Interview: Howard Kohn

INTERVIEW: HOWARD KOHN

When three Detroit police officers and five civilians were convicted last month of selling heroin and obstructing justice, perhaps only one person felt more satisfaction that Deputy Chief George Bennet, the tough black cop who headed the four-year investigation. That person would be Howard Kohn, now a 28-year-old Associate Editor of Rolling Stone magazine, whose stunning expose of police involvement in the heroin business hit page one of the Detroit Free Press in April 1973.

The verdicts in the 10th Precinct Conspiracy Trial have gone a long way toward finally vindicating Kohn, whose credibility was unfortunately called into question after he was kidnapped with his own gun, then lied on the subsequent police report. The fatal slip in judgment by a reporter under tremendous pressure, both from the Police Department and from the city's pushers, led to his firing by the Free Press and the dropping of the investigation -- which promised to lead next to a Watergate-style coverup in police headquarters and to the well-to-do white financiers of the heroin trade.

Since then, of course, Kohn has gone on to write several major investigative articles for Rolling Stone, the most famous being his collaboration with David Weir on "The Inside Story," an account of the underground activities and capture of Patty Hearst and her SLA comrades.

Kohn and Weir, both graduates of the University of Michigan's journalism program, were back in their old stomping grounds this month to lecture on the Hearst/SLA piece at the Showcase Theatre for Probity Productions. Coming on the hells of the 10th Precinct Verdicts, it was an auspicious time indeed for a reunion of Kohn, who has also worked with the SUN, and our interviewers. 

In this initial segment of our two-part interview, SUN Editor Derek VanPelt and Publisher David Fenton talk with Howard about the significance of the 10th Precinct Conspiracy Trial. And for the first time in print anywhere, Howard recounts the chilling story of the arduous two-year investigation that led to his bombshell in the Free Press. 

Settle back, then, and sit in on our conversation with the best investigative journalist Detroit ever lost.

Part 1: The Investigation

The Heroin Industry & Police Corruption

By Derek VanPelt and David Fenton

SUN: You worked closely with George Bennett in developing much of the information leading to the indictments at the 10th Precinct trial. Now that the verdicts are in and the people have been sentenced, how do you react to what's happened?

Kohn: Well, from the beginning, the 10th Precinct trial has been a microcosm of what was wrong with the Police Department. In and of itself, it did not represent all of the corruption, by any means, and it didn't even represent the most significant corruption -- which was the coverup going on at the highest levels of the Police Department.

But I think Bennett deserves credit for what he's done. He's the only one in the entire department that was willing to stand up, and he a few of his men really risked their lives and stuck it out and persevered and got the convictions. I realize the eventual verdict was sort of a compromise by the jurors. Not everyone was convicted, but all the ringleaders were, and that's good and proper.

I think because of that whole investigation, the Police Department has changed. I am not familiar enough with it anymore to say how long-lasting that change is going to be, but for the time being, I think that there's a big drop in the kind of corruption that was going on three or four years ago -- when the typical narcotics officer was involved in some way or another, either tacitly or directly, in abetting the heroin trade. 

SUN: Do you think, as Bennett said, that the verdicts will serve as a demonstration to the "typical narcotics officer" that they can no longer ply this kind of trade with impunity?

Kohn: Well, that remains to be seen, but had Bennett at any time given up on this thing, it certainly would have had the opposite effect. It would have been carte blanche for heroin corruption in the city. It has got to have some short term effects, at least. But the fact that it took so long and involved so much energy, time, and money means that it is not going to happen again.

SUN: Period? You mean that there won't be that sort of trial agin?

Kohn: Well, I don't know that there will be another investigation like this one A four-year investigation isn't going to happen again very soon. Ideally, this investigation would have led to a much broader one involving some of the top people in the Department, and that apparently is not going to happen. So, in that sense, it is a defeat -- or at the very least, it is not a full and complete victory.

But what has happened is that a lot of corrupt cops have left the Department, and in the meantime, with a whole new administration in City Hall, new people have taken over the top positions in the Police Department: Bennett, Frank Blount, and William Hart, all of them much more aware of the city's problems.

I think their promotions will probably be as significant as the 10th Precinct investigation.

SUN: After everything that's gone down, do you feel a sense of personal vindication from the verdicts?

Kohn: Yeah. If the trials had not been carried all the way through, there would have always been that lingering doubt whether, in fact, these guys -- Davis, Mitchell, and the rest of them -- were guilty. Now that's been determined by the people of Detroit, the twelve people sitting on the jury. I think it does, in that sense, completely vindicate both what Bennett was doing and what I was doing. And I'm glad that happened. It would have been personally very frustrating to see the whole thing cut off by some technicality, and there were many places where Bennett could have copped out and made some deal along the way. I am glad he didn't.

SUN: As you know, there is still some considerable controversy over the events surrounding your kidnapping and your firing by the Free Press. What can you tell us at this point about your kidnapping?

