n
his 2003 autobiography, Al on America, the Rev. Alfred
Charles Sharpton Jr. admits, “I have been guilty of letting ungodly
things around me.” And that was never more true than with the latest
revelations about Sharpton, who has now been exposed as a cat’s-paw
for the national Republican Party.
Rev. Al has a long
and sordid history of posing as the champion of the have-nots, while
renting himself out to the greedy have-everythings, which predates his
’04 GOP-funded presidential campaign. In 1986, he endorsed N.Y.
Senator Al D’Amato for re-election — although D’Amato, a conservative
Republican pit bull, was anathema to more issues-attuned black
leaders. In 1994, he helped dampen down the black vote for Governor
Mario Cuomo by making a media-hyped appearance with successful
conservative Republican candidate George Pataki just days before the
election. In the 2001 New York mayoral campaign, he connived with GOP
billionaire Michael Bloomberg in the defeat of the Democratic
candidate, Mark Green.
But Sharpton has not
limited himself simply to supporting candidates considered by most to
be inimical to the interests of the impoverished black community. A
1988 investigation by the Long Island daily Newsday revealed
that Sharpton, who denounces African-American leaders who disagree
with him as “yellow niggers,” had been a longtime FBI informant in a
scheme to entrap black leaders and personalities on drug-related
matters, even going so far as to wear a wire to record their
conversations for the feds.
How did the FBI turn
Sharpton into their bitch? Why, they caught Rev. Al up to his hairdo
in a drug-money Laundromat in which Don King, the much-indicted boxing
promoter and a longtime pal of Sharpton’s, was a central figure.
What’s more, the drug deal was an FBI sting — and the feds had it all
on videotape, too. Just two years ago, Bryant Gumbel — the second most
popular black on television next to Oprah — aired on his HBO Real
Sports show an FBI videotape of Sharpton discussing laundering
money from a South American drug dealer via King with Michael “Sonny”
Franzese, a former Colombo family captain. Sharpton was going to
arrange a meeting with King and the coke peddler to set up the deal.
But the “South American” was an FBI agent, Franzese had already been
turned by the feds into an informant — and Sharpton fell right into
their trap. Sharpton became a sting artist for the feds when he was
himself stung. After the tape aired, Sharpton announced he was going
to sue HBO for a billion bucks. Nothing has been heard of the lawsuit
since then.
Now, in his current
presidential campaign, Sharpton has been revealed as a wholly owned
Republican subsidiary. Sharpton has been used by Republican operatives
to discredit real contenders for the Democratic nomination. And the
more prominent a place on the Democratic stage Sharpton can command,
all the way to Boston, the more the Republicans can use the
wisecracking but polarizing preacher-without-a-church as a bogeyman to
frighten moderate voters away from the Democratic ticket. That’s the
story behind the
blockbuster report in the February 5 Village Voice — the
L.A. Weekly’s sister paper — in which veteran Voice
investigative reporter Wayne Barrett and his team unveiled the
malevolent forces keeping Sharpton’s campaign alive: “Roger Stone, the
longtime Republican dirty-tricks operative who led the mob that shut
down the Miami–Dade County recount and helped make George Bush
president in 2000, is financing, staffing, and orchestrating the
presidential campaign of Rev. Al Sharpton.”
Who is Roger Stone? A
slash-and-burn Republican black-bag election tamperer and consultant
whose mentor was the repulsive Roy Cohn — the redbaiting hatchet man
for Senator Joe McCarthy. Stone first made news in the Nixon Watergate
scandal, when it was revealed that the 19-year-old apprentice
McCarthyite had infiltrated George McGovern’s 1972 presidential
campaign as part of CREEP’s sabotage plan. A few other highlights of
Stone’s career as the boastful black prince of Republican sleaze:
Stone helped Ollie North raise money for the Nicaraguan contras, and
was a close associate of the notorious Lee Atwater (the GOP hit man
who created the race-baiting Willie Horton TV spots for Bush père’s
1988 presidential campaign).
