Terror in the City of Champions by Tom Stanton

weekly pages in the daily papers.
    In the legion’s third regiment, home to Dayton Dean, officers rented a vacant church, the Little Stone Chapel, figuring it would provide privacy. The chapel was situated on the northeast corner of Second and Ledyard. Built in the 1800s, it was a remnant from the days when the neighborhood sparkled as one of the city’s most desirable, host to grand Victorian homes with brick turrets, bay windows, steep gabled roofs, and long porches with iron spindles. Its stone bell tower anchored the corner, adorned with a small sign that stuck from the surface like a starched flag. Two sides of the building featured round rose windows. The pews inside could seat more than five hundred people. But it wasn’t the sanctuary or nave that interested the legionnaires. They liked the intimate meeting rooms that were tucked in the basement and off the main hallways. It was there that they conspired and conjured mystery and extracted promises of devotion.
    It also helped that just down the block stood the crowning glory of fraternal life in Detroit, the magnificent, massive, fourteen-story, Indiana-limestone, Gothic-inspired, awe-engendering, accolade-inducing Masonic Temple, the largest Knights’ temple in North America. Constructed in the 1920s, it towered over Cass Park. With more than one million square feet of space, the temple offered a labyrinth of a thousand-plus rooms. The place was so large that a child who wandered in from the street once got lost for nine hours before a passerby heard her frantic cries.
    Among the grandest rooms were a 5,000-seat theater, two ballrooms with capacities of 750 and 800, and a cathedral for 1,600. Amenities and flourishes abounded: a hotel, a gymnasium, bowling lanes, billiard tables, a barber shop, and a shoe-shine stand. Lodge rooms were done in Tudor, Egyptian, Corinthian, Byzantine, Greek Doric, Greek Ionic, Italian Renaissance, and Medieval Romanesque. The temple featured marble walls, intricate wood carvings, a terra-cotta fountain, ornamental beams, and brass, bronze, and copper details. All of these added to the ambience, making a spectacular spot for testimonial dinners and a place where the rich, the celebrated, and the powerful—men like Walter O. Briggs, Will Rogers, Thomas Edison, Ty Cobb, and Mickey Cochrane—found comfort and companionship. In the late 1920s, before the market crash, 55,000 men belonged, representing twenty-eight groups. (Cochrane, often assumed by fans and reporters to be a Catholic, was in fact a Protestant and a longtime Shriner.) The temple’s presence on the same block meant Black Legion members needn’t worry about their parked cars drawing attention on the streets around Cass Park. There were always cars.
    The Masonic Temple was still gloriously new. But the Little Stone Chapel, like the Victorian homes in the neighborhood, had seen more prosperous days. Parts of the building were in poor shape. Legion members spent Sundays and weeknights improving the facility. Dayton Dean and his lighting department co-worker Harvey Davis were particularly devoted. They wrapped furnace pipes and painted walls with supplies stolen from their employer.
    Davis and Dean made quite the pair visually. Davis weighed twenty to thirty pounds less than Dean, but stood four or five inches taller. Beside the chunky, thickheaded Dean, Davis looked awkward and slump-shouldered. People who met Davis described him as gawky and gangly and as possessing shifty, suspicious eyes. His dark arched brows and pronounced widow’s peak—he flattened his hair with tonic—gave him the unsettling look of a horror-movie mortician from the silent era or a devious butler. The two men had known each other before joining the Black Legion.
    Many others contributed to the chapel. The legionnaires brought their own lunches for weekend work days. Sometimes their wives served potluck suppers. On occasion they roasted a pig. The legion paid $200 per month in rent and asked