A federal jury deliberated for only three hours before convicting William Risby, a roofing contractor, last Friday on 64 DISD-related counts that included charges of kickbacks, embezzlement, and conspiracy to defraud the school district of more than $385,000 for roofing repairs that were never performed. But as the proceedings unfolded…
Getting the “facts” straight I can’t understand the absurd diatribes that get posted every week against Robert Wilonsky and the other music critics of the Dallas Observer. Case in point: the reactions to Wilonsky’s dissing of Pearl Jam. Outraged readers wrote that Wilonsky was ill-informed, poorly educated, smoking crack, and…
Fred Baron is one of the good guys. Or so he says, loudly, repeatedly, as though it were an incantation to make the questions go away. The legendary plaintiffs’ attorney marshals his defense with high drama: hushed apologies, and a grand array of verbal feints and bobs. It all adds…
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,…
Torrential rains lashed the crowds that had gathered outside the state prison in Huntsville, two disparate camps that had come to noisily support and prayerfully protest the execution by lethal injection of convicted murderer David Wayne Spence in April 1997. Inside the death chamber, the 38-year-old beefy, blue-eyed Spence would…
On a summer day in 1969, as American hearts pounded in cadence to Neil Armstrong’s first step on the moon, NASA engineer Tom Moser’s heart almost stopped cold.XAbout two weeks before the epic launch, Moser’s boss at the Johnson Space Center in Houston had assigned him a top-secret mission. Congress…
Buried at the back of a report by the Army Corps of Engineers is an admission that the $2 billion Trinity River project may make flooding in the region worse, not better. The Corps says the increased threat of flooding should be allowed because of the project’s value as a…
The doctor is out Dallas Independent School District board candidate Richard Evans, the self-described “doctor”(as in bogus Ph.D.), has been quiet in the wake of reports that he may have dropped out of high school and never attended an accredited college or university. That may be because Evans has been…
Annexation politics In “Raw deal” [July 23], on governor emeritus (from the Latin “e” meaning “out,” and “meritus” meaning “deserved to be”) Clements’ land by the south end of Lake Ray Hubbard, Jim Schutze gets the fundamentals of politics right. This is rare and difficult. Schutze again shows what everyone…
There’s a chance that Richard Evans’ tardiness on this Thursday evening is a faux pas, an innocent error made while the Dallas school board candidate juggles his busy campaign schedule. But it’s more likely that Evans’ fashionably late arrival is just another calculated campaign tactic designed to propel the “management…
Dallas Observer Editor Julie Lyons recently won a first-place award in sportswriting from the National Association of Black Journalists for her July 17, 1997, article “The Saint,” about Lone Star Park jockey Marlon St. Julien. St. Julien, 26, is the only prominent black thoroughbred racing jockey in the United States…
The best things in life “People pay for value, and most people disregard free things because they intrinsically have no value because people don’t pay for them.” That bit of, um, wisdom spilled from the lips of D magazine publisher Wick Allison, as quoted in The Dallas Morning News. He…
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…
A fine whine I read Rose Farley’s article [“Whine capital of Texas,” July 16] with great interest today. She did an excellent job capturing the Grapevine Heritage Foundation story. I hope any doubts the public had about the foundation’s motives have been clarified. I always thought the combination of P.W.’s…
1) Ignore scientific consultants. In 1983, the Texas Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Authority hired Los Angeles-based engineering consultants Dames & Moore to conduct a siting study for the proposed facility based on state guidelines. After looking at all of Texas, the consultants excluded much of Hudspeth County–the authority’s current choice…
“I want to bring the artists back to Deep Ellum,” declares developer Don Blanton, referring to the halcyon (and sometimes hyperbolized) days of the mid-’80s. Those were the days when yuppies stayed away from Deep Ellum because of the perceived skinhead threat, and musicians, painters, and performance artists were crammed…
Pay up and shut up Get ready. Buzz has located the nation’s newest persecuted minority: the filthy rich. That’s their claim, anyway, judging by comments from two members of the metroplex’s moneyed class, who say they were harassed by “Nazis” who (gasp!) demanded that they pay their taxes. A few…
Death Row railroad “Deathtrap” [July 9] was well-written, carefully considered, and needed to be written. The criminal “justice” system needs a free and vigilant press. Somehow, such things seem to work better when the media “looks” at them. Thanks for doing this one. Maurice Healy Via e-mail I read your…
In the stark, Wild West landscape of the Trans-Pecos region, a rancher and a baker kick up dust in the bottom of a trench 32 feet deep, 210 feet wide, and 400 feet long. The rancher, shielded from the blazing sun by a cowboy hat, scoops a small pebble of…
On his way out the door, departing City Manager John Ware is setting up a sweetheart tax-dollar giveaway to former Governor Bill Clements and oilman Ray Hunt that will make his Trinity River and sports-arena deals look like sound government policy. Impossible? Consider this: Clements and Hunt, both hugely wealthy…
In the end, history will judge the events that took place on Main Street, in the heart of Grapevine, on September 14. Maybe this time history will get it right. On that sweltering Sunday, thousands of wine lovers savored the final hours of the annual GrapeFest, a three-day celebration promoting…
Peter Schmidt shouldn’t even be here now. Here is Matt Pence’s home studio in Denton, and now is December 1997, not so long after it appeared that Schmidt had finally given up on music for good. By now, Schmidt figured, the record he has been making for months–months that seemed…
