Detroit, Death City

It's a throwaway city for a throwaway society, a place where the American dream came to die. No other U.S. metropolis has suffered a decline as steep as Detroit's. From "the arsenal of democracy" during World War II to a blue-collar Shangri-la in the 1950s and 1960s--where a man could go straight from high school to the factory floor and earn enough money to buy a house and a car and support his family for the rest of his life--to a global symbol for what happens when cities go bad, a byword for violent crime, urban decay and racialized poverty. Today Detroit is America's forgotten city.

Detroiters complain endlessly about negative media portrayals of their town, usually just after they've told you of the latest horrible crime they've witnessed. They claim that journalists give their city a bad rap. But long gone are the days when reporters from all over the world flocked to Detroit on Devil's Night to capture the death throes of a great American metropolis. Once the most American of places, Detroit is now so far outside the mainstream that its plight rates lower than ethanol subsidies in our political discourse. Who cares--other than the residents--about the fate of Detroit, which even today would be regarded as a national disgrace in any civilized country? Other than knowing it as the home of white musicians such as Eminem, Kid Rock and the White Stripes, the rest of America couldn't care less about Detroit.

If Detroit were a character in a novel, it wouldn't be believable. What madness could possess a civilization to construct such a grand and magnificent place and then, within half a century, to obliterate so thoroughly what it had created? When talking about the state of Detroit, one is tempted to compare it to a natural disaster--some earthquake that laid waste to the landscape. Except there's nothing natural about what has happened to Detroit in the past 30-plus years. Humans built this city, and humans--an unholy and unconscious alliance of fat-cat businessmen and street-corner criminals--destroyed it. Now other humans are trying to bring it back from the dead.

Wayne State University professor Jerry Herron, who has written extensively about Detroit, compares it to a disposable industrial appliance--something that when used up gets thrown into the trash. "It's the disposable character of the city," he says. "Once the auto industry got here, the attitude was always to make your money and then move away, to dispose of the past and leave it behind. And that applied whether you were Henry Ford or the lowliest worker."

That's not how I imagined Detroit. When I was growing up in Manchester, U.K., Detroit was a mythical place, home of Tamla Motown, whose 1960s dance tunes--a slick, sophisticated sound that appealed across race lines and 3,000 miles of ocean--were popular throughout the 1970s among workingclass youths in the north of England. Manchester and Detroit seemed like twin cities--grimy industrial centers that had seen better days but nonetheless played host to vibrant music scenes that provided a measure of colorful compensation for living in such a gray environment. Some people in my neighborhood regarded R. Dean Taylor ("There's a Ghost in My House") and the Funk Brothers' Earl Van Dyke practically as legends. Plus, Detroit was the home of Iggy Pop and Alice Cooper. How cool was that?

So imagine my disappointment when I first came to Detroit in 1990 with my new bride to visit her parents. I thought Manchester was a dump, but Detroit made my hometown look like Venice. Burned-out houses, vacant storefronts, abandoned factories--whole neighborhoods looked as though an invading army had pillaged them. The atmosphere of desolation was pervasive. Once-proud art deco skyscrapers stood empty and forlorn. Architectural wonders such as the Statler-Hilton and Book-Cadillac hotels resembled homeless shelters. Michigan Central Station, formerly a handsome beaux arts building on the western edge of downtown, was in the process of being methodically gutted by vandals and thieves to the extent that the 18-story structure would soon become a skeleton.

The most startling thing I saw was the large tracts of open land everywhere. Nature seemed to be bursting through the cracked sidewalks. Wildlife--possums, raccoons, foxes, even pheasants--sported in the rubble. It was as if the city were reverting to the prairie it had been before the French arrived in the 1700s. I wasn't expecting to see people dancing in the street, in the words of the Martha & the Vandellas song. But I didn't expect a depopulated wilderness where the pavement was so broken that people had to walk in the street. It will take years, maybe decades, to fix this place, I remember thinking.

On subsequent visits I got to hear all the war stories and attend some of the funerals, and I saw a city in which life improved by increments, if at all, not so much rising like a phoenix from the ashes as crawling lethargically toward some semblance of normal city life.

Since my first visit, conditions have gotten better. Downtown, if not exactly bustling, is no longer a ghost town after dark. White suburbanites who hadn't journeyed past 8 Mile Road in 20 years are now walking the streets--going to Greektown Casino, a Tigers game at the new Comerica Park or a performance at the meticulously refurbished Detroit Opera House. Young professional couples are moving into luxury lofts by the river. The November opening of a Borders bookstore was cause for great municipal celebration. The current mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, boasted that nine new restaurants had opened downtown in the past year. In his recent state-of-the-city address Kilpatrick announced that Michigan Central Station was to be restored and turned into a new police headquarters.

But in the neighborhoods surrounding downtown, little seems to have changed. The financial benefits of such large-scale commercial developments as the Renaissance Center and Comerica Park haven't filtered out to the adjacent residential districts. Poverty is still widespread, and crime is still out of control. Some areas appear as if the Sanitation Department hasn't paid a visit in years. Why has the pace of revival been so slow? Other American cities--New York, Philadelphia, Indianapolis--have come back from the brink. Why not Detroit?

