Ambassador Bridge

0:00This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Detroit, Michigan is the home to the Ambassador Bridge, which links Detroit to the Canadian border city of Windsor. The Ambassador is essential. CNN once called it the most economically important one and a half miles of roadway in the Western Hemisphere. Every day, endless lines of trucks wait for hours on a concrete plaza flanked by rows of traffic cones so they can be processed by a border agent. That's producer Andrew Lapin. The Ambassador is the linchpin of the North American auto industry. Cars are constantly being driven back and forth to different factories.

0:40Last year, more than 2 million trucks drove across the Ambassador. In fact, 30 % of all trade between the U.S. and Canada rolls over this bridge. Everybody has to use the bridge because they basically don't have any other choice. There's a tunnel nearby that's too small for most trucks to drive through. And the next closest international bridge is some 65 miles away. To get to the bridge, all those freight trucks first have to drive by a residential neighborhood in southwest Detroit called Mexicantown. And for many years, they had to drive right through it. Mexicantown is right at the bridge's entry point.

1:20And residents have suffered through loud honking and negative health effects for decades. Here's how Sam Butler, president of a local neighborhood group, described it to me. There is this black soot on windows or on the outside of people's homes that face the bridge that you can literally take your finger, wipe off a piece of this black soot, living so close to an international crossing that gets 10 ,000 trucks per day. Folks in Windsor don't like the bridge either. It's not well-maintained. Large chunks of concrete have been known to break off and fall on the streets below. Basically, everyone in the surrounding area hates this bridge.

2:00But they have nobody to complain to. They can't petition the city or the county or even the U.S. or Canadian governments. Because none of them own this bridge. In fact, for the longest time, the Ambassador Bridge was owned by one guy. You had to take it up with him, if you could get a hold of him. I'm a quiet, private man. But somebody decided to make me something other than being private. I didn't. That's Manuel Maroon. He went by Matty. He owned the Ambassador Bridge from 1979 until 2018, when the ownership transferred to his son, Matthew. The elder Maroon may have been private, in the sense that he almost never gave interviews.

2:45But for decades, he was, quietly, one of the most important people in Detroit. When Manny Maroon died in 2020, he was a billionaire. A good chunk of his empire was funded with bridge tolls and the duty-free gas stations on the bridge. By this point, you're probably asking the obvious question. How can one man and his family own an international bridge, a critical piece of infrastructure that so many people have to use? Actually, a lot of critical infrastructure is privately owned. And the story of the Maroon family in Detroit shows how this kind of relationship can go totally wrong.

3:27The Ambassador Bridge has always been privately owned. And when it was built in the 1920s, that wasn't so unusual. At the time, the economy was booming and the country was modernizing. But local governments were often slow to act. So big infrastructure projects, like bridges, sometimes needed private investors to get off the ground. In Detroit, the auto industry was taking off, but there was no easy way to get parts across the river from Canada. They needed a bridge. The city and the state weren't building one, so private investors started raising money and drawing up plans. I should add, the mayor of Detroit at the time did not like the idea that this bridge would be privately owned.

4:09He tried to stop it. But after the city passed a ballot proposal by a huge margin, he had no choice. The stakes were driven into the ground in 1927. At a ceremony to mark the occasion, a 16-year-old girl in high heels bounced across a catwalk over the Detroit River. This girl, Helen Austin, was the daughter of one of the bridge's original investors. Reports at the time said she was the first person to walk across the river. Here's what one local newspaper wrote that day. Through the clouds of dark brown smoke that rose above the railroad, one could vision a mighty steel structure of greater clearance than the Brooklyn Bridge, spanning the Detroit River and opening a new era in continental transportation.

4:58But the celebrations were short-lived. The ambassador struggled after the Great Depression and, for years, had financial problems. The owners managed to keep it open by making the bridge into a publicly traded company with shares available on the stock market. For a time, this approach helped keep the bridge solvent. But ultimately, the decision to sell shares opened the door to a takeover by one man, a man nobody in Detroit had ever really heard of. His basic biography ought to be that of Rags to Riches' American hero. and instead he's probably the most disliked businessman in Detroit by far in a couple of generations.

