1-Oct-10 – Chicago police are investigating a bomb threat against WLS-TV that was initially blamed on downtown celebrity Vincent Falk.

Falk was quickly cleared of any connection to the threat, but not until he was taken into custody and forced to spend a night at CPD’s first district headquarters.

And despite no evidence linking Falk to a series of letters and emails to WLS over the past year, other than his name appearing on the notes, the television station wasted no time turning Falk over to the police. A few hours after WLS received the bomb threat, a station employee pointed Falk out to an officer as the Marina City resident happened to walk by on State Street.

Known in downtown Chicago as the man who dresses in loud suits and dances on bridges for the amusement of tour boats, Falk is also known at WLS. The generous street-level windows of the station’s State Street Studio attract curious onlookers as well as anyone looking to be on TV. Channel 7 viewers have often seen Falk doing a signature “spin move,” dressed in suits perhaps a bit formal and colorful for the Loop, even State Street.

Legally blind since birth, Falk developed the routine in recent years while living in a one-bedroom condo he owns at Marina City and working for Cook County as a computer programmer. In 2008, he was the subject of a documentary that has won critical acclaim and was shown in May and July at the Gene Siskel Film Center located in the same block as WLS.

The shtick was a sharp contrast to the letter WLS received on the morning of April 9, claiming to be from Falk, stating according to the police report, “he had a gun and a bomb and that he wanted to come to [WLS] and shoot and blow up the employees.”

WLS employees believed Falk was sending the threatening letter because the station had stopped showing him in on daily newscasts. The letter appears to have been addressed to Jerry Taft, whose position as television meteorologist certainly gave him no control over who appears in crowd shots from the State Street Studio.

When a police officer arrived at WLS at about 1:30 p.m. on April 9, he interviewed Erica Bautista, the building manager for WLS. As they spoke, Falk happened to walk by, going north on State Street toward his home at Marina City. Bautista pointed this out to the officer, who caught up with Falk as he crossed Lake Street.

Apprehended “without incident,” says the police report, Falk was taken to district headquarters about two-and-a-half miles directly south on State Street. While Falk believes he was arrested, a police spokesperson says he was “just detained for questioning.”

But while police say they “tried to expedite” questioning and “get him in and out as soon as they could,” the legally blind Falk spent the night of Friday, April 9 in jail.

Falk cleared, investigation ongoing

“There’s a lot of information that you’re not privy to,” said Detective Mark Flynn more than five months later when asked what evidence against Falk could have possibly kept him in jail overnight.

Still, Falk was not charged with anything and, says Detective Flynn, was cleared “months ago.” The CPD Bomb & Arson Section continues to investigate the threat against WLS and there appears to be another suspect. Flynn would not elaborate, saying he is “trying to protect the rights of the individual we’re looking at.”

Soon after Marina City Online contacted Detective Flynn for an update on the investigation, he called Jennifer Burns, director of the documentary on Falk, and told her that Vincent had been officially cleared of any connection with the bomb threat.

Emily Barr, the WLS-TV president and general manager who herself appears to have received strange but non-threatening emails claiming to be from Falk, expressed no remorse for him being detained overnight.

“When we receive threats – if we believe the threat to be something of concern – a bomb threat we would take as something of concern no matter who it comes from – or even if we don’t know who it comes from – we turn those over to the police and we let the police make the decisions from there,” explains Barr. “We don’t – quote, unquote – have people arrested and we don’t do anything further with that.”

She points out it was the police that decided to detain Falk, not WLS. “In fact, they didn’t even consult us on it, they just told us this is what they had done.”

Barr (left) says police did notify her when they had cleared Falk, but did not give her any further details. “I have a huge staff of people here,” says Barr, “so if somebody’s going to threaten either a specific individual or the whole building, I take those threats seriously, no matter what and I turn them over to the police and then I let the police do their job because they’re the pros on that.”

Falk says he was told that the emails Barr received last year, claiming to be from him, were sent from a computer at a public library. He says he was also told that WLS received so many non-threatening but “weird” messages to their general mailbox that they did not bother investigating them. Barr is said to have started taking the messages more seriously when they started being sent to her email address, but no one at WLS or Chicago Police Department has offered any evidence any of the messages came from Falk, other than the messages appear to be “signed” using his name.

Barr stresses that although her station does not receive many threatening emails, “We investigate any threatening emails we get.”

According to police spokesperson Robert Perez, they believe it is possible Falk was “set up.” Falk himself thinks he knows who did it, another figure in a sub-culture attracted to street-level windows of television news sets.

Perez admits it is relatively easy to get someone in trouble by signing his or her name to a threatening note. He likens it to identity theft.

“It’s almost like you got to do an extra effort on your own to prove that, hey, that wasn’t me that made that purchase,” he says. “There’s nothing you really can do. Because anybody can use your name and just drop a ‘nasty-gram’ to somebody. In order to clear your name, you just have to have your alibis – somebody that can vouch for you.”

Year full of ups and downs for Falk

Later in April, the documentary about Falk was shown at Roger Ebert’s Film Festival in Champaign, Illinois. The Pulitzer-winning critic has been a fan of Vincent: A Life In Color, calling it “remarkable” and “beautifully photographed.” Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times called it “a lovely film” and “a world class documentary.”

By early May, both Falk and the film about him appeared to be doing very well. But on May 28, following what should have been a routine glaucoma procedure, Falk suffered a complication and his very limited vision was reduced to an almost total blindness.

Progress was slow and modest. In July, Falk was seeing shapes and colors and felt well enough to perform daily on the Chicago River bridges.

In September, he was featured in a television spot for My 50 Chicago, a local Fox affiliate. By then, the retina in his left eye had mostly healed, and Falk was hopeful another cornea transplant would improve his vision in that eye. He is completely blind in the other eye.

Finally, in late September, as the documentary was being screened in Normal, Illinois, and to a crowd of 180 at the Beverly Arts Center in Chicago, a transplant was scheduled for October 26. A similar transplant in 2008, says Falk, resulted in some improvement to his eyesight.

The film will be shown in San Francisco on December 16.