Detroit City Is the Place to Be (34 page)

Soon the six candidates filed onstage. Part of the drama of the debate, aside from its finality, surrounded Charles Pugh, who had been forced, just the day before, to make a humiliating disclosure: his $385,000 downtown condominium was about to be foreclosed on, after his default on a second mortgage. Apparently, Pugh was also being sued by his condo association for unpaid dues. As a broadcast personality, Pugh made well over $200,000, a year, but he claimed that leaving his job in order to run for city council full-time had put him in financial jeopardy—a claim undermined when the
Detroit News
reported on the eleven different eviction notices Pugh had received while renting an earlier apartment during a four-year period beginning in 2001. In an effort at damage control, Pugh posted a video on his website. It appeared to have been hastily produced with a cheap webcam. Pugh’s large and uncannily egg-shaped head—which, completely shaved, made him look like a colossal baby—had been shot at an unflattering angle and nearly filled the screen as he exhorted viewers to pray for him and vowed to remain “on the grind, asking for your vote.” He also insisted that going into foreclosure actually opened a number of “options” for the foreclosee—true, in a sense, if those options were limited to (a) leaving your house or (b) paying back the money you owed.

In his introductory remarks, Pugh assumed an upbeat tone, as if he were anchoring live from a Super Bowl victory party for the Detroit Lions. Explaining his decision to move from journalism to electoral politics, Pugh said, “I’m tired of just reporting what’s
wrong
.” As for his more immediate problems, he transformed them into an asset—an issue not of irresponsibility but of relatability, pointing out, “Just like many families, I’ve experienced personal tragedy. And just like many families, I’m facing financial challenges right now.”

Aside from his polished delivery, Pugh’s performance struck me as terrible. At one point, he told the moderator, straight-faced, “Well, the good thing is, personal finances have nothing to do with how the city is run.” He also had the annoying habit of referring to his finances as “my challenges,” as if he’d been nobly struggling to overcome some severe disability, like being been born with flipper arms and then deciding, through sheer force of will, to become a professional juggler.

Several of Pugh’s opponents provided even greater entertainment value. Kwame Kenyatta, a gaunt fifty-three-year-old sporting a pinstripe jacket, mustard yellow turtleneck, and brown
kofia
, had the best fashion sense of anyone on the stage, a sort of Casual Friday Afrocentric look. That April, Kenyatta and his wife had not only defaulted on the mortgage of their four-bedroom colonial home on Detroit’s northwest side but physically abandoned the property, simply walking away from the loan. When confronted with this fact by the moderator, Kenyatta was unapologetic. Flashing a tricky half smile and peering over his podium through permanently hooded eyes that gave him a serpentine quality, Kenyatta insisted he’d made a financial decision, “just like GM made a financial decision to go bankrupt.” This line received hardy applause, as did his bit of one-upsmanship of candidate James Bennett, an ex-cop who had declared himself “a blue-collar guy,” to which Kenyatta responded, “I’m
street
collar, not necessarily blue collar. I come from the streets.”

Mohammad Okdie, the only non–African American to make the final primary cutoff—Okdie’s parents were Lebanese immigrants—mentioned he regularly rode the bus. During his closing remarks, he declared, “I am you, Detroit.”

Gary Brown said, “I will not embarrass you.”

Kenyatta, delightfully, concluded with a quote: “As the Last Poets said, ‘It’s down to now.’”

Pugh asked the voters of Detroit for their support of his leadership, “flaws and all,” then flashed a grin.

On Election Day, the voters—such as they were: turnout was under 25 percent—wound up responding to Pugh’s message, and he became the new city council president. Brown, coming in second, became council president pro tem. After his victory, Pugh told the
Free Press
he’d be calling the newly reelected Detroit city clerk to congratulate her and also, more urgently, “ask[ing] her for a certified letter that I was the top vote-getter … and the salary that corresponds to the top vote-getter is $85,000 a year. That’s officially provable income. And the mortgage company was kind enough to postpone the sheriff’s sale.

“I’m on much more solid footing on negotiating,” he went on. “It’ll be wrapped up before the swearing-in. Hell, it may be wrapped up before December.”

