Ambassador Bridge owner Manuel (Matty) Moroun eyes 'twilight deal' as his son rises

Manuel (Matty) Moroun sits at his desk, reflecting back on his life's journey from a Depression-era Arab boy who worked himself up from the greasy floors of a Detroit gas station to the multi-billionaire owner of the Ambassador Bridge.

"My biggest defeat?" the 90-year-old shipping magnate says, "I never had one except time. Time. As much as I try, I can't stop the clock. It's the twilight deal for me, I guess."

Notoriously private and media-wary, Moroun has granted just two interviews in his life. And so, on the opposite side of his desk sits his son, Matthew, monitoring the old man, keeping him focused, making sure he doesn't incriminate himself to a reporter with stories of days gone by.

Moroun built an economic empire based on trucking, real estate and toll collecting, making himself one of the richest men in the U.S. From behind his hardwood desk, he has crushed competitors, bruised egos and sired powerful enemies: the Canadian government, the American government, the governor of Michigan, the media, ordinary people, even priests who say he put profit over people and tag him with the titles of slumlord, monopolist and mobster.

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He has stretched the law to its limits, perfecting the art of legal foot-dragging until a judge tossed him in the county jail for 30 hours back in 2012 for contempt of court. Even then, he was allowed a carry-in supper from the Detroit Athletic Club. What he ate exactly is lost to memory, but he remembers being given plastic cutlery and wearing a green jumpsuit.

Moroun has even dragged his sisters to court. Despite having built that gas station into an international logistics giant, Moroun's father Tufick did not leave his son controlling interest of the company: Moroun got 49%, his sisters the rest. An eight-year court battle erupted, ending with Moroun buying his sisters out for an undisclosed sum.

"I'd like to fix that relationship with my sisters," he once told me. "It's something I'd like to do before I die."

There are only two fights left for Matty Moroun: death and legacy. The first, he knows he cannot win. The second, Moroun has placed in the hands of his son. Nowadays, when you're talking about Matty Moroun, you're really talking about Matthew Moroun. It is the son who holds the majority stake and makes the decisions. It is the son who talks to the sisters when talking needs to be done.

"I couldn't get that new bridge built; Matt's going to get that done," the father says, snuffling over a Styrofoam cup of coffee.

Matty Moroun is stooped now, having lost noticeable weight, his pleated trousers hitched high, a spot of soup on the leg.

"Matt will build it," he insists. "He's running everything. I'm an adviser, but my ideas sometimes are not as good as they should be. I'm not up to the times."

Because of the enemies he has made, his critics have long thought Moroun's planned twin bridge would never be built. But after years of bitter dispute with the Canadian government, the Trudeau administration granted a permit in September allowing the Morouns to build a new 6-lane span adjacent to the 90-year-old Ambassador Bridge. (One caveat: the Ambassador Bridge will have to be torn down, but this could prove to be a poison pill since the span is designated as a historic landmark in the U.S. and cannot be torn down.)

Nevertheless, the decision shocked residents and reporters on both sides of the Detroit River. How did Matty do it?

It wasn't Matty. It was Matthew, who, at 43, is more urbane and polished, charitable and well-dressed. He is a product of private schooling and an upbringing on the shores of Grosse Pointe.

Opting for compromise and negotiation over his father's scorched-earth court battles and brass-knuckle PR campaigns, the younger Moroun has groomed Ottawa bureaucrats and legislators, boarded up and cleaned up the company's vacant properties across the city of Detroit and even put windows in the decrepit Michigan Central Station.

Now, Matthew Moroun is promising the people of Detroit something splendid for the old train station. But he won't talk about it, bound by a nondisclosure agreement with the developer. The deal is now in its due diligence period. Reports have it that Ford Motor is planning to move its smart vehicle development center to the building. An official announcement on the sale and future use of the train station could come at any time.

"The redevelopment of the train station is going to happen and the bridge is going to be built," Matthew tells me during a driving tour, surveying the Detroit skyline from the shores of Windsor. "Those are going to be my legacies: a new bridge and the train station.

"I'm different from my dad. He was born poor with a chip on his shoulder. I was born rich. He'd bang on the table and take the position that he's 'entitled to it under the law, so you've got to give it to me.' I'm trying to build a bridge, so I need friends. My father's friends? They're all gone, practically."

Coleman A. Young, Jimmy Hoffa, the Fisher Brothers, those were the friends and contemporaries of Matty Moroun; the hard-fisted titans of a long-ago Detroit; men who built political and business empires in a city of belching smoke and vice that cranked out automobiles and war machines.

"The people I passed through with are long gone," the old man says. "Our way of doing business was different."

Those men are gone and so, too, are the things they built; their legacies having merged, been sold, bankrupted or struggling to stay afloat — except for Moroun's. Central Transport continues to thrive. The company has more than 10,000 trucks working across the continent. The centerpiece of the Moroun empire, however, is the bridge.

Manuel J. Moroun was born in June 1927, two weeks after the first shovelful of dirt was turned for the Ambassador Bridge. Ironically, the family's home in Windsor was expropriated and demolished to make room for it. The money for the house allowed the Morouns to move to Detroit.

The family ran a boarding house in the east-side Italian slums. A whorehouse and a blind pig operated across the street. A nun encouraged Matty Moroun to take the entrance exam for admission to the prestigious University of Detroit Jesuit High School. He passed, and is thought to be the first person of color admitted there — a decade before the first black student.

