Terror in the City of Champions (29 page)

At the 1935 World Series, club owner Frank Navin talks with baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

WALTER P. REUTHER LIBRARY, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY

Recovering from a nervous breakdown, Mickey Cochrane films the Wyoming landscape beside his friend Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell, a future four-star general.

FROM THE AUTHOR’S PRIVATE COLLECTION

Harry Bennett, Henry Ford’s right-hand man and infamous enforcer, became close friends with Tigers manager Mickey Cochrane.

WALTER P. REUTHER LIBRARY, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY

Football star Dutch Clark led the Detroit Lions to their first-ever championship in 1935.

WALTER P. REUTHER LIBRARY, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY

Police officers model confiscated Black Legion robes and weapons.

WALTER P. REUTHER LIBRARY, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY

As major-general of the Black Legion, Bert Effinger, an electrician, led the secret society from his home in Lima, Ohio.

FROM THE AUTHOR’S PRIVATE COLLECTION

Leftist attorney Maurice Sugar, a candidate for judge and city council, became a target of the Black Legion after representing blacks and pro-union activists in several high-profile cases.

WALTER P. REUTHER LIBRARY, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY

Captain Ira Marmon of the Michigan State Police tried for years to get the FBI to investigate the Black Legion.

PHOTO COURTESY OF MARMON FAMILY

Father Charles Coughlin attracted a massive weekly radio audience that varied from an estimated ten to thirty million people.

WALTER P. REUTHER LIBRARY, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY

Dayton Dean (left) and Harvey Davis (second from left) with two other defendants.

WALTER P. REUTHER LIBRARY, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY

The Black Legion murder trials drew international press coverage.

WALTER P. REUTHER LIBRARY, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY

Gunman Dayton Dean, the prosecution’s top witness, takes the stand in one of the 1936 Black Legion trials.

WALTER P. REUTHER LIBRARY, WAYNE STATE UNIVERSITY

World Champions

On a chilly Wednesday, October 2, throngs of fans weaved across the brick pavement of Michigan Avenue between taxis and long lines of streetcars, pouring toward the turnstiles of Navin Field. The air felt of football, but this was the World Series, America’s grandest sporting event. Jovial chaos reigned. Cops whistled, newsboys yelped, car horns blared, streetcars rattled, trucks rasped, mobs of people pushed. Officers on horseback guarded the perimeter of the park, trying to keep order, their shoed mounts clacking on the sidewalk. The police had vowed to come down on scalpers if they charged more than face value for tickets, and they were enforcing that dictum.

In the Tigers dressing room, Mickey Cochrane was growing frantic and angry. An hour before the one-thirty game time, with batting practice over, Schoolboy Rowe, his starting pitcher, had yet to arrive. Cochrane couldn’t reach Rowe by phone. After last year’s threats and the injured hand—and his knowledge that Rowe liked to sleep late (and that Edna was back in Arkansas with their son and, thus, not there to wake him)—Cochrane alternated between worry and irritation.