Sharpton Is Run by GOP
To Steal LaRouche Vote
by Anton ChaitkinOne shocking blow by the Village Voice demolished Al Sharpton's Presidential campaign, early in February. The New York weekly revealed that Roger Stone, the ultra-right Republican Party dirty tricks specialist, was "financing, staffing, and orchestrating" the efforts of Sharpton, who portrays himself as the spokesman for African-Americans.
The Voice article showed that since last Fall, Stone has been running all national finances for Sharpton—for the campaign, for Sharpton's own maharaja-style tours, and for Sharpton's private organization, the Harlem-based National Action Network. Stone has personally funded much of it, from sources unknown, while providing campaign strategy.
Stone has "loaned" the Sharpton campaign over $200,000, without likely repayment, while, as the campaign's de facto manager, he has apparently not even been paid. Stone got his Republican friends to contribute $250 each so Sharpton could just barely qualify for Federal matching funds. Since the story broke, the Federal Election Commission has been petitioned to revoke Sharpton's matching funds, as obtained by fraud.
The Voice reported that Stone's involvement with the Sharpton campaign began in a March 2003 strategy session, where Stone said he and Sharpton share "a mutual obsession: We both hate the Democratic Party." By Fall 2003, Sharpton had appointed Stone's man Charles Halloran as official campaign manager. Operatives Joe Ruffin and Andre Johnson, who had worked for Stone and Halloran in the New York gubernatorial campaign of billionaire right-winger Tom Golisano, later directly ran Sharpton's campaign in the District of Columbia.
The news confirming Sharpton's status as a stooge spread quickly throughout U.S. politics. This was only three weeks after the Jan. 13 District of Columbia primary. Sharpton had been brought in for some last-minute media appearances in D.C. to give cover to the stealing of Lyndon LaRouche's vote. (Stone's Joe Ruffin claimed that Sharpton spent $125,000 in D.C. for radio and print advertising and distribution of 55,000 pieces of literature—a small fraction of the distribution by LaRouche campaigners.)
A False Front, Garbage-Filled
The Sharpton campaign has been an empty charade put on by Roger Stone, whose fascist life is outlined below. LaRouche's campaign spokeswoman Debra Freeman noted on Feb. 14 that Sharpton "started his career as an FBI informant.... There is absolutely no doubt in my mind, that during the actual primary vote that took place in D.C., [Lyndon LaRouche's] vote was given to Al Sharpton. Because Al Sharpton ran no campaign.... Some members of the LaRouche Youth Movement visited Al Sharpton's office .... repeatedly, and there was never anyone there. So they looked into the mail slot, and what they saw was an empty office with no furniture, and piles of garbage: And that's lawful, because that's exactly what Al Sharpton, and his candidacy, is."
Sharpton's pathetic agentry is an old story.
New York's Newsday reported on Oct. 21, 1988 that Sharpton "has worked as a Federal informant ... [and] that beginning in 1983, Sharpton secretly supplied Federal law enforcement agencies with information on ... black leaders and elected officials. And in a two-hour interview, Sharpton admitted .... he also accompanied undercover Federal agents wearing body recorders to meetings with various subjects of Federal investigations. He said he had allowed [the Feds] ... to install a tapped telephone in his Brooklyn home."
Sharpton went to Sudan on a propaganda stunt for the pro-war, anti-Muslim crusaders of the Religious Right and the Bush Administration. Rupert Murdoch's New York Post (April 10, 2001) described the trip: "The Rev. Al Sharpton ... departed yesterday en route to strife-torn Sudan.... Sharpton [means] to link up with Christian Solidarity International, a Swiss-based group whose members have been involved in slave retrieval for more than a decade.... The oppression visited upon Christians in Sudan has made for some odd bedfellows. The Rev. Franklin Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham, has made Sudanese relief a priority.... No small irony ... that the very Christian religious right that Sharpton and his allies have demonized in the past is pushing hard to get a Republican administration involved in Africa. Sharpton says he received a briefing on the situation in Sudan from National Security Council Africa experts. Clearly, he has managed to get interest and tacit support for his trip from the Republican administration...." The New York Post article's author, Robert A. George—former senior speechwriter to Newt Gingrich— was "accompanying the Sharpton party to Sudan."
