Free Detroit: An American Autopsy by Charlie Leduff

honeypot and a loudmouth who let a bit of power go to her id.
    It didn’t matter to me if she spent tens of thousands of dollars on overseas trips paid for by the city’s pension fund. It didn’t matter to me if she mishandled the business of the poorest citizens in the country. It wasn’t my problem. It was my job.
    She typified the politician of the current American landscape. An overfed buffoon who fattened herself at the public trough while the ribs began to show on the gaunt body politic. And in that capacity, she was nobody special. Chicago had its Governor Rod Blagojevich. Newark had its Mayor Sharpe James. San Diego had its Congressman Duke Cunningham and Youngstown, Ohio, had its Congressman James Traficant.
    Clowns for sure. But Monica’s makeup was better. She was the perfect political caricature wrapped up in a real human being.
    And one thing about clowns. Clowns sell copy.
    I started keeping notes on her. Monica was fascinating. The big-mouthed girl from a broken home—her father had a record for breaking and entering, her brother for robbery—Conyers was susceptible to violent outbursts. She was a drunk in rush-hour traffic, a wreck in the waiting. I could have been related to her. I waited for the moment and Monica delivered.
    One day, after showing up to council chambers looking tired and wan, her hair a mess and pulled back in a rubber band as if she’d just rolled out of bed, Monica flew into a rage when she was gaveled down by the balding council president, Kenneth Cockrel Jr., over some unimportant business.
    She shouted at him. She intimated that he beat his wife. She called him “Shrek.” Twice.
    Cockrel threatened to adjourn the meeting, to which Conyers shrieked: “Do it, baby! Do it!”
    He did it. The scene made the six o’clock news. People printed T-shirts.
    I had to get myself a piece of this. I called Conyers’s political adviser—a rakish con man named Sam Riddle who seemed to play the role of Clyde Barrow to her Bonnie Parker and accompanied her on her lavish trips paid for by the pension fund. I had met him once previously for coffee, at which meeting he told me: “The only difference between Detroit and the Third World in terms of corruption is Detroit don’t have no goats in the streets.”
    Riddle answered the phone. He complained bitterly about a colleague of mine who wrote an unflattering story about him taking trips on the pension board’s dime.
    “She’s a fucking bitch, and I don’t talk to the
News
.”
    “You’ll have to take that up with her,” I told him. “Her sins aren’t mine.”
    “Oh yeah?” Riddle shot back. “Go fuck yourself.”
    He hung up.
    I called back ten minutes later, thinking it an appropriate amount of time to have gone and fucked oneself.
    “Look,” he said, before I could even say hello, “I don’t even work for that crazy bitch Monica Conyers anymore. She gives me gas. I don’t want to put up with her bullshit anymore. I’m too old. Do you know what I’m saying? Do you?”
    I didn’t know what he was saying, but I said that I did.
    He called himself her pimp, except for the fact, he said, that he didn’t like standing in the night air.
    “Anyway, can you reach out to her?” I asked. “I’d like to do an interview.”
    He thought a moment. “Would it be front page?”
    “If it’s good,” I said. “I can’t see why not. I’ll even make a video for the Web site.”
    “Let me see,” he said. “I’ll call you back.”
    * * *
    Not only did Conyers agree to do it, baby, she also agreed to my bringing along a group of schoolchildren who would ask her questions about her behavior in the council chambers, all of it to be videotaped.
    The children arrived at the council chambers with their prepared questions in hand. They took the seats of the politicians behind the big oaked arch. At first, they cowered before Conyers, who sucked the air from the chambers with long, empty bromides about her march from squalor to law