Detroit Mayor Violates Bond Twice; Sent to Jail

[Nightwing 0]

While it's gotten little national coverage, the saga of Kwame Kilpatrick has been pissing off the entire state of Michigan for a little while right now. While the entire saga can be recounted in these pages here, the basics are as follow.

 

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick fired two police officers for investigating the mayor's actions at his own mansion regarding an "alleged" stripper party where his wife walked in and assaulted one of the strippers. This occurred in late 2002. Apparently during this time they had also stumbled across a possible affair between he and his Chief of Staff. Rather than settle out of court for hundreds of thousands of dollars like the City Council tried to do, Kilpatrick calls their bluff and tells them to go to trial. At this trial, he completely denies the affair and firing them for improper reasons. He loses, and the verdict awards $5.6 million to the plaintiffs.

 

Kwame vows to fight on, and even comments that "it isn't his money"; the City of Detroit has to play it because he was an acting official or some such bullshit. In a meeting between the lawyers, the attorney of the former cops reveals that he obtained text messages from the company that gave the City of Detroit their blackberries (I believe via subpoena, but don't quote me on that), and gives proof-positive that he committed perjury when he said he did not have an affair (among things such as obstruction of justice, blatant favoritism towards certain contractors, and more). Kilpatrick's attorneys immediately settle for $8.4 million. In return, there is a secret settlement which hands over the copies of the text messages to the mayor's attorney. This settlement is approved by the City Council (obviously without knowledge of the secret settlement).

 

*As a quick aside, a slander suit involving Kilpatrick, his Chief of Staff Christine Beatty, and Chief of Police Ella Bully-Cummings is settled by the City Council for $25,000. What happened was Beatty got pulled over by some cops for speeding. She immediately said "DO YOU KNOW WHO THE FUCK I AM?!" and the three would later accuse them of setting up the speed trap to harass her. Thankfully, Kwame didn't have any say in this one.

 

** A second aside: The alleged party is still alleged, mostly because the stripper in question died in Spring 2003. How? She was shot around twenty times in her car via drive-by. The Detroit Police Department concluded officially that they were after her boyfriend, who got away after the vehicle which fired on her went around for a second pass on her. The investigator who was originally working on the case was reassigned and locked out of information after he concluded that it could have been a hit on her, and that the bullets used (.40 Glock) were the same round used by the Detroit Police Department). The son of the woman is still gathering evidence, and multiple people have come forward to confirm there was a party, though it still has no definitive "proof".

 

The Detroit Free Press (A top-rated paper, for those of you who don't know) delves into the settlement and (I believe through freedom of information) manage to obtain the text messages that the cops' attorney had gotten. They break it in January. Kilpatrick apologizes, though he refuses to say for what and accuses the media of hounding his family. The City Council asks him to resign in a 7-1 vote, which he refuses to do, commenting he "won't quit on Detroit".

 

In his "State of the City Address", he ends with a race-baiting comment about he's never been called a "Nigger" so many times in his life. For those of you who don't know, Detroit is a very racially-polarized city and has been in constant conflict between the black city and white suburbs ever since the "Great White Flight". It calmed down quite a bit with Mayor Dennis Archer, but Kilpatrick has played on it to keep himself in office. At this point, multiple people ask him to step down, including State Attorney General Mike Cox.

 

Recently, with accusations of favoritism towards a contractor (Who he went to school with, is close friends, and whose brother is married to his sister), he was at his sisters house when the County Sheriff's Department came to serve a subpoena on the man, believing he was there. Before the officers can be shown away, Kilpatrick apparently came out, yelled at them and shoved a Deputy back into another while shouting racially hateful things (I believe one of them was "A black man shouldn't be riding in a car with a guy named 'White'." was one). The Governor has started her own process to force him to resign. There's even more going on, including an investigation into a charity run by his wife, in which she is the only employee and is receiving thousands of dollars, as well mass nepotism in appointments and pay-raises in the city government.

 

Now, after the Sheriff-pushing incident (Which the State Attorney General is looking into to see if he should press charges or not) and two trips without giving the judge any warning has brought us to this.

 

Kilpatrick will spend night in jail

Giles unmoved by mayor's apology

 

By M.L. ELRICK and JOE SWICKARD • Free Press Staff Writers • August 7, 2008

 

Judge Ronald Giles sent Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick to jail moments after the mayor pleaded for forgiveness and admitted he made an unauthorized trip to Windsor on city business.

 

"The first day you were before me, I thought I made it clear to you that this court comes first in everything," Giles said. "I do understand that you're under...pressure...but I have to look at how the system should be run and perceived by the public."

 

"At the beginning of this case you were given every privilege that could be given to you with regard to travel," Giles said, adding that he later imposed restrictions after learning Kilpatrick had been abusing his privileges.

