The Man on the Phone

In the line of duty, Reporter Jack Pickering of the Detroit Times knows a good many of Detroit's crooks, screwballs, small fry and tipsters. A few moments after he answered his office phone one night last week, he knew he had one of them on the line. The caller, without identifying himself, said: "You did me a favor once. I want to tell you a story. You know the building at Milwaukee and Cass?" Pickering did. "Right," the voice went on. "Dynamite has been planted in the building. It was planted when the Big Guy was in the office." A moment later, the line went dead.

Reporter Pickering had heard enough. The building at Milwaukee and Cass was obviously the headquarters of the C.I.O's United Automobile Workers and the Big Guy was its hard-hitting President Walter Reuther, who was cut down by a shotgun blast fired through his kitchen window 20 months ago. Pickering called a photographer, and hustled from the office.

Three Bundles. For almost an hour Pickering and Detroit police searched the three-story building, found nothing suspicious. But at 11:30 that night, a night watchman spotted a rain-soaked cardboard carton outside an unused basement entrance. It was wrapped in red and green Christmas paper and tied with a piece of cheap blue ribbon. Inside were 39 sticks of dynamite, carefully packed and taped into three bundles. One of the two fuses had burned out within an inch of the detonator, apparently snuffed out by the black friction tape which bound it too tightly; the other had fizzled out against a defective dynamite cap.

There was no question, said explosive experts, that the dynamiter, however inept he may have been, meant business. There was enough dynamite in the box to wreck the building and to damage the General Motors research building next door, too.

One Clue. The news of the discovery touched off an immediate uproar. The union added another $25,000 reward (to a total of nearly $250,000) for information about the assailants of the Reuther brothers -- Walter, whose right arm is still crippled by the attack on him, and Victor, education director in the U.A.W., who lost his right eye in an assassination attempt on him 13 months after Walter was shot down. Side doors to the U.A.W. headquarters were closed and locked and all visitors entering through the front door were thoroughly searched by police guards. U.S. Attorney General J. Howard Mc-Grath ordered out the FBI, which had stayed out of the first two attempts against the Reuthers.

Still in the dark, without clues or suspects, Detroit police suspected that the deadly attempt against the Reuthers stemmed from their successful anti-Communist crusade within the U.A.W. Another theory was that it resulted from their attempts to stamp out the numbers racket that once flourished in the Ford River Rouge plant. Walter Reuther, who had gone straight home from an out-of-town business trip instead of turning up at headquarters that night as expected, refused even to guess what was behind the plot.

One faint clue seemed to be Newsman Pickering's mysterious caller. In the Times two days later, Pickering wrote a personal appeal "to the man who phoned me Tuesday night. I don't know, naturally, what your part was in this, but your part didn't include wanting to kill. You're a different kind of man." Forlorn as this hope was, it seemed stronger than any expectation that Detroit's bumbling police department would be any more successful than they had been to date.

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