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 th
ing 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 cer
tain 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.
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