The Northland Dirt Scandal Keeps Getting Weirder
They're building a soccer stadium on the site now, and the developer seems to have ties to the FBI
Southfield — Things are getting weird at the old Northland Mall site. Tough-guy tactics, a federal sting, dirty dirt, and a soccer terrordome.
Workers for developers at the 114-acre plot in the middle of Southfield were picking cement blocks out of the mountains of dirt last week and then moving the dirt to the northern edge of the urban wasteland.
Across the street are Providence Hospital, a day-care center, and a mega church.
Previously, tons of this dirt made its way into Detroit’s demolition holes. Detroit officials had the “soil” tested and it’s shown to be excessively contaminated and suspiciously similar to highway junk.
Like how bad? Like children-shouldn’t-play-near-it bad. Like long-term-cancer bad.
My partner Ken and I went there last Friday to film the plumes of dust being kicked up by an excavator, a dump truck, and a bulldozer pushing dirt around the lot.
That’s when a surly dude in a heavy-duty pick-up rolled up on us. He gave the stink-eye. The voodoo vibe. The grim peeper. He never rolled down his window and never said a word. He just idled for some time before driving away, only to cut a circle and do it all over again. The job was shut down for a good hour-and-a-half while this dude worked the phone.
The FBI is on the case, which now sprawls across two counties in southeastern Michigan. Workers and subcontractors are spilling their guts. Mike Duggan was forced to fall on his sword and drop out of the governor’s race. And the city of Southfield can’t—or won’t—produce soil analytics.
Weird.
In the midst of all this, the Southfield city council last month approved a 120,000-square-foot sports dome on the site that will be home to the Detroit City FC South Oakland soccer team.
When reached by telephone, the soccer club’s CEO Marcel Schmid said he had not seen soil analytics. “But it was discussed before the vote,” Schmid said. “If the city’s not concerned about it, then we’re not concerned about it.”
Suit yourself, Marcel, but you’ll never see me at the concession stand.
Why doesn’t the city of Southfield simply have the soil tested and post the results to the public? Where is the county in all this? The state? The feds?
While the FBI is indeed investigating the environmental scandal, I don’t think much will come of this considering that the Northland developer—Contour Companies—may be a confidential source for the federal government.
Consider: Contour Companies was involved in a major FBI public corruption sting in Jackson, Mississippi. In short, FBI agents posed as out-of-state developers, proposing a multi-million-dollar hotel project to the mayor there. The FBI straw company partnered with the real-life Contour Companies to create a bogus development scheme and then bribe local Jackson officials.
In a scene straight out of “Donnie Brasco,” the mayor of Jackson was plied with booze and boobs before he was filmed on a yacht in Miami taking bags of cash from undercover agents.
Why would a legitimate development company based in Michigan lend its name to an out-of-state FBI sting?
That can’t be good for business.
In the phony pitch to the mayor of Jackson, Contour claimed its $500 million Northland future city project—backstopped with millions of dollars in public subsidies —would be completed by the end of this calendar year.
Fuhgeddaboudit.
Meanwhile, the federal corruption trial of the mayor of Jackson begins next month.
