COWBOYS AND INDIANS
What you read in the papers about Detroit is not inviting. The two dailies, the News and the Free Press, relentlessly chronicle the events in America’s most violent city. Shortly after I arrived in town, they published the FBI’s crime statistics for 1987, a compilation that showed Detroit once again leading the nation’s major cities in homicide.
According to the FBI, there were 686 homicides in Detroit in 1987—almost 63 per 100,000. (Since then, the rate has declined slightly, and Washington has become the nation’s leader.) Atlanta, second among major cities, averaged 48 per 100,000. Highland Park, a tiny enclave entirely surrounded by Detroit, led all cities, large and small, with a murder rate even higher than the Motor City’s. And Pontiac, my old hometown, had the highest number of rapes per capita in the United States.
The papers also published charts showing Detroit’s homicide rate over the previous eight years. During that time, the city averaged 47 per 100,000—almost 50 percent more than second-place Dallas.
Since I was about to embark on a long journey into the city, I viewed these numbers with more than passing alarm. The one reassuring note was the contention of some law enforcement officials that most of the murders were underworld or family-related. I had no gang connections, and (as far as I knew) no outraged relatives, so I felt relatively safe—until Tom Delisle explained the local accounting system.
“Back in the early seventies, when I worked for Mayor Gribbs,” he told me, “we had more meetings on how to get rid of the Murder City tag than how to stop the murders. In those days, the big PR thing was, ‘It’s an in-family problem; it’s not generally dangerous.’ I was there when that bullshit was invented. To this day, people still quote it; it’s a real pacifier.”
According to current Detroit police statistics, approximately half of all murder victims knew their killers; but even if this is the case, there is still plenty of random slaughter. While I was there I heard reports of women caught in the cross fire of rival drug gangs, little girls raped walking to school in the morning, kids assaulted on their way to evening church services, teenage boys shot and killed on buses or at the movies and tiny children struck by bullets from careless drive-by gunmen. These stories carried a clear message: The police had lost control of the city.
I asked a reporter who spends a lot of time in Detroit if things were really as dangerous as they seemed in the media. “Are you kidding?” he said. “They’re worse.” And he took me to meet John Aboud.
Aboud and his two brothers own and operate a small grocery store, the Tailwind Party Store, on the lower east side, in one of the city’s toughest neighborhoods. Aboud was born in Detroit, in 1956; his parents, Iraqi Christians known as Chaldeans, came to the city from a village not too far from Baghdad.
The Detroit area has the largest Arab population in the United States, estimated at anywhere from 80,000 to 250,000. Since 1967, Syrians, Palestinians and, especially, Chaldeans (who often do not consider themselves Arabs but are generally regarded as members of the Arab community by outsiders) have replaced the Jews and other white ethnics as the city’s shopkeepers.
It was a transition I had seen in my own family. After my grandfather was murdered in 1960, my uncle Jack reopened the store. Going in every morning was painful, especially for my aunt Ruth, who was never able to see a new customer without wondering ‘Is he the one?’ But they were working people, the store was their livelihood, and so they stayed on.
Despite my grandfather’s death, Jack and Ruth did their best to maintain good customer relations. They supplied local softball teams with soft drinks, donated turkeys to church suppers and gave after-school jobs to their customers’ kids. They probably weren’t beloved figures—white grocers in black neighborhoods seldom are. But they were friendly and fair and they had a loyal, mostly black, clientele.
Early on a Sunday morning in July 1967, Jack got a call from a customer. “You better get down here,” the man said. “All hell’s breaking loose.” By the time he arrived, the store had been looted. “They took everything except some ‘yortzeit’ candles and a few boxes of matzohs,” he said. Within a few hours, Jack Fine was out of business.
There was no point in trying to reopen the store; the 1967 riot made it clear that white merchants were no longer welcome in Detroit. Jack offered the place to a young black man named Donny who had worked for him as a teenager. He asked only a few thousand dollars for the building and whatever goodwill he had accumulated over the years. Jack promised to work with Donny for six months, until he learned the business. He made the offer because he liked Donny, and because he had nothing better to do.
Donny wanted to buy the store, but he had no cash. Jack and Ruth went to the Urban League and explained the situation. Officials there listened unsympathetically. They had no money to loan, no help to give. “If you want to sell your business to this young man, why don’t you loan him the money to buy it,” they said.
Jack Fine sold the store to a Syrian family that promptly installed bulletproof glass and put weapons behind the counter, and the same process repeated itself all over town. Today, roughly 70 percent of the neighborhood grocery stores in Detroit are owned by Arab-Americans and Chaldeans.
These merchants, known locally as A-rabs, are enormously unpopular in the black community. Their control of the city’s petty commerce is a rebuke to blacks, who have been unable or unwilling to set up their own stores. It is generally believed that the Arabs came to America with large sums of money, but this isn’t true. Most of them arrived with very little, worked like demons to save money and, after the 1967 riot, bought businesses at fire sale rates.
Even today it costs only $60,000 to open a grocery store in Detroit—not an astronomical sum by any means. Many blacks say that it is hard for them to borrow that much from banks or other financial institutions. Arabs, with their tradition of family solidarity, don’t have a similar credit problem; well-established relatives usually help new arrivals to go into business on their own.
Relations between blacks and Arabs are often tense. “They exploit us,” said Robert Walls, a senior official in the city’s Neighborhood Services Department. We were sitting in his office one day with his boss, Cassandra Smith-Gray, and George Gaines, the deputy director of public health, talking about the lack of black commerce in the city. When the subject of Arab merchants arose, the conversation turned angry.
“Let me tell you about overcharging,” said Gaines. “They operate on pure greed.”
“It is greed,” said Smith-Gray. “And it’s the way they act toward us. You can go into some stores where kids have to walk with their hands at their sides”—presumably an antishoplifting measure.
“Or, only one child at a time is allowed in,” Gaines added. “If there’s another riot in Detroit, it will be against the Chaldeans.”
No one challenged the prediction. “They came here with assumptions about blacks,” said Smith-Gray angrily. “I have been here since 1754. How dare they make assumptions about me? Their stores smell, too. I don’t like ’em. That’s my right.…”
But like all the coins in Detroit, this one has another side. Since 1960, roughly one hundred Arab and Chaldean merchants have been murdered in their stores. Six of them were related to John Aboud.
