Once in a Great City

by David Maraniss

  The link between the Party Bus and football players began in the drowsy early Saturday morning darkness of the previous August 18, when officers from the Criminal Investigations Bureau entered another hangout, the Grecian Gardens on Monroe Street in Greektown, only one block south of police headquarters. Inside they happened to see Wayne Walker, a Lions linebacker, sitting with the Giacalone brothers at a table in the back. Also visible was Jimmy Butsicaris, Alex Karras’s pal who had brought him into part ownership of the Lindell Cocktail Bar. The officers had entered the restaurant based on a complaint of illegal liquor sales, but now they had something more to interest them, so they left and staked out the scene from their car. The Grecian Gardens, as it happened, was a familiar Lions lair, much like the Lindell. The players often held what they called Loyalty Parties there, a night of male bonding, team building, and prodigious drinking without management, coaches, and wives. But this was not the cleanest crowd for Walker to be seen with, not with Tony Jack and Billy Jack at the table and so many other underworld characters connected to the place. The bar operator, Gus Colacasides, considered the kingpin of Greektown gambling, kept secret black books of gamblers and bribable lawmen. The building was owned by the widow of the late Pete Corrado, known as “the Enforcer” during his heyday in the rum-running Prohibition era, when the Detroit River, with Canadian booze on the other side, swarmed with smugglers. Two modern-day enforcers, Sammy Giordano and Pete Vitale, worked at the Gardens now, and a Corrado son, Anthony, provided muscle for the Giacalones.

  The police officers watched the mobsters and Walker leave from the back door and part ways. They saw the Giacalones and barkeep Butsicaris board the Party Bus along with Odus Tincher and Anthony Thomas. The cops knew Thomas, who possessed a string of convictions and the nickname Screechy. He was on the mob chart they kept at the precinct office and looked the part, dressed in black shirt and white tie, driving a big red Cadillac. One of the Detroit Police Department rookies, David Wright, who worked Woodward Avenue up near Wayne State, had recently stopped Thomas in his Caddy and was standing outside his car when another sedan pulled up snug to his side and trapped him between the two vehicles. “This nice young officer here was not going to give me a ticket,” Screechy scratched, which precipitated an exchange of fuck-you pleasantries before Wright walked back to his squad car with his hand on his gun. Now the vice officers were tailing Screechy, Tony Jack, Billy Jack, and their pals on the Party Bus for 170 miles to Cleveland, where the Lions were playing a preseason game later that day against the Dallas Cowboys, part of an unusual NFL doubleheader, with the hometown Browns hosting the Pittsburgh Steelers in the second matchup. After the game, the mobsters returned to the Party Bus, but this time the surveillance crew noticed Alex Karras and a teammate climbing aboard for the three-hour ride back to Detroit. The most prominent Lion was in the mob’s rolling den.

  On Monday, at his office at 1300 Beaubien, George Clifton Edwards Jr., the police commissioner, received an oral report on the weekend episode from John O’Neill, one of his trusted lieutenants. Edwards, the son of a civil liberties lawyer from Dallas and educated at Southern Methodist and Harvard, was now forty-seven, lean and bespectacled, with the Wilsonian look of a Presbyterian minister or college president. He had arrived in Detroit in 1936 with fifty dollars, his life’s possessions in a single suitcase, and his hopes resting in the dream that he could write a novel on the industrial urban condition, a Detroit auto plant variation of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s turn-of-the-century muckraking novel on the meatpacking industry in Chicago. After landing a job at an auto plant, he was tutored in the rough-and-tumble of the Detroit labor movement by the Reuther brothers of the UAW and rose through city politics and law to the bench and then the police commissioner’s job, far to the left of the force he was asked to lead but no one’s patsy. When the Free Press broke the story that he was taking the job, the article called him “a liberal with a capital L.” Along with advancing civil rights in the city and attempting to weed out corruption on the force, he had made gambling and the mob a priority since taking the top cop job the previous January. His distaste for the Detroit underworld went back to his earliest days with Walter Reuther, when the unsavory connections between legal and illicit power centers in the city emerged in the most harrowing way.

