Detroit: An American Autopsy

by Charlie Leduff

  “Kilpatrick. Bing. Whatever. Nothing’s fucking changed,” growled Martel, squeezing the life out of his lemonade glass. He looked over his shoulder, on the lookout for anybody from the homicide squad who might rat him out for talking to a reporter. Seeing nobody, he drank the glass whole.

  * * *

  I went to visit Dr. Schmidt, the medical examiner. Every murder victim has to funnel through the morgue, and so I knew I could get a true and accurate count there.

  I was shown to the examination room. The cooler was stacked to the ceiling with cadavers in vinyl zip body bags, and a tractor-trailer refrigerator truck in the parking lot handled the overflow. It reeked of spoiled cherries. The floors were sticky.

  “What’s that all about?” I asked Dr. Schmidt, the poetical man of death, as he came into the room with a quick shuffling step, his hand extended.

  “That is a sign of how bad things have gotten,” he said matter-of-factly. “It’s the economy. Some people really have to make a choice of putting food on the table or burying their loved ones. It is very sad, really. In all of my years here, I have never seen it this bad.”

  The people of Wayne County now couldn’t afford to bury their loved ones. More than 250 sat unclaimed. The doctor pointed out the saddest case—the cadaver of an elderly man that had been here for two years, shuffled to the bottom of the pile as his kinfolk waited for a ship to come in.

  “You might say this is a fairly decent barometer of where we are as a society,” the good doctor said with a shrug.

  Poor Grandpa. I put it in my notebook. His predicament wasn’t good news, but it smelled like front-page news.

  And then the doctor handed me a spreadsheet with more front-page news than I was 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.

  * * *

  I was fishing up in the lake country when I got the phone call. The police high command on the line.

  “The deputy chief would like to see you in the morning,” the woman said. “Are you available?”

  I said that I was. It was my vacation but it was rare to get an audience with the police. The Kilpatrick scandal had the department on a lockdown.

  The real press knew that the department solved about one quarter of its cases—a national disgrace—and reporters were kept at arm’s length.

  After months of being stonewalled, I threatened to sue the department if they did not open their homicide ledger to me. With no legal basis to deny me the records, the brass had finally called me in for the meeting.

  I finished my beer, walked buck naked up the hill, kissed my wife and daughter, got dressed and drove back to the city for the meeting.

  * * *

  Among those in attendance were the two men who had put Detective Wright up to the phone with my boss, pressuring him to recant his statement that he was the only detective assigned to the murder of the firefighter Walt Harris.

  The deputy police chief sat behind a metallic desk, imperious, heavily muscled beneath a starched dress shirt. There was a window to his right, the blinds drawn to keep the sight of Detroit where it belonged. Outside. The deputy chief squinted anyway.

  The lieutenant from the homicide bureau stood off to his side, like a court servant, dressed in an ill-fitting suit that looked as though it belonged on a ventriloquist’s doll. His skull was neatly shaved and framed by dark-rimmed spectacles. The lieutenant, despite his rank, had never worked a homicide case in his career.

  The deputy chief, for his part, was a political creature, a man who had rapidly scaled the ranks of the department through hard work, a good measure of competence and the uncanny ability to make himself scarce when the shit hit the fan.

  The deputy chief had a good shot of making chief one day if he could avoid scandal sticking to him. Not an easy proposition in the Detroit PD.

  To him, I represented just another steaming pile positioned between him and the top job.

  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.”

  “Now, I’m just a redneck who went to public school,” I said, flipping through a folder full of spreadsheets. “But according to my math that leaves another four dozen bodies unaccounted for.”

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

  In Detroit police thinking, some homicides just weren’t homicides and so they were “backed out,” or not counted.

  “You see, Charlie, there’s homicide and there’s murder,” the deputy chief explained patiently. “Now, when the medical examiner still says it’s a homicide and we go on about our investigation and in the course of our investigation we present documents to the prosecutor’s office, they can say it’s self-defense. It’s ruled medically a homicide. But in the eyes of the prosecutor’s office, they will not charge anybody with this. So it’s not a murder.”

  “Like for instance?” I asked.

  “Well, let’s see,” he counted. “There were ten police killings, so those don’t count.”

  He was right about that. The FBI allows killings by police to be backed out of the murder count. Still, it was a shocking number. That made the Detroit Police Department the deadliest in America. No one had reported this, despite the fact that the department was supposed to be operating under federal supervision for, among other things, the overuse of lethal force.

  “And okay, okay, here you go,” the deputy chief continued, stabbing his finger at the spreadsheet, certain that he had found a convincing case in his revolver of reason.

