The Witch of Delray by Karen Dybis

Author:Karen Dybis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2017-03-18T04:00:00+00:00

The Great Depression hit Detroit particularly hard given its dependence on the automotive industry, which was already prone to financial dips and layoffs. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

During the grand jury, Ferguson asked Dowling why he had been discharged from the prosecutor’s office. Dowling replied, “I was fired before I tried to carry out McCrea’s orders to be honest, truthful and loyal.”

“Did McCrea tell you to stop anyway?” Ferguson asked.

“Yes,” Dowling replied. “It hurt me to be told to stop. I knew I was doing my duty.”

The most damaging testimony came from Harry Colburn, who had served as McCrea’s chief investigator when he became prosecutor. Colburn, one of McCrea’s closest friends, had no experience in the law or law enforcement. Previously, he had worked in the wholesale fish business and as a tailor. Originally, Colburn was charged as a defendant in the case. However, he chose to plead guilty and testified as a witness for the prosecution.

O’Hara slowly worked Colburn over, causing the big man to snap his gum furiously to offset his nerves. “How did you handle the graft money for McCrea?” O’Hara asked.

“I generally did it in person and in cash and generally in McCrea’s office,” Colburn said. “The money was in cash, not even in envelopes. It was paid each month. [A guy] would give me the slips showing where the money came from and who paid it, but McCrea never looked at the slips. He would ask, ‘Oh, keep those. It’ll be all right. I’m not worried.’”

Colburn also testified McCrea paid him a visit during the trial. McCrea told him to pretend he was sick to avoid going into court.

“‘You have got to do it,’” Colburn quoted McCrea as saying. “‘It is the only thing that will save you.’ I said, ‘What am I supposed to do when these doctors that the court sends out come to examine me?’ He said, ‘You lay in bed, and you got pains in your back, and you got pounding in your head and you don’t know what you are talking about. And if they become insistent, you get up and pound the wall with your hands, tear your hair out, tell them you don’t know what they are talking about at all, that you get dizzy spells, that you can’t stand up and you fell on the floor.’”

“I said, ‘How long can I keep that up?’” Colburn said. “He says, ‘As long as it is necessary. Months, six months, or a year.’ He says, ‘You will have a better chance later on than you will have now.’”

When O’Hara put McCrea on the stand, he asked his former colleague why he avoided a probe into the graft allegations. “I lacked sufficient investigators,” McCrea said.

“Wasn’t the real reason,” O’Hara shot back, “that you had been taking dough along with other officers in the Detroit Police Department?”

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