In April, Aboud, a man in his early thirties with hard brown eyes, a soft voice and a weight lifter’s torso, attended a mass commemorating the fallen shopkeepers at the Chaldean Mother of God Cathedral. There were speeches about gun control and prayers for the souls of the departed. A special booklet, with pictures of more than forty slain merchants, was distributed. Many were wedding photos of young men dressed in frilly shirts and tuxedos, sporting tentative mustaches and blow-dried haircuts.
Johnny Aziz’s picture was not in the book. A second cousin of Aboud’s, he was murdered coming out of his store not long after the memorial mass. Someone ambushed him in his parking lot, stole his cash and left twenty-two bullet holes in his body.
“Johnny was a weight lifter,” said Aboud. “He walked into the emergency room himself. He died there. His older brother was shot and stabbed this year, too, on Christmas Eve.” Aboud’s voice choked with emotion, and he ran a callused hand over his face. “You may not believe this, but right now my family is involved in three separate murder trials.”
Family is the most important thing in John Aboud’s life. He and his brothers had just bought a second store, in the suburbs, and they split the work, each putting in about one hundred hours a week. “Nobody does anything out of the family,” he said. “We are all in partnership or no one is. One pocket, one heart.” Aboud is still single, but he hopes to get married soon. In the meantime he works and saves for his nieces and nephews, and to build something for his unborn children and grandchildren.
“I haven’t had a day off in two years, and I haven’t wanted one,” he said. “Why do I do it? To please my family.”
The members of Aboud’s family take care of one another. Every night at 10:45, just before closing time, Aboud’s father calls. He always has the same message—“Watch yourself,” a Chaldean warning. At precisely eleven, the brothers take their money home. “We have the same ritual every night,” Aboud told me in a matter-of-fact tone. “Just before going out we say, ‘Eyes open,’ and then the lead man goes out with a weapon and scans the street. If things are clear, the others follow with drawn weapons. There’s no talking—it’s done that way. You get careless, you get burned.”
His cousin Johnny was murdered because he didn’t take precautions. “Johnny was a good kid, a gem,” said Aboud. “He was closing the store by himself, at two in the morning. He didn’t have help and he was scared. Four days before he was killed, he asked us to find someone to help him close.” He shook his head. Detroit after dark is no place for a single man to be with a bag full of money.
In their years at the Tailwind, the Aboud brothers have never been held up—a record that Aboud attributes to the family’s honest business practices and its militance. “When we caught shoplifters we never used to call the cops,” said Aboud, preferring the past tense. “We took care of things in our own way. If somebody killed my brother, I’d get even, that’s the type of family we are. People who think we’re crazy are right—we are crazy. But we don’t look for trouble. We’ve got a friendly store. Come over any night and you’ll see.”
The following Friday I took him up on his offer. After all the horror stories I had heard, I was surprised by the relaxed atmosphere in the Tailwind. Customers, mostly black, bantered with Aboud and his brother Mike, exchanging neighborhood gossip. John Aboud flirted amiably with several of the young women and they flirted back. Over the cash register there were snapshots of kids from the block.
After each customer left, Aboud provided me with a thumbnail biography. Some were solid working people, but many were drug addicts or dealers, teenage mothers and ex-cons. Each story was told in a flat, nonjudgmental way. Aboud is a merchant, not a missionary, and he accepts the foibles and weaknesses of human nature philosophically.
Aboud’s tolerance has not impaired his vigilance, however, and the Tailwind’s security system could be fairly characterized as forbidding. The front door has a permanent squeak, to let the brothers know when someone comes in. They work behind a thick shield of bullet-resistant glass (Aboud told me that when they come out from behind it, they wear bulletproof vests) and on the shelf behind the counter there was a small arsenal: a .44 Magnum, a 9-millimeter pistol, and a couple of AR 15 semiautomatic assault rifles—tools of the shopkeeper’s trade in Detroit.
In addition to the guns, Aboud spends hours keeping himself in fighting trim. “I know karate and I do body building,” he said. “I do these things to protect my store. You have to act like it’s a war zone. A stranger walks in, you have to stand up straight and not turn your back. You can’t show an ounce of fear. If you do, they’ll eat you up, you’ll be a meal. The main thing is respect.”
Friday nights are especially busy at the Tailwind, and John Aboud and Mike waited on a steady stream of customers buying bread and lunch meat, beer, soft drinks and other weekend staples. During the week, when things are quieter, they go downstairs into the basement and take target practice in a makeshift pistol range. Their current target was the face of Mike Ditka on a Lite Beer poster. They had nothing against the Chicago Bears coach; the targets change with the posters.
“When my brother was eighteen he got his first Magnum,” said John, in a tone that some people use referring to their first bicycle. “Know what he did? He shot out the furnace.” Aboud laughed, a soft, melodic sound.
The basement serves a less sporting purpose, too; it is where the brothers take shoplifters. “We handcuff them to this,” he said, pointing to a metal post. Legend has it that years ago, on the other side of the room, on a chain-link leash, was the family Doberman, Taza (“tender” in Chaldean Arabic). When extended, the leash let Taza come within inches of the genitals of the defendant. After a few charges, thieves usually got the point. “At the end of the evening we come down, beat their ass and send them home,” said Aboud.
One of Aboud’s hobbies is monitoring the police radio. That night we heard a weekend crackle of announcements—shootings, break-ins and other assorted crimes and misdemeanors. Aboud didn’t seem to be listening, but suddenly he held up his hand for silence. Together we heard the report of a holdup at a nearby grocery store.
Aboud responded like a Chaldean minuteman. He dashed from behind the counter, jumped into a van parked outside and headed for the scene of the crime. As we raced through the ruined streets of the east side it crossed my mind that if anything happened, my friends in Tel Aviv would never believe that I was killed trying to protect an Arab grocer.
To my profound relief, it proved to be a false alarm. Aboud turned the van in the direction of the Tailwind and drove with adrenaline-fueled speed back toward the store. We hadn’t gone more than a few blocks before spotting an agitated crowd of kids on the front lawn of a ramshackle house.
Aboud pulled over. As we got out, we saw a fourteen-year-old boy lying on the grass, oozing blood from a knife wound in his chest. A friend held his head in his arms and moaned softly, “Don’t die, Matthew, don’t die now baby,” but the stabbed boy didn’t respond. Neighbors on either side of the house stood on their porches and watched the scene with dismay. In the distance, we heard the sound of an ambulance siren. Within a minute or so it arrived, and the stretcher bearers took the boy away. “God damn this city sometimes,” Aboud said.
