What Can't Be Ignored

Hi. I’m Jiggly. And it’s a Tuesday.

This past week, I was saying that despite my thoughts going into the Miami game, I felt like writing something nice about the club. There has been a lot of work done around the Chicago Fire that should be commended, and the way they played Wednesday night shows signs of hope for the coming season. I even said, “No matter what happens on Saturday, I want to write something nice.” I said that believing that the worst thing that could happen was the Fire lose and get effectively knocked out of the playoff race. While that did happen, that is not what has given me pause. What happened cannot be ignored and needs to be documented for fear of it fading away into the background of what will likely be a very busy offseason. It cannot be ignored.

I was in the supporters’ section alongside the Barn Burners on Saturday, helping on drums for most of the second half. Behind me in a nearby section throughout the game, someone had been lighting flares and smoke bombs. I was later told that security had been monitoring a “tall blonde guy”, as they were described to me. Somehow, despite having already lit one flare that I wasn’t in the section for, that same person lit a second flare during the game. As someone with MLS safe smoke certification, I know that there is a bucket at the bottom of the stairwell to drop smoke bombs into safely. Instead of taking this safety precaution as I and multiple others warned the guard about it, a Monterrey security guard picked up the flare from where everyone had backed away, and carried up the stairs through a crowd of people and onto the enclosed concourse. This was an incredibly stupid and dangerous way of dealing with a fairly minor situation. It would be an indicator of things to come. The person setting off flares was more an annoyance than a danger to those around him, not something that would necessitate a massive amount of force. Still, the guy did need to be caught.

After the game, as the players walked over to the supporters’ section, likely for the last time this season, a flare was set off once again. The guy set it and backed away. Monterrey rushed down to apprehend somebody, and despite the description of the main suspect, they decided to surround Nick, a black man, immediately. He was nowhere near the flare, I was near him, and we both turned around in annoyance at the flare being set nearby, and he was not a “tall blonde guy.” Monterrey demanded to search his pockets, and the altercation moved away from earshot. The next time I looked back over, I saw about four or five guards around Nick, grabbing at his jacket, which was about halfway off already. At this point, other supporters were jumping to his defense. Again, I wasn’t close enough to hear what was said clearly, but I’m sure they were trying to explain what I knew, which was that Nick was nowhere near the flares. One of those involved in this scrum was our own Eray, who, along with others, got himself in between security and Nick.

Both Fire club staff and more Monterrey security swarmed the group, shoving and pushing supporters around. I watched as Eray took a whole elbow in the back of the head from a guard. I later heard that one of the Monterrey guards was in a lower row shoving around supporters’ legs to get them to fall. This altercation continued, with Monterrey shoving people together even more and forcing supporters to defend themselves. By the time it ended, Eray was being taken away by Monterrey security, with Nick following behind. Both were detained after being attacked by security over effectively nothing.

I noted everything in there that I only heard from someone else, but the rest I watched as it happened. It should not have happened. In fact, I’ve heard even more information since that could’ve prevented the altercation from happening if Monterrey Security had actually done their job rather than running after the first black man that they saw. There were fans just a few rows down from where they grabbed Nick, who had photo evidence of the person who was actually setting the flares. I helped to get those images to Section 8 leadership, and they will be working with the club on what the consequences will be for the individuals involved with the actual misconduct. And as the pictures showed, the guy these guards were looking for was nowhere close to Nick’s appearance. It was a caucasian man, yet they immediately attacked a black man. And based on what I heard later about an individual that they were already monitoring the “tall blonde guy,” the information they already had was nowhere close to Nick’s appearance. So how did he suddenly become a suspect when Monterrey rushed down the stairs? There were plenty of people nearby who were both closer in description and closer to the flare than Nick. Racial bias doesn’t have to be explicitly stated, but it is implicit in the actions taken by security. So, a situation in which security immediately identified the wrong man, seemingly based on race, was only further escalated by Monterrey guards running in at speed to attack supporters. One member of the group of security involved was later identified to me as a man who attempted to start another altercation with a fan of color at the game Wednesday night. Although this was dealt with without incident, he should not have been allowed to suit up for the next game. Supporters were more endangered by Monterrey than they ever were by any of the fans that Monterrey was roughing up.

This all comes out of a pattern of misconduct from Monterrey Security. Monterrey was founded back around 1999 by Juan Gaytan and a firefighter that I’ll be mentioning later. They actually failed to get a state license required for security firms for the first 21 months, mostly due to a lack of proper background checks. Gaytan insisted that they didn’t need a license to operate, stating that they were only consultants. Despite this, they continued to provide guards and even received a $2.9M contract with the City of Chicago after what the Chicago Tribune described as “an unusual bidding process.” At that time, they were still operating without a license, and Gaytan himself was in the middle of resigning from the Chicago Police Department after he was scheduled for a disciplinary hearing surrounding an incident in 1994 where he allegedly threatened to shoot someone during a traffic stop and later smeared fake blood on his face to appear like he was attacked. In resigning, the disciplinary hearing was canceled, and the case remained unresolved. Monterrey had contracts with the city during that time and continued to get more contracts with the city after the incident, including one with Soldier Field right as the Fire were returning to the stadium in 2003.

