Detroit: An American Autopsy (16 page)

“The FBI,” I answered.

“Who says the FBI decides?” he snapped. “The bottom line is, if we say it’s justifiable, it’s not a homicide. More power to the FBI.”

I put it in my copy, pressed “send” and walked out to my car, shaking my head.

When I got to my car, I stopped laughing. Somebody had slashed my tire. It could have been random. Probably was. But this was an old Checker taxicab, the big curvy kind you see in old New York movies. It’s noticeable in a town where cars don’t last five years. I changed the tire and drove home to my nice house in the ’burbs, thinking things were getting out of hand: death threats and racial venom and now a shiv in my tire.

I was going to have to change cars.

* * *

The following morning, a woman who had read my follow-up story called to tell me that the man who said he had witnessed a homicide years before was, in fact, a suspect in the murder of her husband.

She claimed he had been released from jail because the witness in that case had mysteriously turned up dead.

I went to the clipping files to see if her story was true. It was.

I laughed to myself. Only in Detroit would a murder suspect call to report a murder suspect and the chief of the homicide squad refuse to take his number.

* * *

Soon after, Police Chief James Barren was notified by Mayor Bing that he was fired.

Barren was replaced by Warren Evans, the Wayne County sheriff, who got together with the prosecutor and settled on a revised 2008 murder tally of 375. Baltimore could rejoice. Detroit was once again the Murder Capital.

Evans was a lean, precise, well-groomed dictator. Raised in the Shrine of the Black Madonna, he had a deep and abiding affection for the city of Detroit and believed the city was more important in the American black experience than Harlem itself.

Having said that, Evans knew the city was crumbling and its people fleeing to the suburbs because of marauding criminals who terrorized the citizens. Evans promised to clean up Dodge by doing “whatever it takes”—which meant both busting heads and walking over union rules.

Evans was probably the most competent appointment Bing made in his first term as mayor. And it was an appointment that would come to an appalling and ridiculous end.

As for Barren, the bad news kept coming. The afternoon he was cleaning out his desk, someone was cleaning out his house. It was the third time his home had been burgled. On this occasion, the thieves took a computer, a television set, jewelry and watches.

“That’s part of living in Detroit,” Barren explained to me when I reached him by phone. “Police resources are sliced to the bone.”

No truer words were ever spoken, but citizens were left to wonder why the police department—a week later—assigned four squad cars to escort two hearses to the cemetery.

There weren’t human cadavers in the back of the hearses but rather stuffed animals left at the Motown Historical Museum by adoring fans in memory of the late pop star Michael Jackson, who had died of a drug overdose.

There may have been 250 unclaimed dead people at the county morgue, but at least the toys were safe and got a proper burial.

The stuffed animals were laid to rest at Woodlawn Cemetery, near the mausoleum of civil rights icon Rosa Parks.

Y
OU
B
ETTER
G
ET
M
Y
L
OOT

T
HE POLICE CHIEF
wasn’t the only politico packing his belongings. With the key players in the billion-dollar sludge contract cutting deals and pleading guilty to bribery, the strain was showing on Monica Conyers like a cheap cocktail dress. Judging by her erratic behavior, it was just a matter of time.

The madam city council president found herself denying to me and the rest of the press that her ex-con brother had gotten a no-show city job at her request. She denied, in fact, that he was her brother at all before turning around and admitting that he was in fact her brother.

Sensing she was near the end of her freedom and her threadbare sanity, I called Conyers on her cell phone to get an interview. No answer.

I hung up. My phone rang a few moments later, a return call from the same number.

“Monica?”

“Who’s this?” the voice answered.

“Charlie LeDuff.”

A long pregnant pause.

“Uhmmmmm . . . my name is Teresa,” the voice stammered. “Monica doesn’t have this number anymore.”

“Jesus, you’ve got to be kidding me,” I said with a laugh. “Monica, I know it’s you. It’s your voice.”

“No, this is Teresa. Sorry.” And then Monica hung up.

After that, I thought I would never see her again, except in court. But a few days later, with the hounds of justice barking at her heels, Conyers inexplicably consented to do a cooking show with Joel Kurth, the city hall editor for the
News
—with me working as producer.

Barroom brawls. Groping my testicles. A cooking show before being sent to the federal penitentiary. I don’t know why she kept doing what she did. Maybe she was nuts. Maybe she was lonely. Maybe there was a master plan rattling around in her brain that I just couldn’t wrap my head around. It hardly mattered. Monica Conyers may have been bad for the people of Detroit City, but she was great copy for readers of the
Detroit News
.

The conceit of the cooking show would be to interview Monica while she prepared fried chicken and sweet potato fries in the kitchen of a bar, all the while lying sweetly about her corruption and fraud.

