^_The
Talented
_{^Mr. Bruseaux}

---

He made his name in Chicago investigating racial violence, solving crimes, and exposing corruption. But America’s first Black private detective was hiding secrets of his own.

_{BY MATTHEW WOLFE}

Early in the evening of April 10, 1928, the day of Chicago’s municipal primary, a candidate for alderman named Octavius C. Granady was pulling up to a polling station, choked with voters fresh from work, when a man dressed in a gray overcoat and a fedora strolled up to his car, drew a pistol, and fired a volley of shots through the back window. Amazingly, the would-be killer missed his target. Granady’s driver slammed his foot on the gas, sending the vehicle, hung with campaign banners, burning rubber down Washburne Avenue. The gunman hopped onto the running board of a nearby Cadillac, which promptly gave chase.

The weeks leading up to the city’s election had been marked by a frenzy of political violence. Chicago’s flamboyantly amoral mayor, William “Big Bill” Thompson, who had recently won office on the populist slogan “America First,” enjoyed the backing of local gangsters, including the infamous syndicate kingpin Al Capone. To push through Thompson’s ticket of loyal supporters, Capone’s henchmen adopted a blunt approach to canvassing. Houses of political officials were bombed, poll workers beaten, and the citizenry intimidated by club-wielding thugs. Tabloids dubbed the election the Pineapple Primary—“pineapple” being slang for a hand grenade.

A brave coalition of civic reformers, however, was fighting back against the corruption afflicting the city. Among them was Octavius Granady. A Black lawyer and World War I veteran, Granady had volunteered to run against a longtime Thompson ally named Morris Eller, who was white, for the city council seat representing Chicago’s 20th Ward. The heavily contested race soon became the front line in the battle for the soul of the city. Fearing for his life as primary day approached, Granady had asked for protection from the police department. The request was denied.

After the attempt on his life, Granady’s car careened wildly for more than a mile through the crowded streets of the South Side, trying desperately to lose its pursuers. The hit man, still hunched low on the running board and clutching the Cadillac’s steel frame for balance, continued to snap off rounds. Then, while trying to maneuver a turn, Granady’s driver lost control and crashed into a curb.

Dazed, the candidate stumbled from the wreck, only to be met by a trio of attackers exiting the Cadillac. Squaring up, they brought him down in a spray of shotgun fire. As Granady lay dying, the assassins sped off, a banner for his opponent flapping from their vehicle’s chassis.

Nearly a decade into Prohibition, Chicagoans had become inured to a certain amount of murder and mayhem. But the daylight execution of a principled political reformer shocked the populace. A special prosecutor was appointed to bring the perpetrators to justice. His first task was to hire someone to lead the investigation into the killing—someone fearless and independent, free from influence by the city’s notoriously troubled police department. A series of reputable investigative agencies, however, failed to make any headway in the case. Frustrated, the prosecutor turned to an unlikely choice—a Black man, one who had been blazing an extraordinary path through the world of criminal investigation: Sheridan Bruseaux.

A little less than a decade before, Bruseaux had become, by all extant records, the United States’ first Black licensed private investigator. The industry was, at the time, a white man’s enterprise, with illustrious agencies such as Pinkerton and Baldwin-Felts marketing their services to the country’s moneyed elite. Bruseaux pitched his to Chicago’s growing Black bourgeoisie, who were beginning to suffer the same messy divorces and estate battles as their white counterparts. While Bruseaux snooped into embezzlement and infidelity—a private eye’s bread and butter—he also moonlighted as an avenger of racial violence, hunting perpetrators of lynchings and bombings. His advantage over his white competitors, Bruseaux would later claim, was his vast network of informants, hidden in plain sight: Black cooks and cleaners and doormen, an army of service workers who received no second glances but were privy to the city’s whispers and confidences.

Though Bruseaux has since been neglected by history, he was once a household name in the Black community. But as he prepared to take on the Granady case, the biggest of his career, his public persona revealed only part of his story. He had become wealthy and famous by unearthing other people’s secrets, but the man known as Sheridan Bruseaux was keeping a few of his own.

On April 26, 1890, Sheridan Bruseau—the second to last of fifteen children, nine of whom survived past adolescence—was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. Sheridan’s father, Alexander, had been born into slavery on a sugar plantation in Louisiana, a land of serpentine bayous and long fields of swaying cane. In harvest season, cutting gangs waded into the tall grass, hacking at the stalks with flat, double-sided knives from dawn to dusk. Among Southern slaves cane plantations inspired terror, so frequent was death from exhaustion, disease, or industrial accidents. (The famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass dubbed captivity on such plantations a “life of living death.”)

During the Civil War, when the Union Army marched into Louisiana, thousands of slaves dropped their blades and fled, many choosing to enlist with their liberators. In the summer of 1863, Alexander Bruseau, then 25, joined up and was mustered into the U.S. Colored Troops 79th Infantry. Following the Union’s final victory in 1865, Bruseau received $249.60 in military benefits from the Freedman’s Bureau and headed north to Arkansas. By the late 19th century, Little Rock was home to a thriving class of Black entrepreneurs and craftsmen. Most former slaves, though, had few marketable skills, and they were forced into menial work and subsistence incomes. Bruseau became a gardener. In 1877, he married a woman, Nancy, from North Carolina, with whom he had several children, including Sheridan. Their home, a simple frame shack near the city limits, sat in sight of a cemetery honoring the Confederate dead.