"Beyond the murder rate, there are three statistics that tell you a lot about what's happening in Detroit," says Wayne State's Herron. "More than half the residents don't have high school diplomas, 47 percent of adults are functionally illiterate, and 44 percent of people between the ages of 16 and 60 are either unemployed or not looking for work. Half the population is disqualified from participating in the official economy except at the lowest levels."

Winter kill

Beneath the blight, Detroit is a city of churches and families

On a bright morning this past February, my wife and I flew into the new $1.2 billion Edward H. McNamara Terminal at Detroit Metropolitan Airport, the latest in a long line of capital projects designed to resuscitate the city. Walking through a glass tunnel between concourses, we were surprised to find an ambient light-and-sound show. The vibe was akin to that of a chill-out room at a rave, perhaps an ironic nod to Detroit's status as the birthplace of techno music. Outside the terminal the plains of southeast Michigan were dusted with snow. It was a bad time to come. The city was in mourning for two cops--one 26, the other 21--who had been shot dead the day before by a motorist after he was pulled over during a routine traffic stop.

Even by Detroit standards this latest incident was particularly senseless. Explaining why he pumped nearly a dozen bullets into the officers, the alleged cop killer, who was quickly apprehended, said, "It was a mistake." The fact that the cops were white and their alleged killer black seemed not to matter at all. The outpouring of sympathy for the slain officers was genuine and widespread among Detroiters of all races. The only note of racial animosity was sounded when two white suburbanites vandalized the black-fist statue downtown--the one commemorating Detroit-bred boxer Joe Louis--and left pictures of the slain cops at the base.

The killing of the officers was part of a bloody surge in homicides in the first part of the new year. The day after, a pizza delivery man was shot dead, and an armored car guard was slain in the early hours of the next day. In 2003 Detroit posted the lowest number of homicides since 1967--about half what it had been in the mid-1970s. By April 13, 2004, however, Detroit had logged 110 murders, a nearly 50. percent jump over the murder rate in the first three months of 2003.

Just when Detroit was having some success in rehabilitating its reputation and getting ready to host the 2006 Super Bowl, politicians worried that the Murder City image was making a comeback.

If someone wants to commit a murder and get away with it, Detroit is as good a place as any to try. Year in and year out more than half the homicides in the city go unsolved. While the homicide rate has declined in recent years, and while New Orleans and Washington, D.C. have more murders per capita, Detroit continues to be the most dangerous major American city in terms of overall violent crime. Detroiters still die violent deaths at the rate of about one a day. To put that in perspective, if you compare killing rates over the past 35 years, Northern Ireland has been about eight times safer than the Motor City.

Sometimes it seems as if there are two Detroits. There's the Detroit that, to a British outsider, resembles a sleepy Southern town. The swelling cadences of the preachers you hear on a Sunday morning. The pickup trucks you see everywhere. The neatly tended trailer parks on 8 Mile Road. The market signs that advertise clean chitlins by the pound or coons for sale (meaning raccoon meat.) The leisurely pace at which citizens go about their business. It's a fundamentally decent and deeply religious world where strangers greet you on the street by saying "God bless you." It's a tight-knit community in which family values and compassionate conservatism are more than empty political slogans. This is a place where, as a local preacher told me, the real welfare department isn't the one at city hall but the network of churches that crisscross the city. No wonder my wife's cousin, a lifelong Detroiter, refers to his hometown as "up south," the northernmost Southern city in America.

But there's another Detroit--the barren, crime-ridden, postindustrial wasteland satirized in the RoboCop movies. The American dream turned Darwinian nightmare. A coldhearted, hyperacquisitive, dog-eat-dog world where life is worth less than a leather jacket or a pair of Nikes, where even criminals from the rest of the country fear to tread. A realm whose heroes are notorious drug dealers from the past: negative role models such as Young Boys Inc., the Chambers brothers and Richard "Maserati Rick" Carter, who was famously shot dead in his hospital room and buried in a coffin that looked like a Mercedes, complete with spinning tires and a grille. A nihilistic, dead-end culture of greed and violence so entrenched it seems impossible to uproot. A place where slinging drugs is the equivalent of Job Corps and crime is such an everyday part of life that it assumes the status of weather.

As I have found out, though, these two Detroits are not separate. They're bound by ties of kinship and community: The drug dealer on the corner or the killer lurking in the shadows is somebody's son or cousin or nephew.

Long hot summer

The riots of July 1967 marked the beginning of a brutal decline

This is a story about a father and son, one a 1960s revolutionary who became a well-known figure in the fight to save Detroit, the other a scion of relative prosperity who became a drug dealer. It's the tale of my father-in-law and my brother-in-law. But it's also the story of the Detroit I came to know through marriage. It's a journey from hope to heartache, a drama that combines race, politics, violence and its victims. And it begins, as many Detroit stories do, with the 1967 riots, an event old--timers still talk about as if it happened yesterday.

