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

by Mark Binelli

  In a dingy, but electrically lighted room of the basement, the “prophet” had set up one of the weirdest “altars” ever uncovered in Detroit.

  Eight or ten wax figures, each hideous and grotesque to the extreme, and each presumably representing one of the “celestial planets,” were suspended on the altar in a circle by wires from the ceiling. Among them was a huge eye, electrically lighted from the inside, which Evangelist referred to in his bible as “the sun.”

  The walls and ceiling of this “religious sanctum” were lined with light green cloth, which bulged out in places like the walls of a padded cell. In a window of the basement, which was on a line with and visible from St. Aubin avenue, a large card bore the words: “Great Celestial Planet Exhibition.”

  A man’s bloody footprints led from Evangelist’s head up to the bedrooms where his wife and children were murdered. But the case was never solved. Police theories alternately fingered mafia extortionists, a mad or disgruntled follower of Evangelist’s, and a murderous Negro acolyte of Wallace Fard, the original prophet of the Nation of Islam. Neighbors described Evangelist as an oddball whose public incantations included “gazing toward and waving his arms at the sky.” Otherwise, they said, he basically seemed like a nice guy.

  The location of the former Evangelist home, at 3587 St. Aubin, turned out to be a short walk from my apartment. Heading east on Gratiot, I passed an old man in a motorized wheelchair riding in the street against traffic. Fortunately, the dearth of actual traffic made it unlikely he’d be struck by a car. I stepped over a toppled streetlight about fifteen feet long, stretched diagonally across the length of the sidewalk. Then I crossed the boulevard and turned onto St. Aubin, where I passed the warehouse of a sausage company, a flophouse, two entire blocks of unruly grass (aside from a single lonely home), the blocks after that—Watson to Erskine, Erskine to Pierce, Pierce to Scott, Scott to Hale, Hale to Mack—holding, respectively, one, one, zero, two, and three houses, with topographically unusual hummocks rising in the middle of certain of the lots.

  The Evangelist home would have been on the west side of St. Aubin between Hale and Mack, but that entire side of block had gone, too. The mounds, most likely, were illegally dumped trash, since camouflaged by vegetation.

  * * *

  In the fall of 2010, some body parts were discovered in Upper Chene: two legs, with the feet still attached, and two arms, with the hands still attached. All four limbs—“unknown tissue,” in the parlance of forensic experts—possessed notably clean cuts. The arms had been sliced off just below the armpit, the legs along the inguinal area of the thigh. They had not been hacked from the body with an axe or regular sort of knife but rather had been removed with an extremely sharp cutting instrument. The smoothness of the cuts reminded the Wayne County medical examiner of the rotating saws they used in the morgue.

  It was quickly determined that the limbs all belonged to the same person, a sixty-one-year-old African American male named David Morgan Jr. Morgan’s left leg had been found on the berm in front of 2281 Hale; his left arm in the front yard of 2281 Hale, inside the fence; his right arm in front of a house closer to St. Aubin, 2137 Hale; and the right leg in an overgrown alley across the street. The right leg turned up bent in an L-shape against a backdrop of yellowed grass, the foot still clad in a dirty white tube sock. The right arm formed an even more precise right angle, like a detached mannequin’s limb.

  A few days later, Morgan’s torso was discovered several blocks north of Hale, in a field not far from the one where Pete Barrow threw his weekly blues concerts during the summer. The torso had been wrapped in a blanket.

  Morgan’s head was never recovered. His neck had been removed entirely with his head.

  Two months later, after it seemed as if the case had gone cold, a pair of suspects were arrested: Kevin Howell, twenty-one, and Aaron Coleman, twenty-two. In the telling of the police, Howell and Coleman had been selling crack cocaine out of a home at Hale and Grandy. The young men became concerned when a second group of dealers set up a drug spot just a few blocks away, at Hale and Chene, and so decided to send the newcomers a message by killing one of their own customers and scattering his limbs around the rival drug house. Howell and Coleman also had a side business scrapping out abandoned homes for metal, so they owned the sorts of cutting tools necessary for the grisly job. The unlucky victim had been Morgan, a habitual drug user known around the neighborhood as “Barbershop Dave” because of the clippers he always carried with him, in order to perform impromptu haircuts for money.