Al and the Stone-Cohn Gang
Roy Cohn, Mafia mouthpiece, murder conspirator for the ultra-right, and Sen. Joe McCarthy's counsel, kept a framed copy of the New York Post from Oct. 17, 1980, endorsing Ronald Reagan for President, inscribed "To Roy Cohn with deepest appreciation and gratitude for all you've done, your protégé and friend, Roger Stone." When Cohn, a gay-basher, was dying of sodomy-induced AIDS, Stone was the toastmaster at his loving mentor's last big event.
Roger Stone broke into criminal politics at age 19, working for Charles Colson in President Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign, running covert infiltration of the opponent Democratic McGovern campaign. Learning his trade, Stone sent to a Democratic Congressional candidate a donation check falsely made out to be from "socialists." The Watergate scandal from that year's Nixon campaign later brought down his Presidency and sent Stone's boss Colson to jail.
In 1975, Stone founded the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) with Charles Black—who would become his permanent political partner—and Terry Dolan, an AIDS-stricken homosexual and radical "family values" right-winger. The main money for NCPAC came from North Carolina racist millionaire Tom Ellis—a promoter of Nazi eugenics—who ran the whole career of Senator Jesse Helms. Ellis brought in the new dirty-tricks consulting firm of Black, Manafort and Stone to run all Helms campaigns. Roy Cohn personally arranged for Jewish millionaires to stop contributing to Helms's opponents, in exchange for Helms changing his politics to support the extreme rightist Likud Party of Israel. Meanwhile NCPAC raised funds from conservatives for Oliver North's Central-American Contras, attempting to cover over the actual financing from narcotics trafficking.
As Black's partner, Roger Stone soon became the permanent strategist for billionaire casino owner Donald Trump, who inherited some of the old Meyer Lansky properties. Stone built up his own interests in the organized-crime-dominated casino world, while acting as political director for the national Republican Party apparatus. In 1982, Stone managed the Senate campaign of Prescott Bush, Jr. (uncle to the current President), using NCPAC funds. To help in that failed Bush race, and for a Helms campaign, Stone and Black hired Roy Cohn protégé Dick Morris, who would later advise and betray President Bill Clinton.
This is the Stone-Cohn disease, that took over Al Sharpton.
Beginning in the late 1970s, the Bahamas became the chief island-transshipment funnel for the flood of cocaine entering the United States, with its casinos as a money-laundering machine. Black, Manafort and Stone arranged in the early 1980s that the Lynden Pindling regime in the Bahamas would pay them to keep the U.S. govenment from prosecuting Pindling, for taking bribes from major drug traffickers. Through the Black firm's influence, the dope kept flowing and Pindling got U.S. financial aid for his "anti-drug" program!
Al Sharpton hired Stone's man Charles Halloran last September. Halloran had then just finished a Stone-arranged assigment running another Atlantic island campaign, for the United Bermuda Party—the white-led group seeking to unseat Bermuda's first black government.
When then-Vice President George H.W. Bush ran for President in 1988, Rep. Edward F. Feighan (D-Ohio) distributed to the press, copies of the Black, Manafort, and Stone proposal to the Bahamians. Feighan asked, "How are these guys who surround the vice president going to lead the drug war when, until recently, they've been on the other side?" In that 1988 Bush effort, Stone helped create a notorious Republican advertisement baiting Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis for granting parole to rapist and murderer Willie Horton, a big boost towards Bush Senior's election.
But Roger Stone was publicly kicked out of the Bob Dole Presidential campaign in 1996, when it was reported that Stone and his then-wife had placed an advertisement soliciting "swinger" sex from other couples.
Stone was back at it in the 2000 election, personally running the Cuban mobs rioting against the attempt to re-count the Florida votes. Later Stone arranged for covert and illegal funding for a political attack aimed at intimidating the judges who were deciding on the Florida election fiasco. A local Florida official whose name Stone used to front for this attack on the judges was fined for this criminality, but Stone got off scott-free.
Meanwhile, on behalf of casino mogul Donald Trump, Stone covertly and illegally ran ads attacking Indian casinos in New York State, rivals to Trump's enterprises, depicting the Indian-run gambling as leading to organized crime and dope! Trump and Stone were both heavily fined by New York State. Stone was represented in this case by the law firm (Greenberg Traurig) of "Casino" Jack Abramoff—the sugar daddy and chief lobbyist for U.S. House Republican Majority Leader Tom DeLay.
The New York Times reported on Jan. 25 that it was Donald Trump who, two years ago, introduced his friend Al Sharpton to Trump's manager, Roger Stone. That Times article was apparently a spur to the publication of the Village Voice piece, which exploded Sharpton's campaign as a sewer trick of the Republican right wing.
