Detroit: An American Autopsy (15 page)

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ETROIT GOT A
new leading man that spring. Dave Bing was elected Detroit’s third mayor in eight months with an underwhelming voter turnout of 14 percent.

Bing first came to Detroit as the number-two pick in the NBA draft in 1966 and played nine seasons for the Pistons, ending up in the Hall of Fame. After retiring from basketball, he started his own business manufacturing auto parts in Detroit. He ran his mayoral campaign touting this executive acumen.

An elegant, introverted and geriatric figure, Bing neglected to tell voters that his business was failing and that it had existed hand-to-mouth for a number of years. With the collapse of the auto industry, GM and Ford told Bing they couldn’t float his company anymore, even if it meant cutting strings with one of the few minority contractors out there.

Bing also failed to mention that his campaign manager had served two years in federal prison for a crime involving a sludge-hauling contract with the water department under Coleman Young. Nor did he mention that one of his legal advisers had been indicted on charges that he acted as consigliere for the Highwaymen motorcycle gang.

But after the nightmare of Kilpatrick, Detroiters wanted calm. And Grandpa Bing was just the warm glass of milk they were looking for. From the outset, Bing’s strategy was not so much to root out bad apples as to keep the apple cart from tipping over.

His first major announcement was that he had decided to keep James Barren, the chief of police, despite the fact that murder was spiraling out of control. Bing also promoted James Mack—who had bounced me from Mike Nevin’s disciplinary hearing—to executive commissioner of the fire department, despite the fact that heart attack victims were dying in snowdrifts waiting for an ambulance that never seemed to arrive.

In the blink of an eye, Bing had changed nothing.

* * *

Chief Barren got to work quickly. And he was a genius. Without so much as pulling a gun or reorganizing the bone-brittle department, he managed to make the murder rate fall at a world-record pace.

His department claimed that homicides had declined 25 percent over the past year, while he was in charge, of course.

It was a drop of historic proportions, so huge that the city should have thrown a parade, complete with clown carts and lemonade tanks and banners that read:
DETROIT! AT LEAST WE’RE NOT BALTIMORE!

But oddly, the announcement was greeted with a midnight silence. It didn’t even rank as a front-page story.

Still, some people read it. Homicide cops read it, and a couple of them called me out to lunch to tell me that the brass was cooking the books. There was no feasible scenario, short of criminal conduct, they surmised, in which the murder count could be that low.

We met at some dark dump near the ballpark where the Tigers play.

“Check out the numbers, there’s no way,” said Sgt. Mike Martel, a large man who seemed to wear his attitude in his mustache. It was thick and bristled and twitched with hassle. “If they make it look better than it is, then we don’t get the money we need to keep a lid on this shit hole. You know what kind of crap we’re driving around in? You know how many cases we’ve got to handle?”

I said I did, remembering the pool of water in the foot well of the car driven by the detective in charge of the case of Johnnie Dollar, the frozen man.

The other detective wore a mustache too. He was shorter than Martel. And meaner. He had a gray smile. He told me about the time a homicide detective had to take a bus to a crime scene because there were no working pool cars in the squad.

“They’re robbing the city fucking blind, Charlie,” he said, rubbing his fingers together. “In this city two plus two equals three.”

“Kilpatrick. Bing. Whatever. Nothing’s fucking changed,” growled Martel, squeezing the life out of his lemonade glass. He looked over his shoulder, on the lookout for anybody from the homicide squad who might rat him out for talking to a reporter. Seeing nobody, he drank the glass whole.

* * *

I went to visit Dr. Schmidt, the medical examiner. Every murder victim has to funnel through the morgue, and so I knew I could get a true and accurate count there.

I was shown to the examination room. The cooler was stacked to the ceiling with cadavers in vinyl zip body bags, and a tractor-trailer refrigerator truck in the parking lot handled the overflow. It reeked of spoiled cherries. The floors were sticky.

“What’s that all about?” I asked Dr. Schmidt, the poetical man of death, as he came into the room with a quick shuffling step, his hand extended.