The riots deeply scarred Detroit. The devastation was so extensive that, 37 years later, some neighborhoods have yet to recover. Whites fled the city in panic. Within five years Detroit would become a black--majority city. Sparked on a hot July night by a relatively minor incident between vice cops and patrons at an illegal after--hours drinking club (a blind pig, in local parlance) at 12th Street and Clairmount Avenue, it was the bloodiest and most destructive American insurrection in 50 years. It lasted five days and cost 43 lives and $50 million in property damage. President Lyndon Johnson called in federal troops to quell the disturbance.

Not long after the riots, the Durley family--Leito Sr. and his wife, Yolanda, along with their three kids (my future wife, Chene; her older sister, Initia; and her only brother, Leito Jr.)--moved into a three-bedroom Tudor with a driveway and a garage on Manor Street, in a quiet, tree--lined neighborhood on Detroit's west side.

It was a solidly middle--class family. Yolanda worked as a pharmacist at a local hospital, and her husband was a vice president at the Edison electricity company, a good job for a black manin those days. When the Durleys moved to the neighborhood they were the only black family on the block. "Not long after we moved in, for sale signs started to go up," remembers Initia.

In his spare time Leito Sr. was information minister for the Republic of New Afrika, a political group that wanted to establish a separate black nation in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina. "Free (continued on page 132)Detroit, Death City(continued from page 64) the land" was their slogan. Members renounced their citizenship and refused to pay taxes, telling white America to kiss their collective black behind. They loaded up on guns and ammo in preparation for the coming conflagration. Not surprisingly, the FBI took notice of the RNA's pronouncements and activities and set out to sabotage the group.

"Leito was always ahead of the times," says Bob Newby, a friend and fellow activist who met Leito Sr. when both were studying at Wichita State University in the 1950s. "In the early 1960s, when everybody was talking about integration, he was talking about black power. He knew white America wasn't going to change. He thought integration was just utopian pie-in-the-sky politics."

Born at the height of the Depression in Independence, Kansas, Leito Sr. served as a paratrooper in the Army before receiving a master's degree from Boston University. He came to live in Detroit at the end of the 1950s, and the experience radicalized him. The racism of the police, the open segregation in housing, the way blacks were banned from employment in certain stores--all of it infuriated him. The effort to better his race became his new vocation.

Leito Sr. was a proud and dignified man, not someone who would easily turn the other cheek. He always spoke proper English and never cursed. He rarely raised his voice, because he didn't have to. His authority and encyclopedic knowledge of world affairs were such that people listened when he talked.

At six feet, two inches, he was an imposing presence. In later years, after he started to go gray, he would be mistaken at airports for Ed Bradley of 60 Minutes. When I first met him in the early 1990s, over Christmas dinner, he scared the hell out of me. He spent most of our meeting playing a game of pin the tail on the honky, blaming me personally for Ronald Reagan's policies, even though I was born and raised in a terraced house in working class Manchester. Of course what really teed him off was that, in opposition to his firmly held racial beliefs, his Nubian princess had married a white man. Still, you didn't have to like his stern personality or agree with his ideology to respect him.

After Edison fired him in 1968 for his extracurricular political activities, Leito Sr. devoted himself full--time to insurrection. The riots killed the dream of integration in Detroit--where only four years before, Martin Luther King Jr. had led 125,000 people in a march down Woodward Avenue to Cobo Hall and delivered an early version of his "I have a dream" speech.

It was a period of open racial hostility. A survey conducted after the riots revealed that 67 percent of white Detroiters believed blacks had only themselves to blame for their poverty. Leito Sr. saw what happened not as a riot but as a rebellion--an expression of rage against racism and oppression. Next time, however, blacks would be organized. Instead of burning down their own neighborhoods, he vowed, they would take the fight to the white man.

To this end, the Durley household became a home for revolutionaries. Though Leito Jr. was too young at the time to remember much, his sister Initia recalls H. Rap Brown and Huey Newton bouncing her on their knees. A secret door in the house led to a closet full of weaponry. An underground newspaper was printed in the basement. Each morning before he took the kids to school, Leito Sr. checked under the hood of his car for bombs. Undercover government agents followed the family whenever they left the house. Everywhere they went, RNA bodyguards went with them. Later, the kids were the only ones in school who wore Free Angela Davis badges and refused to stand for the pledge of allegiance.

Things came to a head one spring night in 1969. Leito and Yolanda kissed their kids good--bye, told them they'd be back soon and headed over to the New Bethel Baptist Church, where the RNA was holding its second annual conference. The Reverend C.L. Franklin, Aretha Franklin's father, had founded the church, a warehouse--like building that dominated the neighborhood.

Shortly before midnight, after the meeting had ended and people were starting to head home, two white officers in a patrol car stopped to ask questions. In those days the Detroit police department was as racist as any in Mississippi. The force was 90 percent white. Members of the RNA's paramilitary wing, the Black Legionnaires, were standing outside. The Legionnaires were a fearsome sight--decked out in black berets, combat boots and leopard--skin epaulets, they were trained in self--defense and openly carried guns. The rookie officers got out of the car and approached the Legionnaires. A confrontation ensued that left one of the officers, Michael Czapski, dead on the sidewalk, his gun still holstered. His partner was seriously wounded.

