Terror in the City of Champions (3 page)

If Cochrane had stayed the night, he could have taxied over to the Naval Armory, where twenty-eight amateur boxers were fighting in a charity exhibition benefitting poor children. Among the ten local winners was a little-known Detroit Golden Gloves champion, nineteen-year-old Joe Louis Barrow, who knocked out Chris Schussler of Chicago in two rounds. If Cochrane had stayed two additional nights, he would have been in town when the governor signed away Prohibition, allowing Detroiters to legally party publicly for the first time in thirteen years. The celebration jammed bars and flowed into the streets. The city exploded in revelry, a fitting toast to a promising weekend. Harbingers of brighter days abounded.

For some, anyway.

Before the market crash Detroit had been booming. Between 1910 and 1929 it had added one million residents, catapulting past Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Boston, St. Louis, and Cleveland to become the nation’s fourth-largest city. Ornate skyscrapers exploded into the sky. The Fisher Building with its three-story marble hall opened along Grand Boulevard near General Motors headquarters. The salmon-colored, elaborately tiled Union-Guardian debuted closer to the waterfront months after the mountainous Penobscot, then the tallest building outside New York or Chicago.

Workers erected a soaring suspension bridge to connect Detroit to Windsor, Ontario, and drilled an international tunnel beneath the Detroit River. The opulent 5,000-seat Fox Theatre debuted, along with Olympia Arena, home to the city’s hockey team. These buildings were preceded by the Institute of Arts on Woodward Avenue, across from the main branch of the public library, onto which the names of thinkers—Plato, Aristotle, Justinian, Archimedes—had been chiseled.

Detroit was awash in money. It adopted “Detroit the Dynamic” as its nickname. The auto industry propelled the prosperity and residents embraced it as their own. Car companies weren’t faceless entities. They carried the names of entrepreneurs whose lives and deaths, marriages and divorces, successes and failures, unfolded on the pages of newspapers and magazines. There was Henry Ford, of course, but also Ransom Olds, James Packard, David Dunbar Buick, Walter Chrysler, Louis Chevrolet, and brothers Horace and John Dodge.

“Why Detroit?” asked Bingay of the
Free Press
. “That question has been asked throughout the world for the past twenty-five years. . . . Chicago was inevitable. Chicago grew like a callous on a hand. . . . Detroit was unique. . . . Word swept over America about a new strange thing that was happening. . . . A group of Detroiters were making wagons that could run without horses.”

Automotive jobs drew tens of thousands to the city. Newcomers came from other parts of Michigan and the Midwest, from throughout the country. “In the South they had labor trains bringing people north,” recalled one Alabama native. Immigrants came from Europe. Between 1920 and 1930 Detroit’s population not only added more than half a million people, rising to 1.5 million, its mix changed substantially. Fewer than 60 percent of Michigan residents had been born in the state. Eighteen percent had come from another country, 9 percent from Ohio or the South. Blacks accounted for more than 7 percent and their presence was growing. In ten years the black population had tripled to 120,000. The result of this broad influx was a city divided by ethnicity, faith, race, economics, political beliefs, and complicated allegiances. When the Depression hit, those divisions grew sharper. Detroit was a cauldron. “It is a city of strangers,” observed writer Forrest Davis. And then the market crashed and the taloned beast of the Great Depression grabbed hold of the great city.

On a visit novelist John Dos Passos found thousands of jobless men living on the streets and in parks, fretting over their futures, debating the right paths, and pondering revolt amid men hawking copies of the
Labor Defender
. “They are everywhere, all over the vast unfinished city, the more thrifty living in shacks and shelters along the waterfront, in the back rooms of unoccupied houses, the others just sleeping any place . . . ,” he wrote. “In the evening they stroll up and down Woodward Avenue and look at the posters on the all-night movies and cluster around medicine shows and speakers in back lots where you hear the almost forgotten names of old-time labor parties like the Proletarian Party and the Socialist Labor Party.”

Mickey Cochrane moved his family into the Walbri Court Apartments in northern Detroit. His three-bedroom unit was one of seventeen in a five-story complex built by Tigers co-owner Walter O. Briggs. Much earlier, when he was a young father, Briggs had been unable to find an apartment that allowed children. He vowed to someday construct a building that would welcome families. Walbri was born, the name a contorted contraction of his own. The Cochranes and their two children occupied apartment number five. Walter Briggs’s twenty-two-year-old son, Spike, was in number ten.

The area was lovely. Across the street lay the three-hundred-acre Palmer Park with ponds, a fountain, tennis courts, a public golf course, and an historic log cabin where Senator Thomas Palmer and his family had summered. Verdant and uplifting, the park had become a destination, anchoring an affluent section of the city. To its west was Detroit Golf Club, with private grounds bordered by sprawling houses. To its north sat Palmer Woods, one of the two addresses—the other being Boston-Edison—preferred by city and industry leaders. Palmer Woods counted among its residents Senator James Couzens, Kresge president Charles Van Dusen, two of the Fisher Body brothers, future GM president William Knudsen, Briggs’s brother Mirt, and Roman Catholic bishop Michael Gallagher, the Detroit diocese head who lived in the city’s largest dwelling, a donated 39,000-square-foot, sixty-two-room mansion. (Joseph Burnstein, one of the founding brothers of the criminal Purple Gang, also lived in the neighborhood in a lovely English Tudor home with awnings emblazoned with the letter “B.”)

