How poisoned is Detroit, really?
The city desperately wants you to believe it’s “just” 500 demolition holes that have been stuffed with toxic soil containing substances like mercury, lead, cadmium and benzene at levels too dangerous for human touch.
If that’s not bad enough, consider that the true number of holes laced with carcinogens may be in the thousands most likely; tens of thousands quite possibly.
It’s a human and environmental catastrophe on the scale of the Flint water disaster. And it’s lays squarely on the arrow shoulders of former Mayor Mike Duggan and current Mayor Mary Sheffield.
Over the past dozen years, Duggan has gone to extraordinary lengths to hide the crimes and incompetencies of his demolition program. When it was the subject of a seven-years-long federal investigation, Duggan went to Washington hat-in-hand to ask Biden to make it go away, which Biden did.
Duggan hired the lawyer who represented the Clinton Foundation in its racketeering lawsuit to represent the City of Detroit, paying her $1,000 an hour. Duggan sued me and cajoled my employers to fire me, all to keep me quiet.
It was all so sick.
Now comes the scandal of Brian McKinney and his demolition firm Gayanga Co. McKinney was the black man hand-picked and nurtured by Duggan to demonstrate to Detroiters that the $500 million in federal and city demolition dollars was going into pockets besides those of Duggan’s white cronies. Duggan even introduced McKinney the state of the city speech in 2020 as a model of minority contracting, even though McKinney had little experience in the business.
After Michigan Enjoyer published an exposé featuring whistleblowers who claimed McKinney was redirecting toxic dirt from the old Northland Mall demolition and dumping it into Detroit neighborhoods, McKinney was suspended by the Detroit Office of Inspector General for fraud, forgery, and breach of contract, among other things.
Mary Sheffield, who was city council president at the time, helped change city procurement rules to get McKinney—an ex-con with ties to Kwame Kilpatrick’s former right hand, Bobby Ferguson—with lucrative contracts as “they were getting to know each other but weren’t in a committed relationship while he had business before the City Council,” as Deputy Mayor Brian White put it. Nevertheless, Sheffield continued to vote for tens of millions of dollars in work for McKinney.
So now Sheffield is mayor. And now comes the revelation that McKinney was investigated back in 2022 for the very same crimes he is being investigated for now. A whistleblower who worked for his firm claimed then that McKinney had forged load tickets, claiming the dirt was from a legitimate source when it was actually contaminated soil diverted from other places like Northland and area landfills.
The load tickets worked on an honor system, with no system built in to track the origin of the soil. It was—and is—a take-my-word-for-it arrangement. No charges were brought against McKinney, since no corroborating witness would come forward.
The OIG recommended then that the ticket system be changed to include receipts verifying the origin of the dirt, just as the U.S. Treasury had demanded back in 2017. In both cases, Duggan and Sheffield ignored them.
But now whistleblowers who worked for McKinney have come forward. Since June, the OIG and the Detroit Police Department have conducted more than six-dozen interviews, issued a baker’s dozen of subpoenas, and seized mounds of financial documents. That investigation continues.
The city demolished nearly 30,000 derelict houses under Duggan’s crooked eye.
For some perspective, that’s the near equivalent of demolishing every house in Flint.
McKinney was responsible for 2,500 of those himself, and 80% of those that were randomly tested came back hot. So 500 holes may be just the tip of this Hindenburg.
And the poisoning scandal is widening, Enjoyer has learned. It appears the bait, switch, and swindling of the city may have been standard operating procedure in Detroit’s demolition world. Dirt from the freeways has been packed in the holes. Sometimes, the freeways themselves. There are whispers of a grand jury.
Through it all, Duggan and Sheffield were warned. Yet they preferred the rosy headlines and boozy hook-ups rather than the mundane duty of protecting the public’s health.
In the end, this debacle is Duggan’s baby. He wants to be Michigan’s governor but has dug a hole so deep it will likely bury his political legacy.
As for Sheffield, she got caught in the quicksand. The handouts are over, and Detroit is broke.
Charlie LeDuff is a reporter educated in public schools. Follow him on X @Charlieleduff.
