Highland Park police chief Darrell L. Fant is the first to admit that morale on his 65-man force isn’t what it could be. “There’s been a lot of misinformation and a lot of misunderstandings, and it’s led to a lot of unhappy employees,” says the 46-year-old chief, sitting in the…
In his own defense You would think that three death-penalty prosecutions and, finally, a no-contest plea from Kerry Max Cook would be enough to satisfy prosecutors in Tyler, who are ever looking for a way to repair their reputations as doers of justice. Yet the Smith County District Attorney’s Office…
Jim Crites takes off his suit jacket to give himself relief from the 100-plus-degree heat. For more than an hour, the director of operations at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport has driven and walked around the airport grounds, giving a nosy reporter and photographer a tour of DFW’s drainage system. It’s…
Michael Ellis doesn’t deny that he sometimes has a heavy foot when he’s on the highway. Just don’t try to give him a ticket for it, not if you’re a municipal court. Do, and he just might make a federal case out of it. Literally. On July 7, 1994, Garland…
If you believe the urban legend, then Amon Carter started it: a bitter rivalry between Dallas and Fort Worth that goes back for generations. Carter is the Fort Worth tycoon who supposedly packed a lunch before traveling to Dallas, just to make sure he wouldn’t have to spend a nickel…
A cozy bungalow, roughly 6″ x 6″, perfectly formed by rectangles of thin steel welded into a symbol of comfort and security, sits atop a long, wooden handle in one recent piece of Tony Schraufnagel’s work on view last summer at 500X, Dallas’ oldest artist-run, alternative gallery. If the artwork…
Edith Baker knows Dallas better than you know your own kids, but that means she knows one hell of a fickle community. As the owner-director of one of the city’s most venerable art spaces, the Edith Baker Gallery, she’s been to hell and back in this town. Times of boom…
For nearly two decades, the people of Pleasant Grove complained, pleaded, and protested — demanding that the city of Dallas clean up an illegal dump fouling their neighborhood. And for nearly two decades, dump trucks rolled through their mostly black community while the city virtually ignored their complaints (“Dumped on,”…
Truth hurts Mike Howard, president of local publishing company Ringtail Productions Ltd., thought he had a pretty good deal with the nonprofit Irving Schools Foundation. The foundation’s board agreed to distribute his company’s book, Just Gimme a Zero! Teaching From the Trenches by semi-retired Irving Independent School District teacher Mary…
If you ever wondered what happened to Pauly Shore, look no further than the Circus Maximus stage at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. That’s where he stands at this very moment, dolled up in a pink suit and white T-shirt as he stalks the stage and says how he’d like…
The invitation for the reception and special performances happening at the Gypsy Tea Room this evening promised “the debut of an astonishing new voice,” but that claim is at least a couple of months too late, maybe more. Jessica Simpson, the 19-year-old Richardson native who belongs to that voice, has…
The FBI case our new school superintendent is leaving behind him in San Francisco seems much juicier than anything so far in our own lackluster FBI school probe. While Bill Rojas, Dallas’ new school superintendent, and Bill Coleman, the chief financial officer Rojas is bringing with him from San Francisco,…
Looking back, Sean Brockette knows the job sounded too good to be true. The 28-year-old television producer, who has an Emmy award to his credit and loves sports, had been toiling as an “account executive” for the Dallas Burn, the professional men’s soccer team. It wasn’t his dream job. “The…
What’s the frequency, Abby? Abby Goldstein spent Tuesday morning fielding phone calls from friends who wanted to know just why her radio station — KKZN-FM (93.3), otherwise known as The Zone — was broadcasting audio from old Bob Newhart Show episodes. She had no idea. Goldstein, a longtime fixture in…
The best clue to the shell game going on at Dallas City Hall — an indicator of the desperation city officials might be feeling over the financial mess they’ve put themselves in — is the tax cut they say they’re going to give Dallas property owners. XIt’s a major political…
It’s dusk in Deep Ellum, still too bright for the frat boys, poseur chicks, and Uptown yupsters who congregate in the restaurants and be-seen bars of what was once alternative Dallas. This August eve, there’s plenty of parking in front of 2808 Commerce St., the site of a venue in…
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…
When Willard Rollins talks about the incident between his automobile and a red Lexus on July 31 in a neighborhood north of downtown Dallas, the executive assistant police chief is brief but emphatic. “Just for the record,” he says, “no fenders were bent.” A few hours before Rollins talked with…
Try, try again It took only 22 years, three trials, and a long stretch on death row for a man who is likely innocent to be released from prison. Now another Tyler grand jury is ready to look into the Kerry Max Cook case. This time, they’re starting by reading…
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…
Education activist Russell Fish might have gotten poured out of court in April when state District Judge Martin Richter ruled that he had no right to force the Dallas Independent School District to disclose 10 years of student scores from the Iowa Test of Basic Skills (ITBS), but he is…
Romeo Hristov is worried. “I know my colleagues,” says the 35-year-old Ph.D. candidate in archaeology. “They will say, ‘He is dreamer. He is romantic. He is not serious person’…Is very dirty game.” His thick, Bulgarian voice rises until he is almost yelling, spitting out words. “They attack each other like…
