When it was over and his guests had left, Kennedy stepped out the back door of the Oval Office. He was leaving for a trip to Europe, starting in Germany (where he would give his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech). Reuther and King and several others gathered for lunch at Reuther’s Washington hotel suite to rehash the discussion and solidify plans. Traveling separately, Reuther and King had the same event and destination listed next on their itineraries: the Walk to Freedom in Detroit. Reuther left that night at six, home in time to read the Free Press editorial supporting the march, saying that Detroit, “a great American industrial city,” could stir the nation by its actions. “Elsewhere—in Birmingham, Jackson, Savannah, Cumberland—the mass marches of citizens have uniformly been protests. Negroes have sought this way to demonstrate their desire to be treated as citizens. Detroit is different. This is not a march of one race against another, but a march of people of good will of all races, protesting injustice against their fellow men. . . . Though we do not believe that a march is the best way of achieving these rights, it is one way. It is a way which has proved effective under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King and his policy of discipline and non-violence.”
King was on his way. He was to arrive on a Northwest flight early Sunday afternoon.
• • •
Mayor Cavanagh had returned from Hawaii by then. He and his wife, Mary Helen, had stayed an extra twelve days after Kennedy’s speech to the U.S. Conference of Mayors but made sure to get home in time for the big march. They usually traveled on separate planes, as a family precaution, but made an exception this time. At the airport they were loaded down with souvenirs for all seven kids, including the youngest, Jerome, who was only two months old. His middle name, as it turned out, was Celestin, not Olympic. Since the mayor’s hospitalization in January, Mary Helen had been pushing him to slow down, and the extra days on Oahu served that purpose. Now he was eager to get to work and excited about the Sunday event. He noted that in Honolulu, with its diverse population, he saw “many examples of racial harmony” that could serve as a model for the nation. He held the same expectations for the Walk to Freedom and urged “the total participation of all citizens in Detroit.” The drive for racial equity was the force that had propelled Cavanagh into the mayor’s office, and once there he had established his priorities with his first two appointments, Edwards to head the police department and Alfred M. Pelham as city controller, the first African American to hold that position. For Cavanagh, who had higher aspirations, the issue of race served as a potent convergence of ambition and idealism.
At the airport Jim Trainor, the press secretary, was there to greet the mayor and his delegation, which included Ray Girardin, the mayor’s executive secretary, another former Detroit newspaperman, who had expressed interest in the police commissioner job if and when Edwards left for a federal judgeship. Trainor had been the acting mayor while they were away, and aside from the various city actions preparing for the march and rally on Sunday, there had been another big story in the city. It was the banner headline in the Free Press that very day: “Gambling Czar Charged with Bribes: Police Spy Used to Crack Case.”
As soon as they saw Trainor at the airport, Cavanagh and Girardin pumped him for everything he knew about the arrest of the Party Bus mobster Tony Giacalone.
Chapter 10
* * *
HOME JUICE
ALONG WITH MARKING the demise of a legendary black establishment, the gambling raid at the Gotham Hotel produced one unexpected and fruitful piece of information. In the bounty of confiscated betting slips, felt counting tables, adding machines, and tens of thousands of dollars in cash, the cops found a black book with an unlisted telephone number in it. The number belonged to Tony Giacalone. Here was a vital connection for Police Commissioner Edwards and his criminal investigators at 1300 Beaubien. It proved what they had believed before the November raid, that Tony Jack, as a capo in the Detroit partnership, controlled the numbers racket in Detroit, all of it, black and white. And it provided them with the means to set the trap to prove it.
Going back to the bootlegging of the Prohibition era, the Detroit mob had tried to stay one step ahead of the law by paying off dirty cops. Giacalone, who grew up on Detroit’s east side, the son of a vegetable seller, and rose through the underworld ranks as bartender, bodyguard, chauffeur, bookie errand runner, and street boss, was known to be paying off policemen since at least 1954, when he was arrested for bribery and served eight months behind bars. Before that he had always beaten the rap, fourteen arrests going back to a car theft in 1937 and no convictions. Edwards and his aides were determined to get him locked up again and out of Detroit for a longer stretch. Certain that the bribe-to-survive policy was still in use, they recruited a sergeant working vice at the McGraw Station, known as the cleanup squad, for the dangerous assignment of ingratiating himself with Giacalone and his men by posing as an officer on the take.