*   *   *

As November approached, stencils began appearing on buildings around town featuring an anachronistic, bearded visage and the words RE-ELECT PINGREE. Elected in 1890, Hazen S. Pingree still reigns, pretty much uncontested, as Detroit’s finest mayor. Republican railroad barons thought they had hand-picked an acceptable leader from the capitalist ranks, one who gave (per Robert Conot) “every indication [he] would complaisantly respond to their desires.” Pingree, fifty years old, a Civil War veteran and owner of the largest shoe factory west of New England, surprised and infuriated his benefactors by becoming one of most progressive mayors in the country, siding with labor during a streetcar-workers’ strike and dramatically revealing the dirty dealings of the public school board (apparently, some things never change) during a surprise appearance at a Board of Education meeting, where he announced to his stunned audience, “You are a bunch of thieves, grafters and rascals! As your names are called, the police will take you into custody.”

Other echoes of futures to come: the depression of 1893 had left one-third of Detroiters unemployed. Along with securing money for an ambitious public works program, Pingree pioneered, nearly a century before it became a staple of the bright-new-ideas-for-saving-Detroit trend piece, an urban farming scheme in which more than three thousand families were encouraged (and partially subsidized) to grow vegetables on five-hundred acres’ worth of half-acre plots throughout the city. Because the program launched in mid-June, the only crops harvested that first year were turnips, beans, and late potatoes, and the gardens were mocked as “Pingree’s potato patches.” In the end, though, it became Pingree’s signature initiative, ultimately viewed as an ingenious pilot program by copycat mayors in Boston, Minneapolis, and New York.

Pingree eventually became governor of Michigan, a vanguard presence of the coming Progressive Era, admired, and copied by towering figures in the movement like Robert LaFollette and Teddy Roosevelt. In his 1895 account of his battles with the status quo,
Facts and opinion; or, Dangers that beset us
, Pingree wrote that “monopolistic corporations” were to blame for “nearly all the thieving and boodling” besetting us and our cities and wonderfully described the white collar bandits of the late nineteenth century as “a grade of criminals of finished rascality.” The book’s frontispiece was a photograph of Pingree’s dedication of the volume to the “great masses of American people,” handwritten on a potato. (A note at the bottom of the page reads, “Photographed from Original Potato.”) It was as governor, campaigning against his would-be Democratic replacement in the mayor’s office, that he informed a crowd in Detroit that “this town needs somebody to tell the public-utility crowd to kiss something else besides babies.”

Frontispiece,
Facts and opinion; or, Dangers that beset us

The yearning for a duly-elected savior like Pingree was understandable. In recent years, the only Detroit politician who’d come close to the old man’s panache—as terrible as it was to admit—was the Hon. Kwame Kilpatrick. From the moment I returned to the city, no matter what Bing or the council happened to be grappling with, a disproportionate amount of news coverage was devoted to the deposed mayor. It was like Nixon being sentenced to house arrest in the Lincoln Bedroom and still being allowed to call the periodic press conference. Kilpatrick had served time, moved his family to an expensive home in suburban Dallas, missed several restitution payments, and was ultimately sent back to jail. Still, his every move, voluntary or otherwise, caused seismic tremors in Detroit—a telling commentary on the power of his charismatic pull, even in exile and disgrace, and especially compared with those who had replaced him. Voters had declared their preference for the dull but steady Bing, Pugh the effervescent anchorman, Brown the crime-fighting Boy Scout—but still, they couldn’t tear their eyes from the larger-than-life figure born to command a room.

Part of the reason, of course, had to do with the soap operatic pull of scandal involving sex, all manner of corruption (shakedowns, nepotism, general kleptocratic rot), even murder. (Rumors had circulated about wild parties the mayor had thrown in the Manoogian Mansion, including one in which his wife arrived unexpectedly and allegedly assaulted an exotic dancer named Tamara “Strawberry” Greene. Later, the twenty-seven-year-old dancer was shot and killed at four-thirty in the morning while sitting in her car with her boyfriend on the city’s west side, feeding lurid but wholly unfounded conspiracy theories that had Greene snuffed by a mayoral hit man in order to prevent her from speaking publicly about the alleged party incident.) But there was an extra sting to Kilpatrick’s downfall precisely because, once upon a time, he truly had struck many as an energetic and even visionary leader who might alter Detroit’s trajectory through the sheer strength of his personality.

