Detroit: An American Autopsy

by Charlie Leduff

  Then power walked in the door: a short, stocky, smooth-skulled black man wearing a full-length leather trench coat accompanied by a tall, large, well-dressed sidekick. I had them pegged for members of the Nation of Islam.

  The bald man in the trench coat gave his name to the receptionist: Adolph Mongo.

  I may not have known much around town, but I knew that name. Adolph Mongo. You couldn’t avoid it in Detroit. Mongo’s technical title was consultant. But he had other names: the political hit man, bomb thrower, assassin. These were titles of prestige.

  Mongo cut his teeth in the Coleman Young administration in the early eighties, working as a deputy director of communications. A former marine and itinerant newspaperman, Mongo came from a family that was powerful in the black underworld of Detroit’s heyday. According to him and his brothers, Mongo’s uncle was a bootlegger and numbers runner, his great-auntie the madam of a brothel. Mongo’s dead older brother moved heroin and cocaine. So naturally when Young took control of the city, the Mongo clan insinuated itself into a place at the table.

  Mongo’s older brother Larry became something of a consigliere to Young, and so when Adolph came knocking, Young put him to work, and his experience in the Young machine taught him that Detroit politics was an insular and imperious world.

  Once, Robert Mugabe, the African revolutionary who would later become president of Zimbabwe, came to Detroit to receive the keys to the city. Mayor Young made him wait an inordinately long time for an audience.

  Mongo remembers it this way: an underling stepped into Young’s office and said, “Sir, you’ve got Robert Mugabe, the freedom fighter, sitting out there.”

  To which Young replied: “Fuck Robert Mugabe. This is Detroit.”

  Detroit indeed. We once gave the key to the city to Saddam Hussein. And never took it back.

  Watching a retinue of Young sycophants take the plunge into prison, Mongo decided to strike out on his own. “It was crooked even then,” he would tell me later. “I wasn’t willing to do what they asked. I wasn’t willing to risk my freedom for a two-thousand-dollar suit.”

  Still, he was connected, and so Mongo became a political consultant. You could hire him to strategize for you—or you could pay him to keep his mouth shut or he would hammer you mercilessly. Mongo knew where the back doors were.

  Mongo had beat on Kilpatrick in the lead-up to his reelection campaign, making the local television and radio circuit calling Kilpatrick a pansy and a mama’s boy. Instead of fighting him, Kilpatrick simply hired Mongo for $200,000—proving to many that he was indeed a pansy and a mama’s boy.

  With Kilpatrick down double digits in the polls, Mongo came up with a now infamous back-page “lynching” ad that ran in a special edition of the Michigan Chronicle, an ad commemorating the life and death of Rosa Parks.

  The ad drew a comparison between a historical photograph of black men hanging from a tree and the media’s treatment of Kilpatrick. It worked. Kilpatrick stormed back from the double-digit deficit to victory. Mongo knew the number-one rule of politics: win.

  Black politicians pretended he didn’t work for them. White politicians suffered the same amnesia. But they sought his advice and they drank with him during the off years of the election cycle. I couldn’t have cared less. He was what politics really were around here. It was my job to know him.

  “Adolph Mongo?” I said, standing up and offering my hand. “Charlie LeDuff, the Detroit News. I’ve been meaning to meet you.”

  He gave me the eye. “Goddamn motherfucker. Dressed like that? I thought you was a junkie or some shit.”

  He shook my hand, introduced the large, well-dressed man as his younger brother Skip and took a seat next to me.

  “You that motherfucker that wrote that stripper story,” he said. “Good fucking story. I try to tell the mayor, he’s got to work the media better. He can beat this thing if he looks like he’s in charge. But he ain’t listening. He’s a talented guy. But he’s ignorant. Politically ignorant. Ignorant of history. He don’t read. You know he doesn’t have a book in his office? Not a fucking book in the shelves. Ain’t that some shit?”

  The receptionist interrupted: “Mr. Mongo, the reverend will see you now.”

  Mongo got up to go, took a few steps down the hall, turned and asked me: “You wanna come in?”

  “With you all?”

  “Yeah, motherfucker, with us all.”

  I went along.

  Sheffield sat imperiously behind his desk, a man in excess of three hundred pounds. He was a large presence in the community. Besides his social work, he preached on the east side of town and did a lot for the people, often pulling money from his own pocket to pay for funerals. He was another who talked the race game—despite the fact that his father was black and his mother was white. In Detroit, we all talked the race game. It is a way of life.

  As we walked in the door, he looked at Mongo and then at me.

  “I invited him,” Mongo said. “He’s all right.” I took a seat in the back. Sheffield was planning a run against Rep. John Conyers—the aging, barnacle-like fixture in the U.S. Congress. Conyers had served more than twenty terms in the House and had presided over the collapse of his district—including Highland Park—where he did not even bother to keep an office.

  Highland Park, the birthplace of the Model T, was an industrial hamlet wholly surrounded by Detroit. Today, little is there. It is poor, black, burned down and so tough that even the Nation of Islam moved its mosque away. The saying goes that suburbanites don’t go to Detroit and Detroiters don’t go to Highland Park.