Under Jim Crow, Black Southerners were frequently subjected to spectacular violence. In 1904, when Sheridan was 14, the town of St. Charles two counties over became the site of one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history, in which 13 Black men were shot to death. Such brutal vigilantism often received the tacit support of journalists. Little Rock’s Arkansas Democrat once printed on its front page that a “black brute”—an alliterative phrase the publication had a special fondness for—accused of assaulting a “highly respected lady” was hanged from a telephone pole in the town of Tillar. The report noted that he had been left strung up for much of the next day. The alleged assailant was 17, only a year older than Sheridan.

After attending a local high school, then the recently established Arkansas Baptist College, Sheridan faced a cruelly delimited future. He took a series of low-paying service jobs—day laborer, messenger, porter. But soon an opportunity presented itself. With the onset of World War I, factories in northern cities began stamping out munitions and canned food. Word of higher wages and fairer treatment spread south. Between 1916 and 1919, around half a million Black Americans departed the rural districts of their birth for the North’s industrialized sprawl and hope of a more profitable, less frightening tomorrow. Sheridan, his mother, and many of his siblings were among them.

When Sheridan reemerged in Chicago, his last name was entered into the public record with an x on the end. Viewed one way, the addition was a simple embellishment—attempted evidence, perhaps, of an unprovable claim Bruseaux would later make to a journalist that he was of French descent. But it was also an act of reinvention. In the comparative safety of the North, Bruseaux was free to fashion a new self.

^The Chicago Defender, _{the city’s leading Black newspaper,} boasted that Keystone was the first detective agency to be run by “our group.”

If Bruseaux thought he was leaving racial violence behind in moving north, his optimism was quickly dashed. Across the nation, racial tensions were beginning to erupt. When the United States entered World War I, millions of white working men were sent overseas, many to fill the trenches of the Western Front. After the Armistice was signed at the end of 1918, many returned home to find their jobs and apartments filled by Black faces, newly arrived from the South. A violent backlash ensued. During the Red Summer of 1919, white residents of dozens of U.S. cities launched a program of attacks on Black homes and businesses, terrorizing and slaughtering hundreds of people. The Ku Klux Klan, an organization moribund for over four decades, was not only revived but became a political force.

Chicago did not escape the national mood. The city’s Black population had doubled between 1916 and 1919, and workers of all extractions furiously competed for shifts in packing houses and abattoirs while crowding into cramped apartments with exorbitant rents. The welcome received by migrating Black families, once so hopeful about a better life above the Mason-Dixon Line, was made no smoother by local newspapers. “Half a Million Darkies from Dixie Swarm the North to Better Themselves,” blustered a headline in the Chicago Tribune. In the months leading up to the summer of 1919, white mobs assaulted Black citizens in the streets and firebombed their properties. “It looks very much like Chicago is trying to rival the South in its race hatred against the Negro,” wrote the famed muckraker Ida B. Wells-Barnett in the Tribune in July 1919.

Just weeks later, on a sweltering late-July afternoon, a handful of Black teenagers, cooling themselves on a homemade raft, accidentally drifted into a zone of Lake Michigan considered off-limits to people of color. From the sandy shore, a white man began lobbing rocks at them. At first it seemed to the boys like a game: The vessel was a good distance from the beach, and their assailant’s aim was lazy. But then, just as 17-year-old Eugene Williams, who was swimming alongside the raft, popped out of the water, one of the rocks hit him in the forehead. Stunned, Williams sank to the bottom of the lake and drowned. When his distraught friends reported the incident to a white police officer, he refused to make an arrest. A brawl broke out, and the violence spread into the worst race riot in Chicago history. In a matter of days, 38 Chicagoans were dead and 500 were injured. The bloodshed only ended with the arrival of thousands of state militiamen and a chilling rain.

It was in this very moment, when the hot days of Red Summer were easing into autumn, that Sheridan Bruseaux hung a shingle for a new detective agency in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood, then a center of Black life. Promoting his services in Black newspapers alongside ads for “High-Brown Face Powder,” Bruseaux, now 29, claimed an impressive pedigree. He proudly stated that, since leaving Arkansas, he’d earned a law degree from the University of Minnesota and spent the war years in Europe working for the government’s Secret Service, which ran a vast counterintelligence network. After a stint with an investigative firm in Chicago, Bruseaux had decided to go into business for himself.

In September 1919, Bruseaux opened the doors of the Keystone Detective Agency at 3333 South State, a popular address among Black entrepreneurs. The agency was the first of its kind to be owned by a Black man. The Chicago Defender, the city’s leading Black newspaper, boasted that Keystone was the first detective agency to be run by “our group.”

