Because when agents instructed Abdullah and four underlings to put down their guns and put up their hands, the imam refused. A police dog was sent to flush him out of a semitrailer full of “stolen” flat-screen TVs that an undercover fed was selling to the imam to sell to other undercover feds.
This is when Abdullah is said to have fired on the police dog. The agents then fired on Abdullah, striking him twenty times.
The dog was rushed by helicopter for emergency surgery. The corpse of Abdullah was handcuffed and left on the floor of the semi-trailer until the medical examiner arrived. The dog died. An obituary appeared in the local papers. His named was Freddy. He was two years old.
The imam was taken to the Wayne County morgue. Dr. Schmidt, the medical examiner, told me later that he had never seen a corpse handcuffed the way the imam’s was.
Jihadists. Fur coats. Blue turbans. Freddy the hero Belgian Malinois. I jumped in the News’ car and raced to the Masjid Al-Haqq mosque on the west side of the city. The transmission whined: Whirrr. Whirrr. Whirrr.
I don’t like to hit the ghetto in church clothes, especially in fancy boots with slippery lambskin soles, but things like militant black Muslims shooting it out with G-men comes around only so often for a newsman. And maybe this was the match that would start the Fourth Great Fire in Detroit.
I sparked a cigarette and stepped on it.
The mosque was located on Clairmount Street near Linwood, not far from the epicenter of the 1967 riot, not far from the apartment where my grandmother died alone a half century ago, not far from where my grandfather miraculously morphed from a black man into a white man.
The neighborhood looked like a photo from postwar Dresden. Row upon row of burnt-out houses, boarded storefronts, weedy and vacant lots peppered with shattered glass, sparkling like quartz tailings. The Soldier Boy meat market had long been dead. Joy Cleaners had run out of luck. The Rising Sun Grand Chapter of the O.E.S. fraternal organization had an unfriendly-looking bullet hole through its dirty window.
A bunch of tough-looking black men in robes and kaffiyeh scarves were milling around the mosque, which was no more than a crumbling house with a hand-painted sign that read in English and Arabic: THERE IS NO GOD BUT ALLAH.
“They bad dudes,” a young woman whispered from her upper window, piecing together from my skin tone and notebook and lambskin boots that I must be a reporter. “They moved in about six months ago and took over the neighborhood. They just took over all them empty houses. Now our cars get stolen. They park on our grass, and you don’t ask them to move. During Ramadan, they was sitting on them mosque steps smoking blunts and drinking Patrón and beer.”
“I thought they were Muslims,” I said.
“Muslims my ass,” she snorted. “They’s thugs.”
I approached the crowd of robed men standing in front of the pillared porch, its roof sagging low. Four of them turned and started walking toward me. I hoped they noticed the notepad in my hand, the press card on a chain around my neck, the lambskin boots, my skin tone. Dressed in church clothes, I must have looked the very picture of a privileged professor of anthropology. Scenarios like this are the organ of adrenaline for a street reporter. This is why people cover war armed with only a pencil or a camera. Danger. My legs began to throb.
“Excuse me,” I offered. “I’m sorry to hear about—”
“Nobody got nothing to say,” the toughest-looking one said to me. His fists were balled. “We don’t want none y’all coming round here. You hear?”
“I just—”
“Fuck off.”
“Can I quote you on that?”
“I ain’t gonna tell you again. Fuck off.”
I fucked off.
I walked back to the weedy lot of glistening glass and stood smoking cigarettes with Brad Edwards, the hard-boiled newscaster from the Fox affiliate. As we smoked, Ricardo Thomas, a photographer from the News, drove up.
“You know where the mosque is?” Ricardo called from his window.
“Around the corner, man. Just look for the other photographers,” I said. “But watch your ass, they’re not in a happy mood.”
Ricardo rolled his eyes. A sixty-seven-year-old black man, Ricardo had covered riots, murders and street protests in his long career. He knew the scene.
He drove off to get his photograph, and I forgot about him when Edwards struck up a conversation with a prostitute walking by.
“Y’all know what happened to them girls murdered on Gratiot?” she asked Edwards. She had bad teeth, good breasts and wore schoolteacher glasses.
“Were they working girls?” asked Edwards in his newsman’s baritone. Edwards always seemed energized by a good murder story. “Someone’s killing working girls? You know them?” He handed her his business card.
She took his card and smiled. Her teeth were ruined worse than the neighborhood. The sun was setting.
“No, I don’t know them, but that’s why I don’t work past sunset,” she said. “They crazy motherfuckers out here.”
That’s when the screaming started.
I spun around on my wooden heels. Ricardo was being pummeled by a dozen men from the mosque, enraged that he had taken photos after they warned him not to. Someone hit him with a wild haymaker and he fell, the back of his head bouncing off the curb. Someone snatched his cameras and whipped them repeatedly against the sidewalk.
I ran to him as best I could, slipping in my lamb-soled boots. In my mind—it all went in slow motion—I thought about it ending here, on a shitty corner in a desperate city. My last words would not be to my wife but to a twenty-dollar hooker with no dental insurance.
