Margie Chestnut doesn’t look like your average felon. With her long, scraggly gray locks smoothed back in a paisley scarf, her soft yellow cotton sweater, and her oversized, owlish glasses, the 63-year-old Chestnut looks more like a grandma than the prototypical grifter. Indeed, as she sits at a plastic-covered table…

What a difference a week makes. Seven days ago, as the Dallas Observer went to press, Paula Jones’ legal team was worrying about how to pick a sympathetic jury; this week, they’re worrying about whether their client has the stamina for a last-ditch appeal. On April Fools’ Day, federal District…

There were a couple of reasons why Hoover vs. Cain wasn’t your typical probate-court lawsuit. First was the case itself. Oh, sure, from the way 33-year-old Dallas lawyer Wes Holmes described the dispute to a panel of prospective jurors, it sounded ordinary: 28-year-old Melissa Rene McReynolds and her sister, 36-year-old…

It is late on the last Friday evening in February, and most employees on the fourth floor at City Hall have long since gone home. But Assistant City Manager Mary Suhm is still bouncing from one crisis to the next. Not only is a city councilman camped in her office,…

Faced with the single biggest embarrassment in the modern history of their newspaper, top Dallas Morning News editors went to great lengths last week to explain why they had published, then retracted, then reasserted a story about a government eyewitness to sex between the president and a 21-year-old intern. Unfortunately,…

Gary Larson, creator of The Far Side, once did a cartoon that showed a grizzled old cowpoke lifting a coffeepot from the campfire. Though at first glance both the poke and the pot appear to be standard cattle-drive issue, upon closer inspection the pot has some funny-looking spouts and attachments…

No matter what bleeding-heart notions lured them in the beginning, eventually those who toil at the business of crime and punishment tend to develop tough hides. But every now and then, a case makes its way through the criminal justice system that awakens outrage in the most scabbed-over heart. Like…

William R. “Bill” Morgan still remembers the phone call that led to the most mysterious presidential fundraising episode of 1996, which led to the strangest political story of 1997, which in turn promises to spawn several entertaining crime stories in 1998. It came on the afternoon of October 22, 1996…

Now that the Love Field suit has landed in his courtroom, The Dallas Morning News apparently has discovered Fort Worth federal Judge John Henry McBryde’s existence. Moreover, they appear to like him–though still not enough to give his historic constitutional brawl with fellow jurists the billing it deserves. As the…

Late one day last week, after presiding over a full day of misdemeanors, Dallas County Criminal Court at Law Judge Dan L. Wyde hied himself from the Frank Crowley Criminal Courts Building to a run-down area of strip shopping centers, Korean grocers, and small warehouses near the intersection of Royal…

The denizens of the Frank Crowley Criminal Courts Building are no strangers to controversy, gossip, or for that matter, rumbles with the Dallas County Commissioners. Even so, tensions at the courthouse may have reached new heights. First came ParkingGate, in which Dallas County Commissioner Jim Jackson or his lackeys leaked…

Forget the gray beards of the Dallas criminal bar: the Doug Mulders, the Vee Perinis, the Billy Ravkinds, the George Milners. Ignore the up-and-coming generation of lawyers: the Tom Millses, the Jay Ethingtons, the Brad Lollars. If you find yourself in the felony or misdemeanor soup, the man to dial…

“Look at the writing–the writing,” exclaims Evan Fogelman, his well-tanned, shaved pate gleaming in the low incandescence of the Melrose Hotel’s Landmark restaurant. With one Bombay Sapphire martini (straight up, with olives) under his belt and another queued up, Fogelman, a Dallas-based literary agent who is the prince of the…

In some ways, John Henry McBryde, federal district judge for the Northern District of Texas, Fort Worth Division, seems destined to spawn a constitutional crisis. Though he was born in Jackson, Mississippi, McBryde grew up in Fort Worth and in many ways personifies the mythical Texan: He is tall, dark,…

If the facts are on your side, trial lawyers say, argue the facts to the jury. If the law is on your side, argue the law to the judge. And if you don’t have either?XBaffle the insurer with your bullstuff. Victoria Phillips doesn’t know which approach won $1.1 million apiece…

In a corner office of the anonymous concrete bunker off Harry Hines Boulevard that houses the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Dallas headquarters, Julio Mercado, the new man in charge, is squirming like a worm on a hot plate. It’s hard to say exactly what is making the 48-year-old former New York…