Chicanery Row

After his girlfriend left and he had a nervous breakdown, quit his teaching job and stopped taking his medication, John the Depressed Guy lived in “the hatchback hotel.” For six months he slept in the back of his 1985 Honda Accord, making a home in RV lots, city parks, roadsides,…

Personal Foul

On Tuesday, City Hall still bore the scars of Monday’s Super Bowl rally. Outside, street sweepers blew away leftover parade litter; on the doors, notes from Mayor Wellington Webb promised a victory celebration for city workers; inside, miscreants wearing blue and orange swapped high fives as they waited to pay…

Honor Thy Mother

It’s a cool, sharp spring morning, early April, 11:45, a time when most people are swallowing the last gulp of their second cup of coffee or feeling the pangs of lunch hunger. Ciaran Redmond has just finished robbing his third bank of the day, and he isn’t finished yet–can’t be,…

Wayne Allard’s Impeachment Diary: The Lost Pages

Editor’s note: These excerpts from Senator Wayne Allard’s impeachment diary were considered “too controversial” for the Denver Rocky Mountain News, which is publishing the senator’s musings on the historic proceeding. The material was provided to us by a well-known smut peddler, who vouched for its authenticity on a stack of…

Gimme Shelter

In the last few years, the Denver Housing Authority has been home to controversies involving its executive director, Sal Carpio, including his well-publicized drinking problem and a sexual-harassment suit. Now another sexual-harassment complaint has the agency scrambling to cover its tracks. In September 1996, seeking to confirm reports from employees…

Home Improvement

Kathy Caddell’s mother spent the last ten months of her life at a high-end nursing home that charged more than $4,000 a month. That sum helped pay for wall-to-wall carpeting, plush sofas and art in the common areas–but Caddell says it didn’t buy her mother basic human dignity. “They treated…

Off Limits

I confess! What a bunch of blabbers this town keeps turning out. Senator and animal doc Wayne Allard has been telling all–and we mean all, right down to his wife’s lame movie choices (At First Sight, according to Sunday’s installment)–to the Denver Rocky Mountain News’s Mike Romano (although some lost…

Anger Bowl

For a good ol’ red-dirt Georgia boy, that Dan Reeves sure has got one pow’ful sense of theater. First he ups and coaxes a 44-year-old back-up quarterback out of retirement because they go back to the leather-helmet days together, and then, when things get rough for his fragile starter, Dan…

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Law Review

In 1957, Bill Thom, then a high-school student in Hartford, Connecticut, played Vice President Alexander Throttlebottom in the senior production of Of Thee I Sing. Remember Of Thee I Sing? No? Well, with music and lyrics by George and Ira Gershwin and a book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie…

Letters

Love It or Leave Regarding Tony Perez-Giese’s “Waiting to Exile,” in the January 21 issue: Loi Nguyen’s problems as a resident alien who finished his time in prison and now is in limbo awaiting deportation is truly underwhelming in its tragedy. It is unfortunate that he sits in limbo at…

Waiting to Exile

In December, when the U.S. launched air strikes against Iraq, Loi Nguyen heard a rumor spreading through the Wackenhut center for Immigration and Naturalization Service detainees in Aurora. The rumor was that if the conflict escalated into a full-fledged world war, the U.S. government was going to come in and…

Under the Knife

Malpractice cases, Moss explained to his client, settle late or never and can cost a fortune. You’ll be personally, perhaps viciously, attacked. You’ll contend with tough, even brutal adversaries, special rules that treat medical negligence far more leniently than any other kind, and blind biases in favor of the defendant…..

Ali Clear

The cops were wrong, and Ali Seyed Kazemi was right: Despite the three-year police investigation that concluded otherwise, it wasn’t he who tried to pass a fake prescription for a painkiller (“Prescription Grudge,” December 10). “There’s not a doubt in the world that there was probable cause to bring charges,”…

Did the Earth Move for You, Too?

John Duffy gives one heck of a house tour. It usually starts in his driveway, with Duffy pointing out a support column to his garage, swathed in metal bands that grip the door frames and keep them from pulling apart. He gives the column a shove, and the entire structure…

Off Limits

Party on, dude: When Republican National Committee chair Jim Nicholson isn’t writing bossy letters to former Colorado governor and still Democratic National Committee chair Roy Romer, urging him to tell Bill Clinton to call off the sleazehounds, he’s fighting to keep his job at the RNC. Although Nicholson is still…

Savage Love

Hey, Faggot: I am a thirty-year-old breeder female and have a boyfriend/lover who is fifty. We met on the Internet about four months ago and in person about six weeks ago. I have always been attracted to older men because they are more caring and respectful toward the needs of…

Letters

Sprawl in the Family Regarding Alan Prendergast’s “The Sprawlful Truth,” in the January 14 issue: What is it about the American West that makes us so impervious to experience? California ought to be a lesson emblazoned on our noggins: single-family housing, no mass transit, arterial and freeway traffic jams, horrifying…

Keep a Light On

Polly Sullivan kept lighthouses in her window, rows of miniature beacons that illuminated the old military dormitory at Lowry that is now Crooked Tree, a shelter for the formerly homeless. It was nice, tenants say, comforting. No matter what else was going on in their lives, and there was usually…

Everybody Wasn’t Kung Fu Fighting

The warriors are in trouble when the tale begins. Their leader has accidentally broken their vow never to kill anyone and has exiled himself. Their only hope may be young Ryan Jeffers, a kid with a limp, parents who are never around, and low self-esteem. His sole friend is a…

The Sprawful Truth

Buy Now, Pay Later You can feel the urgency in the Rock Creek Ranch sales offices of Richmond American Homes. You can see it in the eyes of the young couples who arrive there in weather foul and fair, brochures in hand and toddlers in tow, their nerves jangled from…

Election Losers

Last summer, Thomas Hendrix canvassed the sidewalks of Denver, hustling up signatures for the petition drive that got Amendments 15 and 16 on the ballot in November’s election. The amendments, pushed by Gary Boyce’s Stockman’s Water Company, would have required flow meters on pumps and payments for water that farmers…

Hell, No, We Won’t Grow!

A proposal that would radically change the way Colorado grows and curb urban sprawl is on a collision course with the Colorado Legislature. And if lawmakers turn the idea down–again–Colorado voters will likely have the final say. The Colorado Responsible Growth Act would mandate “urban growth boundaries” around most of…