In this episode, AADL Talks To Stephen Cain. Stephen, now retired, was an award-winning investigative journalist for the Detroit News, Ypsilanti Press, and Ann Arbor News. His stories from his fascinating career in southeast Michigan include hair-raising undercover operations; exposing corruption in the newspaper, labor, and criminal justice system; reversing wrongful death row convictions, and inspiring sweeping changes in the health industry. Stephen also talks about some of the changes he’s seen in Ann Arbor over the years and the loss of the city’s original Ann Arbor News. Stephen’s recent book “Relentless: The Making of an Investigative Reporter,” is available in hardcover and softcover from Amazon.com, or locally at Schuler Books in Ann Arbor’s Westgate Shopping Center. For a signed copy, e-mail the author at Cains1001@bellsouth.net.
[0:00:08] [MUSIC]
[0:00:08] DARLA WELSHONS: Hi. This is Darla.
[0:00:10] AMY CANTU: And this is Amy.
[0:00:12] DARLA WELSHONS: In this episode, AADL Talks To retired investigative reporter Stephen Cain. Award-winning Michigan journalist, Cain talks about his extraordinary career, exposing corruption, reversing wrongful death row convictions, and inspiring sweeping changes in healthcare. From the Ypsilanti Press through the Detroit News to the Ann Arbor News.
[0:00:36] AMY CANTU: Thanks so much for coming, Stephen. I know you have a lot of stories. Can you start off with one?
[0:00:44] STEPHEN CAIN: My mother had been the state president of the League of Women Voters and then she wrote the document creating the Center for the Education of Women at the University. My father was a department chair and I was in awe of them and never felt for many years that I could measure up. I dropped out of college three times. [LAUGHTER].
[0:01:09] AMY CANTU: Wow.
[0:01:12] STEPHEN CAIN: My parents were really very understanding about it, but you knew how they really felt. [LAUGHTER] The last time, at the University of Michigan, I was taking some courses in journalism and one of my teachers was a man named Elwood Lohela, who was the city editor of the Ann Arbor News, and he was doing this on the side and I was his A + student, because I’d already had some experience with small papers. He just begged me to come to the Ann Arbor News when I graduated. I dropped out, so I went down to the Ann Arbor News to see Mr. Lohela. Unfortunately, he was in the hospital. He had lung cancer. They sent me to talk with Dave Tefft, who was the News editor. He didn’t look at anything, he just said, You’re a university dropout we can’t have you. We are the paper of a university town, and that would be beneath our standards. [LAUGHTER] I was crushed, and I was mad. I worked a little bit in Saline for a couple of months, unsatisfied, and then ended up with a job at the Ypsilanti Press, which was then owned by Booth Newspapers. I made a vow that I would go into Ann Arbor once a month to find a story that would be of interest to Ypsilanti readers that the Ann Arbor News didn’t have, and when they saw it, wish they had had it.
[0:02:49] AMY CANTU: That was smart.
[0:02:50] DARLA WELSHONS: Yeah.
[0:02:51] STEPHEN CAIN: It was really angry and [LAUGHTER] I did this for three years.
[0:02:58] DARLA WELSHONS: Did they take notice?
[0:02:59] STEPHEN CAIN: Oh yes. My ultimate victory was after doing two years of this, some friends of my parents — and this was at a cocktail party, where I used to bar tend my parent’s cocktail parties, which is really a lot of fun but I made very dry martinis. I had read that Churchill did 7:1 gin to vermouth, so that’s what I did. [LAUGHTER] If it was good enough for Churchill, it would be good enough for them. Well, this Ann Arbor housewife, Anette Hodesh, had gone back to visit her mother in Northampton at Smith College. In the paper, she saw this notice looking for a chef for a short term. It was Ernest Lehman, who was, I don’t know whether he was the director or producer of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf” with Burton and Taylor. She had been trained at Cordon Bleu in Paris, so she was really very good. The Burtons happened to stop in at Lehman and tasted her food and then pulled rank and had her come and cook for them for several weeks. She had signed a non-disclosure agreement, as everyone does in that situation, but because she didn’t have anything negative to say, she thought it would be all right. I did the story on an Ann Arbor housewife cooking for the two most famous entertainers in the world at that time and I really enjoyed that. Then I was looking to see how the Ann Arbor News used it. It was picked up by the Associated Press. Under the AP rules, and every newspaper is part of the Associated Press, you have to present to them all of your stories, and they can pick any ones they want to then send out to the rest of either the people in that state or national. My story set a national record for usage. [LAUGHTER] There were 1,700 daily newspapers in the country at that time, and it was used by, like, 1,500 of them.
[0:05:21] DARLA WELSHONS: Wow.
[0:05:22] AMY CANTU: Oh, w w.
[0:05:23] STEPHEN CAIN: I mean, because it was just a fluff piece, and during the shooting of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf,” which was an incredible movie. I wanted to see how Ann Arbor used it. Week and a half went by — nothing — and then it appeared on their women’s pages. They had taken off the Ypsilanti dateline, taken off the AP bug, and eliminated my byline as if it was theirs.
[0:05:53] DARLA WELSHONS: Oh, wow.
[0:05:54] STEPHEN CAIN: That was my ultimate victory. [LAUGHTER] I could then let loose of my anger, but I kept doing it anyway. [LAUGHTER]
[0:06:04] AMY CANTU: But they knew it was you?
[0:06:06] STEPHEN CAIN: Of course, they did. Yeah.
[0:06:07] AMY CANTU: Yeah.
[0:06:07] STEPHEN CAIN: But they were embarrassed by it because you was an Ann Arbor housewife.
[0:06:12] AMY CANTU: Good.
[0:06:12] STEPHEN CAIN: But it turned out that my anger was really good for me because in the three years I was at the Ypsilanti Press, my stories won the best in the state on the AP contest for small papers, two out of three years.
[0:06:28] AMY CANTU: Wow.
[0:06:28] STEPHEN CAIN: Those were the stories that I had done.
[0:06:31] AMY CANTU: Were a couple of the other ones?
[0:06:35] STEPHEN CAIN: The first one that won is Al Wheeler, who became then Ann Arbor’s first black mayor and was an associate professor at the U-M Medical School. But he was also a head of a precursor to the NAACP in town and head of the Office of Economic Opportunity for Washtenaw County. Now the main principle behind the war on poverty was the maximum participation of the poor in the design and organization and administration of programs. But the University of Michigan had all these really brilliant people in sociology, social work, all these other things. They were also really savvy at writing grant proposals and so on.
[0:07:22] AMY CANTU: Right.
[0:07:24] STEPHEN CAIN: And also felt that they knew best.
[0:07:27] AMY CANTU: Yep.
[0:07:29] STEPHEN CAIN: Al’s challenge, which he was very successful at, was keeping all of the academics on board and satisfying maximum feasible participation of the poor, which is the actual language of the statute. My story on how he threaded that needle won the state award. That was one of them. The second one was really quite important. This was seven years before Roe v Wade. My wife Pat’s and my — Pat’s my wife — eldest son was born with a bilateral cleft lip and palate. Quite severe. I knew — because I was doing part-time medical writing — that German measles, Rubella, generates a fairly high percentage of birth defects if the mother is infected during the first trimester. I was curious to see what happened in Michigan because there had been an epidemic of German measles just about the right time for my son. The question I was asking was if a mother is infected during her first trimester, what percentage of births have birth defects? One of the people I talked to was Gordon Brown, who was one of the epidemiologists on Tommy Francis’ team that proved the efficacy of the Salk vaccine. I mean, that was like two million cases that they did for that. It was one of the greatest things ever done by public health in Michigan. He said, “Steve, you’re asking the wrong question.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “It’s horrible to say, but the rotten fruit tends to drop from the womb.” It’s not how many fetuses are damaged by that, but how many live births. The other reason is that we perform so many abortions.
