Terror in the City of Champions (10 page)

Davis and Dean made quite the pair visually. Davis weighed twenty to thirty pounds less than Dean, but stood four or five inches taller. Beside the chunky, thickheaded Dean, Davis looked awkward and slump-shouldered. People who met Davis described him as gawky and gangly and as possessing shifty, suspicious eyes. His dark arched brows and pronounced widow’s peak—he flattened his hair with tonic—gave him the unsettling look of a horror-movie mortician from the silent era or a devious butler. The two men had known each other before joining the Black Legion.

Many others contributed to the chapel. The legionnaires brought their own lunches for weekend work days. Sometimes their wives served potluck suppers. On occasion they roasted a pig. The legion paid $200 per month in rent and asked members to contribute a dollar each month for the place. They sometimes struggled to come up with the money. To make their charade complete, the legionnaires solicited the services of a pastor. The Rev. Sam Jacob White led them on Sundays. Initially unaware of the legion, White thought he had stumbled upon a fervent, driven group of Protestants hungry for the word of God and desperately in need of spiritual leadership. It surprised him when interested visitors would inquire about joining the church only to be rejected for membership by Dean or Davis. That was unusual, he thought.

Dayton Dean wasn’t a religious man but he considered himself moral. “I believe in doing what’s right,” he said. “I don’t believe in attending church all the time. You can be as good out of church as in church. Right is right.”

Dean’s stature within the legion had rebounded since his failure to kill editor Art Kingsley. Back in the good graces of his higher-ups, he had been promoted to head a death squad. The new position quickly ballooned his ego, which affected his relationship with his common-law wife Margaret O’Rourke. “Nothing could stop him after that,” she said. “He was wild with power and importance and wouldn’t listen to anything I said.” The two weren’t getting along. They fought. He slapped her. They and the kids would eat dinner in silence, then he’d run off to the chapel, the Blinking Eye beer garden, or some legionnaire’s house. When the society added a women’s group to spy on neighbors and report what had been heard in grocery stores and at card parties, O’Rourke got a night job so she could limit her involvement.

One evening, Dean and other legion members assembled in his and O’Rourke’s house. She overheard them plotting a murder. When she confronted Dean later, he downplayed the talk. Another time, while drunk, he hinted that the legion had poisoned a man. When she raised issues, he told her to mind her own business. She began to fear him. Dean acted as if he had immunity from the law. Maybe it was because he had seen police officers at legion gatherings and heard Major-General Bert Effinger talk about how the legion had members at the highest levels of law enforcement.

Police headquarters sat about a mile and a quarter from the Little Stone Chapel. Cops got entangled the same way everyone else did, through friends, co-workers, and acquaintances. Patrolman George Pratt, still dealing with the lingering effects of having been trampled by a runaway horse in the mid-1920s, became ensnared through a close pal. A Marine veteran with five kids, Pratt introduced another department employee, Paul Jentsch, who was sworn in with nearly a hundred men in Highland Park. At his ceremony he recognized Detroit sergeant Ernest Lindemeyer, director of the police band. Accident investigator Robert Kingston, married with two children, had nearly a decade on the force when he joined. He thought he was going to a meeting to “discuss voting for the right man and keeping colored children out of our schools.” Kingston tricked other cops into joining. He told patrolman William Chegwidden that they were going to “meet a bunch of American fellows who stood for clean things.” Kingston also introduced his uncle Paul Dotten, a police electrician. Patrolman Alfred Roughley, who would be discovered dead in 1936, had also invited him. Dotten reported being inducted by a hooded and “very strenuous speaker” who “would have put fear in any man.” Sixteen-year patrolman Lloyd Modglin also had been deceived by a fellow officer, but once inducted at gunpoint at the Little Stone Chapel, he came to appreciate what he learned about the group. Sure he was against communism. And no, he didn’t think Negro and white children should attend school together. A former Klansman, he also didn’t care much for Jews or Catholics.

Modglin invited another cop, Harlow Evans, out for a beer after work one evening. Instead he took him to the chapel. They went through a side door, down a darkened staircase, and into a room dimly lit in red light like a photo lab. A troop of hooded men encircled Evans and other recruits. Under threat of death Evans took the Black Oath. He found the ordeal childish but given the weaponry present didn’t want to risk his life. Even a child with a gun can be dangerous, he thought. Legionnaires gave him the bullet and issued the usual warnings.

Outside afterward Evans chided Modglin and tossed the cartridge. He told Modglin he was done. But strangers soon appeared on his porch demanding that he appear at meetings. They told him that whipping squads were often sent for errant members. Evans wouldn’t be bullied. He told them to leave. They returned another evening. Evans again ordered them off his porch, vowing “somebody might get hurt” if they refused. Evans considered going to Col. Pickert or the famous radio priest Father Charles Coughlin. “But I was afraid they would consider the whole thing ridiculous and laugh in my face,” he said.

Col. Pickert’s first months in the police commissioner’s office saw his force mostly dealing with typical big-city troubles: missing persons, purse-snatchings, house burglaries, simple assaults, and river suicides. Traffic deaths—nearly one hundred by early April—kept morgues and funeral homes busy. There were numerous ways to be extinguished in or by “a machine” as Detroiters demonstrated in the span of one week: rollerskating in the street, pulling into the path of a freight train, alighting from a trolley, stepping from behind an automobile, or speeding on ice. Just crossing a road on foot could be deadly. The city was infected with hit-and-run drivers. They killed nine people in that time and injured eighty-four others. Among the dead was Ralph Wilson, a black man who was struck and left to die at Livernois and Fort Streets, a route driven regularly by the corpse-like Harvey Davis, who lived nearby. Likely just a coincidence.

