Newly unsealed federal seizure warrants add fresh details about the FBI’s continuing hunt for money tied to illegal Detroit conduct during Kwame Kilpatrick's 2002-08 mayoralty.
Bobby Ferguson got $84 million in corrupt contracts while his buddy Kwame Kilpatrick was mayor, prosecutors say.
Robert Snell of The Detroit News reports:
The night before jurors reached guilty verdicts in the City Hall corruption trial [in March], the FBI obtained a search warrant and seized almost $700,000 from accounts linked to contractor Bobby Ferguson, the close friend and co-defendant of . . . Kilpatrick. . . .
The money, found as far away as Alabama, could factor into a request due as early as this week from prosecutors for stiff prison sentences for Ferguson and Kilpatrick.
Prosecutors say Ferguson, 44, got $84 million in corrupt Detroit contracts during Kilpatrick's tenure, He's at the federal prison in Milan with Kilpatrick while they await sentencing next month for corruption. Both face 20 years or more in prison.
The March 7 seizure warrants were the latest involving the contractor, as Snell describes:
In all, the FBI has seized more than a dozen pieces of construction equipment from Ferguson and about $4 million — some found in banks in Texas and Alabama, $775,000 in a lockbox stashed behind a clothes dryer and $261,000 in a hidden wall safe — during a series of raids tied to the City Hall corruption trial and a separate bid-rigging case.
