James W. Gee Jr., owner of Youngin's Towing, has not always had the best relations with his customers—they've been so bad, in fact, that Youngin's has recently had its business license revoked by the city. Nor is his record with cops spotless. In June 2004, Gee was so belligerent to a 5th District cop that [...]

Saturday night, I was drinking beer and eating steak with my neighbors. The host kept saying he wanted to fatten me up; he acted hurt when I didn't finish my potato. In an hour, I went to my room to do some work. My windows were open, though, and soon I heard so much commotion [...]

Today, the city assembled inspectors, police officers, and reporters for "Operation Pitbull," a crackdown on shady operations along Bladensburg Road NE. The Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs wanted to catch used-car dealers who were screwing their customers. What happened was less spectacular.
At one used-car lot, inspectors learned that a federal task force had arrived [...]

On television, James W. Gee Jr. of Youngin's Towing looks tough but honest. If you treat him with respect, he says, he'll treat you with respect. Viewers have no reason to believe otherwise. The only contrasts to Gee's opinion are car owner LeRoy Atkins (you might remember him from our story) and Department of Consumer [...]

Unlike many car owners with beefs with Youngin's Towing, Michigan Park resident Kevin Williams actually wanted the controversial company to tow his car. The Infiniti coupe had broken down on Pennsylvania Avenue SE, and he needed a wrecker to take it to a service station on Alabama Avenue SE. According to a court complaint, the [...]

My neighbor sat shirtless in his yard on Mother's Day. He had his vodka, his beer, his sausages, his pork chops, his chicken, and he had found a way to amuse himself.
"There's nothing wrong with it," he said. "I'm just saying Happy Mother's Day." Then his voice got lower: "I'm just saying it to girls [...]

Last night in Wonderland's beer garden, a drunken man chased his friends. He wanted them to hear the jokes he was telling, loudly: "What does a gay horse say? Haaaaaay. What does a straight horse eat? Haaaaaay. Three men were standing at the pearly gates. No, you listen to me. Three men were standing at [...]

I had a one-night stand in December with a woman who, once we were too far into things for a second thought, told me that she had been raped. She said she was clean, but when I didn't hear from her again, I started to worry. I would wash my hands for too long in [...]

One night in summer of 2002, I walked through the streets of my hometown, taking pictures. After I tried to capture a view of the U.S. flag flapping outside the federal courthouse, an agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms followed me down the street, flashed his badge, and asked what I was [...]

Retired D.C. cop Stuart Smith responds to the current edition of Suit Yourself, our weekly feature detailing lawsuits filed against the District, in which a Ward 5 man is suing local cops for assault and harrassment:
Possibly the worst thing about this case is the many hours that city employees (police supervisors and attorneys) have spent [...]

Once in ninth-grade theater, we read short stories aloud. Mine was "Kaleidoscope" from Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man. It drags on for pages and pages of marvelous description of men falling through space from their scrapped rocket. As they drift apart, each to die alone in a different corner of the sky, the men talk [...]

When I saw Grindhouse, one of my friends kept pointing at a man far behind us in a hooded sweater. "It's him!" she said. "It's Nicholas Cage!" I wished she'd shut up. The last thing I care for is celebrity sightings, and what would Cage be doing anyway in the AMC Loews Georgetown theater? I [...]

In 1995, Laverne Robinson was fired from his job as a sales manager at Ottenberg's Bakery, one of the District's biggest bread distributors. Six years later, he won a nearly $350,000 racial discrimination judgment from the D.C. Commission on Human Rights. Now, after another five years of litigation, a division of the D.C. Court of [...]

I drank too much at the City Paper party last night, and I paid for it this morning, with the aching head and inability to think that come of getting too friendly with bad red wine. One of my first blurry thoughts—besides "Oh shit, it's 10" and "I need water"—was "I wish I was in [...]

To draw attention to our newly designed paper, all staffers are helping to hawk today's issue at Metro stops and elsewhere. So I stood outside Union Station, with the men who were passing out the Express and the Examiner, and I shouted: "City Paper! Get your City Paper!"
I had to shout the name a few [...]