As a newspaper reporter, I was sent to cover three Hoffa searches in the past 10 years, and each time, nothing came up. The headlines were big, the stories exhaustive. At one newspaper nearly 10 years ago, an editor asked me to interview Hoffa’s daughter, a retired St. Louis judge, about a search near Bay City. What could she say? She was tired of the media circus, the calls, the references in movies.

“It’s as if everyone forgets he was a dad, a real person,” the daughter, Barbara Ann Cranser, told me.

And here we go again. FBI agents are digging for Hoffa’s body this week after another tip about the whereabouts of his body. And like most stories about Hoffa, the reporters say the evidence is stronger than ever – stronger than four decades of fruitless searches.

One person is happy about the coverage: Anthony J. Zerilli, the son of a mafia boss. He created a website, www.HoffaFound.com, and is now selling transcripts and autographed pictures of himself.

He must enjoy the free advertising.

Although Kenyatta was wrong – even former Mayor Coleman A. Young was a member – he and his colleagues rejected a proposal to protect the building with a historic designation. That allowed the owner, Albert Ammori, who also owns a liquor store across the street, to move forward with plans to demolish the three-story Collegiate Gothic building at 1411 E. Jefferson Ave. and replace it with a larger liquor store or fast food joint.

But that wouldn’t happen. Ammori neglected the building since buying it for $600,000 in April 2010, leaving it open to scrappers, vandals and extreme weather. Stained glass windows were shattered; graffiti covered the red-brick facade; and the roof was caving in.

And then at 4:30 a.m. Saturday, a two-alarm blaze gutted the three-story building, ending any hope of preserving it. Arson is suspected.

Preservationists were hoping to avoid such a mishap when they approached council members last year about the historic designation. But the discussion would devolve into a discussion of slave institution and the Holocaust.

“I don’t have the same nostalgia that most folks have about some of these buildings; most of them were built many years ago when certain folks couldn’t be let in,” Kenyatta said in September 2012. “You’ve got slave institutions that were designed by great architects and some of them still stand.”

Then Kenyatta glanced at preservationist Debbie Goldstein, who has a popular Jewish last name and is a member of the Historic Designation Advisory Board, and said, ”I’m sure folks would not be for preserving any elements of the Holocaust as well.”

Goldberg responded: “Mr. Kenyatta, we do preserve monuments of the Holocaust. We need to remember that.”

Kenyatta sniveled: “They can have the ones that belong to slavery; I don’t want them.”

In 1931, the club, which served as a social institution for college graduates, moved to the Jefferson Ave. building, designed by celebrated architect William Kapp, who also designed Music Hall Center for the Performing Arts. The club went bankrupt in 1992, and the YWCA took over the building until 2008, when maintenance costs became unsustainable.

In the opinion, Schuette concluded that the collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts must be preserved because it’s held “in charitable trust for the people of Michigan.”

Whether Schuette’s opinion would hold up in federal bankruptcy court is another question, but his interpretation of the law is important as city officials negotiate settlements to shrink Detroit’s long-term debt.

“I recognize the serious financial hardships that face the City, the difficulties that the people who live and work in the City have endured for decades, and the many challenges facing the citizens of the City of Detroit and the State in the future,” Schuette wrote. “Yet, in the 128 years since the creation of the Detroit Institute of Arts, at no time have the people demanded that their most precious cultural resources be sold in order to satisfy financial obligations. To the contrary, the citizens of this State recognize that abandoning or selling the public’s artwork would damage not only the City’s but the State’s cultural commonwealth. In Michigan, we not only appreciate our cultural treasures, we guard them zealously in charitable trust for all state residents, present and future.”

The new emergency manager, appointed to restructure the city’s debt and reduce the nagging deficit, has advised the DIA to get an attorney in case creditors try to go after the artwork, which includes several works by Vincent van Gogh, including a self portrait, Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker,” paintings by Henri Matisse, Edgar Degas and Rembrandt, ancient sculptures, plus enormous murals of Detroit by Diego Rivera.

A Bloomberg column last week suggested that metro Detroiters don’t deserve the artwork.

On Friday, Orr is to meet with the city’s unions, creditors and insurers in hopes of striking a deal that would require them to accept a small fraction of what the city is owed.

If Orr can’t strike a deal, he’s prepared to file for make Detroit the biggest city to file for bankruptcy.

Mayoral candidate Tom Barrow, who has led the effort to remove the former Wayne County prosecutor, filed a request this morning to move the case to the top court and bypass the appellate court.

“Detroiters need a quick and definitive resolution to this historic case, so that we can continue the campaign process unobstructed by legal maneuvers which delay and confuse voters with legalese and interminable appeals to shop for a favorable verdict,” Barrow said today.

