Book notes: Detroit: An American Autopsy, by Charlie LeDuff

PROLOGUE

It is important to note that, growing up in Detroit and its suburbs, I can honestly say it was never that good in the first place. People of older generations like to tell me about the swell old days of soda fountains and shopping stores and lazy Saturday night drives. But the fact is Detroit was dying forty years ago when the Japanese began to figure out how to make a better car.

No one cared much about Detroit until the Dow collapsed in 2008, the economy melted down and the chief executives of the Big Three went to Washington, D.C., to grovel. Suddenly the eyes of the nation turned back upon this postindustrial sarcophagus, where crime and corruption and mismanagement and mayhem played themselves out in the corridors of power and on the powerless streets. Detroit became epic, historic, symbolic, hip even.

Detroit is Pax Americana. The birthplace of mass production, the automobile, the cement road, the refrigerator, frozen peas, high-paid blue-collar jobs, home ownership and credit on a mass scale. America’s way of life was built here.

NEWSROOM

Someone had slipped the Free Press a cache of text messages showing that the city’s mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, was a criminal and a pimp. Kilpatrick had denied in a court of law that he had fired the police department’s chief of internal affairs because he was getting too close to an alleged sex party at the mayor’s mansion—where rumor had it that a stripper named “Strawberry” was beaten silly with a high heel by the mayor’s wife. Strawberry—real name Tamara Greene—later turned up murdered.

not only was Kilpatrick carrying on with his chief of staff, he was a crook who was looting the city and a letch who bagged more tail than a deer hunter.

I was now writing and producing a video column called “American Album.” The conceit was simple. Go across the country and find regular Americans and make stories and videos about them using their language and point of view and post it on the Internet. The work was popular with readers but not with the editor. And at the Times, it is not the reader who matters so much. The editor called the farmers and hunters and drive-through attendants and factory workers I wrote about losers.

It was time to go home. Part of it was for my daughter. Back in Detroit, there were grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins.

Circling back to Detroit was instinct, like a salmon needing to swim upstream because he is genetically encoded to do

I got the feeling then that those TVs were bellwethers, canaries in a coal mine. Once they went black, the final grains of sand in the 135-year-old Detroit News would run out.

The murder of Tamara “Strawberry” Greene had become the stuff of Detroit legend, a whodunit of sex and politics and power. The most incredible plot was a simple one: she is said to have danced at a party at the mayor’s mansion and was executed on the orders of Kilpatrick because she knew the names and proclivities of the powerful attendees. She died in a hail of bullets in a drive-by shooting nearly a year later, the story went: slumped over her steering wheel, her eyeglasses broken, the car still in drive, creeping down the street. Her boyfriend—a dope dealer—survived.

Looking at the case file was like looking at the high school yearbook of my sister, Nicole. A beautiful woman tied up in an ugly life. Strawberry oozed sex. And she used it. She teased dangerous men, manipulated them and stole from them. And in the end she paid with her life. A Good Time Girl Who Met a Bad End in the Streets of Detroit. Strawberry. Nicole. A simple book. Made in Detroit.

I said good-bye to Carlisle and went back to the newsroom. I called that first investigator and confronted him with the facts. It was the middle of the afternoon, and he sounded creaky and unstable, as though he’d been beaten silly with a feather pillow. He couldn’t explain the factual discrepancies but offered me this: “To be perfectly honest, it’s like an octopus’s tentacles that spread all over. In Detroit, once you see it, once you connect the dots, it’s obvious.” The only thing obvious to me was the people of Detroit had been duped by a loon. The mayor was a liar and a cheater, but he wasn’t a murderer—at least not in the case of Strawberry it seemed to me. I was convinced that I had the answer to the mystery of the murdered stripper. And it had nothing to do with the mayor. And that’s the way I wrote it. The story ran on the front page of

JOY ROAD

My sister, my three brothers and I grew up on Joy Road, the dividing line between Livonia and Westland—two working-class suburbs about three miles west of the Detroit city limits.

Men like my stepfather were packing their bags, walking out the door and never looking back.

I knew a lot of children who caved in to the greaser on the school bus. My siblings were among them. So were the other kids who hung around our house and ditched school while our mother was working in the flower shop on Detroit’s east side.

