On the morning of April 28 Ceylon Mooney sat in the Starbucks near Madison and State drinking a cup of coffee. On the floor next to him lay a banner that read “Boeing Weapons Crucify the Least Among Us” and a backpack containing 200 buttons with the names of Iraqi children who’d been befriended by activists from Voices in the Wilderness during a visit to Iraq last year. Next door in the Renaissance Chicago Hotel three other activists, two of them Voices in the Wilderness members, were in room 914, getting ready to disrupt Boeing’s annual shareholders’ meeting, which was to start at 10 AM in a third-floor conference room.
“One of the officers I knew immediately said, ‘You’re under arrest,’” says Mooney. He thought the guy was joking. “My brain said, ‘Just fly casual.’ But, boy, were they smiling. They said, ‘Hey, we’ve been looking for you. We were hoping to get you today.’” Before the elevator reached the lobby, he says, he was handcuffed and told that he was being arrested for trespassing and for violating his bond. He spent the next hour in a paddy wagon.
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Hangey says he looked out the peephole a little later and saw six policemen and security guards in the hallway, one with his ear to the door. “We were getting a little paranoid,” says Hangey. “Our plan was to disrupt the meeting, but it quickly became clear that we wouldn’t make it.” They thought that as soon as they left the room they’d be arrested, so they called another Voices in the Wilderness member, Bitta Mostofi, who brought them a camera to document whatever happened. Mostofi says that by the time she arrived only one policeman was standing in the hallway, and he didn’t give her any trouble. But the other officers soon returned. Mostofi agreed to leave first to see what they would do.
Hangey and Mackley left together. He took the stairs, and she headed for the elevators. She says a policeman told his partner he was “going for a smoke break” and hopped in with her. When he stepped out of the elevator in the hotel lobby, she hit the button for the third floor, hoping she could still disrupt the shareholders’ meeting. She stopped in a rest room and started pulling the posters she intended to hold up out of her purse.
Shortly after that Mackley returned to the hotel. “I thought, they can’t just kick us out,” she says, adding that she went to the front desk to file a complaint. “At that point I didn’t want to pay for the room because of the way we were treated–we were harassed.” She says she was returning the key card for the room, which cost $277.61, and talking to the hotel’s director of security, Brandon Moore, when Risley walked up and asked why she was still in the hotel. She told him she was filing a complaint. She says he walked away, then sent over another officer, who told her the police needed to do “further investigating.”
The activists were released from the lockup at 18th and State around 9 PM, and the next day they hired Tom Brejcha, the attorney who’s been representing the 11 protesters, including Mooney, arrested at Boeing headquarters on March 13. Brejcha says that when that case first went to court, on April 25, the prosecutor, Mikki Miller, indicated that she was amenable to a deal, but at the next court date she told him she was “under orders from the top not to cut any.” He thinks it was “a delayed reaction to the mass arrests [of protesters] on March 20–after that they were treating people guilty of crimes of conscience as harshly as people guilty of violent crimes.” Marcy Jensen of the state’s attorney’s public affairs office says Miller disputes his account: “What she told the defendants’ attorney was that her supervisor had instructed her not to drop the cases. We are always open to plea agreements.”
Risley says he can’t comment on Mooney’s account of his arrest because he wasn’t there. “I have to go by what’s on the report,” he says. But he thinks the question of whether Hangey and Raterink actually entered the conference room, as their arrest reports state, is a nonissue. “They made it to the floor where the conference room was located,” he says. “They were, I’d say, about 100 feet from the conference room. There were numerous attendees leaving and being subjected to their shouting.”
