Terror in the City of Champions (26 page)

The legion’s campaign against Voisine was in its early stages. Harvey Davis hoped to enlist Dayton Dean in the effort. But Dean was still looking for the right moment to take down attorney Maurice Sugar. It wasn’t as easy as he had thought. Sugar, who was still running for city council, had testified at a raucous statehouse hearing against a bill designed to quell union activities. The hearing turned loud and accusatory with former governor Wilber Brucker, business interests, and the American Legion on one side and labor and left-wing forces on the other.

“There is room for only one ‘ism’ in America,” said Lester Moody, Michigan commander of the American Legion. “That is Americanism. There is no room for pacifism, Hitlerism, fascism, syndicalism, Orientalism, or communism.” Jesuit Joseph Luther, dean of men at the Catholic University of Detroit, backed the bill too. “This insidious propaganda of communism wants religion abolished,” he said. “The issue is clear. God, religion, morality, and Americanism on one side. Soviet Russia on the other.”

Sugar spoke against the legislation, dismissing it as “an effort of the great barons of labor to stop talk about conditions when corporate profits have gone up” while workers’ living standards have declined. “Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, by their words, could be convicted of a felony under the terms of the bill,” he said. Sugar blasted another speaker, Harry A. Jung, founder of the American Vigilante Intelligence Federation, as “a fascist and anti-labor body.” Jung was known in anti-communist circles. In April 1933 Father Coughlin had sent Henry Ford a letter of introduction on behalf of Jung. “To my mind he is the best advised man in America on radicalism,” Coughlin wrote. “I feel that he would have information that he could give you that would be very hard to get from any other source.”

Weeks after Maurice Sugar’s committee appearance, he and his wife Jane got a new neighbor. Recently separated from his common-law wife, the man moved into unit four at Winchester Apartments, down the street from the Little Stone Chapel. In his wallet he kept a newspaper photo of Sugar. Every day Sugar walked past the new tenant’s unit, unknowingly breezing by the door of Dayton Dean, the man assigned to kill him.

Zero Hour

What did Frank Navin think? Were his Tigers a lock to win a pennant? He chased that black cat. “No, no, no!” he stammered to a reporter.

Navin veered off into a tale about a Cleveland team—it was Cleveland, wasn’t it?—back in 1905 (or was it 1906?) when the Indians held a ten-game lead and felt so confident that the players went to a jeweler and bought diamond rings in anticipation of their championship. “The team went east and came back in second place,” Navin said. Navin’s Tigers would soon be heading to Philadelphia, Washington, Boston, and New York for fifteen games. Navin wasn’t about to jinx his team. He didn’t want his squad returning in second place.

The Tigers had built an eight-and-a-half game lead over the Yankees by Monday, August 26. Though five weeks remained in the season, opponents were conceding that Detroit would be winning another title. “The only way for the Tigers to lose the pennant is for all of them to drop dead,” said Boston manager Joe Cronin. Connie Mack, speaking before an audience of five hundred at St. Juliana in Detroit, went so far as to forecast a world championship. “Great as your team is today, it is only on its way up,” he said. “Your team is great because of Mickey Cochrane. He never could lose.” Demoralized by his dismal crowds in Philadelphia, Mack looked at Navin Field with wonder. “It’s a lovely sight, you know, to see all those thousands of men and women climbing the ramps. I could just stand . . . and watch them and never get tired.”

In the National League Dizzy and Paul Dean pitched back-to-back wins in a Sunday doubleheader, putting the Cardinals in first. The photo of them side by side kissing a baseball ran in papers across the country. The mere sight of the Deans annoyed the Tigers. “Those guys make me sick,” said one.

While in Washington, D.C., Mickey Cochrane and the team’s G-Men—Gehringer, Greenberg, and Goslin—met the nation’s top G-Man, J. Edgar Hoover.
Free Press
editorial director Malcolm Bingay, a figure known in power circles, arranged the introduction. Hoover led the players on a tour of the bureau’s headquarters. They saw the gymnasium and the fingerprinting division. Hoover shared with them the evidence used against Richard Hauptmann, the convicted killer of the Lindbergh baby. They learned about eavesdropping equipment.

“Listen, Mr. Hoover,” Greenberg said. “Can’t we get one of those machines for use during the World Series?” Greenberg said he wanted to plant one in their opponents’ dugout. The mood was breezy. Hoover joked that Gehringer would make a good gangster. Gehringer probably didn’t mention that in 1931 while in Chicago he and several Tigers had visited Al Capone, a baseball fan, at his Lexington Hotel office.

At FBI headquarters the Tigers took target practice with Hoover. Cochrane handled the machine gun best, Goslin the pistol. The facilities impressed all of the men. “After getting an eyeful of the machinery they have for catching up with crooks, I can scarcely recommend a life of crime,” said Cochrane.