"One of the cops started to pull out his gun, but the young brothers outshot him," Imari Obadele, then the group's charismatic leader, says today. "The cops were out to kill us that night. It was an attempt to assassinate the leadership of the RNA." The Detroit police saw it as cold--blooded murder, the politically inspired killing of a brother officer. Within minutes police vans and cruisers surrounded the church, and an armed siege followed. Cops fired rifles and pistols into the building.

Yolanda was standing in the church lobby when bullets starting flying through the open doorway. She rushed back into the sanctuary to find her husband. RNA officials turned off the lights and told everybody to get on the floor, where they crawled under the pews as round after round whizzed above their heads, creating hysteria among the women and children

"It went on for 15 or 20 minutes," recalls Yolanda. "They finally stopped shooting, then stormed the church and told everybody they were under arrest. We didn't know what was going on."

A dozen guns and a cache of ammunition were confiscated. Everybody was taken to the police station, where they were kept incommunicado while being fingerprinted and given nitrate tests to find out if they had fired a weapon. By the next day the police had released all but a handful of individuals. "Before they let us go they asked us to sign a release saying we hadn't been mistreated," remembers Yolanda. "We told them to get lost." Three RNA members went on trial for the murder, but all were acquitted.

•

With the revolutionary father, I knew where I stood within minutes of meeting him. But my brother--in--law always seemed to be hiding something behind his gleaming smile. Popular with the ladies, he was a dapper, handsome man in his 30s, with Asian--looking eyes and an almond--shaped head that seemed a bit too small for his broad shoulders. Charming and well mannered, he was a ghetto playboy who enjoyed the good things in life.

Leito Jr., or Lo, as his friends called him, was a drug supplier by trade--something the whole family was aware of. He once called to ask if I knew where he could get 10 keys of cocaine in a hurry. There was a drought in New York's Washington Heights, where he normally bought his coke before transporting it to Detroit. Appalled that he was talking about a major drug transaction on my home phone, I told him I knew where to get an eight ball in a hurry, but that was about it, and then I hung up.

Like so many other dealers, Leito fell on hard times. After finishing a prison stretch in the mid--1990s, he went back to the streets but was unable to hook up with his dope connections, most of whom were either dead, in jail or retired. A new set of hustlers had taken over the trade, which was now more anarchic than in the past. This wasn't like the old days, when someone fronted you a couple of keys of cocaine and told you to pay him back the next week. If you didn't have the money right then and there, nobody would deal with you.

Stressed out by his diminished circumstances and too proud to show it, Leito felt increasingly trapped by his bad life choices. Running through his mind was the constant worry that he would be unable to support his son, Little Leito, who was living with the child's mother in South Carolina. He hated being poor and was embarrassed not to own a car, a severe social handicap in a city where the automobiles people drive are often better tended than their homes. The time had come to quit the game. Tired of the daily gangster grind, he was going through the hustler's equivalent of a midlife crisis, a harsh realization that while crime often pays in the short term, it rarely does over time.

•

Club 313 occupies a one-story stucco building at the corner of Schoolcraft and Greenfield. When we pull into its parking lot on a cold February evening, the old attendant, seeing me write in a notebook, accuses me of being undercover heat. "I know what you doing, boy," he says. "You taking down plate numbers. Don't lie." It seems the police had been keeping an eye on the dance club.

Earlier, one of Leito's acquaintances had cautioned us, "You got to be careful about the questions you asking. These niggers up here is crazy, man. This ain't New York. These niggers don't want publicity. They want to shoot you."

A notice at the door instructs patrons, No Hoods, Baseball Hats, Gym Shoes, Jerseys. Men 25 Up.A human colossus pats down customers on the way in, which is just as well, according to Kenny, the joint's amiable owner: "You'd be crazy to go to a nightclub in Detroit that doesn't check for guns. Shit, some restaurants in this town even search you for weapons." Attired in a flight jacket, sneakers and a wool cap, he is in violation of his own dress code, even though he wears an expensive Piaget watch.

A large bar occupies the center of Kenny's establishment. Leather booths ring the perimeter. The DJ plays a mixture of old--school soul and funk with some contemporary hip--hop--typical for a city where Frankie Beverly and Maze are still big stars. A line of young women in new boots gyrate on the dance floor in perfect formation as they check themselves out in the mirrored wall.

Club 313 is the land of a thousand hustles. There's the social hustle, the booty--call hustle, the push--it hustle, the original hustle, the ballroom hustle andso forth. "Detroit has so many different hustles, it's ridiculous," says 313 bartender Adrienne, an elfin, light--skinned black woman whom Leito used to date.

Leito often came to 313, where he'd sit in the corner drinking a split of Moët & Chandon. 'He always used to reminisce about his life before he went to prison," remembers Kenny. "He had a bad time after he got out. People he'd helped in the past turned their backs on him."

