Just because a city's paranoid doesn't mean someone isn't really trying to tear it down.

Detroiters have complained for decades about the negative impact of seemingly invisible suburbanites who profit off the city's misery while helping to worsen its reputation and appearance. 

Detroit has long struggled with those north of 8 Mile Road who prefer to get paid off its misery:

  • Business owners who fence illegal scrap metal and other stolen goods.
  • Truckers paid to dump tires and trash in vacant lots.
  • Professional arsonists who, as far back as the "Devil's Night" era, have helped transform once-vibrant neighborhoods into charred hellscapes. 

But often, Detroiters' complaints are dismissed as the baseless rantings of residents who won't take responsibility for their communities. If you grew up here in the 1980s when "Devil's Night" shenanigans suddenly and seemingly inexplicably morphed from egging car windows to torching entire blocks, you might be familiar with that dismissiveness.

The sentencing Wednesday of a suburban arson ring that for years damaged and destroyed numerous city properties to collect insurance underscores just how real the problem is. Led by 31-year-old Beverly Hill resident Ali Darwich, the nine-person ring includes five Dearborn residents, along with another man from Beverly Hills, a person from Farmington and another from Warren.

From a Free Press report:

According to evidence presented at trial, the scheme started in 2005, when Darwich and eight codefendants committed a rash of arsons and then submitted false claims to insurance companies for reimbursement. Specifically, Darwich and his cohorts would buy insurance for various dwellings, businesses and vehicles and then intentionally burn, vandalize or flood the properties or vehicles. The false insurance claims followed.

“We hope that this conviction sends a strong message that individuals who commit arson for profit will be brought to justice,” U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade said in a statement.

Jurors heard about several arsons, including a 2008 fire at a home on Cheyenne in Detroit. Darwich was seen entering the house carrying a bottle of liquid, and then seen running from the home empty-handed moments later, prosecutors said. He was arrested after police noticed the house going up in flames.

In another incident, Darwich set a delayed fire at Warrendale Hardware on West Warren in Detroit, resulting in more than $500,000 in damage. Darwich also placed the ownership of various properties in the names of friends and family members to hide their true ownership, defrauding seven insurance companies for more than $5 million.

Understand, we aren't talking about the beer-drenched baseball fans my man Jeff Wattrick took down so brilliantly for trashing downtown after Tigers games. Yeah, irresponsible jerks in Brandon Inge T-shirts may need better home training, but hot dog wrappers and soda bottles can be swept up.

The damage people like Darwich inflict is far more lasting, far more difficult for the city to recover from, far tougher to wipe away. 

Sure, insurance companies may recoup the money Darwich swindled them out of, and the legal system may put his criminal ass away for the rest of his life, in effect. 

But the communities they damage keep on suffering. For them, it means one less building in which a prospective business can set up shop. One less residence for a family to call home. And one more reason for people to continue to dash for the city limits. 

I don't deny that Detroiters themselves also contribute -- big time -- to the decline of neighborhoods and the city as a whole. Plenty have.

But more than any other city I know, Detroit is bludgeoned regularly by simple-minded narratives that do away with complexity, history, nuance and broader perspectives in order to affix blame squarely and solely on the city's poor and powerless.

This why it's easier to bitch about what the the City Council and mayor have or haven't done than to discuss Detroit in the context of the mortgage crisis or de-industrialization or racism. This is why it's easier to cry for murdered teenagers and call for more jails than to create effective anti-violence programs and jobs for youth.

This is why it's easier to believe our educational problems can be solved by pointing fingers at teacher's unions and the school board, by turning our kids over to for-profit school factories and by making up experimental school districts led by unqualified emergency managers and failed bureaucrats. 

And this is also part of why Detroiters tend to be wary of -- perhaps even paranoid about -- influential "outsiders," be they in politics or business.

While some surely have the purest intentions, Detroiters know well that too many others are, like Ali Darwich, more than happy to burn this city down while laughing all the way to the bank.