Detroit: An American Autopsy (19 page)

J
IHAD

A
FTER MY AUNT’S FUNERAL,
I dropped my wife and daughter at home and drove back to the paper. It was late afternoon. I was still dressed in my church clothes, including my fancy boots with the smooth, slippery lambskin soles.

The newsroom was a barnyard. Telephones were bleating. The flickering television sets were warbling. Reporters were cackling. This was the good part of newspapering. The Rush. This is what it sounds like when there is Breaking News.

The FBI had just raided a suburban warehouse and killed a man known as Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah, the supreme and spiritual leader of a group of black Muslims who called themselves the Brotherhood.

The feds maintained that not only were Abdullah and his followers part of a radical Sunni jihadist organization intent on carving out an Islamic state within the United States through violent means, they were also fencing stolen fur coats and TV sets.

A sting to arrest Abdullah and his men was set up at a Dearborn warehouse about twenty miles west of downtown. The imam, a thin, bespectacled man who wore a cleaved goatee that made him look more like a circus clown than a conspiratorial mastermind, should have worn a Kevlar vest instead of the bulbous blue turban he fancied.

Because when agents instructed Abdullah and four underlings to put down their guns and put up their hands, the imam refused. A police dog was sent to flush him out of a semitrailer full of “stolen” flat-screen TVs that an undercover fed was selling to the imam to sell to other undercover feds.

This is when Abdullah is said to have fired on the police dog. The agents then fired on Abdullah, striking him twenty times.

The dog was rushed by helicopter for emergency surgery. The corpse of Abdullah was handcuffed and left on the floor of the semi-trailer until the medical examiner arrived. The dog died. An obituary appeared in the local papers. His named was Freddy. He was two years old.

The imam was taken to the Wayne County morgue. Dr. Schmidt, the medical examiner, told me later that he had never seen a corpse handcuffed the way the imam’s was.

Jihadists. Fur coats. Blue turbans. Freddy the hero Belgian Malinois. I jumped in the
News’
car and raced to the Masjid Al-Haqq mosque on the west side of the city. The transmission whined:
Whirrr. Whirrr. Whirrr.

I don’t like to hit the ghetto in church clothes, especially in fancy boots with slippery lambskin soles, but things like militant black Muslims shooting it out with G-men comes around only so often for a newsman. And maybe this was the match that would start the Fourth Great Fire in Detroit.

I sparked a cigarette and stepped on it.

The mosque was located on Clairmount Street near Linwood, not far from the epicenter of the 1967 riot, not far from the apartment where my grandmother died alone a half century ago, not far from where my grandfather miraculously morphed from a black man into a white man.

The neighborhood looked like a photo from postwar Dresden. Row upon row of burnt-out houses, boarded storefronts, weedy and vacant lots peppered with shattered glass, sparkling like quartz tailings. The Soldier Boy meat market had long been dead. Joy Cleaners had run out of luck. The Rising Sun Grand Chapter of the O.E.S. fraternal organization had an unfriendly-looking bullet hole through its dirty window.

A bunch of tough-looking black men in robes and kaffiyeh scarves were milling around the mosque, which was no more than a crumbling house with a hand-painted sign that read in English and Arabic:
THERE IS NO GOD BUT ALLAH
.

“They bad dudes,” a young woman whispered from her upper window, piecing together from my skin tone and notebook and lambskin boots that I must be a reporter. “They moved in about six months ago and took over the neighborhood. They just took over all them empty houses. Now our cars get stolen. They park on our grass, and you don’t ask them to move. During Ramadan, they was sitting on them mosque steps smoking blunts and drinking Patrón and beer.”

“I thought they were Muslims,” I said.

“Muslims my ass,” she snorted. “They’s thugs.”

I approached the crowd of robed men standing in front of the pillared porch, its roof sagging low. Four of them turned and started walking toward me. I hoped they noticed the notepad in my hand, the press card on a chain around my neck, the lambskin boots, my skin tone. Dressed in church clothes, I must have looked the very picture of a privileged professor of anthropology. Scenarios like this are the organ of adrenaline for a street reporter. This is why people cover war armed with only a pencil or a camera. Danger. My legs began to throb.

