Bernard Kilpatrick
Federal wiretaps captured Bernard Kilpatrick asking for $5,000 from a pension fund businessman who later killed himself amid a soured city pension deal.
Prosecutors played a phone call Tuesday between Kilpatrick and Detroit businessman Abner McWhorter.
During the call, Kilpatrick asked the businessman to give $5,000 to the Kilpatrick Civic Fund.
Abner McWhorter
Kilpatrick tells the businessman the mayor’s close friend Jeff Beasley wants him to donate the money to the Civic Fund.
“He wants you to step up,” Bernard Kilpatrick says during the phone call. “If you can do five, that would be real cool.”
McWhorter was featured in a series of stories in The News earlier this year about the Detroit Police and Fire Pension fund.
In early 2008, he obtained a $10 million loan from the Detroit Police and Fire Pension fund to buy and rehabilitate foreclosed homes.
The deal with McWhorter’s company, Paramount Land Holdings, later unraveled and was followed by McWhorter’s suicide last year, an ongoing legal battle and a search for $5 million in missing pension fund money.
George Kastanes
Before the loan was issued, McWhorter hired Bernard Kilpatrick’s consulting firm, Maestro Associates, to work on the pension deal.
McWhorter allegedly told his partner, George Kastanes, he paid a $100,000 bribe to Bernard Kilpatrick in order to receive the pension fund loan.
The News reported in May that federal agents were investigating whether money for the $100,000 alleged bribe came from an accused international heroin dealer, Macomb County resident Carlos Powell.
The FBI has spent years investigating the city’s pension funds. Beasley was indicted earlier this year and is awaiting trial while the pension fund probe continues.