By Joel Thurtell
I was urged to post a comment about Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s excellent essay about Matty Moroun in the Huffington Post. I did, but wanted to share the full text of my comment with JOTR readers. Here it is:
Great column by Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib on Detroit Ambassador Bridge owner Manuel “Matty” Moroun with family and hangers-on subverting the Michigan Legislature to preserve his monopoly on bridge traffic between the U.S. and Canada at Detroit/Windsor.
Rep. Tlaib made a good start at condemning the anti-democratic behavior of the Morouns, but a book could be written about their thuggish approach to business and politics.
I posted my thoughts about Moroun and Rep. Tlaib’s essay on my blog, joelontheroad.com.
A big question is why it took mainstream media so long to catch onto Matty Moroun’s greedfest in Detroit.
I was a Detroit Free Press reporter for 23 years, and toward the end of my time at the paper, I had put together a picture of Matty Moroun as 1) a mean-spirited monopolist who 2) was somehow immune to media coverage.
But I could not write about Moroun. He was not my beat. Didn’t seem like he was anybody’s beat. If Detroit’s two dailies had spent half the time unmasking Matty Moroun as they put into investigating the felon mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, we might actually have a government-owned bridge now instead of a Moroun-controlled state Legislature cowed by his monetary handouts and fulminations from Matty’s Tea Party allies.
That changed on September 22, 2008, a year after I retired from the Free Press, when one of Moroun’s security guards tried to arrest me and kicked me out of a public park in Detroit that he’s illegally occupied for years. It turned out, Moroun needs the park to build a new international bridge beside his old Ambassador Bridge. Apparently, the goon had orders from Matty to harass anybody who tried to use the park, because I heard from others who were mistreated by bridge company guards.
Anyway, I was pissed. I went home and posted a column about my experience with Matty’s “shotgun totin’ goon.”
I kept writing about Moroun. For a time, I was on the story solo. Eventually, Metro Times writers Curt Guyette and Jack Lessenberry began writing about Moroun and the bridge. I celebrated The Detroit News’ first effort to write about Matty with a December 13, 2008 blog column.
In great part because of my efforts to expose Matty Moroun on my blog, the faculty of the Wayne State University Journalism Department last month named me their 2011 Journalist of the Year.
Today, four years and a couple months after I met Matty’s goon at Riverside Park, there is lots of coverage of Moroun. And yet, there is much that remains unwritten.
I’m encouraged that Huffington Post published Rep. Tlaib’s essay. This never was a local story. The local papers, except for the Windsor Star and Metro Times, failed to grasp it early on. It is time that Matty Moroun’s efforts to hang onto his aging monopoly were looked at in a national perspective.
Drop me a line at joelthurtell@gmail.com
