Jim Fouts, mayor of Warren, Michigan’s third-largest city, largely has escaped criticism for his erratic behavior over the past decade, but he now faces a firestorm as high-ranking officials on both sides of the partisan aisle might force him to consider resignation.

Fouts’ crude remarks in the past rarely gained notice outside of Macomb County boundaries, but this time the ultra-arrogant mayor’s outrageous comments about developmentally disabled children – caught on tape – might be his downfall.

On the recording, Fouts used a slur to describe his distaste for mentally challenged kids. He said they belong in cages or should be “Kevorkianed.” The 74-year-old mayor has disingenuously claimed the distinctive voice on the tape is not his, but two voice recognition experts say, with a high degree of certainty, that it is.

At tonight’s Warren City Council meeting, a resolution is expected to be introduced calling for Fouts to submit to a sophisticated voice analysis, or resign. A group called “Speak Out Against Mayor Fouts” is running a Facebook campaign designed to generate a large crowd at the council meeting. A protest is also slated outside of the Warren Community Center event.

Since the audio tape emerged in recent days, Fouts has faced derision from across the state, and the story is starting to gain some national attention.

‘Vile, horrendous’ comments by Fouts

Lt. Gov Brian Calley, one of the state’s most outspoken advocates for mentally challenged people, is the latest to speak up.

“While I have heard and seen many offensive things in my life,” Calley said on Facebook, “… I have never, ever heard such a vile and horrendous disregard for the value and worth of people with developmental and intellectual disabilities.”

Macomb County Executive Mark Hackel, who was initially supplied with the tape by a friend of a city employee, has been joined in blasting Fouts’ hateful language by Congresswoman Candice Miller, who will be retiring from Capitol Hill at the end of the year.

Others who publicly expressed outrage regarding the mayor are Tom Watkins, CEO of the largest community mental health department, in Wayne County, and Michigan Democratic Party Chair Brandon Dillon.

The radio station which broadcasts Fouts weekly talk show, WDFD-AM 910, a station that specializes in controversial hosts, announced on Monday that they have pulled the plug on the mayor.

None of this is particularly new for Fouts.

A track record of bizarre behavior

The quirky mayor, who often comes across as a mild-mannered, frail-looking guy in public, has a well-established track record as a bully and a rather schizophrenic, paranoid politician:

  • Far too many Warren voters have forgotten about his taped tirade of 2013, which prompted a brief criminal investigation on possible charges of making death threats. One of his appointees secretly recorded the mayor during a mafia-style rant , aimed at a persistent Fouts critic, during two phone conversations: “If I saw him in the (expletive) street and had a baseball bat I would beat the (expletive) down to the (expletive) ground,” he said. “It would take me just a little bit to find a (expletive) gun and blow his (expletive) head off. That’s how pissed off I am.” The aide, Jim Hartley, reported the death threats to police, and Fouts fired him. Hartley was awarded $175,000 in a federal whistleblower lawsuit. The mayor dropped dozens of F-bombs in those taped conversations, revealing a private side of his personality that Warren voters had never known. But the matter soon faded and Fouts won re-election two years later with 85 percent of the vote.
  • In 2014, in a meeting with the mayor in his office, city Treasurer Carolyn Moceri said the mayor yelled and lunged at her as he threatened to cut her budget in retaliation for comments she made in a news story a year prior. In a written complaint filed with the city’s Human Resources Department, the city treasurer said Fouts became “enraged and out of control … I thought he was going to strike me,” Moceri wrote. “… I have known Mayor Fouts for over a decade and was his friend and his supporter as a citizen activist and a fellow council person. Over the past few years, I have noticed a growing pattern of the mayor losing his temper and engaging in aggressive and verbally threatening language.”Moceri had also been targeted in the infamous 2013 tapes when Fouts said of her: “All she does … is sit around all day and finger herself and look at television.” The political fallout from the HR complaint was barely perceptible. Two years later, in August 2016, Warren voters approved a revision to the city’s term limits that will allow the mayor to serve another eight years in office when his current term is complete in 2019.
  • Former Fouts political consultant Joe DiSano took to social media this week to say he has his own recordings. He recalled some outrageous conversations with the mayor: “He dropped a series of N-bombs in meetings I had with him regarding the Connor Creek charter school. School was to be predominately African American. It’s tough to describe, but he actually stood up and did a monkey dance and mimed eating a banana.”
  • After Fouts was caught on tape in 2013 espousing his urge to violently murder two of his persistent political critics, one of those potential targets, former Warren assistant city attorney Jeff Schroder, once a Fouts ally, responded on Facebook. “I have remained silent for too long,” Schroder wrote. “The Warren mayor is a tyrant, a pathological liar, and a hypocrite. He’s spinning out of control and I am tired of being mentioned in his paranoid rants. Three years of working for him drove me right to the edge. This is worst kind of person you could ever elect to public office because personal vendettas control his agenda, and not the public good. There — now I feel better … Rest assured, all of his nutty accusations are fabricated horsesh– like everything else he says.”
  • In October, Fouts seemed to downplay Donald Trump’s crude language toward women, infamously caught on tape by the TMZ infotainment TV show. He argued online that a public official’s private comments should not enter the public domain. In a Facebook post, the mayor said: “I would have been more contrite and not used ‘locker room talk’ as an excuse. Still that was a private conversation. Issue is, should everyone’s private conversation be a public issue? Behavior is one thing but what people say privately and perhaps with too much (alcoholic) beverages is another thing. His comments are unacceptable but they were not meant for the public.”
  • Insiders have said for years that Fouts routinely berates his employees and instills fear in fellow elected officials. One fading Fouts supporter, an elected official of considerable status, said a few years ago that he believes the mayor began coming “unglued” in 2011 when questions about Fouts possibly lying about his age became front page news. At one point, Fouts reportedly threw a chair in anger at the city Clerk’s Office when he didn’t get the answers he was looking for on ways to make the age issue go away. He even resorted to giving up driving for several months rather than renew his driver license and publicly submit a date of birth. All this because of documents that suggested the eccentric Fouts was, at the time, 69 years old, not 67 as he claimed.
  • The peculiar mayor, a lifelong bachelor, has apparently created a trust fund that, upon his death, will finance an ongoing campaign against his political enemies. One official calls it Fouts’ “revenge fund.” In media circles it’s well known that Fouts is paranoid about the news coverage he receives. He has previously maintained a list of more than 100 news segments broadcast by WDIV-TV Channel 4 that he insists were intentionally unfair toward him. He has made it clear that he believes certain Macomb Daily writers have conspired to destroy him on a regular basis. He also has kept close tabs on website message boards where some of the Internet trolls routinely post hateful messages about him.

 

 

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