Terror in the City of Champions (47 page)

Others hinted at it. Senator Elmer Benson was among them. “No organization like the Black Legion of Detroit can operate for four or five years enrolling peace officers, prison guards and other men in public service unless the duly constituted authorities winked at their crimes or quietly acquiesced,” he said.

The Black Legion became a partisan political fireball. When Democratic Prosecutor McCrea’s membership card first appeared, Republican state officials quickly drew a hard line. State Attorney General David Crowley said that if McCrea took the legion oath he shouldn’t be prosecutor. Governor Frank Fitzgerald expressed doubt that McCrea could continue “as a public servant sworn to uphold the law.” Those condemnations from the top two state officials came within a day. Crowley also acknowledged rumors that two judges and a prominent politician were members. “I don’t care who they are or how influential they may be. If they are allied with the legion, they’ll be exposed,” he said.

But soon he shaded his statements. After conferring with the governor, Crowley announced it wouldn’t be enough for someone to have simply taken the Black Legion oath. “There probably would have to be an overt act on the part of a member,” he said. In a short time Crowley had gone from saying Black Legion membership made one unfit for office to contending that membership didn’t matter at all, just the crimes. This change did not go unnoticed. “The danger of uncovering ramifications of the legion in influential circles seems to have put a check upon the zeal that was at first manifest in the local investigation,” reported
Christian Century
.

Crowley’s assistant would be challenging McCrea in the fall election and he would have loved to drape McCrea in a legion cloak. But it became a dangerous tactic. Figures from his own party were more involved than McCrea had ever been. That became apparent when the Wolverine Republican League was revealed to be a front for the legion. Senate candidate Wilber Brucker had launched his campaign at one of its meetings. Attorney Harry Z. Marx and court clerk Leslie Black, both heavily involved, were Republicans. Former Highland Park mayor Markland, a legion member, had served on a key Republican party state committee. Further, the brother of the governor’s chief of staff was a member. Perhaps the governor and attorney general had also heard about Col. Pickert.

Prosecutor McCrea wasn’t about to allow himself to be the lone tainted public official. Two years earlier he had been at a large outdoor meeting where several legion-backed candidates spoke, all hoping for votes. Now he slyly flecked mud, saying that the suspects in custody were told by legion officers that high-ranking politicians would protect the organization. “They were told that I was a member of the Black Legion, that Sheriff Behrendt is a member, that Police Commissioner Pickert and other high police officials are members, and that Governor Fitzgerald, circuit and recorder’s court judges, and others prominent in public life are members.”

Without identifying anyone, police confirmed it. “We have had several big names linked with the legion, but are not announcing them without a thorough check,” said inspector John Hoffman. Among the many legion membership cards, detectives uncovered one signed by their boss, Col. Heinrich Pickert. But investigators did not divulge the information. If Hoffman made it sound as if names might be forthcoming, he soon doused those prospects. Without offering any evidence, Hoffman judged the prominent men innocent. A few weeks later Col. Pickert announced the August 8 promotion of Hoffman to chief inspector of detectives and of Navarre to assistant deputy chief of detectives. Mickey Farrell worked at a different agency, but for his silence about Pickert’s membership he secured a promotion for his brother, a Detroit cop.

By the end of 1936, Black Legion members had been sentenced in several cases prosecuted by Duncan McCrea. Twelve were convicted of first-degree or second-degree murder in the death of Charles Poole. Three of those men, as well as two others, received life sentences for the killing of Silas Coleman. Convictions followed in the plots against publisher Art Kingsley, Mayor Bill Voisine, and attorney Maurice Sugar, as well as in the flogging of Robert Penland. All resulted from Dayton Dean’s willingness to talk.

Another break in the case came in the winter when records surfaced showing that Peg-Leg White had traded in his vehicle to purchase a new car in Cumberland, Maryland. White had taken an alias, I. M. Stull. On December 16 police arrested him in Oldtown, an unincorporated village in northern Maryland. He had been living in a storage building. He was sick in bed waiting for a doctor when a detective arrived. White’s wife and four-year-old boy were with him. White had pneumonia. He was hospitalized and too ill to be interviewed, doctors said. Officers guarded his room. As a precaution, they confiscated his leg. The only statement he made was given to an Allegany County constable. White said he hadn’t communicated with Bert Effinger in seven months, not since Poole had died. “He said the orders for the death of Mr. Poole were not given by him,” wrote Constable R. Bucy. “He said the orders were given by a man higher than himself and that Mr. Effinger was not to be trusted.” White died on Sunday, December 20.

That left Effinger. James Blissell, editor of the
Lima News
, informed J. Edgar Hoover that the “same large grocery orders are being delivered” to Bert Effinger’s house in Lima, though Effinger, “a prodigious eater,” was supposedly not there. Hoover offered his usual response: The bureau has no authority in this matter. An investigator for the Michigan attorney general also asked the FBI to help apprehend Effinger. The attorney general feared that an attempt to remove him from Lima would result in bloodshed. Same answer. When Captain Marmon’s men visited Lima again, they heard rumors that Effinger wouldn’t be back until the trials in Michigan had concluded. Maybe the heat would be off by then.