5:40That's John Gallagher. He's a retired Detroit Free Press journalist and one of the only people to have ever interviewed Maroon, who really was a self-made success. Maroon started working in his dad's garage after college and tenaciously grew that into a local trucking empire. Matty told me during one of the few times when he was talking to reporters that as a teenager, he had pumped gas for Jimmy Hoffa and, you know, built, you know, came from sort of rags to riches, built this enormous fortune, mainly through his trucking company. Matty Maroon outbid some fierce competition, including from Warren Buffett to get total ownership of the bridge.

6:20Matty Maroon actually had a long history with the ambassador before he purchased it. His family had been pushed out of their home by the original construction project. But 50 years later, the bridge was all his. Basically, a license to print money. You have a family-controlled private company of scale, right, that, you know, you do the math, but they must have been turning millions and millions of dollars of unbelievable profit from this asset. This is Steve Tabachman, a former Democratic Michigan state representative from southwest Detroit. He says after Matty Maroon bought the bridge in 1979, he became a notorious figure in the community.

7:04Describing every shenanigan Matty Maroon got up to in Detroit would take hours. I'm not going to do that. But Baseline, according to DeBachman, Maroon didn't do very much to address the longstanding complaints about noise and dirt in the neighborhoods near the bridge. In fact, there wasn't much community outreach at all. There was no presence for this company in the community other than the commerce they were doing. So there weren't large investments. There wasn't like there was a Manny Maroon community center or rec center or, you know, reading room at the high school or anything like that. Detroit's wealthiest businessmen have tended to give a lot to local charities, especially when the city started losing people in the mid-20th century.

7:51But Matty Maroon wasn't a big public philanthropist. He was more focused on expanding the bridge empire. In the 1980s, Maroon bought up a bunch of land near the bridge. Then he presented a plan to expand the ambassador's entryway, the opening plaza. This expansion was so the bridge could accommodate more traffic and bring in more tolls. To accomplish this, Maroon needed to buy up the land near the bridge's opening. But there was one problem. That land was already occupied. by a vibrant residential neighborhood. I mean, the bridge company wasn't thinking about what they were wiping out. They had tunnel vision.

8:30Bridge vision, I guess, is what it should be called. Kathy Wendler is a Detroit native. She worked for the Southwest Detroit Business Association for decades, first joining in 1981, two years after the Maroons took over the bridge. Her job was community development. She soon realized that meant she would have to oppose the Maroons. It was located in a community. It was located in a place. And that place was at least as important as that bridge. Important and to its residents, pretty special. Southwest Detroit was not some big industrial depot. Far from it. This is a closely knit neighborhood. A lot of the Motor City is really spread out.

9:16Wide boulevards meant for a lot of cars. But southwest, it's dense and it's accessible. It was walkable. You didn't have to have a car. You could get groceries. You could go to the doctor. You could get dry cleaning done. It was vibrant. For the folks living here, the neighborhood felt special. And the Maroons and their ambitious plans quickly became everyone's business. Here's Sam Butler again, the head of a local neighborhood group. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that a lot of neighbors feel like the bridge company has historically been an existential threat to the neighborhood. Throughout the 80s, Matty Maroon bought up a lot of property to expand his bridge empire.

10:02His representatives went door to door in the Mexican town neighborhood, purchasing one house after another and putting pressure on the residents who stayed. Anthony Benavides is a Southwest Detroit community activist. He says the Maroons used a tactic called blockbusting to buy up local real estate. Basically, they would buy up houses and depopulate the street so that eventually everyone would leave. He was strategically buying houses throughout the block and just letting them sit there. They were vacant, so of course you had drugs, you had prostitutes, you had wild dogs. Anthony loves his community.

10:39He's worked for years at a public park in the area, in full view of the bridge. And he saw the systematic destruction of his neighborhood up close. The people next door to that house, they sat there looking at a vacant house for years until they are begging Manny Maroon to buy their house. Sometimes the sales agents gave no indication they were there on behalf of the Maroons. They'd represent companies with names like Mexicantown Real Estate Company. Some unsuspecting homeowners were desperate to get out of the area that was being hollowed out and collapsing from blight. They were happy to sell.