For all its prestige, Palmer Woods stood across Woodward Avenue and about three-quarters of a mile from a plain, nameless, working-class area. It was there Dayton Dean lived. Dean, thirty-three, rented a place along State Fair Road with his common-law wife, Margaret O’Rourke, her two adolescent daughters, and his two children by his first wife, Geneva and Bobby. Dean and O’Rourke had been together nearly a decade. Born in Vassar in the thumb area of Michigan, he had lived in Detroit since the age of eight, moving to the city after his father died and his mother married Clarence Nacker. Dean left school early, labored as an office boy for the Electric Light Company, and bounced between physically demanding jobs before and after joining the Navy during the Great War. He liked to tell drinking buddies how in July 1919 during the Washington, D.C., race riots he and several sailors on patrol obeyed an officer’s directive and opened fire on a group of blacks. “We shot them down. Quite a few of them.” It wasn’t the targeting of the blacks that filled Dean with pride. The racial aspect was secondary. Dean liked the notion that he was a good soldier, a man who could be depended upon. “I always obey orders,” he said.

Dean had worked for Packard, Ford, and Briggs Manufacturing before settling into a job with the Detroit Public Lighting Commission. He wrapped pipes in asbestos and considered himself the city’s best at it. For a while he belonged to the National Guard and the Orangemen, a Protestant fraternal organization. Many nights you could find him smoking oversized cigars—he loved big cigars—and drinking beer at the Blinking Eye on John R Road. The bar was just beyond the railroad tracks amid cinderblock machine shops and plumbing, auto-parts, and lumber stores.

Dean was stocky at five-eight and round-faced, like actor Edward G. Robinson, but with a wide, flat forehead. Some described him as dim-witted, with the intellect of an eleven-year-old. He had his qualities though. He had always been good with guns. He liked to sit on his back porch taking his weapons apart, oiling them, and reassembling them. He could also muster charm with the ladies, some of whom were susceptible to his twinkly eyes and broad, white, straight-toothed smile. He owned a superb memory too. Years on, he could recall details of mundane moments, faces, names, locations, peculiar traits, and makes of cars.

In March 1933, nine months before Mickey Cochrane stormed into town, Whitney Fleming, one of Dean’s co-workers at the lighting commission, asked him if he’d like to join a political organization similar to the Ku Klux Klan. The idea intrigued Dean. He and Fleming, fifty-one, had belonged to the Klan years earlier, and Dean had enjoyed his time as a member. In the 1920s the Klan flourished throughout Detroit. An estimated 30,000 people belonged. In an intimidating show of force, Klan supporters gathered on Christmas Eve 1923 to burn a cross on city hall grounds. More substantially, they nearly elected their candidate mayor of Detroit in 1924. By the end of the decade, the Klan itself had faded but the sentiments it evoked remained.

One evening not long after the invitation, Fleming and three other men picked up Dayton Dean at his home. The five headed north on Van Dyke Avenue to Washington Township, a rural community twenty miles outside the city. Lights from occasional homes interrupted the darkness. It was late in the evening and their car’s headlamps striped the road and illuminated the budding trees as they drove. Soon they spotted a red signal flashing across the night landscape of a secluded field. As they approached, a band of guards waved them deeper into the woods. They parked and walked farther yet. Along with several other men, Dayton Dean was about to begin his initiation into an organization that would alter his life—an organization he knew nothing about.

It started innocuously enough with the signing of cards labeled “insurance prospect.” The cards served as a decoy. If discovered, they could not possibly be incriminating, the organizers felt. Each man recorded his name, address, phone number, car make, and occupation. Questions followed: Are you native-born? White? Protestant? An American citizen? Dean was informed he was joining a secret militaristic group that some viewed as outlawed. Guards searched him and the others for weapons and then administered a preliminary oath. Dean promised to never reveal anything about the organization. “If I should fail in keeping of this, my oath, may the fearful punishment of the Black Knights be meted out to me,” he repeated. “The punishment is death.”

The mood grew even more serious when the guards ushered Dean and the other recruits toward a grove of trees, where a throng of black-robed men waited with guns. Dean could see their eyes through the holes in their hoods. He didn’t recognize any of them. The high-ranking officers wore capes with gold trim. One man walked with a halting limp. Until that moment, Dean had never heard of the Black Legion. Few people other than its members had, and some of them knew it by other names: Black Knights, Black Guards, Bullet Club, Night Riders, Malekta Club, or United Brotherhood of America. Dean was about to join a brutal secret society with tens of thousands of members spread across several states.

The robed men interrogated each recruit at length. Dean was asked his name, age, religion, and whether he could ride a horse, fire a rifle, and drive a car. (He could do it all.) As a member, he would need to acquire a gun; Dean already had one. But for those who didn’t, the legion had connections in city and county offices. Recruits were lectured about the legion’s “chivalry and daring.” They heard a lengthy diatribe against blacks, Catholics, Jews, immigrants, anarchists, and communists.

“At the present time, neither of the two great political parties stands for the liberties and privileges that the founders of this country intended us to enjoy,” said an officer. Another series of questions followed, each ratcheting up the inductees’ level of commitment: “Will you take an order and go to your death if necessary to carry it out? . . . Will you accept for your roof, the sky; your bed, the earth; and your reward, death? . . . You may be required to perform some duty on a higher plane other than the routine night riding. This would require a blood pact. Are you willing to sign your name in your own blood?”