It all seemed too easy, when they swept away the peanut vendors from the United Center’s steps.
Weinberg and copublisher Steve Kohn print an issue for every game and peddle it outside the stadium for $3 a copy. On a good night they’ll sell 1,500. The Blue Line’s filled with statistics and gossip, and it portrays Wirtz as a lecherous old robber baron. One gag, written by Weinberg and Greg Simetz, a freelance humor writer, features a made-up letter from Mayor Daley. When mayoral press secretary Jim Williams called Kohn and complained that some might think the gag letter real, Weinberg penned an apology to Daley in which he also apologized for “stating repeatedly in The Blue Line that you are ‘in the back pocket’ of [Wirtz and Reinsdorf]; that you are, in fact, a mere puppet of a select group of wealthy white men who actually run the city; and that, while you proudly wear the illusion of power, the real power belongs to the businessmen who primarily finance your campaigns….Now could you please have my water service resumed, my trash picked-up, and the Denver Boots (all four) removed from my Yugo?” (The Blue Line, by the way, is suing the Blackhawks for not providing press credentials.)
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But when the United Center opened last year, security officials went beyond anything the Cubs or Sox had attempted–they confiscated bags of peanuts. “If you tried to bring a bag in they told you, no peanuts allowed,” says Weinberg. “It’s ridiculous. Peanuts and sporting events are an American tradition. Whoever heard of banning peanuts at a game?”
He rounded up 18 peanut vendors and, after a long search for a cocounsel (“a lot of firms turned us down because, let’s face it, you don’t get rich representing peanut vendors”), found one in Donald Weiland. On October 2 they sued, arguing that the ban on food is an unfair, monopolistic business practice that violates federal antitrust law and deprives vendors of several hundred thousand dollars a year in wages.
Again, Weinberg disagrees. “Yeah, right, there’re so many people getting hit by cars outside the United Center ’cause of peanut vendors,” he says sarcastically. “They used the same argument for moving the peanut vendors away from Comiskey Park. Now you have vendors selling along the exit ramps from the Dan Ryan, which is a real safety problem. Meanwhile, the White Sox made a separate deal with one company that gets exclusive rights to sell peanuts in the parking lot. You watch. The United Center will make the same kind of deal.”