  Late on an April night in 1938, Edwards and his wife, Peg, were at Reuther’s apartment at 13233 LaSalle, along with six other couples invited to an intimate birthday party for Victor Reuther’s wife, Sophie. They had ordered chop suey dinners from a nearby Chinese restaurant, and when the doorbell rang, Walter quickly opened the door, expecting the delivery man. Instead two thugs bulled their way in, brandishing revolvers. While one intruder held the guests at bay with his gun (“Stay back or I’ll plug you!” he said), the other went after “the redheaded guy” with a blackjack, and when Walter Reuther pried that away, he and the assailant struggled over a floor lamp. Edwards told the gunmen that if they shot Walter they would have to shoot them all. The men fled after one guest escaped out a back window and called the police. Not long after, the two thugs were caught; it turned out that one had mob connections, going back to a four-month sentence for bootlegging in the twenties, and had until two weeks earlier worked as an investigator for Ford Motor Company. Was it merely coincidence that at the time of the home invasion Walter Reuther was preparing to testify at the trial of six Ford goons who had attacked him and his labor comrades a year earlier in the battle of the overpass at the Rouge plant? Not likely. Yet when the assailants, Eddie Percelli and Bud Holt, were put on trial, they came up with the novel defense that Reuther had hired them to stage the incident and then double-crossed them. The jury bought their story and found them innocent. In the courtroom after he was cleared, Bud Holt, who had charmed the jury, was surrounded by six women jurors eager to shake his hand.

  Edwards had been in Detroit less than two years then, but from that moment on he never looked at the place the same way again. “I never wrote the novel,” he once explained. “But I think perhaps I lived it.” By the time he took over the Detroit Police Department he carried with him a dark understanding of the many ways the mob moved in the city. He kept a three-ring notebook in his office titled MAFIA: Members-Relatives, Associates-Suspects. It listed and described every thug suspected of being in the Detroit mob, sometimes called the partnership or the outfit. He wanted his men to follow leads wherever they went. He had pushed for the raid on the Gotham Hotel in November as a means of cutting into organized crime’s numbers treasury and concluded that the publicity resulting from that raid had a dampening effect on gambling across the city. The more sunlight, the more publicity, the better, he thought, as long as it was based on solid legwork. Sometimes publicity was his best weapon, and easier than prosecution. But the connection to the Lions was worrisome. He enjoyed football. He was not looking to bust the athletes, but it infuriated him that “the crumbs of the underworld would try to force themselves on Lions players.”

  The day after receiving the report, Edwards dispatched O’Neill and another aide to the suburbs to meet with George Wilson, the Lions coach. At the Fox & Hounds, an old English Tudor restaurant on Woodward Avenue out near the team’s training camp at the Cranbrook Schools in Bloomfield Hills, O’Neill detailed to the coach what they knew about Karras and the Party Bus and the downtown bars and mobsters. No big deal, Wilson essentially responded. His boys were responsible and popular and dealt with all sorts of people and would not get involved in gambling.

  Over the fall and early winter, as the 1962 season played out with the Lions finishing 12 and 3, second in the Western Division to the Packers, several lines of investigation converged. Word spread that the office of NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle was probing various reports of other players on other teams associating with gamblers. In late December, Edwards passed along the information his inspectors had gathered to the principal owner of the Lions, William Clay Ford, a grandson of Henry Ford and younger brother of the Deuce, and then sent a repor
t to Rozelle. Along with information about the Party Bus and the Grecian Gardens, Edwards informed the NFL that Karras had become a part owner of the Lindell Cocktail Bar, which did not seem as mobbed as the Gardens but had some connections to gamblers and prostitution. The FBI, meanwhile, was conducting a separate investigation of Detroit mobsters, whose telephones they had been tapping for more than a year. Everything popped into the open again in early January, when the Lions traveled to Miami to play the Steelers in the Playoff Bowl, a dreary postseason game involving the second-place finisher in each division.

  On the day before the game, Rozelle met with reporters in nearby Hollywood Beach. The big news from this session was the commissioner’s declaration that some players had been “associating with undesirable types.” His investigators, mostly former FBI agents, had been following scores of leads. So far, Rozelle said, there was “smoke but no fire” in terms of proving anything beyond imprudent associations by the players, but there was reason for concern. The first publicized leads were to Chicago. “Bears Fullback Reveals Lie Tests in ‘Fix’ Quiz,” ran a banner headline. The fullback in question, Rick Casares, said that he had taken and passed two lie detector tests administered by the NFL to determine if he had shaved points for gamblers in any games. The concerns arose because Casares was seen with an underworld bookie, Zaza Yitkavitz, and he and other Bears were known to frequent two nightclubs connected to Chicago’s mob, a strip joint on North Clark and a club out by O’Hare International Airport.