When we returned to the store, John told his brother Mike and their helper, Danny Boy, about the incident.
“This isn’t even a jungle, it’s barbaric,” said Mike, shaking his head sadly. He studied criminal law at Wayne State University and is considered the bleeding heart of the family. Less physically prepossessing than his older brother, he has a gentle face and a courteous manner. It isn’t easy to picture him shooting a Magnum or cuffing a shoplifter to a post. But on the lower east side, people do what they need to do.
“Yeah, it’s rough down here all right,” said Danny Boy, a pimply, pudgy white teenager who lives in the neighborhood. He took out a Samurai switchblade and pounded it in his palm, looking at Aboud, his macho role model, for approval.
“Still, I ain’t never had no trouble,” he continued. “People don’t mess with me. One reason is, I can talk like a white guy or a black guy.” He demonstrated his black accent, which sounded the same as his white one, with an added “man” here and there.
“No trouble? How about the bullets they shot into your living room?” Aboud reminded him. Danny Boy shrugged. “That was only some stray shots,” he said. “Hell, it was no big deal.”
Danny Boy is a Catholic, and he was anxious to talk about a parochial school that had closed, a church that had shut down, people who had moved away. “This used to be a real fine parish,” he said. “We had parks, a movie house, it was nice. You could walk around and nobody would bother you. It was great.”
“Can you remember all that?” I asked.
“Naw, not really, but my dad told me about it, about the way it was,” he said. At sixteen, Danny Boy already had a vicarious case of the white man’s malady, nostalgia.
The Abouds are less emotional. They live in the suburbs; to them, Detroit is a place to make money. This has given them a certain detachment regarding the city and the complaints of the blacks against their fellow Middle Eastern merchants.
“Go around and see other stores, a lot of them are filthy,” said Mike. “They treat their customers bad, call them ‘nigger’ and ‘bitch.’ That’s not right. A man may be a crackhead or a stone killer, but you should be respectful. He may not have as much as you, but he’s still a man. At least he’s a man.”
“That’s right,” said John. “If we ever sell this store, I’ll always come back to visit these guys. People come in here in their party times, their sad times. You see people in their moods.”
“Somebody said that if there is another riot in Detroit, it will be against the Chaldeans,” I said.
John Aboud thought about that for a moment. “A riot against us?” he said pensively. “Well, it’ll be a good war. They’ll be going up against some good warriors. Nobody’s taking anything from my family.”
In John Aboud’s defense strategy, the police play virtually no role. Coleman Young’s first priority as mayor had been to tame the city’s racist, violent police department. Nowadays, Detroit has the country’s most integrated force: more than half of its senior officers are black. But some people feel that the department has gone too far in a dovish direction.
Not surprisingly, chief William Hart disagrees. Hart is a quiet man in late middle age who collects police caps from around the world and runs his department according to the liberal principles of his boss, the mayor. “This is a gentle police force,” he told me when we met at his office, a spacious room decorated with plaques and awards from community groups, police pennants and bric-a-brac bestowed by visiting law enforcement delegations. “We are public servants. We can’t enforce the law by being unlawful. It just don’t happen here.”
When William Hart joined the police, in the fifties, he was one of only a handful of black cops, whose duties consisted of helping to patrol black neighborhoods. When he was named chief by Coleman Young, the appointment took everyone, including him, by surprise.
“I can remember when they made Hart chief of police,” said Fred Williams, the police spokesman. Williams, like Hart, is a black cop; they used to be partners. “After the ceremony we came to my place and talked, and I said, ‘Man, do you realize that you are the chief of po-lice?’ And Hart said, ‘It’s no big thing.’
“Then the next day I got a call to come to his office. I walked in and he was sitting behind that big desk, and he looked at me and said, ‘Fred, do you realize that I am the chief of all this here crap?’ It took him that long for it to sink in.”
Hart’s critics say it hasn’t sunk in yet. His gentle approach to law enforcement seems oddly inappropriate in the nation’s most lethal city; sometimes, it appears to border on impotence. “In this city, a lot of times cops just walk away from trouble,” a white crime reporter told me. “I’ve seen cops on duty drive right past drug deals. People who call 911 have to lie and say there’s a man with a gun outside to get a patrol car to come. For cops in this department, the emphasis isn’t on busting criminals, it’s on not screwing up.”
During my travels around town I met a pharmacist who owned a drugstore on the west side, near the University of Detroit. Inside, behind bulletproof glass, the druggist filled Medicaid prescriptions; outside, in the parking lot, pushers ran an alternative apothecary. Some of their merchandise came from the druggist’s own stock—people would sell the pills they had just received to the pushers, who resold them for a tidy profit. Tough young men loitered in front of the place, drug deals were made in the open, and occasionally shots were fired.
All this action proved bad for business. The druggist called the cops dozens of times, but nothing happened. And so he sold the store and moved to the suburbs.
Chief Hart knew about this case. “We’ve been over there time and time again,” he said. “We arrest these people but they beat us back to the parking lot. Usually they don’t even go to trial. Dope is a big problem. If we locked up every dealer in town, it would be going full blast again in five days. It’s that lucrative.”
Guns are another problem. Everybody has them, from shopkeepers like John Aboud to the young criminals who drive around town in late-model Mercedes with Uzis under the seat. Even members of the clergy carry guns. A couple of years ago, a busload of nineteen Baptist ministers decided to cross the Ambassador Bridge for a Canadian excursion. Border guards searched them—and uncovered nineteen pistols.
My only personal brush with the law came when a suburban visitor had the hubcaps stolen off his new Cadillac while we were downtown eating. A few blocks from the scene of the crime we spotted a cop. “Officer,” said the visitor, “I’ve just had my hubcaps stolen. Should I report it or something?”
The cop looked at him as if he had just driven into town from Mars. “Report it?” he said. “Are you kidding? You ought to be grateful that they didn’t take the car.”
My friend, who was raised in Detroit and now lives in a town where hubcap theft is considered a major crime, was obviously upset by the cop’s reaction. I told him not be be naive—there isn’t a big city in the country where the police investigate petty larceny. “I know that,” he said. “And I don’t care about the hubcaps; they’re insured. What got me is the policeman’s attitude. He seemed so damn proud of the crime in this city.”
