Detroit: An American Autopsy (13 page)

M
AMA’S
B
OY

W
ITH
G
ENERAL
M
OTORS
stock trading at levels not seen since the Great Depression, Kwame Kilpatrick walked out of jail shortly after midnight on February 2, 2009.

Kilpatrick had done ninety-nine days.

By the look of things, incarceration had been good to him. Although his fingernails were in need of their customary manicure, he was twenty-five pounds lighter, and the Afro and shaggy beard he had grown in the Wayne County Hilton made his head and ears appear larger—and so his padded shoulders less ridiculous.

As he emerged through the revolving doors of the concrete jailhouse, he was swallowed in a weird scrum of television cameras and thick-necked Nation of Islam bodyguards who threatened to pulp any reporter who got too close. The police only smirked at the complaining reporters, who did not get too close. I stood far on the fringe.

It was as sad as it was appalling: a black city in which the most prominent leader plundered, pillaged and lied, all the while presenting himself as its guardian angel against the White Devil.

Kilpatrick, who walked into that jailhouse as a quivering-lipped pretender, walked out as the creature he always claimed to be, the preening Hip Hop Mayor. Kilpatrick ducked into an SUV and was chauffeured to the house of his mother, Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, where she reportedly made him eggs for breakfast.

He probably would have benefited from a few hours spent working in a factory. Factory work tends to give you perspective on the importance of things. Of course in the hip-hop world, work was for suckers.

Not that the automobile executives were much better at running things. Turns out our masters of the universe couldn’t manage a grocery store.

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.”

The weakest finance operation any of us had ever seen.

Christ, 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.

Consider that Rattner himself was being sued by the attorney general of New York and investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission for his involvement in a kickback scheme involving the state’s pension fund and his investment firm.

Corruption and ineptitude was a national sickness and it was killing us. But Detroit, it cannot be denied, had a certain
flair
.

P
AIN
N
EVER
F
EELS
G
OOD

A
FTER A FULL
morning of having his balls busted at the screw factory for eight stinking bucks an hour, Billy walked out. Bruce Springsteen–style, with his fist in the air. The guys who once hated him shouted, “Much respect, man!”

It was the best day of work he ever put in there.

* * *

My brothers and I and our cousin Johnny got together in Billy’s basement to do some drinking. He was renting a small two-bedroom Cape Cod about a quarter mile down the road from the house the sheriff locked him out of, the one he wrote the mortgage note on, the one not too far from the interstate.

We drank well into the morning. Our brother Jimmy passed out with his head on the table and Frankie snored like a tractor on a threadbare couch. Johnny asked Billy if he wanted to come to
his
factory, where Johnny worked as a foreman. Johnny told Billy he could probably get him $10.50 an hour plus overtime. And if Billy showed up and did the job with no absenteeism, then after ninety days he could probably get Billy on full-time with higher wage and bennies.

My brother jutted his square, inebriated chin into the air. He pointed a finger. He moved to say something. And when he opened his mouth, the dental bridge fell out and bounced into the ashtray. Billy looked down quizzically, then plucked it from the ashes, blew on it and popped it back into place.

Billy got around to answering my cousin’s offer with this: “No way.”

“Suit yourself,” Johnny said with a shrug. “Jobs are awful hard things to sneeze at.”

Billy just shrugged.

“What the fuck?” I shouted. “It’s a better chance. Look at your fucking teeth!”

“I still got dreams,” Billy said after some drunken silence. “If I take that job I’m just admitting that I gave up.”

“Gave up? You’ve got a family.”

“I’ve got dreams, Char,” he croaked. “And a factory just isn’t part of it. I’ve got more in me.”

* * *

When the bank began moving in on Frankie’s house, Frankie didn’t want to make a deal. He wanted out. The place was worthless, what with the hookers and rats flooding into the neighborhood. What was the sense of trying to dig your way out of a hole by putting the dirt in your pockets? Frankie went looking for boxes to pack up his home.

Boxes are expensive—about four and a half bucks for the big ones. But Frankie found a guy selling them cheap up on 20 Mile Road. A buck apiece. When Frankie got there, he saw the stamp on the side:
MADE IN CHINA
.

“Motherfucker, don’t we make anything anymore?”

“Not so’s you could afford it,” the guy said.

Frankie bought two loads of the Chinese boxes and we went to pack his house. We loaded the moving truck in the rain. I took the metal gates as a memento.

Frankie and his family moved to a nice three-bedroom house in a working-class suburb a few miles down the road. The place had a main street and ice cream parlors and children actually played in their front yards. It was the first time in his adult life that my brother did not own his home.

“Maybe it was for the best,” I said, drinking a bottle of beer and scanning the quiet street. “This is a really nice neighborhood. It’s got to feel good.”

Frankie looked at me with a crooked eye. “Char. Despite what they say in the poetry books, pain never feels good.”

S
CREEN
D
OORS

I
RECEIVED A
letter. It was typewritten with no return address and unsigned. It was from an anonymous neighbor complaining about a teacup-size wind chime I had hung on my porch. The anonymous neighbor wrote that now that the weather was warm and people had their windows open, the little bell was distracting and my cooperation in removing it would be greatly appreciated.

