Devil's Night (7 page)

When William Hart joined the police, in the fifties, he was one of only a handful of black cops, whose duties consisted of helping to patrol black neighborhoods. When he was named chief by Coleman Young, the appointment took everyone, including him, by surprise.

“I can remember when they made Hart chief of police,” said Fred Williams, the police spokesman. Williams, like Hart, is a black cop; they used to be partners. “After the ceremony we came to my place and talked, and I said, ‘Man, do you realize that you are the chief of po-lice?' And Hart said, ‘It's no big thing.'

“Then the next day I got a call to come to his office. I walked in and he was sitting behind that big desk, and he looked at me and said, ‘Fred, do you realize that I am the chief of all this here crap?' It took him that long for it to sink in.”

Hart's critics say it hasn't sunk in yet. His gentle approach to law enforcement seems oddly inappropriate in the nation's most lethal city; sometimes, it appears to border on impotence. “In this city, a lot of times cops just walk away from trouble,” a white crime reporter told me. “I've seen cops on duty drive right past drug deals. People who call 911 have to lie and say there's a man with a gun outside to get a patrol car to come. For cops in this department, the emphasis isn't on busting criminals, it's on not screwing up.”

During my travels around town I met a pharmacist who owned a drugstore on the west side, near the University of Detroit. Inside, behind bulletproof glass, the druggist filled Medicaid prescriptions; outside, in the parking lot, pushers ran an alternative apothecary. Some of their merchandise came from the druggist's own stock—people would sell the pills they had just received to the pushers, who resold them for a tidy profit. Tough young men loitered in front of the place, drug deals were made in the open, and occasionally shots were fired.

All this action proved bad for business. The druggist called the cops dozens of times, but nothing happened. And so he sold the store and moved to the suburbs.

Chief Hart knew about this case. “We've been over there time and time again,” he said. “We arrest these people but they beat us back to the parking lot. Usually they don't even go to trial. Dope is a big problem. If we locked up every dealer in town, it would be going full blast again in five days. It's that lucrative.”

Guns are another problem. Everybody has them, from shopkeepers like John Aboud to the young criminals who drive around town in late-model Mercedes with Uzis under the seat. Even members of the clergy carry guns. A couple of years ago, a busload of nineteen Baptist ministers decided to cross the Ambassador Bridge for a Canadian
excursion. Border guards searched them—and uncovered nineteen pistols.

My only personal brush with the law came when a suburban visitor had the hubcaps stolen off his new Cadillac while we were downtown eating. A few blocks from the scene of the crime we spotted a cop. “Officer,” said the visitor, “I've just had my hubcaps stolen. Should I report it or something?”

The cop looked at him as if he had just driven into town from Mars. “Report it?” he said. “Are you kidding? You ought to be grateful that they didn't take the car.”

My friend, who was raised in Detroit and now lives in a town where hubcap theft is considered a major crime, was obviously upset by the cop's reaction. I told him not be be naive—there isn't a big city in the country where the police investigate petty larceny. “I know that,” he said. “And I don't care about the hubcaps; they're insured. What got me is the policeman's attitude. He seemed so damn proud of the crime in this city.”

Chief Hart knew all about the prevalent feeling that the police are too soft, but for him sensitive law enforcement is a matter of ideology. Like the mayor, he sees Detroit as a postcolonial city, liberated from oppressive white police occupation; to him, gentle law enforcement is an expression of black home rule.

“I'd hate to turn the clock back to when we kicked ass and took names,” Hart said. “It's unconstitutional and it leads to false imprisonment. Besides, you just can't do that with the kind of officers we have. We recruit out of the neighborhoods. It's hard to practice brutality and then go home and live among the same people. This city is just one big ghetto, all the way out to Eight Mile Road.”

As we talked it became clear that Chief Hart had an answer for every question, a reasoned explanation for every grievance. He blamed the media for sensationalizing crime, the courts for handing down lenient sentences, the county for not providing enough jail cells, and most important, parents for not controlling their children. “We're hired to arrest criminals, not raise people's kids,” he said.

