Top Quotes: “Detroit: An American Autopsy” — Charlie LeDuff

“Detroit is Pax Americana. The birthplace of mass production, the automobile, the cement road, the refrigerator, frozen peas, high-paid blue-collar jobs, home ownership and credit on a mass scale. America’s way of life was built here.”

“Trees and switchgrass and wild animals have come back to reclaim their rightful places. Coyotes are here. The pigeons have left in droves. A city the size of San Francisco and Manhattan could neatly fit into Detroit’s vacant lots, I am told.

Once the nation’s richest big city, Detroit is now its poorest. It is the country’s illiteracy and dropout capital, where children must leave their books at school and bring toilet paper from home. It is the unemployment capital, where half the adult population does not work at a consistent job. There are firemen with no boots, cops with no cars, teachers with no pencils, city council members with telephones tapped by the FBI, and too many grandmothers with no tears left to give.”

“One night at the VFW hall, a retired cop a stringy older white man — told a story about a black man killed on the beat. It was during the early 1970s, and the white man had just gotten back from Vietnam and was a rookie on patrol with a partner.

“We were chasing him down through an alley,” the man ex-plained. “We couldn’t catch him. So I pulled out my service revolver and shot him in the back. He died.”

“So they tape off the scene, and the investigating sergeant in charge of the scene walks up to me and my partner and pulls a starter pistol from an ankle holster and says, ‘Okay, here’s the story. The nigger pulled this cap gun, see..?”

The sergeant always wore a cap gun in his ankle holster, the old white man explained. Just in case a black man decided to run and a gun accidentally went off and struck him dead in the back. That’s how order was kept along Eight Mile in the old days.

The old white man seemed blistered by the memory, like it was burning him up. Frankie bought him a drink to cool him off.

Since its founding, Detroit has been a place of perpetual flames. Three times the city has suffered race riots and three times the city has burned to the ground. The city’s flag acknowledges as much. Speramus Meliora; Resurget Cineribus: We hope for better things; it shall rise from the ashes.”

“Detroit has the ignominious distinction of being the only American city to have been occupied by the United States army three times.”

“Detroit reached a peak population of nearly 1.9 million people in the 1950s and was 83 percent white. Now Detroit has fewer than 700,000 people, is 83 percent black and is the onlv American city that has surpassed a million people only to contract below that threshold.”

“”Arson, he said. “In this town, arson is off the hook. Thousands of them a year, bro. In Detroit, it’s so fucking poor that fire is cheaper than a movie. A can of gas is three-fifty and a movie is eight bucks, and there aren’t any movie theaters left in Detroit, so fuck it. They burn the empty house next door and they sit on the fucking porch with a forty, and they’re barbecuing and laughing ‘cause it’s fucking entertainment. It’s unbelievable.”

“In came a call: A man has tapped into the gas main with a garden hose because he is too poor to warm his children. The hose leaks. The block explodes. They arrive at the neighborhood three minutes later. The place looks like a painting from the hand of Hieronymus Bosch, a landscape of fire and human failing. The firefighters pull the children from the flames and peel a guy’s guts from the jagged window frame where he lies like an old cloth doll. One fireman gets in the ambulance with a kid, holding one hand over her eyes, the other over her shattered femur.

There is a crater where the house used to be.

“Is it ever gonna stop?” Nevin asked no one in particular an hour later through his cheap cigar, nonchalantly, as though the carnage were an everyday occurrence. “Children are dying in this city because they’re too fucking poor to keep warm. Put that in your fucking notebook.”

I put it in my fucking notebook.”

“Even the firehouses themselves were not untouched by thieves. Recently the men here cooked a supper of steak and potatoes, but a call came over the box before they could eat it. When they returned, they found that their dinner had been stolen, right down to the green beans. The canned beans and coffee creamer were gone from the larder, and so was a pickup truck belonging to one of the men.