  Conyers was weak. If only someone with connections to the churches would man up and run against him, he could be taken out.

  Sheffield was smart, I could see that. He viewed the chessboard and was almost convinced he was the man to put Conyers king down, and he hired Mongo to do his groundwork.

  Conyers’s district was gerrymandered into a strange racial stocking that also included some working-class white communities.

  “The rednecks would vote for a fucking pink donkey before they’d vote Conyers,” Mongo said. “You’re black, but Conyers is the face of everything they hate.”

  But Sheffield was getting pressure from D.C.: Charles Rangel, the longtime congressman from Harlem, had called that very morning and asked Sheffield to bow out, and Sheffield, a product of the political machine, was considering it.

  “I have to think about it, Adolph. There’s a lot to consider here. I’ve got a lot to lose.”

  “Oh goddamn, Horace, you ask me to do this shit and then you act like an old white woman. You think about it then,” he said with exasperation. “Call me when you decide.”

  Mongo and his brother left. I decided to leave with them.

  Mongo turned to me at the door, near the room where the students were now sleeping with their heads on the tables. “Did you learn anything?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “He seemed pretty worried about an opportunity that seemed there for the taking.”

  “It got decided a long time ago in Detroit,” Mongo said. “The city belongs to the black man. The white man was a convenient target until there were no white men left in Detroit. What used to be black and white is now gray. Whites got the suburbs and everything else. The black machine’s got the city and the black machine’s at war with itself. The spoils go to the one who understands that.”

  “So we’re standing in a moment of history?” I asked.

  “That’s right,” he said. “And you’re going to find out, if you stick around, that a lot of the people holding political power nowadays are some bizarre incompetent sons-a-bitches.”

  “And what about the reverend back there?” I asked, pointing to Sheffield.

  “Fuck it,” Mongo said, shaking his head at a lost opportunity.

  LIPSTICK AND LAXATIVES
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  I BEGAN TO understand just how bizarre Detroit politics could be when I met Monica Conyers, the high-strung city councilwoman, for a cocktail at a local jazz club in the early summer.

  The youngish and voluptuous wife of the doddering congressman, Conyers had come to city politics under the banner of being a Conyers.

  Her campaign commercials had the murky production quality of bad porno films and looked as if they’d been shot through a shower curtain. Still, they were simple and traded hard on her husband’s name as a civil rights warrior.

  “Join the Conyers family as we fight to take back Detroit from those who put self-interest above your interest,” she cooed, dressed in a form-fitting blouse that highlighted her ample cleavage. “Detroit deserves better.”

  Detroit chose Conyers, a political novice whose thin résumé included failing the bar exam four times. And Conyers got to work before she was even sworn in. Her first order of business was to pummel a woman in a barroom brawl after the woman complained about Conyers chatting up her man. The woman left with a black eye as big as a tea saucer.

  Just in time for my arrival in Detroit, Conyers—in her capacity as a trustee on the city’s pension board—threatened to shoot one of Mayor Kilpatrick’s aides who rubbed her the wrong way.

  “I’ll have my brothers fuck you up,” she shouted at the man, according to the police report and news accounts. “I’ll get a gun if I have to, and I got four brothers who’ll whup your ass.”

  Conyers denied that she threatened the man. She said he started it first. She filed a complaint against him after he filed one against her.

  Monica was my kind of woman. As least as far as the reporter in me goes. She was a self-absorbed, self-serving diva. A honeypot and a loudmouth who let a bit of power go to her id.

  It didn’t matter to me if she spent tens of thousands of dollars on overseas trips paid for by the city’s pension fund. It didn’t matter to me if she mishandled the business of the poorest citizens in the country. It wasn’t my problem. It was my job.

  She typified the politician of the current American landscape. An overfed buffoon who fattened herself at the public trough while the ribs began to show on the gaunt body politic. And in that capacity, she was nobody special. Chicago had its Governor Rod Blagojevich. Newark had its Mayor Sharpe James. San Diego had its Congressman Duke Cunningham and Youngstown, Ohio, had its Congressman James Traficant.

  Clowns for sure. But Monica’s makeup was better. She was the perfect political caricature wrapped up in a real human being.

  And one thing about clowns. Clowns sell copy.

  I started keeping notes on her. Monica was fascinating. The big-mouthed girl from a broken home—her father had a record for breaking and entering, her brother for robbery—Conyers was susceptible to violent outbursts. She was a drunk in rush-hour traffic, a wreck in the waiting. I could have been related to her. I waited for the moment and Monica delivered.

  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.

  I had to get myself a piece of this. I called Conyers’s political adviser—a rakish con man named Sam Riddle who seemed to play the role of Clyde Barrow to her Bonnie Parker and accompanied her on her lavish trips paid for by the pension fund. I had met him once previously for coffee, at which meeting he told me: “The only difference between Detroit and the Third World in terms of corruption is Detroit don’t have no goats in the streets.”

  Riddle answered the phone. He complained bitterly about a colleague of mine who wrote an unflattering story about him taking trips on the pension board’s dime.

