Devil's Night (29 page)

The election was eight months away and the mayor had no intention of running with a paternity suit on his back. When a blood test revealed that the odds were 270 billion to one that he was, indeed, the father of Annivory Calvert's son, Young instructed his lawyer to work out a deal.

It proved expensive—close to $1,000 a month in child support and the establishment of a $150,000 trust fund—but it was money well spent. One of the mayor's reelection slogans was “Do the Right Thing,” and he could hardly face the electorate, many of whom were, themselves, victims of indifferent fathers, as a coldhearted skinflint.

I was in Israel when the scandal broke, and when I returned, a month or so before the November election, I asked a reporter if it had affected the mayor's chances. “It was bad for a while,” he said. “Some church people were offended. But it's blown over. The truth is, a lot of folks are proud of the old man. Now there's an heir to the crown.”

There were also pretenders to the throne that year. Since Young first came to power, in 1973, by narrowly defeating White Hope candidate John Nichols, he had won a string of easy reelection victories over second-rate-opponents. In 1977, he beat Ernest Browne, a bland, black city councilman, by some twenty points. Four years later, he whipped an unknown white accountant, Perry Koslowski,
63 percent to 37 percent. His last time out, in 1985, Young walked through a contest against another anonymous accountant, thirty-five-year-old Tom Barrow, 61 percent to 39 percent.

The mediocre quality of the opposition was not accidental; no serious politician wanted to take Young on. He had all the advantages of incumbency, including a multi-million-dollar campaign fund, an army of city workers, the support of organized labor and financial aid from the white surburban business establishment, which, whatever it thought of Young personally, counted on him to keep the city under control. Most important, he had the unshakable loyalty of the city's black voters. To challenge him was to call into question the legitimacy of their revolution, and no ambitious black politician wanted to be accused of that.

All that was left was the ABC coalition—a steady 35 percent of the vote composed mostly of elderly white ethnics who lived on the city's fringes, and a smattering of disgruntled blacks. To beat the mayor, somebody would have to find a way of holding the dissidents and, at the same time, making inroads into his core of black admirers.

In 1989, for the first time in sixteen years, it suddenly seemed possible. Young was on a losing streak—the casino gambling issue, the humiliating Jackson landslide in the 1988 Michigan presidential primary, the paternity suit—and he seemed old and vulnerable. The city's problems were not getting any better, but Young appeared curiously detached, rarely venturing out of his office and mansion. Most important, a new generation of voters had grown up under black rule. According to the conventional wisdom, they regarded Coleman Young as a politician, not a savior. That was the feeling in the city: The old man could be taken.

In Detroit's two-stage electoral system, a September primary free-for-all would be followed, in November, by a runoff between the two leading candidates. No one doubted that Young would be one of them, but there was stiff competition for the second slot. Four contenders
eventually came forward—Tom Barrow, on a roll after having led the antigambling crusade in the summer of 1988; Erma Henderson, the septuagenarian president of the Common Council; Charles Costa, a Maltese immigrant businessman; and, most dramatically, thirteen-term U.S. Congressman John Conyers.

The first to declare was Costa, who cast himself as the great almost-white hope. On a morning in the late fall of 1988, he invited me to his downtown paint store-campaign headquarters for a briefing on his electoral strategy, which could best be described as flexible.

“I'm a chameleon,” he confided. “I'm a conservative, I'm a liberal; I can be both. Greeks, Italians, Mexicans, they all think I'm one of them. And with blacks, well, I'm dark complected. They think I'm part black. I tell them that Malta is an island off the coast of Africa.”

Costa is a small, compelling man in his fifties, with white hair and piercing brown eyes, who came to America at age sixteen, started out as an announcer at the Stone Burlesque, mastered the essentials of business (“I can play that Jewish piano, you know, the cash register”) and eventually became a major inner-city landlord. At his peak, he had some five thousand tenants, but he went bankrupt in 1971. Undaunted, he commissioned a biography, which he called
Slumlord
, and set himself up in the paint business, where he has flourished.

