E-mails show mayor's side feared leak of deal

Cough up missing document, judge orders Kilpatrick
BY JIM SCHAEFER and JOE SWICKARD
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITERS
April 26, 2008

E-mails released Friday in a Free Press lawsuit against the City of Detroit show that Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick's city-paid attorney fretted about the release of a police whistle-blower settlement because of the "potential adverse impact" if the media got ahold of it.

Also Friday in Wayne County Circuit Court, a judge said he wanted Kilpatrick to personally produce a missing legal document that triggered the $8.4-million deal, which kept the mayor's salacious text messages secret.

In one e-mail sent last fall, Samuel McCargo, a private lawyer paid by the city to represent Kilpatrick in the police lawsuits, wrote that certain terms of the deal were supposed to have been included in a separate, confidential letter. But Mike Stefani, the lawyer for three cops who sued Kilpatrick, had included the terms in the settlement document itself.

"I will leave it to Val's judgment as to the potential adverse impact such language might have given the potential broad base of public and media disclosure this document is likely to receive," McCargo wrote in an apparent reference to city lawyer Valerie Colbert-Osamuede.

The Oct. 29 e-mail appeared to draw Colbert-Osamuede ever deeper into the secret deal to pay Stefani and his clients $8.4 million to hush up about the text messages.

In response to McCargo's e-mail concerns, Colbert-Osamuede wrote of the proposed language, "I need to quickly run this past John," apparently referring to her boss, city Corporation Counsel John Johnson Jr.
All the mayor's lawyers

Johnson, Colbert-Osamuede and McCargo are among a dozen or so lawyers with connections to the case under investigation by the Michigan Attorney Grievance Commission.

The Free Press exposed the cover-up in January with the publication of the messages and a subsequent court battle to unseal the secret settlement papers, which the mayor's legal team insisted did not exist.

Kilpatrick and his former top aide, Christine Beatty, are facing perjury and other felony charges after the Free Press revealed texts showing they lied at last year's whistle-blower trial about their sexual relationship and gave misleading testimony about the firing of one cop, Gary Brown.

Earlier this year, Colbert-Osamuede told Judge Robert Colombo Jr. she knew nothing of secret terms in the deal, before recently conceding that she was familiar with the deal.

The newspaper had asked Colombo to release her e-mails and those of other attorneys involved in the settlement negotiations. Colombo agreed they were public records.
Who has Stefani's motion?

The judge said Friday he also wants Kilpatrick to produce an elusive document from the whistle-blower trial that set off the scandal.

"So if anyone knows where it is, the right thing to do is to turn it over to me," Colombo said.

The last known sighting of the document, a legal motion penned by Stefani, was Oct. 19, when McCargo delivered it to Kilpatrick's home, the Manoogian Mansion, according to a letter McCargo gave the judge. Another copy was to have been placed in a safe-deposit box with the text messages.

The document is Stefani's motion for attorney's fees in the whistle-blower case. It contained excerpts of the explosive text messages. The mayor and his lawyers agreed to settle the police cases hours after learning, through the court motion, that Stefani had gotten his hands on the texts.

The judge said he wants the document or the mayor's explanation of what happened to it.

James Thomas, Kilpatrick's criminal lawyer, argued Friday the mayor should not have to respond because it may imperil his Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination in his criminal case.

Colombo set a May 8 hearing on the issue.

Larry Dubin, a law professor at the University of Detroit Mercy, said the Fifth Amendment generally deals with a defendant's statements rather than documents or other evidence.

"I just don't think the mayor could claim the right in connection with the motion itself," Dubin said.