Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American Metropolis

by Mark Binelli

  Hollowell had always thought being a cop would be a cool job, that or the military, and began working as a cadet-in-training at the police department when he was fifteen. By the time he turned twenty-one, he’d already seen close to thirty homicides. The job started to get to him. He’d been fired upon by people openly selling drugs from their porches, and he took to strapping on his gun before going out to cut the lawn.

  “Actually, if I was outside at all,” he emended. “I could be sitting on my porch and I’d have a gun on the table next to me with a rag over it. The city was riddled with dope.”

  Hollowell related all of the above in a muted deadpan. I’d be tempted to describe his affect as hard-boiled if not for his habit of coaxing reactions from his listener by pulling some manner of exaggerated face.

  A train flew by. Hollowell lifted his hand and waved at the conductor. He told me he’d transferred to the engine house as soon as word of an opening came down.

  Hollowell’s colleague Sergeant Nate Irwin wandered outside and planted himself in another chair, bringing his cigarette and coffee mug. Hollowell told Irwin about my book.

  Irwin gave me an appraising look. “You going fiction or nonfiction?” he asked.

  Non, I said.

  He snorted. “No one’s gonna believe it.”

  Hollowell and Irwin could be characters in an eighties Hollywood buddy movie about firemen. Irwin, a thirty-two-year-old white guy, had grown up in Royal Oak, which, back when I was a kid, had been the “hip” suburb (record stores, vintage shops, a bondage outfitter). His head, shaved cleaner than a brush cut, retained a sandpapery stubble, and Irwin clearly derived therapeutic pleasure from pensively rubbing it while discussing the particular hardships of his career path. Having worked in Highland Park for over ten years, he’d armored himself with a jaded air similar to Hollowell’s.

  “How did I end up here?” he asked. “Well, you watch the news.” He meant that, like Marvin, he’d been drawn by the action. “And then,” he said, lighting another cigarette, “after a few years, you can’t leave, for multiple reasons: (a) you don’t want to, and (b) no one will take you.” The reason for (b), oddly enough, had to do with the amount of field action one quickly accumulated in a place like Highland Park: a captain at a suburban department, who might see a handful of fires each year, wouldn’t necessarily be eager to hire a young guy with so much more experience.

  Highland Park and Detroit get so many fires, of such spectacular variety, that firefighters from around the country—Boston, Compton, Washington, D.C.—make pilgrimages here. Some monitor the police scanners and just turn up at the scene, snapping photos and shooting video. A decent enough photograph might make the pages of one of the trade (Fire Chief or Firehouse), where a cover shot could fetch a thousand bucks. “We’re YouTube legends now,” Irwin noted wryly. One firefighter from the Bronx visited twice every year. He’d told the Highland Park guys the Bronx had become boring. Most of their buildings were occupied now, and it just wasn’t popping like in the old days.

  The sky had turned a mauve color. On the service road of the industrial park, a stream of cars began to depart; a late shift at one of the parts shops must have ended. From inside the warehouse, we could hear the echo of a television commercial for Liberty Mutual Insurance. What’s your policy? the announcer asked. A slight, pleasant breeze stirred up.

  “It’s probably something free-burning somewhere, sucking up all the oxygen,” Hollowell said.

  A firefighter named Chaplain sat nearby, occasionally answering a phone and taking notes on a pad. I hadn’t paid much attention to him until I realized he was talking to someone who seemed to be requesting an ambulance. Hollowell noticed the curious look on my face and said, “This is our 911.” He meant that Chaplain—a lone guy sitting in a folding chair answering a phone—was the 911 operator for the entire city of Highland Park. When the call was completed, Hollowell said, “Chaplain, who have you got tonight waiting for the EMS?” Chaplain looked at his pad and said, “Two strokes, a heart attack, a guy who fell and cracked his head open.” He said the first call had come at 5:56 p.m. and none had received EMS attention yet. I looked at my watch. It was after eight.

  The city of Highland Park did not own an ambulance and had only one EMS truck. Many of the calls Chaplain had been fielding were repeat calls from people asking when the medics would arrive.