  After Rozelle talked to the press, a reporter for the Detroit News interviewed Edwin J. Anderson, the Lions general manager. Anderson could not have sounded more out of the loop. “In my twelve years with the Lions, not a single Detroit player has been under suspicion in any way of association with gamblers or unsavory characters of any kind,” he said. He was also quoted as scoffing at “the idea that any young man in [his] right mind would vary a hair’s breadth from the accepted line of conduct.” Given the training camp meeting at the Fox & Hounds with Detroit officers, one could not say that Coach Wilson too was out of the loop, yet he commented to the press that same day that he “had not heard of any investigation involving the Lions.” With a game at hand, Wilson was left alone after that, but Anderson’s comments precipitated a meeting hours before kickoff with Rozelle and William Clay Ford. He emerged with a slightly different attitude, saying he was now unhappy that Karras was part owner of the Lindell bar and wished the player would sell his interest.

  The cast of characters at the Orange Bowl included Alex Karras and Wayne Walker on the field, George Wilson on the sideline, William Clay Ford and Pete Rozelle in the stands. Also in the stands were Vito Giacalone, Mike (another enforcer) Rubino, and two sons of old-time Prohibition-era Detroit mobsters, Anthony J. Zerilli and young Corrado. Zerilli had a linen supply company and Corrado was in the vending machine trade. Rozelle knew they were in Miami, as did Edwards and leaders of his vice squad in Detroit, who had called their Miami counterparts beforehand, provided descriptions and flight information, and asked for surveillance from arrival to departure. Billy Jack and his boys rented a Cadillac at the airport and checked into a hotel under assumed names. A few hours before the game, they met with Joe Masset, an old Detroit booze smuggler who had long ago resettled in Miami. Then they headed for the stadium. An undercover Miami policewoman sat nearby, and one of her colleagues snapped photographs from a middle distance. By then Rozelle’s comments and the Casares story were out there. According to the Miami police report, Giacalone and his men sat stoically, showing “little interest in the game but looked at the player benches through binoculars.” They left town without any contact with players.

  The story caught fire in the Detroit press over the next four days. Rozelle told reporters that whatever he knew about Lions associating with unsavory figures came from the police commissioner in Detroit. That led to reporting about the Party Bus and Grecian Gardens and Karras and the Lindell bar and the Miami surveillance. Wayne Walker acknowledged being at the Gardens but said he had not gambled and had done nothing wrong. Karras responded to Anderson’s belated call to give up his interest in the Lindell by saying that he would sooner quit football. The Butsicaris boys were like brothers to him, he said. He said he knew the Giacalones enough to say hello. Then he went after Rozelle, appearing on national television to acknowledge that he had gambled on games but that that was his right as long as he did not bet on games involving his team. At the cop shop at 1300 Beaubien, Edwards went into full publicity mode. He held a press conference the following Wednesday, January 9, detailing the chronology of his department’s investigation. From then on, he said, he would use public exposure as a weapon: “It is going to be our policy to expose organized crime to public view when we can legitimately do so with established fact. We want to cut down the trade these people have; we want to cut down their tolerance in the community. . . . If people feel we are serious about this they will give us more information which we can investigate.”

  Rozelle was focused on the football players and eventually would suspend Karras for a year and Paul Hornung of the Packers indefinitely (also a year, as it turned out), both for betting on games. He also levied fines against Wayne Walker and five other Lions. But Edwards concentrated on mobsters, and they, as it happened, were also concentrating on him. FBI wiretaps indicated that all the publicity about gambling and the Lions was bothering them. Tony and Vito Giacalone were heard complaining during a conversation on January 21 that they were unable to “get to” Edwards. The normal means were not working, so they thought about embarrassing him with their embrace. “I’m going to haul my fucking bus out,” Vito said. “I’m going to get a great big picture of Edwards and put it on there and say we—every hoodlum—we love him. This will knock his fucking wheels off. Hoodlums love Edwards and we are voting for him.” How they might be voting for him was another matter; he was not running for office then. But the point was clear.

