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As Sharpton Rose, So Did His Unpaid Taxes

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I can't believe a mainstream media source actually hinted at the truth about this guy who is nothing but a poverty pimp, rackater and makes a living fanning the embers of racism.

Scary to think he is advising Obama on Attorney General picks. Does not even pay payroll taxes. Owes 4 mil in taxes he is not paying. Anyone surprised.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/nyregion/questions-about-al-sharptons-finances-accompany-his-rise-in-influence.html?_r=1

The Rev. Al Sharpton, who came to prominence as an imposing figure in a track suit, shouting indignantly at the powerful, stood quietly on a stage last month at the Four Seasons restaurant, his now slender frame wrapped in a finely tailored suit, as men in power lined up to exclaim their admiration for him.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo hailed him as a civil rights icon. President Obama sent an aide to read a message commending Mr. Sharpton’s “dedication to the righteous cause of perfecting our union.” Major corporations sponsored the lavish affair.

It was billed as a “party for a cause,” in honor of Mr. Sharpton’s 60th birthday. But more than a birthday celebration, or a fund-raiser for his nonprofit advocacy group National Action Network, the event in Manhattan seemed to mark the completion of Mr. Sharpton’s decades of transition from consummate outsider to improbable insider.“I’ve been able to reach from the streets to the suites,” he said that night.

Rachel Noerdlinger, then Mr. Sharpton’s communications director, held a New York Post article in 2005 on his campaign contributions. Credit Kathy Willens/Associated Press

Indeed, Mr. Sharpton’s influence and visibility have reached new heights this year, fueled by his close relationships with the mayor and the president.

Obscured in his ascent, however, has been his troubling financial past, which continues to shadow his present.

Mr. Sharpton has regularly sidestepped the sorts of obligations most people see as inevitable, like taxes, rent and other bills. Records reviewed by The New York Times show more than $4.5 million in current state and federal tax liens against him and his for-profit businesses.

And though he said in recent interviews that he was paying both down, his balance with the state, at least, has actually grown in recent years. His National Action Network appears to have been sustained for years by not paying federal payroll taxes on its employees.

With the tax liability outstanding, Mr. Sharpton traveled first class and collected a sizable salary, the kind of practice by nonprofit groups that the United States Treasury’s inspector general for tax administration recently characterized as “abusive,” or “potentially criminal” if the failure to turn over or collect taxes is willful.

Mr. Sharpton and the National Action Network have repeatedly failed to pay travel agencies, hotels and landlords. He has leaned on the generosity of friends and sometimes even the organization, intermingling its finances with his own to cover his daughters’ private school tuition.

Mr. Sharpton in 1988 with Tawana Brawley, whose accusations were later discredited.

He has been in the news as much as ever this year, becoming a prominent advocate on behalf of the families of Eric Garner, a Staten Island man who died in police custody, and Michael Brown, the unarmed black teenager who was killed by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo. He also has a daily platform through his show on MSNBC.

Behind the scenes, he has consulted with the mayor and the president on matters of race and civil rights and even the occasional high-level appointment. He was among a small group at the White House when Mr. Obama announced his nomination of Loretta E. Lynch, the United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, to become the next attorney general.
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Mr. Sharpton’s newly found insider status represents a potential financial boon for him, furnishing him with new credibility and a surge in donations. His politician-heavy birthday party, at one of New York City’s most expensive restaurants, was billed as a fund-raiser to help his organization. Mr. Obama also spoke at the organization’s convention in April, its primary fund-raising event.

But the recent troubles of Rachel Noerdlinger, Mr. Sharpton’s closest aide for many years and more recently a top official in the de Blasio administration, served as a reminder of Mr.

Sharpton’s fraught history and how easily it can spill over into the corridors of power in which he now travels.

Ms. Noerdlinger took a leave of absence from her post on Monday, after her teenage son’s arrest on trespassing charges. The decision capped weeks of scrutiny after news accounts revealed that she had failed to disclose a live-in boyfriend with a criminal record on a background questionnaire when she became the top adviser to Mr. de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray.

The omission was unrelated to Mr. Sharpton, but it is the kind of paperwork oversight that has been a trademark of his nonprofit, where Ms. Noerdlinger built her career.

At a protest rally on Staten Island in August, a besuited and slimmed-down Rev. Al Sharpton looked back over his career in political activism, spanning more than a quarter of a century.