[0:09:45] AMY CANTU: What?
[0:09:47] STEPHEN CAIN: This is seven years before Roe V. Wade. So, now I have a problem. He’s a doctor, And also an epidemiologist, talking about the number of abortions performed presumably at the U of M, but....
[0:10:03] AMY CANTU: Everywhere.
[0:10:07] STEPHEN CAIN: So then I’m in a crisis. My wife is Catholic. I mean, she’s not doctrinaire, but it’s touching and I happen to believe in the absolute right of a woman to decide. Is this a story I want to do? If I do it and these people are shut down, then the women who otherwise might give birth to a severely damaged child can’t get an abortion. I decided if I was going to be a journalist, I had to pursue it.
[0:10:33] DARLA WELSHONS: So you went ahead and wrote the story.
[0:10:35] STEPHEN CAIN: Well, I had to document it first. I got three OBGYN’s on the record with their names, saying not that they personally performed it, but implying that, but saying that institutionally, they did because it was good medical practice and it would be a violation of their Hippocratic oath to deny a woman good healthcare, so I had it knocked down. Then I went basically the rest of the way. I went to Attorney General Frank Kelley, who is good Catholic. But Kelley was a good politician and smart, and he set me up with his deputy who was Jewish, who explained prosecutorial discretion. How, if you’re like a state police officer and you see 10 people speeding, you can only pull over one or two. That was his explanation why they didn’t go after these doctors and did others, but when I wrote it, I wrote it really low-key — just the facts, ma’am, nothing inflammatory — waiting for the Detroit papers to pick it up. All Booth used it. That’s nine papers, and that was a lot of circulation. But nobody else touched it. I thought, I’ve dodged the bullet. I have done my story and the things I believed in weren’t damaged.
[0:12:01] DARLA WELSHONS: Was that it? [OVERLAPPING]
[0:12:04] STEPHEN CAIN: Well, no, there was another outgrowth of that. What I didn’t know was the head of Planned Parenthood of mid-Michigan, which is I think just about the largest in the country then, next to New York, was Eleanor O’Brien, whose husband was the managing editor of the Detroit News. I get this call from John O’Brien, saying, Would you like to come and work for the Detroit News?
[0:12:34] DARLA WELSHONS: Oh, wow.
[0:12:34] STEPHEN CAIN: I had no idea that was the connection.
[0:12:36] AMY CANTU: So that’s it. So what year was this then?
[0:12:38] STEPHEN CAIN: Oh Lordy. Well, let’s see.
[0:12:41] AMY CANTU: You said six...
[0:12:43] STEPHEN CAIN: Seven years before Roe V. Wade, I’d have to work backwards but it was 82? ’79.
[0:12:53] AMY CANTU: That’s what took you to the News.
[0:12:55] STEPHEN CAIN: The day I was to report, they went on strike. [LAUGHTER] I’d already given my notice at the Ypsi Press. But he said, Is there any way that you could stay there till the strike is over? — thinking it would be a couple of weeks, well it was like eight months. I went to my editor at the Ypsilanti Press who’d been delighted to have me. So I stayed there.
[0:13:22] AMY CANTU: Well, but no formal invitations from the Ann Arbor News yet?
[0:13:26] STEPHEN CAIN: No. Well, the funny thing was when I was at the Detroit News, I was researching the story that was Ann Arbor-based, and I was missing some information. I went into the Ann Arbor News and talked to Art Gallagher, who was the editor — really nice guy, just a tremendous human being — asking him if I could look in the files. He’s saying, Oh, Steve, I just wish when you were starting out, you had come to us.
[0:13:56] AMY CANTU: [LAUGHTER] What did you say?
[0:13:57] STEPHEN CAIN: I told him the Dave Tefft story, and he was, Oh, God. [LAUGHTER] That was that.
[0:14:04] AMY CANTU: [LAUGHTER] At the Detroit News, you had a lot of incredible reporting, a lot of front-page stories. Can you talk about those?
[0:14:14] STEPHEN CAIN: I got lucky because things happened. One of the first things that happened was the clinical research unit at the U of M Hospital shut down, which was difficult because one of the patients there was scheduled for a heart transplant. There’s only like, three or four other ones in the nation at that time. He was basically sent to the wards to die, because his heart was badly deteriorated. They thought he had either weeks or a couple of months to live. I got a phone call — I can’t say who from — but it was connected with the transplant team, alerting me to this. I said, Oh, shit. This is my second week on the paper.
[0:15:05] AMY CANTU: At the News.
[0:15:06] STEPHEN CAIN: Yeah, at the Detroit News. So the Wednesday story across the top of Page 1: “No money, no heart.”
[0:15:14] AMY CANTU: Nice headline.
[0:15:18] STEPHEN CAIN: The patient was Philip Barnum from Kalamazoo. Another reporter went out and talked to Barnum’s wife and kids and all the rest of that. The second-day story was the U of M said, If a suitable donor comes, we’ll perform the transplant and worry about the pay afterward. The problem with clinical research unit is that it was a federal regulation that you could not use second or third-party monies. It had to be all the hospital and grant monies, because although patients were treated, it was supposed to be clinical research. There was no money. Then the third day, an anonymous donor ponied up the money. It was Upjohn of Kalamazoo, which had a lot of ties to Michigan, but no one would say it on the record. Top of the story, it was going to be paid for. The fourth day, I wasn’t a part of that, but our Washington Bureau took my stories and got a national policy change that allowed second and third-party monies to be used in the clinical research units until the next budget cycle came. This is during the Vietnam War, so it was like, guns are butter, and guns won out. There were 83 clinical research units in the country, 40 of them had already closed. They all reopened.
[0:16:52] DARLA WELSHONS: Wow.
[0:16:53] AMY CANTU: Oh, my gosh.
[0:16:54] STEPHEN CAIN: That’s like the second week of the paper!
[0:16:56] AMY CANTU: That’s incredible. That’s really something.
[0:16:59] STEPHEN CAIN: Then, it gets better.
[0:17:02] AMY CANTU: Keep going.
[0:17:04] DARLA WELSHONS: Did the scope of that really hit you at that time?
[0:17:08] STEPHEN CAIN: Intellectually, not emotionally. That was a big deal. I had got the story and now it’s going on to the next one.
[0:17:18] DARLA WELSHONS: So I interrupted you. Go on.
[0:17:19] STEPHEN CAIN: That’s okay [LAUGHTER] .
[0:17:20] STEPHEN CAIN: There had been eight hippie bombings, anti-establishment bombings. They blew up the CIA office in Ann Arbor on South Main. They blew a hole in one of the buildings at the Institute of Science and Technology on the North campus. They blew up the East Detroit Draft Board, the South Lake School District building — didn’t destroy it, but blew a hole on it — and then a bunch of Detroit Police cars that were in precinct parking lots. In the Sunday paper — this was the following week to my clinical research unit stories — assistant City editor sent me around, told me to go out to the bombing sites to see if anyone saw someone with long hair running away just before the blasts. This has got to be the worst assignment, stupidest assignment in the history of journalism, because all of the bombings were like 2:00 A.M. I’m working days. So obviously, I’m not going to do it. But I was the new kid. I took my photographer, and we went around to a couple of the sites, and, of course, there was nothing. I was too new to be really mad, to confront the editors. I sent my photographer back to the office, said, You’re free for the day, do whatever you want, and went up to the Cass Corridor, which is now midtown in Detroit. I knew a little bit about the Weather Underground. They’re pretty serious revolutionaries. But this didn’t have — I mean, South Lake School District for God’s sake? What it seemed like to me was a bunch of hippies sitting around a crash pad, getting stoned, having access to a pile of dynamite, saying, “What do we blow up next?” [LAUGHTER]
[0:19:15] STEPHEN CAIN: I simply started stopping any guy with long hair I saw, asking, Who can talk about the bombings? Obviously, they were being careful not to hurt anybody. But it was the protest against the war in Vietnam, capitalism, America with a K? I said, who knows? Finally, after the third or fourth person said, Oh, go talk to President Dave. He’s the darling of the weekend hippies, he’ll talk about anything. I dropped the bombing and I just started stopping, looking for President Dave. This was during the Nixon-Humphrey Presidential campaign. Dave was the White Panther candidate for President. His platform was the 10 points of the Black Panthers, plus free dope and fucking in the streets.
