Terror in the City of Champions (46 page)

From northern Michigan Marmon learned that in 1934 trooper Irvine Wurm, twenty-two years old, was flagged down on a road near Traverse City, forced into a car, blindfolded, and taken to a legion initiation. His abductors didn’t know he was a trooper. At the last minute, with guns trained on him and after multiple recruits had taken the pledge, Wurm gathered the courage to refuse the oath. Pretending to be a teacher, he said the vow would violate his job. Legionnaires yelled at him, lectured him, called him yellow, questioned his American citizenship, and generally gave him hell. They told him they would kill him if he talked. He hadn’t until now.

X-9 continued to send Marmon reports. In one labeled “extra confidential,” X-9 proposed trying to set up a meeting of all legion officers who were battalion majors or higher. He hoped to lure them with an agenda that would explore how to halt the police investigations, how to defeat Senator Couzens because his son, the mayor, was pledging to wipe legionnaires from the city payroll, and how to beat Frank Murphy, the former mayor who had come home from the Philippines to run for governor and was promising to round up all legionnaires. X-9 said he would issue the invitation in Major-General Bert Effinger’s name. It’s doubtful the meeting ever took place. Records indicate that X-9 issued only two more reports to Marmon. What became of him is not clear. Maybe he drifted back into normal society.

In his memos Marmon told Commissioner Olander of additional interviews he conducted related to the Bielak, Marchuk, and Pidcock cases. He was absolutely certain the legion had killed Roy Pidcock. Some other law enforcement individuals agreed with him. If in fact the legion murdered Pidcock, then what about Hazen Branch? He had died on January 25, months before Pidcock. According to Michigan State Police files, he supposedly knew of the legion’s long-running plans to force Pidcock to dump his wife or be killed and he may have threatened to expose the group. Branch, age thirty-eight, died from an explosion while working at Wyandotte Oil and Fat Company, thawing pipes with an acetylene torch. Co-workers said the father of five was far too smart and cautious to be using the torch without having taken precautions. The resulting fire burned Branch severely. It melted his clothes to his skin. He died within hours. The death was ruled accidental, but friends and family viewed the circumstances as suspicious.

Captain Marmon’s talk of multiple murders put pressure on officials to reexamine old cases. Some did so enthusiastically; some didn’t. Marmon forced the issue. He listed other men whom he thought the legion might have murdered in Michigan: Charles Allran of Wyandotte, who was shot roadside the day after Alexander Murdy disappeared; Jerome Wolf, an oil prospector who socialized with legionnaires and who was beaten to death in the legion hotbed of Napoleon; Howard Curtis, a former steel plant investigator in Ohio, who was found dead near the GM Proving Grounds in Milford; Vernon Dodge, an ex-probate judge in Flint, whose hanging death was thought to be a suicide; R. T. Philip, a city railway inspector who worked with legionnaires and drowned in the Olympic-size pool at Rouge Park; Walter Fisher, who died in a May 1936 fire after reportedly placing his own head and shoulders into the fire of a furnace; Cornelius Vanderveen, who also died beside a furnace in his Grand Rapids home; and Oliver Hurkett, twenty-two years old, whose brother said he belonged to the legion and had been threatened with death. Hurkett died of carbon monoxide poisoning in his car after having been beaten.

During the Black Legion inquiry, Marmon displayed a willingness to be uncommonly open and uncharacteristically blunt. His candor irritated not only Detroit and Canadian command officers but one of his own higher-ups. State Attorney General Crowley complained about “a certain official, who should have known better” that has been saying the legion committed “dozens of murders.” While not naming Marmon, Crowley criticized the person for creating unrealistic expectations with “exaggerated accounts” of crimes. Republican Crowley had established the one-man grand jury in Wayne County, blocking Democratic Prosecutor McCrea from the proceedings. Crowley felt that as a result of Marmon’s statements if the investigative body didn’t return “innumerable indictments the entire work of the grand jury would be discredited and those conducting the grand jury adjudged incapable and inefficient.”

Or worse, part of a cover-up.

Wyoming

Mickey Cochrane looked bad. His dark eyes bulged. His shoulders sagged. His face harbored more creases than usual. “It is painful to watch the creeping shadows of a man’s sunset,” wrote Austen Lake in the
Boston Evening Transcript
.

Cochrane remained in the hospital as speculation swirled about the cause of his mental breakdown. At Hearst’s
Times
, columnist Bud Shaver cited a list of reasons, ranging from Hank Greenberg to Al Simmons. “Cochrane has been doing a couple of men’s jobs under exceptionally trying conditions and it backfired on him as it inevitably would,” Shaver said. Harry Salsinger blamed Cochrane’s condition on “a highly nervous temperament” and “terrific mental pressure.” He also attributed it partly to Malcolm “Iffy the Dopester” Bingay without naming him. Salsinger wrote that Cochrane’s mental state was “aggravated by a Detroit newspaper columnist who set out on a campaign of persecution . . . criticizing Cochrane for every real and imaginary act.” Only Bingay qualified. From down the street came Iffy’s response: Bunk. “It has been no fault of Mickey’s, nor has it been the fault of anybody else,” said Iffy.

Doctors eased Cochrane’s restrictions on his eleventh day in the hospital. They allowed him to listen to the Tigers’ game in his room. After the Yankees’ phenomenal rookie Joe DiMaggio started a four-run rally in the first, Cochrane turned off the radio. He gave it another try later, but the Tigers lost their seventh straight. They had not won since Cochrane left the team. They had fallen twelve games out of first place. In the evening Cochrane, ever the boxing fan, tuned his radio to the same event that had much of the world listening, the heavyweight bout between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling.

