News

Bill Dallman, the Fox 31 news director recently featured in this space (“Twenty-First Century Fox,” January 13), had better work overtime to keep his first hire, chest-pounding radio troubleshooter Tom Martino, fat and happy. Because if Martino’s 1999 departure from Channel 4 is any indication, he’s not a guy to…

Tea and SympathyRegarding Justin Berton’s “The Glendale T&A Party,” in the January 20 issue: An important part of the story was missed in the focus on T&A and the Raptors: the open-democracy effort that the Tea Party rode in on. Lots of decent, independent people who cared about good government…

Veggo Larsen, the city manager of Glendale, keeps one pressed suit, one clean golf shirt and a set of clubs packed in the backseat of his Chevy Blazer. After all, at the end of any city council meeting, held on the first and third Tuesday evenings of each month, Larsen…

Giving up her daughter to the state was the hardest thing Ellen Laurence has ever done. Four years ago, Laurence and her husband decided they could no longer cope with Annie, now eighteen. Born autistic, Annie suffers periodic seizures and often becomes highly aggressive. As a young teenager, she had…

The girl behind the glass is wearing a form-fitting white cotton shirt, beige cargo pants and sparkling silver high-heeled shoes that lift her three inches off the ground. As people walk by the glass, she strikes a heaven-help-me pose. Her tiny arms thrust toward the sky, her straw-thin legs stand…

What a tangled Web we weaveLast Tuesday, the legal naysayers piled on attorney Ellis Rubin, who said that his client, one Michael Ian Campbell, was suffering from Internet intoxication when, on December 15, he had the following exchange (as Soup81, a play on his last name and the year of…

Downtown Golden’s Foss Drug began the new year in a shambles — the Patty Cake Break Cake display jammed into a crevice next to the Ride the Champion coin-operated horse, the magazine racks rumpled and picked over, the basement full of Y2K water no one ever bought. And while the…

The people in charge of the news conference held at Denver police headquarters on January 11 were, in pissing order, Mayor Wellington Webb and Chief of Police Tom Sanchez, followed by Assistant District Attorney Chuck Lepley, divisions chief Armedia Gordon and Sergeant Jon Priest. Or at least that would have…

Eight days after Danny’s funeral service, his parents and sister gathered in front of the Nativity scene at the Denver City and County Building. The weather was turning colder and snow was in the forecast as they waited for a few reporters to gather with their cameras and notepads. Their…

An inmate at the Denver County Jail wants something to drink to celebrate New Year’s Eve, and he wants something with a little more punch than Kool-Aid. First he swipes a plastic trash bag while he’s on cleanup duty by folding the bag flat and slipping it into the heel…

For the record, Douglas Bruce is not a socialist. You don’t have to be one, he says, to despise the regressive tax structure in the state of Colorado, which heaps an unjust load of the state and local tax burden on the backs of the poor. “This is really a…

A rocky weekAfter taking heat for its failure to throw a New Year’s Eve party and criticism for instituting “martial law” downtown on what was elsewhere the world’s most festive night, the office of Mayor Wellington Webb defended itself last week by circulating an editorial published in the January 4…

Begin with the tattoo and Leonard’s big, bald head, because the tattoo that screams from atop Leonard’s big, bald head says it all. On Wednesday, September 1, Leonard Carlo had just returned from a trip to Alamosa when the manager of his Colorado Springs bar delivered the bad news: Two…

Appearances are important at Channel 31, Denver’s Fox affiliate. For example, while a request for an interview with news director Bill Dallman, who is putting together a 9-to-10 p.m. newscast tentatively scheduled to debut in late spring or summer, is happily granted, there’s a string attached: Promotion and marketing manager…

It takes someone with a bit of a culinary wild side to try the appetizer of sliced buffalo tongue with caper sauce at The Fort in Morrison. Even the bay-leaf-and-black-pepper seasoning doesn’t change the fact that you are about to bite into, well, the tongue of a buffalo. But, hell,…

When the lights dim over the crowd, a child clad in African robes ascends the stage and in a slightly nervous voice introduces The Black Nativity. The cast gathers on stage one by one until one becomes forty, and for the next two hours, one powerful voice after another belts…

Here’s a lesson for young CEO wannabes looking for negotiating tips: When you agree to become a chief executive officer of, say, a local phone company, make sure that your contract has a clause in it that ensures that if you lose your job through a merger, your landing will…

A veteran official of the Colorado Department of Corrections resigned last week in the wake of controversy surrounding two sexual-harassment lawsuits that have cost the state more than a million dollars. The departure of Joe Paolino, associate warden of the Territorial Correctional Facility, came three weeks after a $287,500 settlement…

Future shlockOnce upon a time, Denver was so trendy that the think tank that would go on to name Colorado a “bellwether” state was actually based here. But when John Naisbitt’s Megatrends made the bigtime in the early ’80s, he moved his office to Telluride (with a satellite in D.C.),…