Art Kingsley, not long out of an Illinois college where he had been a football star, visited Highland Park, Michigan, in the early 1910s while working for Western Newspaper Union. He found a town that thanks to Henry Ford was booming. Kingsley, a short man who smoked aggressively, wanted to be part of it. He started a local paper, the News, and began building his future. Not long after, the Great War interrupted, temporarily derailing his dream. When he returned in 1919, Kingsley relaunched the publication, bought his competition (The Times), and merged the two into the Highland Parker.
An enclave literally surrounded by Detroit, Highland Park swelled in population between 1910 and 1920, increasing tenfold. Families flocked to the community, drawn by well-paying manufacturing jobs at Ford’s 120-acre Woodward Avenue complex. New Model Ts rolled off the assembly line in mesmerizing numbers, one every three minutes. In 1925, just blocks away Chrysler christened its new headquarters, close to the railroad lines, attracting even more residents to the bungalows and apartment complexes that lined leafy streets.
A lifelong bachelor, Kingsley devoted himself to his work. He relished his role as publisher and enjoyed the allegiance of employees who fondly called him The Boss. Every Thursday his newsboys blew their whistles as they delivered to subscribers. “The whistle means your paper is on the porch,” proclaimed the weekly’s tagline. As his Highland Parker grew, Kingsley—friends called him Art, but his byline, Arthur L. Kingsley, carried a more regal flair—became a powerful force in city politics, aggressively pursuing stories and ardently endorsing favored candidates and crusading against opponents. So strong was his newspaper that even those he mocked had to advertise on his pages.
Kingsley had known N. Ray Markland since 1928, when “Billy Ray,” as chums called him, became a city commissioner. He did not impress Kingsley. “He is not very smart,” he once wrote of the councilman. When Markland sought a promotion to mayor in 1932, Kingsley took aim with a barrage of ink-filled bombs. In a special “Edition of Progress” days before the election, he published two long front-page editorials against Markland, without ever mentioning his name. Politicians Cannot Muzzle This Newspaper read the banner headline. It charged that elected officials were dangling the city printing contract in exchange for endorsements. “Neither threats nor bribes can purchase our support,” he wrote. “Spinelessness does not happen to be our weakness.” Kingsley endorsed former judge James Ellmann for mayor, describing him as “vastly better equipped.” Kingsley noted that Markland had admitted he wasn’t a bright man, a statement the editor echoed in print. “His modest appraisal of his own mental equipment may be quite correct,” Kingsley wrote. Markland’s campaign ads, in fact, seemed to hint at such, touting no qualifications and highlighting mainly this promise: “I shall do what I think is right.” In public Markland referred to Ellman as “a damn Jew.” “Watch me take that hook out of his nose,” he said. Kingsley, a Catholic, chided Markland, saying his prejudice rendered him unfit “for any office in this democracy.” He added, “Intolerance of race or religion, or bigotry of belief, conclusively establish this fact always—whoever admits them, denies his own right to represent all races and all religions in the city government in any capacity. . . . We are peculiarly in a position to know the qualifications for office of the men now seeking election, and on the basis of our knowledge, we are urging the election of the one we consider immeasurably superior in every respect.”
Kingsley was not alone in his low opinion of Markland. A reporter for a Detroit daily also characterized him as “not an intellectual giant or a man of any marked brilliance.” A native of Indiana, Markland also could not be accused of being debonair in appearance. His meaty shoulders set off a jowly face that featured wild, wiry eyebrows, deep, asymmetrical eyes, and a smile flecked with gold teeth. Regardless, Markland had the secret support of the clandestine Black Legion, and Highland Park voters elected him mayor. The outcome wasn’t so much a rousing endorsement as a judgment against the faith of his Jewish opponent.
The election did not end the war between Kingsley and Markland. When Mayor Markland ousted several department heads, Kingsley ran their photos with the notation: “Sacrificed at the altar of political ambition.” Throughout Markland’s term, Kingsley took aim, blasting him relentlessly for a bond deal that cost the city $19,000. “I have always been critical of the city fathers when I thought they were not competent,” said Kingsley. For good measure he added that Markland lacked “the ability to be mayor of any city.”