Two of our neighbors’ fathers worked at the leviathan Ford River Rouge complex in Dearborn, on the western city limits of Detroit. It must have been terrible in there. They both killed themselves with a rope. Who knows?

What our generation failed to learn was the nobility of work. An honest day’s labor. The worthiness of the man in the white socks who would pull out a picture of his grandkids from his wallet. For us, the factory would never do. And turning away from our birthright—our grandfather in the white socks—is the thing that ruined us.

Work versus The Hustle. That was the internal conflict on Joy Road, USA. My mother gave us the work ethic. My stepfather taught us that the best dollar was an easy dollar.

My brother Jimmy got lost in the blizzard of the eighties crack cocaine epidemic. He was sixteen and working and living in a crack den in Brightmoor—a notoriously rough section in northwestern Detroit.

rival drug boys strafed his Buick with semiautomatic gunfire. One bullet entered into the windshield at chest level and by the divinity of physics ricocheted downward and lodged in the dashboard. That’s when Jimmy, thankfully, came home.

EIGHT MILE

Frankie lived two doors east of the Dodge Ram plant, which was down to a single shift since nobody could afford a truck anymore, much less a Ram with an eight-cylinder Hemi. Even the rats seemed to know Chrysler was on its last legs. They fled the plant in hordes, infesting my brother’s neighborhood, nesting in his garage and under his house.

Warren isn’t a suburb really; it’s just a continuation of the urban sprawl. It was set up as an antidote to Detroit’s increasing blackness during the war years, with Eight Mile serving as a moat.

white man—told a story about a black man killed on the beat. It was during the early 1970s, and the white man had just gotten back from Vietnam and was a rookie on patrol with a partner. “We were chasing him down through an alley,” the man explained. “We couldn’t catch him. So I pulled out my service revolver and shot him in the back. He died. “So they tape off the scene, and the investigating sergeant in charge of the scene walks up to me and my partner and pulls a starter pistol from an ankle holster and says, ‘Okay, here’s the story. The nigger pulled this cap gun, see . . . ?’”

Detroit has the ignominious distinction of being the only American city to have been occupied by the United States army three times.

Michigan may geographically be one of America’s most northern states, but spiritually, it is one of its most southern.

During Detroit’s great expansion between 1920 and 1960, nearly half a million blacks came north from the cotton fields of the South as part of what is known as the Great Migration.

Southern hillbillies also came to places like Detroit and Flint looking for unskilled factory work. The Klan in Michigan exploded in membership during the Roaring Twenties. By the end of the decade, there were estimates that eighty thousand Klan members were living in Michigan, half of them in Detroit,

What the black man found when he came to Detroit was de facto segregation enforced with bodily threats

Detroit reached a peak population of nearly 1.9 million people in the 1950s and was 83 percent white. Now Detroit has fewer than 700,000 people, is 83 percent black and is the only American city that has surpassed a million people only to contract below that threshold.

FIRE

but by the looks of his troops’ equipment—melted helmets, boots with holes, and coats covered with thick layers of carbon that made them the equivalent of walking matchsticks—these men, it seemed to me, were nothing less than soldiers garrisoned on some godforsaken front. They were fighting an unwinnable war, and it was taking its toll. Detroit was perpetually on fire. The burning couldn’t be stopped.

“Arson,” he said. “In this town, arson is off the hook. Thousands of them a year, bro. In Detroit, it’s so fucking poor that fire is cheaper than a movie.

They burn the empty house next door and they sit on the fucking

porch with a forty, and they’re barbecuing and laughing ’cause it’s fucking entertainment.

It’s unbelievable. And the old lady living next door, she don’t have insurance, and her house goes up in flames and she’s homeless and another fucking block dies.”

I came back to the firehouse to embed myself, like a correspondent tailing a squad of marines in an Afghanistan backwater.

The firehouse is located on the city’s east side, near the hulking wreck of the Packard automobile plant that closed in 1956 but which nobody ever bothered to tear down. A square mile of industrial decay, scavengers had descended upon it, ushering in a marathon game of cat and mouse. The scavengers, looking for metal to sell at the scrap yard, light a section of the building on fire. After the firemen dutifully extinguish the blaze, the scavengers return to help themselves to the neatly exposed girders and I-beams that form the skeleton of the structure.

