Kwame Kilpatrick: The once and future king? The convict bedecked in proper jewelry, at a previous trial
Bobby Ferguson, 2011: The bucks stop here?; Bobby Ferguson was also convicted in federal trialPosted by Nicholas Stix
I understand that every corrupt politician is going to have cronies whom he favors with more graft over others, but the difference between Bobby Ferguson and everyone else is staggering. Kwame Kilpatrick gave some cronies thousands of dollars for a scheme, while giving Ferguson millions. Either Ferguson had something on Kilpatrick or, what is more likely, Ferguson was kicking back millions to Kilpatrick. However, this trial has still not established how the money flowed back from Ferguson to Kilpatrick.
But more importantly, Tamara Greene is still dead, and still has not gotten any justice.
Tamara Greene is the central figure in a world of incidents that officially “never happened”: She never performed for Kilpatrick at a secret party at the mayoral residence, Manoogian Mansion; she was not discovered by Kilpatrick’s wife, Karlita, who then did not proceed to beat Greene so badly with a blunt object that Greene had to get taken to a hospital emergency room; and the later murder of Greene was not covered up by a conspiracy within the Detroit Police Department. Except that everything did happen.
By Mary M. Chapman and Steven Yaccino
March 11, 2013
New York Times
DETROIT — Kwame M. Kilpatrick, a former mayor of Detroit, was found guilty on Monday of a range of charges, including corruption and fraud, at the completion of a five-month trial. Jurors reached consensus on 40 of the 45 charges leveled against Mr. Kilpatrick and his co-defendants, the judge in the trial said.
The verdicts brought to a close a trial in which prosecutors laid out a complex case against Mr. Kilpatrick and his co-defendants — including his father, Bernard, and a city contractor, Bobby W. Ferguson — arguing that they had used the mayor’s office to enrich themselves for years through shakedowns, kickbacks and bid-rigging schemes.
The jury found Mr. Kilpatrick guilty of some 22 of the 30 charges against him, including the most serious charges, that of racketeering and extortion, which each have a maximum sentence of 20 years. The former mayor was also found guilty of mail fraud.
The remaining charges were returned with no decisions from a hung jury or as not guilty verdicts.
After the verdicts were read, Mr. Kilpatrick shook his head, muttered and looked at his lawyer.
Mr. Ferguson, who faced 11 counts, was found guilty of racketeering, bribery and extortion, with at least one not guilty verdict on an extortion charge.
The former mayor’s father was convicted on a charge of filing a false tax return.
Elected mayor of Detroit in 2001, the youngest person, at 31, to hold that position in the city’s history, Mr. Kilpatrick was seen by many as a future star of the Democratic Party, destined to lift Detroit out of economic hardship and then rise himself through the ranks of national politics.
But his tenure as mayor was plagued by scandal, his career cut short. He was soon fighting rumors about partying, questions about the use of city money to lease a luxury vehicle for his wife, and claims that he fired police officers for investigating his sizeable staff of bodyguards.
In 2008, Mr. Kilpatrick resigned after text messages were unearthed by The Detroit Free Press that exposed an affair with his chief of staff. The romantic revelation led him to plead guilty to obstruction of justice charges for lying about the relationship under oath in an unrelated lawsuit against the city.
But the corruption charges against Mr. Kilpatrick, filed in 2010, had been by far the most serious of his troubles. Prosecutors accused him and his close associates — a group referred to in the indictment as the Kilpatrick Enterprise — of extortion and illegally steering municipal contracts to Mr. Ferguson worth $84 million.
In two-hour closing statements last month, after a trial that featured about 80 witnesses for the prosecution, R. Michael Bullotta, an assistant United States attorney, said the Kilpatrick administration’s enrichment formula was simple: “No deal without me.”
“That was their mantra, those were their words,” Mr. Bullotta said. “They had to get a piece.”
Federal prosecutors also contend that Mr. Kilpatrick spent donations that were intended for his charity, the Kilpatrick Civic Fund, on golf equipment, summer camp for his children, yoga lessons for himself and other personal expenses.
Defense lawyers claimed that there was no proof Mr. Kilpatrick did anything wrong, saying the prosecution’s case was built on weak circumstantial evidence and a raft of lying witnesses.
“We came here into this courtroom with a lot of baggage,” said James Thomas, Mr. Kilpatrick’s lawyer, who argued that his client had been unfairly “demonized by the media.”
Mr. Kilpatrick, whose wife and three children live in the Dallas area, could face up to 20 years in prison.
Christine Hauser contributed reporting from New York.
[See my report, “Detroit’s Gangster Mayor Reportedly to Accept Plea Today: Kilpatrick Era Over … for Now”;
Also, from WEJB/NSU’s Kwame Kilpatrick file:
“(Kwame) Kilpatrick Enterprise” in Detroit: Most Corrupt Municipal Administration Anyone Had Ever Seen”;
“Carlita Kilpatrick, Wife of Convicted Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, Fights Paying One Dime of the $1 Million Restitution He Agreed to, as Part of His Plea-Bargain; Mrs. Kilpatrick Has Not Said Whether She Wishes to Pay Restitution to the Family of Murdered Stripper Tamara Greene”;
“Feds Declare War on Detroit’s Gangster Mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, Charge Him with Everything but the Murder of Tamara Greene”;
“Detroit’s Ex-(and Future?) Felon Mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, is Living Large in Texas, with No Visible Income (but with a Secret Loan), Has Committed Tax Evasion, is Not Paying Back His Court-Ordered Restitution, and being Represented on the (White) Taxpayer’s Dime (And Trying to Forget Tamara Greene!)”;
“In Detroit, to Find the Biggest Crooks, Look to the Highest Offices: Judge Carlos Powell Charged with Being City’s Drug Kingpin”; and
“Detroit: Trial on Bid-Rigging Under King Kwame Continues; but Why was Bobby Ferguson So Powerful?”]
That guy looks like it took a lot of welfare food money to grow him that large.
ReplyDeleteI believe it easier for a bad person to pull a good person down than for a good person to pull a bad person up. Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future. When, in a fully enfranchised democracy, an alliance of the immature and the retarded, led by the God complexed, narcissists become the majority, sanity is voted out and insanity is voted in.
It is surreal when the alliance expects, demands and forces upon non-liberal whites the role of the white man’s burden, whilst said alliance misappropriately points the finger of blame at those same non-liberal whites, who in reality, are the causal agent for their luxuriously high lifestyle. Only the immature, the retarded and those who suffer both traits, can never fathom the great depths of this conundrum.
This is the reality of America today. The liberals, the God complexed and the immature, and their allies, the retarded and the immature have won. There probably is no saving our Founding Fathers free enterprise Republic at this point. The only viable solution is white flight followed by secession via a declaration of independence followed by an outlawing of everything that gave the alliance the power they needed to transmogrify our once great and flourishing nation. Only by never allowing the alliance their chance to steal our great collective good for their personal gain and vanity again would such an endeavor be worth the hard effort.
In South Africa a similar problem, though more advanced, is showing America her future. The white Afrikaners were so successful they raised the life expectancy of blacks from 38 to 61. Now after near 20 years of black rule the black life expectancy has dropped down to 52. Further, the retarded blacks are murdering off the white Afrikaners, the people who gave said retarded blacks a better life in spite of themselves.
Non-liberal whites should shuck the white man’s burden role, imposed by the white liberal, upon the non-liberal white. We are not our different sub-species keeper. They want their liberation from the non-liberal white man we should give it to them.
Non-liberal whites should not share the white creations with any other sub-species. Let the others live in their natural state as created for them by the nature of their gene pool. Whites created anti-biotics and foolishly gave them to other different sub-species of humans. In turn, those other sub-species of humans have so misused and/or abused our miracle drugs that they are being rendered impotent. Further, outright stealing of the creations of our investing capitalist by the more r selective, gene pool people of the world, the third world people, has removed the incentive to spend on R&D, and so there are no new miracle drugs in the pipeline, we, and our humanity is headed for a Malthusian apocalypse of old Testament, Biblical proportions.
At this point I could care less if all the more r seclection, gene pool humans suffer the horrendous deaths their gene pool leaves them prey to, including disease and starvation. They are thankless, clueless and prefer the death to the white race, rather than admit to themselves their envious immaturity is what drives them to kill the white goose that lays the golden eggs.
Why we whites should allow any other, lower sub-species to steal from our gene pool is beyond sanity and into insanity.
Let us non-liberal whites separate out from the alliance, secede, declare independence and leave those immature and retarded people to their own devices. At that point, never again should we afford those who ruin; their chance to ruin again. Thank you.
Yeah, and the felonious douche bag chose to escape to obscenely affluent, lily white Southlake, Texas. http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/Kilpatrick-Family-Moves-Out-of-Southlake-to-Grand-Prairie-99573689.html
ReplyDeleteI came closer to solving her murder in my book that the DPD did in ten years!
ReplyDeletehttp://www.amazon.com/They-Called-Her-Strawberry-ebook/dp/B00D99LFJE
KC Marks