Mr. Sharpton acknowledged his financial troubles in recent telephone interviews. He said all of the debts were being paid, thanks to vastly increased revenues from donors. And he pointed out that he had lent the organization money himself, while at times not taking a salary.

“You can say I’m not a great administrator,” he said. “You can’t say that I’m not committed.”

Seen as Inflaming Tensions

Mr. Sharpton got his start preaching in Brooklyn churches at age 4. As a young man, he worked at the side of the soul singer James Brown, where he met a backup singer, Kathy, who would become his wife. By the 1980s, however, he was becoming increasingly involved in fiery activism on behalf of black people hurt by the police or members of other racial groups, sometimes making outlandish accusations. He accused an upstate New York prosecutor, Steven A. Pagones, of being part of a group of white men whom he said had abducted and raped the teenager Tawana Brawley, an allegation that a grand jury report showed had been fabricated.

He often used strident language that many saw as inflaming racial tensions. During rallies at the Slave Theater in Brooklyn, he characterized black people who disagreed with him as “yellow niggers” and called white people “crackers.” After a car in a prominent Hasidic rabbi’s motorcade jumped a curb in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn and killed a 7-year-old black boy in 1991, Mr. Sharpton referred to the neighborhood’s Hasidic Jews as “diamond merchants.” In 1995, he referred to a Harlem businessman who wanted to expand his store into a space that had been occupied by a black-owned business as a “white interloper.”

Problems keeping his personal and professional affairs in order have threatened Mr. Sharpton’s rise from the streets for decades.

Marching in Queens in 1998 to protest a racially offensive Labor Day float Credit Edward Keating/The New York Times
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In 1990, he was acquitted of felony charges that he stole $250,000 from his youth group. Then in 1993 he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for failing to file a state income tax return. Later, the authorities discovered that one of Mr. Sharpton’s for-profit companies, Raw Talent, which he used as a repository for money from speaking engagements, was also not paying taxes, a failure that continued for years.

I

n 1998, Mr. Sharpton lost a defamation suit brought by Mr. Pagones and was ordered to pay a judgment of $65,000. He said he did not have enough money to pay all at once, and after years of a slow trickle of money from wage garnishments, Mr. Sharpton was forced to testify under oath about his finances.

He said he had no assets, save for a watch and a ring. Everything else, including some of his suits, was owned by a for-profit business, Revals Communications, he said. He testified that he put nearly all of his $73,000 in take-home pay from the National Action Network into Revals, which in turn paid many of his expenses, including his daughters’ private school tuition and some of the rent on his house. Even though state law prohibits nonprofits from making loans to officers, Mr. Sharpton said National Action Network had also once lent him money to cover his daughters’ tuition.

During the deposition, Mr. Sharpton coyly suggested he was not really sure who owned the Brooklyn house where he lived with his wife and two daughters. “Well, I haven’t checked the deed,” he said.

In fact, Mr. Sharpton knew his landlord, Bishop E. Bernard Jordan, quite well. Mr. Sharpton had performed the wedding ceremony of Mr. Jordan’s daughter at Zoe Ministries, the Upper West Side church where Mr. Jordan is the pastor. Mr. Jordan, who makes millions of dollars a year offering prophecies about his followers, and his wife, Debra, had been among only three couples to give the maximum allowable amount to Mr. Sharpton’s 1997 mayoral campaign, records show.

It also appears from property records that Mr. Sharpton got a deal on the six-bedroom house, which he said at the time he wanted in order to dispel questions of his residency in the city before starting his mayoral campaign. He testified that he paid $1,500 a month. He moved there from a two-bedroom apartment in Englewood, N.J., where years earlier he had been paying the same amount, according to court records.

At the Democratic presidential candidates’ debate in 2003.

But he still insisted he could not pay off the Pagones judgment. In 2001, friends paid it for him.

With the National Action Network’s finances always tenuous, that year it quietly paid $70,000 toward the judgment against one of Mr. Sharpton’s co-defendants in the case, Alton H. Maddox Jr., a lawyer who was suspended for refusing to cooperate with a grievance committee investigating his conduct in the Brawley case. Mr. Sharpton acknowledged the payment in an interview last week, saying the nonprofit’s board had supported the idea that Ms. Brawley deserved to be represented. Tax lawyers told The Times that because the payment benefited just one person, it could have led the Internal Revenue Service to revoke the group’s nonprofit status.

