Kwame Kilpatrick Found Gulity On 22Charges Including Corruption And Fraud Former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick has finally had his day in court following a 5-month trial in connection with a laundry list of corruption allegations that began surfacing back in 2008. via NY Times 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. 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. After the verdicts were read, Mr. Kilpatrick shook his head, muttered and looked at his lawyer. Mr. Kilpatrick, whose wife and three children live in the Dallas area, could face up to 20 years in prison.
