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APRIL 7--When friends and family members gathered recently at the White House for a private celebration of Michelle Obama’s 50th birthday, one of the invited partygoers was a former paid FBI Mafia informant.
That same man attended February’s state dinner in honor of French President Francois Hollande. He was seated with his girlfriend at a table adjacent to President Barack Obama, who is likely unaware that, according to federal agents, his guest once interacted with members of four of New York City’s five organized crime families. He even secretly taped some of those wiseguys using a briefcase that FBI technicians outfitted with a recording device.
Sharpton--then involved in the early stages of the Tawana Brawley hoax--said he sought the help of investigators to combat the crack coc aine epidemic ravaging New York’s poorest communities. Sharpton also claimed to have contacted agents (and pledged his assistance) after a Mafia associate allegedly threatened him over a music industry dispute.
He is a sell out in so many ways.
dashen
I wonder who's going to put a contract on him first?
Sharpton was known to have crossed paths with underworld figures through his work in the music industry and boxing world, including with his mentor James Brown. He also had an association with boxing promoter Don King.
Sharpton, in a Post interview, did not deny that he cooperated with the FBI. But he said the report greatly exaggerated his role.
“It’s crazy. If I provided all the information they claimed I provided, I should be given a ticker-tape parade,” Sharpton said.
A defiant Rev. Al Sharpton today responded to media reports that he served as an FBI informant against mob bosses in the 1980s, confirming that he recorded conversations, but insisting the reports missed the mark.
Speaking at a hastily-called press conference at the National Action Network’s headquarters in Harlem, Mr. Sharpton took special issue with the “informant” characterization. The front pages of the New York Post and Daily News today labeled the reverend a “rat” and a “mob snitch” respectively.
“Rats are usually people that were with other rats. I was not and am not a rat, because I wasn’t with the rats. I’m a cat,” Mr. Sharpton explained. “I chase rats.”
Sharpton said he cooperated with the FBI but didn’t consider himself an informant.
He said his only embarrassment about the report is that the website posted photos of him when he weighed more.
“Because a lot of my younger members didn’t know how fat I was,” Sharpton said.
On Monday, he told WCBS 880′s Rich Lamb that the story exaggerates his role and that he only asked the FBI to investigate the crime family after receiving threats.
The FBI “came in 1982, ’83, after Don King tried to entrap me in a drug deal that didn’t work,” Sharpton said. “Then seven months later, when I was threatened by members of the mob because I was saying that a lot of concerts should be going to black artists, and I went after them. I was threatened. I called these FBI guys back, since some of the guys were from California, and told them these are the kind of things they ought to be investigating.”
Sharpton began cooperating with the FBI in mid-1983. So he had actually been working as a confidential informant for about nine months before Pisello’s purported threat, an encounter that Sharpton now falsely claims prompted him to first contact federal agents (and subsequently begin recording Buonanno).
The reverend was “flipped” by FBI agents three months after he was filmed in March 1983 (during a bureau sting) talking coc aine with an undercover agent. On a Thursday afternoon in June 1983, Sharpton showed up at a Manhattan apartment expecting to meet again with the undercover agent, who was posing as a former South American druglord seeking to launder money through boxing promotions.
Instead, Sharpton was confronted by FBI agents who showed him the “coc aine” videotape. The panicked reverend agreed--on the spot--to cooperate with federal agents, according to sources familiar with the contents of Sharpton’s FBI informant file.
DURHAM, NC — A drug trafficker who worked for Al Sharpton’s nonprofit in the 1980s said that despite the preacher’s denials, he was eager to get a slice of the lucrative drug deal captured on FBI surveillance video.
“It was greed. He just wanted money,” Robert Curington, 72, told The Post during a two-day interview at his North Carolina home, detailing for the first time how Sharpton stepped into the FBI’s trap — and was then forced to become a federal informant.
DURHAM, NC — A drug trafficker who worked for Al Sharpton’s nonprofit in the 1980s said that despite the preacher’s denials, he was eager to get a slice of the lucrative drug deal captured on FBI surveillance video.
“It was greed. He just wanted money,” Robert Curington, 72, told The Post during a two-day interview at his North Carolina home, detailing for the first time how Sharpton stepped into the FBI’s trap — and was then forced to become a federal informant.
Sharpton has said he showed interest in the drug deal only because he feared the undercover agent was armed. He also claimed that he snitched for the feds — as first reported by The Smoking Gun this week — because the mob was threatening him.