Terror in the City of Champions (45 page)

“What was the general attitude of the members of the Black Legion toward colored people?” Cowans asked Dean, who was puffing on a cigar. One could imagine Dean feeling unsettled by the smart, better dressed, and more successful Cowans.

“There were many members in the legion who had no hatred toward colored people,” Dean said. “But they were overruled by those in high office, especially Davis.”

“By Davis,” said Cowans, “you mean Col. Harvey Davis?”

“Yes,” Dean said. “Davis was bitter in his hatred of colored people. He wanted to kill every one he saw.”

Partway through the interview, which would be published in black papers across the country, Cowans began addressing Dean by his last name. The tone shifted to a mix of aversion and condescension.

“Well now, Dean, just what plan did the Black Legion have which was to be used against the colored people?”

“They had planned to start by having the children separated in the schools.”

“When was this to start?”

“It started about two years ago when literature was distributed in Ecorse and other downriver towns, urging the parents to fight for segregation in schools.”

Dean said an attempt by black parents to get the district to hire black teachers provoked the action.

“Why did the legion want separate schools?”

“Well, you know,” Dean said. “If the children mingle in school, it will not be long before there will be inter-marriages, and this would weaken both races. Inter-marriages are bad.”

Cowans asked Dean whether he had ever worked with Negroes.

He had at a Ford factory.

“How were the colored people you worked with?”

“I found them fine fellows. In fact I don’t have any hatred toward colored. I was just following the policy of the Black Legion.”

Dean said if he could do it over again, he wouldn’t join the legion.

“I was in and couldn’t get out—” he said.

Cowans shifted to sports.

“What did the members of the Black Legion think about Joe Louis?”

A white reporter, perhaps trying to frame Dean’s response, interjected: “They held him in high regard, didn’t they?”

“Some of them did and some of them didn’t,” Dean said.

“What about the boys who are members of the American Olympic team?”

Jesse Owens, Ralph Metcalfe, and other blacks were expected to do well in Berlin. The games were to begin on August 1.

“They’re doing fine work,” Dean said. “I think a lot of them will win Olympic titles.”

Earlier in the week Dean had disclosed another legion crime. He said the legion had killed Silas Coleman at the Ford Mill Pond in Pinckney—“just for the hell of it,” in Prosecutor McCrea’s words. Until Dean’s confession, no one had connected Coleman’s death to the legion. Dean named those who had participated.

When Cowans asked about the killing, Dean began to squirm. Perhaps he felt guilty. In the murder of Charles Poole, Dean could convince himself that he had been misled—that he thought he was exacting justice against a man whom he believed had beaten his wife and killed their soon-to-be-born child. With the plots against publisher Kingsley, Mayor Voisine, and attorney Sugar, Dean likewise could rationalize that they were engaged in political war and a battle over the soul of America. They were enemies getting what they deserved. But Coleman’s case was different. Coleman had not done anything. His only crime was being black. He had been killed purely for entertainment. On some level Dean must have seen the distinction.

Cowans wondered what Silas Coleman said en route to his death.

“He didn’t know that he was going on a one-way ride,” Dean explained. “He talked about two cases of beer that he had at home and how he was going to have a good time with his landlady.”

Not everyone thought Dean was telling the truth when he linked the legion to Coleman’s death. The prosecutor who oversaw the town of Pinckney expressed doubt. “I’m afraid Dean is confirming anything that is mentioned to him,” said Stanley Berriman. “It doesn’t look right to me. Coleman was last seen with a group of Negroes and shortly later was shot to death. Farmers heard the shot, but did not see the killing. Just where the Black Legion could figure in that is beyond me.”

Soon, though, another suspect confirmed the legion’s involvement. Dean was telling the truth, as usual. He shared one other sensational detail. Dean said several more bodies might have been thrown into a sinkhole at Ford Mill Pond.