“Children are dying in this city because they’re too fucking poor to keep warm. Put that in your fucking notebook.”

There are things going on here beyond an ordinary person’s control. These people are hungry and they have no job. No possibility of a job. They’re stuck here. And the assholes in charge, from Bush in the White House to Kilpatrick in the Manoogian, they’re incompetent, and it’s like a national sickness.”

MONGO

Reverend Sheffield had a community center on the far west side of town, walled off from the ghetto he served by a pike fence and an electronic gate. The son of a UAW icon, Sheffield operated in part on public contracts and grants from city hall. Since the feds were crawling up Kilpatrick’s ass, that spigot of money had dried up.

With Kilpatrick down double digits in the polls, Mongo came up with a now infamous back-page “lynching” ad that ran in a special edition of the Michigan Chronicle, an ad commemorating the life and death of Rosa Parks. The ad drew a comparison between a historical photograph of black men hanging from a tree and the media’s treatment of Kilpatrick. It worked. Kilpatrick stormed back from the double-digit deficit to victory. Mongo knew the number-one rule of politics: win.

The receptionist interrupted: “Mr. Mongo, the reverend will see you now.” Mongo got up to go, took a few steps down the hall, turned and asked me: “You wanna come in?” “With you all?” “Yeah, motherfucker, with us all.”

Highland Park, the birthplace of the Model T, was an industrial hamlet wholly surrounded by Detroit. Today, little is there. It is poor, black, burned down and so tough that even the Nation of Islam moved its mosque away. The saying goes that suburbanites don’t go to Detroit and Detroiters don’t go to Highland Park.

“It got decided a long time ago in Detroit,” Mongo said. “The city belongs to the black man. The white man was a convenient target until there were no white men left in Detroit. What used to be black and white is now gray. Whites got the suburbs and everything else. The black machine’s got the city and the black machine’s at war with itself. The spoils go to the one who understands that.” “So we’re standing in a moment of history?” I asked. “That’s right,” he said. “And you’re going to find out, if you stick around, that a lot of the people holding political power nowadays are some bizarre incompetent sons-a-bitches.”

LIPSTICK AND LAXATIVES

I BEGAN TO understand just how bizarre Detroit politics could be when I met Monica Conyers, the high-strung city councilwoman, for a cocktail at a local jazz club in the early summer. The youngish and voluptuous wife of the doddering congressman, Conyers had come to city politics under the banner of being a Conyers.

Monica was my kind of woman. As least as far as the reporter in me goes. She was a self-absorbed, self-serving diva. A honeypot and a loudmouth who let a bit of power go to her id.

Conyers was susceptible to violent outbursts. She was a drunk in rush-hour traffic, a wreck in the waiting. I could have been related to her. I waited for the moment and Monica delivered.

Sam Riddle he told me: “The only difference between Detroit and the Third World in terms of corruption is Detroit don’t have no goats in the streets.”

she also agreed to my bringing along a group of schoolchildren who would ask her questions about her behavior in the council chambers, all of it to be videotaped.

“Yes, but we’re kids. We’re looking on TV, and, like, this is an adult calling another adult Shrek? That’s something a second-grader would do.” Conyers could barely contain her anger. Her eyelids flared, her jaw clenched. “Now you’re telling me, young lady, what I should have and should not have done?”

When I had left home—back in the early nineties—Detroit was still the nation’s seventh-largest city, with a population of over 1.2 million. Back then, Detroit was dark and broken and violent. Murders topped six hundred a year and Devil’s Night—the day before Halloween when the city burst into a flaming orgy of smoke and shattered glass—was at its height. Studying the city through the windshield now, it wasn’t frightening anymore. It was empty and forlorn and pathetic.

Before it was New Bethel, the church had been the Oriole Theater, once the headquarters of the Church of Universal Triumph, the Dominion of God Inc. That congregation was led by a man known as Prophet Jones. During the 1940s and ’50s, Jones was one of the most successful showman-evangelists in the country, one of the few black preachers who broke the color barrier and was broadcast nationally by the white-controlled media. The Saturday Evening Post dubbed him the “Messiah in Mink.”