Sitting next to Kenny is his cousin Fly Guy, one of Leito's oldest friends. He wears a baby blue suede outfit, with matching hat, jacket and trousers. It looks more like a stage costume for a 1970s funk band than something you'd wear on the street. Leito met Fly Guy at a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show in the early 1980s, when Leito saved him from a beating after Fly Guy was cornered in the cinema's parking lot. "That nigger taught me how to shoot," Fly Guy says. "Before I met Lo I was throwing the bullets, spraying them all over the place. I'd turn the gun to the side and shoot like in the movies. Leito told me, 'No, man, that's garbage. That's stuff you see on TV.' "

Living in Detroit, Fly Guy has seen his fair share of senseless slaughter. "When I was in high school two sisters had their mother killed for the insurance money. And guess how much the insurance policy was for? Fifty thousand," he recalls. Later a friend of his was murdered because he stepped on somebody's shoes outside a bar and refused to apologize. He was shot in the back as he walked away. The victim's brother came to the bar the next week and blew away his brother's killer in front of a packed room. "A lot of people walking around Detroit don't have any souls," says Fly Guy. "There's people out here who are so petty they'll take your life over nothing. It's the crab--in--the--bucket syndrome. We're all hungry down here at the bottom of this barrel. But if you're climbing up, trying to get out of this nonsense, I got to pull you down and take from you."

•

Given the perilous nature of Leito's chosen lifestyle, it's a wonder he didn't quit the game sooner. While Leito was in prison, another friend was crippled after hoodlums heard he had a lot of cash in a safe at his home. They broke into his house and shot him a dozen times in the legs, arms and genitals with an Uzi, attempting to get him to give up the combination. Knowing that if he gave it up, the next bullet would be to his head, he held on for life. An acquaintance sitting outside in a car heard the commotion and called the police. The assailants ran away.

By the early 1970s Leito's parents had separated. His father went from trying to overthrow the system to working within the system, taking a job as chief of public information for the Wayne County Commission, a position he held for three decades. After 1967 more blacks were elected to high office in Detroit. Former revolutionaries were now councilmen and commissioners. In 1973 Detroit chose its first black mayor, Coleman Young. "Coleman Young had a high regard for Leito's intellect and often asked him for advice," says one former mayoral aide. They would lunch together at the now--shuttered Enjoy, on Michigan Avenue, an unhygienic hole in--the--wall soul food restaurant that functioned as a male clubhouse for the new political class.

Leito Sr.'s dream of black power had been achieved only on a political level, not on an economic one, where it really would have counted. The 1967 riots were merely a prelude to a deepening economic crisis. In the face of cheaper and better--made Japanese imports, Detroit's auto industry suffered a dramatic decline. The OPEC crisis only exacerbated the slump. Between 1967 and 1981 Detroit lost half its manufacturing jobs.

Scared whites continued to decamp to the suburbs. Many middle--class blacks soon followed, especially after the public school system collapsed. Court--mandated school busing hastened the exodus. Between 1970 and 1980 Detroit shed more than a fifth of its population. The diminished tax base was unable to support a city increasingly made up of poor black people. During the next 20 years, Detroit would lose two thirds of its property--tax base as the number of whites in the city dropped from 56 percent of the population in 1970 to 22 percent in 1990.

Criminals became more brazen. In August 1976, at a Kool & the Gang concert, 150 members of the Errol Flynns gang (in tandem with another group, the Black Killers) committed what one gang--banger boasted was "the boldest mass robbery in Detroit history." They stormed through Cobo Hall and stole money and jewelry, beating or sexually assaulting any of the 8,000 concertgoers who resisted. Named after the swashbuckling Hollywood star of yore, the Errol Flynns fancied themselves debonair criminals. They came to the concert dressed in double--breasted suits and their signature black felt Borsalino fedoras, the collars of their shirts turned up, many of them carrying walking sticks. They commandeered the stage and grabbed the microphones, chanting "Errol Flynn, Errol Flynn" and doing the Errol Flynn dance move popular at the time.

As the industrial economy went into free fall and well--paid jobs on the assembly line dried up, a new underground economy developed in its place--a deadly trade that would end up destroying almost everything Leito Sr. held dear.

"The politics changed dramatically," remembers activist Bob Newby. "When I left Detroit in 1970 to go to graduate school, the talk was all about black power. When I came back in 1974 it was all about personal escapism. Drugs had a lot to do with that."

•

Oak Park--the Detroit suburb where Yolanda moved her family after her divorce in the mid--1970s--bills itself as "the family city." Driving around the neatly tended streets, you see nothing to dispel that image. Ranch--style homes, all nearly identical, line the streets. On the outside, at least, there's little to suggest this area was a breeding ground for criminality.

Yet when Leito was in high school in the early 1980s, Oak Park had quite a reputation. This was the era of Young Boys Inc., a group of older men who used underage kids to peddle drugs. Milton "Butch" Jones, the gang's leader, lived in Oak Park. He also had several houses for counting and storage in the neighborhood. The YBI's assembly--line cocaine and heroin operation reportedly grossed $35 million annually and flourished for five years before police and the feds broke up the gang in the early 1980s. "At that time a lot of the major gangsters in Detroit came from Oak Park and Southfield," says one of Leito's best friends, Pretty Tony.

"You had kids when we were in school who were 15, 16 years old, driving BMWs and Benzes and wearing mink coats," says Fly Guy, who also grew up in the area. "Why bust your butt going to college and doing the right thing when the person down the street who can't spell cat or dog has a pocket full of money? You look at yourself and say, 'Damn, I got more brains than this one. I could do the same thing and make more money.' Which Leito did."

