By Ben Joravsky
His ticket was a teacher–“her name was Miss Wright”–who used to take him and a friend to restaurants and museums. “If it wasn’t for her getting me and my friend Tim out now and then, there’s a lot of things I wouldn’t know. Tim’s a minister, by the way, living in Virginia. I’m real proud of him.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In 1977 he graduated from Cregier High School and enrolled at Loop College, intending to major in art. Within a few months, however, he found himself locked in the county jail charged with a murder. “A guy got shot over at ABLA and they said I did it. I didn’t do it. I didn’t have nothing to do with that. But I sat in jail for over six months. My mother didn’t have the money to pay the bond. I turned 19 in jail. I have a son who’s 19 now and I worry for my son, not that he ever did anything wrong. I’d never want him to spend his 19th birthday in jail.
In the meantime, his lawyer, a public defender named Alan Goldberg, was assembling the evidence to establish Wilson’s innocence. Eventually the case was dropped. “When it happened the thing that angered me the most was that there were some people who didn’t believe me,” says Wilson. “I feel real bad about the guy who got shot. He was only 19 years old himself. His name was Frankie. His family knows that I didn’t do it. Every now and then I still see his mother and brother and they’re really nice to me. It’s just the saddest thing, such a waste for a young man.”
So in 1999 he and Jeanne found space in a storefront in the 1400 block of West 103rd Street and went to work creating Wilson Systems Cyber Cafe. “We oversaw the build-out–plumbing, electrical, new walls, you name it.” His days were spent in constant motion. He scrambled all over the city and into the suburbs setting up systems and working with clients, and returned each night to 103rd Street to work on the cafe.
But WVON paid only a fraction of what it owed him, he charges. “They were going to pay me in part with free commercials for my cafe, but they stopped airing the commercials even though I was still providing them with service.”
Hooks says the radio station will respond to Wilson’s allegations in due course. “Our story is we’re filing an answer in court,” he says. “We strongly deny the allegations and we will vigorously defend ourselves against them.”
