Detroit was once the heart of the world’s largest economic empire—the auto industry. Whether you’re from Southern Europe, the Middle East, or the American South, factories are always hiring and the pay is good. But as the auto empire withered and collapsed, the city’s economy began to revolve around a new business – the distribution of illegal drugs.
Between 1965 and 1970, violent crime in the United States more than doubled. Why this happened has never been fully explained, but drugs, the breakdown of social control around the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War were certainly key factors.
Nowhere is it more out of control than in Detroit, Michigan, which experienced some of the deadliest riots of the ’60s and by 1971 had become the homicide capital of the country. In the spring of 1972, the Drug Administration sent John Sutton to Detroit on a special mission to infiltrate and take down the city’s largest black heroin dealer.
Agent Sutton arrives in Detroit to find the city divided. On the one hand, Detroit has the wealthiest black middle class in the country, thanks in large part to the auto industry, and many live a good life. On the other hand, this is a city where the entire police force is taken over by heroin dealers and crooks.
Detroit had few black police officers in the 1950s, making it difficult for the department to infiltrate the city’s burgeoning drug infrastructure. Henry Mazet was a hometown boy and Korean veteran when he entered the police academy. Working as an undercover narcotics officer since the 1950s, Mazet set arrest records. But he soon began to play both sides, and was convicted of corruption in the late 1950s.
After a brief stint in jail, Marzette returns home determined to take over the streets. In 1970, he convened a meeting of top heroin dealers known as the “West Seven.” He suggested that they buy and distribute heroin together without involving the Italian Mafia, which controlled a group known as the Eastside Twelve, which was composed mostly of white high-ranking dealers. The coalition fell apart when certain drug dealers refused to bow to Mazet in waging the deadliest drug war in Detroit history.
