He sued, claiming his dismissal was retaliation for calling department brass a “steaming pile of shit” in the local press and alerting state inspectors to the dangerous levels to which the fire department had sunk.
Nevin won his case, including an award of $5,000 plus back pay, and was ordered returned to duty.
They were celebrating the return of Nevin at the Engine Co. 23 firehouse, so my brother Frankie and I went over to congratulate him ourselves. Frankie brought along a large framed black-and-white photograph he took of the busted toilet inside the firehouse—a gift for Nevin, who nearly broke into song when he unwrapped it.
“That’s the prettiest fucking thing I ever got,” he said. “A picture of a broken fucking toilet in a broken fucking city.”
He was right. It was a pretty picture. An American flag hanging crookedly above the stained commode, a drying mop leaning stiffly against the stall.
It was high art if you actually knew what you were looking at, if you understood the context of where you were standing. If your friend had died and you knew it didn’t have to be and you knew what killed him was incompetence and corruption, you might call that photograph of the busted toilet epic poetry. If you knew that this place was sliding toward the drainpipe, a place that your grandfather built, you’d call it sculpture.
Grandpa Nevin’s old house was just down the block falling in on itself, toasted like a burnt mattress. And the grandson kept trying anyway: running into burning houses, running out with choking children, trying to save what he could of this place, and he couldn’t even keep the flies out of the firehouse because there were no fucking screen doors.
The teapot was burning up on the stove and the town was caving in and his best friend was dead and all Nevin had was this photograph of a toilet with a busted seat and it was the prettiest fucking piece of art he’d ever seen.
“Thanks man, I’m gonna put that right in my living room,” he told Frankie.
Nevin set the photo down near the chow table and disappeared upstairs where the bunks and lockers are. I followed him without his knowing. He went straight to Walt’s old locker, which had been set up like a religious shrine with his photos and funeral card and tools and turnout gear inside.
Nevin held a cheap cigar in his right knuckles and leaned against Walt’s locker door. He rubbed his head where hair used to be. With his left hand he covered his eyes and he cried a little, I think.
* * *
James Mack, the fire official who had led me out of fire headquarters by the elbow a few months before and deposited me into the rain, was now the fire commissioner. I took Nevin’s predicament to be a clear message that anyone who got out of line, anyone who appeared in my column space, anyone who was advocating for a change in the department or the way things worked in Wayne County government generally was on the hit list.
So as promised, I started peeling through fire department paperwork looking for the missing screen door money. I requested under the Freedom of Information Act reams and reams of contracts and inspection reports and cashed checks from the Detroit Building Authority, which oversees city construction projects.
Normally, I don’t write about paperwork, I write about whiskers and sweat. But it was apparent that the city, the regular people who lived in Detroit, was being destroyed—at best by ineptitude and at worst by graft.
A young, bashful receptionist was assigned to sit with me in a windowless conference room as we went through stacks of contracts. The ventilation system seemed to be broken, which gave the room a suffocating, funeral parlor feel.
The records they gave me were shoddy, invoices billed to wrong addresses, and in many cases paperwork was missing. It would have taken a forensic accountant to sort it all out.
But after hours of random reading, I began to see it: $7 million for doorknobs and faucet handles and screen doors that never saw their way to the firehouses. Money just seemed to vanish in the paper shuffle. An emergency addition needed here. A change order there. A little painting gets done. The rest seemingly disappears.
Take the joint police precinct and firehouse on the city’s west side. It began as a $240,000 no-bid contract and ballooned into a $20 million job as far as the paperwork said. Everybody got paid and Detroit did the paying.
The floors in that joint police precinct and firehouse were cracked, the heat didn’t work and water pipes to fill the fire engines were forgotten.
They may not have been the Pentagon Papers and they weren’t going to win me any Pulitzer Prizes, but the contracts offered a clue as to how this city had been bled to near death over the decades.
I made copies of random reports and toured the firehouses, having to knock at the back doors, because firefighters were afraid to be seen with me in public after what happened to Nevin.
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.
* * *
After visiting at least a dozen firehouses, I arranged a meeting with the top fire officials down at headquarters in the old brick building. I was led into a room with a large cartoonish mural of firefighters, a mahogany table as large as the mural, and a hyperactive radiator that was whining like a chained dog. The room was a balmy eighty-five degrees. I removed my tie and rolled up my sleeves.
After a few minutes, in walked Commissioner Mack and two underlings—none of them carried so much as a pencil.
“What specific questions do you have?” Mack asked in a dismissive voice, taking a seat. He noticed my tape recorder and forbade me from taping the meeting. “There’s no need for that, is there now?” he said with a toothy smile.
“No problem, sir,” I said. He did not remember me from the elevator. I showed him some invoices.