It was the war years back then and the proverbial soup was thin for the young gas station attendant, who took the streetcar to school and wore the same jacket in the yearbook pictures. He was as inscrutable to his classmates then as he is to the public now. His senior year epitaph rating a mere six words: Manuel J. Moroun ... he came in … smiled ... and left. Through his years at U of D, Moroun was exposed to a Shangri-La of wealth and privilege he did not yet know existed.

"It opened my eyes," he said. "The money and the cars and the mansions. … That was where it was at. I wanted that."

And he would get it, one truck at a time.

Since its inception, the Ambassador Bridge has always been privately owned. And by 1979, Moroun had become so successful in the hauling business, he was able to secure a $30-million loan to buy controlling interest.

That's when his troubles began.

The Canadian government demanded a 50% stake. Moroun balked, taking the Canadians to court. The Canadians struck back, launching an investigation into Moroun, intimating he had ties to organized crime.

"I knew the Teamsters pretty well; I was close with Jimmy Hoffa, since he used to buy gas from my father's station" Moroun recalls. "I knew the heavy Italian guys pretty well. I went to (grade) school with them in the Depression. They were all family to me. I was welcome with them wherever I went."

"That's enough, Dad," his son interrupts from the corner of the office. "Let's leave it there."

Fast forward to 1992: After slogging through the courts for more than a decade, and with NAFTA set to become law, the Canadians capitulated, settling for nearly nothing except for an agreement that Moroun make improvements to the bridge, which his critics complain he inadequately did.

Still, Moroun remained relatively unknown until he began making way for the bridge's expansion in the early '90s, gobbling up properties on both sides of the border, letting them sit empty, creating easy targets for arsonists and dope addicts. He was accused of block busting to drive down prices. Outraged Windsor officials barred him from tearing down the houses.

Around this time, Moroun also bought the abandoned train station, thinking there would be future value in the rail yard located behind it, which links to a freight tunnel under the river. Although it had already been stripped of its bronze doors and mahogany railings, he left the station gutted, windowless, vandalized. An embarrassing reminder to everyone of the city's collapse — becoming the unofficial image of Detroit's demise, literally, with photographers from around the world using the ghosted facade as the money shot of the city's ruin porn.

Look at the station and you saw Matty Moroun. He became the symbol of everything wrong; the billionaire kicking boy; the troll under the bridge, as Forbes magazine once called him. Rightly or wrongly, Matty Moroun was the face of decline, and he cared not a lick.

"No regrets," he says. It was just business. And he wouldn't be the last billionaire to profit from the practice.

His son sees things differently.

"These things, the train station and the bridge, they're iconic to the community," says Matthew, who inherits not only the family business but the family reputation from his father. "I understand that. I grew up in a different time. I'm trying to be civic-minded. I'm trying to open dialogue instead of fighting at every turn."

Drew Dilkens, the mayor of Windsor, describes Matthew as courteous and professional. They have met on a number of occasions, something the mayor never did with Matty Moroun.

"I think Matthew is sincere in wanting to push the reset button," Dilkens said. "He told me he is not his father. But three weeks after that, he hits us with a third party lawsuit. He's still a Moroun.

"My position is, he's got the permits, he wins with a bridge. But my city also has to win here. I'm not going to get pushed around by an American corporation that is all about the money and nothing about the people."

The Ambassador Bridge is the most important economic link between the U.S. and Canada, taking in an estimated $60 million in tolls alone, with more than $500 million in trade crossing daily. Matthew Moroun estimates his new bridge will require about $500 million to complete — all of the money to be raised privately.

But, Canada is in the midst of building the Gordie Howe International Bridge, which is supposed to be financed through toll revenues. The reasoning for the Howe bridge is economic security — taking a crucial piece of infrastructure out of the hands of a monopolist.

Another part of the reasoning appears to be less rational, says Ron Rienas, general manager of the Peace Bridge over the Niagara River and president of the Bridge and Tunnel Operators Association: Many in the Canadian government simply despise Matty Moroun.

"Look, I've had my own war with Moroun and I'm no fan of the Ambassador Bridge Company," Rienas says. "But the Canadian government is cutting off its nose to spite its face. The costs on the project keeps rising. The traffic is not there to finance it. Eventually, it will require a massive subsidy from the Canadian taxpayers."

The Gordie Howe project has stumbled through a decade of delays and rising cost-estimates. First, it was $2 billion, then $4 billion, and now some observers estimate it could cost as much as $7.5 billion. It is supposed to be financed through tolls, yet trade has shifted to Mexico since the turn of the century and traffic is down 45% in that time.

Assuming the Gordie Howe Bridge would cost $4 billion, the principal and interest would be about $230 million annually for 30 years. To break even on the new bridge, Canada would have to quadruple the current tolls, assuming it drew all the traffic from a Moroun-owned bridge. And this calculation does not take into account the outcome of ongoing NAFTA renegotiations or the potential impact of President Donald Trump's steel tariffs.

"We won't know what the cost will be or when the money will be recouped until the bids come in," says Brook Simpson, spokesman for the Canadian Minister of Infrastructure. "But it is going to be built. One hundred percent. Take it to the bank."

Bids are due in June, Simpson says. A contractor will be selected this September. However, like the cost and the financing, a completion date is unknown.

Of course, math is math. And all parties agree there will not be enough revenue to support two bridges. Mutual assured destruction, Matthew Moroun says. An international game of financial chicken. So why stare down a federal government that has limitless amounts of money to waste?

"My reputation is hanging out over the river," he says. "I said I'm going to build it, and I'm going to. I want to leave my own legacy and I want to make my father proud. I'm a Moroun."

With the train station — at least seemingly — gone, and a new bridge coming; a new era is dawning, featuring a new kind of Moroun.