Tall and broad shouldered, with his short hair conked and split into a stylish side part, Bruseaux cultivated an air of old money, wearing the finely cut suits favored by bankers. (He’d one day be included on a list of the city’s best-dressed men.) Along with other investigative services, Bruseaux offered to shadow unfaithful spouses and locate lost relatives—a common concern for families whose members had been separated during the migration north. His agency made use of emerging technologies like fingerprinting, listening devices, and hidden cameras. Ambitious from the start, Bruseaux made it known that he was available for jobs anywhere in the country, publicizing his business with the slogan “We Cover the World.”

Drawing clients from the city’s growing Black middle class, Bruseaux assembled a diverse docket of cases. Investigations ranged from retrieving stolen jewels and catching currency forgers to debunking confidence men and quacks. In an early success, Keystone made the front page of the Chicago Whip for catching the trafficker of a 15-year-old girl “lured into the underworld.”

Bruseaux’s big break came a month after his agency’s founding, though it wasn’t exactly an investigative coup. The editor of the Chicago Defender hired him to set up the Black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, who had incurred the integration-minded Defender’s wrath by urging Black Americans to return to Africa and establish their own state. At the editor’s behest, Bruseaux bought two shares of stock in Garvey’s Black Star shipping company. By selling them, Garvey violated of an obscure Illinois law forbidding the sale of equities without a state license, and he was briefly jailed. The arrest of a prominent activist was controversial—Garvey had plenty of supporters in the city—but it transformed Bruseaux into a boldface name. In just a few months, he’d have enough business to move from his humble Bronzeville office into two spacious suites decorated with oil paintings and panel mirrors.

Discovering that many of the prejudices that afflicted his family in Arkansas and Louisiana had followed him to Chicago, Bruseaux took on a sideline gig investigating racial violence. He dug into bombings of Black family homes on the South Side, the burning of a Black church, and the murder of a Black 16-year-old by a white druggist from whom the boy had tried to purchase pomade. By investigating such crimes, Bruseaux’s agency offered an alternative path to justice for Black Americans shunned by the legal system.

Bruseaux also began interrogating the root causes of social problems. One client hired him to look into the conditions causing Black unemployment in the Midwest. In a letter to an official at the Department of Labor, Bruseaux asked “why the Negro is constantly being discharged from positions, and even the commonest labor at which he has previously been employed.” Bruseaux frequently drew from interviews, surveys, and first-person observation—mirroring the pioneering work being done by sociologists at the University of Chicago. He waded into public debates, and once used statistics to dispute charges that Black men were responsible for a disproportionate amount of the city’s crime.

As Bruseaux’s profile grew, his work took him farther afield—to investigate a lynching in North Carolina; to reexamine the killing of a Black teenager by a policeman in Gary, Indiana; and to locate a Creek Indian girl in Oklahoma who claimed that she was coerced by a group of white men to sign over a deed to valuable oil lands.

Though Keystone promised in its ads that all client business would be kept “strictly confidential,” Bruseaux’s exploits were breathlessly covered by the press. When hired by attorneys to testify in court, he often delivered sensational evidence on the stand. In 1923, during the scandalous divorce proceedings of Williams Stokes, a millionaire real estate heir, and his second wife, Helen, Bruseaux was brought in to rebut a maid’s accusation that Mrs. Stokes had been seen in the apartment of another man. After the maid’s testimony, Bruseaux shocked the court by producing an affidavit from her mother stating that she was lying, forcing the witness to break down and admit that she had perjured herself. The move, one newspaper noted, “puts Mr. Bruseaux on record as one of the cleverest detectives in the country, not only of his own race, but any race.”

Not all coverage was favorable, however. The following year, Bruseaux earned the enmity of the Black-owned Chicago Whip after investigating its publisher for the theft of $8,000 in bonds. In an angry article, the paper dismissed Bruseaux as a “joke” and a “dining car detective.” It mocked his Arkansas accent, writing that “one could easily picture the sleuth trailing a plough in the southern cotton fields.” The Whip’s attack displayed a condescension commonly directed at new Black arrivals in the city. “Securely established Negro citizens were perturbed by the avalanche of their rustic brethren whose manners and personal appearance were not always so prepossessing as they might be,” noted Arna Bontemps in Anyplace But Here, a book about the Great Migration. “Feet used to a plowed field found it hard to steady themselves on a lurching streetcar, so that migrants stepped on toes and jostled their fellow passengers.” Some members of the Black professional class even complained that, in their uncouthness, Southerners such as Bruseaux were responsible for the new tension with white citizens, having upset a hard-won equilibrium—blaming them, in effect, for dragging racism up from the plantations.

Perhaps seeking to overcome this class prejudice, Bruseaux hosted extravagant parties. In 1923, after several years of public bachelordom, Bruseaux married Ethel Sewell, who the Chicago Defender reported was from a prominent Philadelphia family. The paper hailed her as one of the “most charming young matrons in Chicago.” By that time, Bruseaux was wealthy. Together the couple threw opulent soirees in their fashionable home on Grand Avenue, where they were neighbors of the champion boxer Jack Johnson (whose wife, it was reported, had once retained Bruseaux to probe her marriage). Guests of the Bruseauxs—among them actor Paul Robeson and jazz legend Louis Armstrong—were presented with expensive gifts like gold watches, glassware, and traveling bags.

