The Doherty Hotel and the night the oil money came due

It was a little after ten on a Saturday night, May 14, 1938, when the shots went off in the tap room of the Doherty Hotel. Isaiah Leebove, a New York lawyer turned Clare oil baron, fell at the bar. The man holding the gun was his own business partner, Jack Livingston, who had lived upstairs in the hotel for eight years. Livingston pleaded temporary insanity and walked free in under an hour of jury deliberation.

That a gangland killing happened in downtown Clare wasn’t really a surprise to anyone there. The Doherty had been the unofficial clubhouse of some rough company. Leebove had been schooled in money laundering by the New York crime boss Arnold Rothstein, and when Rothstein was murdered in 1928, Leebove headed for Michigan. He landed in Clare just as oil was coming up out of the central Lower Peninsula, and he, Livingston, and a Detroit Purple Gang lieutenant named Sam Garfield started an oil company. The Purple Gang — Detroit’s most feared Prohibition mob — treated the hotel as a regular stop, close enough to the Saginaw oil fields and far enough from the city to feel safe.

Alfred J. Doherty had built the place in 1924 on a bet about the future. The town’s old hotel, the Calkins House, had burned in 1920, and the Chamber of Commerce handed Doherty the corner of McEwan and Fifth to put up something new. Most hotels in those days hugged the railroad depot. Doherty, a friend of Henry Ford, was sure the automobile would win, so he set his fireproof hotel right in the middle of downtown instead.

He bet right. The depot is long gone; the Doherty is still open, still serving in the same room where Leebove took his last drink. Ask at the front desk and someone will happily point out the spot.