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"FacebookPinterestFacebookPinterest\n\nLeDuff. Smoking a Winston in the Detroit police-headquarters parking lot under the limitless blue sky of a September day before a press conference. From a hundred yards he's instantly recognizable: the Wayfarers, the blue jeans, the motorcycle boots, the hair, the vest. Almost always a vest, whether it's suede or a sweater\u2014the rest of it seems pretty straightforward, but the symbolism of the vest I haven't been able to suss. He might just like vests. He's got one leg canted against the door panel, the other wedged against the ground.\n\nThey spent $6 million on this building, he says about the police headquarters. And compare that to the state of the firehouses I'm gonna show you. Detroit? It's like Selassie's Ethiopia.\n\nBefore heading inside, Charlie LeDuff explains what this press conference is about. A girl calls 911\u2014she fears for her life. More than an hour later, she is shot with an AK-47. The police still hadn't shown. It's kind of Charlie's press conference, actually. It was Charlie who got the tip about the shooting, Charlie who reported it out for the Fox affiliate in Detroit, Charlie who's here today to find out if DPD heads are going to roll. When it's time to get to it, he takes one last drag of his cigarette, stubs it out with the heel of his boot, and exhales. He puts an arm around me:\n\nShould we do this, brother?\n\nThat's one important thing to know about Charlie LeDuff, who was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The New York Times and is now probably the least likely and best-known local TV news reporter in Detroit and maybe the country: When you meet him, he might call you brother. Like, I put the chances at 90 percent. He'll brother you, and suddenly it's as if you're two Vietnam vets: I was at Khe Sanh. Cool, I was in the Mekong Delta. And then you don't even have to say you'd lay down your lives for each other. It's an essential pivot he takes with everyone, viewers included. You and him, you're exhausted grunts in the war against the government, the capitalists, laziness, self-interest, vanity, greed, America, NAFTA, bullshit, rich people. But mostly bullshit. Bullshit is the greatest threat to the American man, which is the brotherhood to which Charlie most ardently belongs. But anyway, you're Charlie LeDuff's brother whether you like it or not.\n\nUp in the second-floor pressroom, we wait for the arrival of James Craig, Detroit's newest chief of police. LeDuff alters the dynamic of the room as soon as he enters. Part of it is simple human chemistry. The four or five other members of his press cohort are reading newspapers in folding chairs in the briefing room. They take their moment of peace where they can get it. But not LeDuff. It's hard to watch Charlie LeDuff waiting for a press conference to start, because it seems physically uncomfortable for Charlie to spend time servicing someone else's agenda. You can kind of feel him getting restless until he just has to confront someone:\n\nSpecifically, he zeroes in on the DPD headquarters. And the gym in particular, which sounds like there's some bullshit involved. I hear the flat-screen TVs in the workout room are to die for, he says to one of the cops. As in: People don't have basic services and you guys have flat-screen TVs.\n\nThe cop gets a little defensive: The building authority built it. We didn't have anything to do with it.\n\nA second cop understands a little better the dialogue you're supposed to have with LeDuff: The TVs are so we can watch Charlie LeDuff segments while we work out.\n\nSomeone else says: We know the mayor's wife watches.\n\nCharlie says: Yeah, and she's not bad looking, either.\n\n(Fact check: Apparently this is true. Yvette Bing, wife of Dave Bing, likes to watch Charlie LeDuff's TV work; it's also accurate that she's kind of hot for a lady who is married to the mayor of Detroit.)\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nThe other reason Charlie alters the chemistry in the room is because he is a celebrity. A singular kind of celebrity, certainly. But he's probably the most famous man in Detroit who isn't (1) Matthew Stafford, (2) Berry Gordy, or (3) in jail for sexting and also pillaging the city coffers (see Kilpatrick, Kwame\u2014the first mayor in modern history to be convicted of a felony while still in office). Besides being the author of a best-selling book about how fucked Detroit is (Detroit: An American Autopsy, published earlier this year), Charlie got famous by basically reinventing local news reporting. Like for instance, in one segment he waits with a woman who has called 911 after her house was apparently broken into. He picks her up some McDonald's, searches her house for assailants, washes his pants, and takes a bath, all hours before the cops arrive. (Asterisk on this one: probably the only segment in the history of local network news in which producers at the station had to pilize a reporter's balls.) A million people watched that on YouTube\u2014not including the people who watched it on TV, or on the station's website, etc.\u2014which is 40 percent more than the population of Detroit. Or in another segment, Charlie plays a game of golf across an eighteen-mile swath of Detroit in a pair of old sneakers and some shorts to show just how empty the place is. (As he'll remind me over the course of the days we spend together, you could fit Manhattan and San Francisco into just the abandoned portions of Detroit.) Or earlier this year, in a piece that's become known as A Plant, a Perch, and a Prophylactic, Charlie and a cameraman canoed the length of the infamous River Rouge, which turned into kind of an antic tone poem about desolation and environmental degradation and the modern urban landscape. All of these videos had a life of their own outside the realm of broadcast journalism. All of them became, for lack of less annoying phraseology, viral videos illustrating something about Detroit. Now, Charlie still considers himself an investigative reporter. He claims, since he came to Fox 2 News three years ago, that his reporting has been responsible for the firing of two Detroit police chiefs and a fire commissioner. In the year when Detroit finally seemed to reach the unsurprising conclusion to its thirty-year narrative of decline\u2014i.e., it's the first major American city in modern times to declare bankruptcy\u2014it was Charlie LeDuff who reported on it in a way that made sense to people who aren't, like, super into Chapter 9 filings.