by
Peter Karmanos Jr. (file photo)
The final-day surprise of former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's clemency grant could have come far sooner, Metro Detroit businessman Peter Karmanos Jr. said Wednesday.
"I think they were thinking about doing it before the election to get votes, and then they thought it might lose votes," Karmanos said in an interview with Deadline Detroit on Wednesday in his downtown Birmingham office, just hours after the White House announced that President Trump had commuted Kilpatrick's 28-year sentence to time served.
In the end, Karmanos, said the prevailing thought at the White House was: "Why don’t we just do it in due course."
That revelation could explain why state lawmakers, who had been lobbying the administration to release Kilpatrick, told the media days before the election that the ex-mayor was about to go free.
Karmanos, 77, who supported Trump's re-election, saw his name among many mentioned by the White House as supporting clemency for Kilpatrick.
"I didn’t earn the right to be in that thing," he said of the White House announcement. "The other people worked much harder. I was an intermediary."
Karmanos explained that the intermediary role involved making sure, through a Washington connection, that the president saw any legal briefs and correspondence Kilpatrick wrote about his case. He described Kilparick as a friend and "very bright."
Compelling Material
"He’s a good attorney," he said of Kilpatrick, now 50. "He wrote up some stuff and I would make sure the president got whatever he wrote, because it was compelling."
Karmanos said reports that he went to the White House to make the case for Kilpatrick aren't true.
Kwame Kilpatrick
Despite trying to help the disgraced ex-mayor, who has been behind bars since 2013, Karmanos said he wasn't told in advance of the final decision to free Kilpatrick.
"Frankly I was surprised. Happy, surprised."
Karmanos, an investor in Deadline Detroit, has long supported Kilpatrick.
Campaign finance records show Karmanos gave $100,000 to Kwame Kilpatrick’s Generations political action committee in 2005, according to the Detroit Free Press. And he donated a total of $4,000 to Kilpatrick's mother — former U.S. Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, D-Detroit — when she served in Congress.
Kilpatrick resigned as mayor in 2008. In 2009, after Kilpatrick pled guilty to state charges related to the text message scandal, Karmanos, then CEO of Compuware, gave Kilpatrick a job as a salesman for Compuware subsidiary Covisint in Dallas, where Kilpatrick moved with his family.
He said Kilpatrick could have done a great job with all his connections, but restrictive probation conditions on the state charges made it impossible to carry out his duties.
Karmanos said the ex-mayor occasionally phoned him from prison.
"He’d call every once in a while and say, 'you gotta help me.' I said, 'I’ll do the best I can.'"
Why did he care? Karmanos said he hated to see a friend serving what he considered an unfair 28-year-sentence, and explained that it was his nature to get involved, pointing to an incident when he was 18.
He said he was with his future wife, Barbara Ann, outside a hamburger joint in Detroit when he saw a group of guys beating someone up.
"I opened the car door, and said, 'Hey, you can’t do that,' and they came over and they started screaming at me and threatening me. Barbara Ann said, 'Why do you get yourself in this kind of situation,' and I said, 'Because it wasn't right.' So what they did to Kwame wasn't right. That's all."
He said he remains skeptical about the government's public corruption case against Kilpatrick and thinks many of his problems were brought on because "he was an arrogant politician."
But even if the government's case was solid, Karmanos said he would have understood a lighter sentence, perhaps seven years.
"Twenty-eight years is just too much. It's not right."
Will he offer Kilpatrick a job if he asks?
"I wouldn’t give him a job," he said. "I don’t have one. I’ve got startups."
"If I have something I need to sell that had some meat on it I wouldn’t hesitate to use him. But I don’t have anything like that right now, and he needs to get less radioactive."