  With the exception of Hollowell and Irwin, the other firefighters sitting out there—the diminutive, shaved-headed white guy who talked about his impoverished childhood, how when his mom got remarried, the family finally had enough money to buy Kool-Aid; the ripped Iraq vet, with tattoos of a machine gun and Arabic script running up and down his arms, who used to live in Detroit, but had moved across 8 Mile, to suburban Ferndale, “just to get city services,” he said, adding, “I mean, my fiancée is pretty tough. She can handle herself. But if you get someone on your front lawn acting crazy and you have to shoot ’em, that’s no good”—all of these guys were being paid ten dollars an hour. Cops in Highland Park started at eight. Irwin and Hollowell both liked to use this fact to wind up their right-leaning chief, especially when it came to conservative demagoguing on the supposed overcompensation of the public workforce.4

  “Unions, I mean, what’s left?” Irwin asked. “The trades? None of those guys even have jobs. The only unions left are the ones they can’t break: public safety, UAW, Teamsters, teachers.”

  Public safety officers in Highland Park were no longer unionized, which was how the city got away with compensating the cops and firefighters so pathetically. As with corporate structured bankruptcies, the city had been able to break its existing union contracts when, facing a $6.5 million deficit, the first emergency financial manager, Ramona Henderson-Pearson, took over the city’s finances in 2001. A disastrous attempt by Henderson-Pearson and then-mayor Titus McClary to build a new suburban-style development within Highland Park was later investigated by the FBI.5 Henderson-Pearson’s successor, Arthur Blackwell II, was convicted of illegally paying himself a salary of close to $300,000 while serving as manager. Blackwell’s successor, Robert Mason, was not convicted of any wrongdoing—though, to be fair to his predecessors, he served only for three months.

  * * *

  Why were there so many fires in Highland Park? The high number of vacant houses, along with squatters and legitimate residents who pilfered electricity via jerry-rigged, easily combustible wiring jobs, pushed up the count, for sure. But Irwin considered most of their runs the result of arson. You could quick-claim a deed to a house in Highland Park for a thousand dollars and insure it for eighty thousand. If the house burned a month later, suspicious or not, it would be one fire among many, and best of luck proving anything, because until recently Highland Park had no fire inspector. Irwin had paid out of pocket to take investigatory courses at the fire academy. He’d also bought his own equipment.

  Hollowell said, “Mark, he probably doesn’t want to tell you this, but I’m going to: getting a license on your own like that is totally unheard of. Up until this point, fires were just not investigated in this city, at all.”

  Irwin, seeming embarrassed by the attention, leaned down to adjust the volume of a walkie-talkie next to his chair. “I have a hard time sitting around,” he murmured. “I was just looking to do stuff.”

  “For fifteen years here, the fires have gone completely unchecked,” Hollowell went on. “The city played games as if they were being investigated, but they didn’t really do anything.” Hollowell was convinced that the eleven-fire night hadn’t been a fluke, that one of the arsonists had started the latter fires to taunt the firefighters.

  Irwin, who was sitting with his legs crossed and black boots unzipped, finally warmed to the topic. “Investigating sucks,” he said. “Only 1 to 2 percent of arson cases end in prosecution, nationally. It’s so difficult to prove. You’re looking at all circumstantial facts. Before you even get into court, the DA is going to try to prove you’re not qualified.” He smiled.
“The good thing about Highland Park is, that’s hard to do, because we have lots of experience. But basically, if you can lie you can get away with arson. You know the foam in furniture, like a couch from Ikea, is made of low-grade petroleum. So if you can put your space heater next to your couch, it’s as good as or better than gasoline. And I can’t prove it was intentional. You’d pass a lie detector test. Not that I have a polygraph machine. Nor am I allowed to interrogate people. But every single case I get has accelerants, so there’s not a problem proving incendiary. The problem is proving who did it. So I just keep trying and trying, hoping to find a fingerprint on a gas can one day.” He smiled ruefully at his own Willy Loman impression. After a moment, the smile vanished and he added, “It gets depressing.”

