Terror in the City of Champions (25 page)

Bill Voisine had been the mayor of Ecorse since 1933. The son of a barge captain, he had parlayed his popularity as co-owner of an auto-sales agency into a council position and then the village’s top office. He had been elected by cobbling together a coalition of blacks, pro-union workers, foreign-born citizens, and white Catholics like himself. Voisine, an extrovert, peddled jobs and favors to followers. His contacts helped him place residents at the steel plant and in other industries. Along the way he made enemies, including the Black Legion. The nearby
Wyandotte Herald
described him as “a stormy petrel in Ecorse politics.”

The village’s population was varied. Clubs that operated there testified to the kaleidoscopic nature of the town. Each southern state seemed to be represented. Natives of West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee had their own meeting places. Likewise for the Poles, Hungarians, Romanians, and Germans. Blacks had their own hangouts too. The politics could be volatile. Voisine clashed repeatedly with council members. In September 1934 four of them tried to illegally remove him from office. That action followed months of thunderous public meetings. In the middle of the night after one of them, bricks crashed through the front windows of three of his opponents’ homes. Months earlier James Bailey, one of his black supporters, had died in a suspicious fire at his small house. It occurred the night before an election, hours after Bailey had appeared at a Voisine rally. Voisine suspected the fire was political but couldn’t prove it. Two and a half years later he would accuse the Black Legion. No one would ever be charged.

Jesse J. Pettijohn despised Voisine. Pettijohn served on the city council in 1934 and 1935 and operated a grocery store. During a graft hearing he and Voisine exchanged slanderous, curse-filled accusations about bribes, payoffs, and gambling houses. Pettijohn was part of a faction aligned against the mayor. He also belonged to the Black Legion. At a July 1935 outdoor meeting, legion members lamented that they had no strong candidate to challenge Voisine in the coming year’s election. They didn’t know anyone who could defeat him.

“Why not get rid of him?” somebody asked.

“Catch him at home and bomb him,” another suggested.

It sounded like a good idea to gangly Harvey Davis.

Just after midnight on Wednesday, August 7, Mayor Voisine returned home from an American Legion carnival and settled into his chair in the front room to read the newspaper and unwind before bed. The papers were filled with previews of Joe Louis’s fight with King Levinsky. Reporters talked about Levinsky’s secret punch and how it might fool Louis. (Tomorrow radios throughout the region would be tuned to the broadcast of Louis knocking out his opponent in two minutes and twenty-one seconds, regardless of Levinsky’s sly punch.) Voisine’s thirteen-year-old son Bobby was in his room with a pal who was spending the night. Voisine’s wife was in the back of the house. The mayor heard an old car turn onto his street and stop near his house at 21 Knox. Footsteps tapped quietly on the walkway. Voisine figured it was a neighbor who lived in the garage apartment behind him. Outside Harvey Davis was lighting a bundle of dynamite and placing it on the porch.

When Voisine heard the car race off, he began to wonder more about the commotion. Too late. The dynamite exploded. The blast rocked the neighborhood. It blew in Voisine’s windows, shredded his front door, and threw him, his wife, and the boys onto the floor. The bomb left a large hole on his concrete porch. It also cracked windows on two blocks, including those of the police commissioner, B. F. Loveland, who had been at the same party. The blast awoke everyone in the vicinity but didn’t injure anyone. Voisine was shaken but refused to acknowledge his fear. “So far as I know, I haven’t an enemy in the world,” he said. “I always try to be nice to people.”

Albert Bates, a retired police detective, worked at Ford as a transportation superintendent. Days after the Voisine bombing a man showed up at his home. Bates remembered him vaguely. They had worked together briefly on a railroad gang. The man asked to speak privately with him. Bates stepped outside to the curb. The man inquired about Bates’s plans for Saturday night.

“We are having a little party and I’d like for you to come to it.”

“Who is giving it?” Bates asked.

“Do you mean you don’t know?”

The man threw out a few names of others who would be there. Harvey Davis? Lowell Rushing? Bates didn’t recognize them.

The visitor pulled a bullet cartridge from his pocket and flipped it in the air a few times.

Bates was confused.

“Don’t you know what this means?” the visitor asked.

Bates thought the man might be a cop.

He thanked him for the invitation but told him he wouldn’t likely be at the party. Bates’s wife, viewing the bullet routine as a threat, urged him to inform police. He refused. On Saturday he attended a ball game. The Tigers beat the Chicago White Sox 4–0 that day. It was their eighth straight win; little Tommy Bridges pitched a three-hit shutout. Bates’s wife worried for his safety. She told her son Edward about his father being pressured to attend a mysterious meeting. Edward didn’t like it either. It sounded like an act of intimidation, so he enlisted two police officers to check out the gathering at Baby Creek Park near Ford’s Rouge complex.

