chapter 12
Out of Nowhere
I WAS TIRED, had a headache every day without fail, and was working my ass off. Plus, I was constantly fighting bullshit rumors about me. One that began to spread alleged that a party had taken place at the mayoral residence, the Manoogian Mansion. The rumor had it that the party, which was said to be so wild that it involved strippers, occurred during the fall of my first year in office.
We were still living in our own home during that time. Carlita was renovating the Manoogian and forbade me or the boys from entering the mansion until it was completed. It was the one thing that made her happy at that time, so I dared not dishonor her request.
Still, the rumor gained momentum. Barbershops, nightclubs and neighborhood gathering spots buzzed about it. In fact, people spreading the story began to place themselves, their close friends or family members there, as well. And because I was known as “the Hip-Hop Mayor,” it was perfectly believable that I had a party at my home—where my wife and children live—with strippers and complete mayhem. Before we knew it, the press picked it up and began reporting it as though it were factual. One facet of the reports suggested that Carlita crashed it, breaking it up and even assaulting one of the dancers. As hard as I was working, and considering the discord between me and Carlita because of my work for the City, this struck me as complete bullshit. I believed, at first, that most people felt the same way. But I was completely wrong. I don’t know when it actually happened, but during this time, Detroiters’ perception of me as the young attorney and family man committed to serving the City eroded, and was replaced with a media-crafted perception of me as an arrogant, hedonistic, immature asshole that didn’t give a damn about anyone but myself.
Noted business leaders, pastors and community stalwarts asked me to admit that there had indeed been such a party, as if offering me their sage wisdom. One Detroit pastor even told me he was told it happened by someone who attended it. Of course, he wouldn’t say the person’s name.
The entire episode quickly depressed and angered me. I was completely undone. While we, as a city, were experiencing paradigm shifts in City services, economic development, crime reduction and our ability to recruit and land huge national and international events, I was reduced to a partying hooligan.
Attorney General Mike Cox, a Republican, announced plans to investigate the rumor in 2004. He rushed to get involved because he really believed that it had happened, and the story stood to advance his own political career by becoming the man who got to the bottom of it. He spent more than $4 million of the State taxpayers’ money on the probe. He subpoenaed cops, my neighbors, hospital workers, the administrative staff in the Mayor’s Office, and others. He pulled 911 tapes, hospital entrance reports, EMS run sheets, police run sheets, and video footage from the house. No real date for the party ever materialized (not even a calendar month) during his query, nor a credible witness or attendee. He never even found one person who knew someone who had attended it. He even interviewed me! It was the biggest news in the city, bigger than the G-8 Energy Summit and the Major League Baseball All-Star Game that was coming to town. And it turned up nothing.
Cox eventually concluded that it never happened, dismissing it as an “urban legend.” But the press weren’t convinced and kept pressing the issue. They deduced that the Attorney General was really a friend of mine who was actually helping me, so they vowed to stay on the investigation. Note that my “friend” the Attorney General would later join the Wayne County prosecution team against me, just to show that he was not my friend. He then would run for governor and air campaign commercials saying that he was the reason Kwame Kilpatrick went to prison, and that’s why people should vote for him. He would lose because the ridiculous rumor would spread and include him as a partygoer. I wish I were making this up. That is funny to me.
What’s not funny is the fact that the rumor still lives, nine years later. The newspapers and news stations have made a massive amount of money on the story, and have managed to implore other law enforcement agencies to get involved. The only question that I still ponder is why? Why am I still on the news about it, after eight years and nearly three years removed from being mayor?
A second issue that plagued me toward the end of my first term was the City’s lease of a Lincoln Navigator for the purpose of transporting my wife and children. This became a national story, one that could have been avoided. But we were unorganized in this instance, and our bad decision-making delayed communication of the truth, thus propelling it forward.
The Navigator issue was big to me, because it rose from a conflict between Carlita and Christine. We’d entered the administration already owning a Navigator. It was the vehicle my wife and children used. When I entered office, Jerry Oliver insisted that Carlita and the boys have some form of security with them at all times. He preferred that she not drive her own vehicle unless is it was necessary. I completely agreed, so a Detroit police officer was assigned to be with Carlita and the boys on a daily basis.
We planned for the officer to drive our Navigator, but Detroit Police rules prohibit officers from using private vehicles. They must drive a police vehicle. The City’s insurance policy wouldn’t cover any other kind of situation, so it provided the Detroit Police Executive Protection Unit with a Ford Expedition to transport my family. It was an existing vehicle in the City’s police fleet, and it did just fine. Carlita preferred the Navigator, and asked to be assigned one when the City renewed its fleet. I didn’t touch those smaller issues. That was Christine’s job. So I hardly thought about it, although my first response to Carlita’s request was that I thought we should get a Chevy Suburban, because I’d just asked my entire staff to take a pay cut, myself included. Plus, the police already had those. So, I did disagree with her about it, but under what I felt were reasonable terms, and then moved on.