  Eighty years earlier, the Evangelist murders had taken place more or less across the street, on the opposite corner of St. Aubin and Hale. None of the coverage of Morgan’s murder noted this uncanny convergence of dismemberments. In fact, compared with the Evangelist case, which received widespread and sensationalistic local news coverage at the time—and for years to come, as wild new theories about the possible killer emerged—the death of David Morgan Jr. barely registered. The following spring, to mark the outset of Howell and Coleman’s trial, one of the dailies ran a story on Morgan. The reporter interviewed his siblings and grown children, who posed together for one of those depressing photographs in which the family of a dead person holds up a framed head shot of their departed loved one, as if they could be a missing person who might still be found alive somewhere.

  When I arrived at the courtroom in the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, I was surprised by the absence of any other journalists. I thought I’d pulled a boner and turned out unnecessarily early. Perhaps, I fretted, veterans of the crime beat never even bothered with that first day. But not a single reporter turned out for the duration of the trial. You’d have figured a gruesome dismemberment would have merited some small interest, but apparently the crime wasn’t quite extraordinary enough by Detroit standards. What did you have to do around here to get some ink?

  Actually, that same week, the big local crime story had been the twelve-year-old girl who’d tried to rob a suburban convenience store with a loaded gun.

  * * *

  In reality, despite the violence of the crime, Morgan had been the wrong kind of victim to merit much in the way of sympathetic, or even prurient, tabloid coverage: too old, too black, too poor, too addicted to crack. Likewise, his alleged killers, a pair of young, African American (alleged) drug dealers, had become such dully familiar types in the urban crime genre, it would take a lot more than a not-even-ritual dismemberment to transform them into Leopold and Loeb. I questioned covering the trial myself. The fact that the murder took place so close to my apartment had piqued my interest, as had the weird echoes of the Evangelist killings. But to illustrate the problem of crime in Detroit, I might have turned to any number of other cases.

  For instance, at the same time the David Morgan Jr. murder trial was occuring, prosecutors in a different case were working out a homicide plea deal with a man named Chauncey Owens. The previous summer, Owens, though in his thirties, had gotten into a verbal beef with a seventeen-year-old named Je’Rean Blake Nobles. They’d been standing outside a massive party store on Mack Avenue and St. Jean where, behind counter-to-ceiling bulletproof glass, kids from the neighborhood could also buy soft-serve ice cream. It was two in the afternoon. Nobles had gone to the party store for an orange juice and happened to be standing out front. By all accounts, Owens hadn’t liked the way Nobles had looked at him. According to a construction worker waiting for the bus, Owens had said, “Stand right there. When I come back, I got something for you.” He’d returned a few moments later in an SUV, along with three other men, and shot Nobles twice with a revolver, killing him. As part of Owens’s guilty plea, he agreed to finger another man in the car, his buddy “CJ”—Charles Jones—as the person who’d provided the murder weapon.

  Killing a teenager in broad daylight for no discernible reason would not necessarily have stood out in Detroit but for what happened two days after the shooting, when the Detroit police came looking for Owens at CJ’s house. Owens had been hidin
g out in the upper floor of the duplex home, but the police went in through the ground level, where CJ’s seven-year-old daughter, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, asleep on the couch, was shot in the head. A film crew from a cable television reality show called The First 48 was shadowing the police officers, leading to speculation that the cops had been recklessly playing to the cameras; a Detroit police officer had been shot and killed during a similar raid a week earlier, which might have also had an effect on protocol. After Aiyana’s death, people began to question the judgment of Police Chief Warren Evans, who had increased the number of such paramilitary-style raids, and later that summer, when a video of Evans’s own reality show pitch surfaced—titled The Chief, it showed him standing in front of the abandoned train station holding a shotgun—Mayor Bing relieved Evans of his duties.

