Matty Moroun. Photo by Joel Thurtell.
By Joel Thurtell
As I write this, a billionaire is eating a baloney sandwich, courtesy of the Wayne County Jail.
And I have a new hero.
I’m not sure about the baloney sandwich, but I saw Matty Moroun disappear through a door at the back of Room 913 of the Wayne County Circuit Court this morning after Judge Prentis Edwards ordered the trucking and bridge mogul jailed along with his chief henchmen, Dan “The Rubber” Stamper.
Matty and The Rubber are to keep eating baloney till they finish work they agreed to do on Matty’s Ambassador Bridge.
Wayne County Circuit Judge Prentis Edwards. Photo by Joel Thurtell.
A flock of personal and corporate lawyers could not persuade the judge to soften his sanctions against the bridge owner and the president of the Detroit International Bridge Company.
It was an amazing scene.
One after another, lawyers for Matty and The Rubber argued that their boys should not be sent to stir.
Why, poor Matty is 84 years old. The poor old guy should not suffer such an indignity as living in a jail cell till he cleans up his act.
The judge was not moved.
After the judge ordered the pair jailed, I watched a uniformed Wayne County sheriff’s deputy standing beside Matty to make sure he knew the way out of court was not going to be home to his Grosse Pointe mansion.
It made me think of another scene — the time on September 22, 2008 when one of Matty’s shotgun totin’ goons, aka security guard, tried to arrest me and forced me out of a city park. After I blogged about my experience, I heard from others who’d been bullied by Matty’s hooligans. I also discovered that the “Homeland Security” signs Matty had posted on a chain-link fence were phony and the property he fenced in was actually park land belonging to the city of Detroit’s Riverside Park.
More than three years later, Matty is still tying a different Wayne County Circuit Court in knots over a simple eviction procedure.
Anyone who’s watched Matty knows that if he doesn’t get his way, he’ll flood the land with lawsuits, postponing to a very indefinite future any consequences that might blow back to him.
Almost two years ago, Judge Edwards held Matty in contempt and ruled that he was not complying with his contract with the Michigan Department of Transportation to complete infrastructure improvements to the bridge approach.
Instead, Matty had built a lucrative gas station and duty free store where ramps were supposed to go.
The judge ordered the store and gas pumps removed.
Matty fiddled around.
His lawyers — he has plenty of them — filed lawsuit after lawsuit.
Judge Edwards considered what sanctions he might bring to bear.
The most he could fine Matty in civil court is $7,500.
He thought of hiring an outside contractor to finish the work.
He thought of having Matty’s insurance company do the job.
He thought of appointing a receiver to take over the project.
By now, the judge knows Matty.
If he had ordered any one of those options, Matty would have filed lawsuit after lawsuit.
The case would have gone on till the end of time.
Meanwhile, the citizens of Michigan for whom the approach improvements were being made would not get what they paid taxes for.
Enough was enough, the judge said.
Judge Edwards used the word “coercion.”
Since Matty and his minions won’t willingly do what they agreed to do, they must be forced to obey the law.
“Coercion” is an interesting word.
I thought of what Matty did to me when I visited Riverside Park in 2008.
I had every right to be there.
I was taking pictures, and I had a right to do that, too.
But Matty’s thug, with a shotgun sitting in the seat next to him, ordered me to stop taking pictures. He ordered me off public park land. I took his picture. When he tried to arrest me, I headed back to my car. He ordered me to stop. He was holding me for the border patrol, he said.
All of these acts — forbidding me taking pictures, ordering me off park land, trying to detain me — were coercive acts. They were backed up by that shotgun.
This was all Matty, acting through his hired gun.
What this tells me is that Matty understands coercion.
He has designs on Riverside Park. Without that park land he stole, he can’t build a new bridge to Canada.
If Matty wants something, being a billionaire, he assumes it already belongs to him.
Mostly, his presumption of possession before the fact works.
It may still work in the eviction case involving Riverside Park.
But Judge Edwards also understands Matty.
The judge knows that Matty only understands force.
Coercion.
Hiring a contractor, assigning a receiver or having an insurance company try to finish the bridge approach an invitation for Matty to whine endlessly through his lawyers.
Send him to jail.
Feed him a baloney sandwich.
Don’t let him out till the work is done.
When will that be?
I heard an MDOT official say the job could be finished by next fall.
Hey, Matty!
That’s a lot of baloney sandwiches!
Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com
Just for the record, according to the Detroit Free Press, tonight’s dinner menu at the Wayne County Jail was chicken fried steak.
If this trial had been held in Arizona, you probably would have been vcorrect about the baloney sandwich.
Baloney to the bologna, sire…. Matty and Danny got their eats Al Capone-style, catered in their cells. Maybe a barbershop quartet of dung-eating shysters should have provided suitable dinner music: “You Take My Toll Road, I’ll Take the Low Road (And I’ll Buy My Way Out of Jail Before You).”