Right Wing Nut House

SOON TO BE CELLMATES?

If you’ve ever wondered how Al Sharpton can afford all those expensive suits and ritzy hotel suites, you’re not alone. Seems as though the FBI was wondering the same thing as they videotaped the good Reverend accepting tens of thousands of dollars in cash contributions to his ill-fated Presidential campaign and then saying “more please”…

WASHINGTON — The FBI, as part of an ongoing criminal investigation into the Rev. Al Sharpton, secretly videotaped him pocketing campaign donations from two shady fund-raisers in a New York City hotel room and then asking for more, it was reported yesterday.

One of the donors was later recorded on a wiretap saying Sharpton may not have reported to the Federal Election Commission (search) tens of thousands of dollars in campaign cash, as is required by the law, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The Post confirmed the FBI investigation of Sharpton. The two dubious donors whom Sharpton met with in the hotel on May 9, 2003 — Democratic fund-raisers La-Van Hawkins and the late Ronald White — suggested that nearly $90,000 was missing from the official campaign report Sharpton filed with the FEC.

An FBI wiretap picked up Hawkins telling White he believed they had raised more than $140,000 for Sharpton in the previous quarter — but Hawkins fretted because Sharpton had reported only about $50,000 on his federal election filing.

A word of caution here: Just because the feds have the rascally Reverend on tape taking cash doesn’t mean diddly. Back in 1983, the G-Men thought they had Sharpton dead to rights in a drug sting. But the racist Rev proved too slippery by half and even though sounding intrigued with the idea of facilitating a drug deal that could have netted himself tens of thousands of dollars, eventually he turned down the offer.

Al Sharpton has proven he has more lives than both of my cats put together. His involvement in race baiting controversies goes far beyond the Tawana Brawley affair where Sharpton accused an assistant DA of involvement in the kidnapping and rape of a 15 year old girl which was later proved a hoax for which Sharpton was sued and lost a $300 million dollar judgement. Almost forgotten is the incident at Freddy’s Fashion Mart where Sharpton’s racist rhetoric led to violence:

The murderous rampage was set in motion when the United House of Prayer, one of the largest black landlords on 125th Street, raised the rent on the Fashion Mart owned by a Jew, Freddy Harari, who then raised the rent on his subtenant, Sikhulu Shange, who ran a record store. Recognizing that the quickest way to gain support in a landlord-tenant dispute is to turn it into a racial issue, Mr. Shange went to Mr. Sharpton’s National Action Network, which in turn knew that the quickest way to build a crowd in Harlem is to rouse racial hatreds. Mr. Sharpton and the daily picketers did their job brilliantly. He opened his public campaign against Freddy’s on WWRL radio, warning: “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business on 125th Street.”

After two months of rhetorical violence, protester Roland Smith ran into the store with guns blazing and burned it down. When it was over, Smith had killed himself and seven others. Armed with a .38-caliber revolver, he shot three whites and a Pakistani in cold blood—he had mistaken the light-skinned Pakistani for a Jew, and then set the fire that killed five Hispanics, one Guyanese, and one black, a security guard whom the protesters had taunted as a “cracker lover.”

Par for the course in the life of Reverend Sharpton. And then there was the incident where a young rabbinical student who accidentally hit a young black man with his car and was subsequently beaten to death by an angry mob of blacks. Here’s our great uniter in action at the young black man’s funeral:

Then, when a young rabbinical student was murdered by a racist mob in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Mr. Sharpton did his best to stoke the anger. At the funeral for Gavin Cato, the young boy whose death in a traffic accident set off the rampage, Mr. Sharpton eulogized in full Farrakhan mode about Jewish “diamond merchants” and “no compromise.”

If it were just the race baiting and anti-semitism, the good Reverend would go down as just another firebrand, a crackpot with a golden tongue. But the level of his personal and professional malfeasance is so profound as to defy description. An investigation by the Village Voice revealed that his “National Action Network” of which Sharpton is Founder/ Director, is a sham, a cardboard cutout of a social organization that apparently ran a fake voter registration campaign as it’s only obvious activity.

And Sharpton’s affair with his executive director, one Marjorie Harris (who Sharpton is pushing to be on the DNC) played out against the backdrop of his presidential campaign where he insisted that his wife Kathy was his “rock:”

Sharpton reveals that he has not lived with his wife and two daughters in their enormous Brooklyn mansion since April 2003, when the couple agreed to “terminate their marriage.” This flies in the face of repeated claims during his year and a half of presidential hoopla—especially one as recently as July 2004, when he rebutted a Daily News item about an alleged other woman by insisting that “Kathy has been my rock and always will be.” The self-described “grassroots activist” now says through lawyers that he “moved” to the luxurious Helmsley Carlton, though he told reporters who caught him there earlier this year that it was merely an easy place to lay his head while on the campaign trail.

And expensive hotels seem to be a habit with the good Reverend Al. Where all serious candidates for President try to stay in modest lodgings to save on expenses, Sharpton seemed to enjoy his campaigning by staying in some of the ritziest hotels in the country:

But while the campaign has struggled to raise money, collecting $284,000 by September, Mr. Sharpton chose to stay in luxury hotels like the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas, a European-style hotel with antiques and private balconies, and the Mandarin Oriental in Miami, on Biscayne Bay. Most candidates stay in more modest hotels to hold expenses down.

Mr. Sharpton said he chose the Mansion on Turtle Creek because he was attending a Black Expo and other attendees were staying there. According to his filing to the commission, the bill came to $3,264.11 for one night for Mr. Sharpton; Eddie Harris, his personal filmmaker; and Mr. Harris’s sister, Marjorie Harris Smikle, the executive director of the National Action Network.

In July, Mr. Sharpton spent $7,343.20 at the Four Seasons in Los Angeles for a three-day stay that included campaign-related events at the hotel.

“If I was going to go and live the high life, I certainly wouldn’t be doing it one night or two nights at a time,” Mr. Sharpton said about his choice of accommodations.

This got him into trouble with the FEC. Predictably, Sharpton pleaded ignorance:

Mr. Sharpton tried to deflect blame for his financial record by suggesting that he and many of the people around him were not financial experts, but activists who should be given some leeway in such matters.

“We are an advocacy group,” Mr. Sharpton said in an interview on Christmas morning, referring to his group, the National Action Network. “Your staff sometimes lets things slip through the cracks, probably.”

“This morning we are feeding the homeless,” he said. “I have no idea if they paid the guy that brings the truck, or tipped the guy that brings in the bread.”

He may as well have added “And I can’t keep track of every $50,000 I stuff in my pants pocket. I was never any good with numbers…”

Like a bad penny, Sharpton keeps showing up in New York politics. And despite this latest brush with the law, I have no doubt the Reverend Sharpton will land on his feet…after playing the race card, the conspiracy card, and the sympathy card to their fullest measure.

Just goes to show you can’t keep a good bunko man down.

Cross Posted at Blogger News network