A Wayne County Circuit judge removed Duggan from mayoral race Thursday over residency requirements, saying he was not a registered voter for the required year before filing for candidacy. That ruling overturned an earlier decision by the Detroit Elections Commission to keep Duggan on the ballot.

Barrow, a perennial candidate for mayor, also leveled harsh criticism against Detroit Clerk Janice Winfrey and other city officials.

“In trying to reverse the decision and reinterpret the provision, the city’s Corporation Counsel is rejecting their own work, their own wording, and their approvals in order to buttress Winfrey’s error in judgment in allowing Duggan to submit his petitions without first vetting his voter registration requirements,” said Barrow. “Had Winfrey done her job with professionalism all of these legal proceedings would never have occurred so Mr. Duggan needs to lay the blame for his dilemma squarely on his friend Janice Winfrey.”

Houses, fire stations, schools and churches are scavenged within days of being abandoned for copper pipes and fixtures, aluminum siding and anything else of value. Light poles are toppled for the metal wiring. And manhole covers and sewer grates are peeled off the streets.

Who are the scrappers? They are laid-off autoworkers, drug addicts, high school dropouts and others trying to get by.

Click on a photo to open the gallery.

His campaign made the announcement today following Judge Lita M. Popke’s decision that Duggan was not a Detroit resident for the required year before turning in his signatures to become an official candidate for mayor. Duggan plans to argue that he was a resident for a year by the filing deadline, even if he wasn’t when he submitted his signatures.

The judge’s decision overturned the city election commission’s 2-1 vote to keep Duggan on the ballot.

Mayor candidate Tom Barrow, who has been calling for Duggan’s removal from the ballot, told me today that he doesn’t believe an appeal will be successful.

“The judge addressed each argument,” Barrow said.

Duggan has been accused of being a carpetbagger. He moved from Livonia to Detroit in March 2012 but failed to register until April 16, 2012. Duggan filed petitions to run for Mayor on April 2, full weeks short the mandated  one-year residency requirement, Judge Popke ruled.

With Duggan out, at least temporarily, the face of the mayoral race has changed dramatically. Fellow frontrunner Benny Napoleon, who is the Wayne County sheriff, so far has no strong competition, but Duggan’s removal could change that quickly.

Metal thieves are tearing apart Detroit at an astounding rate: They’re stealing manhole covers, sewer grates, church bells, copper roofs, catalytic converters, transformers, mausoleums from cemeteries and virtually anything else made of metal. They’re destroying schools, historic buildings, the lighting system and thousands of homes.

Why? Because many scrapyards are paying top dollar for stolen metal, no questions asked.

Over the past two years, Michigan lawmakers have proposed tougher rules and penalties on scrapyards, but politicians have buckled under the pressure of the powerful metal recycling industry. Once again Tuesday, industry representatives successfully lobbied lawmakers to shelve new legislation indefinitely.

“How much more policing do you want business to do for you?” state Rep. Tom McMillin, R-Rochester Hills, asked law enforcement in Lansing.

Police and prosecutors testified this week that scrapyards operate with virtually no oversight, allowing thieves to drop off scrap metal for quick cash and little risk.

The new state House bills, which replaced similar legislation that had been shelved for more than a year, would require require scrap metal buyers to keep logs of the identity and address of sellers and snap photos of their items and vehicles. Cash transactions would be banned so that a paper trail is maintained.

The House committee may reconsider the bills in several months, members said Tuesday, but that has been the refrain for the past two years.

But I didn’t expect any of that Monday evening at Wayne State University, where Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr was holding his much-anticipated first public meeting to address residents and field questions. Although Orr and his advisers were warned that as many as 1,000 Detroiters may show up, they held the event in a cramped, 250-seat venue at Wayne State University that predictably filled up with students, media, city officials and the lucky residents who arrived early enough to gain entrance. 

Police began forcibly removing residents from the public building, pushing them into the rain.

While capturing the moment on video, I turned my camera on an officer forcibly removing Deadline Detroit reporter Jeff Wattrick from the building. Seconds later, a cop pushed me from behind, shoving me out the door and onto the cement. My glasses and camera crashed onto the sidewalk, corrupting some of the video files. (We are trying to salvage them)

“People are suffering as a result of what’s happening,” Lila Cabbil, a Detroiter locked out of the meeting, told me. “We want to have a people’s voice in the solution.”

Inside the auditorium, Orr dismissed criticism that the meeting room was too small.

“I’ve had many meetings, particularly ones with the faith community,” Orr said. “There’s no subterfuge. I have no problem discussing where we are and what we have to do.”

That still doesn’t explain why Orr chose to hold the forum in a room four times smaller than the ones Mayor Dave Bing held during his public meetings. Wayne State University, where city services are least impacted by budget cuts, has four larger venues that are commonly used for these kinds of meetings. And there are dozens of community centers, churches and auditoriums with much larger capacities scattered throughout Detroit, including city hall.

