DETROIT-– There’s no denying that Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan is a political powerhouse and awesomely popular among his city’s voters. Last month, he breezed to a third term with more than three-quarters of the vote, a white man in a mostly black, mostly poor city whose residents think he’s made their lives better.
But one man thinks the real Mike Duggan is a crook, has been waging a sometimes bizarre crusade to try and bring him down — and has hit the mayor with one hugely embarrassing blow.
Meet Robert “Bob” Carmack, a 62-year-old guy who owns a collision shop in Southwest Detroit, and who usually sounds like a fellow who has spent his life fixing cars. He says Duggan is a phony and takes bribes, and isn’t shy about saying so.
He has hired airplanes to fly banners over the Detroit Tigers’ stadium on opening day demanding the mayor be sent to prison for corruption and accusing him of using city funds to pay a mistress for sex. The mayor and the city say his charges are beneath contempt.
And if anyone is going to go to prison, at this point Carmack seems far more likely to end up in the slammer than the mayor. He is facing four felony charges in connection with selling a piece of city land he didn’t own, and has also been bound over for trial on a drunken driving arrest, which, because of prior drunken driving convictions, would also be a felony.
“I was set up. I wasn’t even driving. All these things are politically motivated, because what I’ve got on Duggan,” he said over lunch in an upscale restaurant in Troy.
A complex character who often seems like someone in a novel, Carmack, then pulled up his pants to show two tethers, one on each leg. “I can’t leave the state, I can’t have a drink, I have to be home by 8 p.m., so I can’t even go to my kid’s football games,” he says. Carmack, who is now single, has been married four times and has six kids, not all of them from his marriages.
Though he owns a small business in Detroit and lives in the blue-collar suburb of Woodhaven, Carmack seems to have vast reserves of cash and drives a fancy red Corvette.
But whether or not the city of Detroit is out to get him, he has been a hero of sorts to the federal government. When Detroit City Councilman Gabe Leland demanded a bribe, Carmack went to the FBI, which had the businessman wear a wire.
Soon, Leland had pled guilty to felony misconduct in office, and resigned. That was a fairly simple case, but the saga of Carmack’s property feud with the city is far more complex.
Years ago, when the notoriously corrupt Kwame Kilpatrick was mayor, Carmack wanted to buy an abandoned industrial property on the Detroit Riverfront and build a luxury condo community.
City officials promised it to him in writing, but then, according to Mr. Carmack, he wouldn’t pay a bribe that was demanded.
One day they sent him the deed to another property that showed he had paid $250,000 for.
“But I didn’t pay nothing,” he said. “I thought they gave it to me to get me to shut up and go away.” Later, he tried again to buy the industrial site after Mayor Duggan took office, but was rebuffed.
That may have been a blessing, because after that part of the site, once owned by Revere Copper and Brass, turned out to have been badly polluted and ill-maintained, and collapsed into the Detroit River, creating a health hazard.
Meanwhile, Carmack sold for a million dollars the property he said he thought the city had given him in 2007. Trouble was, the city then said he didn’t really own it. Though he seems to have proof that he does, and the district judge found fault with the city’s arguments, she still bound him over for trial.
By this time, Carmack had turned solidly against Mayor Duggan, who he had initially supported. He hired someone to follow Duggan around and videotape him.
He may have expected to catch him taking a bribe. But instead, what followed was this: Mike Duggan went to the home of a woman in a distant suburb and let himself in. Eventually, the woman showed up, and they both stayed there an hour, and left.
The woman turned out to be Dr. Sonia Hassan, who ran a prenatal health clinic to which Duggan had been accused of giving preferential treatment; the city had provided it with $350,000 and had tried to raise more money for it.
These things then followed: 1) Mike Duggan indignantly denied he was having an affair. 2) Duggan’s wife, Lori, sued for divorce. 3) Mayor Duggan and Ms. Hassan got married.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel concluded that there had been unethical behavior in the way the Duggan administration had handled the prenatal health program, but said she saw no evidence justifying criminal charges.
But there are still plenty of criminal charges pending against Robert Carmack. Over lunch, I asked him why he didn’t try to settle with the city, wash his hands of politics, and concentrate on his business and his private life.
“I’d like to,” he said. “But I can’t, you know?”
Photo credit: ClickonDetroit