[0:20:13] AMY CANTU: Right. Of the White Panthers.
[0:20:18] STEPHEN CAIN: Somebody had pointed me to a crash pad on Canfield, and it was an old apartment building that was boarded up. But it was boarded up and no one was there. There was a guy across the street, big pot belly, wife beater undershirt, sitting on a porch, and I asked him if he knew where the hippies went. Well, he didn’t, they’re all gone, and we’re talking a bit more. Then he says the only one that he liked at all was President Dave who would stop by to chat. In fact, there he was walking down the street.
[0:20:52] AMY CANTU: You found President Dave?
[0:20:53] STEPHEN CAIN: I found President Dave. I fell in with him, told him I wanted to do a story on his candidacy for the president. We went to Johnny’s, which is a campus hangout, and drank coffee for a couple of hours, and then I made this tearful confession that while I was interested in his campaign, I was also interested in the bombings because nobody would tell me what it was all about. So he told me what it was all about. But he said, I can’t say that he was the bomber, but I could say that it would be appropriate for the police to suspect him. But he wasn’t going to say. But here’s why it was done. I said, Nobody’s going to believe, I’m the new guy on the paper, so I got to take you into my office. I took him by his current crash pad where he got a hit of LSD — said it was his 300th in the previous two years — and I took him into the Detroit News main office on Lafayette. Took him up to the upper floor for a photograph, and he’s got this long flyaway blonde hair, and these old photographers are sticking their head in the door looking at him, and they got his photograph, took him down to meet my assistant managing editor, Boyd Simmons, and I said, Hi, Boyd, I’d like you to meet President Dave Valler, President Dave. He’s the bomber. But Boyd had a great poker face. We talked for about 10 minutes, then I took Dave back up to the to his crash pad. Well, the News was afraid of that story. I also told Dave that he had to prove to me that he was the bomber, but I would keep it secret. So he told me where he bought it, which was the hardware store in Midland, and his father owned some farmland there. Dave had gone into the hardware store saying that he needed to buy some dynamite for his father to blow up some stumps on the farm, and got the dynamite. I called the hardware store pretending to be the father’s accountant, needing a verification for taxes, and got it. But that’s secret. The News sat on it for, like, two weeks, and then I had to take my assistant managing editor out to meet Dave’s parents before, and then the paper — one of the senior copy investigators in Detroit — said, Dave’s a suspect, so then they ran the story. The day before the story ran, U of M performed the heart transplant. So of course, I had the entire page.
[0:23:34] AMY CANTU: Wow.
[0:23:35] STEPHEN CAIN: I never topped that. But I did get three merit raises in my first year.
[0:23:41] AMY CANTU: Wow, that’s something. Wow. I know there are a couple of other stories, you got people off death row?
[0:23:48] STEPHEN CAIN: Four.
[0:23:49] AMY CANTU: Can you talk about it?
[0:23:50] STEPHEN CAIN: Well, the first was a woman in Midland who had been convicted of first-degree murder for starving her baby to death. She was innocent.
[0:24:01] AMY CANTU: What was your approach?
[0:24:03] STEPHEN CAIN: Well, I’d been working on another investigative piece in Detroit Recorders Court. There was a judge there who would look at a case that would come in front of him, and if the evidence was pretty solid, if it went to trial for a conviction, he would call the attorney in, and make a really good offer if the guy would plead. If he wouldn’t plead, he’d take them immediately to trial, and the sentence would be two or three times what he would have gotten if he’d pled. Now, you’re allowed in sentencing to take into consideration the person’s admission and so on. What you’re not allowed to do is punish a person for not exercising their constitutional right, and this is what the judge was doing, and he had the best docket in the whole court because he disposed of so many cases, so the other judges weren’t blowing a whistle on him. But I had it pretty solid. So I’m in with the final confrontation interview where you let the guy explain why he was doing that. He gets a phone call from the Detroit House of Correction, which was the state’s prison for women for the entire state, and it seemed that there was a woman who had come before him four years before for shoplifting. She had been convicted like four or five other previous times for shoplifting. She was a really nice, pleasant, single mother of five young kids, so the judges always gave her a break. Well, Joe Gillis, this was the judge I was interviewing, wanted to teach her a lesson, so he sentenced her to five years in prison for shoplifting, under some statute for continuing criminal or whatever. His intent was to let her out after a year, figuring she’d learned her lesson, but he forgot about it. She’s spending four years in prison for this nonsense thing, and she escaped. Of course, she was recaught immediately, and that’s why the phone call. Judge Gillis said, I’m going out to Dehoco, do you want to come with me? Well, sure. So he’s talking about a judge in Flint, a woman who ran a law and order campaign and unseated a veteran judge, and immediately the entire bench got nasty on their sentences, and Joe was claiming that he could look at a prisoner’s card that had the crime and the sentence and tell whether it was Genesee County or someplace else. And he got four straight until he hit Margaret Lynch from Midland. She had been sentenced to mandatory first-degree murder, mandatory life in prison for starving her baby to death. Well, alarm bells go off. I knew that infanticide almost always comes down to manslaughter, which in Michigan is, maybe 5–15 years. It could be probation even, but that’s how it’s done because it’s a recognition that postpartum depression, you know, that’s what triggers it. Mandatory life in prison? That’s nuts! I forgot all about Joe Gillis and his white sale, and what after Margaret Lynch, I went up to Midland and pulled the the transcript. Well, she had been interrogated by a detective Sergeant for the county for seven hours. At the end of that, she said, “Well, I must have taken my baby’s bottle away or she wouldn’t have died. Yes, I did it.” That’s nuts. They held what’s called a Walker Hearing to see whether the confession was voluntary and sufficient, and they judged that it was.
[0:28:23] AMY CANTU: And you thought, No way.
[0:28:24] STEPHEN CAIN: No way. Right. So she’s convicted. One of the very first stories I did when I was a new reporter at the Ypsilanti Press in the Western Wayne Bureau was — a baby had died, and the police opened a murder investigation. The baby had smothered in its crib. Well, I wrote the story just from the police report, including the name of the husband and wife, parents. Then, kept checking on it. Three days later, the autopsy comes back. It was SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. The parents were totally blameless, and yet they had been a target of a murder investigation, and then a target of me having written their names. I felt like crap. But what can I do? It’s done. I did a story on crib death and I discovered from the medical literature that — I found three other cases where women had actually said they had killed their babies, and this was just out of total guilt. “She wouldn’t have died, if I’d been a good mother, I killed my baby” and that was in the medical literature. So that was another red flag. Then, her baby had a cleft lip and palate.
[0:29:40] AMY CANTU: This is the woman.
[0:29:41] STEPHEN CAIN: This is the woman of the baby that died. Well, my last son was born with a cleft lip and palate, as I said before, and they’re devilishly hard to feed because they can’t do suction. Without a palate, a phlegm goes down into their stomach, so they spit up a lot. Well, you know, you can overcome it, but it takes considerable effort. Margaret Lynch had an IQ of 80. She was never given adequate instruction, and her home life was also a miasma of whatever.