\n\nThe chief of police enters. Light-skinned dude with light eyes and a tight business fade and a slow, exceedingly deliberate baritone delivery. Craig takes the reporters through the chain of events. A 911 call is made in the early-morning hours last Friday, August 30. For some reason it's not dispatched. (On a force of 2,600 officers, down from 5,000, dispatchers will once in a while hold a call until a shift change to help with burnout.) After the call is dispatched, police arrive in eight minutes, but find that the woman has been shot and ferried via private car to the hospital because no one thought it was worth it to call an ambulance. The chief is here to announce that the head of communications has been demoted; the dispatcher was suspended. This offers a ray of hope to Charlie: None of the other assholes who came before Craig would have done anything.\n\nThe last question of the day, like many of the others, comes from Charlie: You called us here. Is there a message you're trying to give? And what is it?\n\nStatus quo, Chief Craig says. Mediocrity will not be accepted. We're in the business of saving lives.\n\nA minute later the whole thing is over. The reporters and cops all lumber out of the too large briefing room. Charlie jokes as he leaves about having to feed the chief his lines: It's like, what's the sound bite you want us to have? Let me help you out with that.\n\nThere's another crucial thing to know about Charlie. It can sometimes seem like he's in a movie. I think many of us see our lives a little cinematically, though we mostly lack Charlie's costuming panache. But if you're spending time around him, realize: This is Charlie's movie. It'd be great if you were in it, since you're his brother and this is a movie about you\u2014Detroit is America (Charlie's theory); it's the canary in the coal mine; it goes first. But either way, it's his movie. He sets the tone, he sets the agenda, he chooses the vests. Charlie's personality has a blast radius of about fifteen feet, and if you're inside of it, you're in the movie.\n\nThe doors close on the headquarters' stainless-steel elevator. Ten journalists descend quietly; the doors open. Charlie exhales loudly, raises a fist. Okay, he says, let's go make some sausage!\n\nNote: If it's not clear yet, the movie can sometimes feel like a more absurd version of The Wire.\n\n\n\nWhen we set the schedule for my four-day visit, Charlie made it clear he did not want to take me on a tour of Fucked Detroit. First of all because he's done a lot of that in his life. Show me how the firefighters put out fires with garden hoses! Show me how the 19,000 homeless people in Detroit live in the abandoned buildings! Show me the desolate blocks and the ruin porn that Japanese tourists make pilgrimages to see!\n\nFuck that, Charlie said when I suggested it, because of course I did. I'm not taking you on some zoo tour of exotic broke Detroit.\n\nBut just in the course of doing his job, he ends up taking me on a tour of exotic broke Detroit. Every story you report here is kind of that story. One day we check out a situation where maybe some citizens are going to get electrocuted. Someone tipped off Fox 2 News about a light pole that fell onto transmission wires right in front of a school. The city had yet to respond to the call. Charlie brainstorms on the ride over\u2014maybe we could do a time-lapse thing where we wait overnight for the power company to come, and we set up cots and sleep in the school and order pizza and stuff.\n\nBut when we get there, it turns out the light pole has fallen on telephone wire and not a power line, and that the school has been abandoned for years, foxglove and Queen Anne's lace and pin oak and all manner of upper midwestern flora exploding from the casement windows. The traffic lights are out up and down the block\u2014but that's not really a story. A man on an ancient ten-speed metronomes toward us. Charlie! Chaaaaaaaarlie! He grabs Charlie's hand like they know each other\u2014Charlie is his brother after all. Man, Charlie, he says, his breath all malty with beer. I love all your shit. I love everything you do.\n\nThere's really no exaggerating how often this happens to Charlie. It feels like a hundred times when I'm with him. It happened less when I did a story about Justin Timberlake.\n\nCharlie continues with the tour: Here's where the fireman died; there's the liquor store where someone was fraudulently cashing thousands of dollars in city checks. Meanwhile, the weather is fine. The sense that the city is about to collapse, the exigency and suspense\u2014that is all in the past. Yellow flowers grow from almost everything.\n\nWe're living in Pompeii, he says. We're living in Chernobyl.\n\nCharlie LeDuff moved back to Detroit five years ago, after a storied career at the Times. He was one of the most recognizable writers at the paper. The day he found out he won the Pulitzer for a story about working in a slaughterhouse, he was returning from reporting a piece in which he was smuggled across the Mexican border by a coyote. He left the Times because he was restless and he understood that, fundamentally, a man with Charlie LeDuff's disposition would always be a weird fit there. (Also: He had a brief scrape with failing to properly cite sources.)