Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan defends actions involving confidential FBI source

Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan on Tuesday opened up the Mackinac Policy Conference defending his stance that he would not knowingly reveal a confidential FBI informant and alert a target of an ongoing investigation of bribery involving towing contractors in the city.

"I did not and would not ever disclose the identity of a person I knew to be a confidential source in an investigation. Any suggestion that I did is just plain false," Duggan said in response to a story The Detroit News story published on Tuesday.

Federal court records and interviews provided a look at Duggan's conduct behind the scenes of a federal corruption investigation targeting at least two of the mayor's closest allies on the City Council in recent years: André Spivey and Janeé Ayers.

After getting advance notice of a federal investigation involving Spivey from the now-former councilman in June of last year, Duggan moved to capitalize on the scandal and shared the informant's identity with multiple people, according to four sources familiar with the investigation who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The informant is a towing contractor in Metro Detroit who was wearing hidden recording equipment for the FBI while secretly filming Spivey and others accepting bribes.

The conversations involving Duggan were revealed earlier this year by prosecutors in a court filing while trying to secure a stiffer prison sentence for Spivey, who was convicted of receiving almost $36,000 in bribes. Prosecutors accused Spivey of lying and obstructing the investigation by, among other things, leaking the informant's identity to Duggan, a move that law enforcement experts say risked endangering the confidential source's safety.

"Andre Spivey never said a word about a confidential source," Duggan said. "I walked out of that conversation believing that I had just been told that I have a city councilman who has taken a bribe from a dishonest tower. If anyone had suggested there was a confidential source involved, I wouldn't have said a word."

Duggan said The News' story was misleading by indicating the FBI was conducting the investigation "and Detroit had no responsibility except to stay out of the way."

"The fact of the matter is, the Detroit Police Department and the Detroit Law Department were doing our own efforts very diligently to get rid of these towers."

The mayor reiterated that "Neither Spivey nor anyone in the federal government ever told me the tower who paid Spivey was a confidential source."

"If you worked for the U.S. attorney or part of the grand jury, I absolutely believe it's illegal to release the name, but I had no reason to believe this person was a confidential source," Duggan said.

Duggan declined to answer a question of why he didn't reach out to federal prosecutors.

The News reported Tuesday that three sources familiar with the investigation said Duggan shared the informant's name with people outside City Hall who have no involvement with towing litigation.

Duggan declined to say who outside city government he shared the information with.

The city set up a lax rotation system for towing contractors in the city in 2011 with a no-bid system.

"These permits are extremely lucrative... you could make hundreds of dollars a day on storage," Duggan said. "The process is supposed to work. All of the towers are supposed to go in order... For years, dishonest towers have found ways to break the rules to get towers much more frequently."

The FBI investigation, named "Operation Northern Hook," has led to criminal charges against six people so far and is the latest crackdown on public corruption in Metro Detroit. In recent years, federal prosecutors in southeastern Michigan have charged more than 110 people with corruption crimes.

The investigation is the latest FBI corruption probe to focus on towing in Metro Detroit, an industry long tied to bribery and corruption. That includes the 2018 conviction of towing titan Gasper Fiore, who funneled illegal payments to so many politicians that prosecutors dubbed him the "Baron of Bribery."

srahal@detroitnews.com

Twitter: @SarahRahal_