It started with a whistleblower lawsuit against Kilpatrick by two city cops who alleged they had been fired for getting too close to the mayor while investigating misconduct among his bodyguards, wild partying at the mayoral mansion, etc.

One of the allegations was that the cops were fired because they were getting close to uncovering evidence that the mayor was having an affair.  The mayor testified under oath that he never had an affair.

A jury found in favor of the cops, but the mayor was determined to appeal.  While the appeal process was underway, however, the attorneys for the fired cops finally won a three-year battle over document subpoenas and got their hands on the smoking gun to end all smoking guns - text messages between Kilpatrick and his chief of staff proving that they were, in fact, having an affair and that Kilpatrick had lied under oath.

In order to keep this evidence from seeing daylight, Kilpatrick suddenly announced that he had had an epiphany and wanted to settle with the cops for a cool $8 million of city money.  What he did - and this only came out in full during a hearing yesterday before the governor - was have his lawyers prepare multiple settlement agreements to be signed.  One of them was a standard agreement providing for payment of the $8 million.  A separate agreement provided that the text messages and other incriminating evidence would be locked away and kept forever confidential.  And even though the city council needed to approve the settlement, Kilpatrick only gave them the first, vanilla settlement agreement, and never disclosed the existence of the separate agreement relating to the text messages.

In other words, what Kilpatrick did was, first, expose the city to major liability by engaging in the retaliatory firings of two cops.  Then, even worse, he arranged for a massive settlement with those cops, to be paid with city money, in order to keep evidence under wraps that he had had an affair with his chief of staff and lied under oath about it.  Needless to say, that's $8 million the City of Detroit could definitely use for a lot of other things.

Kwame Kilpatrick has resigned as mayor of New York.

Kilpatrick attorney Sharon McPhail countered with a four-pronged attack, disputing that Kilpatrick settled the police suits to cover his own hide and disputed that he misled the council by failing to tell its members of the secret deal to hide his text messages.

Referring to a wide-ranging federal investigation of city officials stemming from a sludge-hauling contract, McPhail told Granholm: "We're here on petition of the City Council, half of whom, by the way, are awaiting indictment on far worse charges than they've proffered to you against the mayor."

Um....as an attorney, I don't think that's the argument I would have made, but I'm not a litigator, so what do I know?

BTW - The Chief of Police (Ella Bully-Cummings) has also resigned.

Sounds like more Chicago-style politics to me with a bit of Louisiana sauce on the side.

No surprise that according to TChris the main problem was that "the Kilpatrick scandal became public."

In reality the Democrat Kwame Kilpatrick was using gangster methods: