Detroit's Gangster Mayor Reportedly to Accept Plea Today: Kilpatrick Era Over for Now
Most Americans would just as soon never think about Detroit, the former national treasure that has deteriorated into a source of national shame. And when they do, it will inevitably be due to black racism and corruption.
Kwame's Mommy vs. Gov. Granholm
I did not attend Governor Granholm's hearing today. I will not attend any of the proceedings started by the Governor. I did not give a statement to any news outlet. I am outraged that The Detroit News would run a story on its Web site that indicates I attended. The paper made an extremely serious error. I expect an apology and a full and immediate retraction.
By 9 a.m. Thursday, Kilpatrick's lawyers and Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy hope to announce a plea deal. While few details have been reported, Kirkpatrick's attorneys are negotiating how much jail time the Mayor would have to serve, how long probation might last beyond that, and whether he would be permitted to again run for public office. Any criminal conviction would require that the Mayor resign from office. The parties had sought to announce a plea deal on Wednesday, but negotiations were reportedly held up by Kilpatrick's earlier refusal to countenance jail time.
Kilpatrick is such damaged goods that even Democratic presidential candidate, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, has called on him to step down.
The Civil Suit
As is so often the case, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's undoing proved to be not his initial indiscretions, but his and Beatty's attempted cover up.
The City of Detroit (read: Mayor Kilpatrick) was initially sued by two high-ranking Detroit police officers, Deputy Police Chief Gary Brown and Officer Harold Nelthrope. Nelthrope had been a mayoral bodyguard, while Brown had been in charge of the Detroit PD's Internal Affairs Division. Both officers had been fired in 2003, after Nelthrope had alleged misconduct within the Mayor's security detail to Brown, who in turn had sought to investigate the matter. A third DPD officer, Walt Harris, was another mayoral bodyguard who backed Nellthorpe's charges of misconduct among the security detail, and was also fired. The officers charged that they were whistle blowers who had been fired in retaliation.
Kilpatrick and Beatty had the men fired, in order to squelch the internal affairs investigation, which would have exposed their affair.
During Mayor Kilpatrick's sworn testimony during last year's civil trial, the plaintiffs' attorney, Mike Stefani, asked him and his then-chief of staff, Christine Beatty, whether they were engaged in an extramarital affair. Kilpatrick and Beatty both emphatically denied, under oath, that they were or had been lovers, or that they had fired the officers.
Kilpatrick could have saved the city millions, but stonewalled previous settlement attempts, causing the eventual bill to multiply.
In one text message, Beatty recalled the "decision that we made to fire Gary Brown."
The Old Deal
Taking the Mayor's testimony at face value, the Detroit City Council approved an $8.4 million settlement to the two officers, which with attorneys' fees, ballooned to over $9 million.
In January, however, the Detroit Free Press got its hands on "more than 14,000 text messages sent to and from Beatty's city-provided pager in 2002 and 2003, many of which included explicit recountings of sexual escapades between the two, their planning more such rendezvous, and one in which Beatty recalled the "decision that we made to fire Gary Brown."
(Unbeknownst to the City Council, the settlement deal included a secret agreement to suppress all of the text messages.)
Initial Indictments
Kilpatrick was then indicted for perjury, misconduct, and obstruction of justice, while Beatty was indicted on seven felony charges.
One of the conditions of the Mayor's bond required what was essentially a rubber-stamp procedure, where he would telephone the court before making any trips outside of the city, whereupon he was free to travel the world on city business. But that was too much to ask of "the hiphop mayor." Kilpatrick traveled to Canada, ostensibly on official business, without asking the court's permission. When the trip was discovered, District Court Judge Ronald Giles ordered Kilpatrick to spend one night in jail, the first time any mayor had been jailed while in office in the 307-year history of the stalled former Motor City.
The ruling, though shocking to prosecutors and allies of the mayor alike, comes after months of the mayor's defiant and sometimes flippant attitude toward his legal woes .
As the case has moved toward trial, Kilpatrick has refused to step down from his mayoral office and, at times, acted as if nothing was wrong.
In the face of Mayor Kilpatrick's indifference to the law and the new assault charges, Judge Giles ruled that he may not travel at all prior to having a court hearing and being granted permission.