A Move Into the Mainstream

Even with his recurring legal problems, Mr. Sharpton was by then already evolving into more of a mainstream figure. He had expressed regret for some of his past incendiary comments and surprised many with his performances in the 1992 and 1994 United States Senate races and his 1997 mayoral campaign. Mr. Sharpton received national exposure with his adroit performance in the debates among the Democratic candidates for president in the 2004 race.

But the messiness of his financial affairs continued to lurk in the background.

With Mr. Sharpton focused on the 2004 presidential race, National Action Network’s finances were reaching crisis levels, tax documents and other public records show. The group’s revenues totaled just over $1 million in 2004, about half of what they had been two years earlier. Nevertheless, it picked up expenses from Mr. Sharpton’s presidential bid: $181,115 in consulting and other costs that should have been charged to his campaign, the Federal Election Commission later found. The group also faced court judgments for several hundred thousand dollars in unpaid office rent and hotel bills.

Mr. Sharpton with President Obama in April. Credit Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times

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Filed: Citizen (apr) Country: Thailand
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Lets see how fast it takes him to blame this on race. I'm sure he'll take a page right of the Coleman Young handbook.

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Lets see how fast it takes him to blame this on race. I'm sure he'll take a page right of the Coleman Young handbook.

Oh you know it. Heshould be in federal prison right now on Tax charges.

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Only the little people pay taxes . I am shocked that his tax file did not get lost with the rest of the IRS back ups

If more citizens were armed, criminals would think twice about attacking them, Detroit Police Chief James Craig

Florida currently has more concealed-carry permit holders than any other state, with 1,269,021 issued as of May 14, 2014

The liberal elite ... know that the people simply cannot be trusted; that they are incapable of just and fair self-government; that left to their own devices, their society will be racist, sexist, homophobic, and inequitable -- and the liberal elite know how to fix things. They are going to help us live the good and just life, even if they have to lie to us and force us to do it. And they detest those who stand in their way."
- A Nation Of Cowards, by Jeffrey R. Snyder

Tavis Smiley: 'Black People Will Have Lost Ground in Every Single Economic Indicator' Under Obama

white-privilege.jpg?resize=318%2C318

Democrats>Socialists>Communists - Same goals, different speeds.

#DeplorableLivesMatter

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Only the little people pay taxes . I am shocked that his tax file did not get lost with the rest of the IRS back ups

This guy is basically a Mobster. Yet he is in the White House yucking it up with Holder and the Preznit. disgusting

10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3

Some Rep President somewhere in history also had a crook in the white house, or in Nixon's case was a crook in the WH

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The kenyan does have a history of hanging around with tax cheats. Even tries to put them on his staff... That fellow Tim what his name ......

If more citizens were armed, criminals would think twice about attacking them, Detroit Police Chief James Craig

Florida currently has more concealed-carry permit holders than any other state, with 1,269,021 issued as of May 14, 2014

The liberal elite ... know that the people simply cannot be trusted; that they are incapable of just and fair self-government; that left to their own devices, their society will be racist, sexist, homophobic, and inequitable -- and the liberal elite know how to fix things. They are going to help us live the good and just life, even if they have to lie to us and force us to do it. And they detest those who stand in their way."
- A Nation Of Cowards, by Jeffrey R. Snyder

Tavis Smiley: 'Black People Will Have Lost Ground in Every Single Economic Indicator' Under Obama

white-privilege.jpg?resize=318%2C318

Democrats>Socialists>Communists - Same goals, different speeds.

#DeplorableLivesMatter

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Filed: Citizen (apr) Country: Thailand
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Oh you know it. Heshould be in federal prison right now on Tax charges.

Unless there's 100% smoking gun proof that he broke the law, he'll never see a day in jail. He's protected because of his race. I think that's called racism.

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Unless there's 100% smoking gun proof that he broke the law, he'll never see a day in jail. He's protected because of his race. I think that's called racism.

Well I would say 4 million in unpaid taxes and refusal to pay payroll taxes is 100%. Don't hold your breath.

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Well I would say 4 million in unpaid taxes and refusal to pay payroll taxes is 100%. Don't hold your breath.

Don't dismiss the power of the race card. There's many folks that have done that, and I'm sure they regret it now.

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This guy is basically a Mobster. Yet he is in the White House yucking it up with Holder and the Preznit. disgusting

10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3

He is even worse than a mobster.

You can certainly tell a lot about a man by who his associates are. Not only does this President have this racist Sharpton as an advisor, don't forget that the disgusting Rev. Jeremiah ("God damn America") Wright is his "spiritual" advisor.

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