Appropriately enough, it was held downtown in the Eastern Market at a joint called Butchers. The meal was easily five thousand calories, complete with homemade cookies and ice cream smothered in chocolate sauce. Conyers downed it all with a diet iced tea.

After the filming, I was having a silent cigarette with her out back of the restaurant, near the cobblestone street. It was late June, the flies were buzzing around the grease trap. Monica appeared not to notice them. She was quiet and distracted. Sensing an opportunity, I dialed her number. Her phone rang. She looked at me.

“Teresa my ass,” I said. “Monica, I’ve never stalked you. Why won’t you answer my calls?”

“It’s a scary time for me, you know?” She looked pale and drawn. A frightened little girl. I almost felt bad for her.

After months of denials, she finally admitted to shaking tens of thousands of dollars and jewelry from people with business before the city council and the pension board on which she served.

The feds had it all—Conyers taking envelopes stuffed with cash, Conyers taking money from a businessman’s coat pocket, Conyers walking out on her meals without paying. Among the highlights of the wiretapped conversations played in court:

“You’d better get my loot, that’s all I know,” Conyers told her aide-de-camp Sam Riddle at one point.

“Don’t be telling me to do shit. I ain’t no little bitch.”

Conyers, the wife of the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery. The citizens were stuck paying the tab for her court-appointed lawyer.

B
URNT
F
INGERS

N
EVIN WAS FIRED
from the fire department for the garbage-picked screen door: charged with dereliction of duty, failure to supervise and conduct detrimental to the department. The men who actually took the door returned to work.

He sued, claiming his dismissal was retaliation for calling department brass a “steaming pile of shit” in the local press and alerting state inspectors to the dangerous levels to which the fire department had sunk.

Nevin won his case, including an award of $5,000 plus back pay, and was ordered returned to duty.

They were celebrating the return of Nevin at the Engine Co. 23 firehouse, so my brother Frankie and I went over to congratulate him ourselves. Frankie brought along a large framed black-and-white photograph he took of the busted toilet inside the firehouse—a gift for Nevin, who nearly broke into song when he unwrapped it.

“That’s the prettiest fucking thing I ever got,” he said. “A picture of a broken fucking toilet in a broken fucking city.”

He was right. It was a pretty picture. An American flag hanging crookedly above the stained commode, a drying mop leaning stiffly against the stall.

It was high art if you actually knew what you were looking at, if you understood the context of where you were standing. If your friend had died and you knew it didn’t have to be and you knew what killed him was incompetence and corruption, you might call that photograph of the busted toilet epic poetry. If you knew that this place was sliding toward the drainpipe, a place that your grandfather built, you’d call it sculpture.

Grandpa Nevin’s old house was just down the block falling in on itself, toasted like a burnt mattress. And the grandson kept trying anyway: running into burning houses, running out with choking children, trying to save what he could of this place, and he couldn’t even keep the flies out of the firehouse because there were no fucking screen doors.

The teapot was burning up on the stove and the town was caving in and his best friend was dead and all Nevin had was this photograph of a toilet with a busted seat and it was the prettiest fucking piece of art he’d ever seen.

“Thanks man, I’m gonna put that right in my living room,” he told Frankie.

Nevin set the photo down near the chow table and disappeared upstairs where the bunks and lockers are. I followed him without his knowing. He went straight to Walt’s old locker, which had been set up like a religious shrine with his photos and funeral card and tools and turnout gear inside.

Nevin held a cheap cigar in his right knuckles and leaned against Walt’s locker door. He rubbed his head where hair used to be. With his left hand he covered his eyes and he cried a little, I think.

* * *

James Mack, the fire official who had led me out of fire headquarters by the elbow a few months before and deposited me into the rain, was now the fire commissioner. I took Nevin’s predicament to be a clear message that anyone who got out of line, anyone who appeared in my column space, anyone who was advocating for a change in the department or the way things worked in Wayne County government generally was on the hit list.

So as promised, I started peeling through fire department paperwork looking for the missing screen door money. I requested under the Freedom of Information Act reams and reams of contracts and inspection reports and cashed checks from the Detroit Building Authority, which oversees city construction projects.

Normally, I don’t write about paperwork, I write about whiskers and sweat. But it was apparent that the city, the regular people who lived in Detroit, was being destroyed—at best by ineptitude and at worst by graft.

A young, bashful receptionist was assigned to sit with me in a windowless conference room as we went through stacks of contracts. The ventilation system seemed to be broken, which gave the room a suffocating, funeral parlor feel.

The records they gave me were shoddy, invoices billed to wrong addresses, and in many cases paperwork was missing. It would have taken a forensic accountant to sort it all out.