[0:30:20] STEPHEN CAIN: So I’m wondering, Why did she confess? What happened? What convinced the detective to a moral certainty that she had killed her baby because that whole interrogation was aimed at getting her to confess. I bought two 6-packs of beer and went over to the detective’s house. We went down in his basement. [LAUGHTER] This is what you do! We drank the beer. I said, What convinced you going in that she was guilty? Well, Margaret’s best friend had told the detective that Margaret had starved the family dog to death as a dry run for the baby.
[0:30:59] AMY CANTU: What?
[0:31:00] STEPHEN CAIN: That’s what the detective told me. So I called the Humane Society. Dog head throat cancer. That’s why it died.
[0:31:09] DARLA WELSHONS: Oh. Wow.
[0:31:11] STEPHEN CAIN: So then I keep going. Margaret’s attorney was a guy named Ty Gillespie, who was president of the Milan County Bar. He was the Dow family attorney as in Dow Chemical. He was a trustee of the hospital where the baby was taken and taken directly to the morgue and never seen by a doctor until in the morgue, after. So I keep going. [LAUGHTER] I discovered that the day before the baby died, Margaret had taken the baby into social services to make an appointment to have a surgeon correct the cleft. The two social workers had seen Margaret giving the baby a bottle. It turns out they had gone to their supervisor, the social workers. The supervisor went to the assistant prosecutor who was handling the case, and the assistant prosecutor said, Did they actually see the milk going into the baby? Well, of course not. Margaret was just trying to establish an alibi. Margaret never thought to say anything. So I went to Ty Gillespie, the attorney, and laid all of this out, Well, he was thunderstruck. This was an assignment from the court and he agreed to take it. He wasn’t an experienced criminal. I said, Well, Ty, what are you going to do about it? So what he agreed to do is he hired — because he was head of the law firm — a new associate who was an experienced criminal defense lawyer with appellate work. He wrote the law I wrote the colloquy of the story, which I shouldn’t do as a reporter, but I did. And the Michigan Supreme Court voted 7–0 to vacate her conviction. I’m talking about it now, but reporters don’t do things like manipulating justice. I just wrote the story about Margaret being set free without mentioning my role at all.
[0:33:38] AMY CANTU: And then there were a couple others?
[0:33:39] STEPHEN CAIN: Yes, there were. I’m going to back up a little bit because we’re still talking Detroit. After the strike, the one that delayed my hiring, there was a strike paper called the Detroit American that wrote a police blotter which was any street crime in Detroit. They would print the race of the assailant, even if that’s the only description they had it was a Black man. Horribly racist. But the strike paper was horribly successful because it appealed to Detroit’s white half at that point. The Detroit News started it, doing the same thing, the police blotter. The mayor, the archbishop, everyone is going down on the paper for doing it, because it’s horribly racist. But editors don’t like to be buffaloed. He dug in his feet and refused to do it, and we keep doing it. And the reporters hated it. Well, most of them. I just lived in total fear of, I’m going to get one of these racial stories. What do I do? This was a woman in the Grayhaven area of Detroit out near the Gross Pointes. Three Black guys have — she’s 80 some years old — broken into her house, beat her next to death, tied her up with a telephone cord, and robbed the place. Well, you want to talk about inflammatory. So I’m going out and I just started going around the neighborhood talking to people. it turned out that Grayhaven had been white working class, but working class is General Motors and Ford, and that’s pretty middle-class incomes. When the Blacks started coming into Grayhaven, they were also auto workers also getting the same pay and benefits, and had the same values of preserving the property, nice law, and all the rest of that. Grayhaven went integrated peacefully. There were a few people that sold off and left, but it was fine until freeway construction came through old Black Bottom in Detroit and displaced all these people, including a lot of ne’re-do-wells, if you will, and they spread out. The second generation of Blacks that included some not-so-nice people came into Grayhaven and they brought crime with them. Their targets were both White and Black. I found a Black man who was an auto worker whose house had been burglarized two weeks before. The following Sunday in church, he sees these kids wearing his children’s clothes.
[0:36:28] AMY CANTU: Oh, God.
[0:36:29] STEPHEN CAIN: But he knows the family. They’re bad people. He doesn’t say anything. He talks about how in Grayhaven, it’s known as the “Steal and Stomp.” I wrote the story from the perspective of freeway construction, moving all the rest of the destabilization of neighborhoods as the cause of this. So it was like, whew, I found a not-racist way of doing it. And then, thinking about it and about the nature of crime... So another reporter and I got the idea of, Let’s look at what goes into street crime. What goes into the crimes in terms of policing and the administration of justice and prisons and the schools and the economy and all the rest of this? So again, we went to Boyd Simmons, the assistant managing editor, with the idea, and we had 20 story ideas, and he paired it down to three each, and then covered for us while we did our other things but went off and did that. So then we came up with six really good stories that looked at the whole problem of crime and criminal justice from an institutional standpoint. I made a joke that the News should take credit for alerting the Black community to the existence of Black crime.
[0:37:54] AMY CANTU: Oh, God.
[0:37:55] STEPHEN CAIN: I mean who would write an editorial like that? Well, it was okay. The editor, Martin Hayden, who had been resisting everything, said, So he had an editorial written, where the Detroit News takes credit for compelling the Black community to confront the existence of Black crime. Therefore, we could drop the crime in the streets and go to trying to search for solutions, these types of stories.
[0:38:25] AMY CANTU: Wow.
[0:38:26] STEPHEN CAIN: I ended up getting stuck while doing those which was all right. I’ll go a little further, and then you can cut out any of that you want. [LAUGHTER] I’m riding with a couple of homicide detectives. The deal I’d made with John Nichols, who was the police commissioner, was I wouldn’t write about active cases that they were involved in. I’d write about closed cases where there was no longer free press fair trial issue, but I would be able to see, in real-time, how they did it. There was a robbery-murder of a Brinks guard at a Ternstedt plant in Southwest Detroit, a GM Plant. They had confronted the guy in the staircase, took his gun away, shot him with his own gun, and took his money, and left, and then the cops come around, and there’s a Black couple who had been working in the front yard of their home on this side street about six blocks away from the Ternstedt plant. They see this car pull up with three young Blacks in it, two get out with things under their coats running into a small apartment building, and then the third guy drives around like that. Then they see a cop car coming, they flag it down and tell them what they saw. The cops surround the building as people are pouring out of it. The couple says, “There’s the getaway driver coming out the front door.” They arrest him. Good identification. They go into the building, and they find one of the shooters in the basement behind the furnace, and he’s got the money bags. The other one is in this apartment, and he’s got the guard’s gun. Nice wrapped-up case. Only problem was, it was a bad identification. The actual getaway driver was the half-brother of the kid that had been spotted.
[0:40:37] AMY CANTU: So you found that out.
[0:40:39] STEPHEN CAIN: Yeah. But I am under an absolute obligation that everything I do with these guys is off the record. The short version is, I went and found the guilty half-brother and convinced him to come into court, and my guy got released.
[0:40:58] AMY CANTU: So you also, during your time at the News, you went undercover in a mental... Can you talk a little bit...?
[0:41:06] STEPHEN CAIN: Well the first one — I did three. First one, I went into Old Detroit Receiving Hospital as a phony medical student. I swiped a white coat, stuck a stethoscope in my back pocket, and went into the emergency room.
[0:41:23] AMY CANTU: For what? What were you...?
[0:41:24] STEPHEN CAIN: To look at the operation of it, because it was something else.
[0:41:28] AMY CANTU: You mean the conditions were that bad?