  “Two brothers were drinking. They got in an argument. One pulled out a knife. So the brother pulled out a knife and killed his brother. I mean, what would you call that?”

  “Me?” I said, looking around the room at the assembled brass. “Me? I’d call that a murder.”

  “I call that insufficient evidence,” he said with a straight face.

  I understood. 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. For example, a man named Antonio Bailey suffered a fatal gunshot wound to the head. The medical examiner ruled it a homicide; the police called it suicide. A man named Roland Jordan was found near the highway, beaten to death, the medical examiner said. The police ruled it an accident.

  Were the cops systematically undercounting murders? And if detectives were having trouble closing cases, then how many murderers were walking the streets of the Murder Capital?

  * * *

  Walt Harris, the firefighter who died in the arson, was homicide victim no. 288 on the police murder list. Seeing his name, I reached out to an investigator. After I had embarrassed the department with a front-page story about no one looking into Harris’s death, a major squad was put together to hunt for his killer. The investigator told me to meet him at a bar on Grand River. It was a scene out of a Chandler novel. The cop was dressed in a trench coat and porkpie hat even though it was the middle of summer. He drank whiskey neat and a beer chaser even though it was the middle of the morning.

  “So your guy, Harris,” he said, looking at his shoes. “We got the killer.”

  “Yeah,” I said too loudly. “Who? When?”

  “A guy named Darian Dove. A lowlife. Kind of slow. Does odd jobs, that sort of thing. He admits he was paid to torch the house. Says he watched it burn from a nearby gas station. Says the owner, who promised him a new truck, was standing there with him.”

  “No shit? How’d you find him?”

  “Traced the owner’s cell phone records to him. Turns out Dove dialed 911. He didn’t do it out of decency but
because the owner didn’t want to burn the house too much, just enough for some insurance dough. The guy’s pissed off the owner never gave him the truck.”

  “That’s great news,” I said, ordering a congratulatory beer. “I’ll get it in the paper tonight.”

  “No, no you don’t,” the cop said, grabbing my forearm. “There’s a little problem.”

  “Oh, no. What?”

  “I don’t think we got him Miranda’d right. We’re working on it, so just keep it out of the papers or you’ll fuck it up. I’ll let you know when.”

  I was ready to publish the body-count story when the lieutenant called, like some kind of soothsayer.

  “I thought we had an understanding, Charlie,” he pleaded. “If it’s not a technically charged murder, how is it a homicide?”

  “How do you change a homicide into a suicide, is what I want to know.”

  “Fine,” he said, hissing like an air hose.

  He hung up the phone knowing how it was going to turn out.

  The murder story appeared on the front page the next morning with a very safe headline: DETROIT POLICE ROUTINELY UNDERREPORT HOMICIDES.

  My work voice mail was full of hate.

  Beep: “White men like you, Charlie, sowing discontent, Charlie. I bet you’re feeling real comfortable in that little castle you built, Charlie. Well, we coming from the neighborhoods and we gonna burn your castle down, white man. It’s gonna be a long, hot summer, Charlie. Watch your ass.”

  Beep: “What do you expect from niggers? Everything they touch goes to shit. Want to solve the murder problem? Send them back to Africa.”

  And so forth.

  As I was mulling over these friendly salutations, a man who had read my story called me to complain that he was a witness to a murder five years prior and now wanted to come forward, but the police wouldn’t give him the time of day.

  I called the lieutenant from homicide.

  “Oh yeah?” His voice was dripping with contempt. “Have him call me,” he said tersely and hung up.

  I called the mayor’s office for the follow-up story. It’s an old newspaper trick. You drop a front-page article. The town gets embarrassed. The mayor promises action. A ribbon is cut and it goes back to business as usual.

  But this is Detroit. When I called Mayor Bing’s press office, they inexplicably declined comment and told me to call the police. So I called the police.

  “We stand by the number, 339,” said the new department spokesman. “We’re saying that it’s not a homicide when two people stab each other and further investigation shows a man was defending himself. So it was a homicide? Who says that?”

  “The FBI,” I answered.

  “Who says the FBI decides?” he snapped. “The bottom line is, if we say it’s justifiable, it’s not a homicide. More power to the FBI.”

  I put it in my copy, pressed “send” and walked out to my car, shaking my head.

  When I got to my car, I stopped laughing. Somebody had slashed my tire. It could have been random. Probably was. But this was an old Checker taxicab, the big curvy kind you see in old New York movies. It’s noticeable in a town where cars don’t last five years. I changed the tire and drove home to my nice house in the ’burbs, thinking things were getting out of hand: death threats and racial venom and now a shiv in my tire.

