Detroit: An American Autopsy (6 page)

He must have torched the shop for the thrill of it, because he took nothing. The senselessness of it left my mother stunned. Why destroy for no purpose? Why burn down a building, a neighborhood, a city? She boarded up the back and stayed awhile longer until someone threw a brick through the window. She replaced it. A week later someone threw another brick through the window. Unable to get her mind around it, unwilling to try anymore, my mother turned her back on Detroit and moved her shop to the quaint, manicured and well-policed streets of Grosse Pointe Park.

I went back to the flower shop not too long ago. It was gone. Nothing but a heap of bricks and plaster. Kicking through the rubble, I found a few billing invoices with Ma’s handwriting. When I gave them to her, she stared at them numbly. And then she wept.

* * *

A few days later, I was back at the firehouse, back on the back of the truck. Nevin wanted to make a point clear to me: “The people in Detroit are poor, but most of them are good. 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.”

He told me about the rationing of firefighters, the fact that 20 percent of the fire companies are closed down at any one time due to the lack of money in the city coffers. The fact that they must purchase their own toilet paper and cleaning supplies. The fact that they are forced to wear aging bunker gear coated in carbon. The city even removed the firehouse’s brass poles some time ago and sold them to the highest bidder.

When you ask him to think on a grand scale, he says the problem is much bigger than city hall.

“I guess when you get down to it, it’s simple,” Nevin says. “The man took his factory away, but he didn’t take the people with him.”

Dinner was served, and Harris, the minister, led the men in prayer as he always did. Then they regaled me with stories, including one about an unlucky man they removed from an electric power line, dangling there like a human piñata. He’d tried to cut down the live wire and sell it for its copper.

Even the firehouses themselves were not untouched by thieves. Recently the men here cooked a supper of steak and potatoes, but a call came over the box before they could eat it. When they returned, they found that their dinner had been stolen, right down to the green beans. The canned beans and coffee creamer were gone from the larder, and so was a pickup truck belonging to one of the men.

A few days earlier I watched as a deranged woman set fire to an abandoned house. As the firefighters worked to put out the blaze, the woman crawled into the fire truck and tried to drive away. The firefighters radioed police dispatch.

The response came: “No cruiser available.”

They covered her in a coat and sat on her until two arson investigators came and took care of her.

We hadn’t finished our supper when the Rube Goldberg alarm sounded again. And again, the men jumped into their bunker gear and into the rigs.

The fire was a few blocks away. The house was empty and unoccupied, the last one left on the block. There was a tractor in the vacant lot across the street. One of the firefighters explained to me that a farmer had turned the tumbledown neighborhood into a hay field. There were large cut piles of it everywhere among the tall grass.

As the firefighters were unrolling their hose, a group of four men arrived in a minivan with video and still cameras. They had gotten to the fire before some of the engine trucks and they wore jackets with patches from fire departments all across the country, which led me to believe they were from headquarters or the union hall. One guy was eating a candy bar.

“You firemen?” I asked with my notebook out.

“Something like that,” one guy answered creepily.

I asked Walt Harris, the minister, who they were.

Harris looked over at the tall hay on the next block, at the older black people standing on their porches in their bathrobes. Harris looked at the white men wannabes and their fire patches.

“They probably set the fire since they got here before us,” he said. “They come, they take a motel and they drive around with a scanner waiting for a fire to go off,” Harris explained to me. “It breaks your heart. What’s happening here, it breaks your heart. Every one of these guys here will tell you that he’ll give you everything he’s got to help the people of this city. He’ll give his life if he has to. It breaks your heart.”

I looked at the douche bags with their cameras and their New Jersey fire department patches. They needed their asses beat down. Where were the police? Where was anybody?

M
ONGO

T
HE WAY
I
saw it, I had mailed Kilpatrick a great big valentine with the dead stripper Strawberry story. With daily revelations about women and pay-to-play schemes within his administration, it was the closest thing to good press the man was going to get.