[0:41:30] STEPHEN CAIN: Yeah, yeah. The hospital didn’t have enough of anything, and they had too much of people messed up, whether it was somebody off of a Cass Corridor, a drunk with tuberculosis and a banged head, or an auto accident, everything came to the emergency room dock. I’m getting information for that story, and I’m taking a cigarette break. I smoked back then. I see the Detroit police come in. They got a guy on a stretcher. But the Detroit police stretchers are rubberized because so many are either bleeding or throwing up ‘cause there’s no ambulance service in regular ambulances in Detroit. The two cops do the old heave-ho with that, bounce the guy off the wall onto a hospital gurney.
[0:42:25] DARLA WELSHONS: God.
[0:42:26] STEPHEN CAIN: At which point I decide my next undercover is going to be to drive an ambulance in the inner city.
[0:42:31] AMY CANTU: So you did?
[0:42:32] STEPHEN CAIN: I did.
[0:42:32] AMY CANTU: And what was that like?
[0:42:34] STEPHEN CAIN: It was an adventure, and I had previously done a story on an inner city landlord who was trying to clean up his buildings. But it was really so difficult because the only people that reliably paid rent were the drug dealers [LAUGHTER], and he told me about a couple of the buildings, including one at 83 Edmund, which he said was the one that just scared him no end because it’d be bullet holes in the wall, and even though he was armed, he didn’t feel comfortable going in there. As it happened, my driver, a guy named Frankie Super Breeze Meyer, stopped in front of that building. The story that I had written a couple of weeks before ended up being used the Sunday undercover on the ambulance in my own name. The only people who read bylines are politicians and parents. [LAUGHTER] Basically. I figured, I’m all right. Except this building was named in my story with a picture of the building.
[0:43:41] AMY CANTU: So much for that.
[0:43:43] STEPHEN CAIN: What do I do? [LAUGHTER] Do I run? No, I just I’m going to bluff it out. We go in to the apartment, which was Frankie’s dope house, and were met at the door by somebody, 6’3, 6’4, 300 plus pounds black as this mic wearing a black leotard and androgynous. I can’t tell whether it’s male or female. It’s up in my throat right there. Turned out as the pleasantest person ever, they invited me in. They fed me pork chop and okra while Frankie bartered for his [INAUDIBLE]. Then the third one was, I had myself committed to Northville State Hospital. A resident had been prepping me on how to fake the right mental illness that would get me through. I didn’t want schizophrenia because the drug given typically for that is Thorazine. If you give too much Thorazine to somebody who was not psychotic, you will produce the psychotic symptoms in which they then increase the dose until you’re basically a zombie.
[0:45:03] AMY CANTU: But you knew ahead of time that Northville was....
[0:45:06] STEPHEN CAIN: It was a pretty bad place. That’s just of all the hospitals because they’re underfunded and overcrowded, and it’s a mess. It’s also right in the beginnings of the community mental health movement where they’re trying to move people out. But that turned out to be a lie because they emptied all these people out, but they didn’t provide for the care. I couldn’t go in as a chronic depressive, psychotic depressive, because the drug of choice was something called Endoplan, which tended to wipe out your near-term memory.
[0:45:39] AMY CANTU: Couldn’t you have just not taken the drugs?
[0:45:43] STEPHEN CAIN: They’re looking at you.
[0:45:43] AMY CANTU: They’re watching.
[0:45:44] STEPHEN CAIN: Because people trying and avoid them. So we worked out something — reactive depression with psychomotor retardation — which basically means that I’m depressed because of the circumstances I can’t cope with, and the depression makes it harder to cope with, and I go downhill / suicidal. I had another reporter who posed as my wife — although just by phone — call the Suicide Prevention Bureau in Wayne County, talking about how her husband had a gun, and was threatening to kill himself. There wasn’t the ability to send anybody out. They said, Well you’ve got to get him to the hospital or... He won’t go. She calls three or four times about this crisis her husband is going through, and he takes the gun, he shoots in the ceiling. Finally, she calls back, and she says, My brother-in-law came down from up North. He is physically taking my husband into the hospital. Can you call the hospital and tell them he’s coming? The suicidal person is coming. That way, it absolutely ensures that I don’t fall between the cracks, because another bureaucracy has been warned. They put me in a chair, and I had to sit there for 19 hours before they finally ended up taking me out to the hospital.
[0:47:18] AMY CANTU: How long were you there?
[0:47:19] STEPHEN CAIN: Just a week.
[0:47:20] AMY CANTU: How was it?
[0:47:24] STEPHEN CAIN: Horrible, because it’s a bureaucracy run for the convenience of the bureaucrats. The patients are just sort of there. For example, in the morning, they empty you out of the dorm rooms. They lock the dorm rooms to isolate you in the hallway. There’s no chairs in the hallway. While they give people their medicine and do these other things. You’re sitting in the hallway for about an hour with nothing to do but sit there against the wall where your legs splayed out. Then breakfast is 15 minutes. Then you go in the day room. The TV set is on, but you can’t change the channels. There’s no current magazines. The only decks of cards have missing...things like that, and there’s nothing to do, and it’s a psychotic culture.
[0:48:21] DARLA WELSHONS: What year was this that you were there?
[0:48:24] STEPHEN CAIN: ’69. Then the problem of taking notes because I don’t want to have to remember everything. But when I was a kid, I had read that Leonardo da Vinci took his lab notes in mirror image, so the Inquisition wouldn’t know what he was working on. I taught myself to print mirror image.
[0:48:49] AMY CANTU: [LAUGHTER] You took notes there?
[0:48:53] STEPHEN CAIN: Yeah. I started off in high school doing that — taking my notes. And you can take the paper and turn it over and hold it up for the light and read it just fine. It ended up being useful because I could retype. Lead type, light printers.
[0:49:14] STEPHEN CAIN: Somebody said, what are you doing, Mr. Hoover? Hoover was my name. I said, Writing a letter to my wife. They said, What are you writing about Mr. Hoover? This place. What are you saying about it? I don’t like it. That’s nice, Mr. Hoover. I just started writing straight away.
[0:49:35] AMY CANTU: So then when did the story come out?
[0:49:37] STEPHEN CAIN: Right after I got out.
[0:49:38] AMY CANTU: What was the fallout from that?
[0:49:41] STEPHEN CAIN: A lot of gnashing of teeth. The head of the Department of Mental Health, the State used the stories to go to the legislature and try and get more money. I don’t know whether it helped or not. But the other thing, there was a clinical social worker who got interested in me because I was a middle-class kid, somewhat educated, not like most of the patients in there. He saw in my troubles a little bit of himself, of having doubts and trying to overcome them. He basically starts really talking to me in great depth. Well, we get to the end of my cover story, and I didn’t want to add lib in front of a professional. So I finally he said, Get out of my head. I don’t want to talk anymore.
[0:50:41] AMY CANTU: It’s a way to get out of that.
[0:50:41] STEPHEN CAIN: Right. But when somebody is depressive and suicidal, the most dangerous time is when they suddenly become asymptomatic. What that frequently means is they have decided with absolute certainty to kill themselves, but not to do it until they could do it for sure and make it count and not get interrupted. After a couple days on the ward, I started being my normal bouncy self. Because how else can you interact with people? Rather than like that all the time. So, I scare the hell out of the staff, cause they thought, Mr. Hoover is gonna kill himself. The head of the ward, Dr. Andre [Inaudible], heavy French accent. I don’t know how the street kids on the ward could understand him. They probably didn’t. Calls me and he wants to know what’s going on, why I’m feeling better. I said, Yeah, I said, Doc, I hate your place. It’s awful. The people are really sick. I’m not that bad. I’ve been feeling sorry for myself. I’m not that bad. Well, it was plausible. But he laid a trap for me. He said, I’m so delighted, Mr. Hoover, and what I’m going to do is let you go. Go home and have a nice dinner with your wife and start building on that and then come back in the morning and we’ll talk and I’ll let you go. I’ll discharge you formally. Well, if I was genuinely suicidal, I would have taken them up on it because that would have given me the opportunity to end it. But I said, no. I said, I told you, I don’t like this place. What happens if I finally go home and get along with my wife and things are really looking good and then I have to face coming back in here? I don’t want to do that. I’ll just stay here until you think I’m ready to go. He let me go the next day.
