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“Will you take our case?” Susette asked.

Bullock liked her bluntness. Yet he didn’t want to give her false hope. “We are very interested in this,” he said. “But there are a lot of things I still have to check out.”

Among the top priorities Bullock had was determining the true motives of Susette and her neighbors. They made clear they didn’t like the NLDC and its plan to take houses. But how many would stay in the fight once the NLDC started waving more money in front of them? Bullock referred to this point as the plaintiffs’ “come to Jesus” moment.

“We don’t negotiate property sales for our clients,” Bullock explained. “That’s just not what we do. We fight to protect people’s property.”

The members of the group nodded. Bullock liked them already; they reminded him of the people he had grown up with in his working-class neighborhood.

“So if we were to take the case,” he said, “we’d want to know that you were committed for the long haul.” Promising he would pull out every stop to fight on the homeowners’ behalf, Bullock expected in return an ironclad promise that the homeowners would stay in the fight when the pressure was turned up and offers for financial compensation came.

Hallquist and Mitchell liked what they heard. After the meeting broke up, Susette took Bullock on a walk through the neighborhood. She told him something about every house on the street.

“There’s Billy Von Winkle’s place,” she said, pointing to the deli at the top of her street.

“Who is Bill Von Winkle?” Bullock asked. Susette smiled and filled him in. Bullock laughed at the stories, especially the one about putting chicken manure in the City Hall elevator.

“He’s a character,” she said.

“Can I meet him?” he asked.

She led him to the deli. “I’ll wait for you at my place,” she said.

Bullock entered the deli. It was empty except for a short, stocky man wearing blue jeans and a partially zipped, hooded sweatshirt and a baseball cap that bore the words “Mayor of Smith Street.”

“Are you Bill Von Winkle?”

“That’s me. Who are you?”

Bullock introduced himself as a public-interest lawyer from the Institute for Justice.

Von Winkle had known Bullock was in the neighborhood meeting with people. “So what do you think our chances are?” he asked. Bullock outlined a series of legal reasons why the city should be stopped from seizing private property in Fort Trumbull. Confident, but not cocky, Bullock’s approach appealed to Von Winkle.

“Why don’t you sit down?” he said. Bullock pulled up a chair. Von Winkle told him the neighborhood’s history and how he had worked across the street at the old navy facility. In between stories, he told jokes about the people and the places surrounding his deli. The whole time, he looked Bullock right in the eye. It quickly became apparent to Bullock that Von Winkle had spent a good portion of his adult life on these streets.

“So do you think you’re going to come help us?” Von Winkle asked.

“Well,” Bullock said, “we are looking into the case pretty seriously right now.”

Von Winkle explained that he had a lot riding on the outcome. His livelihood rested on all the rental properties he owned in the neighborhood. He had spent years personally renovating outdated buildings to get them in shape for residential occupancy. It angered him that the city could just take away his buildings and his income stream to accommodate a big company’s moving into the area. “It’s not right,” he said.

Bullock detected an edge in Von Winkle’s tone, a certain fighter’s instinct—an essential ingredient for the kind of plaintiff it would take to endure a bruising legal battle with a city determined to bulldoze the neighborhood.

On the other hand, he was very independent and dangerously unpredictable. Von Winkle had purposely stayed away from the initial neighborhood meeting with Bullock at Susette’s house. And he was notorious for doing things on his own. Stunts like his could be a huge liability in a lawsuit.

“By the way, where did you get that hat?” Bullock joked, “Are you the mayor of Smith Street?”

A painful expression