The author is a lifelong journalist with stretches at The Detroit News, Detroit Monthly magazine, HOUR Detroit magazine, and Metro Times. He has been honored with more than 50 professional writing and reporting awards and is now semi-retired. This column first appeared on his Substack page and is being reposted with permission. To subscribe to his page click here.
By Ric Bohy
Kwame Kilpatrick, Dennis Archer and Coleman A. Young
Sitting down to write about mayors I’ve known, it quickly became clear that Kwame Kilpatrick was the most colorful, even more than Detroit’s “mayor for life,” Coleman A. Young, who served five terms (I’ve always thought that was two terms too many).
That’s saying a lot because I also knew Highland Park Mayor Bob Blackwell, who once had his jaw wired shut to lose weight, and shamelessly frequented the Tender Trap, a topless-bottomless joint next to city hall. When a body-painting studio opened in his city, he happily painted the first female model.
I knew Dennis Archer from the time he was a young lawyer, and we were always friendly. The only thing about his mayoralty that sticks in my mind was being admitted to his office at the beginning of his term to interview him about those beginnings. A uniformed policewoman sat at the back of the room, and I objected, telling him a third party tended to warp an interview. He snapped that if she wasn’t there, he wouldn’t be either.
Years after returning to law, he was as friendly as he had ever been when I ran into him at a benefit. I’ve always thought that as soon as he took office as mayor, he began to receive death threats, as Young got regularly, and felt endangered, even by someone who was an old friend.
Young and I knew each other during most of his five-term tenure in office, and generally got along better than it appeared. Once, when I scored an interview with him at the Manoogian Mansion, I was shown in as a cocktail party was coming together and directed upstairs to the mayor’s quarters. I found him sitting at his desk, wearing a robe and peeling solitaire. Our meeting was supposed to last 20 minutes, and we ended up talking for more than two hours. He blew off the party downstairs to sit and chat. It was a rare one-on-one with The Man.
As a newspaper reporter, I was far more interested in felons than frailty, or flamboyance more than flawlessness, so Kwame had my attention.
Even though he comported himself as a thug, Kwame resented being called one.
At 6’5”, he tended to loom over, rather than walk through, a room. He wore sharp suits and was accompanied everywhere by a crony posse of similar height and girth.
He had a national rep as “The Hip‐Hop Mayor,” and promoted himself and his administration as “sexy.”
Time magazine, like others, named him as one of the worst big-city mayors in the country. During his first term, he spent $210,000 on Moet & Chandon champagne, massages, and feasts, all of them going on his city credit card.
The Free Press called him “a city hall gangster,” while Kwame dubbed himself “God’s guy.” But God didn’t help his guy when he was convicted of perjury and obstruction of justice and sentenced to four months in jail, of which he served 99 days. Neither was he of any help when Kwame was sentenced to 18 months to five years in state prison for probation violation.
Three years later he was convicted for 24 federal felonies, including racketeering, mail fraud and wire fraud. Three months later, he was sentenced to 28 years in federal prison, and served 76 months before Donald Trump commuted his sentence.
They were brothers in criminality. They were made for each other.