The use of deadly force by police was not uncommon. During Prohibition the police presence in Detroit ballooned. It remained large afterward. The force had 3,500 officers, most with little training. On average their bullets were killing one person a month. In March a fourteen-year-old who had stolen an accordion and two watches was chased for a block by an off-duty officer who shot and fatally injured the boy. The officer’s defense was that the youth had taunted him, saying, “You’ll never get me.” The incident merited only a few small stories. The shooting fell into a gray area. The police manual allowed officers who had witnessed serious crimes to fire at escaping suspects. But an officer should not “shoot at a person who is running away to avoid arrest for a trivial offense.” An accordion was no trifling matter evidently.

Of more interest was the pursuit of John Dillinger, who had escaped prison. After one of his cohorts died in a shootout in Port Huron, word spread that Dillinger was in the region. At Detroit’s Woodmere Cemetery near Baby Creek Park, visitors heard a shot fired, which led to rumors that Dillinger was on the grounds, hiding among the tombstones. Visitors fled the cemetery as police swarmed it. They found nothing. In nearby Dearborn one of Henry Ford’s employees said he had seen a man resembling the mobster on Ford’s wooded estate. More than fifty officers, including a mounted division, responded. Again, nothing.

Weeks into Col. Pickert’s tenure, police raided what they called a “voodoo school.” The University of Islam children’s school was located in the heart of the city’s black district along Hastings Street, a half mile from the Brewster Center where Joe Louis trained. The school was siphoning hundreds of black children from public schools. White officials were alarmed that some were taking Muslim names. Police arrested nineteen instructors and confiscated their learning materials. They feared that “many of the teachings would frighten and disturb the Negroes of Detroit.” The school was believed to be run from another state by Wallace Fard, who had been ordered to leave the city two years earlier. Fard was the founder of the Nation of Islam.

Two days after the raid, hundreds of blacks marched toward police headquarters in protest. A handful of officers tried to stop them but the encounter escalated to violence. Police retreated to the steps of the headquarters until reinforcements arrived, some on horseback. Col. Pickert joined the effort. The riot was quelled after an hour. Thirteen police officers were injured and forty-one blacks were arrested. Most of the rioters escaped into the black neighborhoods. Such civil unrest was the sort of thing that infuriated Col. Pickert and legionnaires like Dean and Davis.

The Superstitious Schoolboy and His Gal

At his locker in the visitors’ clubhouse at Comiskey Park, Schoolboy Rowe looked over his collection of good-luck charms. Some of the tokens, like his magical US Eagle ten-dollar gold coin, had been with him for years. Others had joined the mystical entourage recently. He possessed enchanted copper pieces from Belgium and the Netherlands, a fortunate black penny from Canada, and a chipped but still powerful jade elephant from the Orient. Rowe carried them all throughout the season and lavished attention on them before every pitching performance.

Rowe was not an anomaly in baseball. Almost everybody in the sport had superstitious beliefs. Many heeded the sacredness of the diamond’s chalk lines, and plenty declined to wash a T-shirt or socks after a brilliant performance. Teammate Billy Rogell stepped on third base when going onto the field and religiously tightened his shoelaces and straightened the elastic bands on his uniform legs while in the on-deck circle. Rogell also knew that Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis was jinxed, at least for him. He and his fellow Tigers infielders, upon realizing that their spectacular play might be attributed to the warm-up ball they used before games, wouldn’t go anywhere without Black Betsy. Flea Clifton, the reserve fielder who had played only twice in June and July, shepherded the ball from town to town. When the team lost, he gave Betsy a bath in iodine to remove any hexes. Owner Frank Navin, with his affections for card playing and horse racing, also believed in omens, harbingers, and preventative routines. Following the rotten 1933 season, he had moved from his favorite seat along the right field foul line to a luckier one nearer home plate. He insisted on being in that seat for the start of every home game.

But few abided superstitions as much as Schoolboy. In his mind his methods worked. After the Saturday afternoon on Chicago’s South Side when he had picked up his glove with his left hand—never the right!—who could dispute him? Rowe had pitched a complete game, winning 11–1 and allowing a mere three hits. It was his ninth straight victory. S
CHOOLBOY
I
S
I
NVINCIBLE
, said one headline. The next day he finished a game in relief and hit a home run for the win, his tenth straight. It marked Rowe’s sixth appearance in ten games. Cochrane was using him as a starter, a reliever, and a pinch hitter, his batting average second highest on the club. Cochrane deployed him three days later to prevent a loss after Red Phillips loaded the bases with one out in the last inning in Cleveland. (Rowe struck out both batters.) Two days on, he pitched Detroit to another victory, not yielding a hit until the seventh inning.

“Young Master Rowe can’t pitch nine full innings one day and do relief hurling the next much longer,” warned Paul Gallico of the
New York Daily News
. He chided the Tigers for scheduling a scrimmage on their day off. It was one of three exhibitions that summer against the National League’s St. Louis Cardinals. American League teams played National League teams only in scrimmages or during the World Series. Though nothing was at stake in those St. Louis games, the Tigers would lose all three.