Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie Leduff Page B

minister, led the men in prayer as he always did. Then they regaled me with stories, including one about an unlucky man they removed from an electric power line, dangling there like a human piñata. He’d tried to cut down the live wire and sell it for its copper.
    Even the firehouses themselves were not untouched by thieves. Recently the men here cooked a supper of steak and potatoes, but a call came over the box before they could eat it. When they returned, they found that their dinner had been stolen, right down to the green beans. The canned beans and coffee creamer were gone from the larder, and so was a pickup truck belonging to one of the men.
    A few days earlier I watched as a deranged woman set fire to an abandoned house. As the firefighters worked to put out the blaze, the woman crawled into the fire truck and tried to drive away. The firefighters radioed police dispatch.
    The response came: “No cruiser available.”
    They covered her in a coat and sat on her until two arson investigators came and took care of her.
    We hadn’t finished our supper when the Rube Goldberg alarm sounded again. And again, the men jumped into their bunker gear and into the rigs.
    The fire was a few blocks away. The house was empty and unoccupied, the last one left on the block. There was a tractor in the vacant lot across the street. One of the firefighters explained to me that a farmer had turned the tumbledown neighborhood into a hay field. There were large cut piles of it everywhere among the tall grass.
    As the firefighters were unrolling their hose, a group of four men arrived in a minivan with video and still cameras. They had gotten to the fire before some of the engine trucks and they wore jackets with patches from fire departments all across the country, which led me to believe they were from headquarters or the union hall. One guy was eating a candy bar.
    “You firemen?” I asked with my notebook out.
    “Something like that,” one guy answered creepily.
    I asked Walt Harris, the minister, who they were.
    Harris looked over at the tall hay on the next block, at the older black people standing on their porches in their bathrobes. Harris looked at the white men wannabes and their fire patches.
    “They probably set the fire since they got here before us,” he said. “They come, they take a motel and they drive around with a scanner waiting for a fire to go off,” Harris explained to me. “It breaks your heart. What’s happening here, it breaks your heart. Every one of these guys here will tell you that he’ll give you everything he’s got to help the people of this city. He’ll give his life if he has to. It breaks your heart.”
    I looked at the douche bags with their cameras and their New Jersey fire department patches. They needed their asses beat down. Where were the police? Where was anybody?

M ONGO
    T HE WAY I saw it, I had mailed Kilpatrick a great big valentine with the dead stripper Strawberry story. With daily revelations about women and pay-to-play schemes within his administration, it was the closest thing to good press the man was going to get.
    Now it was time for payback. Kilpatrick owed me lunch and an interview at the very least, and I called his people to say so.
    But he was hiding in his badger hole and he wasn’t about to come out, I was informed.
    “What’s in it for him?” asked his spokesman, James Canning, over coffee in the eastern wing of City Hall. We were sitting in a window across the street from the Renaissance Center, the world headquarters of General Motors. It was a workday morning, but the buildings and the streets below were empty. My eyes went from a panhandler and settled on Canning, a young white man who had the unenviable task of standing before the news cameras and lying that it was business as usual for Mayor Kilpatrick who was hard at work saving the city.
    “What’s in it for him?” I echoed back, summoning my best big-city big-shot-reporter indignation that I’d