The Algiers Motel Incident

by John Hersey

  10. On Being a Fanatic

  “A lot of times we’d pick up a prostitute coming in, back into the station. That’s what I mean about my crew. We’re fairly unusual. We work almost all the time. My sergeant was a fanatic. He’s such a good officer that you can overlook some of the faults, like going for months and days without eating—you just don’t take lunch. We used to eat in our car; we had a place over on Canfield that we’d get sandwiches, you know, real large sandwiches. Well, when it came time to eat, if we were in the area, we’d swing over there and buy some sandwiches and go back into the productive numbers area and just circle around there looking for numbers as we were eating. We were doing two things at once.

  “We worked nights on blind pigs—days we usually worked eight-, eight-and-a-half-hour days—but nights on blind pigs we used to work from eight at night on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday night all the way to eleven o’clock in the morning. Because we’d get these blind pigs right at the end of the day, right at the end of our evenings, and then we’d have to process all these people, and make reports for court, and then one guy’d be elected to take the person to court, or the people to court, and it would be hectic.

  “Bill and I, one time we were due to get off duty at two o’clock in the morning, and we were drinking in this one bar on Woodward—we also investigate liquor complaints in these bars—so we were drinking in this place, looking for something or other. It was about a quarter of two, we were coming back into the station, and these two prostitutes accosted us, and normally, I know a lot of guys would just pass it up, because it was too close to quitting. But we didn’t. We had no idea of passing it up, and we got two of the best cases we ever got, they just laid everything on the line because we were a little high, and they just let caution to the winds, so to speak, and we took them in, and it turned out we had to work two hours overtime making out the paper on them. We missed our bowling that night; we were supposed to bowl with some people out at an all-night bowling alley. But we did it! When you have dedicated police officers, they work.”

  11. The Teacher

  “I was quite pleased,” he said, “that I had an opportunity to learn from my sergeant. He’s a dedicated man, he’s the most dedicated man in the precinct, or in the city as far as I’m concerned. He’s taken more abuse than any one police officer I can think of, and he’s still a working sergeant.

  “Sergeant De Lavalla’s been on the force for twenty-three years. This man is a fantastic police officer. He’s gotten three departmental citations. (I got two regular citations, and I was supposed to be given four more, when the riots came; naturally they can’t give a person a citation if he’s suspended.) Very few people get departmental citations; very few get one in a lifetime. He’s gotten three of them, and he’s gotten so many just regular citations that I couldn’t even give you a rough estimate.

  “I wish I could tell you some of the stuff Vic was in. He got his stomach slashed from end to end by a queer in his younger days as a police officer. He stands a good chance of dying from hemorrhaging if he gets hit in the stomach. That hasn’t stopped him one bit from being out there. If any one of us gets in trouble, he’s the first guy helping us. Last year he spent a month straight in the hospital because he helped one of my more ignorant partners with a drunk. The guy was in plain clothes and he jumped a drunk before identifying himself. What you’re supposed to do is put your badge in front of the guy’s face, let him see it, identify yourself verbally, and then place him under arrest, and if he fights you, then, that’s it. And this guy jumped his drunk and then said he was a police officer. The first instinct of the drunk was to start fighting. So Vic grabbed him, got him in a bear hug. And he was laid up for a month because of that. He cracked a narcotics ring when he was in the Narcotics Bureau that extended over to Europe. And it was all due to his work. That was one time they gave him a citation; they gave him a citation for the queer; they gave him a citation for going into a burning building.”

  12. How a Girl Gets Started

  “They say society can’t get along without some prostitutes in order to satisfy some people,” he said. “They use the excuse that if there weren’t prostitutes to satisfy these people they’d become sexual degenerates and start attacking children and stuff like this because they couldn’t get their sexual desires appeased. But I don’t think a sexual deviate goes after prostitutes anyway. Because I talked to prostitutes—just talking—and they say there are some people that have really odd sex drives in different ways, and they want them to do unusual things; and most prostitutes will go along with it as long as it doesn’t hurt them, but they say the number of people who do this are very insignificant. Most of the Johns are businessmen from all walks of life that for some reason or other—I mean, their wife is pregnant, or something like that—they feel that working off their anxieties off on a prostitute is a lot better than hurting their wife in some way. There are a lot of reasons they can give you that make you stop and think and say, ‘Well, some aspects you could look at and say, “That’s all right. You know, it has its place.” ’ But then you look at the prostitutes from my angle, and as far as I’m concerned they’re just as bad criminals as rapists and anything else, because they contribute to any crime that you can name.

  “There isn’t a crime that I can think of offhand that you couldn’t involve prostitutes or pimps in some way. Rape. Rape! Just thinking about rape you would say, ‘Well, how could a prostitute or a pimp be connected with that?’

  “But how do most prostitutes start out?