Firefighters at Ladder Co. 19 house on Detroit’s east side couldn’t park their fire trucks in the main house because the floor was unsound, even though the city had set aside nearly a half million dollars to repair it.
“Maybe it was a clerical error,” cracked the first underling, insinuating that a clerk simply confused Ladder Co. 19 house for Engine Co. 19 house.
“I thought of that,” I said. “The problem is, there is no Engine Co. 19 house, though that firehouse received a quarter million in renovations too.”
“Lemme see,” she said, snatching for the documents like an opossum at the trash bag. She pawed through the papers a long time before she came up with this: “I don’t know what to tell you.”
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.
“I’ll look into it,” Mack promised without looking at the documents. “Anything else?”
“Yes, there is,” I said chummily, really enjoying the moment. “The Fire Training Academy was awarded $1.5 million for a new training tower. There is no new training tower. The money disappeared.”
The money may not seem like much considering the size of the automobile bailouts, but it was enough to reoutfit the entire depar
tment with bunker gear and breathing apparatus and homing alarms. The second underling, who looked freakishly like his superior, with both the toothy smile and the shorn skull, explained that the tower project was abandoned and the money was reallocated to put a million-dollar roof on another building.
However, there was no paper trail showing a stop-work order on the training tower or what became of the other $600,000, I told him.
“It’s air,” the look-alike underling explained with the smile. “That million was allocated but it’s not there. In the case of canceled jobs, there is no paper trail. I guess you can infer a paper trail. That’s how many things go down here.”
Mack stopped the meeting short. “Make a list of questions, we’ll get back to you,” he said.
I smiled, gathered up my paperwork and headed for the door.
“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.”
Then I turned to Mack, who was escorting me to the door. “You remember me?”
He gave me a once-over. “I can’t say I do, Mr. LeDuff.”
“One thing about me, sir,” I told him. “I keep my promises.”
It was bullshit but it felt good to say it. Because 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. Seemed like nobody gave a shit except the parakeet using the Metro section as a septic field.
TWENTY BUCKS
IT WAS LATE FALL, nearly a year since Harris’s death. Outside the courthouse window, leaves were falling from the trees, whipping in the streets.
Inside the courtroom, Darian Dove sat in the witness chair with his chin buried in his chest and mumbled the events of November 15. They began with a can of gasoline and ended when a roof collapsed on Walt Harris.
At the defendant’s table, Mario Willis sat impassively in a jail-green jumpsuit as Dove recounted how Willis had hired him to burn up the house “a little bit” for an insurance job.
Dove, a worn-at-the-heel handyman, had cut a plea deal. He got a hamburger and seventeen years in prison in exchange for his testimony against his boss Willis.
Willis, whose gold-framed spectacles nicely set off the green prison attire, presented himself to the court as a business sharp and man of God who orbited in the same universe as Mayor Kilpatrick. He maintained his innocence.
Not according to the handyman. According to him, Willis had picked him up around 2:30 A.M. and they stopped at a Gratiot Avenue service station to buy gasoline.
“He paid,” Dove mumbled. “I didn’t have no money.”
From there, they drove to Kirby Street, where Willis waited in his vehicle while Dove went to set fire to the house.
“He called me on my cell phone,” Dove said, so quietly that the judge told him to speak up. “He called me on my cell phone. He said: ‘What’s taking so long?’”
Dove set the fire, then he tried to put it out with his shirt because the boss didn’t want the whole thing burned down in case he wanted to burn it again a couple months later. It was an insurance job, Dove said. He’d set a fire at the same house a few years before, whereupon Willis had collected $20,000. He never made repairs to the house and the city never required him to do so.
But the handyman couldn’t get the flames under control this time by waving a shirt at it. A piece of timber broke loose from the ceiling and struck him on the head, knocking him down.
After collecting his senses, he ran out to the boss’s vehicle and they drove to a gas station where Dove called 911 from a pay phone to report the fire.
Harris’s widow sat impassively in the gallery, leaning into the shoulder of firefighter Jimmy Montgomery while Nevin draped a broad hand across her shoulder.
“He said he was going to buy me a new truck when he got the money,” Dove continued, mumbling into his wiry beard. “He never bought me nothing, though. He gave me twenty bucks is all.”
“How much?” the prosecutor asked.
“Twenty bucks,” he repeated.
The courtroom gasped.
CHEAPER THAN A MOVIE
ARSONISTS DO THEIR best work at night. As do murderers. And so it stands to reason that homicide dicks should work the graveyard shift. But it’s a bad thing to give your number to these types of cops, because they like to ruin your sleep. One evening, homicide detective Sgt. Mike Martel called me while I was curled up on the couch. He said he had a scene I might be interested in. I slid my trousers on and drove to the southwest side.