After a year in office, Markland had weathered all the criticism he could handle and began to plot more elaborately against Kingsley. One day he got a supporter to arrest Kingsley and editor Curtis Swanwick on a charge of criminal libel. They were held in the county jail for a few hours before a judge released them. Another time Markland confronted Kingsley at a meeting and snarled a vague threat. He promised to get him. Kingsley, accustomed to such warnings, took it to mean that Markland would get him politically, but Markland had other ideas. He wanted Kingsley out of the way. Permanently.
The Black Legion—called the Bullet or Malekta Club in Highland Park—wielded significant municipal power. Numerous city figures and their followers belonged, including a councilman, police officers, and fire officials. Their biases spread along a spiteful scale from serious (attempts to block blacks from moving into neighborhoods) to silly (qualms about renaming Six Mile Road for Father John McNichols, the late Jesuit president of the nearby University of Detroit). Mayor Markland, a central figure in the local legion, turned to his friends for help in dealing with the troublemaking editor. Among them was Black Legion state commander Arthur F. Lupp.
When legion leaders wanted action, they filtered their orders down through their military-style ranks, reminding members of the life-and-death pledges they had made to fulfill their assignments. Lower-level members got “picked” to handle the dirtiest work. In July 1933 at his cottage at Lake Orion, thirty miles outside of Detroit, Markland assigned Gordon Smith to bump off Kingsley, promising him a job with the city fire department if he succeeded. Later Lupp gave Smith a .45-caliber army pistol. Another man handed him fifty dollars to help with expenses. Smith used the money to rent a room under the alias Willis Hudson at a small hotel not far from where Kingsley lived. While Smith had completed some assignments for the legion—infiltrating a communist group, for example—he drew an unspoken line at murder. He had no intention of killing Kingsley. Eventually Lupp got wise to him and told him it would be his own fault if he got shot “through a window with a rifle that had a silencer attached.”
Somebody else would have to do the job. On a chilly evening Col. Roy Hepner, a metal finisher by day, took Dayton Dean and several other legionnaires to a field north of Eight Mile Road. There the men entered into a pact. Each cut his hand, dipped a matchstick in his own blood, and signed his name to paper. They resolved to do as told, whatever the assignment. It was a test of their commitment, an attempt to flush out the squeamish. They all signed and on the drive back Hepner revealed that publisher Art Kingsley needed to die and that Dean must do the job. The others were tasked with ensuring that he did.
Dean received a blackjack from Markland and a pistol from Lupp. He built a compartment in the floor of his car to conceal the weapons. He had never seen Kingsley and did not know him by sight. It fell to a fire department captain to point out the journalist to Dean while sitting with him in a restaurant between Kingsley’s apartment and office. Kingsley lived in a third-floor unit about a block from the Woodward Avenue home of the Highland Parker, which stood next to Sievert’s Radio Store and across from Koslow’s Grocer and Manufacturers National Bank. While waiting for Kingsley, the fire captain ordered himself a meal. He got Dean just a glass of milk. (Such rudeness would not be forgotten.) Kingsley entered the diner and sat three tables over.
“There’s your man,” the fire official said quietly. “Look him over good.”
In the weeks that followed, Dean waited for Kingsley outside his apartment, near his office, and in the restaurant. The circumstances were never quite right and the publisher always managed to slip away. Lupp and Markland tired of the delays. They reminded Dean that three men had been assigned to kill him should he let them down. At a Black Legion meeting they chastised Dean for his failures. They also discussed a variety of new approaches. They could try to lure Kingsley on a hunting trip and Dean could kill him en route. Or Dean could tail Kingsley to Lefty Clark’s gambling establishment and shoot him when he exited. (Kingsley had a fondness for cards and craps.) Or Dean could join the local American Legion, in which Kingsley was active, to get a better sense of his comings and goings. Easily manipulated, Dean admitted that he had failed and promised to do better.
