At first, independent Dallas tour guide Elaine Swartzwelder couldn’t see anything wrong with the loping longhorns and the three horsemen that make up the Texas trail-drive sculpture in Pioneer Plaza, and she’s seen it plenty. In fact, she says, it’s one of the most popular spots on her route, second…
When we last left the city marshal’s office, officers were upset that a sergeant was allowed to continue working for months after he admitted taking an unauthorized loan from the Dallas Police Patrolman’s Union (“Marshal law,” August 5). They also complained about the leadership of interim Marshal Dean Darnell, whom…
Get a grip Buzz hates being one of those guys — commonly known as “losers” or “dateless” — who laboriously explain jokes. Unfortunately, some people — commonly known as “clueless” or “Judge Darlene Whitten” — did not get, or did not appreciate, the joke behind the news story “Stop the…
Richard A. Anderson makes part of his living arguing cases before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, a nine-member panel of elected judges that is the state’s supreme court over criminal cases. In the hallowed halls of the judiciary, deference to those in the black robes often plays out in…
Last Saturday night, the Dallas Observer and its staff took home eight Katie Awards — the most in the newspaper’s 19-year history — including one for best non-daily newspaper. The Katie Awards are presented by the Dallas Press Club in recognition of excellence in journalism and mass communications throughout Texas,…
Matt Orwig could smell victory. Perched nervously on the edge of his swivel chair, the assistant U.S. attorney tried not to glance too obviously at the big wall clock in the conference room of the city manager’s office. “I wanna vote, I wanna vote, I wanna vote,” he thought, half…
Carlton Whitlock is about to lose money — a lot of money, fast. Perched before a computer at a Far North Dallas office, the 39-year-old Garland man will soon see $1,600 evaporate in less than an hour. Four weeks have passed since Whitlock quit his $100,000-a-year marketing job at Nortel…
Last June, for the sixth time in two years, Rufino and Cynthia Cruz loaded their two young daughters into their 1985 Chevy Suburban and drove from Fort Worth to Dallas, where they spent a warm and sticky night in front of the Immigration and Naturaliza-tion Service office on Stemmons Freeway…
Magnum CPA You would think that by now we would have lost our ability to be appalled by anything Dallas City Council members say or do. Fat chance. Buzz is talking, of course, about the move afoot either to fire City Auditor Robert Melton or to deny him a raise…
In the second homework-related arrest in as many weeks, a Denton County juvenile court judge jailed a Ponder student for suspicion of making a terroristic threat after the first-grader wrote a book report on the children’s classic Where the Wild Things Are. Cindy Bradley, a diminutive 6-year-old, was arrested without…
When Tom Lardner drives his burgundy Chevy Suburban around the historic State-Thomas district these days, you’d expect the real estate speculator to marvel at his own handiwork. Just 10 years ago, the neighborhood north of downtown was little more than a cluster of deteriorating dwellings, home to a dwindling, impoverished,…
Looking back, Sherrie Wilson thinks she can pinpoint the moment she knew something was wrong. It was mid-August 1998, barely a month after she started her new assignment as a recruiter for the Dallas Fire Department. Landing the position was a coup, elevating her two ranks to acting captain, which…
Timothy Kelley’s 10-year battle with Dallas County over court fees wasn’t so much about the money the county overcharged the public — it was only $30, after all — but the principle. In the end, that principle and that $30 could end up costing the county around $3 million, thanks…
Welcome to our world In case you were wondering where your copy of DFW Icon was last week — or maybe you’re just wondering what the hell DFW Icon is this week — it turns out the newest local weekly publication wasn’t quite ready to peek out of its shell…
In a strange new film that opens this week, people pay for the pleasure of slipping through a small door in an anonymous office building and spending 15 minutes inside John Malkovich’s head. Turns out celebrity’s not all it’s cracked up to be: Those who make the trip watch Malkovich…
Dallas Observer staff writer Christine Biederman has been named a winner of the Dallas Bar Association’s Stephen H. Philbin Award for her February 25, 1999, story “Lost in translation,” which details the controversy surrounding Spanish-language interpreters in the Dallas County courts. Biederman uncovered evidence that the county’s main contractor for…
If there is still such a thing as a war on drugs in Texas, then one of its last skirmishes is unfolding in the trenches at New Place, a drug treatment center that operates amid a pocket of vacant lots in Old East Dallas. On this Thursday evening, the addicts…
Ed Burleson is one of them folks who can’t help but be country — and, more than that, Texas country. You could say it’s in his blood, type TX-positive. A sixth-generation Texan, he’s the direct descendant and namesake of Gen. Edward Burleson, a commander at the Battle of San Jacinto…
Paid endorsement It must have warmed Mayor Pro Tem Mary Poss’ heart: Just three weeks after she wrote a column for The Dallas Morning News’ editorial page announcing that the city’s streets were in better shape than anyone who actually drives might think, the paper published a letter filled with…
If publisher Gary Turner expects to get rich from Crime and Politics, he’ll have to try harder. Only one of the handful of mid-afternoon, weekday shoppers at Albertson’s on Midway and Northwest Highway had ever heard of it, even though a yellowing stack of the free neighborhood newspaper with the…
In the spring of 1970, as a prospective middle-round National Football League draftee, I was haunted by a recurring nightmare. On a practice field somewhere, between two blocking dummies, I faced a monstrous offensive tackle who sat poised and quivering in his stance. To the tackle’s left, on the far…
On July 19, three carloads of armed officers from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service arrived at the small Fort Worth house that 23-year-old Quy Ngoc Tran and his family share with their cousin, Ann. In front of his wife and two young sons, officers arrested Tran and put him…
