Former Minneapolis Chamber CEO’s downfall ‘could make a TV movie’

A rising star, Jonathan Weinhagen flourished at St. Paul’s chamber of commerce before landing the top job at Minneapolis’ chamber when he was only 33.

Now, he may end up in prison.

Weinhagen is expected Monday to enter a guilty plea, accused of embezzling over $200,000 from the Minneapolis Regional Chamber of Commerce in an elaborate scheme that financially hobbled the organization.

The federal charges against Weinhagen, levied in October, stunned many who’d worked with him over the years in the chamber of commerce world.

“When I first heard about it, it was like ‘Good god, what?’” said Scott Burns, who worked with Weinhagen when he was on the St. Paul chamber’s board.

“I can’t piece it together,” said Burns, an entrepreneur who currently is on the Minnesota Star Tribune’s board of directors. “You could make a TV movie out of it.”

Federal prosecutors charged Weinhagen, now 42, with five counts of fraud in a case featuring a fictional company, a fake obituary and the alleged looting of a $30,000 chamber donation to a Crime Stoppers reward fund.

A chamber chief is a business and civic cheerleader by nature, and Weinhagen played that role to the hilt. He relished the political connections that go with the job, too, people who worked with him say.

Weinhagen abruptly resigned from the Minneapolis chamber in June 2024.

The married Shoreview father of four has a plea agreement hearing Monday in U.S. District Court in St. Paul. Court records don’t elaborate further. Weinhagen’s attorney declined to comment.

Weinhagen’s murky departure from the chamber and his ensuing indictment has launched other inquiries by public organizations.

Earlier this month, the Metropolitan Council said its auditors found a “high risk” that a subsidiary of the Minneapolis chamber misused federal grants earmarked for transit.

The audit found “a pervasive lack of documentation” and “evidence of fraudulent practices,” raising questions whether federal money was caught up in alleged embezzling by Weinhagen.

The Mounds View public school district last month asked its auditing firm to review the district’s finances during Weinhagen’s 11-year tenure on its school board. Weinhagen resigned from the board in October shortly after he was charged.

The district found no improprieties in its regular annual audits. But it is doing an extra evaluation in light of charges against Weinhagen and “in response to concerned residents,” said Colin Sokolowski, a district spokesman.

Weinhagen graduated from Mounds View High School. He then earned a bachelor’s degree and an MBA from Bethel University, a private Christian school in nearby Arden Hills.

He began as a teenager working at his family’s auto repair shop, Weinhagen Tire Co., on St. Paul’s West Side. The 100-year-old business closed in late 2023 after filing for bankruptcy and losing its lease.

The Minneapolis chamber hired him as its CEO two years later.

“He was a good candidate to get the job in Minneapolis,” said John Regal, a Stillwater insurance industry executive who was the St. Paul chamber’s board chair when Weinhagen moved across the river.

Steve Cramer, head of the Minneapolis Downtown Council from 2013 to 2023, worked with Weinhagen on several projects during the early years of Weinhagen’s tenure.

“I thought he got off to a good start,” Cramer said. “He had a lot of energy and new ideas.”

Other people who worked with Weinhagen in Minneapolis used words like “energetic” and “gregarious” to describe his style, noting he also could be “polarizing.”

“He was online like nobody’s business,” Cramer said.

Some chamber programs are funded through grants, but member fees from businesses — hundreds in the case of the Minneapolis chamber — are the organizations’ life blood.

With that comes the duty of lobbying for members’ priorities, and Weinhagen dove into the politics end of the job.

In 2017, alarmed that a left-wing majority would dominate the Minneapolis City Council after that year’s election, Weinhagen and the leader of another business group targeted a socialist candidate running for the seat vacated by Jacob Frey, who successfully ran for mayor that year. She lost.

The Minneapolis chamber under Weinhagen supported Frey and other more centrist DFLers as democratic socialists made headway winning council elections in recent years.

A year earlier, the chamber had offered to loan a staffer to Frey’s office for advice on management efficiency. But the proposal, which Frey supported, was shot down by the City Council.

Some council members raised concerns about the arrangement in light of the chamber’s support of a 2021 ballot initiative granting the mayor more power over daily city operations.

Frey’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Several people who worked with Weinhagen said he liked to give the impression he was in the thick of Minnesota politics.

“I think Jonathan positioned himself as close to a lot of people,” said a source who worked on chamber issues in Minneapolis and St. Paul but was not authorized to speak about Weinhagen in their current position.

The investigation found that about $290,000 in chamber money had disappeared during Weinhagen’s tenure. The resulting financial stress helped spur merger talks earlier this year between the Minneapolis and St. Paul chambers.

The indictment against Weinhagen claims his fraudulent scheme lasted from 2019 through the month he resigned.

He allegedly stole over $200,000 from the chamber using a fake consulting company, Synergy Partners, which he created using the alias “James Sullivan.”

When the chamber caught on, Weinhagen tried to “cover his tracks” by saying Synergy no longer existed and Sullivan had died, prosecutors claim. “Sullivan” succumbed to pancreatic cancer, Weinhagen allegedly wrote in a fake obituary posted to Legacy.com in 2024.

According to federal charges, Weinhagen also: