Kilpatrick Lands On His Feet

It was a hard fall from the pinnacle. Elected into office as the youngest mayor ever of a large American city, Kwame Kilpatrick assumed the office with big dreams that would never die but with a fleeting humility that did not survive his inauguration speech.

I stand before you as a son of the city of Detroit and all that it represents. I was born here in the city of Detroit, I was raised here in the city of Detroit, I went to these Detroit Public Schools. I understand this city. ... This position is personal to me. It's much more than just politics.

And that it was. Politics cannot describe fully the ineptitude and rottenness that pervaded the Kilpatrick administration, his scandals so numerous and well documented that I will not even bother to repeat them.

It will be years, if ever, before Detroit can recover from the damage and embarrassment he bequeathed to the city where he was so proud to have been born, raised, and educated.

Kilpatrick left Detroit several months ago after being released from jail, a felon and badly in debt to the city that he also left badly in debt.

Kilpatrick is appealing a judge’s order that he pay $6,000 a month to the City of Detroit, saying he has only $6 remaining after expenses such as rent and a $900 a month lease on a new Cadillac Escalade. As part of his sentence in the text message scandal, Kilpatrick was ordered to repay $1 million to the city.

One million bucks does not come close to repaying the city for the scandalous whistle blower lawsuits he settled on the sly, let alone paying back the tens of millions of dollars his bumbling administration lost for screwing up deals, missing deadlines, driving business from the city, and simply living too large.

Only $6 left after necessary expenses does sound a lot like abject squalor to me. Poor Kwame must be hunting in the folds of his couch for spare change and maybe pushing a shopping cart in an around the clock quest for deposit bottles and scrap. One Hot-N-Ready pizza and the whole budget is shot. $6 wont even get you a decent lap dance. Poverty can make a man do things!

So, how does a guy living in poverty and too poor to pay back the city he has devastated manage to move into a 5,866 square foot million dollar mansion in a gated community in Southlake, Texas?

Chutzpah, that's how (or maybe a lot of Dr. Pepper bottles.)

At 5,866 square feet, Kilpatrick’s new digs, which he is leasing in tony Southlake, Texas, are nearly 50 % larger than the city-owned mansion he used to occupy as Detroit mayor, before the text message scandal cost him his job and his freedom. The Detroit mansion, now vacant, is just 4,000 square feet.

Kilpatrick’s new home is in a gated community, and is listed on Web sites for sale at $1.1 million. Built in 1998, it has five bedrooms, 5½ baths, a game room, a study, a formal dining room and an in-ground pool in the back hugged by a stone patio and pathway.

It does not look like his time behind bars accomplished much, at least if rehabilitation was even an infinitesimal consideration for his incarceration. Someone in Detroit, maybe once again a whole city, got snookered with the Kilpatrick deal that left him released after such a short amount of time in jail and with such a minuscule monetary punishment. The good Lord knows his ego suffered little.

So, how do you like that? Even after exiting Detroit and starting his new life in a far away land, Kwame Kilpatrick has managed once again to embarrass the city and state of his birth.

Sometimes, I guess, you just gotta stick with what you are good at.