Terror in the City of Champions (36 page)

On March 9, 1936, Voisine was reelected mayor, defeating a local high school civics teacher by one vote. Dean had failed yet again, though this one couldn’t be laid entirely on him. Dean had so far been assigned to kill newspaper publisher Art Kingsley, attorney Maurice Sugar, and Mayor Bill Voisine. Not one of them was dead. He also hadn’t managed a shot the night Harvey Davis and his posse hunted down Silas Coleman at the Ford Mill Pond. Dean was either an inept assassin or a reluctant one.

During the Voisine chase Dayton Dean had come to realize that he knew too much. He also was beginning to feel like a dupe. He recognized that orders always came from legion higher-ups, who usually commanded, but did not carry out, the crimes. Leaders made sure to involve several underlings in each assignment. It gave them something to hold over the men.

“I can promise you that your prints won’t be checked against those of criminals,” said agent H. H. Reinecke, head of the FBI’s Detroit office. Reinecke was speaking to the Exchange Club on March 16 in the Book-Cadillac Hotel. He wanted to add members’ prints to the FBI’s collection of more than five million, strictly for noncriminal identification purposes. He said they could come in handy if a law-abiding citizen were killed without identification or stricken with amnesia.

It was just after six o’clock in the morning on St. Patrick’s Day, Tuesday, March 17. Sexton William Currier was readying the Shrine of the Little Flower for the six-thirty mass. He stoked the furnace and prepared the altar. Nearby two nuns knelt in prayer. Father Cyril Keating and Perrin Schwartz, editor of
Social Justice
, the official publication of Father Coughlin’s National Union, had arrived when a passing motorist noticed flames darting from the shingles of the wooden church. The driver rushed into the sanctuary and alerted the parishioners. The sexton headed to the roof with an extinguisher. The fire department was called.

As wind gusts spread the flames, the nuns, priest, and arriving parishioners rescued what they could from the burning church: vestments, the tabernacle, equipment from the radio room, and statues of Mother Mary, St. Jude, St. Christopher, and St. Therese de Lisieux, the Little Flower in whose honor the church had been built in 1926. Soon Coughlin came from his home. “The entire church was a fiery furnace,” he said. He watched from across the street, his parents at his side. Within an hour “the building which I loved more than all the other buildings in the world” had been reduced to ashes.

Early in the decade, as Coughlin’s radio show was making him one of the most famous men in America, the church had become a tourist attraction. On any Sunday cars from faraway states lined the roadways. People made pilgrimages to the shrine. Three years ago the church had been moved back from its original location to make room for the Crucifixion Tower and the grand new church, which was now nearing completion. The plan was to keep “our little shingle church,” as Coughlin called it, on the site as a treasured landmark.

A fire official said he believed the blaze was electrical in nature. He said it had started between the ceiling and the roof. Coughlin had his doubts. He had been targeted before. Three years prior, in the pre-dawn hours of a March 1933 morning, someone had tossed a black-powder bomb into the basement of his Royal Oak home. It was not unfathomable that someone would set his church afire. “I do not know what caused the fire,” Coughlin wrote in the church bulletin, the
Shrine Herald
. “Perhaps there was defective wiring. Perhaps there was not. It is not my purpose to indulge in rash judgments.” Coughlin was still unaware of the Black Legion.

Mickey Cochrane struggled as Tigers vice president. Among his headaches was Iffy the Dopester. When Malcolm Bingay, one of city’s best-known journalists, began writing The Dopester column for the
Free Press
, he envisioned a fun little read—and an answer to Harry “The Umpire” Salsinger, his former protégé, at the market-dominating
News
. Salsinger “was writing his head off, giving the folks what they wanted,” said Bingay. “He was running us bowlegged and I had nobody to match him.” Bingay had tried to lure a crusty sportswriter out of retirement but had failed. Bingay had once been a baseball beat man, so he turned to himself. In his early days Bingay was the
News’
wunderkind sports editor. Now he ran the enemy
Free Press
—the whole thing—just down West Lafayette Boulevard. He already authored the daily “Good Morning” column, which appeared on the editorial page. He hadn’t wanted his byline over another column, so he adopted The Dopester alias and wrote history-tinged, inside-the-game pieces.

Over the summer of 1934 the column evolved. Disguising his identity he became Iffy the Dopester, a character depicted in a line drawing as a curmudgeonly, bearded, bespectacled elder. The column’s flavor shifted too. Iffy’s personality grew larger on the page. His prose became more whimsical, seasoned with words that harkened to another era. He called his readers “my hearties” and he gave players contorted, archaic-sounding nicknames: “Mickey the Mike,” “Homer Hank the Big Greenberg Boy,” “Peter Pan of the Ozarks” for Schoolboy Rowe, and “The Silent Knight” for Gehringer. By 1935 Iffy had become a craze, with Iffy clubs, Iffy buttons, Iffy contests, Iffy drinks, Iffy books, and pica poles of letters to Iffy. Most of Detroit didn’t realize Iffy was the alter ego of Bingay, who peppered his stories with Latin phrases, Greek philosophers, and Roman warriors. Iffy described himself as the team’s vicarious manager. Occasionally he made pointed comments, but usually in a lighthearted way. The column qualified as pure fan fodder, a love letter, with memories and easygoing advice swirled into the mix.