A mob is made up of men, and usually the men want to be stopped before they become a snarling pack. But there is a tipping point after which you can no longer stop them because “they” will have become an “it.” I was hoping for my life and Ricardo’s that the point hadn’t been reached.
I approached from the back of the pack and grabbed Ricardo by his armpits and started skating backward. I was waiting for the glass bottle on the back of my head, but it never came. No one so much as touched me.
The men, realizing what they had done to an old man, shuffled shamefully back to their mosque; all except for the one carrying the broken cameras by their straps.
“Our leader was killed, man,” he said with tears in his eyes as he walked away. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?”
He was the guy who threatened me. I took it to be an apology. Ricardo didn’t.
“I’m not afraid of you motherfuckers,” he shouted.
The guy tossed the cameras in the gutter and walked away.
I noticed the sun had set.
“I was too cowardly to help,” said an Associated Press man, walking up from the shadows with what was left of the cameras. It was a brave thing to admit. The cameras looked like battered cuckoo clocks.
* * *
Ricardo was giving his statement to the police when my cell phone rang. It was a cop source of mine. A high-up. I told him about Ricardo.
“Is he all right?” the voice asked with real concern.
“Yeah, I think so,” I said.
“Do you have it on videotape?”
“Yeah, I think Fox got it,” I said.
“Good,” the cop said. “Send it to me. I love watching reporters get their ass kicked.”
He said it deadpan.
“Listen,” he went on. “You know Wyatt Earp Evans?”
He was talking about the new chief of police, Warren Evans, whose curious method of public relations was to ride along with his newly constituted “strike force” and bust down doors and snatch up guns.
“Well, you know how he likes to play big shot and go to see these shooting scenes?”
“Yeah?” I said. I had been out with him o
n one occasion. So had Edwards. So had ABC national news, for Christ’s sake.
“Well,” the cop said, “he got there a little too early tonight. His driver just put a cap in a kid.”
“What?”
“Yep. Just shot a kid. Could you imagine if that was Bratton in L.A.?”
“International headlines,” I said.
“Hell of a day in Detroit.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” I said. “I’ll call the news desk. Thanks.”
I looked over. Ricardo was giving an interview to Edwards.
* * *
The shooting of a man in the presence of the chief of police earned nothing more than a three-paragraph story buried in the inside pages of the next morning’s papers.
The FBI’s shooting of the imam, however, was the stuff of international news, with lapdog headlines that could have been crafted by the FBI itself.
Detroit, according to media accounts, had a homegrown terror cell, and the feds had smashed it before it could wreak havoc on the populace.
It smelled like bullshit to me. What I saw at the mosque was a street gang, not a jihadist terror cell. In fact, reading over the charging documents presented to the federal judge that morning, the only conspiracy I could find was a clownish and amateur attempt by Abdullah and some of his henchmen to change the VIN plate on a stolen Ford Bronco. They had even given the truck the code name “White Lady.”
These were not acolytes of Osama bin Laden. They were followers of H. Rap Brown, the former Black Panther and convert to Islam who was serving life in a Colorado supermax prison for killing a cop and wounding another in Georgia in 2000.
Part of the reason they were dealing in stolen goods, it seemed, was to get rent money for H. Rap’s old lady in Atlanta.
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.
As for our jihadists, Abdullah and his men were caught on wire spinning fantasy scenarios about killing cops. But they never had a bomb and they never traveled to Yemen. They dealt in stolen property. They bullied neighbors and stole cars.
The Brotherhood was a gang, no doubt. But the FBI spin that this was a Sunni terror group was a silly overstatement. In fact, none of those arrested were charged with any terrorism counts, and a U.S. magistrate saw fit to release some of the eleven defendants on personal bond.
What I saw was a bunch of lost, pissed-off black men. Creatures of the ghetto—90 percent of whom had taken the well-worn path from the street block to the cell block and back to the corner, their lot never improving.
Imam Luqman Ameen Abdullah, a.k.a. Christopher Thomas, himself was introduced to Islam while in prison, and when he was released from incarceration, he began to create a Robin Hood thing in the ghetto. Carry guns. Rob to feed the poor. Espouse violence against the crown. Give yourself cool new names and costumes. Wear a turban. He gave lost men something to be and something to do.
But the fact is, he wasn’t even a good thief. The Brotherhood was so broke, in fact, that the group was evicted from its previous mosque by the city for back taxes. What did the Brotherhood do? They simply walked a few blocks south and took over an abandoned house.
Frankly, the poverty is so severe in Detroit that I was surprised there weren’t more groups like the Brotherhood bubbling up. Just a few weeks before Abdullah’s killing, fifty thousand people had stormed Cobo Hall in hopes of getting one of the five thousand applications for federal rent and utilities assistance. The scene turned into a near riot, with people being trampled and applications being snatched from old people’s hands.
“This morning, I seen the curtain pulled back on the misery,” a man at Cobo told me. “People fighting over a line. People threatening to shoot each other. Is this what we’ve come to?”
Indeed.
