Former Detroit Mayor Back In Jail

The famously corrupt politician who ran Detroit for six years before getting criminally convicted will go back to jail for violating the terms of his probation by hiding assets to avoid paying the city $1 million for his felonious antics.

The storied career of Kwame Kilpatrick keeps providing fodder for local media even though he moved to another state last year to start fresh after serving four months in prison. In 2008 Detroit’s self-described “Hip Hop Mayor” pleaded guilty to obstructing justice by lying under oath about an extramarital affair with a staffer at a whistleblower trial. He also got five years of probation, was ordered to pay $1 million in restitution and forced to turn over his state pension to the city of Detroit.

This week a Wayne County judge determined that the scandal-plagued politician, who is the son of Michigan Congresswoman Carolyn Cheeks, has been “maliciously” hiding assets to avoid paying his debt to the long ailing city he left in shambles. That constitutes a probation violation, which the judge says will land the disgraced lawmaker in jail for 18 months to five years.

At the hearing Kilpatrick begged the judge to keep him out of prison with an emotional speech in which he proclaimed to be a changed man who would never hide money from the court. As he implored for mercy however, the former mayor revealed that he had settled into a $1 million home outside Dallas, continued to drive expensive cars and spent thousands for his wife to have cosmetic surgery.

No wonder the visibly irritated judge sent Kilpatrick to the slammer after telling him that “your testimony in this court amounted to perjury.” The once rising star in Michigan’s Democratic circles showed a lack of candor, remorse, humility and forthrightness, the judge further said before ordering the court officer to handcuff Kilpatrick.

It was a dejavu moment for the self-destructive former mayor who has been handcuffed on numerous other occasions. Though lying under oath to cover up his extramarital affair with a city staffer ended his career, Kilpatrick has committed numerous other crimes. He orchestrated a secret $9 million settlement with wrongfully fired cops who came close to exposing his undercover romance, was charged with two felonies for assaulting a sheriff’s detective trying to serve a subpoena on one of his shady friends and previously violated his probation in another case.

Kilpatrick’s troubles began shortly after he took office in 2002. He spent a great part of his first tenure partying with strippers at the mayor’s mansion and got busted for charging hundreds of thousands of dollars on his city-issued credit card for personal travel, meals and entertainment. He also used $25,000 of city funds to get his wife a fancy sports utility vehicle at a time when Detroit was in a deep financial crisis and thousands of city jobs were being cut.

After completing his prison sentence last February, an old buddy hired Kilpatrick as a medical software salesman at a Dallas-based company called Compuware Corporation. Kilpatrick made $120,000 a year but got fired this week after his probation got revoked. A Michigan state congresswoman, who assures that jailing more African-American males has done little to stem crime, criticized the sentence as too harsh. It shows that there is “no mercy in society and no grace in the judicial system,” Detroit Democrat Shanelle Jackson proclaimed.