Chief Hart knew all about the prevalent feeling that the police are too soft, but for him sensitive law enforcement is a matter of ideology. Like the mayor, he sees Detroit as a postcolonial city, liberated from oppressive white police occupation; to him, gentle law enforcement is an expression of black home rule.
“I’d hate to turn the clock back to when we kicked ass and took names,” Hart said. “It’s unconstitutional and it leads to false imprisonment. Besides, you just can’t do that with the kind of officers we have. We recruit out of the neighborhoods. It’s hard to practice brutality and then go home and live among the same people. This city is just one big ghetto, all the way out to Eight Mile Road.”
As we talked it became clear that Chief Hart had an answer for every question, a reasoned explanation for every grievance. He blamed the media for sensationalizing crime, the courts for handing down lenient sentences, the county for not providing enough jail cells, and most important, parents for not controlling their children. “We’re hired to arrest criminals, not raise people’s kids,” he said.
Like the police chiefs of other big cities, Hart’s biggest problem was the spread of crack. Drugs, particularly cocaine, were a hot topic in Detroit while I was there. During my stay, a young drug lord, “Maserati Rick” Carter, was murdered in his hospital bed by a rival gang, and his friends treated the city to one of the gaudiest funerals since Prohibition. Sixteen Cadillacs ferried mourners to the cemetery, where they saw Rick buried in a casket made out of a Mercedes—headlights, grill and all.
In the city, where cheap cocaine is sold more or less openly in houses and on street corners, blacks talked of it like a biblical plague. In the suburbs, it aroused less alarm than fascination. There was something about the word “crack,” redolent with the hard city sounds of cracking bullets and cracking bones, that tickled the suburban ear. And since more than one of these discussions took place with an expensive vial of white powder on the coffee table, calling it “crack” put some distance between upscale consumers and the dope-crazed blacks below Eight Mile Road. But whatever it was called, people talked about it constantly; there was an aura of glamour surrounding it that all the disapproving social commentators on Nightline couldn’t dispel.
The drug dealers I met in Detroit were anything but glamorous. One of them, a young white man in a Detroit Tigers warm-up jacket and a blank expression associated with drug-fried brains, was introduced to me by Aboud. “You want to know about drugs, he’ll tell you all about drugs,” said Aboud. “The man is an expert, the hard way.”
“That’s right, the hard way,” agreed the young man, who told me with a look of cunning invention that his name was John Doe.
“I was born right here on this street,” he said in black-inflected English. “When I got eighteen I began to deal drugs, cocaine. Opportunity knocked. I used it, too, I ain’t gonna lie, but mostly I was just selling it.
“One day, last year, I was ridin’ around in my father’s Tempo and someone came up and shot it thirty-four times. I ducked. I didn’t get hit; it’s amazing. The insurance company said, ‘What are you, Miami Vice?’ That’s when I decided to quit.”
At the high point of his career, as a teenage pusher, Mr. Doe worked as a salesman in a local crack house that cleared three thousand dollars a day. His cut was a salary of seven hundred dollars a week—good money for a near-illiterate kid, although the hours were arduous.
“I worked between five and seven days straight,” he said. “Twenty-four hours a day. People would come to the door with their spoon and their money. I’d take the money, fill up the spoon and pass it back.
“I sold on the street, too,” he continued. “See, the police didn’t expect a white dude to be sellin’. But I got out. I didn’t dig the pressure, y’know? Today I make a hundred and fifty dollars a week as a busboy. But the guy I was working for, he killed a guy who was like his brother. It’s a bad business.”
John Doe was shot at thirty-four times and survived. Jacqueline Wilson was shot only once, and didn’t. She was killed coming out of a grocery store on Woodward Avenue, where she had gone to buy cigarettes. Two rival drug gangs happened to be staging a shoot-out in front of the store, and she got caught in the cross fire.
Normally this kind of murder doesn’t arouse much interest in Highland Park, a 2.2-square-mile urban enclave surrounded by Detroit. Highland Park is the headquarters for the Chrysler Corporation, and two generations ago it was a model of urban progress, with the country’s first freeway and one of its first junior colleges. Academics, mid-level auto executives and businesspeople lived in large, comfortable brick homes and shopped in smart shops along Woodward Avenue, which bisects the tiny town.
Today, Highland Park is a smaller, meaner version of Detroit. Hookers and drug dealers ply their trade on its main streets, and homicide is more common there than anyplace else in the United States. But Jacqueline Wilson’s murder was not a common killing. She was the daughter of the late singer Jackie Wilson, and her death received extensive local and even national publicity. The mayor wanted action, the chief of public safety demanded action, and the case wound up on the desk of Jim Francisco.
Francisco took their calls seated, feet on the desk, in his dingy office in the Highland Park police station annex. A powerfully built man dressed in jeans, a sweatshirt and a Crimson Tide baseball cap, he answered each call with “Francisco, Morality,” in the slight southern drawl of Detroit’s working-class whites. He chomped a wad of gum vigorously as he listened, occasionally making polite responses to a superior’s questions. From time to time, he ran his massive hand over the pistol in the shoulder holster he wore.
Each conversation ended with Francisco’s earnest assurance that he and his men were working on the case. But despite the pressure, he wasn’t at all sure that they could deliver. It was, after all, a random killing with no motive and no witnesses. “We’ll probably never solve the motherfucker,” said Francisco of Morality, cheerfully.
Jim Francisco is a man who loves his work, which is chasing bad guys through some of the most dangerous streets in America. “Working here is like playing cowboys and Indians with real Indians,” he told me.
It was a Francisco thing to say, tough and funny and tinged with bravado. He exudes competence and courage, the kind of cop that other cops refer to as a “legend in his own time,” and his exploits provide a seemingly endless supply of station house anecdotes. In the Highland Park police station, which resembles a fortress, and on the streets of the tiny town, which is often compared by its residents to a battlefield, Jim Francisco is the perfect platoon commander.
A few days after the Wilson murder, Francisco got a break: an informer turned in the name and address of the killer. The cops decided to raid his home, which was in Detroit, less than a mile from the police station. On a Friday afternoon, Francisco gathered his troops—a dozen officers, six white, six black, each outfitted in assault overalls, combat boots, bulletproof vests and riot helmets, armed with a variety of very powerful weapons.
