The Rev. Al Sharpton was an F.B.I. informer who had extensive dealings with Mafia figures in New York in the 1980s and secretly recorded their conversations using a briefcase modified with hidden electronic equipment, a report said on Monday.
The report, on the website The Smoking Gun, said that Mr. Sharpton had worked with a joint task force overseen by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Police Department. The Smoking Gun posted dozens of pages of documents that appeared to provide details of Mr. Sharpton’s dealings with mob figures. In what The Smoking Gun described as secret affidavits that were posted on the site, he was referred to as CI-7, short for Confidential Informant No. 7.
Mr. Sharpton played down his involvement with Mafia figures, although it has long been known that he worked with the F.B.I. in the 1980s in an investigation of the boxing promoter Don King.
“The claim is I helped get the mob, not that I was in the mob,” he said in a telephone interview on Monday. “I was never told I was an informant.
“Most of what I’ve looked through does not remind me of anything I was involved in,” he said in the telephone interview.
Mr. Sharpton said he had reached out to law enforcement officials after the King investigation, when “some guys who claimed to be gangsters in the music business threatened me.”
In 1992, when Mr. Sharpton was seeking the Democratic nomination for the United States Senate, he denied that he had consorted with mobsters or had provided information that had helped lead to their convictions. But several law-enforcement officials said at the time that he had in fact met with mobsters he knew from his contacts in the music industry.
Documents posted with the report on The Smoking Gun’s website said that CI-7 had “reported that Vincent Gigante had developed a stranglehold on Morris Levy’s recording industry enterprises, in effect turning Levy into a source of ready cash” for the Genovese family and its leaders.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/documents/investigation/al-sharpton-764312
"I'm NOT A RAT...I'm a CAT" - Rev. Al Sharpton