  While most discussion of reinventing Detroit centers on wonkish policy paper topics involving land use and the efficacy of Keynesian economic stimulus, the biggest obstacle to any sort of serious change arguably remains the problem of crime. Detroit’s notoriety for violence and general mayhem scares off new residents and businesses and makes it exceedingly difficult to retain old ones. By 2011, as Mayor Bing was trying to maintain focus on positive, upscale-demographic-luring new developments, the members of the permanent underclass inconveniently refused to stop killing one another. In fact, the murder rate soared after the ousting of Chief Evans, handing Detroit its statistically highest homicide rate in more than twenty years.

  Modern Detroit has always been considered a rough place. During Prohibition, the city’s proximity to Canada made it the wettest in the United States—“a wide-open booze town,”2 with liquor ferried or driven across the river, depending on whether it was frozen or not. “It was absolutely impossible to get a drink in Detroit,” wrote Free Press columnist Malcolm Bingay, “unless you walked at least ten feet and told the busy bartender what you wanted in a voice loud enough for him to hear you above the uproar.” The local board of commerce estimated the illegal liquor trade employed fifty thousand Detroiters by 1929, making it the city’s second-largest industry, right behind automaking. As would happen later in the century with the prohibition of drugs, gangs flourished, with “individual entrepreneurs,” according to Robert Conot, “[falling] by the way as syndicates were formed in emulation of trusts in legitimate industry … that would have done justice to General Motors.” There were Jewish mobsters—most notoriously, the Purple Gang—and Italian mobsters, and their turf battles turned Detroit into a war zone, with one of the highest murder rates in the country.

  The seventies brought heroin crews like Young Boys Inc., the eighties crack gangs like the Chambers Brothers, who controlled half the dope houses in the city, netting an estimated $50 million annually. For the three-year period between 1985 and 1987, Detroit was the homicide capital of the United States, with triple the murder rate of New York City. Local law enforcement estimated there were more guns in the city than people. On average, a child was shot every day in 1986.

  The Carter, the terrifying high-rise apartment complex run entirely by a drug gang in the movie New Jack City, is based on a real building in Detroit taken over by the Chambers Brothers after overly conspicuous lines began forming at their more traditional crack houses. As William Adler chronicles in his compulsively readable book about the Chamberses, Land of Opportunity, you could get five-dollar rocks of cocaine on one floor and ten-dollar rocks on another, with special areas set aside for smoking and prostitution.3

  Violence ebbed in Detroit in the nineties, mirroring a national trend, but after the turn of the new century, murders started to creep up again. Long before Warren Evans, police chiefs in Detroit had been mounting their own versions of shock-and-awe, and by 2003, the Justice Department placed the Detroit Police Department under a consent decree for illegally detaining suspects and excessive use of force; a Free Press study showed Detroit leading the nation in fatal shootings by police officers for the eight-year period beginning in 1990.

  Substantively, Evans’s replacement, former assistant chief Ralph Godbee, didn’t mess with his old boss’s strategy, a data-driven, Moneyball approach to policing that called for stretching the city’s miniscule budget by statistically targeting the most crime-ridden neighborhoods. Some wondered if Evans’s aggressive tactics, however criticized, had been the secret of his success; but then again, the perpetual downturn in which the economy seemed mired might have made the spike in crime rates inevitable. Godbee, unsurprisingly, and not necessarily incorrectly, cited dwindling resources as his biggest problem.

  “Between layoffs and restructuring, we’re a thousand officers fewer today than in 2005,” he told me in late 2010. “That’s significant. The city is still 139 square miles. And you have a high level of people who move because they can afford to, leaving behind a disproportionate number of people who are fending for themselves with all of the problems that go along with poverty. This leads to, for lack of a better term, a perfect storm, where crime stays high even as the population is dropping.” Godbee grew up in Detroit, the son of a brick mason; his father discouraged him from entering the police academy, afraid he would not continue his education, but Godbee wound up getting a master’s degree and working his way up from street patrol, in one of the city’s most dangerous districts, to become head of security for Mayor Dennis Archer and eventually chief.