Officer Larry Robinson was not dressed for the occasion. A stoic black veteran, he wore a civil-service-blue short-sleeve shirt and black slacks. Robinson looked at eager young cops and sighed. “I’m near retirement and I don’t really like to do this anymore,” he said. “But I’ve gotta think about the rookies, help them save their ass. And I’ll tell you something else. I’ve done this before, plenty of times, but when I hit the corner and pull out my gun, it’s no longer routine. The adrenaline flows, I guarantee you that.”
Although the raid was scheduled for 2:00 P.M., it was postponed again and again. At a desk, a young officer pecked at a typewriter with leaden fingers. The tension in the room rose and fell as deadlines neared and were deferred. Because the suspect’s home was in Detroit, the city police had to be involved, and there were problems coordinating the raid. Finally Robinson picked up the phone impatiently. “Okay,” he said, “I’m gonna call the thirteenth precinct, get me some menfolks and we gonna bust.”
Apparently the call worked, because within a few minutes the Highland Park strike force was gathered in the parking lot, making last-minute checks of their weapons. The plan was simple. They would surround the house, and Francisco would lead a group of officers through the front door. They had no idea what to expect once they got inside, nor did they know how many guns they were likely to encounter. The uncertainty led to some gallows humor as the cops crowded into two vans. Francisco, who wanted to drive by the house before going in, sped on ahead.
Half a mile from the station house, on Woodward Avenue, the vans came to a screeching halt. Three black men were spread-eagled, facedown, on the pavement, and Francisco stood over them with a gun. The other cops leaped out and drew their guns, too.
“What’s your name, sir?” Francisco drawled, addressing one of the prone men.
“Lucky,” he said.
“Well, Mr. Lucky, you got some ID?” The man handed Francisco his wallet. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “And you other gentlemen, please bear with us.” If there was irony in the remark, it wasn’t apparent from his courteous tone.
Francisco had stopped their car on instinct—he thought one of them might be their man—but their IDs checked out. The three suspects rose and dusted themselves off. Although police vans blocked two lanes of traffic and there were a dozen cops in riot gear milling around, pedestrians and cars passed without more than a glance. “It’s a pretty common sight down here,” explained a huge black cop named Caldwell.
The raid itself was an anticlimax: There was no car parked in front of the suspect’s house. Francisco decided to try again later that night. On the way to the station Robinson was in a foul mood—the new hour was certain to screw up his weekend—and he grumbled about the false alarm on Woodward Avenue. “Some people think all blacks look alike,” he said. “Please. The guy we want has close-cropped hair. That guy on the street had long hair. Now, we can’t grow hair overnight. I mean, please.”
There was nothing personal in Robinson’s remark, though. I recognized the tone from my army days, the sound of a man who just felt like bitching. In Detroit today, tough white cops like Jim Francisco could not survive if they were even suspected of racism.
That night at eleven, Francisco’s task force regrouped. Before going out, they sat around a television set and heard a news report about two Detroit police officers who had been accused of raping a woman. This was greeted by hoots of disbelief. “There’s enough women chasing cops, they don’t have to rape anybody,” one officer said, and the others voiced their agreement.
Woodward Avenue was twitching with weekend nightlife when the cops headed out. Once again I rode with Robinson. “The man that shot Jackie’s daughter is going to get some justice tonight,” he said, his good spirits restored.
I mentioned to Robinson that it seemed strange that a murderer would simply go home and continue with business as usual, but he told me that it happens all the time. “These punks think that they’re above the law, just like Richard M. Nixon,” he said. “Nobody will tell anything, that’s what they think. We dealing here with the Richard M. Nixon of northwest Detroit.”
Despite Robinson’s prediction, Jacqueline Wilson’s killer did not get any justice that night; he still wasn’t home. A dozen disgruntled cops, weekend plans shot to hell, drove back to the station to get into civilian clothes. Robinson, adrenaline pumping, decided to cruise for a while. Within minutes, we heard a radio report of gunfire outside a motel. When we arrived, a crowd of people were hanging around the parking lot, but there was no sign of any shooting.
“Just hookers,” said Robinson, disappointed. “I would venture to say that if someone was chasing someone with a gun, these people wouldn’t be out here sunning themselves at midnight.” He nodded to several of the women as he drove slowly through the lot; Highland Park is a small town, and the police and street people know one another. “Just a bunch of little Richard Nixons,” Robinson grumbled as he headed in.
The Highland Park police never caught up with their suspect. They didn’t have to—he caught up with them. A couple of weeks after the abortive raids, he walked in off the street. Although the police had what they considered an ironclad case, he was released on a fifty-thousand-dollar bond—five thousand in cash.
On the day that the suspected killer was released on bond, I went to see Jacqueline Wilson’s mother, Frieda. She was living in a flophouse motel, across the street from the store where her daughter was killed. The first thing she said to me was that she was glad her husband, Jackie, wasn’t alive to hear about the murder.
“Happy Jackie Wilson,” Frantic Ernie Durham, the rhyming disc jockey, used to call him, but it was a misnomer. Wilson had the best voice and the worst luck in Detroit show business. Berry Gordy wrote some of his first hits—“Reet Petite” and “Lonely Teardrops”—but Wilson never rode the Motown bandwagon. He was locked, instead, into a recording contract with Brunswick Records, which had no idea of what to do with his remarkable gifts. Wilson could have been bigger than Marvin Gaye or Smokey Robinson; instead, he wound up entangled in grotesque musical arrangements full of florid strings and peppy white background singers. He recorded songs that Eddie Fisher would have rejected, including a never-to-be-forgotten rendition of “My Yiddishe Mama.”
As a stage performer, Jackie Wilson was in a class with James Brown, far grittier than the choreographed and coiffured teenagers at Motown. His sweet-and-sour good looks and prizefighter grace inspired frenzy in his audiences, and passion in women. One, a fan, shot and almost killed him. Another, a neighborhood girl named Frieda, married him.
Frieda and Jackie met when he was nine and she was ten. They wed as teenagers, in 1951. Together they had four children, Jacqueline, Sandy, Anthony and Jackie Jr., and they lost others—Frieda was pregnant fifteen times.
“Jackie believed in keeping me barefoot and pregnant,” she said. “And not just me. I don’t know how many other children he had. Women always liked Jack, even churchwomen. And he wasn’t the kind of man to say no.”