The Captain

Soft-spoken Ira Holloway Marmon took up residence at the Leland Hotel after the Black Legion case broke. Marmon was a veteran law enforcement captain, chief of the investigative bureau of the Michigan State Police. The Leland served as his base when he came in from Lansing. Not yet a decade old, it remained a destination—“one of the world’s foremost hotels,” according to a boastful advertisement that heralded its “seven hundred large rooms with bath.” Rising twenty-two stories, the Leland was topped with a forty-foot steel grid that held ten-foot block letters spelling out its name on two lines, “Detroit” over “Leland.” At night the support grid disappeared in the darkness and the glowing words hovered above the rooftop. The sign was a prominent part of the skyline in the popular Washington Boulevard shopping district.

The hotel was conveniently located around the corner from the
Times
, a couple blocks from the
Free Press
and
News
on West Lafayette, and less than a mile from the Detroit Police, the courts, Navin Field, and the Masonic Temple (Marmon was a thirty-third degree Mason, the highest rank). Several ballplayers lived in the Leland, Hank Greenberg among them. Schoolboy Rowe had married his beloved Edna there. Plus the place had a good bar. What more could an officer want?

Marmon had joined the state agency in 1917 after the army rejected him because of his poor hearing. The state troopers had just organized and Marmon was among their first recruits. Early on he guarded Port Huron’s tunnel and power plant after reports of a German terror plot originating from Canada. While working along the St. Clair River Marmon saved two men when their boat capsized on a stormy night. Two of their friends drowned. In Jackson he protected railroad war shipments. In Muskegon he spent five weeks at a manufacturing plant battling anti-war saboteurs. By 1920 he had become head of the state detective bureau. He led the probe of “King Ben” Purnell of the House of David, a religious colony, and commanded a liquor-related corruption investigation in Hamtramck that saw fifty-two people indicted. In 1927 Marmon began a three-year stint in Detroit as the leader of a Prohibition squad that chased rum-runners and battered down their doors. Like almost every lawman who worked the region in that era, he had stories about the Purple Gang, reputed to be involved in Chicago’s St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Marmon’s biggest achievement may have been establishing the state’s fingerprinting system. It began in a shoebox he stashed under his bed in the portable barracks. He also helped create the scientific lab and the photo and ballistics departments. Born in Arkansas and described as “quiet . . . unobtrusive . . . determined,” he proudly wore the Michigan shield—two deer bucks and an eagle accenting the word
Tuebor
(I Will Defend). He also had the respect of men in other departments, like Deputy Farrell, who found him “wise and smart,” a high compliment given the rivalries that could flare between agencies.

Marmon enjoyed being in Detroit. Though he missed his wife Lillian and his sons, Leon, fifteen, and Owen, thirteen—and certainly their dog, Sport (a German shepherd who had failed as a police canine)—he delighted in the time away from his mother-in-law, Frieda Spreksel, who lived with them in Okemos. Frieda rattled his nerves. In her mid-sixties she harbored fierce opinions and spouted them forcefully in German.

Several Black Legion investigations were underway, including Marmon’s. Detroit detectives and Wayne County deputies took the lead on the Poole case. Prosecutor Duncan McCrea had an investigative crew, as did the state attorney general, whose assistant would be challenging McCrea in the coming election. “Big Jim” Chenot, a popular judge, had been appointed as his own one-man grand jury and a heap of local departments were looking into matters too. Various institutions, like the state prison and the streetcar department, had their own agents. Toss in the politics—McCrea being a Democrat; the governor, mayor, and attorney general being Republicans; and an election approaching—and you had a tangled mess of pressures, loyalties, and motivations. In addition Prosecutor McCrea and Police Commissioner Col. Heinrich Pickert disliked each other. They had a long-running feud. A year earlier Pickert had accused McCrea of failing to cooperate with police after McCrea had made similar charges against Pickert. In March McCrea had told a judge that he would not allow his prime witness in a case to be held in a police cell because he distrusted Pickert’s department. It was just one of many run-ins between the two men.

Days into his investigation Captain Marmon had shocked almost everyone when he announced that the Black Legion might be responsible for fifty deaths in Michigan alone. Until that point law enforcement officials had implicated the secret society in only the Charles Poole killing. If they harbored other suspicions, they hadn’t disclosed them to the press. But Marmon did. For starters he shared his belief that the hanging of Roy Pidcock and the shooting deaths of auto union organizers John Bielak and George Marchuk were done by the Black Legion.