By the mid-1920s, Chicago’s Black residents had built a thriving enclave, with its own stores, churches, theaters, newspapers, literary societies, and professional class. The latter half of the decade, as St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton observe in their 1945 study Black Metropolis, would be “the Fat Years”—the most prosperous in the community’s history. And Sheridan Bruseaux sat atop that plenitude, scraping cream from the scandals of the affluent. But as Bruseaux would soon discover, his position, based on perception as much as deed, was a precarious one.

The death of Octavius Granady happened, in part, by chance. When deciding who would run against Morris Eller, Granady and another reformer had flipped a coin; Granady lost.

Taking on Eller brought with it considerable risks. During his campaign, Granady’s staff were harassed and sabotaged, their headquarters raided and the telephone lines cut. A chilling rumor spread that, even if Granady won, he’d never serve a day in office. On the morning of the primary, one of Granady’s poll monitors was kidnapped by three men, who forced him into a car and bashed his head with a revolver. Chicago police stood around, the monitor later recalled, “watching in amusement.”

Danger was not unique to the alderman’s race. The Second City felt increasingly lawless. Its murder rate had skyrocketed and its governance was in decline—both thanks to Prohibition. One local sociologist described “an unholy alliance between organized crime and politics” that allowed criminality to flourish, an environment where Al Capone could reportedly raise $200,000 for mayor Thompson’s campaign in exchange for the freedom to run a violent empire.

Thompson was an opera buffa demagogue, a loud, self-styled cowboy who once set his 300-pound frame atop a horse and rode it into a city council meeting. In 1927, he’d staged a debate against two live rats: stand-ins for his political opponents. The Chicago Tribune later declared Thompson “a byword for collapse of the American civilization” and his political career synonymous with “filth, corruption, obscenity, idiocy, and bankruptcy.”

According to the New York Times, the city’s police department, under the command of a Thompson-appointed commissioner, accomplished little in its investigation of Granady’s murder. Fed-up state officials summoned a special attorney to look into the killing and the broader lawlessness plaguing the election. The man they chose for the job was the legendary square-jawed crime fighter Frank Loesch.

Loesch was a veteran Chicago prosecutor with an unimpeachable reputation for honesty and integrity, an eminence grise whom one newspaper compared to the Roman Republic’s Cato, waging a relentless battle against the city’s foes. He struck a profile that the Los Angeles Times described as “erect, snowy-haired and unafraid.” But Loesch, now 76, was too old to work alone. To find Granady’s killer, he would need a reliable deputy, someone to do the heavy lifting the investigation would require. Loesch didn’t trust Chicago’s usual authorities—he believed the police to be untrained, prosecutors ignorant, and judges corrupt. To build his case, Loesch needed a true outsider, someone unafraid of making enemies.

At the time of Granady’s killing, Sheridan Bruseaux’s practice was busier than ever, with operatives all over the country. He had become a community hero of sorts—a crusading sleuth fighting hatred and exploitation. Loesch offered him the job, and Bruseaux accepted. He was given a detail of three Black police officers to assist him, and charged with assembling a criminal case Loesch could bring to trial.

From the beginning, Bruseaux faced long odds. Finding witnesses wasn’t difficult; hundreds had observed either the initial attack on Granady, the frantic chase through the streets of Chicago, or the murder itself. But Capone’s thugs were said to be cruising the South Side, warning residents that they’d be killed if they testified in the case and offering $1,000 for the location of witnesses so the goons could intimidate them. Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that the criminal underworld had created a defense fund, levying a tax on gamblers, hoodlums, and saloonkeepers, to assist anyone who might be arrested for the crime.

Bruseaux was undaunted. He announced that his investigation would cover the whole city, leaving no complicit party untouched by the hand of justice. “Every man who comes within the scope of the inquiry will be investigated regardless of his political standing or his position within the police department,” Bruseaux told reporters. “And all such information gathered through the investigation will be presented to the grand jury without fear or favor.”

Persuading bystanders to reveal what they’d seen required all of Bruseaux’s skill and charm; keeping them alive posed more significant challenges. Weeks into the investigation, gangsters with shotguns, posing as insurance salesmen, tried to break into the home of James Huff, a Granady campaign worker and a passenger in the candidate’s car when it was attacked. Huff’s wife slipped out the back and notified Bruseaux, who dispatched a member of his detail to rush the witness and his family to safety.

Bruseaux soon realized that even his colleagues couldn’t be trusted. While he employed his own staff, he also received assistance from state investigators and local police. At one point, suspicious of a Black detective assigned to his detail, Bruseaux followed him from work. After trailing him through the city, Bruseaux watched as he knocked on the door of Oscar DePriest, an influential Black boss in the Thompson machine. Bruseaux kicked the detective off the case. By way of revenge, the police commissioner pulled the rest of Bruseaux’s detail. Loesch assigned Bruseaux a bodyguard, and after that only Bruseaux knew the names and locations of cooperating witnesses.

