When oil came up under Clare and the mob came with it

The deal that built a Michigan oil empire was struck in a cabin near Harrison in 1929. Three men sat down to it: Isaiah Leebove, a New York lawyer fresh from the orbit of the murdered crime boss Arnold Rothstein; his cousin Jack Livingston; and Sam Garfield, a lieutenant of Detroit’s Purple Gang. Out of that meeting came the Mammoth Producing & Refining Company.

The timing was perfect for them, and strange for Clare. Oil was being struck across central Michigan in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and a quiet county that had been logged flat a generation earlier suddenly had derricks going up in the fields. For men with money that needed cleaning, a legitimate oil company was a gift. Mammoth grew fast and grew big — by reputation one of the largest independent oil producers east of the Mississippi River. The crews drilling those wells were doing honest, dangerous work; the money behind some of it was anything but.

The boom drew a particular crowd to town. Detroit gangsters could drift up to the oil fields, do business, and disappear, and Clare’s Doherty Hotel became their stopping place. It’s a peculiar thing to picture now — Purple Gang men eating supper and tipping big in a small northern Michigan town — but the oil and the outlaws arrived together and were hard to pull apart.

It ended the way these stories tend to. Leebove and Livingston fell out over a piece of land and whether to drill it, and in 1938 Livingston shot Leebove dead at the Doherty bar. The wells eventually played out too. What’s left is a county that, for a few wild years, was an oil town with a Detroit accent.