Like the police chiefs of other big cities, Hart's biggest problem was the spread of crack. Drugs, particularly cocaine, were a hot topic in Detroit while I was there. During my stay, a young drug lord, “Maserati Rick” Carter, was murdered in his hospital bed by a rival gang, and his friends treated the city to one of the gaudiest funerals since Prohibition. Sixteen Cadillacs ferried mourners to the cemetery, where they saw Rick buried in a casket made out of a Mercedes—headlights, grill and all.

In the city, where cheap cocaine is sold more or less openly in houses and on street corners, blacks talked of it like a biblical plague. In the suburbs, it aroused less alarm than fascination. There was something about the word “crack,” redolent with the hard city sounds of cracking bullets and cracking bones, that tickled the suburban ear. And since more than one of these discussions took place with an expensive vial of white powder on the coffee table, calling it “crack” put some distance between upscale consumers and the dope-crazed blacks below Eight Mile Road. But whatever it was called, people talked about it constantly; there was an aura of glamour surrounding it that all the disapproving social commentators on
Nightline
couldn't dispel.

The drug dealers I met in Detroit were anything but glamorous. One of them, a young white man in a Detroit Tigers warm-up jacket and a blank expression associated with drug-fried brains, was introduced to me by Aboud. “You want to know about drugs, he'll tell you all about drugs,” said Aboud. “The man is an expert, the hard way.”

“That's right, the hard way,” agreed the young man, who told me with a look of cunning invention that his name was John Doe.

“I was born right here on this street,” he said in black-inflected English. “When I got eighteen I began to deal drugs, cocaine. Opportunity knocked. I used it, too, I ain't gonna lie, but mostly I was just selling it.

“One day, last year, I was ridin' around in my father's Tempo and someone came up and shot it thirty-four times. I ducked. I didn't get
hit; it's amazing. The insurance company said, ‘What are you,
Miami Vice
?' That's when I decided to quit.”

At the high point of his career, as a teenage pusher, Mr. Doe worked as a salesman in a local crack house that cleared three thousand dollars a day. His cut was a salary of seven hundred dollars a week—good money for a near-illiterate kid, although the hours were arduous.

“I worked between five and seven days straight,” he said. “Twenty-four hours a day. People would come to the door with their spoon and their money. I'd take the money, fill up the spoon and pass it back.

“I sold on the street, too,” he continued. “See, the police didn't expect a white dude to be sellin'. But I got out. I didn't dig the pressure, y'know? Today I make a hundred and fifty dollars a week as a busboy. But the guy I was working for, he killed a guy who was like his brother. It's a bad business.”

John Doe was shot at thirty-four times and survived. Jacqueline Wilson was shot only once, and didn't. She was killed coming out of a grocery store on Woodward Avenue, where she had gone to buy cigarettes. Two rival drug gangs happened to be staging a shoot-out in front of the store, and she got caught in the cross fire.

Normally this kind of murder doesn't arouse much interest in Highland Park, a 2.2-square-mile urban enclave surrounded by Detroit. Highland Park is the headquarters for the Chrysler Corporation, and two generations ago it was a model of urban progress, with the country's first freeway and one of its first junior colleges. Academics, mid-level auto executives and businesspeople lived in large, comfortable brick homes and shopped in smart shops along Woodward Avenue, which bisects the tiny town.

Today, Highland Park is a smaller, meaner version of Detroit. Hookers and drug dealers ply their trade on its main streets, and homicide is more common there than anyplace else in the United States. But Jacqueline Wilson's murder was not a common killing. She was the daughter of the late singer Jackie Wilson, and her death
received extensive local and even national publicity. The mayor wanted action, the chief of public safety demanded action, and the case wound up on the desk of Jim Francisco.

Francisco took their calls seated, feet on the desk, in his dingy office in the Highland Park police station annex. A powerfully built man dressed in jeans, a sweatshirt and a Crimson Tide baseball cap, he answered each call with “Francisco, Morality,” in the slight southern drawl of Detroit's working-class whites. He chomped a wad of gum vigorously as he listened, occasionally making polite responses to a superior's questions. From time to time, he ran his massive hand over the pistol in the shoulder holster he wore.