It would have been a funny little note had it not been so outrageous. For one, a freeway runs directly behind my house. Before I made an ass of myself and started banging on doors demanding that the anonymous note writer step forward, I decided to take a cool-down drive.

I cruised through Detroit trying to get lost in the sunshine and the radio. Then I spotted a tumultuous cloud of black smoke and drove for it like it was the lodestar.

The smoke came from a tumbledown ghetto neighborhood where a white vinyl house was burning savagely, kicking up the acrid plume. A horde of neighborhood people were blocking the street so the firefighters couldn’t gain entrance with their trucks. The engine driver was leaning on his horn, which reminded me of the wailing cries of animals at a slaughterhouse. I thought of my little wind chime.

A mini-riot was about to erupt, with the firemen screaming at a man who had blocked the street with his van. I jumped out of my car and ran toward the crowd.

“What’s going on?” I asked a heavyset woman with her hair in a cloth, showing her my press card.

“That be a crack house,” she said. “We been calling the police every day, but nobody does nothing. That house be wild and we got children living here. So somebody lit the house on fire and nobody on this block wants it put out.”

I told this to the battalion chief, who finally managed to negotiate his rigs through the crowd without incident.

“I can’t say I blame them,” he said. “Sometimes people gotta do for themselves.”

* * *

Strange things had been happening in the fire department. One of the men who worked alongside Walt Harris on the morning of his death was sent to work at Ladder Co. 14, also on the east side of the city.

The guy took the death of Harris especially hard. He had turned to the Bible and was studying to become an ordained minister.

He was reading by lamplight on an early Tuesday morning just after midnight and attempted to create a little mood by lighting some incense and dousing the harsh light of a floor lamp by placing a towel over it.

Then the ladder company received a call for a fire at an abandoned apartment complex.

The sleepy-eyed firefighter jumped into his bunker gear, forgetting to take the towel off the lamp.

It seems that nobody in the crumbling neighborhood saw the flames cascading from the firehouse or cared enough to call it in, even though fire was leaping out high above the window frames. In fact, the fire was discovered by the firefighters themselves as they returned from their call.

Laughably, they could not put out the blaze because they had no engine to pump water from the fire hydrant. As it happens, the city decommissioned the engine at the firehouse in a cost-cutting measure.

* * *

Inspectors came to talk. I eavesdropped on the whole conversation because another guy had called me with a cell phone in his pocket. The Bible-reading firefighter was scared. As much as he probably wanted to leave Detroit, he needed this job.

“Man, I’m telling you, I didn’t have nothing to do with it,” he shrieked.

Crestfallen, he disappeared for the better part of a day, which launched a manhunt of firefighters concerned that he would take his own life.

In the end, the investigation ruled it an electrical fire and not another word was spoken about it.

* * *

Unbelievably, the same thing—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.

People in uniform will tell you that no one life is more important than another. The lives of a white cop, a black fireman, a minister and a drug addict all have equal value. But the presumption is that if a person in uniform is killed with impunity, if such a killer is allowed to run free, then no regular citizen is safe. So for the sake of civil order, when a person in uniform is murdered, heads must get knocked, doors must be kicked in and every available cop is put to the task.

In Harris’s case, the sole detective’s name was Tony Wright. I knew him well. He had been the partner of Mike Carlisle, and I had tailed the two of them a few years earlier when they were hunting down a serial killer. Wright was a good cop, overworked and waiting to retire. I called him from home.

“Tony, what the fuck is going on with Walt’s case?”

“It’s just me,” Wright said. “I’m frustrated. I’d like to solve this case. But I’ve picked up two more cases since this one. Then I’ve got to be in court tomorrow. It just goes on and on and on.”

I called James Tate, the police department mouthpiece. Poor schmuck. He had to make the department’s shit smell decent. He had to tap-dance around the Kilpatrick scandal. He accomplished this by never giving a straight answer.

“We’ve got a few leads on this case,” Tate said, “but if people aren’t talking, they aren’t talking.”

“James, you’ve only got one guy working this case,” I said.

“You’ve got to remember that we’ve got three hundred twenty-five other homicide cases out there.”

“But this is a guy in uniform.”

“It is what it is,” Tate said. “I’m just the talking head here.”

The situation had grown so ridiculous that the firefighters themselves were going door to door trying to develop leads. But the only thing a fireman is going to accomplish by stepping into the middle of a murder investigation is to fuck it up.

So I wrote the story:
HERO GOES FORGOTTEN.

Almost immediately, my boss, Miles, got a call from a deputy chief of police and a junior officer from the homicide squad. They were not pleased with the piece and complained that Wright had not said those things to me. They said I had made them up out of thin air.

Miles said he would have to hear it directly from Wright.

As it happened, Wright was in the room with his commanding officers. They put him up to the speaker phone.

I made a mistake by putting Wright’s name in the paper. His balls were in a sling and I placed them there. I imagined him bookended by the brass, scowling, like he was the suspect of an interrogation. You’d think a grown man would know better. I couldn’t blame the detective for whatever he was about to say.