There was a doctor or something who had his Mercedes-Benz ruined by his brains splattered all over the leather interior.
“Look at it,” the detective said, shining his flashlight on the dead man. He was slumped over the wheel almost like he was leaning to change the radio station. From the passenger side you could see his teeth. All of his teeth. Half his face was gone. Glass stuck to his golf shirt. His shoes were in need of a competent polish.
“Did you bring a camera?” the detective asked.
“No.”
“Too bad. Good picture.” He pulled off the rubber gloves from his large, nail-bitten hands. He slipped them into his suit pocket. It was hot but he still wore a hat. A porkpie with a feather in it. It looked ridiculous but that’s a Detroit murder thing. The homicide cops wear hats. Still, his hat didn’t fit and I never knew Martel to wear one. He must have borrowed it. He was clowning me on the crime set. Murder does that to a man’s mind if he stares into it long enough.
“Shouldn’t try painting the town red in this part of town,” he lectured the corpse, pantomiming pity for the dead man in the expensive car who didn’t really deserve any. “It’s usually your own blood that gets used for paint.”
He turned to me. “You hungry?”
* * *
We sat in a local diner, a rundown joint with walls the color of an old man’s teeth. I watched the detective tear into a chili dog. He weighed 350 pounds and was trying that meat-only diet.
“The whole shit is corrupt from top to bottom,” he said through his mustache and a mouthful of dog. “Cops to judges. The fucking radios in the cars don’t even work. Why you think so many guys are leaving the department?”
And then he launched into the craziest story of true-life murder I’d ever been told.
“You should look into this one, it’s totally fucked.”
In January 2008, a teenage street tough named Deandre Woolfolk made plans to avenge a failed hit on his boss, Darnell Cooley, a reputed drug dealer who was lying in a hospital in a coma.
Woolfolk tried to enlist the help of a neighborhood mope named Perry to be the getaway driver.
Perry declined, insisting he had to work that night. But Perry never went to work. Perry didn’t even have a job. Instead, Perry went to the intersection of Fenkell and Wyoming, where he had been told the hit would take place, to watch. Before Perry arrived, however, the thirty-four-year-old picked up his sixteen-year-old brother and three teenage girls, including fifteen-year-old Martha Barnett.
It was two A.M. on a school night. They went shopping for Slurpees and snack cakes.
“It was cheaper than a movie,” the detective said, launching into his second dog. That’s the same thing Nevin told me about arson, I thought. Cheaper than a movie.
In any event, that evening’s entertainment didn’t turn out to be as cheap as he figured. Perry either forgot or did not know that the intended target of the hit drove a black Jeep—just like his.
And when Woolfolk and his hit squad came careening around the corner, they did not stop at the Jeep to inquire. One opened up with an AK-47. Woolfolk, sitting in the front passenge
r seat, raised a 9 mm pistol, pointed and pulled the trigger.
“What’s going on?” little Martha screamed.
When the smoke cleared, little Martha Barnett was dead with a gunshot wound to the head.
Woolfolk got away for a couple months, until he was swept up in a dope raid on the city’s west side. He was arrested among a cache of weapons and narcotics.
Two days after his arrest, Woolfolk was interrogated by Sergeant Martel. During that taped interrogation, he was read his Miranda rights. And on that tape he admitted that he was in the car when the girl was murdered and that he had indeed tried to shoot but that his gun jammed.
“How can I be responsible for a gun I didn’t fire?” he asked.
The driver and the shooter with the AK-47 were convicted of first-degree murder, but Woolfolk’s lawyer—who was married to a judge—argued that his client had repeatedly asked to speak with a lawyer before he confessed but was denied one by detectives.
The judge believed him and threw out his confession on the grounds that Woolfolk probably had asked for a lawyer since he knew the legal system so well.
With little other evidence, the prosecutor was forced to drop the charges.
Woolfolk walked.
Fast forward six months. Robert Alexander had gone to Arturo’s Jazz Club in Southfield, a suburb of Detroit, to celebrate his thirty-third birthday. He went with a group of guys from the barbershop and their girlfriends. Among them was his best friend, Anthony Alls.
Also there was Woolfolk, along with kingpin Darnell Cooley, who had gotten over his coma and was feeling better.
The evening began as a good one. Champagne was flowing, the music was sweet. Then someone from Woolfolk’s table spoiled the evening by fondling one of the women at Alexander’s table. Alexander, a large man weighing more than 250 pounds, went over to straighten it out.
When police arrived, they found Alexander lying amid upset tables, a broken bottle and his own blood. He was faceup, unconscious and gasping for air. Then he died.
Detroit: An American Autopsy Page 16