Now it was time for payback. Kilpatrick owed me lunch and an interview at the very least, and I called his people to say so.

But he was hiding in his badger hole and he wasn’t about to come out, I was informed.

“What’s in it for him?” asked his spokesman, James Canning, over coffee in the eastern wing of City Hall. We were sitting in a window across the street from the Renaissance Center, the world headquarters of General Motors. It was a workday morning, but the buildings and the streets below were empty. My eyes went from a panhandler and settled on Canning, a young white man who had the unenviable task of standing before the news cameras and lying that it was business as usual for Mayor Kilpatrick who was hard at work saving the city.

“What’s in it for him?” I echoed back, summoning my best big-city big-shot-reporter indignation that I’d honed for a decade at the
Times
. “I’ll tell you what’s in it for him. If he
doesn’t
give me an interview, I’ll kick his ass every day up and down Woodward. That’s what’s in it for him.”

Canning looked sour, like I’d just pissed in his coffee cup.

“Where’d you come from?” he asked. “New York, right?”

“Yeah. New York.”

He nodded, then scribbled a name and number on a busi-ness card. “Here, call the reverend. He can speak on the mayor’s behalf.”

I looked at the card:
Rev. Horace Sheffield
. I put the card in my pocket.

“And lunch?”

“I’ll ask.”

“Tell him I’ll pay.”

* * *

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. When I later called him, he complained to me that his cell phone had been shut off and he was in danger of missing his mortgage payment.

His center was drab and ill lighted and as I walked in toward the reception desk, I stopped and looked at the classroom where a half dozen kids were slouched in chairs, doodling or groping one another. According to the signage, this was the life skills program for at-risk youth, ostensibly where that money from city hall went.

I signed in at the desk.

“The reverend is on a telephone conference,” the attendant told me, and I took a long, cold seat.

I studied the civil rights photographs on the wall—the well-dressed black men at the union rallies and dinner banquets—and I realized how little I knew about the history of Detroit, its race and labor record, the rough-and-tumble machinations of Detroit black—and for that matter, white—power. I was wearing a tie, but I had neglected to shave and I noticed a small hole in the knee of my blue jeans.

I really had no specific questions for Sheffield, because I knew nothing insightful to ask. I simply wanted to stare big-city politics in the face, study the knickknacks and doodles on its desk.

Then power walked in the door: a short, stocky, smooth-skulled black man wearing a full-length leather trench coat accompanied by a tall, large, well-dressed sidekick. I had them pegged for members of the Nation of Islam.

The bald man in the trench coat gave his name to the receptionist: Adolph Mongo.

I may not have known much around town, but I knew
that
name. Adolph Mongo. You couldn’t avoid it in Detroit. Mongo’s technical title was consultant. But he had other names: the political hit man, bomb thrower, assassin. These were titles of prestige.

Mongo cut his teeth in the Coleman Young administration in the early eighties, working as a deputy director of communications. A former marine and itinerant newspaperman, Mongo came from a family that was powerful in the black underworld of Detroit’s heyday. According to him and his brothers, Mongo’s uncle was a bootlegger and numbers runner, his great-auntie the madam of a brothel. Mongo’s dead older brother moved heroin and cocaine. So naturally when Young took control of the city, the Mongo clan insinuated itself into a place at the table.

Mongo’s older brother Larry became something of a consigliere to Young, and so when Adolph came knocking, Young put him to work, and his experience in the Young machine taught him that Detroit politics was an insular and imperious world.

Once, Robert Mugabe, the African revolutionary who would later become president of Zimbabwe, came to Detroit to receive the keys to the city. Mayor Young made him wait an inordinately long time for an audience.

Mongo remembers it this way: an underling stepped into Young’s office and said, “Sir, you’ve got Robert Mugabe, the freedom fighter, sitting out there.”