“That is a sign of how bad things have gotten,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s the economy. Some people really have to make a choice of putting food on the table or burying their loved ones. It is very sad, really. In all of my years here, I have never seen it this bad.”

The people of Wayne County now couldn’t afford to bury their loved ones. More than 250 sat unclaimed. The doctor pointed out the saddest case—the cadaver of an elderly man that had been here for two years, shuffled to the bottom of the pile as his kinfolk waited for a ship to come in.

“You might say this is a fairly decent barometer of where we are as a society,” the good doctor said with a shrug.

Poor Grandpa. I put it in my notebook. His predicament wasn’t good news, but it smelled like front-page news.

And then the doctor handed me a spreadsheet with more front-page news than I was looking for—nearly four hundred people had been murdered in Detroit in 2008—not three hundred, as was claimed by the city.

The police were right. The police were lying.

* * *

I was fishing up in the lake country when I got the phone call. The police high command on the line.

“The deputy chief would like to see you in the morning,” the woman said. “Are you available?”

I said that I was. It was my vacation but it was rare to get an audience with the police. The Kilpatrick scandal had the department on a lockdown.

The real press knew that the department solved about one quarter of its cases—a national disgrace—and reporters were kept at arm’s length.

After months of being stonewalled, I threatened to sue the department if they did not open their homicide ledger to me. With no legal basis to deny me the records, the brass had finally called me in for the meeting.

I finished my beer, walked buck naked up the hill, kissed my wife and daughter, got dressed and drove back to the city for the meeting.

* * *

Among those in attendance were the two men who had put Detective Wright up to the phone with my boss, pressuring him to recant his statement that he was the only detective assigned to the murder of the firefighter Walt Harris.

The deputy police chief sat behind a metallic desk, imperious, heavily muscled beneath a starched dress shirt. There was a window to his right, the blinds drawn to keep the sight of Detroit where it belonged. Outside. The deputy chief squinted anyway.

The lieutenant from the homicide bureau stood off to his side, like a court servant, dressed in an ill-fitting suit that looked as though it belonged on a ventriloquist’s doll. His skull was neatly shaved and framed by dark-rimmed spectacles. The lieutenant, despite his rank, had never worked a homicide case in his career.

The deputy chief, for his part, was a political creature, a man who had rapidly scaled the ranks of the department through hard work, a good measure of competence and the uncanny ability to make himself scarce when the shit hit the fan.

The deputy chief had a good shot of making chief one day if he could avoid scandal sticking to him. Not an easy proposition in the Detroit PD.

To him, I represented just another steaming pile positioned between him and the top job.

He thumbed through paperwork, explaining to me in an avuncular tone that the 306 homicide tally was a clerical error attributable to the state police computers.

“So you see the true number is 339, Charlie.”

“Now, I’m just a redneck who went to public school,” I said, flipping through a folder full of spreadsheets. “But according to my math that leaves another four dozen bodies unaccounted for.”

That’s when he explained the “back-out” log.

In Detroit police thinking, some homicides just weren’t homicides and so they were “backed out,” or not counted.

“You see, Charlie, there’s homicide and there’s murder,” the deputy chief explained patiently. “Now, when the medical examiner still says it’s a homicide and we go on about our investigation and in the course of our investigation we present documents to the prosecutor’s office, they can say it’s self-defense. It’s ruled medically a homicide. But in the eyes of the prosecutor’s office, they will not charge anybody with this. So it’s not a murder.”

“Like for instance?” I asked.

“Well, let’s see,” he counted. “There were ten police killings, so those don’t count.”

He was right about that. The FBI allows killings by police to be backed out of the murder count. Still, it was a shocking number. That made the Detroit Police Department the deadliest in America. No one had reported this, despite the fact that the department was supposed to be operating under federal supervision for, among other things, the overuse of lethal force.

“And okay, okay, here you go,” the deputy chief continued, stabbing his finger at the spreadsheet, certain that he had found a convincing case in his revolver of reason.