TRAINS, PLANES AND AUTOMOBILES

Detroit actually began its decline in population during the 1950s, precisely the time that Detroit—and the United States—was at its peak. And while Detroit led the nation in per capita income and home ownership, automation and the beginnings of foreign competition were forcing automobile companies like Packard to shutter their doors. That factory closed in 1956 and was left to rot, pulling down the east side, which pulled down the city.

By 1958, 20 percent of the Detroit workforce was jobless. Not to worry, the city, rich with manufacturing revenue, had its own welfare system—a decade before Johnson’s Great Society. The city provided health care, fuel, and rent and gave $10 every week to adults for food; $5 to children. Word of the free milk and honey made its way down South and the poor “Negros” and “Hillbillies” flooded in by train. If it wasn’t for them, the city’s population would have sunk further than it did.

Henry Ford announced the $5 workday,

People came from Poland, from Ireland and from the sharecroppers’ shacks of Mississippi. The American middle class was born here.

The Big Three executives, who had been so unceremoniously booted out of Washington in November, returned to the capital in December with a more specific plan, which had now jumped from $25 billion to $34 billion. And they didn’t fly the corporate jets this time.

Poor Bob Nardelli of Chrysler. The pickings were slim. Chrysler, known more for the styling of its bodies than for its technological savvy, sent Nardelli to Washington in an Aspen Hybrid SUV, about the only “green” thing Chrysler had to offer. Problem is, it was a terrible vehicle and unreliable.

there were two engineers tailing Nardelli at a discreet three-mile buffer, carrying laptops and a trunk full of tools in case the Aspen broke down. Even Chrysler didn’t trust their products.

Leaving the Capitol building, Nardelli climbed back into his unreliable $50,000 SUV for the ten-hour return drive home. But they had not even cleared the Lincoln Memorial when Nardelli, according to Carlisle, instructed him to drive to the airport, where the corporate jet was waiting.

On December 15, President Bush, not wanting the collapse of the auto industry as another black mark on his legacy, extended a $17 billion bailout to GM and Chrysler.

SCREWED

nobody in America works fourteen minutes for free.

Note:SOMETIMES this book is overly dramatic and overcynical. This line, for example, is total BS.

As far as I know, Westland is the only city in the world that renamed itself after its shopping mall. But as it is with most things around here, the shopping mall is on the rocks, rundown and made more dismal by the empty storefronts surrounding it and the vacant lot where the Quo Vadis theater once stood.

Quicken used to have three thousand loan officers when I was there. Now I hear it’s about two hundred. You know what I mean? At one point in this country, when that shit was the rage, one in ten adults was employed in the real estate business. What’s that tell you? We were all living a lie and we all knew it.

THE KING IS DEAD

BY EARLY FALL, it was apparent that the feds had been laying more wire in Detroit than the cable guy. Leaks of snitches and news of plea deals and grand jury testimonies emerged almost daily, and Motown became hypnotized by a widening corruption scandal.

Details leaked out of the grand jury room about Councilwoman Monica Conyers and her clandestine meetings in fast-food parking lots where she took envelopes stuffed with cash. Apparently Conyers, it seemed, was a big fan of the fish fillet sandwiches on white bread.

GONE TO THE DOGS

This place called Detroit wasn’t interesting to me anymore. It was breaking my heart. It was driving me insane. A whole generation of people relegated to the garbage pile.

A firefighter is Irish by culture even if he is a black man, and there were plenty of them here. The firehouse is one of the few places in Detroit that is integrated at all. The blacks run the department, but its soul will always be Irish. And the Irish don’t handle outsiders very well. Especially reporters. Especially in death. Even if one has been invited to the wake.

As the firemen were snuffing out remnant embers in the attic, someone heard timber snap. And then the roof collapsed. “He was right behind me,” said Hamm, pointing to the spot. “He was right next to me. I don’t know why I’m here.” It took a few minutes to find Harris because his homing alarm failed to sound. It failed because it was defective. Because that passes for normal here. Defective equipment for emergency responders. Harris died not because he was burned or because the timber broke his bones. He died of suffocation, unable to breathe from the weight of the roof. If the alarm had only worked.