I had no further communication with my wife, Christine or the Chief of Police until Steve Wilson, a reporter at the time for Detroit’s ABC affiliate, heard the story about a month later and confronted me at the U.S. Council of Mayors conference in Washington, D.C. A member of my security detail, Mike Martin, pushed Wilson, and it became a big story.
Upon my return to Detroit, the Police Chief told me the Navigator had already been leased, a special one leased outside the fleet of other City vehicles. Damn! Here we go again, I thought.
“Well, we don’t need it,” I said. “We’re already driving the Suburban.” But the dealership wouldn’t take it back. Christine then got upset because she felt we never should have ordered it in the first place.
Cooler heads ultimately prevailed. Both the Navigator and Suburban were police vehicles, so Carlita never drove either. But the press behaved as if it were hers. We failed to get in front of the story, and it became far bigger than it ever should have. In context, it wasn’t that far out of the ordinary. Mayor Archer’s wife was escorted in an SUV for eight years. Positioned properly, I could have asked the public why an escort for one mayor’s wife was no good for another’s. But because we failed to get ahead of it that way, it ended up looking like another mayoral blunder, one in a line of PR miscues. It was as interesting a phenomenon to watch as it was unnerving, because it furthered the negative perceptions about me, and it helped put me on a collision course with a saga of epic proportions. Sensing this, or something like it, I had a headache all the time. My political career had become a huge roller coaster. My marriage had become an even bigger one.
chapter 13
Friendship and Loyalty
THE MOST riveting controversy of my career is also the most intensely personal, and it requires a step back in time.
As I mentioned earlier in this book, I met Christine Beatty at Cass Technical High. As a teenager, she was a somewhat popular girl who didn’t get too close to guys. She was known as the girl who intended to abstain from sex until she was married. In high school, if a girl wasn’t having sex, guys generally weren’t interested in her. I hate to sound cold, but mo
st men can think back and associate this with their own hormonal years.
Christine, whom I call “Chris,” was in my tenth grade chemistry class. She had a strong personality, and always thought she knew everything, a trait that continued well into her adult years. In class, we’d talk casually about whatever classmates discuss in high school. That was the extent of our interaction. I was playing football, and Lou Beatty, the man Chris would later marry, was on the team with me. One day in the locker room, the fellas were talking trash about who had this, who had that, who had the finest woman, and so on. Guy stuff. Lou always bragged about having the finest women, and Chris was his girlfriend.
“Whatever,” I said, “Chris ain’t fine! She ain’t fine at all, man. She’s funny lookin’.”
Lou said something back, I’m sure, because I really don’t commit those kinds of conversations to memory, and we carried on, talking junk and teasing each other. But the next day, he told her what I had said. She was offended and cold toward me for a while after that. About a year later, she cooled off. We had many of the same friends, and had plenty of opportunities to hash things out. In fact, we became good friends by senior year.
Ours was a platonic relationship, although as platonic friendships sometimes go, we did share an underlying attraction. We just channeled it. I considered asking her to our prom, but I didn’t, because I wanted to have sex after prom. Again, the guy thing.
We began dating after graduation. Kinda. She and Lou had broken up, so we started hanging out, going to movies, things like that. We’d kiss and hug. It was an innocent relationship.
We broke up during a graduation party at my house. I’d been listening to people who suggested that since I was leaving early to start football camp, I’d want to date at FAMU. We agreed that we should break up while we were apart, and just keep in touch. She’d write three-, five-, and ten-page letters to me, and I learned that she’d gotten back together with Lou. Oh well, I thought. We had tried to turn a true friendship into something romantic, and it never worked. Something always interrupted our would-be romantic moments. So, we remained friends throughout college. In fact, I dated her friend Alexis during the summer after my freshman year, and continued to date her until I met Carlita.
During these times, I’d take trips to D.C. to hang out with Chris and her friends. We developed a deep trust in each other. If there was anyone in the world I could talk to about personal matters, besides Carlita and my closest partners, it was Chris. We were very much like Dre’ and Syd, the main characters in the movie Brown Sugar whose connection was complicated by Reese, Dre’s fiancé, who was a new and disconnected love interest.
Chris and I know each other like the backs of our hands. The only difference in our relationship from the movie was that Carlita wasn’t a new entry in my life. I’d grown up with her, too, just at a different phase, and in a very different way. Carlita and I nurtured an adult, romantic relationship, while Chris was my dawg.
This aspect of my relationship with Chris has always challenged my wife and I more than anything, and yet it’s the truth. When Carlita moved to Detroit, Chris and I naturally saw less of one another. But we’d see each other around. In 1994, when I was back in Detroit with Carlita, my mother ran a write-in campaign after Michigan State Senator David Holmes died, even after the filing deadline. Sen. Holmes is a legend. He once hit a man on the floor of the Lansing legislature for making a racist remark toward him. He was so revered that his people filed for him to run for re-election while he was on his deathbed.