  “You know, you don’t just say, ‘Well I’m going to be a prostitute.’ Because you get women from Grosse Pointe, which is a very wealthy section of town, and they become prostitutes—and why do they become prostitutes? Not because they need money, but they want to please some guy, some pimp. They go to a bar downtown, and they meet this guy. He’s smooth, you know. So she falls in love with him, and pretty soon he doesn’t have enough money for something or other, and she wants to buy him something, and he says, ‘On my bed.’ This is common to him, you know, this is like drinking a cup of coffee in the morning—to know whores and everything. So she says, ‘Well, it may not be that bad.’ So he fixes her up with a real high-class guy—at first—and then he breaks her in, and he’s shacking up with her all the time, so sex isn’t that immoral to her any more as it used to be, and after a while it becomes just a chore. And after they get enrooted in the thing there’s no way of backing out, because the pimp won’t let them back out. They’ve been had, see? They’ve already given their money to him, they’ve already started, and most of the time they love these pimps. It’s hard to believe, because the pimps beat them with clothes hangers. They’ll take a clothes hanger and double it up and beat their backs, see, because the backs don’t matter, the back isn’t going to bring in any money. Johns don’t look at the backs anyway, so they can beat them black and blue. I’ve seen a lot of prostitutes’ll wear a real low-cut dress in the front and high-cut in the back because their backs are all bruised up. And they show us this stuff, they show us where the pimps beat their backs.

  “So it initially starts with a rape. A pimp will rape a woman, and a woman will—well, it’s a rape. A virgin is molested and she doesn’t want to be. She comes from a halfway decent background, a lot of times; but it’s done, see. And then he says, ‘What if we have a kid? You going to turn me in? You going to send me away to jail?’ These people have lives that you wouldn’t believe.

  “This one pimp, he owns a bar, down on Woodward, now, or not Woodward, on Gratiot—this guy started out in our precinct. Little punk, eighteen years old when he started out. Right now he’s twenty, two years from there now, he’s got at least ten girls working on Third Street, black and white, and he’s got girls working in his bar down on Gratiot, in an all-white neighborhood, prostitutes, and he owns this place. And he owns a Cadillac and a ’67 Malibu convertible. And he paid cash for both of them. He’s got his own private attorney that just works for him. Twenty year
s old. And he’s not even a citizen, as far as I know. He wasn’t then. He was a citizen of Canada.

  “Some of the girls that you meet when they first start out are clean, respectable girls, they’re in transit, a lot of them are in transit and they go to Wayne State University. They start going with some shady character who takes them to a couple of bars downtown like the Roxy, they meet these hoods down there, fall in love with one of them, and then it’s only a couple of steps down. It’s like narcotics, when they start out with marijuana and go to smoking opium—it’s so stupid.”

  13. Fostering the Flames

  “How much do you think that prostitution and pimps have to do with race difficulties in general?”

  “I think that if it weren’t for them to foster the flames you wouldn’t have anything.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because any trouble I’ve ever seen that they’ve attributed to racial trouble in the city, like officers in trouble where they’re trying to arrest a person, and he starts screaming, ‘Brutality!’ and the people come outside—they’ve always been due to either prostitution or pandering of some sort. Illicit practice. We have most of our trouble with white Johns coming into the colored neighborhood. Most of the time they’ll look for prostitutes on John R or Brush, and there are certain sections that are predominantly colored, and prostitutes in other sections are white. Just by the corner you can almost pick your kind of person. And I can remember many a time where guys will come into the station, and they’re just beaten to a pulp and cut up. You wouldn’t believe the extent that they’re molested. And it’s due to them cruising these areas for prostitutes, see, not knowing what they’re doing, and either going into a house of prostitution and waiting for their tricks and being molested either by several prostitutes ganging up on a John, or the prostitutes’ pimp, who sizes the man up as being worth taking. And they’ll have prostitutes that’ll have their pimps inside the closet of the room that they take the Johns to. And it’s a rather precarious position once your pants are down and you can’t do a whole lot of struggling. You’re at their mercy. I wouldn’t even venture a guess as to how many Johns get themselves beat up and in trouble and just don’t want to report it.”

  14. The Murphy Game

  “The Murphy game,” he told me, “is a big crime in Detroit.” (Police Commissioner Ray Girardin had described the Murphy game to me: “I think it came from Boston originally”—and he began to talk with an Irish accent—“where the fellow would say, ‘I know a lovely woman, name of Mrs. Murphy, who’s dyin’ to give it to you. Just pay me. She’s waitin’ for you up on the second floor.’ The Murphy man collects. There’s no woman there.” All rolling of Johns by pimps, using their prostitutes as lures, is now loosely called Murphying; so even is stealing by gangs of prostitutes.) “Every weekend without fail,” Senak said to me, “there’s at least one man that come into the Thirteenth full of blood and saying that he was looking for a girl and they jumped him. You’d be surprised how six or seven girls can work over a really tough guy. They could be on the street and do it. In fact they had one instance at Palmer and Brush, where the whores would wait till four or five o’clock in the morning, you know, when there was just barely a few cars on the street, and they’d line up right across the street, ten or fifteen of them, and the guy would be so petrified that he’d slam on his brakes and stay there, and the girls would stay in front of him, because they knew that the guy wouldn’t run them down, the other ones would swarm around his car, open his doors, they went so far as to break the vent windows to open the doors—they’d have hammers with them—beat up the guys, steal their clothes and their wallets, and let them go.”