  I was going to have to change cars.

  * * *

  The following morning, a woman who had read my follow-up story called to tell me that the man who said he had witnessed a homicide years before was, in fact, a suspect in the murder of her husband.

  She claimed he had been released from jail because the witness in that case had mysteriously turned up dead.

  I went to the clipping files to see if her story was true. It was.

  I laughed to myself. Only in Detroit would a murder suspect call to report a murder suspect and the chief of the homicide squad refuse to take his number.

  * * *

  Soon after, Police Chief James Barren was notified by Mayor Bing that he was fired.

  Barren was replaced by Warren Evans, the Wayne County sheriff, who got together with the prosecutor and settled on a revised 2008 murder tally of 375. Baltimore could rejoice. Detroit was once again the Murder Capital.

  Evans was a lean, precise, well-groomed dictator. Raised in the Shrine of the Black Madonna, he had a deep and abiding affection for the city of Detroit and believed the city was more important in the American black experience than Harlem itself.

  Having said that, Evans knew the city was crumbling and its people fleeing to the suburbs because of marauding criminals who terrorized the citizens. Evans promised to clean up Dodge by doing “whatever it takes”—which meant both busting heads and walking over union rules.

  Evans was probably the most competent appointment Bing made in his first term as mayor. And it was an appointment that would come to an appalling and ridiculous end.

  As for Barren, the bad news kept coming. The afternoon he was cleaning out his desk, someone was cleaning out his house. It was the third time his home had been burgled. On this occasion, the thieves took a computer, a television set, jewelry and watches.

  “That’s part of living in Detroit,” Barren explained to me when I reached him by phone. “Police resources are sliced to the bone.”

  No truer words were ever spoken, but citizens were left to wonder why the police department—a week later—assigned four squad cars to escort two hearses to the cemetery.

  There weren’t human cadavers in the back of the hearses but rather stuffed animals left at the Motown Historical Museum by adoring fans in memory of the late pop star Michael Jackson, who had died of a drug overdose.

  There may have been 250 unclaimed dead people at the county morgue, but at least the toys were safe and got a proper burial.

  The stuffed animals were laid to rest at Woodlawn Cemetery, near the mausoleum of civil rights icon Rosa Parks.

  YOU BETTER GET MY LOOT

  THE POLICE CHIEF wasn’t the only politico packing his belongings. With the key players in the billion-dollar sludge contract cutting deals and pleading guilty to bribery, the strain was showing on Monica Conyers like a cheap cocktail dress. Judging by her erratic behavior, it was just a matter of time.

  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 that, I thought I would never see her again, except in court. But a few days later, with the hounds of justice barking at her heels, Conyers inexplicably consented to do a cooking show with Joel Kurth, the city hall editor for the News—with me working as producer.

  Barroom brawls. Groping my testicles. A cooking show before being sent to the federal penitentiary. I don’t know why she kept doing what she did. Maybe she was nuts. Maybe she was lonely. Maybe there was a master plan rattling around in her brain that I just couldn’t wrap my head around. It hardly mattered. Monica Conyers may have been bad for the
people of Detroit City, but she was great copy for readers of the Detroit News.

  The conceit of the cooking show would be to interview Monica while she prepared fried chicken and sweet potato fries in the kitchen of a bar, all the while lying sweetly about her corruption and fraud.

  Appropriately enough, it was held downtown in the Eastern Market at a joint called Butchers. The meal was easily five thousand calories, complete with homemade cookies and ice cream smothered in chocolate sauce. Conyers downed it all with a diet iced tea.

  After the filming, I was having a silent cigarette with her out back of the restaurant, near the cobblestone street. It was late June, the flies were buzzing around the grease trap. Monica appeared not to notice them. She was quiet and distracted. Sensing an opportunity, I dialed her number. Her phone rang. She looked at me.

  “Teresa my ass,” I said. “Monica, I’ve never stalked you. Why won’t you answer my calls?”

  “It’s a scary time for me, you know?” She looked pale and drawn. A frightened little girl. I almost felt bad for her.

  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.

  “Don’t be telling me to do shit. I ain’t no little bitch.”

  Conyers, the wife of the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit bribery. The citizens were stuck paying the tab for her court-appointed lawyer.

  BURNT FINGERS

  NEVIN WAS FIRED from the fire department for the garbage-picked screen door: charged with dereliction of duty, failure to supervise and conduct detrimental to the department. The men who actually took the door returned to work.