Detroit Houseclecming

Homer Ferguson is a quiet, mild-mannered Scotsman with unruly grey hair, nearsighted, friendly blue eyes, and a keen mind which he is never in any hurry to make up, or afterwards change. A graduate of the University of Michigan's Law School, he taught school, studied medicine and dentistry before he decided he wanted to practice law. From that point his career ran in a straight line.

In 1929 the Governor of Michigan appointed solid, able Mr. Ferguson a circuit judge. In his judicial routine Homer Ferguson won the respect of lawyers and colleagues alike. There he was doing his quiet job, when the noses of the circuit court sniffed a decidedly gamy smell curling up from Detroit and suburban Hamtramck. The police blandly assured them that everything was O.K., but the circuit court decided to poke around, appointed Judge Ferguson (under a peculiar Michigan law) to sit as a one-man grand jury and find out what was making the stink.

Pompous, handshaking, smiling Richard William Reading was mayor. While Mayor Reading held Detroiters' hands, Judge Ferguson held patient, unnoticed hearings, bided his time. Last January a new administration moved in, stumbled over some decaying policemen and began fumigating the police department. Judge Ferguson decided then that the time was ripe. First gobbet of muck he forked up was a million-dollar conspiracy among city and county officials, policemen and gamblers to operate a baseball pool. Among those he accused: Wayne County's fighting prosecutor ("I'll be in there sluggin' in the people's interest"), Duncan Cameron McCrea.

Righteously indignant, Mr. McCrea attempted a raid on Judge Ferguson's grand-jury chamber, alleging that witnesses had been tortured until they squealed. The judge's guards slammed the door on McCrea's deputies, stuffed the judge's records into a vault. Next day. Judge Ferguson produced a second dripping forkful. Gambling dens, bawdy houses, running wide open in Detroit and Hamtramck, had long enjoyed official cooperation, said he. Among many officials, he specifically indicted Prosecutor Duncan McCrea.

Frantic was the scurrying in Detroit. Judge Ferguson slapped a bond on all those he had accused (including Mr. McCrea), held them for trial, continued his hearings. Last week he came up with the biggest gobbet of all.

On a charge of conspiring to protect and operate policy houses (which did an estimated $10,000,000 annual business in Detroit and have been operating unscathed for more than ten years), Judge Ferguson indicted 151 persons, including ten police lieutenants, 34 sergeants, 37 patrolmen, six detectives, Negro John Roxborough (comanager of Heavyweight Champion Joe Louis), pompous ex-Mayor Dick Reading--and Prosecutor McCrea.

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