“Excuse me,” I offered. “I’m sorry to hear about—”

“Nobody got nothing to say,” the toughest-looking one said to me. His fists were balled. “We don’t want none y’all coming round here. You hear?”

“I just—”

“Fuck off.”

“Can I quote you on that?”

“I ain’t gonna tell you again. Fuck off.”

I fucked off.

I walked back to the weedy lot of glistening glass and stood smoking cigarettes with Brad Edwards, the hard-boiled newscaster from the Fox affiliate. As we smoked, Ricardo Thomas, a photographer from the
News
, drove up.

“You know where the mosque is?” Ricardo called from his window.

“Around the corner, man. Just look for the other photographers,” I said. “But watch your ass, they’re not in a happy mood.”

Ricardo rolled his eyes. A sixty-seven-year-old black man, Ricardo had covered riots, murders and street protests in his long career. He knew the scene.

He drove off to get his photograph, and I forgot about him when Edwards struck up a conversation with a prostitute walking by.

“Y’all know what happened to them girls murdered on Gratiot?” she asked Edwards. She had bad teeth, good breasts and wore schoolteacher glasses.

“Were they working girls?” asked Edwards in his newsman’s baritone. Edwards always seemed energized by a good murder story. “Someone’s killing working girls? You know them?” He handed her his business card.

She took his card and smiled. Her teeth were ruined worse than the neighborhood. The sun was setting.

“No, I don’t know them, but that’s why I don’t work past sunset,” she said. “They crazy motherfuckers out here.”

That’s when the screaming started.

I spun around on my wooden heels. Ricardo was being pummeled by a dozen men from the mosque, enraged that he had taken photos after they warned him not to. Someone hit him with a wild haymaker and he fell, the back of his head bouncing off the curb. Someone snatched his cameras and whipped them repeatedly against the sidewalk.

I ran to him as best I could, slipping in my lamb-soled boots. In my mind—it all went in slow motion—I thought about it ending here, on a shitty corner in a desperate city. My last words would not be to my wife but to a twenty-dollar hooker with no dental insurance.

A mob is made up of men, and usually the men want to be stopped before they become a snarling pack. But there is a tipping point after which you can no longer stop them because “they” will have become an “it.” I was hoping for my life and Ricardo’s that the point hadn’t been reached.

I approached from the back of the pack and grabbed Ricardo by his armpits and started skating backward. I was waiting for the glass bottle on the back of my head, but it never came. No one so much as touched me.

The men, realizing what they had done to an old man, shuffled shamefully back to their mosque; all except for the one carrying the broken cameras by their straps.

“Our leader was killed, man,” he said with tears in his eyes as he walked away. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

He was the guy who threatened me. I took it to be an apology. Ricardo didn’t.

“I’m not afraid of you motherfuckers,” he shouted.

The guy tossed the cameras in the gutter and walked away.

I noticed the sun had set.

“I was too cowardly to help,” said an Associated Press man, walking up from the shadows with what was left of the cameras. It was a brave thing to admit. The cameras looked like battered cuckoo clocks.

* * *

Ricardo was giving his statement to the police when my cell phone rang. It was a cop source of mine. A high-up. I told him about Ricardo.

“Is he all right?” the voice asked with real concern.

“Yeah, I think so,” I said.

“Do you have it on videotape?”

“Yeah, I think Fox got it,” I said.

“Good,” the cop said. “Send it to me. I love watching reporters get their ass kicked.”

He said it deadpan.

“Listen,” he went on. “You know Wyatt Earp Evans?”

He was talking about the new chief of police, Warren Evans, whose curious method of public relations was to ride along with his newly constituted “strike force” and bust down doors and snatch up guns.

“Well, you know how he likes to play big shot and go to see these shooting scenes?”

“Yeah?” I said. I had been out with him on one occasion. So had Edwards. So had ABC national news, for Christ’s sake.

“Well,” the cop said, “he got there a little too early tonight. His driver just put a cap in a kid.”

“What?”

“Yep. Just shot a kid. Could you imagine if that was Bratton in L.A.?”

“International headlines,” I said.

“Hell of a day in Detroit.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” I said. “I’ll call the news desk. Thanks.”