That role was given to James W. Thomas, who at age thirty-eight had already been on the force for sixteen years and seemed perfectly average in every respect: average height, average weight, dark hair, unprepossessing demeanor. Average in every respect except one. He was a former marine who fought at Iwo Jima and was known on the Detroit force as someone who would not flinch in a pinch. His task was made easier by the fact that even before Edwards gave him the assignment he had been approached by Giacalone underlings to see if he could be bribed.
Sergeant Thomas did not act alone. He was supported by members of the Criminal Investigations Bureau who worked in shifts monitoring Giacalone’s movements with electronic surveillance. The first contact Thomas made, on February 28, was with Claude Williams, one of Tony Jack’s top numbers runners. Thomas set a price for his protection at fifty bucks a month, and for reassurance asked to talk to Williams’s boss. Soon thereafter he had a classic underworld conversation that went like this:
T: Wait, now, who am I talking to? So I know.
G: Tony.
T: Just Tony, huh.
G: You heard of me?
T: Yeah. I don’t know if I heard of you or not.
G: Yeah. You’ve heard of me.
T: If you said I did, I guess I did.
G: Yes, you have heard of me. What’s your first name?
T: Jim.
G: Jim. All right. Listen, Jim. You’ve heard of me. You’ve heard of Tony Giacalone.
T: Tony Giacalone?
G: That’s me.
During March and April, Thomas worked his regular shift with the cleanup squad while also playing his role as the dirty cop. He got his first fifty-dollar payment on time, but before the second payment arrived, the police arrested Williams and charged him with possessing numbers tickets. Thomas was not sure if the arrest was part of the sting or incidental to it, but he played it to his advantage, explaining to Williams that the cops would lay off if he got paid on time. Soon came another call from the boss, who by now was calling Thomas “buddy.” Thomas took the call at a telephone booth at the corner of Schoolcraft and Chatham.
G: How are you, buddy?
T: This Giacalone?
G: Yeah. How you feel?
T: Yeah. I wonder what’s going on.
G: Well, it’s just what I told you. I’d call you around this time. Where you at? In an outside station?
T: Yeah. I’m in a pay station.
G: How you?
T: Okay.
G: Listen. Have you got an address where I can send that to you?
T: Oh.
G: I got to send you $150.
The investigators now had clear identification of Giacalone and proof of a bribe. In a meeting with Williams, recorded by the police, Thomas showed the numbers runner a photograph of Giacalone, and Williams confirmed that was his boss. But Edwards needed an airtight case to get a Giacalone conviction. No more beating the rap. Through this investigation and the loosely connected probe of the Giacalone brothers and the Party Bus and the Lions, the police commissioner had come to despise the mobs
ters and the sinister effects of their criminal enterprise. During the Party Bus investigation, Edwards had already taken the precaution of writing letters for the publisher of the Detroit News and Robert Kennedy to open in case of his untimely death. Now the surveillance showed there might be reason for concern. On one recording, Tony Jack could be heard telling an associate that he was in favor of killing policemen.
Giacalone lived in a redbrick palace on Balfour Street in Grosse Pointe Park between East Jefferson and the Detroit River. Only the highest-ranking mobsters, of whom he was one, had homes there. The Zerillis and Corrados had moved into the neighborhood before him, all following the same path from petty street crime to the top of the heap, from impoverished Sicily to promising America, from Terrasini Favarotta to booming Detroit. Favarottado, they were called. Within the Detroit branch of the Mafiosi, it helped to be a Favarottado like Tony Jack and Billy Jack, whose parents immigrated from the small village near Palermo. In Grosse Pointe Park, Tony Giacalone was respected as a family man. A local judge once gave him a reprieve using those very words. Fanny Fierimonte, the wife of a Detroit cop, grew up near the Giacalone kids and attended Catholic elementary schools with them: “We were all just one big happy family, even though my mother would say, ‘Are you running with the Dagos again?’ She knew the kinds of troubles the fathers had. They [the children of the Giacalone clan] always said, ‘Dad’s at a meeting.’ The Giacalones were very private people. They really stuck with the Italians. They didn’t move out of their circle much at all. And the other Italians orbited around them. They were the sun and the others were all the planets.” In that environment, as the Italian family man, Tony Giacalone would not be seen with the tools of the enforcement trade that he was said to have available in his trunk: the blackjack, brass knuckles, or rock-hard slab of deer leg.