“I'm capable of thinkin' in the fourth dimension,” he said in a voice ringing with conviction. “What other candidate can say that? In my life I've done things that are incredible. I'm calculative and from a PR point of view, ain't nobody who can beat me. I shall climb my mountain.”

There is a certain fourth-dimensional aspect to Costa's surroundings. He has five talking parrots in his office, a Pac-man machine, four life-sized teddy bears seated around a card table, and hundreds of antique clocks, blunderbusses, electric trains, stuffed animals, figurines, wagon wheels, model ships in bottles and other such collector's items. His floors are covered with carpets of all nationalities,
the walls adorned with uncountable pictures—mostly of Costa himself, including one taken with Ronald Reagan—busts of American presidents, a lifetime membership plaque from the NAACP and, displayed prominently, a photograph of Coleman Young.

“Coleman is going to be history. His own people are going to put me in office,” said the Maltese challenger. “Blacks want a change. They know their own can't cut it. I'm white but I'm not too white. I'm just right for the transition. And I talk their language. I've got soul.”

To demonstrate, Costa called over a customer, a thin black man in a painter's hat. He advised the man on the best kind of paint to buy. “And don't forget to make a profit on the deal; that's how you grow,” he said in a fatherly tone.

“Hey, man, I been doin' this for eight years,” said the painter.

Costa shrugged. Okay, okay, just trying to help,” he said.

Despite his chameleon-based appeal to blacks, Costa was counting mainly on substantial white support. “Thirty-five percent of the vote in Detroit is white, and historically whites vote five to one for a white candidate against a black,” he explained. “Last time two thirds of the whites didn't vote. But this time, I'll bring them out.”

Costa was careful to point out that this strategy was not antiblack. “Most white people perceive all blacks as bad,” said the candidate, displaying his liberal side. “In fact, only seventy-five thousand to a hundred thousand are undesirables. The rest are fine.

“I know there might be some opposition who would like to keep Coleman in,” he continued. “They might try to stop me. I still could be assassinated. They could drive by right now and throw a firebomb through the window. I'm not afraid, but that don't prevail me from thinkin' about it.”

Morbidity does not come naturally to the ebullient Costa, however; he is a positive thinker who likes to get out on the campaign trail and mingle with the voters. That morning he loaded a batch of “Costa for Mayor” posters and leaflets into his car and headed off
to press the flesh. His destination was a downtown residential hotel, its check-in counter protected by bulletproof glass. “A guy got shot here by a guy with no legs,” he said, laughing, amused by the endless vagaries of Detroit's human comedy.

In the airless lobby, Costa passed out literature and made small talk with the elderly white men who make up the hotel's main clientele. A toothless fellow dressed in a dirty flannel work shirt and jeans approached, and Costa handed him a campaign leaflet. “I'm running for mayor, and I'd like your support,” he said.

The man looked at him in disbelief. “Forget it, buddy,” he said. “You're the wrong color. In this city, white people are toilet paper.”

After a few more handshakes, we took the rickety elevator upstairs to meet with the hotel manager, an old friend whom Costa wanted to enlist in the campaign. The manager greeted him cordially, but he was less interested in politics than in battlefield stories.

“Hey, I went to see a building that's in receivership,” he said. “I get there and as soon as I come up to the door, a guy with his hands tied behind him comes flying out the window. How about that?”

This precipitated a whole series of guys-falling-out-of-windows anecdotes, each gruesome, each told with the special relish that white Detroiters use when they deplore their city's violence. “You know, the place looks worse to me than ever,” said the manager. “I personally think that anyone who stays in Detroit willingly is a real asshole.”

“I'm gonna turn things around,” said Costa.

His friend regarded him with good-natured skepticism. “They've been saying that it's gonna turn around for twenty years, Chuck,” he said. “No offense, but if God performed a miracle, could you think of anything He could do to save this city?

The Young camp was not particularly disturbed by the Costa challenge (when I mentioned Costa to Bob Berg, he looked at me blankly and said, “Chuck who?”); to make the primary, he would
have to get a majority of the white vote—and that was going to Tom Barrow.

