Greenville's free alternative weekly

Ed. Note: City Paper has been giving the Five Points Association a pretty tough time lately. After our publisher asked some tough questions at their latest meeting this week I thought we could at least cut them a break and broadcast our “Bum of the Week” column from the Vista. Little did we know what we were getting into.

By Corey Hutchins

Ed. Note: City Paper has been giving the Five Points Association a pretty tough time lately. After our publisher asked some tough questions at their latest meeting this week I thought we could at least cut them a break and broadcast our “Bum of the Week” column from the Vista. Little did we know what we were getting into.

The man with no legs is parked in a wheelchair on the corner of Gervais and Park streets in the Vista, a shit-stained crusty towel balled up under his lap where his legs should be— a makeshift ghetto colostomy bag. When the wind shifts you can smell him from half a block away.

“I know I smell like shit, too” he says. He hasn’t been able to clean himself. The Vista isn’t usually a choice spot to find Albert Witherspoon. It’s normally well after midnight in Five Points or locked up in Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center after catching a bust on another crack charge, according to one Columbia police officer.

But Witherspoon has been run out of his old stamping grounds, he says. Or in his own words: “I can’t fuck around in Five Points no more.”

According to Witherspoon, Dennis Hiltner, president of the Five Points Association and owner of the Gourmet Shoppe, made a deal with a local cop in order to make Witherspoon disappear. Since then the hobo’s been hanging on the other side of Harden.

“That damn asshole down there, Hiltner, motherfucker you know he don’t like black people,” Witherspoon said shortly after 9 p.m. Feb. 23. “And he a damn dickhead.”

Witherspoon, who has been in and out of the news since the late newsweekly Snitch profiled him in early 2005, said that after he’d gotten an officer fired from the department for harassment and police brutality Hiltner took it upon himself to banish him from the area.

“[That] damn cop I had fired was one of his buddies,” Witherspoon says. And while he can’t remember the particular officer’s name, he did say the man was an “old damn motherfucker.”

It was shortly afterward that Witherspoon said he saw Hiltner pointing him out to another cop while rolling through the area near the Five Points fountain. Witherspoon says he wouldn’t be surprised if Hiltner paid the cop off.

“Anyway, I got the hell up out of there because I don’t need no problems,” he says.

But even though Witherspoon has rolled himself out of Five Points, he’s still bitter about the man whose hassling of him has made the pages of both print and online news. In a Google search of Dennis Hiltner’s name the first hit yields this quote from S.C. blog, The Future Is Unwritten, dated March 2005:

The gathering was directly in response to a February incident in which the owner of The Gourmet Shop, Dennis Hiltner, called the police on Albert Witherspoon, a homeless man, for washing hubcaps in front of his store. Albert was arrested and faces the absurd charge of “operating a business without a license.” He is threatened with a $600 fine and jail time. This is not the first incident of harassment. Dennis is known among the homeless and others for his poor treatment of the homeless and others who use the area without economic motives.

About that, Witherspoon laments.

“He [Hiltner] used to have an ass of motherfuckin’ customers. Now he don’t have as many customers. Why? Because he always trying to fuck people. Long as you sit there and spend money with them he’s all about you,” he says. “He’ll laugh in your face and then stab you in the back at the same time. I don’t talk to people like that. If you do bad things to people it’ll come back around. He’s all about the Five Points Association…all these families… these mommies and daddies, they don’t really know what the hell be going on down there.”

And so what does Albert Witherspoon, a handicapped homeless man who has called the streets of Five Points home for nearly a decade personally think about the Five Points Association?

“It really, really fucking…shit stinks,” he says.

And what would he say to Hiltner if he had the opportunity?

“What I say to him? ‘Stick a horse’s dick up his ass’ if you want to know the truth.”