All the Durley kids inherited their father's rebelliousness. Middle--class security was a bore. "We didn't want to be preppy Negroes," my wife says. "None of us wanted to hang out with the sort of people my mother wanted us to hang out with." While the sisters contented themselves with symbolic rebellion by dressing up like punk rockers, the brother took a more hazardous path. The danger and excitement of the streets--a world from which his parents had always shielded him--appealed to Leito in a way tennis lessons and horseback riding never could. Becoming a drug dealer represented everything he was bred not to become.

Leito's career path resists easy sociological explanation. The normal excuses for criminal behavior--poverty, poor education, abusive parents--didn't apply in his case. He wasn't stupid, a delinquent because he was too dumb to do anything else, nor was he selling drugs because he needed to support a habit. He was widely read--everything from Shakespeare to Sun Tzu to Donald Goines. And you couldn't blame it on genetics: The Durley family had no history of serious criminality. The only possible explanation is cultural. Leito dug the lifestyle. He liked being a gangster.

"Many young boys in Oak Park were selling drugs when they had no real reason to," says his sister Initia, who suffered many sleepless nights worrying about her brother's fate. "It had a lot to do with peer pressure. Leito was slinging drugs because his friends were."

Within the city proper, things went from bad to worse when the recession of the 1970s was followed by the downturn of the early 1980s. In parts of Detroit normal economic life ground to a standstill. On some strips the only signs of commercial activity were the ubiquitous party stores. In the 1980s Leito Sr. led a campaign called Denounce the 40 Ounce, against the advertisement of malt liquor in poor neighborhoods. While the effort succeeded in persuading liquor manufacturers not toadvertise in such areas, the proliferation of party stores continued unabated. Leito Sr. was also active behind the scenes, trying to combat the escalating problem of drugs in the community. He was a founder of Partnership for a Drug--Free Detroit.

Meanwhile, his son and a couple of friends had set up shop at the Crystal House, a rundown motel on Greenfield Road. They would bribe the desk clerk, then rent 20 to 30 rooms and have a team of juveniles sell drugs for them. When one group of dealers would get tired, they'd go to bed and the next group would take over. It was a 24--hour operation.

Crack was just hitting Detroit. You could take an ounce of powdered cocaine, cook it, cut it up and sell it within an hour at the Crystal House, doubling or tripling your money.

The notoriously violent Chambers brothers ruled Detroit's crack trade in those days. The four brothers from Arkansas got their start selling pot out of a party store; two moved on to selling crack by the mid--1980s. They supposedly grossed about $55 million a year, more than any privately owned legitimate business in the city. Dubbed "crack capitalists" by writer William Adler, they employed hundreds of people and controlled some 200 crack houses before being arrested in 1988. According to Adler, there were 450 emergency room admissions for cocaine intoxication in 1983. Four years later there were 3,811.

Leito's operation paled in comparison with the Chambers brothers'. But he was still making $10,000 to $20,000 a week, which he spent on luxury cars, Armani suits, diamond watches and alligator shoes. He paraded around town toting a Bally briefcase that contained a MAC--11 nine--millimeter machine gun.

Along with the drug dealing, Leito was involved in running guns. His father once threatened to call the FBI after he found a large number of weapons under Leito's bed. "It's the only way he's going to learn," he told his sobbing daughters as he reached for the phone. (He didn't make the call.)

For years Leito avoided the law and made tons of money in the process. "We had no real concept of what money was worth," says Fly Guy. "Having that amount of money so early in life fucked us all up to a certain extent, but it particularly fucked up Leito."

Leito's luck couldn't last. In late October 1987 two undercover Detroit cops spotted him in a brand--new Acura, talking on his car phone in front of a building known to be a drug hot spot. As the officers got out of their car and approached, Leito got out of his and ran across the street. As he ran he tossed a clear plastic bag containing white powder to the ground. One of the officers chased after Leito and tackled him from behind. Another bag was found in the jacket he was wearing--250 grams of cocaine in all. Found guilty of possession with intent to deliver, he was sentenced to 10 to 30 years.

In 1992, while in prison, Leito was charged, with members of a gangster--rap group called the Rap Mafia, on a drug conspiracy count that could have kept him behind bars for the rest of his life. The cops claimed the Rap Mafia was merely a front for a $5--million--a--month cocaine operation. And Leito was allegedly one of the group's suppliers. Eventually Leito was found not guilty, but not before he pummeled the Rap Mafia associate who had ratted him out to the cops--someone he knew from Oak Park High--after they encountered each other in lockup. "Leito was so mad he probably would have killed him if it wasn't for the fact that he knew the guy's mother and family," recalls Fly Guy.

•

The Reverend Loyce Lester appears at the door of the Original New Grace Baptist Church, sporting a mink coat and wearing gold jewelry on his wrists. His hair is relaxed and puffed up in the style favored by James Brown and Al Sharp--ton. In Detroit, competition is fierce in the preacher business, and if you're not a showman, you won't attract a congregation. Every Sunday morning Lester's 400--capacity wood--paneled church, near the intersection of Woodward Avenue and 7 Mile Road, is packed with parishioners. After the service, guards escort the elderly to their cars for their own safety. In this neighborhood, as in most of Detroit, the church is the anchor of the community and a sanctuary from the madness all around.