  “She’s a fucking bitch, and I don’t talk to the News.”

  “You’ll have to take that up with her,” I told him. “Her sins aren’t mine.”

  “Oh yeah?” Riddle shot back. “Go fuck yourself.”

  He hung up.

  I called back ten minutes later, thinking it an appropriate amount of time to have gone and fucked oneself.

  “Look,” he said, before I could even say hello, “I don’t even work for that crazy bitch Monica Conyers anymore. She gives me gas. I don’t want to put up with her bullshit anymore. I’m too old. Do you know what I’m saying? Do you?”

  I didn’t know what he was saying, but I said that I did.

  He called himself her pimp, except for the fact, he said, that he didn’t like standing in the night air.

  “Anyway, can you reach out to her?” I asked. “I’d like to do an interview.”

  He thought a moment. “Would it be front page?”

  “If it’s good,” I said. “I can’t see why not. I’ll even make a video for the Web site.”

  “Let me see,” he said. “I’ll call you back.”

  * * *

  Not only did Conyers agree to do it, baby, she also agreed to my bringing along a group of schoolchildren who would ask her questions about her behavior in the council chambers, all of it to be videotaped.

  The children arrived at the council chambers with their prepared questions in hand. They took the seats of the politicians behind the big oaked arch. At first, they cowered before Conyers, who sucked the air from the chambers with long, empty bromides about her march from squalor to law school to the chapel with a powerful congressman to the position of president pro tempore of the Detroit City Council. She insisted the children call her by that title: City Council President Pro Tem. A fancy way of saying runner-up.

  Finally, Riddle stepped in and asked the children about the Shrek incident.

  “Anybody have an opinion on that?” he asked the kids. A thirteen-year-old girl, Keiara Bell, asked Conyers if she felt she’d been disrespectful toward the council president and the city itself.

  “What do you mean by that?” Conyers asked with a sneer.

  “You’re an adult,” Bell lectured. “We have to look up to you.”

  “Absolutely,” Conyers replied. “You’ve never gotten angry with someone?”

  “Yes, but we’re kids. We’re looking on TV, and, like, this is an adult calling another adult Shrek? That’s something a second-grader would do.”

  Conyers could barely contain her anger. Her eyelids flared, her jaw clenched.

  “Now you’re telling me, young lady, what I should have and should not have done?”

  “Well, you’re an adult,” Bell countered. “Sometimes people need to think before they act.”

  * * *

  Not surprisingly, the video made its way around the world via the Internet, and Conyers became yet another symbol of what was wrong in Detroit: murder capital, arson capital, poverty capital, unemployment capital, illiteracy capital, foreclosure capital, segregation capital, mayoral scandal capital—and now Monica Conyers capital.

  Her negative publicity boiled for a month: the CBS Early Show, the front page of the Wall Street Journal, even the local television stations. None of it credited to the dying Detroit News.

  Suddenly, Conyers was everywhere for the wrong reasons.

  Naturally, Monica wasn’t happy and wanted to tell me. In person. We arranged to meet.

  As I drove to my rendezvous with Conyers at a cocktail lounge off Eight Mile Road, I decided to stop off at Keiara Bell’s home and say hello to her family.

  I hadn’t seen Keiara since the “Shrek” taping, which had made her a YouTube darling and an example of w
hat is good in Detroit. I drove through the crumbling neighborhoods on the city’s west side, where she lived.

  When I had left home—back in the early nineties—Detroit was still the nation’s seventh-largest city, with a population of over 1.2 million. Back then, Detroit was dark and broken and violent. Murders topped six hundred a year and Devil’s Night—the day before Halloween when the city burst into a flaming orgy of smoke and shattered glass—was at its height.

  Studying the city through the windshield now, it wasn’t frightening anymore. It was empty and forlorn and pathetic.

  On some blocks not a single home was occupied, the structures having fallen victim to desertion and the arsonist’s match. I drove blocks without seeing a living soul.

  I stopped by the Bells’ home off Livernois, once known as the Avenue of Fashion. They lived in a Tudor alongside other grand Tudors that surrounded a park with long, unkempt grass and a broken drinking fountain. I knocked on the iron gate that sealed the front door. The Bells weren’t home. They’d taken their rattletrap Cadillac and gone around the way to sell candy from the trunk, since the only other candy to be bought within a five-mile radius was at the liquor store.

  A dead sycamore that had snapped in the wind was lying in the street.

  Harry Bell, the family patriarch, praised God when I called him on his cell phone to find out where they were. I asked about the tree. He said the sycamore had fallen on his car a week ago during a heavy rainstorm and smashed it. He’d been asking the city for months to cut the dead tree. He called the city to come clean up the timber. But it was still lying there like a corpse.

  “The car still works,” Harry told me over the phone. “Great is He. God works miracles.”

  Harry was a typical Detroiter: unemployed part time, full of God and finding hope anywhere he could get it. At least the car still works. Praise Him!

  I drove around the corner to meet up with the family. They were in a neighborhood of blown-out, windowless houses mixed with others that had neatly manicured lawns. Harry grew up on this block.