In 1965, Frieda and Jackie Wilson were divorced. Ten years later, during an oldies show in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, the singer collapsed onstage from a heart attack. He lingered on in a coma for years, his money tied up in legal tangles, until he finally died in 1984.
But even before his stroke, the streets of Detroit began to claim Jackie Wilson’s children. Jackie Jr. was shot and killed at the age of sixteen in circumstances that his mother did not want to discuss. Sandy died, of “unknown causes,” at twenty-three. And, in the summer of 1988, Jacqueline Wilson was gunned down.
The music community was shocked by the news, and saddened; many remembered Jacqueline as a little girl, backstage at her father’s shows. Berry Gordy sent money to bury her. The Four Tops dispatched a telegram. And Frieda Wilson, a prematurely old woman in a red ski cap, tattered overcoat and torn plastic shoes, went back to her rented room at the sleazy motel across the street from the party store and cried for days.
Once, when the money was good, Frieda Wilson lived like a celebrity. She had a big home and a fancy car. Her children were educated at exclusive Catholic academies, and she traveled in Detroit’s show business circles. In those days, she was an envied woman. But no one envies her anymore. Three of her children are dead, and she shares a room with a dying old man in a wheelchair, whom she nurses. There is only one window in the room, boarded up because of the gunfire of drug dealers in the parking lot. Frieda cooks on a Bunsen burner and cleans her dishes in the bathroom sink.
“The income tax people took my house,” she said, sitting on an unmade bed. “And Jack’s estate is still all tied up, because of all these women and children he had.” Frieda Wilson picked up a picture of her dead daughter and stared at it. “When Jackie Jr. was killed, Jack couldn’t even come to the funeral. He just locked himself up in his room and wouldn’t come out. He wanted to see pictures of his son in the casket. He was very, very close with his kids; he was a family person. And now look what’s happened.…”
Frieda Wilson has been battered by circumstances and she knows it. At times she seems confused and helpless. But occasionally she summons the strength to pull herself together, and you catch a glimpse of her as an articulate, ambitious young woman who dreamed the Detroit show business dream, a dream so powerful that it could, for a moment, dispel the gloom of the present.
“You know, Jack’s songs are starting to sell again in England,” she said. A few months before, “Reet Petite,” written by a man who has been as lucky as Jackie Wilson was unlucky, hit the charts in Great Britain, and a generation of young kids there were thrilled by the great singer’s voice. “Maybe they’ll be some money from that,” she said wistfully. If there is, it’s safe to say that Berry Gordy will get his share. Frieda will get hers—maybe.
“And you know, the people from Entertainment Tonight were here,” she said. “They visited Jack’s grave. After he died, we reburied him next to his mother. I told you, he was a family person. And we’re negotiating with ABC about a miniseries.…”
Loud laughter from the pimps and dealers in the parking lot wafted through the open door. Frieda looked once more at her daughter’s picture. “Maybe something good will come of all this,” she said, and then she began to cry again.
Jacqueline Wilson was murdered because she got caught in the cross fire of an unsuccessful drug transaction. Much of the violent crime in Detroit is drug related, and there is little the cops can do about it. Crack is sold openly; police say that there is simply no way to arrest everyone. The main thrust of enforcement is to keep the supply to a minimum. No one believes that it can be dried up altogether.
From time to time, the cops stage raids on known crack houses, which are nothing more than apartments or homes from which drugs are sold. Locating them is as easy as finding stockbrokers on Wall Street, but busting them can be dangerous—most pushers are armed and ready to fight.
Not long after the search for Jacqueline Wilson’s killer, Jim Francisco gathered his troops for a raid on a crack pad. Robinson was off that night, but half a dozen others were there, including Caldwell, the massive, bearded black undercover cop. The raiding party also had one woman, a thin redhead with a southern twang. Francisco took the wheel of the van, and the raiders climbed in the back. They were in good spirits that night, buoyed by the prospect of action, and as the van turned onto Woodward Avenue, they began to sing—“Roll ’em, roll ’em, roll ’em,” to the tune of the theme song from Rawhide. They sounded like a high school football team on the way to a big game.
The singing stopped when we pulled up in front of a seedy apartment building on a side street. Without a word the cops jumped out of the van and raced into the building. Caldwell carried a battering ram, and the policewoman held a shotgun in both hands. A couple of people stepped aside to let them pass as they ran up the two flights, stopped in front of a door, hollered “Police, open up!” and, without waiting for a response, bashed in the door and flooded into the apartment.
Inside they found a very frightened black woman of twenty, dressed in a flimsy nightie and holding an infant. They were alone. One of the cops looked in a nightstand drawer and found several packages of cocaine.
“That’s my boyfriend’s,” the woman said, crying. “He’s not here. I don’t know where he stay. We don’t even get along that good—he’s just the baby’s father, that’s all.” The policewoman sat on the bed and talked gently to her while the others continued their search. Under the bed they found a police scanner, a pager and a loaded carbine. “I don’t know nothin’ about all that stuff,” the young mother protested. “It belongs to my boyfriend. I ain’t mixed up in nothin’.…”
The small apartment was neat and clean. A high school equivalency diploma hung on a wall, next to a shelf of stuffed animals. Record albums were stacked near an expensive stereo. The cops, respectful of neatness, searched gently, replacing things as they went along.
The baby, dressed in pink-and-white pajamas, began to cry. “He had a shot today, that’s why he don’t feel good,” his mother explained.
“Yeah,” said the policewoman empathetically. “Those shots make me feverish, too.” She gently undid the baby’s diaper, looking for hidden drugs.
The police stacked the carbine and the cocaine on a counter, next to a box of Oh So Nice Baby Wipes, and began to make a list of the seized material. By this time the young woman had calmed down and was watching the search without apparent emotion. Her composure irked the policewoman. “If we bust you again, we’ll take your baby and get it a good home,” she threatened. “Not no crack house.” The mother nodded, but said nothing. Now that she knew she was not going to be arrested, she was simply waiting for the police to complete their business and leave.
As they carried out the search, I could hear people scurrying through the halls. The building is a maze of crack houses, and many of the tenants were quietly leaving with their inventory. Francisco, who had no warrant for any other apartment, seemed unconcerned. This wasn’t his first visit to the building, and it wouldn’t be his last.
