Detroit Mayor Quits, Faces Jail Sentence After 2 Guilty Pleas

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Raw Video: Detroit Mayor Pleads Guilty, Resigns

After months of defiantly holding onto his office, Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick pleaded guilty to two obstruction of justice charges. He will spend 120 days in jail and five years on probation.

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For Detroit and its 915,000 residents, Kilpatrick's departure means an end to a standoff that has lasted since the council called on him to resign for misleading lawmakers about an $8.4 million legal settlement he had authorized.

Yet the negative national publicity and the disruption at City Hall, where about 150 Kilpatrick political appointees are awaiting word on their professional futures, is a reminder of the persistent setbacks for a city that has hemorrhaged more than a million residents since its industrial heyday.

Detroit is now one of the poorest cities in the nation at a time when the U.S. auto industry, which once ruled the city, is struggling to stay afloat.

Kilpatrick, elected to the Michigan legislature at 25 and the mayor's office at 31, helped attract downtown investment. During his tenure, Detroit hosted a Super Bowl, Major League Baseball's All-Star Game and an unlikely World Series. At times, things seemed to be looking up, but scandal marred his tenure from the early days.

Kilpatrick cultivated his image as "the hip-hop mayor," wore a diamond stud in his ear and rang up $210,000 on his city credit card during his three years. Even as he was laying off workers to reduce the budget deficit, he kept an 18-person security entourage and leased a cherry-red Lincoln Navigator for his wife for $1,000 a month.

When he ran for reelection in August 2005, voters seemed in a mood to punish him, pushing him back to a second-place primary finish against Freman Hendrix. But Kilpatrick, who said he was on "an assignment from God" to be mayor, promised to change -- and won the runoff.

The felony charges that led to his resignation emerged from a whistle-blower lawsuit filed by police officers. They said they were fired partly because they were conducting investigations that could have led them to discover Kilpatrick's illicit romance.

In court last year, Kilpatrick and Beatty denied having an affair.

"My mother is a congresswoman," Kilpatrick testified, referring to Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick (D-Mich.). "There have always been strong women around me. My aunt is a state legislator. I think it's absurd to assert that every woman that works with a man is a whore. I think it's disrespectful, not just to Christine Beatty but to women who do the professional job that they do every single day."

After a jury awarded the officers $6.5 million, Kilpatrick vowed to appeal. But he changed his mind when a lawyer for the officers said he would reveal text messages sent by Kilpatrick and Beatty on their city-owned pagers.

Kilpatrick signed off on an $8.4 million settlement -- a figure higher than the jury award -- that required the plaintiff not to reveal the steamy messages.

In January, the Free Press obtained and published messages showing that Kilpatrick and Beatty had ordered the firing of Deputy Police Chief Gary Brown and had engaged in an affair.

After months of assertions that he had done nothing wrong, Kilpatrick told Groner that he lied under oath, "with the intent to mislead the court and jury, to impede and obstruct the disposition of justice."