He was a busy man with several offices. His main office was in Greektown, at 1013 St. Antoine, with paneled walls and carpeted floors. There he watched over his interests in what were considered legitimate enterprises, including Detroit Stevedoring and Lightering on East Jefferson, Snow Pest Control on Livernois, and Home Juice Company on East Palmer. Until the cops shut it down, his gambling hangout was the Lesod Club on West Columbia, where the specialty of the house was a dice game called barbut. Edwards became obsessed with the brazenness of the Lesod and made it his mission to close it. Earlier that year, when William O. Douglas, the Supreme Court justice, was in Detroit to deliver a speech, he asked Edwards to show him the police department in action. “How about we go out with the late shift and stake out a gambling parlor?” Edwards asked. Douglas was game. In a speech he delivered to the Advisory Council of Judges in New York in May 1963, Edwards picked up the story from there: “At one a.m. on the night in question, we showed him the security arrangements at the Lesod Club, one of the most aggravating and persistent operations of organized crime with which we had to deal in Detroit. The club possessed a state charter as a social club but was actually the medium through which the two top gambling bosses in our area—the Giacalone brothers—ran a barbut game. At one a.m. the scout car we were in pulled up near 106 W. Columbia in downtown Detroit. Two-story building in a business block. Lights shone through drawn shades on the second floor. In front of the door was an auto with [a] driver at the wheel and directly behind was another—our unmarked vice squad car. The officer wandered over and I introduced him to the gray-haired man with weatherworn face who was my companion. Vice then showed and explained some of the defense mechanisms of modern organized crime to Justice Douglas. He identified by name the lookout at the wheel and gave the record for gambling convictions. All customers have to check in first with the lookout posted at the door. If properly identified the lookout rang a bell on the downstairs door, gave [the] proper signal with eye-to-eye contact with the doorman looking out the door at the head of the stairs, who pressed a buzzer to open the downstairs door. Then another lookout followed the same procedure on the second floor.” Not long after that unlikely scene, Edwards and his men cracked the fortress and busted the Lesod, though Tony Giacalone was not there that night.
Giacalone’s unofficial office was the back room of Grecian Gardens, at the table where the Detroit cops happened to see him sitting with Lions linebacker Wayne Walker and Lindell Cocktail Bar owner Jimmy Butsicaris the previous August. The Gardens is where Tony Jack held court, made deals, collected debts, and when the mood struck slipped out onto his Party Bus. At whatever office, Giacalone carried himself with the same self-assurance, dapper and cold and intimidating at six feet and two hundred pounds. The piercing look in his brown eyes could chill a man. His suits came from the same haberdashery that Mayor Cavanagh used. He always had a fresh silk handkerchief in his breast pocket. He had his hair cut twice a week at Jimmy the Barber’s place in the Seville Hotel, where the shoeshine man knew to shine the soles of his shoes.
After several dealings with Giacalone, Sergeant Thomas became anxious. In one telephone conversation, they both talked about how they were starting to feel exposed. Edwards and his men decided it was time to move in. On the Thursday afternoon of June 20, Tony Jack was hanging out at the Home Juice Company, which, according to word on the street, his brother Vito had won in a dice game. The brothers served as vice presidents. Home Juice was based in Chicago and clean of mob ties there, but the Detroit franchise, with the Giacalone brothers involved, was their most profitable branch. It was there that the Detroit police found Tony Giacalone that afternoon, wearing a flashy blue suit and freshly shined shoes. They placed him under arrest on charges of bribing a police officer and took him downtown for arraignment at Recorder’s Court, where Judge Paul E. Krause set bond at $5,000. When Giacalone’s lawyer protested that the bond was excessive, the judge held out a sheaf of papers documenting his previous bribery conviction and fourteen other arrests. “He has this,” the judge said.