In July, white Wayne County Sheriff's deputy Brian White, and his black colleague, JoAnne Kinney, went to the home of Kilpatrick's friend, Bobby Ferguson to deliver a subpoena. According to White, instead of Ferguson, Kilpatrick answered the door, responding with racial taunts and assaulting White, giving him a fractured hip.
According to court papers, Kilpatrick told Kinney, "You should be ashamed of yourself for being a black woman and working this case. How could you even ride in the same car with him, especially someone named White?"
Had a white man been charged with making racial taunts while interfering with and assaulting a peace officer, giving the officer a broken hip, the white would surely be prosecuted on hate crime charges.
When Kilpatrick was jailed, a press release from his office informing the media, "Detroit's government will continue to operate as usual," was hardly comforting. Kilpatrick's new female chief of staff, Deputy Mayor Kandia Milton, ran the city in his "absence."
In 1950, Detroit, then known by whites as "the Motor City" and by blacks as "Motown," had 1,849,568 predominantly white residents; only 16.2 percent of the city was then black. Not only was the city America's fifth most populous, but was by some accounts the nation's most beautiful and affluent major city.
Detroit's point of no return came in 1967. Since the 1950s, the black share of the city's population had been steadily increasing, and with it, the crime rate. Less than one month after black nationalist H. Rap Brown and his comrades demanded that white Detroiters surrender the city to them (Brown: otherwise, "we are going to burn you down"), from July 23-27, blacks engaged in what would remain the most destructive, 20th century American race riot until the 1992 Los Angles race riot, with 43 dead and 467 wounded. Whites responded by fleeing the city, selling their homes at way below their previous market value, losing everything. In no time, beautiful, safe, white neighborhoods mutated into violent, black slums.
In 1973, black supremacist Coleman Young became Detroit's first black mayor. Young hired convicts fresh out of prison to be police officers, and during his five terms in office, reshaped Detroit into the African-style kleptocracy that it has remained ever since. One of the new local folk ways that grew under Young was "Devil's Night," which black youth celebrated citywide annually the night before Halloween, by committing arson, looting, and rioting across the city. Detroit made a gift of Devil's Night to the nation, as the arson-riots spread across the country. City government was only able to douse the party by employing police state tactics in the 1990s, which they must employ every year anew, or risk a return of the flames.
Kwame Kilpatrick is the most notorious example of Detroit's lawless current officaldom, but Detroiters and Michiganders could rattle off many other such names. In 2004, when Christine Beatty was pulled over by a Detroit police office for speeding, she reportedly demanded of him, "Do you know who the f--k I am?!" Beatty called Detroit's black Police Chief Ella Bully-Cummings on her cell phone, and got out of the ticket.
Just last week, while attending the Democratic National Convention, black Detroit Councilwoman Monica Conyers instigated an incident at the Magnolia Hotel, where she was staying with her husband, Detroit Cong. John Conyers, and their two teenaged sons. Although Mrs. Conyers knew that the hotel's suites carried only one bed, she insisted on having a suite. And knowing that the suite they were in was booked for the following night, Mrs. Conyers agreed to move to a different room, but when hotel personnel came to move her family, she screamed obscenities at hotel staff, and refused to switch rooms. The hotel yielded.
Look for a racial shakedown lawsuit by Conyers to attempt to profit from her own racism, in the same mold as the successful conspiracy by racist blacks to shake down the Adam's Mark hotel chain a few years ago.
Speaking of racist shakedown artists, Mrs. Conyers' husband, Cong. Conyers, is the most notorious one in Congress. For over 20 years, Cong. Conyers has submitted a bill in every session of Congress to shake down white Americans for "slavery reparations," a project which is wholeheartedly supported by the Democratic candidate for president under the euphemism, "education debt."
The reason Cong. Kilpatrick spoke contemptuously of Gov. Granholm is that the Governor is white, while the Congresswoman is black. After all, the idea for the hearings came from Detroit's black City Council.
Today, Detroit does not have a single major supermarket. All the chains have left, in the face of constant theft, robberies, and violence in the aisles. Instead of vying for the title of America's most beautiful, prosperous city, it now competes annually for title of America's murder capital. The auto factories are gone, and much of the city is a vast wasteland that is slowly being reclaimed by the land. Local blacks refer to Detroit as "The D"; most Americans try not to think about the city at all.
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.
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