As Bruseaux dug deeper, he began to unearth a monstrous conspiracy. Witnesses told him that Granady had been pursued by not one but two cars—the Cadillac and, a short distance back, an olive-green Buick. (Bruseaux would eventually track down the former, sold two days after the assassination.) The Buick was said to have been driven by men in police uniforms—the same ones who then responded to the scene of the murder.

After weeks of work, Bruseaux finally identified the shooters: Harry Hochstein, Johnny Armando, and Sammy Kaplan. The men were not only freelance goons for Capone, they were also on the payrolls of powerful people associated with Granady’s rival, Morris Eller, whose banner had been affixed to the killers’ car. In fact, Hochstein and Armando worked directly for Eller’s campaign. What’s more, Bruseaux found evidence of far-reaching electoral fraud. On the day of the primary, gangs of Eller supporters had driven from polling place to polling place—venues often staffed entirely by America First clerks and judges—where they stuffed ballot boxes. Hundreds of “voters” who resided in vacant buildings or at nonexistent addresses cast ballots; some did so from beyond the grave.

In other instances, election officials appeared to have altered the ballot tallies to give Thompson candidates the edge. Bruseaux found too that, in the weeks leading up to the election, hired thugs extorted tribute from speakeasies, craps games, and brothels to finance Eller’s campaign. A gambling operator, for example, was taxed $600 per week—the equivalent of about $10,000 today.

At times during interviews, suspects seemed to be having Bruseaux on. The notebook of one reputed gangster showed multiple payments of $100 to police. When asked about them, the man claimed he liked to play “policy games,” or illegal lotteries, on the South Side. “And how do you spell policy?” asked an investigator assigned to the grand jury. “P-O-L-I-C-E,” he replied.

On June 29, 1928, Loesch stepped forward to address a swarm of reporters. He unveiled a series of shocking charges: In all, 19 suspects were indicted by a grand jury as part of a vast conspiracy to murder Octavius Granady and meddle with the election for the benefit of Morris Eller. Among them were five Chicago detectives, including the leader of a squad assigned to the 20th Ward on election day. Eller and his son, Emmanuel, were accused of providing protection to criminals in exchange for votes. Two witnesses, a barber and a collector on Eller’s payroll, testified that it was Eller himself who had supplied the 20th Ward’s gangsters with guns on the day of the primary.

Charges were also filed against Oscar DePriest, the politician whom Bruseaux had seen a police detective visit, for election fraud. DePriest, a South Side power broker, was in the midst of a campaign to become the first Black official elected to Congress in almost 30 years. The indictment asserted that DePriest and others had collected money from liquor, vice, and gambling establishments in exchange for police protection—cash that was then routed to a slush fund in Mayor Thompson’s America First campaign.

Announcing the indictments, Loesch, who was usually grim faced, couldn’t help but break into a smile. “Gentlemen,” he informed reporters, “we have them.”

The indictments were built on the efforts of Bruseaux, who—overcoming what Loesch described as “insurmountable obstacles”—had secured the testimony of more than 100 witnesses. The detective estimated that he’d uncovered more than $5 million that had been illicitly collected for Thompson’s political machine from gangsters and corrupt politicians. Overnight, Bruseaux became a sensation, the daring gumshoe who stood up to corruption and sought justice for murder. Publications around the country rushed to interview him. The New York Amsterdam News, in a glowing profile, compared him to Sherlock Holmes. Even his journalistic bête noire, the Chicago Whip, which once had mocked Bruseaux’s unpolished style, reluctantly lauded his accomplishment.

Bruseaux was at the pinnacle of his career, his achievements sufficiently impressive that the NAACP took notice. Since 1915, the nation’s preeminent civil-rights group had awarded an annual prize recognizing the individual in America who best embodied Black excellence. The Spingarn Medal was its most prestigious honor, previously bestowed on such trailblazers as the Army’s first Black colonel, Charles Young, and agricultural scientist George Washington Carver. In early 1929, when the organization was considering nominees, Bruseaux’s name was at the top of the list.

Records show that W. E. B. DuBois, the NAACP’s cofounder and head of publicity, received dozens of letters from Black luminaries written on Bruseaux’s behalf—the most for any candidate. Among Bruseaux’s supporters was Ida B. Wells-Barnett, another NAACP cofounder now living in Chicago. “Every day for six months, I thrilled with pride over the tributes to this negro’s ability,” her handwritten note to DuBois read. “Because Mr. Bruseaux could neither be bribed nor bullied … he has won a signal victory for the forces of law and order, and the gratitude of the entire city.” Arthur Mitchell, a well-known Chicago lawyer, noted that the Tribune had been unstinting in its praise of Bruseaux—no small matter for a paper, Mitchell observed, that “heretofore had been thought to be most unfriendly to ambitious Colored men.… Winning the commendation of this paper for the race and changing its attitude on many racial questions is, within itself … worthy of the highest commendation.”