With money provided by his superiors, Dean began attending American Legion meetings. He asked fellow veterans about Kingsley. What he heard intrigued him. They all respected the man. They described him as one of the post’s finest, and they applauded his efforts to help veterans. A Navy man himself, Dean liked what he heard. During Christmas week, days after Mickey Cochrane had become the Tigers’ manager, Dean and another man were following Kingsley. They pulled alongside his car near Woodward Avenue. Dean had a clear shot but didn’t take it, claiming that he was too close to the main thoroughfare and might hit an innocent person. The driver was furious.
Two Highland Park police officers, also legion members, were drawn into the Kingsley plot. Dean met with them in a patrol car near the railroad tracks. They told him that after he killed Kingsley they would help him escape the city limits. In truth they had orders of their own: to shoot Dean as he fled. Doing so meant that Kingsley would be dead, the assassin killed, and the cops glorified. The plan fizzled when Dean skipped the follow-up meeting.
On another evening Dean and two companions drove to Kingsley’s place and waited for him to exit. Kingsley noticed their car and pointed it out to friends. He was aware someone had been following him. It was an effort to scare him, he figured. He had made a habit of always checking his rearview mirror and maneuvering onto side streets to gauge whether he was being shadowed. Dean and company chased Kingsley that winter night as snow glistened in the streetlights. Given the presence of other Black Legion members, Dean knew that if they got close he would have to shoot Kingsley or be shot. For six miles—through the streets of Highland Park and into Detroit—Dean and company tailed the publisher. They nearly caught him, but Kingsley turned abruptly and blew through traffic lights. He owned a new car and it was faster than theirs. The pursuit lasted fifteen minutes. A few blocks from Detroit’s mammoth Masonic Temple, Kingsley lost the legionnaires.
Through the winter and into the spring of 1934, Dean hosted small Black Legion initiations in his home. He wore his gun in a holster around his waist and kept a suitcase with rawhide whips and nooses under his bed. He borrowed chairs from a local undertaker, sometimes two dozen, sometimes fifty, and set them up in the basement. Before the men began arriving at night through a side door, Dean’s wife would leave the house. If their four children—her two and his two—hadn’t fallen asleep, she would take them with her, returning only after the men had left, usually around midnight. The Black Legion had become a daily affair for Dean.
As the spring 1934 vote approached in Highland Park, with Kingsley still hammering Mayor Markland in print, a fake newspaper appeared with a special pre-election issue. Banner headlines crowded its pages. Rather than targeting Markland’s opponent, it took aim at publisher Kingsley. Shall ‘Dictator’ Kingsley Run Highland Park? Will Kingsley Rule Here? Stories referred to him as Boss Kingsley and Czar Kingsley and compared him to Mussolini and Hitler.
Mayor Markland and the Black Legion lost the election on April 5, 1934, to Joseph “Honest Joe” Hackett, whom Kingsley had endorsed. In the days after, Arlington Jones, a city employee, came to Kingsley with a bizarre story. He told him how he had been tricked into joining a secret society, enticed to a meeting by word that a black family was moving onto a nearby street. He said he had been forced to take an oath at gunpoint. He now feared he would be killed. After his initiation Jones had told an acquaintance that he didn’t like the group and wanted no part of it. Mayor Markland and others had heard and confronted him. They had warned that he would face serious trouble if he didn’t keep his mouth shut. Jones told Kingsley all of this and recalled parts of the Black Oath, the threats of floggings and murder, and the evil things happening within the group.
Kingsley found the story unbelievable but shared it with the new mayor. He thought it inconceivable that anyone in their city would resort to murder over politics. Still, he told Jones to report it to the office of county prosecutor Duncan McCrea. He did. But no one there was interested. Jones went to the Detroit bureau of the Federal Department of Justice. Agents viewed his story as a bag of mumbo jumbo. No one believed “Little Arly” Jones. They wondered if he had been hallucinating. Agents directed Jones to file a complaint with the Highland Park Police. Weeks earlier, Jones had spotted Highland Park cops at a Black Legion gathering in the basement of a church, two blocks behind Mickey Cochrane’s apartment. The cops belonged to the secret society. He knew better than to complain to them. So he let it go.
Not long after his defeat, former mayor Markland found work as an investigator—for Prosecutor Duncan McCrea.