The task force gathered up the drugs and weapons, put them in bags, and trooped down the stairs. Francisco, pistol in hand, potbelly drooping over his jeans, Crimson Tide baseball cap set back on his head, swaggered down the hallway, just to make sure the neighbors knew who had been there. In the stairwell he met a tall, thin black man with a heavily bandaged hand and the look of someone caught in the act.
“Excuse me sir,” said Francisco, his mouth working on a large wad of gum. “I can’t help but notice that you have been wounded.” The man nodded in guarded affirmation. Francisco waited. “I got shot,” the man finally said.
“May I ask you a personal question?” said Francisco in an intimate tone. “Was the shooting by any chance, ah, drug related?”
“Naw, man, it was a family situation,” said the thin man.
“I’m glad to hear that, sir. It’s a pleasure to meet a family man in a place like this,” said Francisco of Morality, and walked down the stairs, pistol in hand, whistling the theme song to Rawhide.
It was around this time that I decided to move into the city. I had been living in West Bloomfield, commuting every day across the Eight Mile border, then retreating behind it every night. But this was an inconvenient arrangement and, more to the point, I found myself increasingly comfortable in Detroit.
The time I spent on the city streets, my evenings with the cops or hanging around the Tailwind and various other neighborhood spots, had convinced me that Detroit’s reputation as a violent city was well deserved. It was possible, I knew, to get caught in cross fire, like Jacqueline Wilson, or stabbed or mugged. But strangely, I didn’t feel any real sense of personal danger, certainly nothing that justified the dire warnings of my suburban friends. Years in the Middle East had given me good antennae for hostility, and the truth is, I didn’t feel any. When I went into a bar or a club where there were no other whites, which was pretty often, I got some wondering looks. If I was taking notes, people sometimes clammed up. But that was all.
My decision to move into the city was made easier by the fact that, during the course of interviewing people, I had become friendly with a number of black Detroiters. They rarely admonished me for living in the suburbs—to them it seemed natural—but the time I spent with them made Detroit seem a less alien place.
Many of my new acquaintances had little experience with books and authors; most of the younger ones had known very few whites. But they surprised me with their willingness to speak openly about their lives and their city. Clearly they enjoyed the chance to educate an interested foreigner. “I know you’ve never eaten any of this,” a woman would say, handing me a plate of collard greens. “I know you’ve never heard anything like this,” a man would tell me, putting on a Little Milton tape. Any evidence that I understood black culture was greeted with good-natured surprise. Once, at a party, I astonished a room full of people by dancing without breaking an ankle.
As time went by, and people became more relaxed around me, I heard a great deal of candid black talk. Detroiters constantly discussed race, often, I suspected, with the intention of shocking me.
“If you want to write about us,” a playwright told me one night at a party, “you’ve got to realize that we come in four types—Afro-Americans, blacks, colored folks and niggers.”
“What’s the distinction?” I asked.
“Well, take vacations,” she said. “An Afro-American goes to the Bahamas. A black goes to Harlem. Colored folks load their kids in the car and go down south to visit their kinfolks.” She paused, forcing my hand. “And what about niggers?” I finally asked. “Niggers don’t go on vacation—they wait for you to go on vacation,” she whooped, and the others laughed loudly.
On another occasion, a group of people were discussing a media controversy that had erupted around the question of why blacks excel in sports. Several experts had been roundly criticized as racists for suggesting that black anatomy is better suited for some kinds of athletic activities. My hosts, however, happily asserted that the experts were right.
“Do you really think that blacks are built differently than whites?” I asked.
“Sure,” said a woman. “We’ve got bigger butts and thinner legs.”
“That’s considered racist,” I pointed out, but she didn’t agree. “All you got to do is look at us,” she said.
From time to time, the tables were turned and I became the subject of other people’s scrutiny. Despite the fact that race is a constant topic among Detroiters, there is a surprising confusion about who is what.
One night in the 606 Club, a sort of black Cheers located downtown, a man who had obviously had a couple of drinks approached me at the bar. “Excuse me, brother, but are you a white man or a light-skinned colored man?” he asked.
“What do you think?” I asked him.
The man looked at me closely, and then ran his fingers over my scalp. “You got nappy hair,” he said. “I guess you one of us.” Satisfied, he returned to his seat and announced in a loud voice that I was, indeed, a light-skinned black. Apparently several other patrons had been wondering, because they looked at me, nodded in satisfaction and smiled.
The incident at the 606 brought back memories of a childhood friend, Jesse Stephen. Jesse was a preacher’s son, and one day he told me that Jews aren’t white, but red. “Noah had three sons,” he intoned, borrowing his father’s sermonic cadence. “Ham, who was black, Japheth, who was white, and Shem, who was red. The Jews are Shemites.”
For years I considered this a personal eccentricity of Jesse’s, but in Detroit I learned that it is a widespread article of faith. People were constantly telling me that I was “almost white” and they would buttress this belief by pointing out that I had “bad hair” and swarthy skin. “I know plenty of black people lighter than you,” a woman told me, “and they don’t go around pretending to be white.” (There was another side to this coin, too. Many people I met believed that Jews are the chosen people. “Do I look chosen to you?” I once asked a churchwoman who scrutinized me and said, “I never said God made the right choice.”)
Not only Jews fail to qualify in Detroit as whites. During my visit I got into an argument with a very sophisticated city official who tried to convince me that all Arabs are black because they come from Asia and North Africa. She believed this despite the evidence of her own eyes—most of Detroit’s Arabs are unquestionably not black-skinned. But it soon emerged that we were talking about different things. “To me,” she said, “a white man is somebody like George Bush.”
The longer I stayed in Detroit, the more accustomed I became to the local habit of immediately classifying everyone by color; and I also began to see the world through the race-conditioned eyes of the people I met. Once, watching Nightline, I asked a friend what she thought about the discussion, which had to do with the economy. “You notice that there are never any black people on these interview programs,” she said. “They don’t think our opinions matter, or that we even have any opinions.” Of course she was right; and from then on I watched American television with a new sensibility.
Constant daily contact with black people was enlightening; and it was also reassuring. I began to think about moving into town, and one day, in the midst of a discussion about the violence on the streets of Detroit, I surprised myself by asking a black auto executive if he thought it would be safe. “Nobody’s totally safe here,” he said. “But you won’t be in any special danger because you’re white. And one thing’s for sure, it’s a hell of a lot more interesting than in Bloomfield Hills.”
