Terror in the City of Champions (17 page)

Bennett reigned over the Rouge. His service department was responsible for “upholding a rule of terror and repression,” according to the National Labor Relations Board. Bennett served as its powerful and much-feared leader. Frank Murphy, who as mayor had battled with Bennett, described him as an “inhuman brute.” Bennett had been at the heart of the 1932 Hunger March, which left several dead, and he would be instrumental in one of labor’s pivotal moments, the violent Battle of the Overpass.

A former Navy man, Bennett endeared himself to Henry Ford by fulfilling his darker commands. The two men talked or met daily. Bennett became Ford’s prime confidant. In Bennett’s estimation he was closer to Henry than Henry was to his own son, Edsel. Ford appeared to enjoy the mystery and shadowy intrigue that followed Bennett. Despite having little knowledge of cars, Bennett was the company’s most powerful nonfamily figure. “I am Mr. Ford’s personal man,” he said simply.

Though five-foot-six, Bennett made an intimidating impression. A former boxer, he retained his wiry physique and always looked ready to pounce. His reddish hair and blue eyes added to his air, as did his memorable bow ties, which he preferred because in a fight one might be strangled with his own necktie. Bennett carried a gun and was not shy about flashing it. He regularly took target practice with an air pistol in his basement office, which was protected by his men. The place had a “pool hall clientele, the air thick with menace,” wrote author Robert Lacey. It was “right beside the garage, so that his visitors could be driven straight in to see him without anyone being aware of their identity.”

Bennett hired an assortment of semi-known tough guys, like boxer Kid McCoy, who had served time for manslaughter, and Eddie “Knuckles” Cicotte, a former pitcher who had become entangled in the Black Sox gambling scandal of 1919. Bennett’s service department was peppered with convicts released from prison into his care, an arrangement helped along by Bennett’s position on the state parole board. Bennett also had relationships with mobsters, in part to deter the kidnapping of Ford’s grandchildren. Bennett’s enemies branded his servicemen violent thugs. He denied it. “They’re a lot of tough bastards but every goddamn one of them’s a gentleman,” he said.

Bennett was an adventurer. He liked boats, he flew an airplane, and he most enjoyed the company of his celebrity sports friends. He took them on his Ford yacht, gave them lucrative Ford jobs if needed, and entertained them at his castle-like home outside Ann Arbor. Henry Ford had helped him design and pay for the sanctuary, which sat along the Huron River on a 155-acre parcel. The house was a fortress and featured modest turrets, two-foot thick walls, secret rooms, hidden escape tunnels, and a steep, pitch-dark, seventy-foot staircase with asymmetrical steps to frustrate would-be pursuers. It also had a movie theater, a Roman bath, and living quarters for his pet tigers and lions. Armed guards sometimes patrolled the roof.

Bennett and Cochrane had much in common. Both flew planes, were former boxers, played musical instruments, and prided themselves on being vigorously masculine men. They were also loyal to friends, not easily frightened, and strongly conservative politically. (Most of the Cochrane men were; in 1964, Mickey’s brother Archie would chair the Montana presidential campaign of his Staunton Military School roommate Barry Goldwater.) In the years ahead Bennett, active in Republican circles, would persuade some of his athletic pals to run for office. He would get two football coaches elected: Harry Kipke to the University of Michigan board and Gus Dorais to Detroit City Council. And in 1940 he would nearly convince Cochrane to run for sheriff of Wayne County. By then Cochrane would be a manufacturer’s representative for Dryden Rubber, selling to Ford and other companies and making more money than he had in baseball. The Cochranes and Bennetts would become so close that Cochrane’s children would call Bennett “Uncle Harry.” The families would even have homes next to one another on Grosse Ile, south of Detroit.

But that was years off. In 1934 the men were just drawing close. Given Bennett’s reputation and his association with questionable characters, not everyone thought it wise of Cochrane to be buddies with him. Malcolm Bingay, as Iffy the Dopester, was apparently among them. Without naming Bennett, he warned in print that Cochrane was surrounding himself with admiring “yes” men whose advice wasn’t always solid. He implied that some were disreputable. Who knew what kind of influence Bennett might have on Cochrane?

P
ART
II
:
G
RAND
P
LANS

1935

A New Year

The optimism of a new year smiled upon Detroit.

Col. Pickert felt so terrific about the dawn of 1935 that he didn’t make any resolutions. “My life is just about perfect. In fact, I might say exemplary,” he told a reporter. Crime had dropped in 1934. The department’s numbers were almost too good to believe. Detroit saw only sixty killings, inspectors said. Half amounted to justifiable homicide, and ten of those were by police officers. All but six had been solved, according to John Navarre, head of the homicide division. Deaths classified as suicides had fallen too. There were 209. Further, of the 936 men reported missing, all but seven had been located, police noted. Given such statistics, how could the police commissioner’s spirits not be high?

Maurice Sugar was hopeful about his judicial campaign. He focused on labor and liberty issues. He supported improved working conditions and the right to organize. He opposed fascism, the spy system in factories, and discrimination against Negroes and the foreign-born. Labor unions would soon begin aligning behind Sugar. So would ethnic organizations like the Ukrainian American Club and the Polish American Political Club. Sugar would earn an acquittal for two black men, Charles Lee and Monroe Brown, who had already been held ninety days for, in his view, being unemployed—officially for having “no home, no job, and no visible means of support.” The case would help him land the endorsement of black ministers and leaders, including Dr. Ossian Sweet. Sugar’s candidacy would grow rapidly.