  According to Edwards’s unpublished biography, later archived at the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University, and a book drawn largely from his earlier text by a family friend, author Mary M. Stolberg, his next moves involved the press. Late in January he had lunch at the Detroit Athletic Club with Harvey W. Patton, managing editor of the Detroit News, and the paper’s ace reporter, John M. Carlisle. Patton offered the paper’s Washington bureau as a conduit for Edwards to pass information along to the Permanent Committee on Investigations, the Senate panel investigating organized crime led by Democrat John L. McClellan of Arkansas. Edwards agreed, and also allowed Carlisle a behind-the-scenes look at what Detroit police were finding. His next lunch at the Detroit Athletic Club was with the editor of the News, Martin S. Hayden, a second-generation newsman who was a pillar of the city establishment, though with a reputation for holding tough against critics of his newspaper, from politicians and advertisers to mobsters. So it was not surprising that Edwards would turn to Hayden as a confidant. Was his life endangered by the Giacalones? Edwards did not believe so, but he was not naïve about violence in Detroit. “I don’t want you to think I’ve developed a cops-and-robbers mentality,” Edwards said, according to Hayden’s later recollection. “What I’m going to tell you is serious. It is also brief and I’m not going to be able to give you supporting details. For reasons I can’t tell you, I’ve decided to write you a letter. It is written and I have turned it over to a close friend with instructions to deliver it to you if anything should happen to me. If you ever publish it, which I hope you won’t, I guarantee you’ll have the damndest newspaper story you have ever seen.”

  Edwards had placed the letter in the hands of John Herling, a labor journalist and liberal activist in Washington who had been his close friend for more than twenty-five years, back to the days when they were both followers of the socialist Norman Thomas. A year earlier Herling had invited Edwards to the White House Correspondents Dinner and introduced him to the attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy. During that conversation, they had talked abou
t the Detroit mob and how organized crime in Michigan swelled during the Prohibition-era rum-running between Detroit and Canada. Now, on the manila envelope Edwards gave Herling, he wrote, “For Robert Kennedy, to be opened only in the event of my death by violent means or by unnatural causes where certainty of death cannot be determined.” The contents of the letter have been lost to history, except for a cover note that read, “Enclosed is an envelope which represents a little bit of extra life insurance. I have taken care that the Mafia here in Detroit knows this is placed somewhere—but you may be certain that they do not know where.” This was the publicity gambit again, with higher stakes. Edwards had already asked his trusted lieutenants to make sure that word got back to the Giacalones about his letter.

  What the Giacalones did not yet know is that Edwards and his Criminal Investigations Bureau were in the process of setting up a sting to ensnare them. Nonstop surveillance with cameras, tape recorders, and miniature radio transmitters were all part of the scheme, but the key to the sting was a “bought cop” who was not really bought, and for that role they recruited a police sergeant who as a Marine corporal during the war had “crawled on his belly in the volcanic ash of Iwo Jima.”

  Chapter 6

  * * *

  GLOW

  WHEN IT CAME TO HIS wardrobe, Jerome Cavanagh, the mayor of Detroit, considered himself a top-drawer gentleman. The dress shirts for his six-foot, 200-pound frame were custom made at J. M. Citron, a haberdashery on Washington Boulevard, and his silk ties were imported from New York. “This tie costs more than your entire outfit,” he liked to say, his blue eyes twinkling, only sort of joking, if someone happened to catch him admiring his apparel in the mirror. In a cozy study adjoining his spacious eleventh-floor office downtown, he kept four extra suits, thirteen striped ties, and a cabinet of fresh shirts, ready for a change of clothes at a moment’s notice. The finery clothed a natural-born entertainer. If three pals accompanied Mayor Cavanagh to the London Chop House on West Congress after work and were escorted to his usual spot, Table No. 1, their favorite drinks waiting on the red-checkered tablecloth, there would be eight or ten people pulling up chairs by the end of the night listening to him spin stories. The blarney came with his Irish heritage, but he had more taste for the good life, and public life, than his father, Sylvester, who spent four decades cleaning boilers at Ford’s Rouge plant. The son, at age thirty-four, thrived on being in the know on all things gossipy and political, and though trained at the University of Detroit School of Law and partial to the New Frontier politics of JFK, he had the sensibility of an old-style newspaper guy. Many of his aides came from that ink-stained world, former newspapermen at the Detroit News and Free Press and Times, an evening Hearst paper that went belly-up a year before his election.