Firefighter Wes Rawls had his car stolen at the memorial service the evening before. It was the third time he’d had his car stolen. One of those times, Rawls was attending an anger-management class. Walt was put in the ground, and as quick as that, the hero went forgotten by the city.

ICE MAN

It was my brother Frankie calling. He said a friend of his had found a dead body in the elevator shaft of an abandoned building on the south side of the city. “He’s encased in ice, except his legs, which are sticking out like Popsicle sticks,” Frankie said.

My brother’s friend was one of a strange fraternity in Detroit who call themselves urban explorers. They are a group of grown men who get their thrills traipsing around the ghost buildings, snapping photographs and collecting bits of this and that for odd pieces of art. In other cities, they have tourists.

True. The average response time in Detroit for an emergency call to the police is a half hour, give or take; it’s little better with ambulances.

Police officials spent the day trying to explain why it took two days and five phone calls to extricate the man. Some black people complained on the radio talk shows that the News—and by extension, I—was racist because it never would have published the picture of a dead white girl from a posh white suburb. The small, white “art community” in Detroit complained that I was focusing on the negative in a city with so much good. What about all the galleries and museums and music? they complained in a flurry of e-mails and blogs. What about the good things? It was a fair point. There are plenty of good people in Detroit. Tens of thousands of them. Hundreds of thousands. There are lawyers and doctors and auto executives with nice homes and good jobs and community elders trying to make things better, teachers who spend their own money on the classroom, people who mow lawns out

of respect for the dead neighbor, parents who raise their children, ministers who help with funeral expenses. But these things are not supposed to be news. These things are supposed to be normal. And when normal things become the news, the abnormal becomes the norm. And when that happens, you might as well put a fork in it.

FIRE WOMAN

THE WHOLE FROZEN-MAN episode was dredging up memories I’d tried to bury for a decade. The death of somebody else society considered worthless: my sister. Nicole died after a night of partying in a bar frequented by prostitutes and heavies called the Flame, located in Brightmoor, on Detroit’s west side.

My sister, among her many endeavors in life, was a streetwalker. I wish I could say it wasn’t true—but it is. So there you go. According to the police report, she had climbed into a van with a strange man. He was loaded on liquor and Lord knows what. He was doing eighty miles per hour down a residential street. The street dead-ended at a vacant lot, and beyond the lot was a garage. My sister was a wild one. And if I remember her right, she probably decided that if she was going to die it wasn’t going to be sitting passively in a van while it smashed into a brick wall. She jumped out, straight into a tree.

I’ve been most everywhere on the planet: war zones, deserts, the Arctic Circle, campaign buses, opium dens, even Albuquerque, but I’ve never returned to that section of Detroit called Brightmoor. I was afraid of it and would drive miles to avoid it. The memories are too hard.

JOHNNIE $

THE FROZEN MAN in the elevator shaft was identified a week after being found by the wallet in his back pocket. His name was Johnnie Lewis Redding. DOB 09-29-1952. The medical examiner ruled out murder or drowning since there were no broken bones, no wounds and no water in his lungs. Most probably, Redding died of a cocaine overdose and was tossed down the elevator shaft by a panicky friend.

Johnnie was a second cousin to Otis Redding, the soul singer.

Johnnie Dollar did not have to be on the streets: “It’s the only place he could be hisself.”

MAMA’S BOY

Steve Rattner, the Obama car czar, walked into the Renaissance Center, the world headquarters of General Motors located on the Detroit River, and made this assessment: “Everyone knew Detroit’s reputation for insular, slow-moving cultures. Even by that low standard, I was shocked by the stunningly poor management that we found, particularly at GM, where we encountered, among other things, perhaps the weakest finance operation any of us had ever seen in a major company.”

it didn’t seem to matter. Black or White. Liberal or Conservative. White collar or Blue. Nobody could run shit. And it wasn’t just Detroit. Sacramento, Washington, D.C., Wall Street. The entire country was being run into the ground by a generation infected with incompetence and greed.

SCREEN DOORS

nothing—was being done with the investigation into Walt Harris’s death. It was a murder because it happened during an arson—someone had torched the house with a can of gasoline. In New York or Los Angeles, there would have been an elite homicide squad investigating the death of a man in uniform. But here in Detroit, no manhunt had been launched. No task force assembled. The Harris case had been given over to a single overworked homicide detective, and so it sat on the back burner growing stale.