The Pidcock probe took Marmon to Wyandotte, near Fighting Island, where he interviewed police, Michigan Alkali employees, and Pidcock’s wife and friends. The next day Marmon pointed out the improbability of a man walking unseen in his underwear for three-quarters of a mile through Ecorse and then swimming undetected a half-mile to the island. Furthermore no one knew Pidcock to be a swimmer. Marmon noted that Pidcock’s briefs showed no signs of having been wet and the soles of his feet were spotless, though ash powdered the floor of the shack where his body hung. Plus he had disappeared hours after Poole had been killed. And what about those cars that supposedly got separated at the drawbridge? Where did they really go? Marmon said he wanted to exhume Pidcock’s body and have a proper autopsy.

Provincial Police had handled the case because Fighting Island lies on the Canadian side of the Detroit River. Inspector Phillip Walters defended his men against Marmon’s insinuation that they had botched the case. Walters said no inquiry was held because it was an obvious case of suicide. “Pidcock had been out of work and was despondent,” Walters said. “He first tried to commit suicide by jumping from a window of his home but was stopped by members of the family. Later, he got out of a locked room and, with only part of his clothing on, fled to the river and apparently swam to Fighting Island. A few hours later, his body was found. It was suicide and a verdict to that effect was returned.”

Marmon relied on an informant who belonged to the Black Legion. He called the man X-9, a nickname filched from the comic strip “Secret Agent X-9,” created by Dashiell Hammett. The source told Marmon that Bielak and Marchuk had been executed by the legion. Marmon wanted the cases reopened. At Detroit Police headquarters homicide chief John Navarre bristled at Marmon’s suggestions. Of Bielak, whom Peg-Leg White had identified as a troublemaker to officials at the Hudson factory, Navarre said, “He had been a communist and had quit the party. We were convinced communists were responsible for his death. I don’t know what information Captain Marmon has, but we have never learned anything to change our opinion.”

Marmon’s claim of fifty deaths couldn’t have been timed any better. Days after he made the declaration a bloated body surfaced off Fighting Island. Members of the Coast Guard pulled it from the water. The man had been dead a long time. He carried no identification but wore a heavy coat, leading police to speculate he was a duck hunter. He wasn’t. It was Alexander Murdy, who had walked out of his home in January and never returned. His son identified him at the morgue. Murdy had been a member of the legion, Marmon said. The captain challenged the coroner’s verdict of suicide. Three days later Murdy’s friend Steve Lada turned up in the same waters. Police said he had stabbed himself multiple times, including once in the heart. Marmon didn’t buy it. Two other bodies turned up in the river around the same time, one near Belle Isle and one near the Ambassador Bridge.

During the first weeks of his probe, Marmon sent a daily memo to his boss, Commissioner Oscar Olander. “There have been several bodies recovered this past week from the river,” he reported one afternoon. “The coroners say they are all suicides. I doubt them very much.” Proclaiming a questionable death to be a suicide was an easy to way to reduce the number of unsolved murders. One former legion member recalled being at a house meeting in Highland Park where legion state commander Arthur Lupp appeared. “A lot of people are going to disappear,” Lupp said. “Some will commit suicide, some will be found in the river, some will be hold-up victims, and some will be found shot to death by ‘gangsters.’ ”

From across the state Marmon fielded reports from other troopers. He couldn’t help but notice the breadth of the legion. Marmon shuttled between Detroit and the downriver communities of Ecorse, Wyandotte, and Lincoln Park and then out to Pontiac, the county seat of Oakland. “It looks as if Oakland County is solid Black Legion,” he reported to Olander, writing on Leland Hotel stationery. “I have talked to many out there, and if you ever saw fear, you should see some of these people. They tell me practically every one in office or power is a member.” In another memo he told of a mass gathering outside of Oxford in 1934, where a village marshal learned of a beating being given to an errant member. The marshal wanted backup from county deputies before heading to the site, but they were unwilling to come, he said. A one-legged fellow was instrumental in the event, the marshal reported.