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Whenever someone handed Pharmacist Bob a prescription for thirty pills, he filled the order for thirty pills. “Not 29. Not 31,” he says. “Thirty. That’s how I see the world.” So when he started seeing nurses fudging the rules at the Colorado prison where he worked, Bob Gusich didn’t like…

Along Elkhorn Avenue, parents with kids in tow pour out of candy stores and T-shirt shops. They fight their way through the crowded sidewalks, quieting the little ones with caramel apples and saltwater taffy. A shiny new black Toyota Solara emerges from a parking lot and pulls out onto Estes…

Michael C. Hill is missing one testicle. Regrettably, this fact is now common knowledge among many guards and prisoners within the Colorado Department of Corrections. According to Hill, a 48-year-old former correctional officer, “very intimate details about my genitalia” were divulged to other prison staffers and to loose-tongued female inmates…

hen the Denver Nuggets trot onto the hardwood floors at the Pepsi Center on November 2 to open the season against the Phoenix Suns, team owner Donald Sturm will be on the edge of his seat. The newly built, $165 million arena will have already hosted its first blockbuster concert…

he roller coaster is already gone, as is the Yo-Yo, a contraption that set riders spinning on metallic swings attached to slender chains — and that’s only the beginning of the end. At 10 p.m. on September 6, Guyton’s Fun Junction, the largest amusement park between Denver and Salt Lake…

Crossing the line Thwarted several times in their attempts to turn Rebel Hill into a permanent shrine with thirteen giant crosses honoring the victims of the Columbine massacre, Steve Schweitzberger and Greg ‘Road Warrior’ Zanis were back in Clement Park on Friday to at least create a permanent record of…

The train is late, again, so the stringy blonde and her friend, the one with the silver stud through her nose, slouch toward a couple of stools at the far end of the Railcar Diner. The friend asks for a banana and a dollar’s worth of change while the blonde…

It was 4:45 a.m. Monday, August 16 — the day students came back to Columbine High School for the first time since April 20, when twelve students and a teacher were murdered there — and while the campus was blessedly peaceful, it wasn’t silent. The building itself was aglow as…

Ray Gifford was stumped. The questions seemed so simple. Why have hundreds of US West customers had to face waits of up to five months for telephone service? Why have these problems plagued the company for five years? A parade of US West Colorado division vice presidents–in gray suits and…

US West may take a lot of criticism, but its customer-service shortcomings are nothing compared to the way Denver’s first telephone company treated customers. In the 1880s, the Denver Telephone Dispatch Company set up shop at 15th and Larimer streets, taking up three rooms in a second-story office. The city’s…

When US West announced that it had decided to reject its first suitor, Global Crossing, and marry Qwest instead, most shareholders rejoiced at their good fortune. After all, Qwest’s bid of $69 per share was considerably more generous than Global Crossing’s offer. And no one had more reason to be…

Buying crack on East Colfax Avenue is easy. All a person has to do is walk the littered street, preferably at night, and pace the sidewalk between Logan and York streets. The thick of the strip is at Ogden Street in front of the 7-Eleven store and beneath the shadows…

Pam Adair knows how to record the moment. When she felt queasy on July 21 last year, she took a two-minute home pregnancy test and videotaped the stick as it turned blue. “I wanted this child for fourteen months,” she says. “I wanted him to be there every step of…

He’s your p-a-l: Locals don’t usually expect articles on newsy topics to show up on the cover of 5280, which describes itself as “Denver’s Mile-High Magazine”; the publication generally uses its front page to tout not-what-you’d-call-hard-hitting pieces about, for instance, the city’s top doctors. But although the sixth annual listing…

For the consumer, it’s a given–a pound equals sixteen ounces in weight, a gallon equals 64 liquid ounces, and a pint is sixteen of the same. Thanks to the watchful eyes of various government consumer agencies, the public trusts that any advertised serving measures up. But here along the beer-blessed…

In the spring of 1998, bail agent Jolene Martinez and her brother, bounty hunter Duane “Dog” Chapman, were allies in a cantankerous price war on Denver’s Bail Bond Row. Siblings united to protect the family business. What a difference a year makes. This past April, Chapman and his common-law wife,…

Paying Dividends Making money can be a dirty business. But when Deb Sanchez attended a workshop at her Wild Oats grocery store promoting “social awareness investing,” she thought it sounded like a good way to grow her small nest egg. Social investors focus their portfolios on things like environmentally friendly…

Ben Kelley sits back on his front porch and looks out across the street at the row of new townhomes, the field of weeds, the boarded-up crack den, the ad for luxury duplexes, and fumbles for the words to describe his neighborhood. He adjusts his baseball cap, which he wears…

Columbine, Friend of Crime? I’ve written to you guys before to congratulate you on your investigative reporting and was moved to write again after reading Alan Prendergast’s “Doom Rules,” in the August 5 issue. The sympathy-and-blame-fest the rest of the media enjoyed for months after the Columbine shootings made me…

It was early last September when Raymond Gutierrez heard the helicopter circling overhead. He was washing dishes. The way Raymond lives, washing dishes takes some time, and he often lets them pile up for days. Pushing aside the cloth that covers the doorway, he walks outside his one-story stone house…