To aid the campaign, Chris and Zeke helped me organize a youth mobilization effort. We got more young people to participate in the campaign and write in Mom’s name than any other youth voting movement in the city’s history. That was the first time I’d worked with Chris, and she caught the political bug soon afterward. Running my 1996 campaign was the next thing for her.
I hired Chris as my first chief of staff when we won and went to Lansing in 1997, thus morphing our friendship into a working relationship. We watched each other grow. She was excellent at her job, and became a legitimate policy shaper and chief. That underlying flirtatiousness, however, the “what if” factor, never went away. It was still the one thing we’d refused to act on. She was close enough to be my sister at this point, only she wasn’t. Plus, she was with Lou, and I was with Carlita.
As I mentioned earlier, when Christine got pregnant and returned to Detroit to work and get ready to be a mom, those were good times. We were angling for a run at a new State ticket but knew, in all the time that I was a State Representative, Democratic leader and mayor, that the party never fully embraced me. The party’s movers and shakers were always opposed to me. In fact, I’ve always taken the most heat from my fellow Democrats. We realized early in the game that we couldn’t rely on them to help position us. We’d have to shape our own destiny. In fact, when I took the stage and spoke at the 2000 and 2004 Democratic National Conventions in both Los Angeles and Boston, we secured those slots without the Michigan Democratic Party’s knowledge. They would have never suggested that I speak. I had to go behind them and use national organizations to get that done. It was always constant work, and I’m telling you this because, when we were working, it wasn’t a movement. It was Kwame and Chris.
Angling. Working. Deciding whom to write for letters of support. It was deep. There were only three of us in my first office —me, Christine and Sharon Solomon. Sharon was a gifted writer. She could make a letter sound like I was the president of the United States. We may have numbered too few to call ourselves a movement, but we moved things. And through it all, the person who remained strongly and deeply engaged through those tough days on the House floor, through excruciating votes on issues like the Detroit school takeover, or City budget issues and during the campaigns when no one thought I would win, was Chris.
Our work styles were complementary, as well. My decision-making style is thorough, but fast. I’ll listen to all opinions in a discussion, consider them all within a few minutes, and make a sound decision on an issue. I process information quickly. Plus, I rarely forget a name or a detail once I hone in on it. Christine drives for a methodology, a process. So once I decided something, she could take over and engage the staff, identify the action steps, and implement them.
We built a tangible and intangible love. When you go through those kinds of trials with someone who stays in the trenches with you, you come to expect that support and loyalty. That’s a rare relationship in this line of work, but we had it—a kinship, a fondness. Tupac Shakur released an album called Me Against the World, and that title accurately describes our shared stance. At work, it was Chris and me against the world.
The problem, though, was that I was slowly creating two separate and imbalanced worlds.
It was in Lansing that I first started to separate my home life from my professional life. And yes, Carlita was affected. At work, life was about Chris and me. At home, it was about Carlita and my family. Because Carlita didn’t like to engage the political process, I always felt she didn’t want to be involved unless it was something fun. But I also separated her from it because I honestly felt that things worked more smoothly when she was absent. I was free to go work, get out there and do what I do. I understand when I see these Hollywood marriages, or guys married to people outside their profession, and you never see their wives, unless they’re at an event. I see how such marriages can work, but I also see how it causes an incredible strain when contending with the separate nature of the relationship.
Christine was working in Detroit in 2001 when we started putting together the pieces for my mayoral run. Once I decided to do it, Christine jumped into her usual role. She’d already managed three campaigns for me, but for the first time, I saw her get nervous. She tried to defer and give the position to someone else, so I brought in another woman, Pam Jackson, to manage the campaign. Pam, a Ph D., is just brilliant. But Pam and Chris worked together about as smoothly as oil and vinegar. Also, Pam didn’t match
the campaign’s general vibe. But I’m partly guilty of setting Chris up, because I knew she’d assume managerial duties as soon as she saw someone else attempting to run things. And that’s exactly what happened. I just never called her the campaign manager.
Pam left after just a few weeks, and Conrad Mallet stepped in. Chris had the final say on media—editing and commercials. She met with the field staff and assigned everyone to their respective posts, approved all literature, and ordered posters and lawn signs. After watching her work, I felt she was ready to be chief of staff for the City, and I hired her for that position.
The same reason that I didn’t hire her for the campaign manager’s job was the precise thing that inspired me to make her chief of staff. Many people suggested during the campaign that the manager’s job was too much for her, and I think even she bought into it. And so did I. Christine never really saw herself as talented, per se. She just got the job done. She was good at identifying problems, delegating and motivating people, and putting out fires. She used the same approach whether she was involved in labor negotiations or campaigning. Ok, we’ve got to win. Let’s figure out how to win. How do we get in the community and stay in the community? I knew she would take that same approach to solving the City’s problems when we took office. Community policing. Illegal dumping. How do we fix it? was her first question to everything. I believe hiring her for that position was the right thing to do, but we engaged our personal relationship the wrong way.
Surrendered: The Rise, Fall & Revolution of Kwame Kilpatrick Page 13