I looked over. Ricardo was giving an interview to Edwards.

* * *

The shooting of a man in the presence of the chief of police earned nothing more than a three-paragraph story buried in the inside pages of the next morning’s papers.

The FBI’s shooting of the imam, however, was the stuff of international news, with lapdog headlines that could have been crafted by the FBI itself.

Detroit, according to media accounts, had a homegrown terror cell, and the feds had smashed it before it could wreak havoc on the populace.

It smelled like bullshit to me. What I saw at the mosque was a street gang, not a jihadist terror cell. In fact, reading over the charging documents presented to the federal judge that morning, the only conspiracy I could find was a clownish and amateur attempt by Abdullah and some of his henchmen to change the VIN plate on a stolen Ford Bronco. They had even given the truck the code name “White Lady.”

These were not acolytes of Osama bin Laden. They were followers of H. Rap Brown, the former Black Panther and convert to Islam who was serving life in a Colorado supermax prison for killing a cop and wounding another in Georgia in 2000.

Part of the reason they were dealing in stolen goods, it seemed, was to get rent money for H. Rap’s old lady in Atlanta.

The real acolyte of Osama bin Laden came to Detroit eight weeks later, on Christmas Day 2009, by airplane, with a bomb sewn into his underpants. In that case, the FBI and other federal agencies knew about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. They knew he supported jihad and knew he had met with senior al-Qaeda operatives and was planning something. Nevertheless, he was allowed to keep his U.S. visa and allowed to buy a plane ticket with cash. Flying from Amsterdam to Detroit on Northwest Airlines, Abdulmutallab lit his crotch bomb on fire above the city. Had the bomb not malfunctioned, it is possible that the airplane would have blown up. Had it blown up it is possible that it would have hit no one on the ground.

Detroit, by some estimates, is 40 percent vacant.

As for our jihadists, Abdullah and his men were caught on wire spinning fantasy scenarios about killing cops. But they never had a bomb and they never traveled to Yemen. They dealt in stolen property. They bullied neighbors and stole cars.

The Brotherhood was a gang, no doubt. But the FBI spin that this was a Sunni terror group was a silly overstatement. In fact, none of those arrested were charged with any terrorism counts, and a U.S. magistrate saw fit to release some of the eleven defendants on personal bond.

What I saw was a bunch of lost, pissed-off black men. Creatures of the ghetto—90 percent of whom had taken the well-worn path from the street block to the cell block and back to the corner, their lot never improving.

Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah, a.k.a. Christopher Thomas, himself was introduced to Islam while in prison, and when he was released from incarceration, he began to create a Robin Hood thing in the ghetto. Carry guns. Rob to feed the poor. Espouse violence against the crown. Give yourself cool new names and costumes. Wear a turban. He gave lost men something to be and something to do.

But the fact is, he wasn’t even a good thief. The Brotherhood was so broke, in fact, that the group was evicted from its previous mosque by the city for back taxes. What did the Brotherhood do? They simply walked a few blocks south and took over an abandoned house.

Frankly, the poverty is so severe in Detroit that I was surprised there weren’t more groups like the Brotherhood bubbling up. Just a few weeks before Abdullah’s killing, fifty thousand people had stormed Cobo Hall in hopes of getting one of the five thousand applications for federal rent and utilities assistance. The scene turned into a near riot, with people being trampled and applications being snatched from old people’s hands.

“This morning, I seen the curtain pulled back on the misery,” a man at Cobo told me. “People fighting over a line. People threatening to shoot each other. Is this what we’ve come to?”

Indeed.

Black nationalism is nothing new in Detroit. It is embroidered in the cultural quilt of the city. The Nation of Islam was founded here in the early 1930s by a mysterious figure named Wallace Fard Muhammad and taken to its apogee by Malcolm X, an ex-convict and Detroiter who preached emancipation “by any means necessary,” only to be assassinated by his own. The Republic of New Afrika, a social movement that began in Detroit, espoused a separate black nation within the United States, to be carved out of the Deep South. Then there is the Shrine of the Black Madonna, the pan-African church from which the careers of Kwame Kilpatrick, Police Chief Evans and countless other political players in Detroit had sprung.