SAFE HOUSES

HENRY FORD'S UNION-BUSTING THUG, HARRY BENNETT, BUILT MONUMENTS TO HIS OWN PARANOIA.

THEY SAY A MAN'S HOME IS HIS CASTLE. Few knew this better than Henry Ford's ruthless henchman, Harry Herbert Bennett. He built his own castle-along with some other grandiose, fortified monuments to an epic, if not unfounded, paranoia-with the help of another angry worrier, his one and only boss, the man whose Tin Lizzie put America on wheels.

A short, scrappy pugilist who'd done a stint in the Navy before joining Ford Motor Company in 1917, Bennett would quickly rise in the firm, becoming head of personnel and Ford's trusted “man of all work.” Over his 30-year tenure, Bennett became Ford's de facto No. 2, armed with a secretive and ever-broadening remit that would drive Ford's only son and heir apparent, Edsel, to distraction.

A multifaceted character with improbable artistic leanings, Bennett will nonetheless forever be remembered for ordering the beatings of UAW president Walter Reuther and dozens of other union organizers and sympathizers on a bridge overlooking Ford's River Rouge plant in 1937. Committed with the help of Ford's notorious Service Department-a roster of crooked police, former and future convicts, athletes, and gang members-the Battle of the Overpass wrote him into the history books. Suffice to say, Bennett, a onetime musicians' union member himself, didn't lack for enemies. But as the elder Ford gratefully observed, “Harry gets things done in a hurry."