11:17Only later did they learn the truth about who bought their property. Maroon wanted to buy up the land near the bridge so he could one day expand its entry plaza and collect more tolls. But he bought lots of other property too. Enough to become a true baron of Detroit real estate. One website that tracks landlords in the city estimates the Maroons have owned as many as 978 properties in Detroit alone. And the Windsor Star estimates that at one point Maroon owned another 139 properties in Windsor at the bridge's entry point on the Canadian side. A lot of the property the Maroons were buying wasn't anywhere near the bridge.

11:57And once they owned them, the Maroons weren't that interested in doing anything with them. In fact, the Maroons accumulated so many blight tickets over the years that they struck more than one deal with the city to pay them off in negotiated lump sums. This kind of thing, buying property and just letting it go to seed, it was happening a lot in Detroit around this time. The city was declining rapidly in the 80s, and land was selling for cheap. That meant land speculators could sweep in, take advantage of an economic downturn, and hoard real estate, just in case Detroit ever made a comeback without having to worry about keeping it up.

12:34Who was going to foreclose on you? The city? They were broke. If you can buy that property for$500,$1 ,000,$3 ,000, I guess you're investing that out of speculation that hopefully one day, someday, somebody comes and wants to buy that property and they're willing to pay you multiples of that, you know, few thousand dollar purchase price and the properties become valuable. And the worst case scenario is you lose the property to tax foreclosure. But that is a 30-year gamble, and then you're only out your original cost. Matty Maroon's buying spree got so big that he eventually landed on a major piece of Detroit history.

13:15In 1992, Maroon purchased Michigan Central, a massive former train station in the southwest neighborhood of Corktown. The station was a relic of an earlier era in Detroit, when people still commuted by train. And its giant tiled ceilings also welcomed newly arriving migrants and Black Americans coming up during the Great Migration. The building was known as Detroit's Ellis Island. Michigan Central had seen better days even when Matty Maroon bought it. But he did nothing with it besides building a fence around the property and putting in some windows after the old ones had been busted by looters.

13:52A majestic transportation hub rotting away in plain sight. To a lot of people, it felt like a metaphor for what had become of Detroit. Carl Craig, a Detroit techno pioneer, cited the building as a weird kind of inspiration for himself and other musicians as they developed this revolutionary new post-industrial sound in the Motor City. This is a typical example of Detroit. Just beautiful structure. It was booming when I was a kid, and now, 20 years later, it's just totally f***ed up. By the 1990s, Michigan Central was a magnet for graffiti and scavengers. It embodied the dreaded Detroit stereotype of ruin porn.

14:43Urban explorers went spelunking inside to gawk at the ravages of the Rust Belt. Like in this clip from the 2012 documentary Detropia, in which an opera tenor wanders through Michigan Central. The walls are crumbling and filled with graffiti.

15:06It looks like something out of a zombie movie. And this is what I think is so sad about the whole situation. The original owners of the bridge were trying to help grow Detroit's economy during its boom years. Decades later, the new owners were coming out on the other end and helping to accelerate the city's disastrous fall. While many of their properties fell into disrepair, the Maroons still made huge profits because their main business, the Ambassador Bridge, became even more indispensable after the passage of NAFTA in 1992. Remember NAFTA? You know, the agreement designed to eliminate tariffs between the United States and Canada?

15:46Anyhow, NAFTA led to a big increase in commerce between the two countries and made the bridge essential. Forbes magazine once estimated the bridge makes$60 million in revenue every year. After the passage of NAFTA, Matty Maroon became notably more ambitious in his dealings with Detroit. He made a pretty brazen move to expand his business by starting construction on a second bridge right beside the first one. Traffic had increased so much on the ambassador, there was clearly demand for another bridge. The Maroons knew that. They also knew that if they didn't act on that demand, the second bridge would be built by someone else.