  15. Trolling Alone

  “I had a prostitute one time,” he told me, “I got a case on her on a Sunday morning as I was coming in to work. I used to go down Chrysler Expressway, and then come down Brush, just to see if there were any prostitutes on the street. Well, this one happened to be a new one to me, and so I made the move then. She was colored, this was a colored neighborhood. I drove by her, and she waved at me, so that I pulled in to the curb. She gave me half a case, she gave me a price as I recall but she wouldn’t tell me what she’d do, she said, ‘We’ll talk about that inside.’ According to procedure I wasn’t supposed to go inside with her because I didn’t have a back-up crew.

  “This turned out to be one of the most notorious houses of prostitution in the precinct. She took me to her room, and she told me what she’d do, and at that time her pimp jumped out at me and knocked me down to the ground. He had no idea I was a policeman; they have more or less of a policy, the pimps do, that is—the prostitutes will fight you, a lot of them are known for fighting—but if the pimps have any idea there’s a police officer around they won’t come anywhere near the area. He thought I was just a John, and it was going to be a Murphy.

  “So he knocked me to the ground, and he started, he kicked me a couple of times, and as he kicked me, my gun fell out. I usually carry it in the back of my trousers without a holster, because a lot of the prostitutes will frisk you before they give a complete act. So the gun fell out, and I grabbed for it, and as soon as he saw the gun he just took off.

  “I got the prostitute on that deal. He ran out the door, and I got the prostitute and ran after him. And a cruiser was coming by, and he ran down the alley, and they caught him later. As I recall, the warrant was denied on that, because they took him for Attempt Robbery Unarmed, and he made no overt act other than an assault, so they kicked the case. This is something that police officers contend with every day. Most judges go on the premise that police officers are paid to risk their lives, and a robbery against you as a citizen isn’t the same in any respect as a robbery against a police officer, because a police officer is supposed to have the means to protect himself, so the judges feel the person shouldn’t have to pay so highly for it.

  “I was reprimanded later by my sergeant for going into the place. We have a policy, only to protect our own men, to have back-up all the time; normally we work in twos or we work in two cars, where one car will back up the other car while we’re trolling, that’s what we call it, ‘trolling for whores.’ The sergeant, he was just concerned with my safety more than anything.”

  16. Nice Couple

  “We used to stop for coffee in this one place on the night shift,” he told me, “and it was about two thirty or so, we were drinking coffee upstairs. I had to go to the bathroom, so I went downstairs, went to the john, I was coming out, and this fellow bumps into me. He says, ‘Hey, I haven’t seen you around here before.’ I said, ‘Well, we just stopped in, I’m with a couple of boy friends of mine upstairs.’ He says, ‘Is there anybody in the men’s lavatory?’ I said, ‘Yeah, there are a couple of people in there,’ He said, ‘Well, let’s go into the women’s lavatory,’ and we were right next to it. I said, ‘Okay.’ So we go inside, and as soon as we were through the door, he backs up against the door and starts pulling down his pants—and gives me a case. And it was kind of funny, because there were a lot of queers upstairs, see, in this one place—it’s known for police officers going there for coffee, it’s centrally located, plus it’s near some queer bars, see, and this was after the bars let out. So I didn’t want the other queers in the place to know I was a copper, because I used to play the bars. So I told this guy that we were going to walk through this area and to keep his mouth shut, and—you know, you’ve got to be forceful with these people, you can’t count on them. So I went through there, and I had him by the arm, you know, like a lot of these queers walk hand in hand, well I was walking into there, so it was perfect; walked right by those queers, and not a one of them—you know, they looked up and they’d say, you know, ‘Nice couple,’ and all that stuff. They had no idea, you know. We did it so well, my sergeant didn’t even know I went by with him! So I ended up waiting with the car for about twenty-five minutes, till he got suspicious from me not coming back for my cup of coffee.”

  17. It’s No Profession

/>   “Queers,” he said “fight a lot more than prostitutes. You can see why, if you look at it. A prostitute earns her living at this trade. If she’s busted, she just takes it in her stride, more or less, most of them, this is generally what happens. But a queer, it’s no profession to him. He could be anything from a ditchdigger to the vice-president of General Motors Corporation—not saying that the vice-president of General Motors is a queer. But there have been very high and well-thought-of people that were convicted, or at least went to court as queers, and on morals charges. So you got a different batch of people, and these people are going to—boy, they’ll do just about anything. You can’t trust them, see. A lot of them are family men, they have a lot of them that are married, and this one guy I got happened to be a fireman. This is another thing, that maybe my crew and my sergeant are different from a lot of police officers in Detroit, maybe, but a lot of police officers felt that because he was a fireman he shouldn’t be convicted or taken to court for accosting. Well, we didn’t think that, you know. I got a case on the guy, and that was it, and that’s the way we feel with prostitutes, you know. Some prostitutes curry favor with a lot of police officers—or not a lot of police officers, but police officers—and you know they figure they should have favors done to them, and we just didn’t feel that way. And this fireman, we took him to court.”