Federal prosecutors recommend more than two years in prison for the next Detroit City Hall corruption saga defendant to be punished -- Bernard Kilpatrilck, father of the ex-mayor.,
He'll be sentenced Thursday by Judge Nancy Edmunds for evading taxes on $180,000 in payoffs during 2005.
Bernard Kilpatrick " flagrantly used his son’s position as mayor to elicit more money for himself," prosecutors say.
Robert Snell of The Detroit News reports on a sentencing memo filed in Federal Court late Friday:
Bernard Kilpatrick, 72, conspired with his son and contractor Bobby Ferguson to exploit city contracts and persuaded contractors to pay him for access to the former mayor, pocketing $1.3 million for mostly no-show work, prosecutors wrote. . . . He also deposited more than $605,000 in the bank during his son’s reign even though he had no other source of income and was a bad gambler, prosecutors said.
The City Hall corruption jury found Bernard Kilpatrick guilty of one count of filing a false tax return, though it could not reach a unanimous verdict on racketeering conspiracy, a 20-year felony.
The tax charge is punishable by up to three years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Prosecutors want Bernard Kilpatrick to spend 27-33 months in federal prison. . . .He also should pay $98,262 restitution to the Internal Revenue Service, prosecutors wrote.
“It is a crime that was motivated by greed,” prosecutors wrote late Friday, the same day Ferguson was sentenced to 21 years in prison and one day after Kwame Kilpatrick got 28 years. “Kilpatrick flagrantly used his son’s position as mayor to elicit more money for himself, for little to no work performed,”