Lester is the man to whom Leito turned for solace and guidance in the final years of his life. Introduced by a mutual friend, a former drug dealer who had seen the light, Lester took Leito under his wing.

It's not unusual in Detroit for troubled souls to turn to God. Just as the city has a hundred versions of the hustle, it also has a hundred versions of Protestantism--denominations such as the Church of God, Church of Christ, Foursquare Gospel, Full Gospel, Nazarene, Bible Brethren, Charismatic and Missionary. Lester's church is straight--up Baptist, but it illustrates one of the enduring contradictions of Detroit: How can such a God--fearing place be so godless?

After Leito was paroled from prison, he told his family he was determined to turn his life around. But it wasn't easy for an ex--con to get a legitimate job in Detroit. A real estate deal he'd put together collapsed after his partner ran off with the money. While he was inside, the funds he'd saved from dealing drugs had also disappeared--either spent on lawyers' bills or stolen by former associates or corrupt cops. Restless and defiant, he continued to peddle drugs. For all his smarts, he seemed oblivious to the hurt he was causing himself and those who loved him.

Predictably, less than two years had passed before Leito was back in trouble. In summer 1997 the Drug Enforcement Administration arrested a Colombian drug courier named Alfredo Reyes at the Dearborn Amtrak train station, where he was awaiting the delivery of half a kilo of heroin from Toledo, Ohio. Reyes told agents he'd planned to deliver the heroin later that day to an individual he knew only as Rambo. At the agents' insistence, Reyes paged Rambo and set up a meeting in the parking lot of a party store in Southfield. At 3:45 P.M. a red two--door Buick with Michigan plates pulled into the lot. Leito got out of the car and walked toward Reyes's car. As he was about to take delivery, the agents arrested him.

During a pretrial hearing, Reyes backpedaled on his story. He said Rambo had expressed interest in buying the drugs but that they hadn't yet sealed a deal when he was arrested. The agents had sprung their trap too early. Leito was lucky; he was let go for insufficient evidence. Nonetheless, what his father's friend Malcolm X had called "the steadily tightening vise of the hustling life" would soon make its last turn.

Seeking to aid his prodigal charge, Lester arranged an interview for Leito at Ford Motor. But the meeting was canceled when the company announced a round of layoffs. Lester also persuaded a judge not to send Leito to jail after he violated his probation by not reporting to his parole officer.

Leito did repairs at the church. He was an usher at funerals. He drove the reverend around town in Lester's Mercedes. On Wednesdays he cooked and served food to poor people at the Mercy Kitchen.

Leito led a schizophrenic existence, running with the reverend during the day and hanging out with drug dealers at night. He was torn between the two Detroits--a struggle between two dogs. "Some people are born to stray," says Lester. "Leito wasn't your typical thug in the street. He could have been anything he wanted to be, but he chose that life. He was a rebellious child who became a rebellious adult. But he sincerely wanted to change."

About this time, Lester first met Leito's father. One part of Leito Sr. secretly admired his son's defiance toward his old enemies, the police and the FBI. "There was this outlaw camaraderie between the two of them," recalls older sister Initia. But the father couldn't disguise the disappointment he felt that his son had become part of the problem.

Understandably, Leito Sr., who by this time was ill with prostate cancer, was scared that his only son would end up in jail or, worse, dead. Indeed, father and son had code words that the son was to use if rival drug dealers ever kidnapped him, a practice the father had supposedly picked up during his revolutionary days. He'd tried everything to help his son and was at the point of despair--until he met Lester.

Impressed by the positive effect the reverend was having on Leito, the father, a lifelong atheist, started to rethink his attitude toward religion, which he had regarded as the opiate of the black masses that had blinded his people to their material conditions. "Leito Sr. wasn't really a religious person," says Lester. "But in his later years he said, 'I think I made a mistake. I got caught up in the revolutionary movement. I didn't get caught up in Christ.

•

Despite his dalliance with religion, Leito was unable to escape his predicament, as the events of July 22, 2003 would prove. Leito had been living in a beat--down ghetto on Detroit's west side, where petty thieves in pickup trucks regularly patrol the potholed streets, looking to steal aluminum from the sides of the shabby residences.

Earlier in the evening Leito had been walking on the sidewalk, carrying a cell phone in one hand and a cigar in the other. Unusual for these parts, where the sound of gunshots is common, the neighborhood was hushed. Taking advantage of the temporary lull in hostilities, older residents in carpet slippers were out on their rickety wooden porches enjoying the summer evening. Leito said hello to his elderly neighbors before entering the side door of a brick bungalow. at the corner of Plymouth Road and Montrose Street. He left the door slightly ajar because he was expecting company later.

The sparsely furnished house was dark and deserted. With only narrow slits for windows, barely any light penetrated the interior. The smell of marijuana was overpowering; the kitchen table was covered with shopping bags full of the stuff. A number of handguns were within reach near the side door in case of trouble. A TV with the sound turned off played in the corner.