  He said that he hoped to build on Evans’s approach by adding more community policing. The elimination of the state law requiring public servants to live in the city where they worked had an especially deleterious effect on cities like Detroit, in Godbee’s view. “Now over 50 percent of our police department doesn’t live in the city,” he noted. Godbee himself owns a home practically across the street from my old high school. The neighborhood used to be nicknamed “Copper Canyon” because so many police officers lived there. Since the change in residency requirements, though, most of those officers decamped for the suburbs, and crime has soared.

  One night while I was on a police ride-along with a Detroit Police Department gang-detail veteran named Harold Rochon, we were called to a reported shooting in this very neighborhood—actually, quite close to where my high school girlfriend used to live. Her parents took in severely disabled foster children for extra income, and a number of my rookie make-out sessions had taken place on a living room sofa across from a crib where a pair of encephalitic twins lay on their backs, occasionally moaning, the whole thing like a movie codirected by John Hughes and David Lynch. When I returned to my ex’s neighborhood with the Detroit police, it was close to one in the morning. The woman who’d reported the shooting lived in a small brick home with bars on the door. The porch was just a bare block of cement that had steps attached but no railing or awning or any kind of furniture. About a dozen people were milling around outside. Most seemed to be in their teens or early twenties. The complainant herself was probably in her late thirties and wore a loose housedress. She said her ex-boyfriend had slapped her daughter, prompting her nephew and the daughter’s boyfriend to roughly show him the door. He’d returned with two truckloads of men with guns and taken a couple of shots at the house.

  “It was a red pickup truck,” a spindly guy wearing a skullcap and a long jersey shouted, slurring his words like a ham actor pretending to be drunk. “Niggas in the back of that bitch shooting and acting crazy, man. Y’all be late as hell.”

  Another officer had already gone off in search of the offending vehicles, with no luck. Rochon told everyone to go back into the house and to call 911 if the men returned.

  The woman became incredulous. “What if he shoot up the house? These niggas had guns. You know what I deal with? I deal with a baseball bat. I don’t mess with no guns. But you don’t touch my child. You don’t touch none of my kids. And then you wanna go get your niggas on some bitch shit? Nah!”

  Rochon’s partner, attempting to reason with her, said, “If you’re outside, it ain’t gonna make it no better.”

  “Realistically speaki
ng, bullets can go through a house,” the daughter’s teenage boyfriend pointed out, not unreasonably, I thought.

  “You’re more prone to be hit out here,” Rochon said tersely.

  The boyfriend said, “It’s a fifty-fifty chance. I witnessed bullets go through walls with my own eyes. And hit people!”

  “You need to go into the house,” Rochon said, “or if you’re that afraid, you need to go somewhere else for the night.”

  For some reason, the guy in the skullcap had extended his arms in an about-to-be-frisked position and called to the officers, “Want me to stretch out, too? I’m used to it!” Then he began cackling. One of the younger guys told him to shut up.

  I’m not sure how I expected the police to respond, but I suppose I figured it would be something more buoying than, “If someone is threatening to shoot up your house, don’t stand on the porch, and maybe leave for someplace safer.”

  Once again, though, Rochon ordered everyone inside, threatening to arrest any minors who continued to loiter. Then we drove off to the next call.

  * * *

  The two defendants, Kevin Howell and Aaron Coleman, were to be tried simultaneously, though they had different lawyers. In court, Howell, the taller of the two young men, wore glasses and a white dress shirt, its collar unbuttoned to reveal a white crew neck T-shirt. He had a chunky, pear-shaped build, and an Afro and fuzzy sideburns that might have passed for intentionally retro, had not his glazed eyes and generally sedated affect made any deliberate fashion choices seem implausible. Coleman, a little guy, had a wispy mustache and wore his hair in braids that fell to the back of his neck. His outfit was fairly ridiculous: a cream-colored dress shirt buttoned all the way to the top, but with no tie and the wrong size, the shirt billowing piratically out of his waistband when tucked, making you think of a little boy posing uncomfortably for a First Communion photo. Still, he had trained his face to betray no emotion other than an icy soldier’s stare and, puffy shirt or no, he threw off an effortless menace.