That changed in the spring of 1936. The team’s treatment of Hank Greenberg served as the catalyst. Greenberg and the Tigers couldn’t agree on the size of his pay raise. Coming off one of the biggest run-producing seasons in baseball history, he became the Tigers’ first major holdout since Ty Cobb. The contract dispute played out in the papers, with Greenberg staying in New York and missing most of spring training as Cochrane played hardball, trying to convince the world through intermediaries that he didn’t need Greenberg. It was as if Cochrane were adopting the forceful industrial ways of boss Walter O. Briggs and friend Harry Bennett. Stories began appearing that rookie Rudy York would be replacing Greenberg, which even York didn’t believe. “We won’t do so badly with York in there at first,” Cochrane said. Hoping to turn fan sentiment against Greenberg, the Tigers planted a false story that he wanted $40,000, which would have made him the best paid player in the game—at age twenty-five. Then Cochrane forecast that Al Simmons would be replacing Greenberg in the number-four spot.

Greenberg downplayed the negotiations at first because the Tigers had advised him to do so. But when Cochrane leaked stories to undermine him with fans, Greenberg spoke up, denying he had asked for $40,000, saying he was standing on principle, and noting that he thought he deserved a larger raise. “I can’t see why the Tigers aren’t willing to gamble a few thousand dollars on me when they invested $250,000 in new bleachers and $75,000 [on Al Simmons] to strengthen the team,” he said.

Bingay had known Frank Navin for decades and could count on him for insights and to act as a go-between when reporters had trouble dealing with Cochrane, who could be brusque and played favorites. With Briggs as president and Cochrane as vice president, the dynamics had changed—and so did Iffy. His columns turned harshly critical of the new leaders. The tone of his pieces felt out of character with Iffy’s playful, grandfatherly image. While he chastised Briggs as “Sir Walter,” he excused him as being sickly and out of touch. More often he took aim at Cochrane. As the Greenberg divisions deepened, Iffy’s words intensified.

On March 15 he wrote: “Mickey’s weakness is that he loves his friends, blindly, and resents criticism. Therefore, he is surrounded by more yes-men than a Hollywood producer. . . . The very spirit that makes him one of the great ballplayers of all time precludes his unbending gracefully.”

On March 22: “If Frank Navin had lived, Hank would have been signed. . . . There is only one man in the world who drove home 170 runs last year and that one feller is pouting Hank, the Big Greenberg boy. . . . A large dose of diplomacy is needed to remove from the colon of the patient a ‘go-to-hell’ attitude, implanted by ‘the club.’ ”

On March 23: “The club is a vast impersonal organization these days—something like the Chinese Empire. Once it was a personality—a baldish feller named Frank Navin. He did every thing but take the tickets and cut the grass.”

On March 26: “Mr. Briggs has only owned the ball club six months and there are a lot of things he has to learn; one of them is that newly appointed executives who play favorites, carry chips on their shoulders, and use ‘go-to-hell’ as diplomatic technique don’t get to first base in the League of Life.”

On March 27: “This public-be-damned gag went out of fashion a generation ago. That is one thing Mr. Cochrane has not learned yet as vice president. . . . A little tact, a little diplomacy, a little understanding of the amenities of life, a little more maturity—and Hank would have been in the fold from the start.”

Bingay, a Pulitzer finalist who had been active in a national effort to improve journalistic integrity, saved some of his strongest Iffy words for the boys who covered the team. They should “keep the public informed,” he said. “They are supposed to be working for the newspapers and not for the ball club. . . . I do not see why vast newspaper properties, valued at many millions of dollars, should be used by sportswriters to win arguments for club owners in a duel of wits with hired hands over how much cash they should grab. . . . I want them to tell me what they know—not what the baseball management thinks we ought to be told.”

The regular season had not yet started and Cochrane had enough pressures to overwhelm any mortal. He carried the weight of a star player, a championship manager, and now a novice vice president. He was dealing with locker room dissension over Simmons, Greenberg, money, and playing time. His team was hitting a dismal .226 in spring with the start of the season days away. Rowe and Crowder were having arm troubles, Gehringer’s back hurt, Goslin’s neck too, and Cochrane’s eyes weren’t focusing properly. “All is not peace and contentment in the Tiger camp,” noted one reporter. “The boys are mumbling and muttering among themselves.”