BOOM

DETROIT WOULD NEVER have been if not for the beaver.

Louis XIII, the ambiguously homosexual king of France, who had a double set of teeth and a pronounced stutter, was fond of prancing about the streets of Paris wearing a beaver-pelt hat.

The next king of France, Louis’s son Louis XIV, dispatched men to the New World to procure more beaver skins and instructed a man who called himself the “sieur de Cadillac” to establish a fort in the lower Great Lakes to block the English advance on his fur monopoly.

On June 5, 1701, Cadillac and two hundred men shoved off from Montreal in twenty-five canoes.

Cadillac also illegally trafficked in liquor and furs with the natives and was for a short time thrown in prison. That would also make Cadillac Detroit’s first dope dealer.

Cadillac chose the strait—détroit in French—that

And thus Detroit was born in July 1701.

Detroit in the nineteenth century was the center of the nation’s carriage and wheel and stove industries because of its lumber and the rich ore deposits in the upper reaches of Michigan.

Henry Ford, a farmer, built his first automobile plant in Highland Park in 1899. Detroit would rapidly become the world’s machine shop, its factory floor, growing in population from 300,000 to 1.3 million in the twenty-five years following Ford’s grand opening.

General Motors was founded in 1909, and a host of other car companies blossomed: Chrysler, Packard, Studebaker, Hudson, Olds, and Dodge among them. In 1919, the young and hungry men of GM devised an ingenious scheme to supplant Ford as the number-one carmaker in the world. Credit.

“It is the home of mass production, very high wages and colossal profits, of reckless installment buying and shifting labour surplus,” wrote the British politician and author Ramsay Muir in 1925. “It regards itself as the temple of a new gospel of progress to which I will venture to give the name Detroitism.”

In 1934, the last beaver was sighted in the Detroit River.

BUST

ON JUNE 1, 2009, General Motors declared bankruptcy, following Chrysler, which had done so a month earlier. Ford was teetering.

300,000 people in Michigan lost their jobs.

The city, what’s left of it, burns night after night. Nature—in the form of pheasants, hawks, foxes, coyotes and wild dogs—had stepped in to fill the vacuum, reclaiming a little more of the landscape each day.

The streets were empty and cratered. The skyscrapers were holograms. I stood and admired a cottonwood sapling growing out of the roof of the Lafayette Building. This was like living in Pompeii, except the people weren’t covered in ash. We were alive.

And if you needed a metaphor for how retrograde things were becoming, a beaver was sighted nesting in the Detroit River for the first time in seventy-five years.

TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS THREE

DETROIT 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.

Detroiters wanted calm. And Grandpa Bing was just the warm glass of milk they were 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.

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.”

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

“Like for instance?” I asked. “Well, let’s see,” he counted. “There were ten police killings, so those don’t count.”

That made the Detroit Police Department the deadliest in America.

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.

YOU BETTER GET MY LOOT

Monica Conyers

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 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.

BURNT FINGERS

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.

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.

“The Fire Training Academy was awarded $1.5 million for a new training tower. There is no new training tower. The money disappeared.”

“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.”

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.

BIG MARTHA

been wishing I never come up here. Trapped in the ghetto like this. People running wild. My grandbaby dead. Me too poor to bury her.”

GRANDMA

It seemed to me looking over her police report that the dead don’t take their sorrows and confusion with them, they pass them on like watches and amulets.

GRANDPA

In 1925, Detroit’s factories employed more than 300,000 people. And thanks to Prohibition and the city’s proximity to the liquor distilleries of Canada, another 50,000 were employed in the illicit sale of alcohol. There was money everywhere, and people arrived by the trainload to get theirs. Of those, 120,000 were black Southerners, an epic shift in American demographics known as the Great Migration. Men and women with histories they were free to erase and reconstruct. How many truths were buried in those years? In Detroit, who really knows?

The year Great-Grandma got off the train—1924—a Ku Klux Klan–endorsed candidate was elected mayor of Detroit. Charles Bowles could not take office, however, because it was a write-in campaign and so many of his supporters had misspelled his name that 17,000 ballots were disallowed. During that campaign there were mass marches of Klan supporters—40,000 strong in the city. They even burned crosses on the steps of City Hall.