16:26Someone who would threaten their monopoly. Matty Maroon didn't have permission from the city of Detroit or the city of Windsor or from anybody to start building a new bridge. In fact, Matty Maroon was supposed to be doing something completely different, something positive for the community. In 2004, Maroon signed a$258 million deal with the city for an initiative called the Gateway Project. The Michigan Department of Transportation, residents, stakeholders, and community leaders are teaming up to improve the international gateway into Michigan, the region, and Detroit. For the Gateway Project, the government would build more roads to ease traffic.

17:07And in exchange, Maroon promised to build entryways to connect the bridge to the highway system so trucks would no longer have to drive through the Mexican town neighborhood. It seemed like a great deal for everybody. But instead of holding up his end of the bargain, Matty Maroon's company started construction on a second bridge in 2007. They didn't get very far. In the end, they only built two ramps that didn't connect to anything. We call it the Dukes of Hazzard Bridge right now. So it's like, you know, it's never been built. It's just like a ramp going up. For years, Matty Maroon promised to take action and connect up with the highway.

17:47But he never did. All he did was build that bridge to nowhere, claiming it was part of the Gateway deal. The city appeared helpless. They waited five years for Maroon to hold up his part of the bargain. Members of the community fought back against this kind of behavior with dramatic public protests. Anthony Benavides remembers one of them. There's people that laid on the road so his trucks couldn't go through. Literally laid on the road. That's how involved they were. They literally put their bodies in front of trucks. More than 100 people formed a human chain to block access to the bridge. Some elected officials joined them.

18:27So did the Occupy movement. We are the 99 %! We are the 99 %! We are the 99 %! And the protests spread out. The Metro Times, the Alt Weekly, published a cartoon depicting Maroon as Mr. Burns from The Simpsons. Protesters carried a giant puppet of Matty Maroon and paraded him in front of Michigan Central, where they chastised him for owning so many blighted properties. I'm here because we are sick and tired of Matty Maroon and his broken, torn down, his houses that's dilapidated, renting them to people. This is crazy. With all the money that he has, he's a billionaire. He's a CEO. He's the only one getting rich.

19:12Despite these protests and pushback from politicians like Steve Tabachman and Rashida Tlaib, the Maroons still largely got their way. Partly because Matty Maroon spent heavily on lobbying in Michigan. For years, when the state would raise the prospect of dealing with the bridge's problems, those efforts would die quickly. They are also known to be very litigious. To avoid drawn-out legal battles, local governments usually decided the best way forward was to cut deals with the family on all bridge matters. But with so much pushback against the Maroons, a showdown became inevitable. In January 2012, Maroon and his longtime right-hand man, Dan Stamper, were hauled before a county judge.

19:54Fed up with their foot dragging on the Gateway Project, the judge ordered both of them to spend one night in jail. Maroon was 84 years old. One of the richest and most powerful men in the city was thrown in county lockup. John Galgo remembers this well. It was astonishing that a guy of his stature, I mean, a billionaire businessman, would be thrown in jail for resisting, you know, a court order. The stay in the pen wasn't too bad for Matty Maroon. He got approval to have the Detroit Athletic Club, a swanky members-only venue in the city, send over a catered dinner that night. When he got out, he had a big smile on his face.

20:34Hi. How are you? I'm fine. How do you feel to be out? I love our country. Best country in the world. For a long time, it seemed like the Maroons' bridge monopoly would never end. Ultimately, the only group of people with the clout and the ability to stand up to the Maroons was the Great White North. Yes, Canada came to the rescue to bail out America. And when Canada came swinging, the final battle over the future of the ambassador began. Canada's top ministers actually agreed with the Maroons about something. There should be a second bridge connecting Detroit to Windsor. They just didn't want Maddie to own it.

21:16Beginning in 2004, the Canadian government made a series of proposals to build a second bridge. Their bridge would link up directly with the freeway, making the trip easier for truckers and the quality of life better for the neighborhoods in Detroit. It would introduce competition and it would bring back pedestrian walkways. The ambassador had closed theirs years ago. A Canadian diplomat named Roy Norton was the public face of the effort. He made it clear breaking up the Maroons bridge monopoly would be no easy task. I confess to having had periodic visions of a Maroon-owned 18-wheeler bearing down on me and forcing me off the road as I crisscrossed the state of Michigan.