Barrow is a handsome, open-faced accountant of forty, with a neat mustache, an Ivy League wardrobe and a manner to match. In 1985, running as a complete unknown, he got about two thirds of the white vote. Whites liked him for two reasons: first, he wasn't Coleman Young; and second, he was a modest, businesslike coalition builder who made it a point to reach out to them.

Unfortunately for Barrow, these same qualities were interpreted by blacks as a lack of ethnic authenticity. In a city where blackness is equated with street-smart militance, he didn't seem like the real thing. Over and over, Barrow, the cousin of folk hero Joe Louis, was reduced to claiming, “I'm just as black as the rest of 'em,” but no one believed him. “Coleman is hot black coffee,” a woman told me. “Barrow is decaffeinated.” In the election of 1985, Barrow got less than one third of the black vote.

“He doesn't even curse,” a reporter said of the challenger. “He thinks it's a bad example for kids. He says he's going to beat the heck out of Coleman. I'll bet Big Daddy is just shaking in his boots.”

In 1985, Young's method of dealing with Barrow had been to ignore him; the mayor barely bothered to campaign. This time, however, Barrow seemed more formidable, coming off his success in leading the fight against casino gambling. Polls showed him trailing the mayor by a relatively small margin. The 1985 run had given him name recognition and experience. He was also better organized, thanks to Geoffrey Garfield, a pudgy, bespectacled, black political consultant from New York who once worked with David Dinkins.

Barrow's 1989 strategy was simple. He would keep his white base and concentrate on making inroads in the black community. Barrow could not hope to compete with Young's civil rights credentials or signifying street style, but he thought he could attract support from young black professionals and tap into the dissatisfactions of other
middle-class voters who cared more about safe streets, good schools and clean neighborhoods than about the ideology of liberation.

Nobody knew quite what Erma Henderson's stategy was, and it didn't matter much. Henderson, an ordained minister, was the president of the Detroit Common Council, a body with about as much influence as the Albanian parliament. Her power base was among elderly churchwomen, not enough to make her a serious threat. Henderson's main contribution to the campaign was an uncharacteristically shrill attack on the mayor's strategy, which she said was “the way Hitler came to power.” “Erma's a fine lady,” a Young aide told me afterward. “She just got a little carried away.” After the primary, to show there were no hard feelings, the mayor named a city park after her.

As the September contest neared, the smart money in Detroit was on Barrow to finish second—and second, again, in November. But then, in the end of July, John Conyers suddenly announced that he was in the running, and it was a whole new race.

Conyers was just what the ABC people had been waiting for—a real contender. He had been in Congress since 1964, and his name was almost as well known as Young's. He had solid civil rights credentials and a reputation for militance that matched the mayor's. He also had a solid base of support in his west side district and access to money: his brother, Nathan, owns a Ford dealership that grossed $21 million in 1987.

For sixteen years, Coleman Young had been fighting lightweights, opponents who came out for the opening bell, sparred tentatively and went down for the count, pleased to have lasted a round or two with the champ. But Conyers was a heavyweight; Young finally would be fighting in his class. Even people who did not like the congressman were excited at the prospect of a brawl.

Conyers came out swinging. “It's all over, Big Daddy,” he warned at his first press conference, sounding like the young Cassius Clay
hollering at Sonny Liston. No one could recall another opponent talking so brashly to the mayor.

On Labor Day, the unions staged their annual parade down Woodward Avenue. Conyers marched the 1.2 miles to the podium; Young walked a block, then got in his official limo and rode the rest of the way. A reporter asked the congressman if this was a sign that the mayor was old and burned out.

“Don't make me answer that question,” Conyers said. “I might have to apologize.”

Conyers kept jabbing away. He called the chief of police, William Hart, “the dumbest cop on the force.” He also challenged Young's hostile suburb remark by coming out for regional disarmament. “As long as we tell all the suburbs that we're not giving up our guns, I don't know how we expect them to give up their guns,” he said.