Kilpatrick came from a politically connected family—his mother, Carolyn Cheeks-Kilpatrick, was a U.S. Representative—and when Kwame was elected in 2001, at the age of thirty-one, he was the youngest mayor in Detroit’s history. I spent two days shadowing Kilpatrick in 2002,
2
when he was celebrating his first year in office with a 75 percent approval rating, having already logged an impressive list of early-term accomplishments that included five thousand new housing starts and balancing the city budget, despite the inheritance of a seventy-five-million dollar deficit. At the time, the comedian Chris Rock gave an interview about preparing for his role as the first black president in the 2003 film
Head of State
; he didn’t cite Barack Obama, the obscure state senator from Illinois, as a model for his character, but Kwame Kilpatrick.

“Kwame got it—he was brilliant,” Kurt Metzger, Detroit’s most respected demographer, told me later, after everything had gone wrong. “He just understood data. Whenever I threw a number at him, he’d know it, and could respond with numbers of his own. And he’d be right!” Metzger smiled sadly. “Unfortunately, he was also a sociopath. But other than that…”

Almost immediately, I took to the mayor. Despite his size, he moved with a relaxed, ambling gait. His head looked small atop such a bulky presence, his ears tinier still, with a slightly crushed quality, as if they’d been stuck to either temple as globs of half-baked dough. But Kilpatrick was a handsome man, with an easy, confident smile, and he backed his storied personal magnetism with obvious intelligence and a quick wit. He also possessed the natural charm advantage of the physically imposing, whereby little more than a reassuring nod or welcoming grin from a person twice your size triggers, on some dank evolutionary substrata, an involuntary rush of gratitude. When I heard rumblings about “immaturity” and “arrogance,” I was quick to write off the objections as generational, stylistic. Kilpatrick and I were close in age, and when journalists dubbed him “the hip-hop mayor,”
3
I didn’t see it as an epithet, but, rather, a milestone.

Still, the cockiness of his administration—“swagger,” in hip-hop terms—was evident. One evening, when I joined Kilpatrick on an Angel’s Night patrol, the mayor’s press secretary, Jamaine Dickens, casually popped a CD into the stereo of his blue Crown Vic as we drove to meet the mayor. “Do you like Ludacris?” he asked. “This was our unofficial campaign song, just because we spent so much time on the road.” The rapper boomed, “You got to MOVE, bitch! Get out the WAY!”

Dickens smiled, flinched, and went on: “You know what? Our real song was ‘You Scared.’ You know that one?” To refresh my memory, he shout-rapped, in the manner of Lil’ Jon, the song’s
auteur
, its bullying chorus: “You SCARED! You SCARED! Bee-AAAAA bee-AAAAA!” “Bee-AAAAA” was short for “bitch.” (The actual title of the song was “Bia Bia,” with other choice lines including “Stop acting like a BITCH and get your HANDS up!”) Adding clarification, Dickens explained, “That was our song because it seemed like everybody was scared to endorse us.”

My exchange with Kilpatrick himself that night felt raw and honest, more so than the majority of interactions I’ve had with public figures. Earlier in the day, Kilpatrick had addressed a council of Baptist preachers (telling them, “The next wave of the Civil Rights movement is access to capital”); he’d since changed from a suit into brown Timberland boots, grey jeans, and an Angel’s Night sweatshirt the safety-orange shade of a deer hunter’s anorak. The night was proceeding smoothly and the mayor lapsed into a decided informality between stops. At one point, while a small group of us rode in the back of the black mayoral Suburban, Kilpatrick absently picked up one of the flashlights being passed out to volunteers and announced, “I wanna flash some people.” He began shining the light out the window. Then he illuminated his own face, like one of the ill-fated teenagers from the movie
The Blair Witch Project
, only instead of telling a campfire story, he began to imitate a man being hassled by a police officer.