But after hours of random reading, I began to see it: $7 million for doorknobs and faucet handles and screen doors that never saw their way to the firehouses. Money just seemed to vanish in the paper shuffle. An emergency addition needed here. A change order there. A little painting gets done. The rest seemingly disappears.

Take the joint police precinct and firehouse on the city’s west side. It began as a $240,000 no-bid contract and ballooned into a $20 million job as far as the paperwork said. Everybody got paid and Detroit did the paying.

The floors in that joint police precinct and firehouse were cracked, the heat didn’t work and water pipes to fill the fire engines were forgotten.

They may not have been the Pentagon Papers and they weren’t going to win me any Pulitzer Prizes, but the contracts offered a clue as to how this city had been bled to near death over the decades.

I made copies of random reports and toured the firehouses, having to knock at the back doors, because firefighters were afraid to be seen with me in public after what happened to Nevin.

But I was always shown in and always given a fresh cup of coffee. And I was barraged with complaints from the firefighters; their frustration had been corked up like a rancid wine. Few had paid them any mind in years. No reporter in town covered the department as a beat and so I was given the rubber carpet treatment.

I was shown mold, leaking pipes, exposed asbestos insulation, broken toilets, cracked floors, malfunctioning heating units, feces bubbling up from the sewer pipes in the basements. I’d seen better government buildings in the slums of Tijuana.

Nevin and the boys from Engine 23 had told me it was bad, but what I was seeing was worse than the Baghdad fire department, which actually got more than $150 million from the United States government, while Detroit got zero.

* * *

After visiting at least a dozen firehouses, I arranged a meeting with the top fire officials down at headquarters in the old brick building. I was led into a room with a large cartoonish mural of firefighters, a mahogany table as large as the mural, and a hyperactive radiator that was whining like a chained dog. The room was a balmy eighty-five degrees. I removed my tie and rolled up my sleeves.

After a few minutes, in walked Commissioner Mack and two underlings—none of them carried so much as a pencil.

“What specific questions do you have?” Mack asked in a dismissive voice, taking a seat. He noticed my tape recorder and forbade me from taping the meeting. “There’s no need for that, is there now?” he said with a toothy smile.

“No problem, sir,” I said. He did not remember me from the elevator. I showed him some invoices.

Firefighters at Ladder Co. 19 house on Detroit’s east side couldn’t park their fire trucks in the main house because the floor was unsound, even though the city had set aside nearly a half million dollars to repair it.

“Maybe it was a clerical error,” cracked the first underling, insinuating that a clerk simply confused Ladder Co. 19 house for Engine Co. 19 house.

“I thought of that,” I said. “The problem is, there is no Engine Co. 19 house, though that firehouse received a quarter million in renovations too.”

“Lemme see,” she said, snatching for the documents like an opossum at the trash bag. She pawed through the papers a long time before she came up with this: “I don’t know what to tell you.”

I also had paperwork for Engine Co. 22, which was awarded a half million dollars for a new floor. Problem was that property was last used a decade ago as a Mexican restaurant: the Casa de España. It was now boarded up and falling in. Assuming that too was a clerical error, I couldn’t find a new floor at Ladder Co. 22. The pattern was apparent.

“I’ll look into it,” Mack promised without looking at the documents. “Anything else?”

“Yes, there is,” I said chummily, really enjoying the moment. “The Fire Training Academy was awarded $1.5 million for a new training tower. There is no new training tower. The money disappeared.”

The money may not seem like much considering the size of the automobile bailouts, but it was enough to reoutfit the entire department with bunker gear and breathing apparatus and homing alarms. The second underling, who looked freakishly like his superior, with both the toothy smile and the shorn skull, explained that the tower project was abandoned and the money was reallocated to put a million-dollar roof on another building.

However, there was no paper trail showing a stop-work order on the training tower or what became of the other $600,000, I told him.

“It’s air,” the look-alike underling explained with the smile. “That million was allocated but it’s not there. In the case of canceled jobs, there is no paper trail. I guess you can infer a paper trail. That’s how many things go down here.”

Mack stopped the meeting short. “Make a list of questions, we’ll get back to you,” he said.

I smiled, gathered up my paperwork and headed for the door.

“Either someone let you in these firehouses, which is against department regulations, or you’ve got X-ray vision,” the first underling said to me on my way out.

“Something like that,” I said. “It’s easy to see inside when there’s no screen doors.”

Then I turned to Mack, who was escorting me to the door. “You remember me?”

He gave me a once-over. “I can’t say I do, Mr. LeDuff.”

“One thing about me, sir,” I told him. “I keep my promises.”

It was bullshit but it felt good to say it. Because after I wrote the story up and published it in the paper . . . nothing happened. Nobody was fired. No investigation was started. No firehouse got fixed. Seemed like nobody gave a shit except the parakeet using the Metro section as a septic field.