  * * *

  Another night, after most of the firefighters had drifted off to the Village, I was left alone to doze off in front of the television. A young firefighter I’d never seen before lay sprawled on the striped couch closest to the fan. I wondered why he hadn’t gone to his room, and then we started chatting and I found out he was a volunteer. Having recently completed his fire training, the guy—I’ll call him Donnie—was looking for a job, and so a few times a month he’d work a shift as a volunteer, hoping to make his presence known and increase his likelihood of being hired if a paying position opened up. I hadn’t realized you could work an unpaid internship at a job requiring you to risk your life.

  Donnie kept turning his head to one side when he talked to me, finally revealing that he was partly deaf in his left ear, on account of being carjacked. He said he’d been very stupid: he’d stopped for gas after dark. (In certain parts of Detroit, this qualified as “asking for it.”) He’d seen the carjackers approaching and hadn’t tried to resist, but one of the guys pistol-whipped him anyway and the gun had gone off near his ear, permanently damaging his hearing.

  Donnie also told me that he was taking classes at Wayne State, that he thought Medicaid should fund abortions and that people on welfare shouldn’t be allowed to have kids.

  I said, “Huh.”

  Donnie said, “I might sound like an extremist, but that’s the way I feel.” Then he complained about how the downtown riverwalk, late at night, had become rowdy—how there were too many “ethnic” people there, if I knew what he meant. I was pretty sure he meant black people. If it had been another white guy saying this to me, I would have felt obligated to keep my face very still and not seem like I was agreeing with any racist insinuations. In the case of Donnie, though, I nodded ambiguously, almost imperceptibly, in a way that might lead one to believe I’d merely started to nod off, considering the lateness of the hour.

  * * *

  Hollowell told me I could ride along with him if a call came in. One evening, close to midnight, the alarm sounded. This time, I was alone on the couch, reading. Then I blinked and everyone was wide awake and suited up. Marvin, on dispatch, took the call. His voice came over an intercom, sounding disconcertingly serious.

  “All apparatus respond to 40 Pasadena house fire,” he said. “Police department is on the scene.”

  Irwin frowned. There’d been a fire on Pasadena the night before, directly across the street. Irwin thought someone must have gotten the address wrong—that, surely, the same house must have lit up again.

  Hollowell and I climbed into his engine. “Sounds like a good fire,” he said. Oxygen tanks set into the front seats forced me to sit forward in an awkward manner. The instrument panel was covered in dust and looked very old, like technology from another era. Different buttons that could light up read “Left Scene Light,” “Right Scene Light,” and “Retarder Applied.” An axe with a yellow handle leaned between our seats like a manual gear shift.

  Blasting his siren, Hollowell raced to Oakland, leading a three-truck convoy. We took a dramatically wide turn onto Woodward, hurtling down the center of the street, and I felt a boyish thrill. Hollowell had a sober look on his face.

  When we turned onto Pasadena, I could see flames strobing from the porch of a brick duplex. As we got closer, though, it became clear that the home itself wasn’t ablaze. Someone living inside had, inexplicably, started a fire in an oil drum on the covered porch—a wooden porch, so doubly foolish. The flames were practically tickling the underside of the eaves. Still, it wasn’t a three-alarm call. As we exited the fire truck, one of the police officers, a blond woman, approached Hollowell apologetically. “When we rolled up, there were flames all the way up to the roof,” she insisted.

  The man who’d started the fire, wiry, in a white undershirt, appeared inebriated. He insisted he’d been burning wood to keep away bugs. When the police officers ordered him to extinguish the fire, he’d disappeared into the house, emerging with a single ice cube tray sloppily filled with water. Hollowell asked the man for his name. He grimaced and said, “She took it,” nodding dismissively at one of the officers, before retreating inside to fetch more water.

  The other firefighters were already beginning to climb back into their trucks. I looked across the street at the remains of the previous night’s fire: a decent-sized brick home, its arched roof now partially collapsed.