Each conversation ended with Francisco's earnest assurance that he and his men were working on the case. But despite the pressure, he wasn't at all sure that they could deliver. It was, after all, a random killing with no motive and no witnesses. “We'll probably never solve the motherfucker,” said Francisco of Morality, cheerfully.

Jim Francisco is a man who loves his work, which is chasing bad guys through some of the most dangerous streets in America. “Working here is like playing cowboys and Indians with real Indians,” he told me.

It was a Francisco thing to say, tough and funny and tinged with bravado. He exudes competence and courage, the kind of cop that other cops refer to as a “legend in his own time,” and his exploits provide a seemingly endless supply of station house anecdotes. In the Highland Park police station, which resembles a fortress, and on the streets of the tiny town, which is often compared by its residents to a battlefield, Jim Francisco is the perfect platoon commander.

A few days after the Wilson murder, Francisco got a break: an informer turned in the name and address of the killer. The cops decided to raid his home, which was in Detroit, less than a mile from the police station. On a Friday afternoon, Francisco gathered his troops—a dozen officers, six white, six black, each outfitted in assault overalls, combat boots, bulletproof vests and riot helmets, armed with a variety of very powerful weapons.

Officer Larry Robinson was not dressed for the occasion. A stoic black veteran, he wore a civil-service-blue short-sleeve shirt and black slacks. Robinson looked at eager young cops and sighed. “I'm near retirement and I don't really like to do this anymore,” he said. “But I've gotta think about the rookies, help them save
their
ass. And I'll tell you something else. I've done this before, plenty of times, but when I hit the corner and pull out my gun, it's no longer routine. The adrenaline flows, I guarantee you that.”

Although the raid was scheduled for 2:00
P.M.
, it was postponed again and again. At a desk, a young officer pecked at a typewriter with leaden fingers. The tension in the room rose and fell as deadlines neared and were deferred. Because the suspect's home was in Detroit, the city police had to be involved, and there were problems coordinating the raid. Finally Robinson picked up the phone impatiently. “Okay,” he said, “I'm gonna call the thirteenth precinct, get me some menfolks and we gonna bust.”

Apparently the call worked, because within a few minutes the Highland Park strike force was gathered in the parking lot, making last-minute checks of their weapons. The plan was simple. They would surround the house, and Francisco would lead a group of officers through the front door. They had no idea what to expect once they got inside, nor did they know how many guns they were likely to encounter. The uncertainty led to some gallows humor as the cops crowded into two vans. Francisco, who wanted to drive by the house before going in, sped on ahead.

Half a mile from the station house, on Woodward Avenue, the vans came to a screeching halt. Three black men were spread-eagled, facedown, on the pavement, and Francisco stood over them with a gun. The other cops leaped out and drew their guns, too.

“What's your name, sir?” Francisco drawled, addressing one of the prone men.

“Lucky,” he said.

“Well, Mr. Lucky, you got some ID?” The man handed Francisco his wallet. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “And you other gentlemen,
please bear with us.” If there was irony in the remark, it wasn't apparent from his courteous tone.

Francisco had stopped their car on instinct—he thought one of them might be their man—but their IDs checked out. The three suspects rose and dusted themselves off. Although police vans blocked two lanes of traffic and there were a dozen cops in riot gear milling around, pedestrians and cars passed without more than a glance. “It's a pretty common sight down here,” explained a huge black cop named Caldwell.

The raid itself was an anticlimax: There was no car parked in front of the suspect's house. Francisco decided to try again later that night. On the way to the station Robinson was in a foul mood—the new hour was certain to screw up his weekend—and he grumbled about the false alarm on Woodward Avenue. “Some people think all blacks look alike,” he said. “Please. The guy we want has close-cropped hair. That guy on the street had long hair. Now,
we
can't grow hair overnight. I mean, please.”

There was nothing personal in Robinson's remark, though. I recognized the tone from my army days, the sound of a man who just felt like bitching. In Detroit today, tough white cops like Jim Francisco could not survive if they were even suspected of racism.