“That’s me and Gotti…Not that Gotti. Gene Gotti. John’s brother,” says Norm Berger, pointing to one picture on the Las Vegas-Atlantic City wall of fame he’s nailed up in his spare, one-bedroom apartment in Far North Dallas. Next to the man he identifies as Gotti, who looks every bit the…
The arrest of drug suspect Edward Allen Wright in an Oak Cliff drug house in January 1998 stirred up more than the usual ration of trouble — mostly for people other than Wright. First, there was the bounty hunter who was incensed that someone else had “jumped his claim” by…
The map on the wall at Luke’s sporting goods is as overrun with boldly colored lines as a New York City subway map. Orange, red, green, blue, they intersect and collide in a web covering most of Dallas County. This laminated dream, produced by a couple of slick consulting companies…
Played in Quebec City in front of as many as 13,000 screaming French Canadians, the International Pee Wee Hockey World Championship is one of the sport’s biggest tournaments. Top-notch teams fly in from Russia, Finland, the Czech Republic, and other hockey powerhouses. Over the years, many of the National Hockey…
Robin Page had been home from her job as an assistant Dallas city attorney for only a day when reporters began calling and showing up at her doorstep. That she would be their quarry, rather than the poorly run unit of the Dallas Police Department with which she had worked,…
A titty bar, $200 worth of beer and tequila shots, and a conservative Republican judge: a combo more volatile than atomic fission. The question is, Will the Texas GOP go thermonuclear when it learns one of its highest-ranking jurists, Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Sharon Keller, owns the building and…
They began noticing the symptoms only days after the explosion. Bronchitis. Asthma. Sleeplessness. Nausea. Trouble breathing. Surely, they thought, it must be the gas. Bill Smith has no doubt he can prove that the butane gas leak and pipeline explosion near his home in rural Kaufman County three years ago…
Porn may be going mainstream on the coasts, but a couple of recent obscenity busts in Dallas make it clear that isn’t about to happen here. Dallas, true to its Saturday night-Sunday morning moral compass, is as schizophrenic as ever in its approach to skin. It consumes porn in vast…
Sarge says he spends most days at his “duty station.” The tall, gentle-sounding man appears to be talking about a single metal folding chair parked under a scraggly hackberry tree a block south of Dallas City Hall, just out of reach of the withering sun. But he is also clearly…
It’s almost a law of nature that if you put 100 strict Baptists or Pentecostals in a room together week after week, eventually someone won’t like someone else’s interpretation of a Bible verse, or they’ll take a dislike to the preacher, and off half the congregation will go in a…
Westlake Park, on the western edge of Lewisville Lake, has that pretty ordinary look that characterizes many of the man-made lakesides in North Texas: It’s flat and it’s bland. But compared with the vista of Cellular Warehouses, Hooters, and Basset Furniture Outlets bracketing nearby I-35 — now fully cemented from…
Crusty, cootish, a legendary ass-chewer, W.A. “Tex” Moncrief Jr. is — to put it lightly — blunt. So when the multimillionaire Fort Worth oilman spoke to the Dallas Observer last summer about the particularly embarrassing defense his ex-secretary used against charges she embezzled from him, Tex put it like this:…
Just how 2-month-old Eric Hernandez’s femur was broken remains a mystery. Only his 19-year-old mother knows how it happened. But every time she explains herself, her story changes. When Juana Olalde arrived at Children’s Medical Center of Dallas on February 27 with her injured son, she told Donna Mendez, a…
Back in December, before her club got in deep with the taxman, Elizabeth Edwards described neighborhood opposition to her Lower Greenville nightclub as “kind of like a tsetse fly…It goes away eventually.” So, it seems, has Edwards. The club, the much-ignored Palace and Moonshine Cafe, has apparently contracted a bad…
Until a couple of weeks ago, this particularly dismal frame home in West Dallas was a two-bedroom place. Valued on county tax rolls at little more than the price of a decent chicken coop–$8,020 total for the 768-square-foot house and the lot–it’s worth far more to its owners and managers,…
Sometime in late December, in the hip, harmony-green halls of the Sammons Center, Chuck Moore and 26 other arts-group managers received their questionnaires. Their “Nonprofit Accountability Checklists,” to be precise. Sent by the influential Dallas Business Committee for the Arts, the mailing asked 20 questions about taxes, debts, budgets, and…
Bounty hunting–a cheesy but sometimes deadly occupation–has come under scrutiny in Austin, where a bill with law-enforcement backing would restrict who can go after bail “skips” and how the absconders can be arrested. The aim is to stop would-be goon squads, stoked on reality-TV bounty-hunter busts, from going out and…
The Kowbell hardly fits its billing as “the rodeo capitol of the world.” On a recent Saturday, when the amateur, small-stakes rodeos are held, about 200 spectators are sprinkled among the 1,500 tattered red seats–or the empty spaces where the seats used to be. Outside, the bulb lighting the hand-lettered…
The much-investigated Dallas County Community Action Committee has a new bunch looking into its free-spending ways: the feds. Ann Gerner, a lawyer for the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, and Brian Montgomery, its department spokesman, say the FBI has been investigating the Dallas anti-poverty agency, which the state…
Alone protester ushered in the 26th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade last Friday at Denton’s only abortion clinic. “I’m a sidewalk counselor,” said Sue Cyr, who carried a poster of a bloody fetus in front of the gray medical office on Elm Street. Cyr’s sign read, “Stop Clinic Violence,” a…
The use of sales tax money to bankroll sports stadiums and other private projects has always been contentious. In Arlington, voters approved a half-cent sales levy eight years ago for a new stadium so the Texas Rangers wouldn’t pack up and leave. Critics argue it ended up shifting wealth from…
Things appear to be looking up for Walter Waldhauser Jr. After being convicted of playing a central role in a gruesome triple murder-for-hire in Houston in 1980, he was released from prison in 1990 after serving a third of his plea-bargained sentence. He wound up back behind bars last month,…