 

"At that time I made it perfectly clear ... don't come back ... ," he said.

 

Giles revoked Kilpatrick's $75,000 10% bond and ordered him jailed.

 

Jim Thomas, the mayor’s attorney, went to appeal before Judge Edward Ewell who is the presiding judge of the criminal division, but Ewell is off, so he came before Judge Thomas E. Jackson who is currently hearing a criminal sexual conduct trial involving a child victim.

 

Court officials said Jackson wanted to review a transcript of the proceedings Giles conducted before hearing the bond appeal, which would take until Friday morning. They said the standard Jackson must apply is whether Giles abused his discretion.

 

Jackson spoke to the attorneys, who were standing around, saying, “This is a courtroom, this is not a circus.”

 

The attorneys are waiting for Jackson to hear the case now. The judge is taking care of a sentencing.

 

Judge Jackson held the appeal over until 9 a.m. Friday. When Thomas tried to pose a question, the judge responded, “I just gave you my answer, I don’t want to hear anymore.”

 

The judge asked for a transcript and a report from the prisoner screening unit.

 

Veteran attorneys in the courtroom said the screening can take up to 10 days.

 

Giles’ jailing of Kilpatrick leaves no clear line of authority in who is running the city because there currently is no deputy mayor. Anthony Adams has temporarily relinquished his deputy mayor duties to be the interim director of the Water and Sewerage Department, and Kilpatrick said at the time of that announcement that chief of staff Kandia Milton and chief operating officer Cathy Square would divide up Adams’ deputy mayor duties.

 

The charter provides that in the “absence or temporary disability” of the mayor that the deputy mayor is the acting mayor.

 

Giles' comments came after Kilpatrick told the judge he had been living under incredible pressure for the past 7 months.

 

"I don't believe that there is a person that's ever been through this process that respects it more than I do," Kilpatrick said, referring to the legal proceedings stemming from the eight felonies ranging from conspiracy to perjury to misconduct in office to obstruction of justice filed against him in March.

 

"Last week was a tremendous wake-up call to me," he said, referring to Giles' rebuke last month after he allegedly assaulted law enforcement officials trying to serve a subpoena.

 

Kilpatrick admitted violating the terms of his bond by traveling to Windsor without notifying the court. He said he was sorry.

 

"My life has been revolutionarily transformed and it's transforming in front of the eye of these media people who don't know me at all," he said, referring to what he called intense scrutiny. "Your honor, I ask for your forgiveness...it will never happen again."

 

He said his sons were watching these proceedings because he asked them to. "I told them that I did something wrong," he said.

 

Kilpatrick further said he was not "frolicking" in Windsor but trying to make a deal that would let him avoid laying off more than a thousand city workers.

 

"I apologize to the citizens as well, but mostly to you. It was never an affront to you," he said of the trip.

 

Assistant Wayne County Prosecutor Robert Moran said the mayor's pleas rung hollow.

 

"Now that he's caught, he's taking responsibility...he thought he got away with it," Moran said.

 

Prosecutors had argued before Kilpatrick addressed the court that the mayor was not taking the case against him seriously.

 

"The defendant left the state of Michigan, left the country, without prior notice to the court," Moran said, referring to a recent trip to Windsor. "All you have to have him do is call me...he has my cell phone, he can call me anytime...we would never say the mayor of Detroit cannot travel for an emergency matter."

 

Moran said he found out about the trip from the media.

 

"That is a flagrant violation of this court's order," Moran said. "At the very least we are going to ask the court to cut off all travel to the defendant...for business or personal, because he violated the very generous terms that this court has set up."

 

"It's not serious to him that he's a criminal defendant," he added.

 

Thomas acknowledged that the mayor violated the terms of his bond, but said it was an emergency.

 

"Who was dying?" Giles asked.

 

"The City of Detroit was sick," Thomas said, adding that the mayor was trying to save a $75 million deal that would help balance Detroit's budget.

 

Last month, Giles put new restrictions on Kilpatrick's travel after Wayne County law enforcement officials accused him of assaulting them as they tried to serve a subpoena. The judge also revoked the mayor's personal recognizance bond and required him to post $7,500 cash to remain free.

[Matt Young 0]

Just everything about Detroit is terrible.

 

EDIT: Except the hockey team, apparently.

[DangerousDamon 0]

Kwame is a fucking idiot. There's no other way to put it.

[Nightwing 0]

Eh, the Downtown is coming along nicely. But this is certainly Detroit's darkest hour; the Auto Companies are falling apart and have gotten little to no government help. The City Council is being investigated by the FBI for contractor problems just like Kilpatrick, and he is the most ridiculous figure in politics today. Elliot Spitzer resigned almost immediately for less. This guy doesn't know when to quit. It's amazing that the west side of Michigan is barely managing to offset everything that is happening in Detroit.