Soon, Bruseaux was reported to be in the running for a top post at the Justice Department, with an annual salary of $10,000 (around $187,000 today). While traveling for business, Bruseaux happened to pass through his erstwhile hometown of Little Rock, where he was feted by onetime neighbors. His picture was hung in his former high school, at a ceremony attended by the city’s Black elite—the high society from which, growing up, he had been excluded. Where Bruseaux’s horizons had once been stifled, his future now seemed limitless.

But just as Bruseaux was taking a victory lap, his life began to unravel.

^{_The investigators working} for Bruseaux faced danger, too—one of his deputies was stabbed in the back _{on his way} home from work, leaving him _{bleeding but alive.}

In retrospect, there were early signs that Loesch’s case against Granady’s alleged killers might run into trouble once it went to trial. Emmanuel Eller was an elected judge, and despite the criminal charges against him, it was in his court that the men accused of shooting his father’s political opponent first appeared, in July 1928. Judge Eller immediately cut their bond, allowing their release. A few weeks later, one of Morris Eller’s henchman suspected of participating in Granady’s killing was found murdered under a pile of rubbish in an alley—“a warning,” a city official declared, “from those pulling the strings that it isn’t healthy to squawk.” Soon after, a second suspect, wanted for questioning, was also found dead, his body slumped over a car steering wheel with eight shots to the head. The investigators working for Bruseaux faced danger, too—one of them was stabbed in the back on his way home from work, leaving him bleeding but alive.

That November, the Thompson machine was smashed in the general election, with every one of the mayor’s candidates soundly defeated, including Morris Eller. But the defendants in Loesch’s case had yet to be prosecuted. The date of the proceedings was repeatedly delayed, and by the time the first witness entered the courtroom to give testimony, 19 months had passed since Granady’s assassination. Readying for trial, Bruseaux became so stressed that he was hospitalized for ulcers. He was right to be anxious, because what transpired in the courtroom was, in the words of one journalist, a farce.

Bruseaux, Loesch, and the state’s attorney disagreed about whether to indict the police officers in the second car, the green Buick, that chased Granady. Ultimately, the cops faced trial, but Judge Joseph David appeared conspicuously preferential toward them, dismissing witnesses who claimed to have seen the men participate in Granady’s murder as “liars.” David even hinted that he would set aside a guilty verdict, should the jury reach one. Some witnesses’ testimony had changed since they were first interviewed—a bystander to the murder, asked in court to identify one of the shooters, pointed to a defense attorney.

Perhaps to some degree these shifting recollections were a result of the time that had elapsed since the crime is unclear. But witness tampering was also a specialty of Mayor Thompson’s most powerful supporter, Al Capone, and it would be another year and a half before he was charged with tax evasion and forced to cede his throne as king of Chicago’s underworld.

The Granady trial was briefly halted when one of the prosecution’s star witnesses, Margaret Welch, was reportedly threatened with death. On November 1, 1929, the 23-year-old was set to tell the jury that she had overheard two of the defendants—John Armando, one of the alleged shooters, and James Belcastro, accused of driving the Cadillac—mention killing Granady in the days following the murder. On the morning of her testimony, according to the Tribune, Welch received an anonymous telephone call informing her that if she went through with it, she’d get her head blown off. To prove that they were serious, Welch’s harassers kidnapped her brother, reducing her to a state of hysterical collapse.

When she was finally coaxed into court a few weeks later, Welch’s hand shook as she took the oath. After giving her name and address, she fell to her knees and begged the judge to protect her. (“And some people pay $5.50 a seat to see a show,” mused a front-row spectator.) After being escorted to the county hospital, Welch never retook the stand. The charges against Armando and Belcastro were dismissed, and the men were set free.

Then, suddenly, a serious charge was leveled against Bruseaux. Under cross examination, several witnesses for the prosecution claimed that the detective had bribed them. A few said that Bruseaux had promised them jobs and paid their expenses in exchange for testimony, and one witness, a preacher named Joseph McMillan, declared that Bruseaux offered him $1,000 to identify Armando as one of the shooters. Though Granady’s own driver had already testified that it was Armando who fired off rounds from the running board of the Cadillac, Judge David was incensed, declaring the preacher’s allegation “far more serious than murder.”

Around the same time, an anonymous letter was mailed to the court accusing Bruseaux of a variety of crimes. The letter’s contents were never revealed; David, in a fit of rage, tore up the document, yelling that something should be done about the detective. “If the things they say about this man Bruseaux are true,” thundered the judge, “he ought to be in the penitentiary.”

Bruseaux vehemently denied the bribery charges, calling them “ridiculous,” but they weakened the prosecution’s case. After a series of unfavorable rulings, the judge dismissed the indictments against some of the defendants. Ultimately, the 15 of Eller’s henchmen who remained on trial escaped with fines after being found guilty of conspiracy.