A few days earlier, Leito had taken delivery of 20 pounds of pot on consignment from a friend who was too busy dodging a team of Colombian hit men to move the product. Leito was grateful for the favor, but there was a problem: Some of the weed was dry and rotten.

Desperate for cash, Leito gave the inferior marijuana, about three or four pounds, to the cousin of a childhood friend. The price was a bargain--basement $1,000 a pound, payment to be rendered later. Earlier that day the dealer had told Leito he wasn't paying for the pot. He said he was going to send some of his boys around that night to return the spoiled goods.

Around one in the morning four black men appeared at the side door of Leito's place. He must have felt comfortable in their presence, because he stepped outside to greet them without a gun. He also wasn't wearing his bulletproof vest. Initially the conversation seemed friendly, but soon it turned angry. A neighbor across the street heard shouts and curses. From her bedroom window she could view the side of Leito's house. Although there wasn't enough light to see any faces clearly, she recognized Leito's voice. "I ain't taking that shit," she heard him say.

The neighbor turned away from the window but was drawn back by the familiar staccato of small--caliber machine--gun fire. She looked out and saw the four males spraying the corner with bullets. According to another neighbor, Leito tried to slap a machine gun out of one of his assailants' hands. Then he made a run for the lot across the street. He managed to get to the middle of the road before he was brought down by three bullets in the back. Immobilized, he lay on the ground and looked up at his attackers. "It doesn't have to be this way, man," he said. One of the gunmen stepped forward, stood over him and pumped a final bullet into the right side of his head. He then reached into Leito's trouser pocket and took his cell phone before escaping on foot.

The police arrived with EMS almost immediately; detectives had been investigating another shooting in the neighborhood when they received the call. Paramedics ripped open Leito's shirt and started to work on him. But it was too late.

In the days after his death, whenever someone called Leito's cell phone, a voice nobody recognized would answer and say, "Your boy's gone. He ain't here no more," followed by the sound of dead air.

•

The family was devastated. Leito's two sisters hadn't gotten over their father's death from prostate cancer the previous year. Reverend Lester presided over Leito's funeral, as he had the father's. While the two Leitos represented the two different visions of Detroit, in their final years they found common ground in the church. Both men had expressed a desire to be baptized, but only the father managed to do so, receiving the sacrament as he lay on his deathbed.

My father--in--law's funeral was packed with dignitaries who came to praise his efforts to improve his community, while his son's funeral looked more like a hustlers' convention. Elaborate floral arrangements covered the altar. Undercover cops searching for leads mingled with the crowd. Leito, laid out in his coffin, looked as if he might get up at any moment. Lester, wearing a red--and black robe, read from scripture--"What is your life but a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away?"--after which he turned his attention to the gangsters in attendance, a number of whom were in tears: "There are people in this room who know what happened to Leito, and you owe it to the family to come forward." Lester had done enough of these funerals to know that Leito's murderer was probably present that day. A procession of Hummers and Mercedeses carried Leito to the cemetery.

Take away the family tragedy and Leito's death was unremarkable, especially for Detroit. My personal connection aside, his death was so run--of--the--mill that it didn't rate a mention in the papers. He wasn't a celebrity rapper. He wasn't a person of note. He wasn't even a celebrity criminal in a city that has seen plenty of those. He was simply another statistic in Detroit's civil war of black--on--black violence.

The day before the funeral I was sitting in a printing store that specializes in memorial programs. I was writing the text for Leito's eulogy when I looked up and saw a wall of dead people, half of them under 40. In the city of the dead, unremarkable ghosts are everywhere.

Shrink City

In 1950 Detroit's population was 1.9 million, making it the fifth--largest U.S. city. By 2000 its population was 950,000.

Vieux Detroit

Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac founded the city on July 24, 1701, almost a century before Chicago was founded.

Town and Country

Detroit is 82.8 percent African American, second only to Gary, Indiana. Livonia, nine miles from the city, is 96.5 percent white.

Motor City

Detroit's yearly pedestrian fatality rate is the nation's highest, at 5.05 per 100,000 residents. New York City's rate is half that.

Tax and Spend,

Detroit residents earn half what their suburban counterparts do. They also spend about half their disposable income in the suburbs.

Don't Bother

Between 1978 and 1990 the city issued only 9,000 permits for new housing. In 1988 no building permits were issued.

Urban Renewal

GM bought the Renaissance Center for $72 million in 1996. The center, which opened in 1977, cost $350 million to build.

Fordism

In 1908 a Model T sold for S850 ($16,000 in recent dollars). In 1925 it cost $290 ($3,000 in recent dollars).

Almsgivers

Thanks to the strength of its churches, Detroit is the nation's most philanthropic city. Residents give 12 percent of their income to charity.

Family Values

Married couples head only 36.9 percent of Detroit families. Single fathers head 8.2 percent, single mothers 54.9 percent.

Hot Wheels

Detroit is the nation's number one city for auto arson. In 1999 more than 3,300 cars were torched, costing insurers $22 million.

Venereal City

Detroit ranks second (behind San Francisco) in per capita primary and secondary infectious syphilis cases.

Each morning before he took the kids to school, Leito Sr. checked under the hood of his car for bombs.