JIHAD

A mob is made up of men, and usually the men want to be stopped before they become a snarling pack. But there is a tipping point after which you can no longer stop them because “they” will have become an “it.”

The Brotherhood was a gang, no doubt. But the FBI spin that this was a Sunni terror group was a silly overstatement. In fact, none of those arrested were charged with any terrorism counts, and a U.S. magistrate saw fit to release some of the eleven defendants on personal bond.

What I saw was a bunch of lost, pissed-off black men. Creatures of the ghetto—90 percent of whom had taken the well-worn path from the street block to the cell block and back to the corner, their lot never improving.

The prosecutor exposed the fact that a group of white suburban businessmen had given Kilpatrick and his wife nearly $300,000 in parting gifts

for a fleeting moment, Detroiters got a taste of the vanilla icing that coats Chocolate City.

FEAR NO EVIL

I felt that I had unleashed some terrible emotions that Big Martha had stuffed away deep in a pantry when I had come knocking a few weeks earlier, and I felt obligated to fix things. I wanted to make things right for her. For Christmas. I made some calls.

Detroit is full of good people who know what pain is, and they sent more than $3,000 by mail, some in tens, some in fifties, the extra money going to a soup kitchen of Big Martha’s choice. One man even gave Big Martha the money for the car she needed. If there is any hope for Detroit it is the thousands of good people like this, afraid but not wanting to be afraid anymore.

FORGET WHAT YOU SAW

“You might say that the homicide of Aiyana is the natural conclusion to the disease from which she suffered,” Schmidt told me. “What disease was that?” I asked. “The psychopathology of growing up in Detroit,” he said. “Some people are doomed from birth because their environment is so toxic.”

ROCKET DOCKET

Known as “Half-Day” Hathaway, she was part of an extended clan of judges related by blood and marriage who held great power over the halls of justice. And because judges are elected in Michigan, name recognition means everything and legal ability almost nothing.

For this reason you could find Hathaways rooted on the benches from family court to the Michigan Supreme Court.

Judge Cynthia Gray Hathaway was removed from the bench for six months by the Michigan Supreme Court a decade earlier for, among other things, adjourning trials to sneak away on vacation.

It would be easy to lay the blame on McNeal for the circumstances in which she raised her sons. But is she responsible for police officers with broken computers in their squad cars, firefighters with holes in their boots, ambulances that arrive late, a city that can’t keep its lights on and leaves its vacant buildings to the arsonist’s match, a state government that allows corpses to stack up in the morgue, multinational corporations that move away and leave poisoned fields behind, judges who let violent criminals walk the streets, school stewards who steal the children’s milk money, elected officials who loot the city, automobile executives who couldn’t manage a grocery store, or Wall Street grifters who destroyed the economy and left the nation’s children with a burden of debt while they partied it up in Southampton? Can she be blamed for that?

PANTS ON FIRE

People often ask, where is the hope in Detroit? It was right here. I had just watched it. Society had functioned properly in this case because we all wanted it to. The firefighters, the cops, the judge, the jury, the reporter. We the people who wish to raise our children in peace and health. We the people who would like to bequeath something decent to the people who will follow us.

KWAME KILPATRICK WASN’T the first Detroit politician to milk the city. It had been going on for a hundred years. And it wasn’t just the politicians. It was union bosses and contractors and industrialists and receptionists who were nieces of the connected. Everybody got their piece and that was all right when Detroit was rolling in money. There were always enough paychecks to paper over the maggots. But now there isn’t. At the time of this printing Detroit finds itself in the midst of a bankruptcy and under the control of an unelected emergency manager.

places like Los Angeles are in the same predicament, ten-fold. Like I said: Detroit was the first up, first down, but never alone.

A quarter million people fled the city in the first decade of the twenty-first century, bringing its population to less than 700,000—a hundred-year low.

Evans’s successor, Chief Ralph Godbee, took a kinder, gentler approach to policing.

Godbee, who moonlighted as a preacher, would abruptly retire when it was revealed that he had bedded a bevy of female officers.

But what you gonna do? You ain’t gonna be reincarnated, so you got to do the best you can with the moment you got. Do the best you can and try to be good. You dig?”