Many of the broader corruption allegations also faded away. Morris Eller and his son were never tried in court, and both would remain active in law and politics for years. Loesch dropped the indictment against Oscar DePriest, and Bruseaux would claim publicly that DePriest, set up by political foes, was innocent of any crime. It’s unclear whether Bruseaux was bowing to political pressure or if he’d been hasty in his initial accusations. Regardless, DePriest, who had won his congressional race, becoming the first Black man elected to the House of Representatives since Reconstruction, had already had his revenge.

Archival records show that, in early 1929, one of DePriest’s associates, writing on the politician’s letterhead, mailed the NAACP a court document indicating that Bruseaux had been indicted for bigamy in 1917, two years before starting his detective agency. In 1906, while living in Arkansas, Bruseaux had married a young woman, and he’d never dissolved their union. The Spingarn Medal was awarded in the spring of 1929, well before the fiasco of the Granady trial. The NAACP presented it to the president of Howard University. Bruseaux had been passed over.

The accusations against Sheridan Bruseaux that aired during the Granady trial, though dubious, hinted at a larger pattern of lies and ethical shortcuts. The year before, in the midst of preparations for the case, the leader of a Black fraternal organization in Indiana claimed Bruseaux had tried to shake him down for $5,000. In 1930, the former head of the National Bar Association, C. F. Stradford, accused Bruseaux of extortion, stemming from a case in which Stradford had represented an abortionist. Bruseaux, he claimed, made himself “an involuntary, uninvited partner of anyone who receives or has an attractive sum,” adding that “money disappears quickly when one is making a bid for social position by giving expensive parties.” Nor was it the first time Bruseaux had been accused of trying to strong-arm clients: One Black newspaper stated that such a charge was “exactly in keeping” with its opinion of the detective and warned the public against associating with him.

His image tarnished, Bruseaux’s reputation within the Black community began to fade. Still, he worked steadily over the next several years. He exposed bank officers who used customers’ deposit to fund dog-race tracks; investigated the mysterious murder of the National Baptist Convention’s chief auditor, whose body was found in a river shot six times; and helped dismantle a prolific counterfeiting ring. Then Bruseaux’s desire to defend the Black community collided with his tendency to blur the truth, in a way that led to his undoing.

On June 19, 1936, the great boxer Joe Louis, then undefeated, was scheduled to fight German heavyweight Max Schmeling. The bout, with its inescapable political overtones—Schmeling was the pride of the Nazi Reich, Joe Louis a rising star of Black America—was an international spectacle. During the fight, staged in Yankee Stadium and broadcast to tens of millions over the radio, Schmeling, an eight-to-one underdog, launched a series of right crosses at Louis’s jaw, until finally, in the 12th round, the Brown Bomber hit the mat and was counted out. In the Black community, grief at the loss was apocalyptic. The poet Langston Hughes, who attended the event, described watching grown men sob like children on the streets of Harlem after the defeat. Hitler, meanwhile, cabled his congratulations to Schmeling.

Louis’s fans searched for an explanation as to how their hero came up short. In was in this sensitive moment that Bruseaux stepped forward to offer a hypothesis. Louis, he declared, hadn’t been beat, he’d been drugged. In an affidavit, Bruseaux claimed that, just before the fight, one of the boxer’s physicians had administered an injection that hindered Louis’s left arm—a story, Bruseaux said, related to him by Louis’s sister. Asked for comment, Louis and his managers angrily rejected Bruseaux’s theory. “I had no shot of any kind except a few hard rights from Schmeling’s glove,” Louis told the Chicago Tribune. Louis’s sister, for her part, said that she’d never told Bruseaux any such thing.

Whatever Bruseaux was attempting with the stunt, it backfired. He became an object of national ridicule, with one sportswriter labeling his affidavit “too screwy to be believed.” Louis’s managers claimed that Bruseaux had tried to extort them, threatening to go to the press with his accusation if they didn’t pay him off, and accused the detective of operating a “shakedown racket.” They filed a lawsuit against Bruseaux for libel, as did Louis’s physician. Bruseaux countersued, claiming defamation. The matter was settled out of court.

As he fell from grace, his case load thinned, and Bruseaux became financially overextended. In 1937, he sent a pleading letter to Arthur Mitchell, asking to borrow $150 because a catering company was trying to seize his car. Then, in his mid-fifties, Bruseaux hit a new public low: He was arrested and charged with grand larceny and blackmail after a client’s husband alleged that Bruseaux attempted to extort $1,900 from him. Bruseaux claimed that the charge was retaliation for tracking down the husband, who had skipped town with much of his wife’s money.

Bruseaux was given one last opportunity to salvage his reputation. In 1943, the detective was quietly hired to investigate another incident of racial violence, a riot in Detroit. On a hot summer day—much like the one in 1919, when Chicago exploded into violence—a pair of false rumors spread through the city: that a group of Black men had raped a white woman, and that a mob of white people had thrown a Black infant from a bridge. When the smoke from the resulting riots cleared, 25 Black Detroiters were dead, most of them killed by police, as were nine white residents. Civic leaders prevailed upon Bruseaux to investigate what had happened. His detective agency, after all, had been founded upon the ashes of a similar incident.