[0:52:45] AMY CANTU: I understand you eventually left the News under not very happy circumstances. And then did you come to Ann Arbor?
[0:52:54] STEPHEN CAIN: Yes.
[0:52:54] AMY CANTU: Can you talk about...?
[0:52:55] STEPHEN CAIN: Sure. I’d always been doing part-time medical writing or public health writing and stuff like that. I had gotten some tips about some corruption in some union health and welfare funds, and my tipster on this was actually a blood testing lab owner who was ratting out his rivals. It turns out he was also a government informant and his business model was to rat out his rivals and they get taken out, and then his business would grow. Yeah. What the heck? I started looking into these union health and welfare funds, and it turned out that it was a mob operation. Mob as in Mafia out of Chicago. Not only that, it was nationwide. What had happened was the Teamster Central States pension fund — it’s $1,000,000,000 fund — was used to buy most of Las Vegas on behalf of the Mafia. Howard Hughes owned the stuff, they bought it from Howard Hughes. Guy named Jim Drinkhall, in a remote little magazine called Overdrive, wrote about the mob taking over Vegas with Teamsters money, and the Congress passed ERISA, which governed then Union pension funds, and overnight, took the mob out of the business completely. The wise guys then started hooking up with Union health and welfare funds. What they would do is they would get some docs or some clinics or so on and set that up and arrange for the dentists, the doctors, the clinics, whatever, to provide health and benefits for the union members, then taking like a finder’s fee. In this case, $8,000,000 a year was drawn off of Michigan’s. Well, but I just, I went nuts. I started tracking it all over the country, from New Jersey to San Francisco, and the wiseguys were setting up. It wasn’t just the Teamsters, but it was all others, not the UAW, either, but, the service unions, particularly. In Michigan, it was a guy named Don Holmes, who was an international Vice president and head of the Michigan Conference of Teamsters, who controlled this whole thing, it turns out. He was corrupt in the same way as the original Mayor Daley was corrupt. He didn’t take monies for himself. He let others do their looting in exchange for political power. I nailed this down. I also knew what I was up against. Everything I had was a document or a taped interview on the record. No source outside at all. And the reason was Don Holmes controlled the distribution of the Detroit News and the Free Press, and he had done them a favor. There had been a strike against the Free Press by the drivers. Under the publisher’s agreement, if one paper was struck, the other paper would shut down. Because otherwise you’re whipsawed and you lose all all your readership. But the Free Press was struck, the News didn’t want to shut down because it was the Republican National Convention that nominated Reagan right during that time. The publisher of the News had contributed a million dollars to the Republican National to help fund this thing and not to be able then to write audit and cover it in his own newspaper. So what he did was he let the Free Press write a four-page insert, no ads. So the Free Press wasn’t going to get any money on it. But we would publish that along with the News. That was his way out of the publisher’s agreement. The question then was, is Bobby Holmes going to allow the trucks to run? He did. I figured they owed him or maybe he threatened. But there was... Holmes called a meeting of all of the local Union presidents and secretary treasurers at a motel outside of Lansing to try and whip them into shape on these contracts with the medical. I knew about it. Got tipped off. The motel was built around a pool. I rented a room on the second floor overlooking the pool, got a photographer, also convinced an FBI guy to come along with me just for protection, and we got pictures of every single person at that meeting. The money shot was around the pool, and it showed Bobby Holmes, Chicago mobster, on one shoulder and the head of the actual welfare medical funds on the other in a tete-a-tete. They didn’t want to run the article. Weeks and weeks went by and they wouldn’t even tell me who edited it or anything else like that. It finally, six weeks later, showed up, cut in half, and all of the heavy stuff on Bobby Holmes was cut out. On the money shot, they trimmed him out of the picture, just leaving the other two.
[0:59:11] AMY CANTU: No, and you just weren’t having that.
[0:59:14] STEPHEN CAIN: Yeah. At that point, a really good friend of mine had left the News the year before and was the city editor of the Ann Arbor News, and I just called him up and says, Mike, do you have a job for me?
[0:59:26] AMY CANTU: Who was that then Mike?
[0:59:27] STEPHEN CAIN: Mike Maharry. Great guy.
[0:59:30] AMY CANTU: You came right over to the Ann Arbor News?
[0:59:32] STEPHEN CAIN: Yeah.
[0:59:32] AMY CANTU: Finally.
[0:59:33] STEPHEN CAIN: I wrote a letter to the managing editor explaining my reasons. That was it. I didn’t blow the whistle on the corruption of the News or anything else like that. I just did it.
[0:59:45] AMY CANTU: We obviously haven’t scanned everything that you’ve ever written, but we do have quite a few articles up that you’ve written, and it looks like you’ve covered a lot of some fairly hard-hitting stories here as well. Do you want to talk a little bit then about the difference in writing and what you covered here at Ann Arbor?
[1:00:05] STEPHEN CAIN: Well, the Ann Arbor News had been basically the newspaper for a company town. I mean, the university. They were very polite. They were very non-confrontational, and it didn’t start with me. But the News had hired some really good people and they said, Do it straight. No fear of favor. Go after it.
[1:00:36] STEPHEN CAIN: I had sometimes a little too much of the Detroit in me, so I bothered people.
[1:00:43] DARLA WELSHONS: How many years did you write for the Ann Arbor News then?
[1:00:47] STEPHEN CAIN: I came in ’82 until mid ’98. The then-editor and I did not get along at all.
[1:01:00] AMY CANTU: Petykiewicz?
[1:01:00] STEPHEN CAIN: Yeah.
[1:01:02] AMY CANTU: Why didn’t you get along?
[1:01:03] STEPHEN CAIN: I saw Petykiewicz as a bully. I hate bullies.
[1:01:10] AMY CANTU: You were done.
[1:01:11] STEPHEN CAIN: Well, no. I was fighting him all the time, and he was fighting me, and a lot of what I did was wrong. I didn’t handle it well. I’ll give you an example. A guy named Bill Curtis lived out in the Dexter area. He was an antiques dealer. He hired this kid to murder his wife, kid named Todd Plamondon in Ypsi.
[1:01:41] DARLA WELSHONS: I remember that story.
[1:01:42] STEPHEN CAIN: Yeah. Well, Todd was a street kid. Gay somewhat, and that’s where they connected, and they would have beers over just a couple of years, like at the Sidetrack and other places in Ypsi, and he got Plamondon to agree to killing his wife. Gave him a razor. Then met him, I don’t know whether it was Dexter or Chelsea, but in a bar restaurant there. Then later, Todd came out to the house and cut the wife’s throat. Then makes this big show when a neighbor comes over of hugging his wife and reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and all the rest of that, and she dies before the ambulance gets there. Well, it’s pretty clear that Plamondon had done it. The question was, what about Curtis? They knew it but they kept saying, No, he’s not a suspect, no. There was a double indemnity clause from his wife’s employment. They even alibied on that rather than raise suspicions, and so Curtis got paid off. I got one of our photographers and we got a candid shot of Curtis really with a telephoto, really nice face shot. Then I went into the News photo files. Looking for other photos that I could use as a photo array, then to take this around to the bars in Ypsi and the bar in either Chelsea or Dexter to see if anybody had recognized them together. But I was one short of the number of photos I wanted for the array, six would be the right one. I only had five. I found a headshot of Petykiewicz, that was just perfect. I included that in my photo array that I took around. As I said, I was not being very smart. I made the serious mistake of telling one of my colleagues the stunt I had pulled. Needless to say, it spread throughout the staff, and then one of the editors came to me and said, Steve, Ed’s going to find out real quick. You’d better go tell him yourself. I went in and handed Ed the photo and said, I owe you an apology. I told him what I’d done. I expected an explosion, but no, he was very cold and said, Did you suspect me of being gay or a murderer? No. That’s how insecure the man was. So I was my own worst enemy, it’s that simple.