The New Yorker’s
Jeffrey Toobin — in his
excellent book,
Too Close To Call, about the 2000 Florida election — details
how Stone was summoned by Bush recount chief James Baker to disrupt
the vote counting (Stone and his Cuban wife, Nydia, organized a
screaming mob of Miami Cubans outside the headquarters of the
canvassing board — Stone directed the mob by walkie-talkie from across
the street — and intimidated the board into ending the count). On the
stump, Rev. Al has frequently denounced the theft of the presidential
election in Florida — which depended in large measure on invalidating
black votes. For example, he told a Democratic National Committee
meeting last October that “We are witnessing a nonmilitary civil war —
it started with the recount in Florida.” So, hopping into bed with
Stone might strike many African-Americans as “ungodly” hypocrisy. But
the tale gets worse.
When Sharpton
launched a vicious attack on Howard Dean for his supposed “anti-black
agenda,” the man behind the curtain was Stone, who crowed to The
New York Times that he “helped set the tone and direction” of the
blast at Dean, while the research for it was provided by the man Stone
had installed as Sharpton’s campaign manager, Charles Halloran, one of
a half-dozen top aides to Sharpton who worked for Stone in previous
campaigns.
A member of Stone’s
stable who stays at Stone’s Central Park South apartment in New York
while working for Sharpton, Halloran — just before taking over the
Sharpton campaign — had been managing the parliamentary campaign for
one of Stone’s numerous foreign clients: the United Bermuda Party, a
white-led party trying to oust the resort island’s first black
government. Since Rev. Al’s presidential campaign is really all about
trying to succeed Jesse Jackson as America’s premier black political
leader, the installation of Halloran is thus an odd choice indeed, one
that can be explained only by Sharpton’s dependence on the money
funneled into his campaign by Stone. (Halloran’s wife works for the
infamous Carlyle Group, the military-industrial-complex giant of which
Bush père was a longtime officer.)
Stone has
acknowledged that he “helped Sharpton” meet the 20-state,
$5,000-contribution threshold required for federal matching funds.
Example, according to The Voice: “In Florida, Stone’s wife,
Nydia; son Scott; daughter-in-law Laurie; mother-in-law Olga Bertran;
Stone’s executive assistant Dianne Thorne; Tim Suereth, who lives with
Thorne; and Halloran’s mother, all pushed Sharpton comfortably over
the threshold, donating $250 apiece in December. Jeanmarie Ferrara,
who works at a Miami public relations firm that joined Stone in the
’90s fight on behalf of the sugar industry against a tax to
resuscitate the Everglades, also gave $250, as did the wife of the
firm’s name partner . . . Another lobbyist, Eli Feinberg, a Republican
giver appointed to a top position by the Republican state insurance
commissioner, also gave $250.” Hired guns for ultraright evangelical
GOP Florida Senate candidate Larry Klayman also kicked in to Rev. Al.
Similar patterns of GOPers giving to Sharpton and phantom donors have
been found in other states.
Sharpton’s almost
penniless campaign has been sustained only by money given or raised by
Stone or by Stone-arranged credit with consultants — without which the
campaign would collapse. The Voice alleges that Stone loaned
some $270,000 to Sharpton laundered through Rev. Al’s National Action
Network (NAN), and that Stone rang up $18,000 on his credit card for
Sharpton’s campaign-travel and other expenses. In the wake of these
revelations, the Federal Election Commission is about to consider
whether the Sharpton campaign expenses picked up by NAN with the money
provided by Stone, and other unpaid-for campaign services provided by
Stone and his chums, constitute illegal campaign contributions,
according to The New York Times.
The Stone revelations
show that Rev. Al’s presidential campaign is nothing more than another
scam he’s running on black Americans, one designed to undermine the
movement to defeat George Bush. Fortunately, black voters aren’t as
gullible as the cynical Sharpton thinks they are — they know an
unprincipled huckster when they see one. Which is why Sharpton —
despite the help from his GOP bedmates on which his campaign depends —
has been rejected by significant majorities of African-Americans this
year at the polls.
Doug Ireland is a New York-based
media critic and commentator whose articles appear regularly in The
Nation, Tom Paine.com, and In These Times among many others. This
article first appeared in the
LA Weekly.
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