Issues with background checks for Monterrey are a recurring theme. Not only were there the aforementioned early issues with obtaining licensing but there was a much more recent issue back in 2017 where both the Buffalo Bills and Minnesota Vikings ended their contracts with Monterrey after they failed to get licensing in those states. The State of New York did not go into detail, but Minnesota said that not only was Monterrey hiring unlicensed and disqualified personnel, but there were allegations of the firm double-billing the Vikings. This happened around the same time as two high-profile incidents involving Monterrey guards without proper background checks. In one, a pair of Monterrey guards burglarized Holy Name Cathedral. In another, an unlicensed Monterrey guard killed a man by asphyxiation and later falsely claimed to be a Lake County deputy. Later, in 2018, it was reported that the Chicago Park District was investigating Monterrey to follow up on the issues found by the Bills and Vikings. Despite the evidence I literally just gave that there were people hired despite improper background checks, it appears that the Park District didn’t see it as Monterrey is still the preferred security firm within Chicago.

In fact, that is a major part of the issues with Monterrey, which is that they are incredibly embedded in Chicago politics, which is probably one of the worst places to be “embedded” into. They are still being handed massive contracts everywhere, and much like their earlier “unusual bidding process,” they’re still being hired in unusual ways. Back in the summer of 2020, during the Black Lives Matter protests, then-Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that she had hired them to be a “peace-keeping force” despite council members neither approving this action nor knowing how much they were even being paid at the time. And you can dig through the sources I’ve been providing to see all of the other contracts they’ve gotten throughout the city, including Lollapalooza, the Lincoln Park Zoo, and pretty much the entire Museum Campus.

Finally, it’s time to talk about the other co-founder, firefighter Santiago Solis. If you know Chicago politics, then you may have heard of his older brother, Danny Solis, a former Alderman with a very particular reputation. Although it is reported in many of these articles from 2017 and later that Santiago had left the company a while ago, there is still evidence as recent as 2019 that connects Gaytan to receiving favors from Solis (the relevant info is at the bottom of the article, but above that is a case that involved an FBI investigation surrounding Monterrey that I do not have the time to unpack). You might wonder how something like this couldn’t have been discovered earlier, and you’re right. Back in 2002, in a Tribune article I already linked to, it was proven that Gaytan had lied to the city about Santiago’s involvement in Monterrey back when he was still arguing that they didn’t need a license. They were later discovered to have had a conflict of interest and the city ethics committee canceled a bunch of contracts. Still, Monterrey recovered and got those contracts back and more, possibly with the help of Solis based on this other evidence. Danny Solis himself was later found to have been a part of the racketeering case against Chicago Alderman Ed Burke and Illinois House Speaker Mike Madigan. He wore a wire in order to have his charges reduced to a single count of bribery and even then, he avoided jail time entirely despite literally everyone wanting to see him go to jail for everything that he’d done to foster corruption in the City of Chicago.

And while this is all general stuff not particularly related to the Fire, I’m sure that you can easily ask around and hear horror stories from everyone who’s been in the supporters’ sections long enough. Both Section 8 and Sector Latino members each have stories upon stories of harassment, excessive violence, and wrongful detainments at the hands of Monterrey Security. One story in particular is a bit too long and too complicated to research and recount fully within this article, but it involved an attempt to frame a member of Sector with charges despite video evidence and multiple eyewitness accounts (source provided comes from the defense attorney). At the time, MLS and the Chicago Fire stood by Monterrey despite provably false testimony based on that video evidence. That incident was actually a part of what the Fire front office used to justify the banning of Sector Latino in 2018.

So, we know that Monterrey Security is horribly run and horribly corrupt. They have a history of ignoring background checks and other regulations placed to help keep people safe. Yet they are still the official security firm that the Fire use. What can we, as normal people and normal fans, do to try to fix things? First things first, there is one person to direct these questions to, and that’s club president Dave Baldwin. Tweet at or email him demanding a statement from the club about Monterrey’s actions as the club’s security and for a plan of action from the club going forward. If you don’t want to bother Baldwin personally, you can email or call your Season Ticket Holder rep. Politely ask them to deliver that same message to him, although remember that it isn’t the rep’s fault. They’re just there to try to sell tickets. Because Monterrey’s contract is through the city and the Park District, contact your local alderman by emailing or calling them and tell them about your concerns regarding Monterrey. You can even tweet at or find some other way of bringing Mayor Brandon Johnson’s attention to Chicago’s numerous contracts with Monterrey and the concerning history of violence, neglect, and corruption the firm has developed over the years. Pretty much all of the information surrounding how terrible Monterrey is is public. The story that prompted this is just one of many incidents that detail how unsafe Monterrey is as a security firm.

To end this, I just want to say once again that I really did want to write something happy and uplifting this week. That there are areas where the Chicago Fire are improving as a club both off and even on the field in places. But we cannot ignore when supporters are attacked. Because we are all that we have. We are the club. Don’t let those in the front office forget it. We’ve been here long before many of them joined and we will be here long after they have left. We cannot let them sweep this abuse under the rug. Supporters have rights and deserve to be respected by those who claim to honor us. Remember to stick together, communicate, and work together to prevent problems. Because we are all fighting for the same thing: A safe environment to watch and cheer for the club that we love.

I love you.

And I’ll see you next week.