On a Wednesday afternoon in late October, about two weeks before Texas voters went to the polls to re-elect the governor and decide several close state-wide races, the numbers somehow got loose. They were poll numbers, the results of the Texas Poll, the most widely publicized pre-election poll in the…
One minute, the woman in the clingy, curvy red and black dress makes the rounds as a waitress, taking drink orders from the tables of men at Mike’s El Socio Nightclub. The next moment, she is sitting with a customer in boots and straw hat, talking and laughing with him…
By the most superficial look at the site, one wouldn’t think the idea is so bad. Certainly a 63,000-square-foot Albertsons would be more vital than four aging apartment houses and a large stretch of empty ground near the corner of Live Oak Street and Fitzhugh Avenue. But there’s a hitch…
On a gentle hillside 30 miles east of Dallas, out in the countryside near Kaufman, Bailey Kemp pulls his one-ton pickup and 40-foot stock trailer up to a steel-covered horse barn and begins to unload. First he shoos from his rig 10 ordinary-looking bays. Then a palomino. Then he guides…
The beginnings of the little statuette weren’t exactly steeped in idealism. It was 1977, and Dallas commercial artist Paul McKay was sitting around talking with a friend. “You ought to do something on this ‘Roots’ thing,” McKay remembers his buddy saying. The TV miniseries–which depicted the enslavement of a fictional…
One day in June 1995, Mary Ellen Lloyd called in sick to work, citing a variety of ailments. Then she vanished. She would later recount how she packed a few personal effects from her modest home in suburban Fort Worth–such as her collection of gold and porcelain swans–stowed them in…
To hear lawyers at the Dallas law firm of Baron & Budd tell it, they are frontline warriors in a battle against callous corporations whose product, asbestos, claimed the lives and health of thousands of working men. But the first casualty of war is truth, and at Baron & Budd,…
Dallas woman who lost custody of her two children after she was accused of coaching them to lie about her ex-husband now doubts she will see them until they are adults. Katherine Andrews, a former flight attendant, has been barred for the past five years from seeing her two children…
The latest move by a Dallas anti-poverty agency in its fight with state regulators has come to nothing. Attempting to sideline state investigators, the Dallas County Community Action Committee this spring asked the federal government to cut the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs out of its business altogether…
Call it the riddle of the Fords. For almost a year, Tarrant County Sheriff David Williams let five brand-new Crown Victoria patrol cars collect dust in a Fort Worth parking lot. His people just never bothered to pick them up. While the $100,000 worth of cars sat, the sheriff yuppie-lusted…
They spot the truck in the gathering light of 7 a.m., way down a ragged, weedy back street in blue-collar Balch Springs. “That’ll be him,” says Mike Armstrong, spotting at impossible range the little details that distinguish the suspected drug runner’s Ford pickup–the dark blue tint, the Mag wheels, the…
The voice on the answering machine was unmistakable: “This is Kevin Massey, aka ‘Cyberstalker.’ “Just to let you know, I won a $75,000 judgment against Maynard yesterday in court…Just to let you know who’s the loudmouth who was right. Have a good day.” The Maynard in question is Robert Maynard,…
Vance Miller lies. So says a federal judge in ruling that the real estate magnate cannot keep his membership at pricey Preston Trail Golf Club while owing U.S. taxpayers $26 million. The scion of the Henry S. Miller real estate dynasty refuses to pay a whopping debt he owes on…
Dr. Dennis Birenbaum looks a little like a runaway chuck wagon as he rumbles down the hall of his Farmers Branch office. Short and wide, he clear-cuts a path through the lavender corridor, at once quizzing his office assistants, scanning a file, and filibustering an interviewer who has been hard-pressed…
Judge John Creuzot looks down from the bench at one of his new charges and apparently doesn’t need a probation officer’s report to figure out what’s going on. “You’ve got a pretty good buzz going, don’t you?” Creuzot says. “You’re high right now. What have you been doing?” “Well,” the…
To free-market conservatives, the Marianas–a chain of tiny, palm-shrouded islands in the western Pacific–are, well, paradise. According to this ideological spin, the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas is a capitalist Eden, a Rock Candy Mountain of commerce bustling with folks willing to cut and stitch and sew in the service…
State regulators are finally getting tough with the Dallas County Community Action Committee, the anti-poverty agency where nepotism, sweetheart contracting, and other shenanigans have flushed tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money down the pipes. In a letter dated December 30, the state demanded repayment of the $66,963 the…
This should be a routine collection matter. Two federal marshals, a locksmith, several appraisers, and a lawyer armed with a court order approach the two-story mansion at 3815 Beverly Drive, making ready to seize art, jewelry, antiques–anything of value to satisfy a judgment that has remained outstanding for far too…
Good fences surely make good neighbors–which is why City Manager John Ware’s neighbors are blowing the whistle on him. The 6-foot, weathered cedar fence behind Ware’s house on Burleson Drive in North Dallas has been half tipped-over in two places for at least four months, two neighbors who prefer to…
There are a lot of questions surrounding the murder of 20-year-old Rogelio Chin. Who did it isn’t one of them. Dallas police don’t know why David Paz Ramirez, a 22-year-old two-time felon from Pleasant Grove, and two buddies were speeding down Stemmons Freeway in pursuit of Chin, who was at…
To people already in a state of posttraumatic stress from dealing with the boozed-up, belligerent, peeing-in-the-shrubbery nightclubbers who visit their street every weekend, the idea sounds particularly cruel: Turn an old Baptist church that has worked as a weak buffer between their homes and the bars on Lowest Greenville into…
“The problem with the big ‘un is he’s too stiff,” Black Bart says to no one in particular as Aaron White’s 275 pounds go on the receiving end of a hip toss. He somersaults to the canvas, a faint “u-u-u-nh!” whistling from his lips as he lands, face up and…
