DETROIT — A longtime confidant to former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick testified against him at his corruption trial Monday, acknowledging that checks from a nonprofit community fund paid for political consulting, a vacation and golf clubs.
Derrick Miller, who was Detroit’s chief administrative officer, has known Kilpatrick since ninth-grade English class and played key roles in his political career. Miller was among the original five defendants in the corruption case until he pleaded guilty in 2011 and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors.
Prosecutors displayed checks on a screen to reinforce the allegations of illegal spending from Kilpatrick’s Civic Fund, which was promoted as a nonprofit fund to help the community. Checks paid for golf clubs, yoga, an $8,600 stay at a resort and political polling. Miller signed many of them.
Miller said Kilpatrick lied when he said at a 2001 debate that Civic Fund money wasn’t used by the campaign. When a TV station learned about the trip to a resort in Carlsbad, Calif., Kilpatrick told his aides that he was there to raise money for the fund, but that wasn’t true either, Miller said.
“He basically had to come up with some kind of response,” Miller testified.
Kilpatrick, his father Bernard and pal Bobby Ferguson are charged with running a criminal enterprise by rigging contracts and taking payoffs over many years. Miller’s testimony is important because he was involved in many of the corrupt acts, according to the government.
The indictment says he once acted as a bagman and passed a $10,000 bribe to Kilpatrick in a bathroom. Miller pleaded guilty in 2011, admitting he accepted $115,000 from a real estate broker in connection with the lease or sale of city properties and $10,000 from a contractor at Cobo Center, a convention hall.
Kilpatrick, a Democrat whose mother is former US Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, was elected mayor in 2001. He resigned in 2008 and pleaded guilty to obstructing justice by lying in a civil case about having sex with an aide. He subsequently served 14 months in prison for violating his probation in that case.