Orr has unilateral control of Detroit’s $1 billion budget, the city’s unions and its numerous assets, such as Belle Isle and artwork at the Detroit Institute of Arts. He was appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder to erase the city’s deficit and strike a deal with creditors to avoid filing for bankruptcy protection.

The last thing she wanted to hear was news about the budget. Her husband, Vincent Fields, had suffered head, back, shoulder and leg injuries in late May. As doctors tended to Fields, from Engine 17, fellow firefighters poured into the hospital to show their support.

But in the chaos, Fields ended up alone with Fire Commissioner Donald Austin, who offered no condolences and instead bemoaned the budget crisis and the cost of caring for injured firefighters, Kaplan wrote to a fire official this week.

“His entire conversation with me was concerning the failing budget, justifying his decisions about helping the deficit within the fire department, the detailed cost of clothing for each firefighter, as well as the cost of accommodating the injured during hospitalization,” Kaplan said.

It’s a common complaint against Austin – that he’s done nothing to improve the morale or safety in the department, that he’s not resisted 10% pay cuts to firefighters who are forced to respond to more blazes, that he’s rarely spoken out when someone is injured or killed and that he’s allowed fire stations to fall into disrepair.

“I was so outraged that his first and only words to me were concerning the budget and cost to run the department,” Kaplan said. “The discussion was totally inappropriate and showed a lack of compassion for the fire fighters that put their lives on the line daily to protect the citizens.”

Over the past year, Austin has declined interview requests by the Motor City Muckraker and only responds via e-mail, which first must be approved by the mayor’s office.

Here is a video of the fire that injured Fields.

Tens of thousands of confidential records containing social security numbers, financial information and medical histories of children and adults have been left behind in abandoned schools, police stations, nursing homes, churches and hospitals in metro Detroit, a one-year Motor City Muckraker investigation has found.

By state and federal law, the records should have been destroyed or properly secured. Instead, they are strewn throughout easily accessible buildings, stuffed in moldy cardboard boxes and scattered across floors littered with debris.

The records contain social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers and other confidential information of rape victims, missing people, students and cooperating witnesses to crimes. Some include psychological evaluations, medical and criminal histories and disciplinary records of employees.

The records can be a windfall for identity thieves and a danger to crime victims and witnesses. At least three police stations in Detroit and Highland Park, for example, left behind records that identified informants, their addresses, phone numbers and statements to police.

One of them was Carolyn J., who helped police track down a murderer in 1993. Now in her 60s, Carolyn was shocked when we told her we found her phone number, address, social security number and statement to police inside a closet at an abandoned city building.

“It’s horrifying; I’m shocked,” Carolyn, who asked that we not reveal her last name. “I never imagined this would happen. I would never have talked [to police] if I knew this was possible. Never.”

Over the past year, some of the buildings have been demolished. But many more are easily accessible through open doors and windows.

The Motor City Muckraker won’t name most of the accessible buildings to keep thieves from finding the records. But one is worth revealing because of the disturbing incompetence of authorities and the shenanigans of the owner: The abandoned and accessible Greater Detroit Hospital in Hamtramck still contains thousands of patient records despite an extensive investigation nearly 10 years ago that was supposed to ensure the records were properly secured or destroyed. The state fined the owner, Dr. Soon K. Kim, $1 million after the confidential records were seen flying out the open windows in 2006 and later being burned at a farm.

Kim was never charged, yet a quick stroll through the hospital would reveal stacks of patient records.

Similar files have been left behind at nursing homes and other abandoned hospitals in metro Detroit.

One of the biggest offenders are police departments. Police stations left behind social security numbers, arrest reports, search warrants, booking records, rap sheets and victim and witness statements. In one station, bulky binders 0f missing-person reports were strewn across the lobby and behind the front desk, containing a treasure trove of personal data – social security numbers, phone numbers, dates of birth, medical histories, photos and addresses.

But no police department was as shameless as Highland Park’s. When the department was dissolved in 2001, city leaders walked away from the building and left behind every conceivable police record. The place was ransacked for 10 years, with only a fraction of the records remaining by the time the building was demolished last year. Police ignored complaints about the records for years.

Schools in Detroit and Highland Park are just as quick to abandon student transcripts, report cards, medical examinations and disciplinary records, which often include social security numbers, addresses, phone numbers, parents’ names and other personal information.

One of the most egregious examples was the former Cass Tech High School in Detroit, where thousands of student and teacher records cascaded from the building as crews demolished it in 2011. I warned Detroit Public Schools about the confidential records but officials never responded.

None of this should have happened. State and federal law make it a crime punishable by up to 93 days in jail for failing to properly secure social security numbers, health records and other confidential information.

Click on a photo below to view the gallery.