The new season of CNBC's "American Greed" series opens Wednesday at 10 p.m. with a show that has it all: Sex, money, politics, hip-hop, mystery and Detroit.
The saga of Kwame Kilpatrick, elected mayor of Detroit at age 31, now serving a 28-year sentence in a federal prison in Oklahoma, will entertain viewers from coast to coast.
"Is it possible to run a criminal empire out of City Hall?" CNBC asks.
It answers:
That's exactly what Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick did during his six years in office. Once hailed as the "Hip-Hop Mayor" of this struggling rust-belt metropolis, Kilpatrick was in reality the leader of a cabal that cost the city millions of dollars. Throughout his tenure, Kilpatrick and his friends extorted city contractors, abused public funds, and turned the mayor's office into their own cash machine. But while the mayor counted his cash, it was a high-profile sex scandal with a city employee that ultimately brought him down. The trial and resulting publicity eventually exposed the mayor's greed for all to see.
