Instead, the man who wants to be governor can't keep his fledgling campaign on message.
It's haunted instead by his four-week, 2003 investigation into allegations surrounding then-Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and a supposed party at the aion gold Manoogian Mansion. That is the 2002 party that nobody's ever proved but everybody swears -- in bars, if not courtrooms -- happened. At the time, Cox pronounced it an "urban legend."
The problem is that, six years later, the legend still looms large, resurfacing just as Cox faces a crucial aion kina moment in his political career.
"I understand. It's human nature," Cox said Wednesday in a telephone interview, referring to the persistence of the rumors and allegations surrounding the aion kinah party and the 2003 shooting death of Tamara "Strawberry" Greene, the exotic dancer who supposedly danced at the party.
"Sometimes the job of the prosecutor is to say no."
The controversy re-emerged this week, after Mark Krebs, a Michigan State Police detective, gave Oct. 20 deposition testimony that raised anew questions about Cox's handling of the case. Krebs is a witness in a lawsuit filed by Greene's family against the city of Detroit and the Detroit Police Department, alleging her death wasn't properly investigated.
Missing evidence?
Six years later, Krebs' dissatisfaction with Cox and the truncated investigation, ring clear.
He suggests that Cox's lead attorney on the case, Thomas Furtaw, was pressured to speedily wrap up the investigation and distressed when it took longer than two weeks. "For somebody to tell me to hurry up, to close this out ... I thought that was unusual," Krebs says of Furtaw, who reported to Cox daily on the investigation.
Into the bulging inventory of suspicious Manoogian-related circumstances, Krebs adds the mysterious aion power leveling disappearance of a box of computer back-up tapes. He claims a box of them, swathed in yellow police tape and locked in a Detroit police vault, was "compromised" the next morning, when State Police returned to claim it. Most of the data were missing and the protective tape had been removed, Krebs said.
Krebs' concern about police irregularities, or Cox's decision to interview Kilpatrick, but not formally interrogate him, is tantalizing but inconclusive.
After weeks of investigating, including reopening the case later after the AG had signed off, Krebs can't offer a reliable witness to the party.
Instead, he describes witnesses whose credibility dissolves. He mentions characters who sound like characters in an Elmore Leonard novel, from the witness whose meticulously kept journal is never produced to a Detroit police woman who used to be a bank teller and danced topless at the Black Orchid club.
Many tantalizing details surface. Besides Greene's death, there's the sudden, fatal heart attack in 2008 that killed Furtaw, 43, eliminating one more potential witness.
Handling the fallout
Cox admits the investigation turned up problems in Kilpatrick's administration: one mayoral bodyguard was paid for 64 hours of consecutive overtime. Expenses were out of control. Bad management was rife.
Cox says: "Criminal law isn't supposed to fix problems like officials who act high-handed or to correct bad bureaucracies."
There's as much logic in the AG's argument that he didn't want to run "a six-year Kenneth Starr" investigation and that, after four weeks, all the State Police had were more whispers and rumors -- "but no evidence of a crime."
What would Cox do differently today?
"Maybe we would have interviewed Carlita Kilpatrick," he says, referring to Kilpatrick's wife, "even though there was no prosecutorial reason to do so."
Why didn't he put Kilpatrick under oath and take testimony? Or tape-record his interview with the then-mayor? "If we'd put him under oath, his testimony would have been secret," Cox said.
Was Cox doing the bidding of wealthy potential contributors to his future gubernatorial campaign?
"At the time, I was like the accidental attorney general," he says. "I don't think I met (Compuware chairman and Kilpatrick employer) Peter Karmanos (now a Cox backer) until three years ago. I was like a nobody."
Now, he's a viable candidate for governor who announced his willingness to testify under oath about his role in the case -- and his wish to make the deposition public. The judge ruled Tuesday that depositions in the case will be sealed.
The fallout from the Manoogian "party" doesn't bother him, he insists.
"If you're in political office, you have to take the heat. I'm taking it. ... I'm not really worried about the political dynamics. At the end of the day, people are going to judge me by what I've done in eight years as the attorney general."
