The Metro Detroit author reports on organized crime and operates The Gangster Report website. This story first appeared on his website and is being published with permission.
By Scott Burnstein
Lou Akrawi (Photo: Gangster Report)
The fact that he remains, almost six decades later, an enemy of the state in Iraq—and that sending him back to his home country could very well be a virtual death sentence—apparently means nothing to the U.S. government under the second Donald J. Trump administration.
It appears to be the end of the line for former Detroit Middle Eastern mob boss and geopolitical revolutionary Lou Akrawi, and for his run as a firebrand immigrant-community leader in the United States—specifically Southeast Michigan.
For more than 50 years, the gravelly-voiced Akrawi fought to stay in the U.S., dodged attempts by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party to kill him in the 1970s and 1980s for being a political dissident, and endured multiple futile efforts by the U.S. government to imprison him for the rest of his life.
He finally lost his battle to stay here.
Akrawi, 78, who suffers from Parkinson’s Disease, was put on an 8:30 p.m. flight Tuesday to Baghdad, returning him to his homeland where there's a murder contract still on his head from his days as a young man in the late 1960s opposing Saddam Hussein and the then brand-new Baathist regime.
None of Akrawi’s relatives are still living in Iraq and Akrawi himself hasn’t stepped foot there in 58 years. Akrawi hasn’t been in trouble with the law in the U.S. since the early 1990s.
For the past decade, when he wasn’t battling deportation, he lived quietly on a rural property in Detroit’s far west suburbs, tending to his garden, prized mastiff dogs, reconnecting with his five sons and taking care of his grandchildren.
Akrawi’s roots trace back to the once-burgeoning Iraqi-Christian community in Baghdad and the country’s socialist movement that challenged the Ba’ath Party for power throughout the 1960s.
The Muslim Baathists drove most of that Iraqi Christian community out of the region and most of them wound up immigrating legally to the U.S. and settling in Detroit, in hopes of finding work in the area’s increasingly-dwindling automotive-manufacturing job market during the Nixon, Ford and Carter eras.
Turned to Crime
When employment at the car plants dried up, going instead out of state or overseas for cheaper labor, and the nation’s economy went into a tailspin, a small group of the Iraqi Christians (known locally as Chaldeans) turned to the streets and a life of crime to find their own piece of the American dream.
The most infamous of those men is undoubtedly Lou Akrawi, fierce and defiant to law enforcement and political and underworld rivals alike. He was also instrumental in building Metro Detroit’s now flourishing Iraqi Christian community from the ground up from its meager beginnings on Detroit’s near Northwest side.
Injured working the line at Chrysler and out of a job, Akrawi accepted muscle assignments from the Detroit Italian Mafia’s Giacalone crew and soon founded his own organization.
Akrawi’s criminal network grew to control all gambling, extortion and drug rackets in the city’s “Little Baghdad” neighborhood in the 7 Mile Road and Woodward area, and eventually absorbed territory in the Westside and Eastside suburbs.
Crafting a reputation as Detroit’s “Teflon Don,” the outspoken, barrel-chested Akrawi beat seven straight state and federal criminal cases, even getting acquitted in a 1991 RICO trial that began the same week the U.S. declared war on Iraqi and began bombing Baghdad.
His vast legitimate business portfolio was packed with interests in restaurants, nightclubs, real-estate investments, travel agencies, auto-body shops. insurance companies, coffee shops and convenient stores.
Murder Conviction
In 1996, Akrawi was found guilty in Detroit Recorders Court of second-degree murder in the accidental killing of 34-year Michael Cogborn, who got hit by stray bullets while in line at a grocery store in September 1993.
Turns out Akrawi dispatched gunmen who sprayed the store with automatic weapon fire in an attempt to kill the store’s owners, who hours earlier had sent hitmen to try and assassinate Akrawi at a coffee house. They failed.
Akrawi’s Chaldean Mafia organization had been at war with an offshoot faction of the gang for the past five years.
Swaggering, handsome and power-hungry Chaldean Mafia street boss Harry Kalasho, Akrawi’s nephew and surrogate son, was murdered in February 1989, with his homicide attracting considerable media attention.
There were allegations of government and police corruption and accusations that shooters were tipped off about Kalasho's whereabouts at a Northwest Detroit home on Greendale just before the shooting.
Since being released from prison on his murder conviction in 2017 after two decades behind bars, Akrawi had battled ICE efforts to boot him to Baghdad; first after being detained at an ICE detention center between May 2017 and December 2019 and more recently, after being detained, beginning around September at ICE's North Lake Processing Center in Baldwin, in northern Michigan.
Trump Business Deal
Donald Trump on Larry King Show in 1987
What's particularly interesting is that Akrawi was involved in a business-deal negotiation that was never consummated with Donald Trump in 1987 -- at a time Trump was simiply known as a loud, flashy New York City real estate mogul and tabloid fixture in the New York Post's Page 6.
Trump vigorously campaigned among Metro Detroit’s Middle Eastern community in his 2016, winning its support that helped him win, much to the chagrin of Akrawi.
Akrawi actively campaigned against Trump, warning his fellow Middle Eastern immigrants that if Trump won, he'd start deporting all of them. The message proved prophetic for Akrawi and thousands of Iraqis, Syrians, Lebanese like him, some who supported Trump and felt betrayed.
Taking part in a failed May 1968 political coup and botched assassination attempt of then-Iraqi vice president Saddam Hussein, Akrawi became a marked man before his 21st birthday, forced to take his family and flee Hussein’s Ba’ath empire.
From that point on, he had to look over his shoulder until Baghdad was toppled and Hussein was captured by U.S. military forces in 2003.
Hussein hunted Akrawi for decades, sending Ba’ath Party agents to Michigan and other U.S. states to carry out murder contracts on Akrawi on at least three occasions, according to federal intelligence reports declassified after Baghdad fell,
Akrawi spent much of the 1970s and 1980s holding protests and demonstrations across the U.S. imploring the White House to break ties with Hussein and his oppressive regime, something it eventually did in 1990. In 1991, the U.S. launched Desert Storm and blocked Hussein’s occupation of oil-rich neighbor Kuwait.
Key To The City
Saddam Hussein
Hussein was given the Key to the City of Detroit in 1980 after he donated millions of dollars to Detroit’s Iraq Christian community to make amends for the Ba’ath Party’s previous treatment of them in their homeland.
During the ceremony, Akrawi led a protest where he marched to Detroit’s City Hall with Hussein masks adorned to the muzzles of his two pit bulls.
NSA and U.S. Secret Service investigative materials included the description of a U.S. Military raid of one of Hussein’s palaces in Baghdad in the wake of his ouster.
Materials found in a private storage room attached to the palace's master bedroom suite included video of the 1980 Detroit City Hall protest and other Iraq intelligence gatherings on Akrawi’s dealings and whereabouts.