By the time Bates returned home, his son was there, urging him to go to the park, where police had stopped more than fifteen vehicles. When they arrived, Bates spotted the former co-worker. He was talking to the graceless Harvey Davis and baby-faced Lowell Rushing. At just twenty-three years old, Rushing was a handsome, clean-shaven young man who had become one of Davis’s sidekicks.

Automobiles had flooded into the park, lining Vernor and Woodmere Streets. The two officers identified themselves and questioned Davis, who claimed it was just a picnic. (Police theorized later that the legion was preparing a death march with Bates as the victim.) Finding Davis’s answers unsatisfactory, police arrested him and several others. They found a pistol on Rushing and discovered a revolver hidden under a seat in their car, which also held a suitcase with rope and five black-and-red robes all emblazoned with skulls and crossbones. The vehicle also contained racist literature.

Police knew they had stumbled upon something, but they had no sense of its size or the gravity of their discovery. Neither did the judge, a brother of future Supreme Court justice Frank Murphy. Months later he dismissed all charges because of illegal search and seizure, a decision that—given different suspects and circumstances—would have inflamed the Black Legion. Reports of the arrests merited only a few paragraphs on the inside pages of the Detroit papers. S
POOKY
H
OODS
F
OUND IN
A
UTO,
stated one.

Lavon Kuney didn’t like what he was hearing. Thomas Heinrich, sitting before him, was telling the Lenawee County prosecutor of his dodgy induction into an organization called the Black Legion. It had occurred six weeks earlier and Heinrich had refused to attend any more meetings. Now he was being ordered to appear at an August 19 gathering at a local farm. The meeting was to be outside Adrian, a county seat halfway between the legion strongholds of Toledo, Ohio, and Jackson, Michigan, and about seventy miles southwest of Detroit.

Kuney called the Michigan State Police for assistance. He told them that for several months a secret society had been convening from sundown to midnight outside the college town. On the night of the meeting two state troopers patrolled the area but couldn’t find anything suspicious. They kept looking for signs of an open-air assembly. Around midnight they noticed a vehicle emerging from the farm. And then another. They recorded plate numbers and trailed a car from Detroit. They pulled the automobile over. Inside were Roy Hepner, Elsworth Shinaberry, and Andrew Martin, all in their forties. Martin had been unemployed for seven years, but the other two worked in the auto industry, Shinaberry at Ford and Hepner at Graham-Paige. One of the intriguing things about the legion was how many of its members held jobs within auto factories. Unemployment appeared less of a problem for legionnaires than for others.

In the car police discovered a .38 Colt revolver, a 6121 German Luger automatic pistol with attached dagger and scabbard, three hooded black gowns, and information about the size of platoons and companies. There was also an address book that listed Harvey Davis of 775 Ferdinand Street, the same Davis who had been arrested the week prior in Detroit. Hepner, Shinaberry, and Martin protested that the weapons, carried in a suitcase, weren’t theirs. They said higher officials they did not know had given them the guns. All three were arrested for carrying concealed weapons. The next day the FBI was brought into the case.

Three men appeared in Adrian on behalf of the accused. One was Leslie Black, a court clerk from Detroit. Another was Harry Z. Marx, whose law office was on the twenty-first floor of one of the city’s most prestigious buildings, the Union-Guardian. The third man, whom an FBI agent described as “very stout” and from Lima, Ohio, identified himself as “one of the highest officers of the Black Legion.” It was Bert Effinger. All three appealed to Prosecutor Kuney to release the suspects, contending that the guns were merely ceremonial, used as part of a harmless initiation. Kuney refused. The suspects were arraigned. But within ten days a local judge dismissed the case, saying police had exceeded their authority by searching the vehicle.

The Black Legion had spies who infiltrated unions and political organizations. They attended those groups’ events and planning sessions. They ingratiated themselves with their unwary enemies. Others spied on the legion. For Fred Gulley it started innocently enough. A Great Lakes Steel worker in his twenties, he agreed to go to a stag party barbeque with a friend. Of course there was no barbeque, and Gulley took the Black Oath at gunpoint. Newly married, he tired of the group’s shenanigans after a month. He disliked the legion and tried to extricate himself. But he had heard of what happened to those who left. He confessed his predicament to his friend, Mayor Voisine, whom he had known for years. Voisine convinced him to stay in the legion as his spy. Gulley agreed. Gulley’s wife, Mary, was rewarded with a secretarial position at the village office.

One night at a beer garden in Ecorse, Gulley got into an argument with other legionnaires about Voisine. Yes, Voisine was a Catholic but he had done some good things, Gulley said. He defended the mayor, saying he intended to vote for him. One of them remarked, “Bill won’t be in office after tonight. We got two cars following him to Detroit now.” Gulley objected and threatened to go to police. “It looks as if two people will have to be killed: you and Voisine,” someone said. Gulley agreed to keep quiet but informed Voisine as soon as he could.