  Back in the truck, Hollowell grumbled about having been summoned for such a nonsense run. “The address on the guy’s license was in Detroit—Burn Street!” he said, appreciating the irony on some level but not laughing. On the way back to the warehouse, we passed an old firehouse on Stordivan dating back from when Highland Park had three stations. That particular station place had been shut years ago and since horribly burned. Hollowell said the fire had happened when a man from Inkster who’d murdered his mother had carried her corpse to the empty station and torched it.

  At the warehouse, Irwin said he thought there might be a connection between that night’s episode and the fire across the street. But Hollowell shook his head. “I think that guy was just stupid. And high. He’ll start up that porch fire again as soon as the police leave.”

  Hollowell’s mood had soured. A few years ago, he’d moved out of Highland Park to a suburb north of 26 Mile. When I asked him what could be done with the city, he gave me a look and said, “Honestly? Level it. Tear it down and start over.”

  Marvin came out of his room to hear about the nonfire. When they told him the guy said he had just been trying to keep away bugs, Marvin said, “Well, in Picayune, Mississippi, you do burn wood to keep away the bugs.”

  “This isn’t Picayune, Mississippi,” Hollowell said.

  Marvin said, “No, it’s not.”

  The family of murder victim David Morgan Jr., posing with his photograph before the trial of his alleged killers. [Patricia Beck/ Detroit Free Press]

  10

  MURDER CITY

  Or, Just an Everyday Activity in Detroit

  YEARS AGO, WHILE IDLY researching what I thought might evolve into notes on a novel about the city, I’d come across the story of an Italian immigrant named Benjamino Evangelista. Like my own family, he’d arrived in the United States around the turn of the last century (1904), not settling straightaway in Detroit but initially on the Eastern Seaboard (Philadelphia, in Evangelista’s case), where Italians had already begun to cluster. He was nineteen and Neapolitan; he worked for the railroad, and later as a carpenter, and by the early twenties had made his way to Detroit, capitalizing on the city’s boomtown status by expanding his own enterprises, first into home construction and then real estate.

  But he also had a healthy side concern going as a religious prophet. Evangelista had been having visions for decades and became convinced he’d been chosen to reveal a complex plan. He began transcribing the things God told him in 1906 and eventually self-published the prophecy, which he titled, fantastically, The Oldest History of the World, Discovered by Occult Science in Detroit, Michigan. The book opens with a strangely nonchalant gloss on Genesis:

  Before the creation of God there existed nothing but air and water.

  Today we find land, men, animals, etc.

  It’s not clear if
Evangelista was a madman or a scam artist, or some combination of both; as a writer of prose, though, he did not make the most graceful conduit for occult science, and much of The Oldest History is a slog, even by the standards of crackpot mythology.1 The book was the first of an intended four volumes. By the time of its publication, Evangelista had changed his name to Benny Evangelist and begun to develop a reputation as a healer, fortune-teller, and local eccentric. Both his family physician and parish priest—he still attended mass and kept Roman Catholic iconography in his home—described Evangelist as insane, though the priest also suspected that the cult was likely a moneymaking ruse and that Evangelist, whom he described as close to illiterate, could not possibly have written The Oldest History.

  On the morning of July 2, 1929, a colleague of Evangelist’s named Vincent Elias stopped by the two-story frame home of the prophet to discuss some real estate business. There he discovered the bodies of Evangelist, his wife, Santina, and their four children, ages seven (Angeline), five (Margaret), four (Jean), and eighteen months (Mario). All had been stabbed or hacked to death. One of the children’s arms was cut off at the shoulder. Santina Evangelista’s head had been “horribly mutilated and nearly severed from the body,” according to the Detroit Free Press. “The murderer worked with demoniac frenzy.” Evangelist’s body was discovered in his home office, slumped in a chair. His head lay at his feet.

  Positing the killing might have “been actuated by religious mania,” the Free Press writer portrayed Evangelist as a shadowy figure, the “‘divine prophet’ of a mysterious religious cult.” The article continued, luridly, “Behind the tragedy was a grotesque background of religious insanity paralleling in its weirdness and barbarism any voodoo fetish of the West Indies”: