In his first extended interview since testifying against his high school friend, disgraced Detroit Mayor Kwame Kipatrick, star witness Derrick Miller tells Carol Cain on her WWJ-TV show about an administration that ran far off the tracks, a band of people who abused their positions of power, people with much promise, including Miller. He was the right-hand man, the chief administrative officer for Kilpatrick.
“People had wants and desires,” Miller said. “They didn’t care who they stepped on to get it. It became insanity. They wanted what they wanted and did whatever they needed to get it.”
Cain, a freelance business columnist for the Free Press, is also senior producer and host of “Michigan Matters,” which airs at 11:30 a.m. Sundays on WWJ-TV (Channel 62).
Miller helped put a more recent Kilpatrick friend, contractor Bobby Ferguson, front and center in city deals and testified he once put $10,000 from a contractor in an envelope and gave it to Kilpatrick in a bathroom.
Why?
“It was loyalty,” he tells Cain. “Naturally, you want to be there for your friends, no matter what that is.
“Once you do something and cross the line, you cross the line. It was too late. Mistakes were made, and I was all in. There was a total sense of entitlement through city government. It had nothing to do with age or stage. It had to do with our positions.”