 

Hopefully cutting away the cancer here will help move Detroit towards improvement. The old racebaiting is starting to backfire, and the State is seriously considering takeovers in areas like Education and such in the area. Gutting everything might be what needs to happen.

[Gary Floyd 0]

Just everything about Detroit is terrible.

 

EDIT: Except the hockey team, apparently.

Having been there, I agree. Even being the birthplace of American Techno can't salvage it.

[Nightwing 0]

Update: The State Attorney General has charged Kilpatrick with two counts of felony assault in the sheriff incident. From the look of things, that case is cut and dry enough to get finished soon. THANKFULLY the charter of Detroit has a clause saying Mayor convicted of a felony is immediately booted out of office (As opposed to the long processes both the Council and the Governor are trying to go through), so it looks like he'll be out of office much sooner than expected, in part to his own hubris.

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

Just everything about Detroit is terrible.

 

EDIT: Except the hockey team, apparently.

Having been there, I agree. Even being the birthplace of American Techno can't salvage it.

 

Fuck you. Detroit Techno is so completely perfect that it redeems any and all failures.

[bobobrazil1984 0]

what's great (relatively) about Detroit is that you can just move 10 miles in any direction and find a cool nice place to live and never ever have to deal with any of Detroit's shittiness. I used to live in the downriver suburbs myself. I've never seen a city metro area that's so segmented like that.

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

Detroit's cool because if you go to certain places it's like you've stumbled upon the ruins of some forgotten ancient metropolis (and I guess you have, kinda). I read somewhere that something like a full third of the city is now just vacant land, the houses/factories/stores/whatever that once stood on it having long since disappeared and been replaced by overgrown weeds and prairie grass.

[Guest Cal Moriarty]

Fuck you. Detroit Techno is so completely perfect that it redeems any and all failures.

fite me u poser, house was better.

 

I've never been to Detroit to experience what you're talking about, but I have perused Forgotten Detroit, so your post reminded me of that site.

That's some ghastly stuff. Apparently this theater just sits there decaying and nobody has done anything about it. Of course I can't find the picture now, but Tiger Stadium has trees growing in the grandstand. It's been abandoned for like nine years already.

 

hm.

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

Harper's ran a pretty fascinating story about Detroit a year or two ago (which is where I pulled the "1/3 of the city is vacant lots" statistic from). You can read it here. It's probably the most elegant/beautiful/depressing portrait of the city I've seen. Excerpt:

 

I tool many pictures on my visits to Detroit, but back home they just look like snapshots of abandoned Nebraska farmhouses or small towns farther west on the Great Plains. Sometimes a burned out house would stand next to a carefully tended twin, a monument to random fate; sometimes the rectilinear nature of city planning was barely perceptible, just the slightest traces of a grid fading into grassy fields accented with the occasional fire hydrant. One day, after a brief thunderstorm, when the rain had cleared away and chunky white clouds dotted the sky, I wandered into a neighborhood, or rather a former neighborhood, of at least a dozen square blocks where trees of heaven waved their branches in the balmy air. Approximately one tattered charred house still stood per block. I could hear the buzzing of crickets or cicadas, and I felt as if I had traveled a thousand years into the future.

[Nightwing 0]

Oh Czech, that pales in comparison to letting Michigan Central Station fall into ruin.

 

And while the treatment of Tiger Stadium is certainly bad, the fact that this mayor attempted to sell the land the Detroit Zoo sits on is even worse. That Zoo was the first ever to try and recreate animal habitats rather than just putting them in cages and is one of the best zoos in the nation.

[Guest Cal Moriarty]

What are you listening to right now?

Talking Heads - "Nothing But Flowers"

 

Fascinating article.

 

For suburban decay, which is a little more up my alley, we've all scoured http://www.deadmalls.com/, right? I actually got to experience a dead mall in May. It wasn't pleasant.

This is the mall where they filmed the car chase scene in The Blues Brothers, down in Harvey. It was vacant then, but dressed up to look occupied. Now it's just overrun with weeds. Come to think of it, the "dead mall" I visited was more in critical condition than dead, in comparison.

[SuperJerk 0]

Detroit Mayor Kilpatrick pleads guilty, resigns

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

End of an era

[EVIL~! alkeiper 0]

Since Tiger Stadium was mentioned earlier, an update.

 

[Jaxxson Mayhem 0]

They should let people play baseball there.

[Guest Tzar Lysergic]

How's the homeless situation in Detroit, during the summer? You'd think it would be incredible, what with all the abandoned buildings.

 

I haven't been up there in years, since the place is a god damn shithole.

[Lord of The Curry 0]

I'd heard about this story but had no clue that Detroit's mayor was the worlds first black Irishman. Seriously, what's that dudes background?

[MFer 0]

More text messages!