[1:04:50] AMY CANTU: But the newspaper was also fairly conservative. Did you have clashes?
[1:04:55] STEPHEN CAIN: No, because during the second half of the ‘80s it was moderately conservative on the editorial page, but not very much. It was really middle of the road. Say, Bill Millikan conservative, as opposed to MAGA, or anything like that. The News columns, nothing. We did some heavy stuff on the university and on the Detroit Police. The thing on the Detroit — the Ann Arbor police rather — that one got me into a little mess too. There had been a smoke bombing at Pioneer just before graduation. Six kids were caught. The seventh kid was the lookout, and that was our publisher’s son.
[1:05:56] DARLA WELSHONS: Oh no.
[1:05:57] STEPHEN CAIN: Now we had back up a little bit. The Ann Arbor Police had been hiding some of the crime reports from us.
[1:06:05] AMY CANTU: Why?
[1:06:05] STEPHEN CAIN: Well, because they wanted to avoid hard questions. There were a group of young black men, three or four of them that were waylaying white U of M students around campus in the evening. They’d take a watch, a wallet, thump on them a bit, and go off, and there’d been half a dozen of these. But you couldn’t tell from the reports that there was a gang of black kids attacking white kids. The News knew they were withholding. Bill Tremel, a really good guy, was the police reporter, but he was also really tight with the police. If he had gone in there, and it wasn’t really his thing anyway, he would have lost this thing. So they sent me and said, Steve, it’s up to you to prove they’re withholding, which I did. I caught them in it, and we sued the Ann Arbor Police for access to the files, not for [information] that would compromise an ongoing investigation, but for just the general run-of-the-mill police reports. The City caved in rather than go to court. On the very first day that the new agreement went in, was the day after the smoke bombing. They give me all of these reports that show the six kids that got caught and were held out of graduation. They got their degree, but they couldn’t walk. That was their punishment. Then Todd, who was the lookout, and he did not admit being that, so they let him walk for graduation. But you read the reports, and it’s clear that he’s every bit as much as the others. So then it comes to me. What do I do? I wrote the story with Todd in the first paragraph. Which you shouldn’t do because he’s a juvenile, but I did it. I didn’t ask my editor for permission. I figured it would be a whole lot harder for them to take it out than to decide to include it, and they let it run.
[1:08:16] AMY CANTU: How’d that go down?
[1:08:17] STEPHEN CAIN: Well, nothing. Three days later, I get a call from Tim White, the publisher, at home, and he says that his wife, Todd’s mother, was really upset about that and she wanted him to call me and find out why I did that.
[1:08:40] AMY CANTU: What did you say?
[1:08:41] STEPHEN CAIN: Well, I was mad as hell, because the bloody coward is laying it off on his wife for the phone call that he knows is off the wall. I said, Well, I explained, that this was the test of the Ann Arbor Police as to whether we would cover up for the publisher’s son or not and that I was determined that we weren’t going to cover up. I said, Besides, there’s two other things on this. One is the advertisers in town are all the time beating up you to try and soften our News coverage on things. You now have the perfect excuse to say, “They’re independent. Look what they did to my son.” I said, Besides, Todd, the son, is really kind of mud with his friends because they all got punished and he walked free. I said, Now at least Todd can say, “I paid a price too.” All of which was true. But you don’t piss on the boss’s shoes and tell him it’s a warm summer rain.
[1:09:41] AMY CANTU: True.
[1:09:42] STEPHEN CAIN: Well, I got away with it. But White didn’t learn the lesson of the independence of the newsroom because he ended up as the publisher, I forget the name of the paper, but it was the San Francisco Chronicle’s rival paper, and there was a deal coming down for the purchase of that paper that had to pass political muster and he cut a deal with the governor. In exchange for favorable coverage, the governor would not oppose this newspaper transaction. Of course, that came out in court, and White then was banned from all newspapering forever and ever because he didn’t learn the lesson. But again, both my daughters and my wife took me to task for putting Todd on the paper. You don’t do that. You don’t punish a kid. I said, Yeah, I know. Probably right, but I did it. I actually saw Todd some months later at Ann Arbor Airport when they still had the Fourth of July fireworks. I talked to him, and I apologized for that and told him why I did it. He said, Yeah. You know. He survived all right.
[1:10:54] AMY CANTU: Did you get along well with Bill Tremel?
[1:10:57] STEPHEN CAIN: Yeah.
[1:10:58] AMY CANTU: Other folks from the news?
[1:10:59] STEPHEN CAIN: Yeah. Not so much with Petykiewicz, but the others, yeah. They had me run the Ypsilanti Bureau for a while. I never wanted to do that. I just wanted to be a reporter. They gave me Treml for a while and we got along just fine and I spent a lot of time editing his articles to really [whoosh] like that, and they were good because he was a great reporter.
[1:11:27] AMY CANTU: It looks like you covered a lot of the radical politics and John Sinclair, and the SDS, and all that.
[1:11:38] STEPHEN CAIN: Dave Valler — ‘President Dave’ — he was convicted. He pled out, I think, and got sentenced to 18 years. But he was out in six or seven, whatever. But I had made the pledge always to everyone that I will not testify for you or against you no matter what. The White Panthers believed me. I got my first joint from John’s brother.
[1:12:09] STEPHEN CAIN: I kept my word. I got a subpoena. The feds had charged John Sinclair, Pun Plamondon, who was the Minister of Defense of the White Panthers, and Jack Forrest with their participation in the CIA bombing. Well, Sinclair at that time was serving the marijuana 9.5-10-year marijuana sentence that was ultimately turned over. The feds served me with a subpoena because I was the only person who was not a cop or a freak who could testify about Dave’s mental competency at the time of the conspiracy. Well, I had no legal cover for that but I simply said — well, I knew the subpoena was coming. Michigan football game against Michigan State, I traded tickets with somebody. My editor found me on the other side and served me with a subpoena. He said otherwise they’re going to come to your house and disturb your family. I spent the next two hours with John O’Brien — who was the guy that hired me; he lived in Ann Arbor — explaining that I wasn’t even going to go into the grand jury to tell them I wasn’t going to tell him, period. He says, But you’ve got no legal cover. I says, I know, but I gave my word. I said, If I end up in prison, I said, my father-in-law is well to do. He’ll take care of my family. I’ll simply write from prison.
[1:13:50] AMY CANTU: That was a plan.
[1:13:53] STEPHEN CAIN: Well yeah and being arrogant and all the rest of it, I meant it. He finally believed me. He went and told the editor, He’s not going to testify. Of course, the paper would have looked like mud for not backing its own reporter. They said, Cain isn’t going to do it and dropped the subpoena. I skated.
[1:14:19] AMY CANTU: I’ve got to ask: We no longer have a very robust newspaper in this town. What are your thoughts about what has happened to the industry writ large, and what do you think it means for our community?
