Mark Weinberg eases toward the Loop on a congested Kennedy Expressway, the gas needle of his old Honda hovering just above empty. He’s hoping, perhaps against reason, to get downtown in time to find Jessie Thompson working the rush-hour crowd.
As Green talks, he periodically interrupts himself to greet an acquaintance or thank a benefactor. “Hey, sweetie, how you doin’?” “Hey, thank you, partner. Have a good day.” “Hey, Rita, let me pick up this cup.”
Despite his track record, Weinberg was full of hope when he filed the suit on behalf of panhandlers. He’d come across the panhandling ordinance while researching another case. “I saw that,” he recalls, “and I was like, ‘No way. No way is the city denying beggars free-speech rights.’”
A lifelong hockey enthusiast, he quit the firm in 1991 to found the “Blue Line,” an alternative to the programs usually sold to Blackhawks fans. It was rife with satire, gossip, and irreverent humor, and its writers took special care to skewer Bill Wirtz, the team’s multimillionaire owner. Weinberg sold the “Blue Line” outside the stadium on game nights with help from vendors he hired from the nearby Henry Horner Homes. He got arrested before one game on what he calls the “bullshit charge” of obstructing pedestrian traffic. “There wasn’t a soul on the street,” he says. The case was eventually dismissed.
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The “Blue Line” folded in December 1997, and Weinberg shifted from satire to serious muckraking. He wrote a book about Wirtz, accusing him of corporate crimes and misdeeds ranging from bribing public officials to defrauding a close friend’s daughter. Weinberg published Career Misconduct himself in December 2000, then jauntily went to work selling it on Wirtz’s turf. United Center security guards wouldn’t have it. They ordered him to pack up, citing an ordinance that prohibited selling merchandise within 1,000 feet of the United Center. Weinberg protested, seeing no difference between selling a book and selling the “Blue Line” or any other publication. He ended up getting arrested and later filed a First Amendment suit against the city, claiming that its distinction between books, which could not be sold on the public way, and newspapers, which could, was constitutionally invalid. The judge didn’t buy his argument.
Weinberg was especially drawn to Jessie Thompson, a “sweet, quiet” man who’d grown up in Mississippi without learning to read. Thompson claimed to have been arrested hundreds of times for begging. He told Weinberg that police would sometimes stop him while he was simply walking down the street and then use the presence of change in his pockets to nab him.
Weinberg filed a class-action suit against the city on September 6, which claims that the panhandling ordinance violates the First Amendment (he’s since cited rulings by Florida, California, and New York federal courts and the Massachusetts Supreme Court that say begging is protected under the First Amendment; other states have upheld some restrictions on it). The suit also alleges that the city subjects panhandlers to unconstitutional searches and seizures and deprives them of due process.