A few days earlier I watched as a deranged woman set fire to an abandoned house. As the firefighters worked to put out the blaze, the woman crawled into the fire truck and tried to drive away. The firefighters radioed police dispatch.

The response came: “No cruiser available.”

They covered her in a coat and sat on her until two arson investigators came and took care of her.”

“One day, after showing up to council chambers looking tired and wan, her hair a mess and pulled back in a rubber band as if she’d just rolled out of bed, Monica flew into a rage when she was gaveled down by the balding council president, Kenneth Cockrel Jr., over some unimportant business.

She shouted at him. She intimated that he beat his wife. She called him “Shrek.” Twice.

Cockrel threatened to adjourn the meeting, to which Conyers shrieked: “Do it, baby! Do it!”

He did it. The scene made the six o’clock news. People printed T-shirts.”

“Half of Detroit kids don’t even make it through high school, and of those that do, half of them are functionally illiterate.”

“By 1958, 20 percent of the Detroit workforce was jobless. Not to worry, the city, rich with manufacturing revenue, had its own welfare system — a decade before Johnson’s Great Society. The city provided health care, fuel, and rent and gave $10 every week to adults for food; $5 to children. Word of the free milk and honey made its way down South and the poor “Negros” and “Hillbillies” flooded in by train. If it wasn’t for them, the city’s population would have sunk further than it did.”

“Westland is a working-class city, and the people there fully embrace their consumer culture. As far as I know, Westland is the only city in the world that renamed itself after its shopping mall.”

“About one in thirty-five people at any given time in Detroit is without a place to sleep. The problem is so bad and the beds so few that shelters like this one offer only a chair to sit in. The chair is yours as long as you stay in it. Step out for a cigarette and it’s a free-for-all. This passes for normal in Detroit.”

“The timing of Moron’s hat giveaway stunt was as unfortunate as the selection of hats themselves. They were not your run -of-the-mill knitwear, they were, in fact, ski masks. The type gunmen use to stick up liquor stores.”

“He and his men were out checking fire hydrants on a spring morning when one of the deckies – fire department speak for grunts – found a screen door torn off its hinges at an abandoned house. The deckie threw the door on the back of the rig and the engine drove off, with Nevin in command. It seemed like no big deal. The copper piping in the old house had been scavenged, the meter box, the electrical wiring, even the garage door. Inside the garage was a pile of trash and human excrement. Who would miss the screen door?

Their firehouse didn’t have a screen door and the flies were getting in. Detroit firefighters have been repairing their firehouses like this for decades. Toilets, doors, lumber, bricks. The city never cared. No one ever complained. And it was cheaper than paying for upkeep.

This time, however, a neighbor caught Nevin and his crew on tape. The neighbor sent the tape to a local news station. The news station put its crack reporter on the job. Within days, Nevin and his men were fired for “looting” the city.”

“All of downtown Detroit is powered and heated by steam produced from a massive waste incinerator located on the edge of a neighborhood. The whole goddamned downtown running on garbage. A whole neighborhood full of kids choking on the smoke of burning diapers and car batteries.”

“Detroit would never have been if not for the beaver.

Louis XIII, the ambiguously homosexual king of France, who had a double set of teeth and a pronounced stutter, was fond of prancing about the streets of Paris wearing a beaver-pelt hat.

As it is with Europeans, the king of England decided he too enjoyed prancing about the streets of London in a beaver-pelt hat. The style caught on and the beaver became all but extinct in Europe.

The next king of France, Louis’s son Louis XIV, dispatched men to the New World to procure more beaver skins and instructed a man who called himself the “sieur de Cadillac” to establish a fort in the lower Great Lakes to block the English advance on his fur monopoly.

On June 5, 1701, Cadillac and two hundred men shoved off from Montreal in twenty-five canoes. Commandant Cadillac was a hustler. His real name was Antoine Laumet, and it is believed he had stowed away on a ship to escape debts in France, arriving in the New World in 1683.

