Heroin Kingpins of the Motor City Matthew Teutsch (bio) The Jones Men Vern E. Smith Rosarium Publishing www.rosariumpublishing.com 252 Pages; Print, $18.95 The Jones man is a new and fiercer breed of black gangster scrambling for far higher stakes; he is the one buying the customized Mark III’s, earning the envy of his street pals, firing the imagination of ghetto youths. This is how Vern E. Smith, in his February 28, 1972 Newsweek article “Detroit’s Heroin Subculture,” describes the purveyors of heroin in Detroit during the early 1970s. The Jones men displayed their prosperity to everyone, driving in new cars, flashing jewelry, wearing mink coats, and exhibiting an air of affluence that said, “Look, I’m making it.” The article went on to win the annual Detroit Press Club [End Page 4] Foundation’s award for magazine writing, and it ultimately inspired Smith’s The Jones Men (1974), a novel that presents the flashy Jones men not only as successors to pimps, but also as products of the urban blight destroying Detroit. Following the Newsweek article, more people wanted to speak with Smith about the heroin epidemic, and a publisher contacted him to see if he would be interested in turning the information that he had gathered into a book. Smith agreed, and The Jones Men appeared in 1974, becoming a New York Times Notable Book as well as a nominee for the 1975 Edgar Allan Poe Award. Upon its release, the novel garnered praise from the likes of The New York Times, Newsweek, and The New Yorker. Now, forty years later, Rosarium Publishing has reissued Smith’s intricately entwined novel of heroin addicts, heroin dealers, policemen, hit men, and the community for contemporary audiences. As Gar Anthony Haywood proclaims on the back cover, “[The Jones Men] was The Wire before there was The Wire.” Set in Detroit during the early 1970s, The Jones Men chronicles the story of Lennie Jack, a 26-year-old Vietnam veteran and young blood, who, along with his partner Joe Red, knock over a do-house (dope house) that belongs to Detroit’s heroin kingpin Willis McDaniel. The resulting heist leads to people being murdered and McDaniel scouring the streets to find out who robbed him of his heroin. Eventually, he discovers it was Lennie Jack and Joe Red, and the novel hits its climax with a shootout at the Casa Del Grato Motel. While this brief plot summary makes the novel appear as if it is a simplistic revenge tale involving criminals and addicts, the reality is much different. Smith’s novel debuted amongst the plethora of pulp novels by African American authors such as Robert Beck (aka Iceberg Slim), Donald Goines, and others during the late 1960s through the 1970s. The Jones Men fits into the same vein of Beck’s and Goines’s narratives because it portrays the lives of poverty-stricken African Americans trying to survive in “ghetto torture chambers,” to borrow a term from Beck. The “ghetto torture chambers” operate in much the same way as prisons do, locking the “citizens” within a confined space that is, as Otis Tilson says in Beck’s Mama Black Widow (1969), policed by authority figures who “put their heads together and frame homosexuals [and African Americans] into long jail terms.” Some, like McDaniel choose to sell heroin in order to survive and to ascend the social ladder. After spending time in prison, “McDaniel had risen from a small-time dope runner methodically up the narcotics ladder, clawing over his competition with a ruthlessness that was now legend on the streets.” That “ruthlessness” provides McDaniel with money and power. People always try to guess how much his “dope houses” bring in, but, according to McDaniel, everyone is “always a few million short.” Since everyone’s guesses fall short, McDaniel has to prove that he makes more money than people assume; thus, he has fifteen cars in his fleet and buys his wife a new car just because she despises the color of the one he just bought. As a dope pusher, McDaniel supplants the pimp as the dominant figure in the streets. As Marshall, a...