Public-radio regulars endured the usual whining last month during KERA-FM 90.1’s June pledge drive. But this time, the pleas for donations were slightly shriller. KERA announcers and staff members told listeners they were worried because donations have fallen off since the station revamped its format, switching to all talk and…

At 8:15 on a Sunday morning in June–Father’s Day, specifically–families pack the St. Luke Community United Methodist Church, where the Rev. Zan Holmes presides over one of the largest African-American congregations in Dallas. Three Palestinian children sit in a front, left pew of the church, looking bored and tired during…

Gary Lewellyn sits behind a massive wooden desk holding a telephone to his ear, but says nothing. From his Carrollton warehouse, the chairman and chief executive officer of Performance Nutrition, Inc. is a guest on a nationally syndicated USA Today Radio Network talk show, “Here’s To Your Health.” But even…

When U.S. Attorney Paul Coggins began putting together one of the nation’s first and largest health-care fraud task forces two years ago, criminal defense lawyers were salivating. They dreamed of a business boom like the one that followed the prosecution of the savings-and-loan bunglers by a similar high-profile task force…

Some of Dallas’ highest-profile businessmen, including former Dallas Cowboys owner H. R. Bum Bright, are targets of an Internal Revenue Service probe–which amounts to a double whammy for this famous pack of former bankers. “I got a letter from them and sent it down to my accounting firm,” Bright says,…

Alan Bonebrake, a Dallas chiropractor, doesn’t know much about the Internet, except that he wants to know more. “People keep telling me it’s the way to go,” says Bonebrake (yes, that’s his real name), who plans to advertise his services on the Net. Last month, Bonebrake, like thousands of others…

Robert Dorrell, a part-time state-licensed massage therapist, says he has grown tired of fielding telephone calls from misguided–not to mention overexcited–prospective customers, who mistake his service for a massage parlor. Typically, Dorrell says, the errant callers “ask me if I’m going to give them a hand job.” Dorrell is blaming…

On his birth certificate, Dwight Martinek uses his legal name, the one that reflects his grandparents’ Czech roots. But on the streets of the East Texas town of Canton, Martinek–a large, ponytailed, sculptor-turned-theme-park promoter–introduces himself as “Wild Willie.” Sure, the handle’s hokey. Martinek borrowed it from a now-defunct Western-style department…

Vernon Johnson is leaving his $125,000-a-year gig as superintendent of the Richardson Independent School District at the end of March to become the chief executive officer at Voyager Expanded Learning Inc. To hear him describe it, leaving the school district to take a job in the public sector–working for a…

The city of Dallas’ overwhelming problem with false burglar alarms became abundantly apparent this past January when Ivey Head’s 77-Drive-In Cafe on South Industrial Boulevard burned to the ground. A controversy ensued because a police dispatcher had refused to respond to Head’s alarm company’s call for help because the city…

Matthew, 12, recently traveled to downtown Dallas with members of Park Cities Baptist Church to deliver sandwiches to the homeless. While there, he spotted his mother, who didn’t see him. Eager to avoid her, he jumped back into the delivery van. A homeless man, seeing him run, walked over to…

Officials of financially beleaguered Kimberly-Clark have some big problems to solve. But last month they proved they could deftly handle a small but embarrassing squabble over a $156,000 jobs-creation grant with Palm Beach County, Florida, and come out smelling like a paper rose. Never mind that the diaper giant had…

Doug Hamilton, a 43-year-old Southwestern Bell manager, left work early on a wet, stormy October day in 1994 to attend a conference with his daughter’s kindergarten teacher. When the meeting ended, Hamilton began driving his wife and three young children home to Mesquite, but decided, two blocks from the house,…

Any real-estate agent worth his listings knows staying ahead in the business these days means getting a piece of the hottest property around, cyberspace. But just how to go about getting a presence on the Internet has caused a schism among Realtors. Nationwide, agents are bickering and even competing among…

Danny Wettreich, a 44-year-old native of London, England, personifies precisely what many find repugnant about American capitalism. In the 13 years since he moved to Dallas, Wettreich has bought and shut down businesses, shuffled millions of dollars in securities, drawn suspicion from two federal agencies, and thrown people out of…

“I do not like to put ladies in jail,” Judge Leonard Hoffman told Tonjua Benge. In her 31 years, the soft-spoken single mother of two has never been convicted of a crime. But on this day in February 1995, on the Texas visiting judge’s orders, she had just completed four…

Vernon Johnson, the superintendent of the Richardson Independent School District, looked glum as he sat with other school administrators on a stage before an agitated audience of 550 people. Johnson had mostly kept his mouth shut and listened during the town-hall meeting that ran for well over two hours last…

When it comes to Dallas, some things never change. This fall, once again parts of the city seethed with discontent as council members struggled to mobilize their disenfranchized constituencies to win bigger pieces of the power pie. But this time there’s a profound difference: the skin colors are reversed, and…

If a $7 bounced dog license check doesn’t strike you as the stuff of political intrigue, you haven’t been to City Hall lately–where Dallas’ blame game has dipped to an absurd level. Before Checkgate–or Doggiegate, if you prefer–was over, Mayor Ron Kirk had received a racially insulting letter, and fired…

When televangelist Pat Robertson, leader of the Christian Coalition, sponsored a 1994 food giveaway in Fair Park as part of a 17-city charitable tour called “Operation Blessing,” Dallas politicians eagerly paraded themselves at the event. But so did a less likely group of volunteers: managers and owners of several of…

In a move that seems to disregard citizen crime concerns and the complaints of the city’s police union, the city of Dallas will turn down $2.85 million in federal funds for additional police officers. Dallas was in line to get $5.25 million as its share of the federal Cops-Ahead program…

On the phone from New York, Wick Allison wanted to offer kind words about the June issue of D magazine, the monthly he founded in 1974 and plans to return to next month as publisher and editor-in-chief. He wanted to be charitable because Chris Tucker, editor of the magazine, whom…