In February 1937 the county prosecutor in charge of Lima sent Hoover photos of Effinger for use on wanted posters. “There is a great amount of rumor in this vicinity that members of the police department and high city officials are members of the Black Legion,” said Prosecutor Robert Jones. “The Black Legion is reputed to be so large in this section that one cannot hazard a guess as to whom might be depended upon.” Once more Hoover responded: Not our jurisdiction. Effinger stayed hidden for more than a year. In December 1937 he reemerged. A trial was scheduled for 1938 on the syndicalism and bomb charges. It was delayed several times. Finally, in May 1939, the prosecution said its witnesses had left the state, couldn’t be located, or were unwilling to testify. The case was dismissed. Effinger would never face trial. “They’re scared he’ll expose too many big shots—that’s why,” legion spy Fred Gulley told an FBI agent who questioned him in prison.

Labor, leftist, and civil rights activists would have loved most to prove that two of their fiercest enemies—the ardently anti-union Col. Pickert and hard-boiled Harry Bennett of Ford—were among the shadowy figures pulling Black Legion strings. Those who spoke with Bert Effinger had trouble accepting that he was the driving force behind an organization so large. He and founder Dr. Billy Shepard were, one observer noted, “small-town men with horizons that extend no farther than their front porches.”

Those who suspected a cover-up could ponder a tangled web of connections. There was the link between Col. Pickert and attorney Harry Z. Marx. There was Harry Bennett’s relationship with assorted officials, including Pickert, Mayor Couzens, and Judge Jim Chenot, the former Republican prosecutor who headed the one-man grand jury. There was Clyde Markland, brother of Mayor Markland, who served as Chenot’s clerk until his attendance at legion meetings became public and he was forced to resign. There was H. O. Weitschat, the governor’s general secretary who represented him before the grand jury; Weitschat’s brother had been a legion member. There was attorney Louis Colombo Jr., who was attached to the Chenot jury. His father represented Ford and knew Bennett well. “It is just possible that the reason why the Ford Motor Company was never linked with the Black Legion was that Ford’s attorney’s son was in this position,” wrote Maurice Sugar in his “Memorandum on the Black Legion.”

In 1979, forty-some years after the Black Legion had been dragged into the light, history professor Peter H. Amann interviewed one of the key figures in the investigation, sheriff’s department detective Mickey Farrell. Almost everyone else affiliated with the case had died by then. Farrell told Amann that for decades he kept a confidential, multipage list that contained 2,000 names of men whom local police had tied to the Black Legion. By the time Amann interviewed the deputy, Farrell had destroyed the list. Amann asked him whether a thorough investigation of the legion had been done.

“No, no, no, no,” Farrell said. “They had a lot of big wigs. . . . If they’d have really investigated it, there’d have been a lot of big timers with their heads off. . . . In fact, the commissioner of police, who was a very good friend of mine, he was hooked into it. A lot of other big ones, too.”

In May 1938, after most of the trials had been held, Captain Marmon was still trying to get the FBI to investigate. He thought he had found a way. He went to the Detroit office of the bureau and informed the agent in charge that Roy Pidcock had been killed en route to Canada’s Fighting Island. The agent reported to J. Edgar Hoover that Marmon had insisted “that the Detroit River was considered the high seas as far as federal jurisdiction is concerned, and that if this crime, as alleged, did occur as claimed, this would constitute a violation over which this bureau would have jurisdiction.”

Hoover asked the attorney general’s office for direction. It was decided that the U.S. attorney in Detroit should explore the issue. The attorney decided that a murder at high seas may have been committed and a probe should be initiated. This led to an FBI interview with Dayton Dean in prison in December 1938. Among the revelations: Dean told the agent that not only were Col. Pickert and Prosecutor McCrea members of the legion, but also that Governor Frank Fitzgerald and other high-ranking politicians had belonged. Dean also described what he had heard about the Pidcock killing. These details were included in a twenty-eight-page report, which also looked into whether the agency had jurisdiction. Local FBI agents felt they did and wanted to investigate. They sought permission from their director to conduct more interviews and they outlined a variety of leads to be followed up on by other bureau offices.

J. Edgar Hoover responded with a scathing letter. “The Bureau is unable to understand why your division should conduct any investigation with regard to the question of jurisdiction,” he wrote. He went on to point out minor discrepancies between the words of Captain Marmon and Dayton Dean and used them as justification to scuttle further interviews. There was no need, in other words, to speak with the men that Dean and others had identified as responsible for Pidcock’s death. Hoover said the probe should have been terminated at the first appearance of inconsistencies in the report of “Captain Marmon or his alleged informant, Dayton Dean.” For all practical purposes the letter quashed further investigation.