Joe Louis also had much to anticipate. If all went well, the year might bring big money and a shot at the heavyweight title. After turning pro in July, Louis had averaged two fights a month and won all twelve. On Wednesday, January 2, 1935, he appeared at the Naval Academy in Detroit for the first round of the Golden Gloves competition. Organizers wanted to honor their best-known alumnus. Louis accepted a trophy from the Briggs company, for whom he had once worked. Mickey Cochrane was on hand for the matches. When fans spotted him in the crowd, they began chanting, “We want Mickey! We want Mickey!” Cochrane climbed into the ring to acknowledge the cheers of 3,000 fight fans. Jovial heavyweight champ Max Baer served as master of ceremonies. He told reporters beforehand that Louis would lose his Friday bout to the experienced Patsy Perroni. But he was wrong. Louis defeated him and a week later scored a technical knockout over Hans Birkie. Months earlier, writers had begun referring to Louis as “The Brown Bomber.” Despite Louis’s victories, his black managers could not break him into the New York market, which was controlled by Madison Square Garden. An official said Louis needed to take on a white manager and be willing to throw some matches.

Cochrane and Navin, of course, had grand expectations for the new year, though Navin hedged his words. “A lot of baseball men are predicting trouble for the Tigers next season on the supposition that we will be hit hard by the injury jinx,” he said. “They don’t believe we can go through another season with our regular lineup intact as we did in 1934. They may be right. However, any team that wins a pennant must get the breaks. We ought to get them again next season if the law of averages still is in operation.”

Life wasn’t just about baseball, not even for Cochrane. Everyday affairs still needed to be addressed. In January he went to the Wayne County clerk’s office to get license plates for his vehicles. While there, he requested a permit for a concealed weapon. All applications needed the backing of two local figures. Longtime scout Wish Egan endorsed Cochrane’s request, and so did Ford strongman Harry Bennett. It was approved while he waited.

Mr. Hoover, Investigate

William Guthrie showed up at the Little Stone Chapel for what he thought was a card party. Lured into the basement, he quickly found himself ringed by hooded legionnaires who placed a rope around his neck and forced him to take the oath beside the American flag. For weeks afterward Guthrie succeeded in avoiding the legion. He stopped going to meetings until two men arrived at his large house on Hendrie Street and commanded he come with them. They drove to a gathering in a field, where legionnaires told him he would have to evict his German-speaking mother-in-law and fire his Catholic maid. Guthrie protested that his wife’s mother was sickly. He refused to expel her. His decision led the legion to court-martial him. They handcuffed him to a tree and whipped him. Bloody wounds snaked across his back. At home he acted angry with his wife so she would keep her distance and not discover the beating. He slept in the basement. The legionnaires persisted about the mother and the maid until Guthrie fired the housekeeper and forced his mother-in-law out of her sickbed. He told his stunned wife that they could no longer afford to keep her.

For his livelihood Guthrie offered massages, therapeutic baths, and foot care in his basement. Though he had no medical degree, he didn’t discourage anyone who assumed otherwise. Visitors called him Doc. When legion state commander Arthur Lupp discovered Doc’s house—an impressive two-story structure with a gabled roof, wraparound porch, and wide exterior staircase—he commandeered use of it. The fact that the Hendrie neighborhood, a mix of industrial and residential, had large parking lots added to its appeal. Plus the legion would be able to cram a hundred men into Guthrie’s basement. It would be one more place to rotate gatherings. When Lupp further discovered that Guthrie was storing a friend’s printing press, he insisted it be used for legion business. They printed membership cards with it. An unwilling participant in the early days, Guthrie became so involved in the Black Legion that one could no longer tell whether he had come to believe fully in what it stood for or whether he had resigned himself out of fear.

Hoods, robes, and guns. Midnight initiations. Red lights in dark rooms. The Black Oath with its death pledge. Floggings, night rides, and porch visits. Police officers and public officials. Friends in high places. Co-workers, bosses, and jobs. Weekend musters. All of these things, the whole accumulation of them, combined to prey on the minds of members, whether truly devoted, reluctant, or errant. At every initiation recruits heard that the only ex-members were dead ones. Beatings and killings—real or faked?—marked inductions.

Early in Dayton Dean’s tenure, he saw a man hanged. Or believed he had. Peg-Leg White was there. It was nighttime and they were in a wooded area in Macomb County, just outside the Detroit city limits. A car ferrying a screaming, terrified man pulled into the meeting and drove past a throng of recruits and members. “A man carrying a red lantern was standing in the roadway leading to the woods,” Dean said. “The men in the car with him pulled him out and hanged him to a tree. After a while they cut him down and put the body in the car along with some shovels. They said they were going to bury him in a ditch in the woods.” Dean never forgot it. He believed his life hung on his success as a legionnaire.

On the west side of the state, at a convention of milk and dairy inspectors, Arthur Lupp spotted Charles McCutcheon, a bacteriologist for the Detroit health department. Lupp was a dairy inspector with the agency. McCutcheon had been trying to avoid Lupp and everyone else associated with the Black Legion for more than a year, ever since he had been invited to a political meeting and found himself in a dark basement, lit only by the beam of a flashlight trained on a pistol that was aimed at him. Petrified, McCutcheon had taken the oath and then tried to break free. He ended up going to a few other meetings after being visited at his home by enforcers. At one he saw an inductee faint with fear. When leaders insisted he bring friends into the organization, McCutcheon told them he had no friends. In the ten months since, he had been ducking the group by not going out at night. Now the state commander stood before him.