FBI reports detail that Rev Al Sharpton led a ‘secret life’ as an FBI informant, taping meetings with mafia crime bosses
Reverend Al Sharpton was once a paid FBI informant who regularly met with members of organized crime families in New York City and secretly recorded their conversations, according to an explosive report from The Smoking Gun.
The report released on Monday details how Sharpton “sat down” with members of “four of New York City’s five organized crime families” and even “secretly taped some of those wiseguys using a briefcase that FBI technicians outfitted with a recording device.”
Known as confidential informant No. 7 (CI-7) Sharpton began the work in the mid-1980s and the report is based on “hundreds of pages of confidential FBI affidavits, documents released by the bureau in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, court records and extensive interviews with six members of the Genovese squad, as well as other law enforcement officials to whom the activist provided assistance.”
Sharpton’s “secret life” assisted the FBI in securing court authorization to surveil two Genovese “family social clubs.” Agents also used Sharpton’s information to get a wiretap on the telephone of Federico “Fritzy” Giovanelli, a “Genovese soldier.”
“Giovanelli was sentenced to 20 years in prison for racketeering following a trial during which those recordings were played for jurors. In a recent interview, the 82-year-old Giovanelli–now three years removed from his latest stint in federal custody–said that he was unaware that Sharpton contributed in any fashion to his phone’s bugging,” the report adds.
Sharpton spoke with Fox News, calling the claims old news and “crazy.”
“This has been brought up three or four times now. I don’t understand. It’s crazy.”
Sharpton acknowledged having contact with the FBI, saying he told agents he was threatened by mobsters and that authorities should investigate the mob trying to squeeze black concert promoters. He suggested the relationship did not go much beyond that.
“If they used some of the information that we gathered around crimes with guys … who threatened me and inadvertently led to other cases with me, I have no knowledge and serious doubts they took a lot of other information to go in front of certain judges,” Sharpton said. “I have no knowledge of doing anything more than trying to stop the mob from threatening and limiting our fight for Black concert promoters.”
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