\n\nI frankly can't even believe he ever worked for The New York Times, a senior editorial type at the paper says. He's just too gonzo.\n\nThis is how LeDuff explains it: You think you can be Jimmy Breslin in New York? (Jimmy Breslin is a famous old blue-collar, ink-stained, man-of-the-people reporter for the New York Daily News.) You can't be Jimmy Breslin in New York anymore. They don't want it. You gotta go home. You gotta go home to do that.\n\nSo Charlie went to Detroit to become Jimmy Breslin. He applied first to the Detroit Free Press, but they were wary of him. He was hired as a columnist and investigative reporter at The Detroit News. Charlie LeDuff was always a character; at the News he honed it, and at Fox 2 he embraced it fully. The showboating, the absurdity, the costuming. Charlie may be the first to apply the lesson of Jon Stewart and Bill O'Reilly and even the opinionless but always attractively windblown Anderson Cooper to local news. And that lesson is that persona trumps all else. Persona is the capsule into which journalism must increasingly be packaged in order for anyone to consume it. Anyone familiar with Charlie's sizable body of work, lovers or detractors (and even the lovers detract, and even the detractors love), will agree: Charlie has always veered, occasionally recklessly, toward being the center of the story.\n\nAnd Charlie knows he is part of the story. Because, brother, we are all part of the story. As we drive back to the station one afternoon, to cut a segment, he's feeling it acutely.\n\nWe're in it together, he says. The dude with the liquor on his breath, riding around on that bicycle? We are in it together. We are all in it together. I just believe that.\n\nThis is when Charlie actually has me look up the John Donne poem For Whom the Bell Tolls. And, once I find it, makes me read it out loud.\n\n No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main\u2026. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.\n\nI believe I see a tear in his eye.\n\n\n\nAt the end of the day of the press conference, Charlie and his producer/cameraman Bob drive out to take some B-roll of the street where the girl was gunned down. For blocks and blocks, the only person we see is an old man who stares at the Fox 2 News vehicle as if it might be a ghost truck that could drive right through him. Then we're on the 13000 block of Bringard, where the shooting happened, and it suddenly looks fully inhabited, and habitable, with trimmed lawns and men washing Chryslers in yards.\n\nThat's the way it'll be in Detroit, LeDuff says. It's block by block.\n\nWe pull over. Bob starts to set up the tripod for the stand-up and Charlie runs through some lines. A tall, muscular kid in a white tee, maybe 18 years old, comes down the block on a tiny BMX bike that makes him look like one of those bears riding a tricycle. Charlie waves him down. He wants to know if he heard about the shooting, if he has any idea where it happened.\n\nYeah, I know where it happened, he says. He's not happy to be talking to Charlie. It happened right here at my house. That was my cousin.\n\nWhat's your name, man? Charlie says.\n\nThe kid looks at him; he's not sure he wants to give his name.\n\nB, he says.\n\nB what? Charlie asks.\n\nB Good, the kid says, smiling.\n\nB shows Charlie the hole where the bullet went through the siding, through the staircase inside, and out through the back of the house. Charlie motions for Bob to come over and set up the camera. But B doesn't want to talk. Just a reflexive distrust: You are you and you are not us.\n\nCome on, B, Charlie says.\n\nB starts moving toward the door. Maybe, lemme just go inside and make a quick phone call.\n\nCharlie senses that if B goes inside the house, there won't be any interview happening. Charlie stalks the yard, walking toward him, crossing the line into personal space.\n\nFuck that, Charlie says. I got forty-five minutes to get this on the air. Come on, B. We all got to do our part. You want to change something? You need to do your part.\n\nCharlie can seem half crazy sometimes yelling at the camera. Wearing his bunny suit or his pilot outfit with the money glued to it or just standing there in his normal Charlie LeDuff costume. But it's my belief that Charlie LeDuff couldn't live with himself if he didn't think that it was all in service to something bigger. That the enterprise is essentially a serious one is what makes everything else okay.\n\nB can't say no. This is his opportunity to be in the climactic scene where you stand up and things begin to change. In real life, you're never offered that chance. When Bob sets up the camera, B tells a complicated story about a fight that happened in the middle of the night. Two girls: his cousin and someone else. How the cops got called, and called again, and again\u2014six times. How a guy showed up with an AK-47 and suddenly his cousin is on the lawn, bleeding. They put her in the back of a car and drove her to the hospital. There's still blood on the seats.\n\nIt turns out B is extremely good on TV. He is just as shocked as anyone else by the state of affairs in Detroit: They got some new-ass police cars with the new decals on them. At least pull up in that shit on my block sometimes when you're not frisking me for no reason. Then maybe my favorite cousin wouldn't be in the hospital now.\n\nB changes tack and assumes some grizzled-veteran distance. She in critical condition. But she doing okay. She strong. She hood, so she got it in her to be strong, he says.\n\nShit, this is Dee-troit.\n\nNormally, I'd feel a little weird using that as the last line. It's a little too Detroit Noir. But this is not my movie.\n\nDevin Friedman (@devinfriedman) is  GQ's director of editorial projects."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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