22:00The bottom line in Michigan, the Maroons win. At least historically, that's been the case. Norton called the Maroons liars and scoundrels. He chastised the lawmakers who took their campaign money and suggested the whole family should be investigated for violating antitrust laws. This tough talk paid off. In 2012, an agreement was reached. A second bridge would be built and controlled entirely by the Canadian government. It would be named the Gordie Howe Bridge, in honor of the Canadian hockey star who played most of his career with the Detroit Red Wings, a symbol of bi-national unity. And here's the sweetener.

22:40Canada would pay the entire cost of the new bridge. American taxpayers would pay nothing. This didn't sit well with the Maroons. Another bridge would mean they'd have to adopt competitive pricing and make costly improvements just to stay afloat. So they pulled out all the stops to try and prevent the Gordie Howe from being built. Matty Maroon's son, Matthew, made his case to the media. We've got a Michigan business that's been here for 83 years and contributed economically to the city and the state. The Maroons fought back with some pretty aggressive tactics. In 2011, when the Gordie Howe was still in the planning stage, a bunch of yellow eviction notices went up in a neighborhood close to the proposed bridge site.

23:22A lot of people, understandably, freaked out. But the notices were fake. A scare tactic meant to drum up opposition to the Gordie Howe Bridge. A conservative lobbying group, Americans for Prosperity, took credit for the fake eviction notices. Then there was the ballot box. Matty Maroon spent more than$30 million to get an amendment passed by Michigan voters called Proposal 6. Proposal 6 would make all future bridge projects subject to a referendum by both state and local voters. The whole thing was designed to make approval for projects like the Gordie Howe Bridge much more difficult. Groups supported by Maddie Maroon ran ads implying that voters somehow would have to pay for the Gordie Howe Bridge.

24:07And that Proposal 6 would stop that from happening. Here's why Michigan voters are voting yes on Proposal 6. There's no such thing as a free bridge. There's no such thing as a free bridge. Someone pays. I don't care who owns the bridge. All I care about is paying for a new one without even being asked. Yes means we have the power. No means we give it away to the politicians. They called their campaign, The People Should Decide. Ultimately, the bridge amendment failed, with 60 % of voters rejecting it. Still, the Maroon family wouldn't go down without a fight. The Maroons took the new bridge authority to court, filing lawsuit after lawsuit to delay its construction, and appealing all the way to the state Supreme Court.

24:52Eventually, they ran out of legal avenues, but they were able to drag things out for six years. In 2018, during President Trump's first term in office, the Canadian bridge was due to finally begin construction, so Matty Maroon tried a Hail Mary to save his family's monopoly. Dear Mr. President, there are two grand new bridges being proposed in Detroit between America and Canada. One is American-made, American-owned. It uses American-made steel. 5 ,000 American workers. The other would be Canadian-made, Canadian-owned, Canadian workers. Who knows who would make the steel? This ad ran on Fox News in the hopes that Trump would see it and intervene.

25:36Given that the president was known to watch Fox News constantly, it wasn't a bad plan. In this ad, the Maroons tried to paint their idea for a bridge project as a patriotic alternative. Choose American. Thank you, sir. Signed, America. Despite all this, let's just call it lobbying, Trump never intervened. And the Gordie Howe Bridge finally broke ground that June. This fall, the Gordie Howe Bridge is set to open. It's a brand new symbol of Canadian-American friendship. At a moment when relations between the two countries and their leaders are at their lowest point since the War of 1812, when British troops burned down the White House.

26:21As another Canadian once said, isn't it ironic?

26:28Since the loss of the bridge monopoly, the Maroons have taken a step back. The same month the Gordie Howe Bridge began construction in 2018, the family sold Michigan Central to the Ford Motor Company for$90 million. In 2020, Matty Maroon died at the age of 93 from heart failure. He had already transferred control of the family's enterprises, including the bridge, to his son Matthew. Since then, the Maroons have continued their blockbusting in new areas of the city, connected to other business ventures. But the tone and the family's tactics have softened. They've held public events. They reached a community agreement with Southwest Detroit that clearly defines where they can build and where they can't.