To which Young replied: “Fuck Robert Mugabe. This is Detroit.”

Detroit indeed. We once gave the key to the city to Saddam Hussein. And never took it back.

Watching a retinue of Young sycophants take the plunge into prison, Mongo decided to strike out on his own. “It was crooked even then,” he would tell me later. “I wasn’t willing to do what they asked. I wasn’t willing to risk my freedom for a two-thousand-dollar suit.”

Still, he was connected, and so Mongo became a political consultant. You could hire him to strategize for you—or you could pay him to keep his mouth shut or he would hammer you mercilessly. Mongo knew where the back doors were.

Mongo had beat on Kilpatrick in the lead-up to his reelection campaign, making the local television and radio circuit calling Kilpatrick a pansy and a mama’s boy. Instead of fighting him, Kilpatrick simply hired Mongo for $200,000—proving to many that he was indeed a pansy and a mama’s boy.

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.

Black politicians pretended he didn’t work for them. White politicians suffered the same amnesia. But they sought his advice and they drank with him during the off years of the election cycle. I couldn’t have cared less. He was what politics really were around here. It was my job to know him.

“Adolph Mongo?” I said, standing up and offering my hand. “Charlie LeDuff, the
Detroit News
. I’ve been meaning to meet you.”

He gave me the eye. “Goddamn motherfucker. Dressed like that? I thought you was a junkie or some shit.”

He shook my hand, introduced the large, well-dressed man as his younger brother Skip and took a seat next to me.

“You that motherfucker that wrote that stripper story,” he said. “Good fucking story. I try to tell the mayor, he’s got to work the media better. He can beat this thing if he looks like he’s in charge. But he ain’t listening. He’s a talented guy. But he’s ignorant. Politically ignorant. Ignorant of history. He don’t read. You know he doesn’t have a book in his office? Not a fucking book in the shelves. Ain’t that some shit?”

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.”

I went along.

Sheffield sat imperiously behind his desk, a man in excess of three hundred pounds. He was a large presence in the community. Besides his social work, he preached on the east side of town and did a lot for the people, often pulling money from his own pocket to pay for funerals. He was another who talked the race game—despite the fact that his father was black and his mother was white. In Detroit, we all talked the race game. It is a way of life.

As we walked in the door, he looked at Mongo and then at me.

“I invited him,” Mongo said. “He’s all right.” I took a seat in the back. Sheffield was planning a run against Rep. John Conyers—the aging, barnacle-like fixture in the U.S. Congress. Conyers had served more than twenty terms in the House and had presided over the collapse of his district—including Highland Park—where he did not even bother to keep an office.

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.

Conyers was weak. If only someone with connections to the churches would man up and run against him, he could be taken out.

Sheffield was smart, I could see that. He viewed the chessboard and was almost convinced he was the man to put Conyers king down, and he hired Mongo to do his groundwork.

Conyers’s district was gerrymandered into a strange racial stocking that also included some working-class white communities.

“The rednecks would vote for a fucking pink donkey before they’d vote Conyers,” Mongo said. “You’re black, but Conyers is the face of everything they hate.”

But Sheffield was getting pressure from D.C.: Charles Rangel, the longtime congressman from Harlem, had called that very morning and asked Sheffield to bow out, and Sheffield, a product of the political machine, was considering it.

“I have to think about it, Adolph. There’s a lot to consider here. I’ve got a lot to lose.”

“Oh goddamn, Horace, you ask me to do this shit and then you act like an old white woman. You think about it then,” he said with exasperation. “Call me when you decide.”

Mongo and his brother left. I decided to leave with them.

Mongo turned to me at the door, near the room where the students were now sleeping with their heads on the tables. “Did you learn anything?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “He seemed pretty worried about an opportunity that seemed there for the taking.”

“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.”

“And what about the reverend back there?” I asked, pointing to Sheffield.

“Fuck it,” Mongo said, shaking his head at a lost opportunity.