(AllHipHop News) Al Sharpton is a man of the people and there are allegations out there that he is a man for a different set of people. Yesterday (April 7th) The Smoking Gun released an article accusing Rev. Al Sharpton of being an informant for the FBI for years in the 1980s.
Due to Freedom of Information Act requests, classified documents were released and The Smoking Gun’s allegations are extensive. Former Shaprton associate and FBI agent Joseph Spinelli introduced the FBI to Sharpton in 1983. The FBI presented Sharpton with a secretly record videotape of the minister speaking with an undercover drug dealer Victor Quintana and mobster, Danny Pagano about boxing match fixing and money laundering. During the conversation, Sharpton is heard saying he can get Pagano a “fair deal” from Don King. The FBI threatened to prosecute him if he did not cooperate, later admitting they were bluffing but according to sources with The Smoking Gun, Sharpton complied.
According to court documents, Sharpton was referred to as CI-7 (confidential informant #7) and was used by the FBI for information which led to the conviction of members of the Genovese crime family. He even secretly taped some of those wiseguys using a briefcase that FBI technicians outfitted with a recording device.
In an interview with The Daily Beast, Sharpton contends that The Smoking Gun‘s allegations are a “stretch” and proclaimed “If I brought down the Mob, I want my ticker tape parade.”
The government was trying to entrap a civil rights kid on some crimes that were never committed, and failed to trap him. That’s the unsaid part of it: Why did they go after Sharpton in the first place? What was the crime? The one interesting thing that we’re looking at, three decades later, is that no one can identify, with all of the documents Bastone’s got, what it is they came after me for? There is no crime here
Back on January 20st, 1988, Newsday released an article alleging Sharpton was an FBI informant against drug dealers in the Black community as well as organized crime bosses. In the interview with Newsday, Sharpton admits to wiretapping his own phone in mid-1987, as senior law enforcement officials say they placed, as a “hotline” for people to catch drug dealers. The article even alleges that Sharpton turned in information to the FBI on famed boxing promoter, Don King.
Check out the full report here.