Giacalone showed nothing.
Sergeant Thomas was not at the scene, but his actions had made it possible, and Edwards, in keeping with his theory that publicity was his best weapon, offensive or defensive, immediately gave him a battlefield promotion to lieutenant and announced it to the press. Giacalone made bail and went back to Grosse Pointe Park. There was no love lost between the commissioner and the capo. Edwards had listened to the tapes, and one had a special resonance. It was when Giacalone brought up Edwards in the context of his attempts to ease racial tensions in the city and his outspoken support of Martin Luther King and the upcoming Walk to Freedom. “Well, you know what I mean. He’s for the niggers,” Giacalone said to Sergeant Thomas. “You’re not for the niggers, are you?”
George Edwards was for a lot of things, but none more than the cause of racial justice. To that extent, if one can move past the racial slur, Tony Jack knew his nemesis. The lessons of race in America were seared into Edwards’s consciousness from birth. He grew up listening to his father, a lawyer in Dallas, tell the story of his first criminal case in 1910, when he was defending an elderly black man who had been accused of assaulting a child. “Before he had reached the room to which he was going in order to interview the client, whose life he was required to defend, a mob broke into the court house, into the courtroom, into the jury room, and seized the man, tied a rope around his neck, threw him out a third story window, dragged him up the main street of Dallas, and hanged him from an arch built for the Elk’s Temple national convention.” Edwards recounted that story in a speech he delivered to a conference on police-community relations at Michigan State University in late May 1963, around the time of Giacalone’s comment and one month before the Walk to Freedom.
In that speech Edwards also recalled how his father’s last case, in 1959, when he was seventy-nine years old, was in defense of the rights of the NAACP in Texas “to continue to exist and function there against a petition and injunction filed by the attorney general in Texas.” And he recounted how he himself was on the Detroit City Council in 1943 when “unreasoning animosities and hatreds” led to the race riot. “Think
about what we are doing in this America of ours,” Edwards concluded. “Think real hard about what we’re talking about today. Because I say to you in as earnest terms as I can say it, there is no other road for these United States of America than to make good its promises of equality and freedom to all of its people, and to make good its promise of order to all of its people. Now, if you say that’s tough, I couldn’t agree with you more. But I also say to you it’s possible and it’s necessary and that’s the job we all have ahead of us.”
Equality and order. Like his friend and mentor Walter Reuther, George Edwards tried to walk a straight line between the two, but there was always some human imperfection in the way.
Chapter 11
* * *
EIGHT LANES DOWN WOODWARD
SINCE THE PLANE from Washington, due at one-thirty, was running late, Police Commissioner Edwards went to the airport with a phalanx of motorcycle cops to retrieve Martin Luther King instead of meeting him as planned at a downtown hotel before the march. Lt. George Harge came along, his presence signaling that Detroit would be a safe haven for the civil rights leader. Harge had been promoted months earlier as the highest-ranking black officer in the Detroit Police Department, and his assignment now was to serve as King’s bodyguard throughout the day. Edwards led the small greeting party on the tarmac, with Harge at his side, when King deplaned with his traveling aide, Walter Fauntroy, an SCLC regional director and pastor of the Washington version of New Bethel Baptist. Michigan’s political leadership wanted to make it clear that this was not the South. Governor Romney had issued a proclamation declaring Sunday, June 23, 1963, “Freedom March Day.” Mayor Cavanagh had offered King the use of his limousine. And Edwards extended a greeting that sharply differentiated his force from the ugliness King had endured in Birmingham. “You’ll see no dogs and fire hoses here,” he said.
Once in a Great City Page 17
