An Incomplete Record of Sin

Here’s a discomfitingly truthful passage from Moby-Dick:

Jonah’s Captain, shipmates, was one whose discernment detects crime in any, but whose cupidity exposes it only in the penniless. In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely.

And here’s an abridged catalogue of Dan Gilbert’s sins:

— While attending undergrad at Michigan State in the early 80s, he allegedly ran an illegal betting ring. He was merely arrested on suspicion — never charged or convicted — but for a long while, it came up whenever Gilbert wanted to get into business with some large entity like the city of Detroit or the NBA. Scuttlebutt is, Gilbert had a habit of roughing up folks who owed him money when the Lions didn’t cover the spread. You can believe what you want, but answer this: if you don’t have the law on your side, how do you enforce an agreement?

— When the mortgage crisis hit, Gilbert’s Quicken Loans made it a point to repeatedly profess that they didn’t traffic in the subprime loans that were widely blamed for the market’s collapse. (Nevermind that subprime loans is a broader term than most people think, and that it’s not a settled fact that subprime loans were the primary issue anyway. Plenty of folks with good credit defaulted on their mortgages in the mid-to-late aughts.) In short, the whole we don’t do subprime loans claim was a canard. Quicken sold off somewhere in the neighborhood of $25 billion in bad loans to the now-defunct Countrywide Financial, who then repackaged them and sold them to major lenders and government-sponsored enterprises. Quicken also offered (and continues to offer) interest-only loans, which are exactly what they sound like they are, and negative amortization loans, in which the homeowner makes increasingly steeper interest payments without paying down their actual debt. No less an authority than the federal government’s General Accounting Office considers negative amortization loans to be predatory.

— Quicken hasn’t been clean following the mortgage crisis either. In 2011, the company was successfully sued for two million dollars by homeowners in Ohio and three million dollars by homeowners in West Virginia for appraising homes at nearly 300 percent their market value. (Managers also encouraged salespeople to lock folks into higher interest rate[s], even if they qualified for [lower rates], and rolling hidden fees into a loan, according to a sworn statement from a former Quicken employee.) The Department of Justice is currently litigating a charge it filed in 2015 that Quicken has misrepresented borrowers’ income and credit scores in order to qualify for Federal Housing Authority insurance. In 2016, a National Labor Relations Board judge ruled that the Quicken Loans employee handbook had illegal restrictions in it: namely, it stated that workers couldn’t so much as sniff around unions or unionizing without being disciplined or terminated.

— In 2009, Gilbert and Penn National Gaming spent $47 million on a public relations campaign to let them operate four new casinos in Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Toledo. They guaranteed 34,000 jobs. They ultimately created 10,600 temporary gigs and, as of September 2014, 4,844 permanent ones. They promised an expansive $600 million riverside casino in Cleveland. They instead crammed the machines and tables into a refurbished department store. Worst of all, they sold the state of Ohio on massive tax revenues and then predictably under-delivered, overestimating the money that would go to schools and hospitals by tens of millions of dollars.

— The Letter is The Letter, and we all know about it, but it’s still remarkable how unhinged and out of line the thing was. Some people think they should go to heaven but NOT have to die to get there. What’re you, a Deadwood villain? Also, what is accruing a $5.9 billion net worth via dubious lending practices, having the privilege of employing LeBron James, and buying up land in blight-stricken Detroit but going to heaven without dying?

— Speaking of Detroit, detailing what Gilbert has done both for and to that city (and is still yet to do) could fill a book, but here’s an egregious bit of attempted robbery: in September of 2016, Gilbert and his development firm, Rock Ventures LLC, lobbied Michigan to let them keep all income and sales tax money from their various real estate projects provided they give a minimum sum to whatever municipality they’re operating in. (As Deadspin’s Bill Bradley helpfully puts it: $500 million in Detroit, $50 million for a smaller city like Flint.) So basically, Gilbert wants all these Detroit redevelopment deals that he pretends to be doing out of the goodness of his heart to be as profitable as possible at the expense of the city he loves so dearly. If one or more of those properties does gangbusters business, Detroit gets a set fee and Gilbert keeps the rest.

— This above is just a cursory inventory. I don’t have a month to research the full extent of Gilbert’s every transgression. There was that time Kelly Dwyer poked fun at Gilbert by calling the Cavs’ home Predatory Loans Arena and Gilbert called Marissa Flipping Meyer and got Yahoo to take the post down. The guy seems hellbent on getting Detroit to pay for a huge chunk of a billion-dollar soccer stadium. In August, he pulled out of a Quicken Loans Arena renovation deal that Cleveland’s citizenry balked at because it would have soaked Cuyahoga County for $70 million, then he doubled back and reinitiated the grift in September.

Melville’s truth endures. If you have money, you can basically do whatever you want. You might find castigation from leftists and some people will realize you’ve built a fortune on their backs and hate you for it, but many more will praise your courage and acumen and canonize you twice as windily as anyone will ever condemn you. What’s there to be done about this? Probably nothing, though delineating the wrongs committed feels a worthy task, perhaps precisely because it’s the only recourse we plebeians have. Dan Gilbert gets what he desires: wealth, import, entire cities at his feet, even a championship ring. And we get to expose what he’s full of and the pain he’s caused. Righteousness is pretty empty most of the time, and it offers little consolation. But it’s better than nothing. You put a name and a face to your anger, and you know for sure they deserve it.