Black nationalism is nothing new in Detroit. It is embroidered in the cultural quilt of the city. The Nation of Islam was founded here in the early 1930s by a mysterious figure named Wallace Fard Muhammad and taken to its apogee by Malcolm X, an ex-convict and Detroiter who preached emancipation “by any means necessary,” only to be assassinated by his own. The Republic of New Afrika, a social movement that began in Detroit, espoused a separate black nation within the United States, to be carved out of the Deep South. Then there is the Shrine of the Black Madonna, the pan-African church from which the careers of Kwame Kilpatrick, Police Chief Evans and countless other political players in Detroit had sprung.
I had to get a look inside that mosque, and Kwame Kilpatrick gave me the key to the door.
* * *
Kilpatrick, in an effort to dodge his $6,000-a-month restitution payment to the city, had filed a motion claiming that when all of his living expenses in a posh Dallas suburb were deducted from his salesman’s check, he had only $6 a month left.
The prosecutor—pissed off with the game and seeking to revoke Kilpatrick’s probation and toss him into state prison—hauled the former mayor into court the morning after the imam was shot.
The prosecutor pulled back the curtain on Kilpatrick’s lavish lifestyle: Gucci shoes, nail salons, plastic surgery for his wife, a million-dollar house and private school for the kids. Under oath, Kilpatrick claimed he didn’t know what his wife did for a living because she had him living in the basement in their rich, white Texas neighborhood.
When asked by the prosecutor what exactly he had spent a half million dollars on over the last year, Kilpatrick invoked his Fifth Amendment privilege—three separate times. That’s one thing the ex-mayor, the hit man and I have in common. We know our constitutional law.
Then came the detail that gave me the key to the mosque door. The prosecutor exposed the fact that a group of white suburban businessmen had given Kilpatrick and his wife nearly $300,000 in parting gifts and loans when he was forced out of city hall.
These self-made businessmen—Peter Karmanos, Dan Gilbert, Robert Penske, James Nicholson and Matty Moroun—still realized there was plenty of loot to be made in a dead city. They were some of the same men who bundled together the last-minute cash in 2005 that saved Kilpatrick’s struggling reelection campaign. What these white men got in return for their charity was anybody’s guess. But for a fleeting moment, Detroiters got a taste of the vanilla icing that coats Chocolate City.
I went back to the mosque the following morning with the newspaper. It was Friday, the Muslim Sabbath. The Brotherhood, I knew, would all be gathering for prayers.
I showed the Kilpatrick headline to a man named Jamel, a security guard who was smoking a cigarette out front on the porch. He looked at me with a tired skepticism before scanning the article. I noticed the irises of his eyes were ringed in blue.
“The white man finds a monkey and dresses up the monkey in a suit,” Jamel sneered, handing me back the paper. “The monkey does the white man’s bidding and makes himself rich. Then the monkey’s talking shit about the white man. Games. And the people’s out here suffering. What do you think we been trying to say?”
A man lighter than an Irish grandmother and dressed in a cotton gown started an argument with Jamel for speaking with me, “Whitey.”
It was turning loud and ugly, and remembering Ricardo, I was heading for my car when Omar Regan, one of Imam
Abdullah’s twelve children, arrived and calmed everyone down with a simple “Brothers.” He invited me upstairs for prayers.
Taking his cue, the Irishman bowed and took my hand while introducing himself by his Muslim name, taken straight from CNN: Jihad al Jihad.
Regan is a young, handsome, powerful orator who speaks Arabic and leads a mosque in South Central Los Angeles. He had come for his father’s funeral and had washed his father’s body and anointed his feet with oil the evening before. He told me his father had been shot twenty times, once through the scrotum.
The crowd was overflowing and the sermon was broadcast onto the street. Inside, the mosque had exposed walls and electrical boxes with no switches. The malfunctioning furnace gave off an oppressive heat, made worse by the pressed-together bodies.
“How can you be what they say you are, when you don’t got nothing,” Regan preached to the weeping congregants. “They forgot about the ’hood. The suburbs are okay, but they forgot about the ’hood. They forgot about you, and so we all, my Muslim brothers, have to take care of each other.
“They call us radicals. They call us terrorists. We don’t care what they say about us because they don’t care about what’s good.”
The killing of Abdullah had only made things worse, I could see. And as I sat there scribbling in my notebook, I wondered why the federal agents couldn’t simply have arrested the imam while he went to get a morning cup of coffee.
As I looked up, two people stood to accept conversion to Islam.
WHITE MAN’S BURDEN
IT WAS A beautiful December morning in southern California. The 405 freeway was bumper to bumper, which was either a good or bad sign for the American car industry, depending on how one looked at it—good because Americans were clearly still buying cars, bad because half of them appeared to be foreign brands.
It was the morning before the Los Angeles Auto Show officially kicked off, and Cadillac was holding a reporters-only preview of the CTS Coupe, the newest member of the Cadillac family, set to hit showrooms in 2010. The new car was being touted as one of the models that would bring General Motors back to profitability, allowing it to pay off its astronomical debt to the American taxpayer.
Detroit: An American Autopsy Page 19