The archives at "60 Minutes" has produced a classic -- the legendary Mike Wallace stalking through Detroit in 1976, investigating corruption in the mortgage-approval process in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Department.
The scandal, which was a major story in the early and mid-1970s, had a major impact on Detroit neighborhoods, as Wallace makes clear in his report.
The first person Wallace interviewed is Carl Levin, then the young-looking president of the Detroit City Council, now the senior U.S. Senator from Michigan, who is wrapping up a long career in public office.
MIKE WALLACE: One of the top officials of Detroit, president of the City Council and one of HUD's chief critics, is Carl Levin. Mr. Levin, you say that H-U-D stands for:
CARL LEVIN: Hell Upon Detroit.
WALLACE: Why?
LEVIN: HUD permitted the speculators, the illegal and bad guys to take advantage of them because their own people took money to overlook defects in houses.
WALLACE: Case in point: this house on Phillips (sic) Street on Detroit's East Side. The owner bought it back in 1970 from a real estate speculator. The speculator had paid only $7,000 for it a few weeks earlier. But in return for a $100 cash bribe, an FHA appraiser agreed to insure a mortgage on that home for $14,650.
LEVIN: And when those defects became obvious a year later, six months later, the people who were placed in these houses, poor people, abandoned the houses because they had no equity in them. They just simply walked away when the big cracks showed up.