And so I left the suburbs and moved into Detroit. At first, I rented a room from a black woman who lived on the east side, not far from downtown. Later, feeling more independent, I moved into one of Detroit’s few high-rise apartment buildings, a short walk from City Hall and the river. The manager proudly pointed out the building’s security features, which included a special service: residents returning at night could call ahead, and an armed guard would escort them from the parking lot into the lobby.
I never used the service, because I didn’t feel threatened. But from time to time I got intimations of danger. One of them arrived at my apartment in the person of Floyd.
Floyd was a young man with a passive ferocity and yellow, malign eyes that peered out of a hard dark skull. When he walked into my living room, in the midst of a small cocktail party, he suddenly made some comfortable people very nervous.
Floyd was brought by Gerald, a heavyset black man who lives in the Brewster projects. We met in the course of my research; Gerald was trying, unsuccessfully, to promote music concerts at one of the downtown theaters, and I went to talk to him about the difficulties faced by a small entrepreneur. We soon discovered that we shared a love of fifties rhythm and blues, and struck up a friendship.
An inveterate do-gooder, Gerald met Floyd in the projects shortly after Floyd had been released from Jackson Penitentiary, at the end of a six-year term for armed robbery, and decided to rehabilitate him. “You got to learn how to interface with white people,” he told Floyd, and brought him to the party.
Actually we were an integrated group that evening, but to Floyd, one of ten children born to an unwed mother, the blacks must have seemed as white as the whites. All the guests were middle-class and well educated. They sipped white wine and looked out at the city through wide glass windows and tried to act like they weren’t scared stiff of Floyd. He drank a gin and orange juice and looked at his red tennis shoes. After a few moments he took them off and stretched out, uninvited, on the couch. Everyone pretended not to notice.
“Feel good layin’ back,” said Floyd sociably. “Up to Jackson, they ain’t got no soft mattress.” A halfhearted chuckle went up, and I thought, How in the hell do I get him out of here?
Gerald believed that it would be therapeutic for Floyd to talk about his past. “I come from Memphis,” Floyd said. “Got some bad motherfuckers down there. Got some up here, too. Met some bad motherfuckers up to Jackson.” The guests waited, but Floyd had summarized his biography to his own satisfaction.
A lady asked about his brothers and sisters. “I got seven brothers. Six of ’em been to Jackson, same as me,” said Floyd, the way someone might mention the name of a family prep school.
“What does your mother feel, with all of you in prison like that?” the woman asked.
“She like it,” he said. “She say, ‘You safer in Jackson than in the city.’ ”
“The city isn’t so bad,” said Gerald defensively.
Floyd stirred, his professional opinion challenged. “Shit, man, it is, too, bad. That motherfucker be a war. Onliest thing, I ain’t never been shot or stabbed.” He sounded a bit amazed at his own good fortune.
“You ever stab or, ah, shoot anyone yourself?” asked one of the guests, trying to sound matter-of-fact. Floyd shook his head. “Naw, man,” he said. “I leave that shit up to my friends. I got a whole lot of friends down there.” He nodded at the street, where the guests knew they would be, on the way to their cars, in an hour or two.
Without further preliminaries, Floyd closed his eyes and fell off to sleep. He snored softly and put his hand on his crotch. An angelic look came over his face. Everyone made small talk and tried to act as if an ex-convict dozing in the living room was a common social occurrence. No one said anything about it because Gerald was there and because Floyd might be listening, even in his sleep, monitoring the conversation with some sort of prison sixth sense.
After half an hour or so, Floyd stirred. He must have been dreaming about sex, because he turned to an attractive black woman in her forties and, in a soft voice, said, “Mama, what you doin’ Saturday night?”
The woman, who has a grandchild, couldn’t believe her ears. Floyd repeated the question. “You gotta be kidding,” she said, sounding more amused than frightened. “Listen, boy, you ain’t ready for me on Tuesday night, and I know you ain’t gonna be ready on Saturday.” Floyd shrugged; Saturday night was a long time off in any case.
Floyd rubbed the sleep out of his eyes, drank another orange juice and gin, and stretched. Gerald, sensing that there had been enough interfacing for one night, told him it was time to be going.
I nervously escorted them to the door, where I made a last-minute (and deeply insincere) offer to be of any help I could to Floyd. He didn’t even bother to say thank you.
“When I come up here, I didn’t think you was cool,” he said. “But you cool, you all right. Maybe I help you.”
“What kind of help do I need?” I asked uncomfortably.
“Man, there’s a lot of dudes out there. Somebody might be watching you right now, y’know. They could be wanting to do you something. I just say a word around, you know, let people know you mah friend.” He stepped out into the hall, leaving behind in the cozy apartment a chill intimation of the street below.
I returned to my guests, shaking my head. “Imagine that,” I said. “His mother would rather have him in jail than on the street.” I expected agreement, but I had assumed too much.
“Well, I can understand her,” said the grandmother who had rejected Floyd’s advances. “Sometimes I wish somebody would put my daughter in jail, too. That’s where she belongs.”
The statement shattered the “we’re us and they’re them” mood. “You want your daughter in jail?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t know what to do about her anymore,” said the woman. “She’s strung out on crack cocaine, and I just can’t get through to her anymore.”
The woman, who is the mother of five, began to talk in a subdued voice about her seventeen-year-old child. “The girl steals everything. She took my microwave oven, brass plates, a floor-model TV. One time, when nobody was home, she got her boyfriend to bring over a U-Haul trailer and they cleaned out the house. I was lucky to find out where it was before they sold it. I had to send my son over there with a shotgun to get it back. I can’t leave her at home alone—one of my sons stays in the house at all times.”
Only a short time before, her daughter had gone out with some friends to buy drugs. She wound up in an argument, and another teenager hit her across the face with a two-by-four. The girl lost an eye.
“Why?” asked the woman. “Why? My other kids are fine—they don’t mess with drugs, they don’t even drink. I’ve done everything I can—psychiatrists, threats, beatings, praying—but nothing works. She says, “I’m gonna be all right now, mama, but she doesn’t stay all right. It’s got to where we have to protect her own baby from her.”
She was an educated woman, the grandmother in the living room. She had been through the civil rights movement, given her children African names, encouraged them to read James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison. Her daughter would sell her books if she could get her hands on them. She had already sold herself, and she might someday try to sell her only child. The lady shook her head. “You ever hear about the bad seed? I hate to say it but I’m afraid of my own daughter.”