There auto be a law: If April wasn’t the cruelest month for lawyer Joseph Patrick Madigan, it sure came close. On April 8, the Colorado Supreme Court ordered Madigan disbarred from the practice of law for three years. Not only had Madigan “effectively abandoned” a client–Donna Carlton, owner of Consolidated…
Mickey Fantauzzi was on the phone with her mother last September when she heard someone knock quietly on her front door in Capitol Hill’s 26-unit Dalton Apartments. Before she could end her conversation, replace the phone in its cradle and walk the ten feet from the bedroom to the hallway,…
Employees say Guadalupe “Lupe” Salinas occasionally walked around Denver’s Social Security Administration office downtown crowing about his job and his good fortune. “Oh, it feels so good to be king!” the regional commissioner reportedly would say. The king is dead. Salinas, who was appointed commissioner of the agency’s six-state Denver…
To hear Ernie Paragallo tell it, he owns the fastest three-year-old on the face of the earth–maybe in the history of the universe. “I don’t think he’ll be beaten again,” Ernie boasted last week. “Ever?” a reporter asked. “Ever,” the owner said. Now, if you’d like to take that to…
In the fall of 1988, life in Denver was anything but a Rocky Mountain high. The economy had been down so long that replacing a perfectly fine airport with a giant public-works project half an hour from downtown seemed like a swell idea. Houses were selling–when they were selling at…
A Landmark Decision Regarding Steve Jackson’s “True Believers,” in the April 18 issue: I am a regular reader of Westword. Since I am a human being and have my own opinions, I don’t always agree with everything that is written in your paper. However, that hasn’t stopped me from continuing…
Every time Joley Cole hears one of her neighbors say “Joley did it the easy way–she adopted,” she wants to spit. Four years ago the Denver woman and her husband spent more than $12,000 and what felt like a lifetime answering personal questions and being examined in order to adopt…
The medical establishment grits its teeth when it hears Hal Huggins’s name. Dentists, scientists and patients regard the Colorado Springs dentist as a brilliant contrarian or a charlatan, with little shading in between. And State Administrative Law Judge Nancy Connick had no problem making up her mind, either. Although Huggins…
Rush to judgment: Boulder’s Aaron Harber was a popular fellow at the National Association of Broadcasters’ convention in Las Vegas last week. That’s because the johnny-come-lately to talk radio had just beaten Rush Limbaugh–in the courtroom, if not in the ratings. Twenty months after Limbaugh’s attorneys sued Harber for $20…
When Karen Jenkins went to work for a market-research company a few years ago, she expected to spend her time talking to consumers about their lifestyles and purchasing habits. What she didn’t expect was a stream of crude comments about spanking, anal sex and other dicey topics–all issuing from a…
Tom Strickland has been shrugging off his connection with the law firm Brownstein, Hyatt, Farber & Strickland ever since he announced his candidacy for the U.S. Senate last fall. But despite the campaign’s efforts to distance the Democratic candidate from his livelihood, Strickland’s contributions tell a different story: Money is…
Tom Kreutz fixes cars for a living, and he was just the sort of ordinary fellow the Denver Art Museum was looking for in its ad campaign to promote the museum’s working-class appeal. The kind of guy, the award-winning ad said, who’d feel equally happy “collecting rocks, bushwhacking in Mexico,…
It’s July. You return to the office after a little vacation. Well, not a vacation, exactly–more like another trip to the welding shop. They cemented fourteen new bones into your body and bolted an Erector Set to your right elbow. Without making a big fuss about it, they also fulfilled…
Your article on Landmark Education and the information about Cult Awareness Network and Action Works was most appreciated and well-presented. I am a recent “graduate” of The Forum and The Forum in Action series. My background is in the field of education, and I wanted to find out just what…
Black Hawk boasts more violent crimes per capita than any other community in Colorado. But the caper the town contemplated last Saturday was completely bloodless. It set out to hijack Central City’s train. Like almost everything else that’s happened to these two adjacent mountain towns since gambling was legalized five…
The sky was the limit for Denver aviation officials hoping to lure overseas air service to the city back in 1987. According to a “forecast summary” prepared that year by the consulting firm of Simat, Helliesen & Eichner, the Mile High City could soon expect to have an aerial armada…
Walter Plywaski placed the blue yarmulke on his head. A Jew by ethnicity but an atheist by choice, he rarely wore the symbol of faith. But it seemed important now, as he stood near a mass burial site for Jews murdered at what had once been the Riederloh “punishment” camp…
Tom Anthony has a dream: of lozenge-shaped, four-person vehicles that cruise an elevated rail on demand, delivering passengers around the metro area at 30 mph or taking them up into the mountains and out to Denver International Airport at four times that speed. Suddenly, cars are unnecessary. Parks bloom where…
What began as a mind exercise for Jerald Lepinski ten years ago has become a crusade to challenge the music notation system that’s dominated Europe and America for hundreds of years. Lepinski, a Denver music teacher and choir conductor for more than thirty years, is not the first to suggest…
When Mayor Wellington Webb’s stepson Keith Thomas clipped a parked car March 31 and kept on driving, it wasn’t the first time he’d “hit and run,” says a former business associate. In fact, claims bar owner Chester Johnson, after he fired Thomas for alleged misuse of funds last fall, Thomas…
State your business: The June issue of Spy rates the nation’s fifty states in order of annoyance–and we make the dirtiest dozen. Texas takes first place, but Colorado clocks in at number twelve for, among other reasons: “Laws: In Durango, it is illegal to go out in public dressed in…
Business and politics have been known to make uneasy bedfellows, but an obscure Boulder company is showing just how strange the marriage can be. Last month United States Voting Machine Inc. declared bankruptcy. The announcement was hardly earthshaking: USVM listed a mere $20,000 in assets. Yet the company’s union of…