Boxing writers predicted a rapid and resounding victory for Joe Louis. The question wasn’t whether Louis would beat former champion Max Schmeling, but how quickly he would dispose of him. “Louis inside of five,” offered Curly Grieve of the
San Francisco Examiner
. “Louis in three,” said Nat Fleischer of
Ring
magazine. “Two rounds,” said Gene Kessler of the
Chicago Times
. The consensus was that Schmeling was washed up—a “condemned man,” in the words of W. W. Edgar of the
Free Press
. One of Louis’s sparring partners added: “I think I can lick Max.” Detroit prepared for a Joe Louis celebration like no other.

The first round passed at Yankee Stadium without a knockout by Louis. Then the second, then the third. In the fourth Schmeling connected with a flurry of punches that stunned Louis and dropped him to the canvas. The fight would go another eight rounds, but it had been decided then. Schmeling had injured Louis. In the twelfth he finally finished him. He knocked out Louis, delivering to him his first professional loss. The defeat was so unexpected, so shocking, so painful, that across the country nearly a dozen listeners reportedly collapsed and died of heart attacks.

Cochrane was discharged on Saturday, June 21. The next morning he boarded a
Detroit News
airplane with close friend Captain Emmett “Rosie” O’Donnell, an athletic chap who in the fall had helped coach the West Point football team. They flew to Billings, Montana, stopping in Minneapolis and Bismarck on the way. They drove the final 110 miles to Cody, Wyoming, where Cochrane was expected to continue his recuperation for two to three weeks. The plan: lots of rest, riding, fishing, shooting, maybe a little catch. He would have the company of O’Donnell and well-known guide Max Wilde. The secluded ranch, difficult to reach, sat in a valley amid mountain cliffs, canyons, and creeks. “It’s the greatest place on earth,” he said.

News reports and photos emerged occasionally from Wyoming, showing Cochrane on horseback or throwing a baseball. Often he was pictured wearing a cowboy hat with a kerchief tied around his neck. L
AST
R
OUNDUP?
asked one headline. The cutline speculated that Cochrane’s playing days were done. Reports offered conflicting information as to who owned the place. It was either Wilde’s cabin or Harry Bennett’s. Either way Bennett had played a role in Cochrane’s escape from the pressures of Detroit. Cochrane left behind his troubled team, as well as all the commotion about the Black Legion. He would remain in Wyoming until mid-July. His stay was extended twice. The Tigers played without him, managed by coach Del Baker.

Within two weeks’ time Mickey Cochrane and Joe Louis—the two supermen most responsible for Detroit’s sports ascendancy, for its anointing as the City of Champions—had been exposed as mortal.

The Cover-Up

Captain Ira Marmon hit obstacles wherever he turned. He tried to reopen old murder and suicide cases but found some police uncooperative. He wanted bodies exhumed but they weren’t being exhumed. Without them the new autopsies he requested couldn’t be conducted. Legion members not yet charged were pleading ignorance or maintaining their silence. Several cases—those of Bielak and Marchuk especially—pointed to Peg-Leg White, who had vanished shortly after the legion’s unmasking.

Marmon’s men searched across Michigan. The easy thing about looking for White was that people tended to remember a fellow with a wooden leg. One lead placed him on a fishing trip near West Branch in the center of the state. Troopers checked campgrounds and tourist spots and interviewed locals. Nothing. They followed rumors to his home in Lyons. Neighbors and the postman reported he hadn’t been there. Two troopers spent a day watching a ranch elsewhere; another false tip. Police heard White was vacationing on land he owned up north. Again, no luck.

Captain Marmon and Prosecutor McCrea wanted to explore the secrets of the sinkholes at Ford Mill Pond, where Silas Coleman had died. They were told that dragging the pond would be futile due to thick vegetation and deep depths. They asked Ford Motor Company for permission to drain the marsh. It was denied. A company official directed onsite caretaker Lucius Doyle to “refuse anyone the right.” Draining the pond would hurt fishing and hay crops, a spokesman said. Asked whether he thought the marsh was a graveyard, a police sergeant was unequivocal in his answer: “Absolutely, I do.”

Major-General Bert Effinger was proving elusive. Lima police refused to execute a search warrant on his house. Two times during the summer Michigan detectives went south to Ohio seeking the legion leader. After finding Lima authorities again uncooperative, they asked the FBI for assistance. J. Edgar Hoover said the matter did not fall into his jurisdiction. When a grand jury finally indicted Effinger on charges of criminal syndicalism and possession of bombs, Michigan officials secured an extradition hearing in Columbus before Governor Martin L. Davey. The case was not going Effinger’s way. During a recess he slipped out of the courthouse. Davey signed the extradition order, but Effinger was gone—a fugitive.

Captain Marmon hadn’t become head of the Michigan State Police investigative bureau by needlessly provoking political leaders. He had nearly twenty years of experience in the field and had dealt extensively with both politicos and the press, so he knew what he was doing when he spoke publicly about his suspicions, about there being fifty legion murders, about reopening old cases, about incorrect assumptions by police. He didn’t make his opinions known quietly behind the scenes. He hyped them. They were more difficult to ignore that way. The record does not indicate whether Marmon suspected a cover-up, but he certainly acted as if he did.