Politics

LeDuff: The Wiz Demands $3Gs to See His Legal Bills

August 02, 2018, 1:16 PM
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Mayor Mike Duggan (file photo)

By Charlie LeDuff

It's starting to feel an awful lot like Oz here in Detroit: pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, we're told by the man behind the curtain.

Sweetheart development deals dipped in public money. No-bid contracts disguised as "unsolicited bids" or "advanced marketing processes." Fake crime numbers classified as "computer glitches."

Public graft characterized as "an honest mistake."

Now city lawyers claim they have no idea how much of your money has been spent defending the Wizard of Woodward and his footmen in the wide-ranging federal demolition corruption probe.

After nearly a month of the runaround, the Detroit Land Bank finally told me it does not keep a running total of the money spent on $1,000-an-hour Washington lawyers for Mayor Mike Duggan. The Land Bank says it does not have a line item in its budget for those legal costs and no one in the bureaucracy will tell me where the money directly comes from.  (It is illegal to use federal money to defend oneself against the federal government.)

To tabulate the legal bills would cost $2,775, lawyers at the Mayor's Land Bank say.

It's worth pointing out that the Detroit Police Department claims it will take $77,000 and approximately 12 years to count the number of police-involved shootings over the past five years, which the department is required to keep by federal decree. It's also worth pointing out that Chief James Craig is also Deputy Mayor James Craig, and so, answers directly to himself.

You want real answers in Comeback City, you might as well clack your transparent slippers together because it's a long way to home.

Let's compare scandals.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Trump campaign collusion with the Russians cost the taxpayers $16.7 million through May, according to documents released by the Department of Justice.

The Flint water debacle has cost the Michigan taxpayer $23 million as the state government fights itself over culpability of who exactly poisoned the people of Vehicle City. As of May, the attorney general's office has received $6.2 million to prosecute, $5.7 went for attorneys for the office of Gov. Rick Snyder who was recently dismissed from a class action law suit, $6.1 million for the DEQ, and $4.7 million for DHHS. How does one find this out? One simply calls those offices.

In Detroit, it's hidden beneath a turban. We know the city has already had to repay the state government nearly $9 million for fraud and auditing costs of the demolition program. We know a private accounting firm has been hired to oversee contracts in the program because of past  bidding irregularities that a state auditor called a "sham."

But, the mayor's legal bills are actually being paid for by the Land Bank Authority, which is technically outside the city structure, but answers to the Wiz. This cozy setup allows an end run of the City Council's oversight of legal bills.

At the same time the mayor's office has unilaterally moved $10 million to the Land Bank, causing howling from the council. A closed-door meeting was convened to discuss it, I'm told. The details of that meeting are being withheld from the public because the talks of what was done with the public's money has been deemed "privileged."

The state constitution is clear: "All financial records, accountings, audit reports and other reports of public moneys shall be public records and open to inspection. A statement of all revenues and expenditures of public moneys shall be published and distributed annually, as provided by law. "

When monkeys fly. Because in good-old-boy Detroit, land goes to the connected, police stay on the job even after bashing a man's skull in or putting guns to people's heads, millions of dollars of demolition money evaporates, and the mayor has admitted to manipulating bidding processes.

Who's got $2,775 in a town where the state's largest newspaper has only one reporter covering city hall and none covering police headquarters? At this point, it's up to the feds to rip back the curtain. 



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