“Two brothers were drinking. They got in an argument. One pulled out a knife. So the brother pulled out a knife and killed his brother. I mean, what would you call that?”

“Me?” I said, looking around the room at the assembled brass. “Me? I’d call that a murder.”

“I call that insufficient evidence,” he said with a straight face.

I understood. Pressured to bring the murder rate down, the police were engaging in nonsensical reclassifications, and it turned out they had been doing it for years. For example, a man named Antonio Bailey suffered a fatal gunshot wound to the head. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide; the police called it suicide. A man named Roland Jordan was found near the highway, beaten to death, the medical examiner said. The police ruled it an accident.

Were the cops systematically undercounting murders? And if detectives were having trouble closing cases, then how many murderers were walking the streets of the Murder Capital?

* * *

Walt Harris, the firefighter who died in the arson, was homicide victim no. 288 on the police murder list. Seeing his name, I reached out to an investigator. After I had embarrassed the department with a front-page story about no one looking into Harris’s death, a major squad was put together to hunt for his killer. The investigator told me to meet him at a bar on Grand River. It was a scene out of a Chandler novel. The cop was dressed in a trench coat and porkpie hat even though it was the middle of summer. He drank whiskey neat and a beer chaser even though it was the middle of the morning.

“So your guy, Harris,” he said, looking at his shoes. “We got the killer.”

“Yeah,” I said too loudly. “Who? When?”

“A guy named Darian Dove. A lowlife. Kind of slow. Does odd jobs, that sort of thing. He admits he was paid to torch the house. Says he watched it burn from a nearby gas station. Says the owner, who promised him a new truck, was standing there with him.”

“No shit? How’d you find him?”

“Traced the owner’s cell phone records to him. Turns out Dove dialed 911. He didn’t do it out of decency but because the owner didn’t want to burn the house too much, just enough for some insurance dough. The guy’s pissed off the owner never gave him the truck.”

“That’s great news,” I said, ordering a congratulatory beer. “I’ll get it in the paper tonight.”

“No, no you don’t,” the cop said, grabbing my forearm. “There’s a little problem.”

“Oh, no. What?”

“I don’t think we got him Miranda’d right. We’re working on it, so just keep it out of the papers or you’ll fuck it up. I’ll let you know when.”

I was ready to publish the body-count story when the lieutenant called, like some kind of soothsayer.

“I thought we had an understanding, Charlie,” he pleaded. “If it’s not a technically charged murder, how is it a homicide?”

“How do you change a homicide into a suicide, is what I want to know.”

“Fine,” he said, hissing like an air hose.

He hung up the phone knowing how it was going to turn out.

The murder story appeared on the front page the next morning with a very safe headline:
DETROIT POLICE ROUTINELY UNDERREPORT HOMICIDES
.

My work voice mail was full of hate.

Beep
: “White men like you, Charlie, sowing discontent, Charlie. I bet you’re feeling real comfortable in that little castle you built, Charlie. Well, we coming from the neighborhoods and we gonna burn your castle down, white man. It’s gonna be a long, hot summer, Charlie. Watch your ass.”

Beep
: “What do you expect from niggers? Everything they touch goes to shit. Want to solve the murder problem? Send them back to Africa.”

And so forth.

As I was mulling over these friendly salutations, a man who had read my story called me to complain that he was a witness to a murder five years prior and now wanted to come forward, but the police wouldn’t give him the time of day.

I called the lieutenant from homicide.

“Oh yeah?” His voice was dripping with contempt. “Have him call me,” he said tersely and hung up.

I called the mayor’s office for the follow-up story. It’s an old newspaper trick. You drop a front-page article. The town gets embarrassed. The mayor promises action. A ribbon is cut and it goes back to business as usual.

But this is Detroit. When I called Mayor Bing’s press office, they inexplicably declined comment and told me to call the police. So I called the police.

“We stand by the number, 339,” said the new department spokesman. “We’re saying that it’s not a homicide when two people stab each other and further investigation shows a man was defending himself. So it was a homicide? Who says that?”