Kohn: Well, what I can say is that I was kidnapped in May 1973. The background is very complicated. But I was kidnapped with my own gun, a circumstance which was both embarrassing and illegal -- and I made a mistake in judgment by lying about that and ended up being fire. It is pretty much as simple as that.

SUN: Of course, the impression the Free Press and the police created was that you weren't kidnapped.

Kohn: I probably should have said something long ago to correct that impression, but one reason I haven't talked about the case is that I was never able to prove that my kidnapped was connected to the Police Department. I spent several weeks that summer trying to pin that down, but I didn't succeed.

The kind of evidence I have is all circumstantial. I know from people in the Police Department that there was an effort to stop my investigation. But I couldn't prove that my kidnapping was part of that effort. 

SUN: What originally compelled you or inspired you to engage in an undertaking as hazardous as this investigation in the first place?

Kohn: At the time, the heroin business and police corruption were the most crucial issues in the city, because heroin was responsible for something like 40 to 80 per cent of all the street crime, and the street crime was tearing the guts out of the city, just draining all the vitality, and killing the city from the inside out.

I found that out early on, when I came to work for the Free Press in '70. I spent some time talking to junkies and lived in an apartment building in a neighborhood with a lot of dope houses in it in the fall of 1970. I learned from that, and I did a few stories based on that experience, but I realized it was very much a top layer of a whole culture, of a whole industry, really -- which involved businessmen, people on the street, and people in the Police Department. I guess we figured it out to be about a million dollar-a-day industry at the time. 

I just decided an investigation into that was absolutely necessary. You know, I only got part way into that by the time I left Detroit.

SUN: Could you tell us what it was like to gather information for this series?

Kohn: I spent a lot of time waiting on street corners. It was a series of meetings with people, setting up meetings that oftentimes didn't work because people wouldn't show up. A lot of frustrating work. A lot of time spent doing nothing. At various times, I staked out different dope houses.

there was a whole pattern of trying to develop an informant, then figure out why he was telling me what he was and corroborate independently anything he was saying, and spend a lot of nights tailing and keeping a surveillance on my own informants. It was a necessary thing, until I was able to depend on certain people, until I felt confident of what they were saying and why they were saying it.

I can't remember anyone who was doing it for altruistic reasons. Everyone had a particular motive for talking to me. Oftentimes it was vengeance, which tended to color the information a certain amount, but was an understandable motive for people to talk. Once the information was confirmed in other ways, I relied on it. At one point, I did get all dressed up and posed as a pimp -- I had the black pointed shoes, the slicked-back hair, and all of that.

SUN: Did most people who gave you information do it knowing fully that it might be published?

Kohn: Yeah, they did that. A lot of this information was gathered over a long time, over eighteen months to two years, and wasn't published 'til the very end -- so none of the people I was dealing with had to really confront the fact that it might be published, because I was just gathering information. 

When it actually was published, there was a totally different reaction on the street. People were very scared all of a sudden, because this was simultaneous with the grand jury investigation, and it was a very heavy time in the spring of 1973. 

There were just a very few, less than a dozen, whose testimony was responsible for my series and the grand jury investigation, although I talked to dozens and dozens of people. Those people were scared for their lives, and for good reason. Had their identities come out at that time, we might never have had those convictions in Recorder's Court.

SUN: We might not have had any of the witnesses living.

Kohn: That's right. That's why.

SUN: Did you worry about being exposed? Or having reprisals against you at various times during this?

Kohn: Yeah, at the end. At first, I assumed it wouldn't happen, then I just sort of avoided dealing with it. 

After the stories were printed, I realized how intense this all was. I had been aware of how obviously violent the dope world is, because I would be talking to people one day, and the next day they would be down in the morgue. That happened to me three or four times. You know, people that I had just been talking to.

One guy was an informant of mine -- I knew him pretty well. The other ones I met on the course of the investigation, but nevertheless, there was a tenuous hold on life that existed at that time.

It was a scary proposition, but I never felt that I really was threatened personally until after the Free Press printed the stories. Then I was told by really reliable people, that there was a contract out on me, and it was put out by a guy named John Classen, who at the time was a really top man in the dop world.

SUN: A cop?

Kohn: No, he was a dope dealer, he was black, and he had a rather larger entourage of hit men who he had employed rather effectively over the last year or so. He was sort of what you would call the High Lord Executioner of Detroit's Murder Incorporated.

SUN: How much were you worth to them?

Kohn: I think the contract was $20,000. Contracts during that period were going for as low as $500, which is incredible to think about. That's, of course, for just some street rebel junkie runner.

And that's only the half of it, folks. Join us in our next issue as we explore with Howard Kohn the reasons why the Free Press failed to continue his historic investigation; the staggering implications of the stories that never ran; and the implications of all this for the future of the press in America

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