It took a two-week trip to Lebanon last spring for Sarah Logan to understand what she was getting into. Among the bullet-ridden buildings in the northern city of Tripoli, the 46-year-old Dallas accountant heard her Baptist missionary hosts describe armed attacks on Christian churches by a faction of Islamic fundamentalists…
Harold Holigan and his son Michael, who have ridden a nationally televised home-improvement show to minor Dallas celebrity, are being accused by their equally well-known investors of diverting proceeds from the show and using them to build a huge Preston Hollow mansion. Olympus Real Estate Partners, which was founded by…
Little did Ronald Bailey know that his handiness and inquisitive mind would one day kill him. The Fort Worth native had a knack for understanding mechanical things. So as an engineering student at the University of Oklahoma in the early 1960s, he took what he thought was a great work-study…
Dallas’ daily has been singing an odd refrain lately. Dallas Morning News writers have been insisting that the city shouldn’t worry its little head about a retrial of Al Lipscomb now that an appeals court has overturned the former city council member’s federal bribery and conspiracy conviction on technical grounds…
He simply wanted his father to tell the truth, to stop the posing and the big-shot games and start saying something that made sense. Why is Mom still missing? What do you know? Why haven’t you told your own brothers and sisters that she vanished three months ago and that…
Low-income housing developer Virginia McGuire has resigned from the troubled nonprofit that paid her and her husband’s company roughly $500,000 to buy an aging East Dallas apartment complex. In late April, on the same day the Dallas Observer published a story about the big fees McGuire and her family collected…
There’s nothing like a dirty movie to get County Criminal Court No. 4 talking about sex. Especially when the title is Euro Angels #20, Anal Retentive–contents exactly as advertised–and it’s about to be unreeled in the obscenity trial of the hapless clerk who sold it. The court stenographer is cracking…
In Dallas’ enduring war against topless clubs, it was supposed to be a new weapon. But in the legal Beirut that has the city fighting 35 different court and licensing cases involving many of the city’s two dozen adult cabarets, the city’s “two-rubs-and-you’re-out” law has so far turned out to…
Williams Run was supposed to be a sterling example of the latest thinking in affordable housing when Virginia McGuire convinced state officials to approve her plans to buy and rehabilitate the place in December 2000. Unlike public housing, where the poor are concentrated in problem-ridden complexes, Williams Run was going…
The spotless white Lincoln Navigator with “Bail Me” license plates and custom chrome wheels shines like a comet in the rough constellation of Korean grocers, car-repair garages and tiny, burglar-barred houses that make up the neighborhood around the corner of Beckley and Saner streets. It is parked in front of…
The story is tantalizing, if only for the characters, who seem as if they’ve been yanked from an Elmore Leonard novel, except they are real and working on the paying side of Dallas crime. There is bounty hunter Reggie Spellman, partial to loud hats, Superfly suits and on occasion some…
At Dian Avriett’s Lunch Box, the homespun signs for Christmas cakes and 22-pound holiday hams are easier to spot than the two small holes in the plate-glass windows at the front of the shop. One is located behind the drive-up doughnut counter, the other in the dining room, near the…
Like other public officials, Dallas City Council member Veletta Lill got the pitch in the Victory Marketing Center, a former machine shop made over to sell the prime, quite empty real estate around American Airlines Center. The show was impressive. Flickering down the granite-topped table were slides of new hotels…
“They aren’t mine,” says Burger House co-owner Angelo Chantilis when asked why his burgers at the new American Airlines Center are garnering so many complaints. In the big picture, critical e-mail and personal complaints about burgers desiccated to the consistency of hockey pucks might not sound earthshaking. But if you’re…
Seconds after Ricardo Vasquez went into his first seizure, bystanders pulled out their cell phones and called 911. The skinny 37-year-old had been attending an AIDS awareness rally on the Southern Methodist University campus, so the emergency calls summoned a University Park ambulance. When the two paramedics arrived, Vasquez was…
For Dallas homeowners and apartment dwellers, the dawn of electricity deregulation on January 1 will bring an immediate 6 percent rate cut and the chance to sign up a company besides TXU that can beat the former monopoly by a few dollars a month. But for the working poor and…
Alzheimer’s had faded Iris Carnathan to a wisp of her former self. The British-born nurse, who came to Texas as the wife of a World War II GI, could no longer tend to her beloved cats or endeavor to raise an English garden in the Texas heat. When the disease…
Fermin Vazquez’s widow is not certain her husband’s zoning fight with neighbors of his North Oak Cliff business and their City Hall allies was the ultimate reason he put a .380-caliber handgun to his chest last month and fired a bullet into his heart, but she says there are clues…
Maybe it was her “P.U.N.K. Keeping kids on the street” bumper sticker, which mocks the D.A.R.E anti-drug program slogan, or her fire-engine-red hair, or more legitimately, the burned-out taillight on her 1994 Olds that prompted a Dallas police officer to pull over Traci Davis. The 25-year-old software analyst says she…
Like a lot of other homeowners in Dallas, Wanda Taylor wasn’t exactly thrilled to see her annual property tax appraisal when it came in the mail this April. In each of the past four years, the Dallas Central Appraisal District has raised the value of her stone cottage in East…
Ted Marules’ new bathroom is neither subtle nor cheap. “We had visions of grandeur,” he says of the $20,000 renovation to his Houston-area home. “We planned to have some wonderful moments in there.” Marules and his wife sprung for all the frills: special-order Spanish tile, marble floors, gold faucets and…
On a Saturday afternoon in late April, 10,200 horse racing fans have gathered in the tan stucco grandstand at Lone Star Park. They’re moistening in the warming sun, ordering beers with their Grand Prairie dogs, queuing up to invest in the ninth race, the $300,000 Texas Mile, which is filled…
