MILWAUKEE -- Beverly Echols turns on the radio and hears her neighbor. She turns on the television and hears her neighbor. She picks up the telephone and hears ... her neighbor.
For a year, the boisterous broadcasts of "Black Jack," a middle-aged handyman and part-time citizens band radio enthusiast, have crackled through neighborhood telephones, radios and baby monitors at all hours.
"Come suck the mud from between my toes," Black Jack once suggested over the airwaves, according to one neighbor, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The neighbor said her 7- and 8-year-old children run out of the room when they hear the man's voice coming through the television.
"They think it's a ghost," she said.
Echols said Black Jack curses and calls his listeners "mud runners" and cotton pickers. "He tells people he rides around with his gun," she said.
The city plans to declare Black Jack's home a nuisance and fine his landlord in hopes that the radio rascal will be evicted, said City Council member Fredrick Gordon.
"We've done just about everything we can do. I've been cursed out by him and the landlord," he said. Gordon said the transmissions of the man he identified as John Williams reach at least 20 to 30 households.
The man who answered the phone at the house refused to give his name but said he was the man neighbors were complaining about. He says he doesn't mean any harm, and tries to use the CB late at night after people have gone to bed.
"I'm just a poor man paying taxes going out there every day in the cold trying to do carpentry work," he said. "This is my hobby. I don't have no other hobby."