“Go on, Wright, tell him,” the deputy chief growled.

“I know Charlie,” Wright told my boss. “He’s a good dude. I talked to him the other night and I know he was meaning to do the right thing. I’ll leave it at that.”

Wright could have thrown me under the bus. He didn’t because that’s how real men behave. Now because he acted like a man, he’d probably be walking the beat in some hellhole on the far northwest side.

There are still a lot of good people in this city trying to hold it together with gum and bailing wire. And I believe Wright wanted me to get done what he could not. Newspapers and journalism still mattered to the community in some way. The work could be important for those without a voice. It could help. That’s what Wright was saying by saying almost nothing at all.

* * *

In the meantime, Harris’s partner Mike Nevin was promoted to lieutenant and transferred from Squad 3 to Engine Co. 38, a firehouse located on the tinder-trap east side.

He and his men were out checking fire hydrants on a spring morning when one of the deckies—fire department speak for grunts—found a screen door torn off its hinges at an abandoned house. The deckie threw the door on the back of the rig and the engine drove off, with Nevin in command. It seemed like no big deal. The copper piping in the old house had been scavenged, the meter box, the electrical wiring, even the garage door. Inside the garage was a pile of trash and human excrement. Who would miss the screen door?

Their firehouse didn’t have a screen door and the flies were getting in. Detroit firefighters have been repairing their firehouses like this for decades. Toilets, doors, lumber, bricks. The city never cared. No one ever complained. And it was cheaper than paying for upkeep.

This time, however, a neighbor caught Nevin and his crew on tape. The neighbor sent the tape to a local news station. The news station put its crack reporter on the job. Within days, Nevin and his men were fired for “looting” the city.

Nevin was beside himself. Maybe he should have told the deckie to leave the door be. Maybe he shouldn’t have revealed to investigators that Walt Harris’s alarm didn’t trigger when the roof collapsed on him. Maybe he shouldn’t have called the city leadership an abject and complete failure in my newspaper column. Maybe he shouldn’t have told Rep. Sander Levin to kiss his balls. There was a lot Nevin probably shouldn’t have done. The brass hated him, and the brass had his balls now.

The irony is, Nevin used to have a little screen door business. He knew the thing wasn’t worth twenty bucks.

I went to Nevin’s disciplinary hearing, a meeting open by law to the public. I waited in the foyer of fire headquarters downtown, making notes in my book. There was a glass case containing the photographs of the department’s fifteen ranking executives—all were black and all appointed. The department in total is about half black and half white, and an all-black command staff would be grounds for a discrimination lawsuit in most other cities. But this is metropolitan Detroit. Race is a way of life.

A man in uniform approached me. I recognized him from the glass case: Second Deputy Commissioner James W. Mack Jr.

“May I ask what you are doing here?”

“I’m a reporter covering Lieutenant Nevin’s disciplinary hearing.”

“I know who you are and I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” he said, taking me by the elbow and leading me to the elevators. He smiled like a lizard.

I wrote his name in my tablet.

It was quiet in the elevator. He watched the lighted numbers change. I watched him watch the lighted numbers change. I never took my eyes off him. I was staring directly at the man. Mayors come and go, but it is the footmen who tie the knots and divide the bag. The longtime little men. Bureaucrats. Cockroaches.

The elevator reached the ground floor.

“Here you are.”

“Sir,” I said, “the only reason you have Nevin up there on charges is because he spoke to me and he told the truth. So I promise you one thing. I’m going to go through all the paperwork, all the contracts, and I’m going to find it.”

“What do you suppose you’ll find?” he asked with a face.

“The money,” I said. “I’m going to find out who ruined this department. I’m going to find those screen doors.”

“Good luck with that, sir, and have a nice day.”

* * *

I stepped outside into the doom and the gloom of the Michigan spring and watched steam hiss from the sewer caps. All of downtown Detroit is powered and heated by steam produced from a massive waste incinerator located on the edge of a neighborhood. The whole goddamned downtown running on garbage. A whole neighborhood full of kids choking on the smoke of burning diapers and car batteries.

I stood under the granite cornices of the fire headquarters where a covey of pigeons was huddled against the rain. I roasted up a Winston and thought about things.

It was funny to me at first: the corruption and incompetence and selfishness. But now I was looking at it in a different way: the leadership was ruining people. Or worse, killing them.

Kilpatrick had been taken out. So too had Monica Conyers. But he was only the head of the snake. And she was a dipshit. I couldn’t laugh at it anymore. I was part of it, related to it, stuck in it. I was home and I wasn’t leaving. I couldn’t.

I decided I was going to keep that promise. I was going to find out who was responsible for the outrage of murderers walking free while the city burned night after night. I was going to become a real reporter. Someone had to answer for this shit. The dignified burial of Johnnie Dollar and the demolition of Harris’s death house gave me confidence. The people of Greater Detroit deserved better than to be robbed by their leaders and forgotten by their neighbors.

I threw my cigarette butt into the sewer grate. I looked up into the rain. That’s when a bird shit on my face.