The day before Silas Coleman died the FBI had filed its first report on the Black Legion. It came from the Cleveland office and it identified Dr. Shepard as the legion founder and Effinger as its most prominent leader. It listed forty-five Lima, Ohio, members by name, among them the city’s police chief, and it put area membership at 3,000. The report included a copy of the oath and detailed the initiation ceremony. It conveyed that legion members took gun practice in Bowling Green and noted that Effinger had obtained dynamite. It also mentioned numerous rumors, everything from crimes (like the torching of two local roadhouses) to the existence of a hit list and the purported membership of a Cincinnati FBI agent. The report also hinted at a strong Detroit contingent that possibly controlled a machine gun company and a battalion in the National Guard. It also noted that “General Upps” (a misspelling of Arthur Lupp’s name) and “Ike White” were central figures. White, the agent added mistakenly, had “lost his leg in a gun battle with the Purple Gang.” Agent C. E. Smith produced the fourteen-page, single-spaced account, relying on interviews with postal inspector J. F. Cordrey and several former Black Legion members in Lima. The agent chose not to interrogate the one man whose name appeared throughout the document: Major-General Bert Effinger.

Cordrey, however, had recently been to Effinger’s house. He had interviewed him in his office. This was the same basement office in which Effinger reportedly kept a large yellow map that pinpointed the country’s secret fortifications. Cordrey found himself the target of one of Effinger’s attempts at intimidation. As they talked, Effinger received a call, reportedly from his own son, who ordered that Cordrey not “leave the house for a half hour.” Effinger relayed the message, hoping to rattle the inspector. Cordrey told him he would go whenever he wanted.

In a follow-up letter weeks later, Effinger accused six men of being associated with “the only registered communist in Allen County, Ohio.” Cordrey wasn’t fooled. He recognized four of the names. They were Effinger enemies. One was an employment officer who had investigated the group. Three were former legion members who had grown concerned that the organization was becoming revolutionary. They had been asked to commit crimes and refused. Two had worked to expose it. After leaving the legion, all had faced threats. On a winter evening one man found fifty carloads of legionnaires occupying the streets around his house. For protection he enlisted armed friends to stay with him. The man warned Effinger that should he or any of his friends be killed Effinger would be the next to die.

The postal inspector had been watching Effinger’s mail and logging return addresses. Effinger had recently received letters from throughout Ohio, Indiana, Louisiana, and Michigan. FBI agents in other jurisdictions followed up on the leads. In Detroit an agent went to one of the addresses, 15877 Indiana Avenue. It was “a modern two-family dwelling,” he observed. He asked a local postmaster to find out who resided there. Two men lived in the house, a Catholic in the lower flat and a Sweden-born, naturalized American citizen in the upper—or so the officer reported. This information was wrong. The agent or postmaster had gone to the wrong address, had been misled, or had supplied erroneous information. The brick home at 15877 Indiana housed state commander Arthur Lupp and his wife.

Hoover and the FBI were receiving other urgent notices about the group. A letter arrived mentioning the activities of a secret society in Indiana. The letter came from a police official with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company. He alerted Hoover that the terrorist organization met every Thursday night across the street from the Majestic Theatre in Fort Wayne. One meeting of two hundred men featured a speaker from Michigan who told them to arm themselves and be prepared to assemble with weapons and ammunition when commanded to do so. In such an event the order would be preceded by the code word “Lixto” (“Luxor” or “Sixto” at some meetings) and followed by a location where the group would mass. “This man derided both political parties, all fraternal organizations, and all churches,” the report said. Oh and he had a peg leg. The railroad executive identified the group as the Black Legion. “I assume that it is of interstate character,” he wrote Hoover, “and I thought you might be interested in its activities.” The author said he would help the FBI infiltrate the group if so desired.

The “Lixto” order was surfacing at many legion gatherings, most often related to what was being called “zero hour”—September 16, 1936. Officers were vague about what would happen on that day except that all legionnaires would respond armed and ready to fight—or else. “If you don’t go, you will be taken care of when we get back,” one officer said. Members were told to expect shooting, killing, and bombings.

Cochrane’s worries increased as Friday the Thirteenth neared. There were omens for those looking. In Philadelphia Schoolboy Rowe and Elden Auker stepped into a hotel elevator after dinner. The operator closed the gate. As the car was rising, its cable broke. The car began to plummet. It jolted the players as it plunged. Rowe heard it pass through two “safety dogs,” iron teeth designed to stop a runaway car, before it caught a third. They expected it to fall again but it didn’t. Rowe and Auker crawled out of the elevator. “I like to died,” said Rowe.

Two nights later on the train to Washington, Billy Rogell got hit in the eye, reportedly with a cube of sugar. It was supposedly thrown in the dining car by one of his teammates, whom no one would identify. Cochrane fumed. Rogell went hitless the next day and sat out the two games that followed. The Tigers lost two of three. Back in Detroit thirty men walked off the job while installing temporary World Series bleachers at the ballpark. Workers picketed the use of nonunion employees. Then came the assassination of Senator Huey Long, who had recently announced his support of the Tigers. It didn’t make the week feel any more charmed.