On September 13, Chicago police stormed a two-bedroom apartment in North Center and arrested 52-year-old Michelle DiGiacomo, who lived there with her 14-year-old daughter. They tossed the apartment, cuffed DiGiacomo, and hauled her off in a squad car. DiGiacomo recalls her daughter screaming as the police led her away, “Please! She’s all I’ve got!”
In the late 90s advice columnist Jeff Zaslow ran a high-profile letters-to-Santa campaign in the Sun-Times. In 2001 the Sun-Times (this was the Conrad Black-David Radler era) decided to can him—so he jury-rigged a program involving Chicago magazine and the Spanish-language radio station WLEY and came up with gifts for about 17,000 kids that year.
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DiGiacomo mixes the marijuana into butters, balms, and tinctures, she says—preparations that require significantly more weed than if she just smoked the stuff. “I got a really good deal because it was the end of the greenhouse season,” she says. “I got it for less than $100 an ounce. So I basically got a year’s worth of medication.” But she didn’t expect it to be sent to her all at once.
Her landlord gave her 30 days’ notice. “With what happened I decided not to renew the lease,” he told me. “It was a really large amount of marijuana she was arrested for having. It made other tenants feel insecure.”
Susan Tweedy did some research and came up with DiGiacomo’s Direct Effect Charities. “She was doing a socks and underwear drive, which we thought was perfect,” says Susan Tweedy. “The Blisters played a gig at the Abbey and everyone who came brought socks and underwear. We’ve done a lot of different gigs for her since. She’s got no backing like other charities. She does it all herself.”