He quickly learned the land and the customs of the natives, which made him invaluable to the crown. Cadillac also illegally trafficked in liquor and furs with the natives and was for a short time thrown in prison. That would also make Cadillac Detroit’s first dope dealer.

Cadillac chose the strait – détroit in French – that connects Lake Erie to Lake Huron, the gateway to the entire Great Lakes basin and its copious beaver, as the site of his new Fort Pontchartrain du Détroit.”

“He told me about the time a homicide detective had to take a bus to a crime scene because there were no working pool cars in the squad.”

“The records they gave me were shoddy, invoices billed to wrong addresses, and in many cases paperwork was missing. It would have taken a forensic accountant to sort it all out.

But after hours of random reading, I began to see it: $7 million for doorknobs and faucet handles and screen doors that never saw their way to the firehouses. Money just seemed to vanish in the paper shuffle. An emergency addition needed here. A change order there. A little painting gets done. The rest seemingly disappears.

Take the joint police precinct and firehouse on the city’s west side. It began as a $240,000 no-bid contract and ballooned into a $20 million job as far as the paperwork said. Everybody got paid and Detroit did the paying.

The floors in that joint police precinct and firehouse were cracked, the heat didn’t work and water pipes to fill the fire engines were forgotten.

They may not have been the Pentagon Papers and they weren’t going to win me any Pulitzer Prizes, but the contracts offered a clue as to how this city had been bled to near death over the decades.”

“The Motor City was booming then, thanks to men like Henry Ford and the Dodge brothers. In 1925, Detroit’s factories employed more than 300,000 people. And thanks to Prohibition and the city’s proximity to the liquor distilleries of Canada, another 50,000 were employed in the illicit sale of alcohol.”

“The real acolyte of Osama bin Laden came to Detroit eight weeks later, on Christmas Day 2009, by airplane, with a bomb sewn into his underpants. In that case, the FBI and other federal agencies knew about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. They knew he supported jihad and knew he had met with senior al-Qaeda operatives and was planning something. Nevertheless, he was allowed to keep his U.S. visa and allowed to buy a plane ticket with cash. Flying from Amsterdam to Detroit on Northwest Airlines, Abdulmutallab lit his crotch bomb on fire above the city. Had the bomb not malfunctioned, it is possible that the airplane would have blown up. Had it blown up it is possible that it would have hit no one on the ground.

Detroit, by some estimates, is 40 percent vacant.”

“The standard reason for men like Gibson getting probation is that there aren’t enough jail beds. But the truth is, half the jail beds sit empty because there is no money to pay deputies to guard the inmates.

In order to relieve this “overcrowding” in the jails and courtrooms, something known as the “rocket docket” was concocted. Put simply: if someone is not accused of a capital crime like murder or rape, they are funneled through the court’s rocket docket at light speed and generally given probation or an electronic monitoring anklet. Too many times, dangerous men escape into the ether, which Gibson did.”

“There are no chain grocery stores in all of Detroit.”

“Kilpatrick was convicted on twenty-four counts ranging from extortion to racketeering to bribery. He ran a mob-style enterprise that stole from the poorest people in America and then tried to play it off with the old Eight Mile race card – even though some of his biggest backers were the rich white industrialists who profited from the confusion. A neat piece of theater that got bad reviews.

He was sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison, the longest sentence for public corruption in the history of the country.

Monica Conyers was sent to Camp Cupcake, a minimum-security federal prison in West Virginia, for a three-year bid. The time there is easy. Martha Stewart served five months for lying to the FBI and managed to lose some weight. There is no razor wire and inmates get a hair dryer. Still, it wasn’t good enough for Madam Conyers. She complained in letters to the press that they wouldn’t give her seconds at supper. She said she was bored. She asked the federal judge to let her serve the remainder of her sentence at home on Seven Mile Road with her son, who never bothered to mow the lawn. Her request was denied. She was eventually paroled and worked for a time at an automobile repair shop.”