Bruseaux arranged focus groups of Detroit residents and asked them about life in the city. With the help of a team of research assistants, he canvassed the city’s neighborhoods to better understand the context in which the riot erupted. His report blamed the violence and resulting deaths on social conditions, namely overcrowding and competition for jobs and housing.

Despite its insights, the report did little to restore the detective’s prestige. As Bruseaux got older, his fabrications intensified, even as he developed a late-life obsession with the use of polygraphs. In his last known interview, with Ebony magazine in 1949, he unfurled a sad tapestry of self-aggrandizing lies, claiming that he had personally handled some 4,000 cases, that he’d turned down J. Edgar Hoover’s job as director of the FBI, and that he’d led an investigation into a famous divorce case in which, records show, he played no part. The magazine printed his fabulations as fact.

In 1950, after a short illness, Sheridan Bruseaux passed away at Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, at the age of 60. Though he was once the toast of Chicago, his obituary in the Tribune consisted of only a single paragraph, buried in the back of the paper.

Emerging from nowhere, ^{Bruseaux had fashioned himself into a} Gatsby _of Chicago’s ascendant Black bourgeoisie.

In the 75 years since his death, Bruseaux has mostly faded from history. Other than a few stray mentions in books about Marcus Garvey and Joe Louis, nothing of substance has been written about him. Bruseaux and his wife, Ethel, who passed in 1973, had no children together. Records show that Bruseaux had a daughter years before, from an extramarital relationship, and a single surviving great-granddaughter. When I reached out to her, though, she had little information to offer, noting that Bruseaux had not been involved in the life of her grandmother, who, to her recollection, never mentioned him.

Ethel, who was married to Bruseaux for 27 years, has numerous living relatives. She gave birth to a daughter before meeting her husband, when she was a teenager living in Baltimore. The daughter’s name was Dorniece; she was sent to live with cousins in southern Maryland.

I met Ethel’s great-grandson Damon Caldwell for coffee in Manhattan’s Columbus Circle, just a block from where Bruseaux died. Now in his sixties and retired, Caldwell graduated from Stanford University, followed by Harvard Business School, then enjoyed a long, successful career. As it turned out, his daughter, a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, was researching the changing nature of anti-Black violence during almost the exact years when her great-great-step-grandfather was investigating instances of that violence.

Caldwell had heard only vague accounts of Bruseaux, who, as a result of family lore, he’d always thought was a lawyer. Asked if Ethel had indeed hailed from a prominent Philadelphia family, as newspapers reported, Caldwell laughed: That was likely one of Bruseaux’s exaggerations.

Archival sources reveal that much of the professional backstory Bruseaux used to buttress the Keystone Detective Agency was bogus. During World War I, he was not employed in Europe by the Secret Service. According to his draft registration card, in 1917 he worked as a waiter on the Tacoma Eastern Railroad. He’d obtained an exemption from military duty by claiming that he needed to support his wife and mother. Nor did Bruseaux ever receive a law degree from the University of Minnesota—there’s no record he was ever even in the state. And while he was at one time employed by Chicago’s McGuire & White Detective Agency, it appears to have been in the role of telephone operator.

Bruseaux even appears to have been, at one time, the type of con artist he later investigated. In 1918, the year before he opened Keystone, a short article in the Chicago Whip reported that a “Sheridan Bruseau,” while pretending to be the head waiter at a local hotel, had fleeced a number of men by promising them jobs in the dining room in exchange for a fee. When the men realized they’d been deceived by Bruseau’s “smooth line of talk,” they threatened him. “Fellow employees testified to the unfaithful regard that Mr. Bruseau has for the truth, and seemingly are not surprised at this unlawful practice,” the article read. “It is also said that women have fallen prey to his beautiful word pictures to obtain them jobs as chambermaids.” (If Bruseaux added an x to his name to avoid association with his past misdeeds, it seemed to work—the Whip, which later set itself against Bruseaux, appears to have overlooked the fact that he had been in its pages before.)

Bruseaux, Caldwell and I agreed, was a complicated figure—a wealthy, charming man of tremendous talent who was also dishonest, profligate, and, at times, morally compromising. He stood as a paradox, someone who adopted advanced research methods in pursuit of justice, but also spread falsehoods when it suited him. Emerging from nowhere, he fashioned himself into a Gatsby of Chicago’s ascendant Black bourgeoisie. “It was refreshing to see that, at that time period, an African-American man could remake himself,” Caldwell told me. “He came from nothing and became something.” 

Would Bruseaux have achieved the same success if he had been honest about his past—if, while starting up his business, he’d copped to being, not a highly educated former government agent, but a mere porter with a two-year degree from a humble Baptist college? Almost certainly not.

Once he was established, however, his investigative skills were exemplary. By an act of will, Bruseaux became the very thing he’d claimed to be. Yet like the fictional Gatsby—a character who, Fitzgerald wrote, seemed to spring from his own Platonic conception—Bruseaux, though mastering a profession dedicated to seeking out obscure truths, hid himself in fiction. The raw facts of his own life seemed, perhaps, too shameful for candor.

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