[1:14:35] STEPHEN CAIN: When they shut down the paper and substituted this nonsense, it so disgusts me I refuse to read it. That’s bad, I should do it just like that. But if my wife comes across something interesting, I will look at it. But I’m just so angry. I suppose it was necessary in the end because of the falloff in advertising because of the Internet. But what it means is that in most of the state houses around the country, but not all, and not in Washington, there isn’t someone to go to if somebody sees something crap going on, and nowhere for the whistleblower to go unless it’s a federal crime or something like that. And it’s awful. I was talking with an associate dean at the U of M, retired now, about the situation. It’s a great university, it’s one of the greatest in the country. But they think their guano doesn’t stink. And without somebody looking over their shoulder, they never ask that question, “My God, what if, Cain found out or what if so and so?” There is that pause to misbehavior or stupidity that isn’t there anymore. I took a fellowship at the U of M National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for journalists in mid-career in Detroit. Was reading a book called The Making of an American Community by one of the U of M professors and two others in Trempealeau, Wisconsin. They looked at the formation of the community. The first two things that happened as the community came together was they would start a school and sometimes even a college and establish a newspaper. That’s what bound it together. That’s what we’ve lost. It’s horrible. There are some online efforts that are pretty decent, but it’s not the same. I don’t know what the solution is.
[1:17:01] AMY CANTU: In your retirement, you are at the Artisan Market?
[1:17:04] STEPHEN CAIN: Right.
[1:17:04] AMY CANTU: You do some artwork. Can you talk a little bit about how that’s been?
[1:17:09] STEPHEN CAIN: Well, it’s been great. I don’t know where it came from. I started off, I was making trays. I was doing woodworking. The only reason I learned woodworking was we had bought some property in the mountains of western North Carolina. We’re still living in Lodi Township. Storm came through and knocked down two magnificent Black Walnut trees in my backyard. What do I do with this great wood? I called around and found the company that makes portable bandsaw mills, and said, Do you have anybody that bought one of your mills in the South East Michigan? Then they gave me a name. I called him up, came out, cut my wood. It was about 3,500 board feet of prime Black Walnut because we were then getting ready to build a house down in the western mountains or the southern mountains. Well, I had the wood. I had to have a trailer. I have a trailer, I had to have a truck to pull it. With the wood in the trailer and everything else, I had to have a wood shop to be able to use it. I found a guy that lived in the mountains, who was an old-time woodworker, come and teach me woodworking and work in my shop. That’s how it went. Then I just started making things and selling them and jewelry and string beading simply, and doing that. I like it. I like being able to make things. It gives me a great excuse to talk to people and tell war stories and learn about them. I love it. I go to the Artisan’s Market about once every two weeks.
[1:18:57] AMY CANTU: And so you’ve seen a lot of changes in Ann Arbor over the years. I mean, aside from the newspaper and all of that...
[1:19:04] STEPHEN CAIN: Ann Arbor is one of the greatest places in the country but, just like the U of M, Ann Arbor’s full of itself.
[1:19:12] AMY CANTU: [LAUGHTER] True.
[1:19:16] STEPHEN CAIN: I understand that, I go along with it. But as much as they talk about, you know, diversity and all the rest of that, because it’s such a nice place with good restaurants and entertainments of all different kinds, it becomes popular, it prices people out. They come in, they build high rises because they can sell them and it just transforms the community into something that is less precious than it was.
[1:19:42] AMY CANTU: If you could write an article right now, if you could investigate something for a more robust newspaper than we have, what would you dedicate yourself to?
[1:19:56] STEPHEN CAIN: Hmm. Well, I’d like to look at the whole process of building permits and exceptions to standards that allow more high rises and all the rest of this. I sometimes think that it is the economics that rules the politics. I’d like to look at that. I’d like to look at what they’re trying to do and failing to do on affordable housing, for example. There really is no good solution on that.
[1:20:26] AMY CANTU: But you don’t feel it’s being covered well?
[1:20:27] STEPHEN CAIN: No.
[1:20:30] AMY CANTU: So, you’ve won a lot of awards, you’ve had a lot of recognition. What, over the course of your whole experience in Ann Arbor and your career, are you most proud of?
[1:20:42] STEPHEN CAIN: Staying true to myself and never backing down. I mean, the flip side of that is arrogance and I’ve done some things that I shouldn’t have done, simply because I wasn’t going to get pushed around on things. I’m a little more forgiving now than I used to be. I should save my guns for the bad stuff. I mean, the idea is you try and give people the information and the insight to be able to make intelligent decisions if they wish to. My late father was a distinguished ecologist. Ecology is the interrelationship between living things and their environment. It’s called context. That’s — growing up as an only child — that’s what just what sort of infused me. In a lot of my reporting, I was always looking for the context out of which something happened. I think that made it different. That and also just this incredible curiosity. There are so many stories that I didn’t land, where I knew what was going on but I wasn’t willing to do “sources said” or anything. I had to bloody damn be able to prove it. And it just killed me. I’ll tell you one: I had a good source. The Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. Well, his brother and sister saw the manifest that he had demanded be published in the Washington Post and New York Times and realized it was their brother. They made a deal with the feds. They ratted him out, but said, You got to move heaven and earth not to kill him when you take him into custody. There was a period of a number of weeks where they were staking out that place in Montana or wherever it was. As then they had agents going all around the country, putting together background information on him. Well, he was a student at the University of Michigan. Got his PhD in mathematics. I got a tip from a Fed that I could look into this, but I couldn’t publish anything until after he was arrested. I went to University Microfilms — it’s been sold and has another name now — which publishes every doctoral dissertation in the world and most of the masters, and pulled up a copy of Kaczynski’s doctoral dissertation. Then went over to the math department and got some graduate students to explain to me as best as they could what he was about. Then I tracked down every living member of his dissertation committee and interviewed them, not revealing why I was doing this. If the Feds had tried to do it, it would have tipped them off because one of the people that got a bomb was James McConnell in psychology at the U of M. So there was a lot of awareness of the Unabomber. But I got a little of that. There was only one course that he took outside of mathematics and that was in physical anthropology. The professor happened to be the wife of a woman that was basically my big sister. She had come from Vassar to work for my mother when my mother was president of the state League of Women Voters and stayed in and became a really good friend of the family and worked for the Democratic Party State Central Committee. Here was her husband who incidentally had the best proof of human evolution that’s ever been discovered. He still had his gradebook with the only A+ he ever gave. And then he described Kaczynski to me — always wearing a suit and tie to class when everyone else was a grubby freak.
[1:25:10] AMY CANTU: So you were never able to use that.
[1:25:12] STEPHEN CAIN: Oh yeah, sure! As soon as he was arrested, I had this big thing about the Unabomber at Michigan and Ann Arbor. Then everyone had to credit us for that material.
[1:25:23] AMY CANTU: That’s great.
[1:25:25] STEPHEN CAIN: Most of the time, I tried to come off as a nice guy. I would always tell someone what I was doing, no blindsiding, and why I was doing it. When you’re doing a really hard story on a person, you always find out other stuff that isn’t really part of the story but is there. It’s kind of manipulative, but I would say, Look, I found this too, but that really isn’t... as long as you and I are dealing like adults, I’m just going to leave that to the side. The funniest thing happens. Here, the story appears, it’s a hard blow, whatever. Then going into the future, the person calls me up and says, Steve, I’m still pissed about that, but let me tell you about such and such. [LAUGHTER]
[1:26:06] AMY CANTU: So you’ve made some good connections.
[1:26:08] STEPHEN CAIN: Sure. And a lot of the people that I’ve written hard stories on; but if you do it straight and honorably... Trump whines, but a lot of people don’t. I mean, they know what they were doing. You got ‘em. You did it straight. You didn’t rub it in. It goes with the territory.
[1:26:26] AMY CANTU: Well, thank you so much for sharing all of that with us.
[1:26:28] DARLA WELSHONS: AADL Talks To is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.