative contracts at Denver International Airport has a history of involvement in controversial consulting projects at the main airport in Atlanta. Aviation Resource Partners Inc. (ARP), a minority-run firm that has contributed generously to Mayor Wellington Webb’s re-election campaign, has been given more…

THE DEVIL MADE HIM DO IT

Fiery talk-show host Bob Larson has spent most of his career battling Satan. But over the past several years, he also has been under attack from a growing number of more corporeal opponents, who charge him with sins such as the financial exploitation of radio listeners by his Lakewood-based Bob…

LETTERS

The Gospel According to Paul Thanks for publishing Ward Harkavy’s “Passing on the Right” in the February 16 issue. The accompanying illustration about the New Right dittoheads marching in lockstep says it all. Paul Weyrich and company have the nerve to rave on about liberal “elitists” and then require absolute…

JUSTICE OR BUST

Sometime this summer, the more than 1,000 people charged with felony drug offenses each year in Denver will begin flowing into a single courtroom on the second floor of the City and County Building. There, if everything goes according to plans now being finalized, William Meyer, a wiry and intense…

ROOM TO GROW

Lillian Wittschen may be pushing seventy and hooked up to an oxygen tank, but she’s always on the lookout for a thrill. She thinks you should be, too. “Why don’t you go take a look at the biggest thing to come down the pike?” she suggests. “It’s an angel’s trumpet…

OFF LIMITS

Nine wants to no: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now that Butch Montoya, former assistant news director at Channel 9, has become the city’s manager of public safety, can Paula Woodward’s appointment to director of public works be far behind? Not if the same connections that counted for Montoya (besides his Hispanic…

SIX-FIGURE SKATING

A handful of choirboys in North Dakota may have been surprised when Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan greeted each other in Lillehammer last week like a couple of old pals, then grinned like starlets from opposite ends of the team picture. But no one else even blinked–least of all the…

THE DAVES OF OUR LIVES

Much was auspicious in 1993, the Year of the Dave. Dave Letterman’s broadcasting coup made the news, Dave Winfield distinguished himself, Wendy’s featured Dave’s Deluxe (designed by one of fast food’s finest Daves) and Hollywood even came up with a Dave movie. “What I want to know,” says Dave More,…

IF YOU CAN BEAT `EM, JOIN `EM

Smiling coyly, Christy steps on stage. Framed by red velvet curtains, he tosses aside his coat with a flourish–ooh-la-la–and reveals his French maid costume, the skirt barely covering his G-stringed buttocks. The all-female onlookers applaud, and Christy blushes. At his feet, a banquet table is spread with imported cheeses, noodles…

LETTERS

Block of Ages I wanted to comment on Michael Roberts’s article about Dennis Powell, “Experience Not Needed,” in the February 16 issue. I thought it was wonderfully well written. I know Mr. Powell only slightly, but I know he’s a very good person. He doesn’t deserve what they’re doing to…

MALL ABOARD!

Change never has been especially welcome at Denver Union Station, the gray stone landmark at the base of 17th Street whose sunlit great hall still evokes the golden age of rail travel. But in recent months, the sleeping giant has been thrust into a strange new role: as the centerpiece…

PASSING ON THE RIGHT

The information highway begins with a sharp right turn just outside Windsor. From the roof of the Windsor Center, a small office building on the edge of this farm town fifty miles north of Denver, your brain will board a parabolic dish paid for by beer prince Jeffrey Coors and…

EXPERIENCE NOT NEEDED

On a lovely evening last May, Dennis Powell and the other teachers and administrators at Denver’s Machebeuf Catholic High School attended an assembly celebrating the achievements of another academic year. Machebeuf’s principal, Dr. Elizabeth Mantelli, addressed the students and staffers gathered before her, and when speaking about the impressive number…

OFF LIMITS

The big shill: A certain Denver-based talk-radio host may be all the rage nationally (after duking it out on Ricki Lake, the Black Avenger next takes on Montel Williams), but Ken Hamblin wasn’t the fellow who raised the ire of Chicago Tribune writer Jon Margolis. In his January 25 column…

GAMES PEOPLE PLAY

You can’t tell the players without an atlas. Or a body count. Since the 1988 Olympic Games, Germany has reunified and the Soviet Union has broken into fifteen pieces. Two Yemens have become one, while Czechoslovakia has split itself into Czechs and Slovaks. The city of Sarajevo, once famous for…

LETTERS

Tempest in a Tepee Regarding Steve Jackson’s “Civil Wars” in the February 9 issue: It’s pathetic that these Native American “leaders” should spend all their time arguing with each other instead of working to make life better for their people–whatever color they may be. Michelle Randolph Denver I find it…

BEAT THE PRESS

For the second year in a row, Westword has taken home the Colorado Press Association’s Award for Editorial Excellence in its class of large weeklies. The sweepstakes award is based on total points accumulated in the CPA contest’s twelve editorial award categories. Among Westword’s wins: Managing editor Andy Van De…

THE SLUDGE HITS THE FAN

Kiowa County residents, deciding that they’ve had it up to here with New York City’s sewage sludge, are telling the company that brings it in to either leave nicely or be forced out. And the company realizes that when you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. Since April 1992,…

GOING FOR BROKE

Former Cherry Hills Village developer Bill Wall has never lacked for chutzpah. Last year the unflappable socialite convinced a federal judge that taxpayers should pay two private attorneys to defend him on bank fraud charges–even though he continued to live in a Cherry Hills mansion and tool around town in…

SCHOOL’S OUT

For years, former residents of the neighborhood wiped out by Denver’s Auraria campus in the 1970s have claimed that authorities stiffed them out of money after forcing them from their homes. Now they’ve turned to the Colorado legislature for help–and have come up empty-handed. The residents, who call themselves “displaced…

CIVIL WARS

Glenn Morris, the outspoken co-director of the Colorado chapter of the American Indian Movement, reaches into a worn briefcase and pulls out a black binder. Bits of yellowed newspaper clippings and photographs poke out from behind the pages; a postcard of an Indian man wearing a feathered headdress clings to…

TOP BUN

Heinie headquarters is located in an unpretentious industrial park in the city of Sheridan, overshadowed by a drive-in movie screen and obscured from view by highway ramps and road construction. It is from this unlikely setting that Lee Spieker, the Colorado-based brains behind the Buns of Steel fitness video phenomenon,…