The Rev. and the
Fugitive Sharpton tried to set up Chesimard, activists say
By Ron Howell, Newsday,
Friday 21 October 1988
The Rev. Al Sharpton,
who has worked as a federal informant, tried to set up a meeting with black
fugitive radical JoAnne Chesimard in 1983, according to activists who said they
were approached by Sharpton.
(JoAnne Chesimard(Assata Shakur))
The black activists said
they feared Sharpton was trying to deliver Chesimard into the arms of federal
agents, but said they had no proof.
One law-enforcement
source, who declined to be identified but has detailed knowledge of Sharpton’s
activities as an FBI informant, said this week that Sharpton was working as an
informant at the time he sought to meet Chesimard. The source said that one of
Sharpton’s assignments was to try to lead agents to Chesimard, who escaped from
prison in 1979 after being convicted in the killing a New Jersey state trooper.
“It wasn’t a big massive
operation. It was just a small shot, an everyday deal,” the source said. “I
would equate it with setting up 10 traps a day trying to catch a fox . . .” He
said Sharpton was not a major participant in the search for the woman, who goes
by the African name Assata Shakur.
A top FBI official said
that Sharpton was not used in any manner to lure Shakur into a trap. “This is
the first I’m hearing of it, it’s bull———,” FBI Assistant Deputy Director
Kenneth Walton, who led the Shakur investigation, said earlier this week.
( Kenneth Walton )
Sharpton flatly denied
trying to make contact with Shakur.
Newsday reported in
January that beginning in 1983 Sharpton secretly supplied federal law
enforcement agencies with information on boxing promoter Don King, reputed
organized crime figures and black leaders and elected officials. And in a two-hour
interview, Sharpton admitted to Newsday that he had assisted the government in
drug and organized crime cases. He said he also accompanied undercover federal
agents wearing body recorders to meetings with various subjects of federal
investigations. He said he had allowed the U.S. attorney’s office for the
Eastern District of New York to install
a tapped telephone in his Brooklyn home.
Sharpton has insisted he
never turned over information on black radicals or on King.
This week, Sharpton
denied assertions by Ahmed Obafemi, a long-time activist, and Kwame Brathwaite,
an activist and photographer who says Sharpton asked him to set up an encounter
with Obafemi. Both men say that Obafemi acted as the intermediary in the failed
discussions with Sharpton to reach Shakur.
Sharpton called the men
“liars” and said they were possibly “police agents.” He charged they are part
of “an element in the black community that has lost out . . . and that will
fabricate any story out of jealousy because they have no following . . . ”
(Ahmed Obafemi (middle))
(Kwame Brathwaite)
Obafemi, the national
organizer for the New Afrikan People’s Organization, said Sharpton met with him
in Manhattan at least four times in 1983, over a period of about two months. He
said that Sharpton offered to donate money to help black revolutionaries running from the law
and that Sharpton was particularly interested in setting up a meeting with
Shakur, once referred to as the “soul” of the Black Liberation Army.
Sharpton told Obafemi he
was representing two former Black Panthers, who wanted to see Shakur, according
to Obafemi.
The ex-Panthers were
supposedly trying to make useful contacts in
case they had to flee the country someday, Obafemi said he was told.
“The first discussion
was that they were close to her, that they had been in the [Black Panther]
party with her and that they wanted to talk to her,” Obafemi said. “I wanted to
find out who they were, but he said they really didn’t want to be known.”
Shakur was once a member
of the Black Panther Party, but went underground around 1971 because she said
she believed the group was being infiltrated by city and federal law
enforcement officers.
The 1983 deal fell
through at a final meeting when Sharpton insisted that money would be donated
only if the two former Panthers could meet Shakur. Failing that, Obafemi said,
Sharpton was interested in making any kind of “contact” with her or with any of
her close associates also on the run from the law. “Naturally, I never got
back” to him, said Obafemi, whose organization believes that blacks should have
their own country within the United States and that they have the right to
fight for it.
“Obviously we had to
feel that a definite possibility existed he was working for the government, and
we would have felt that way about him or anybody else who approached us in that
manner,” said Chokwe Lumumba, an attorney and chairman of the New Afrikan
People’s Organization.
(Chokwe Lumumba)
Lumumba had been
informed in 1983 by Obafemi about Sharpton’s proposal. The attorney said his
organization was more interested in getting information about Sharpton’s
motives than in receiving money from him. “I can’t say that we were able to
make any definite conclusions” about whether Sharpton was acting as an agent
for the government, Lumumba said.
Both Lumumba and Obafemi
denied knowing where Shakur was at the time.
Sharpton’s first
broached his interest in Shakur during a chance encounter with Brathwaite, a
black nationalist, Brathwaite said. Brathwaite said he happened to run into
Sharpton one day in midtown but he could not remember the month. Already
acquainted with each other from entertainment circles, the two men started
talking and Sharpton “said he wanted to make a donation to Assata,” Brathwaite said.
A day or two later,
Brathwaite told Obafemi of the offer. “I told him to watch out,” said
Brathwaite. “I knew that authorities were trying to find out where she [Assata
Shakur] was and that they were trying to get close to somebody who was close to
her . . . And then I just knew that he’s always been a hustler.”
Last year, Newsday
disclosed that Shakur was given political asylum in Cuba and was living there
with her daughter, now 14 years old. She is probably the most sought-after of
the 1970s radicals linked to bank robberies and police killings over a 10-year
span.
The specific amount of
the contribution Sharpton said he was prepared to make in 1983 on behalf of the
ex-Panthers was not discussed, Obafemi said; but Sharpton said the prospective
contributors gained the money by “ripping off the system,” Obafemi recalled.
He said that at least
two of the meetings occurred in a luxurious apartment at 30 Lincoln Plaza, near
Lincoln Center. That was the building where, according to a law enforcement
source and a report published in the Feb. 2, 1988 edition of The Village Voice,
a federal agent using the name Victor Quintana set up an apartment in 1983 or
earlier to lure boxing world denizens suspected of illegal activity. Quintana
in that year ensnared Sharpton into working for the FBI, New York Newsday
reported in January.
The Village Voice
article reported that apartment was on the 29th floor, but Obafemi could not
recall the floor on which he had his rendezvous with Sharpton. Sharpton lives
in Brooklyn and Obafemi said he did not explain why Sharpton had access to the
apartment. “He made me think it was his,” said Obafemi. “I was saying (to
myself), ’What kind of money must they have to have a spot in here.’ He had the
keys and everything.”
Sharpton denied this
week ever being in the building.
Obafemi said that up
until 1983 he knew Sharpton only as the head of a youth organization, the
National Youth Movement, and as someone with vague connections in the
entertainment world.
Obafemi is the
ex-husband of Nehanda Obafemi, once known as Cheri Laverne Dalton, who is still
wanted by the federal government in connection with the notorious Brink’s
robbery which took place seven years ago yesterday. She is allegedly connected
to the group of black and white revolutionaries convicted in the Brink’s heist.
A guard and two police officers were killed in that incident, which took place
upstate near Nyack.
In 1983, Obafemi was
busy trying to gain support in the black community for the people arrested in
the Brink’s case. In October of that year, several blacks and whites were
convicted in that robbery and in the highly planned breakout of Shakur from
prison in 1979.
The law enforcement
source implicating Sharpton in the hunt for Assata Shakur said that Sharpton
was also, secondarily, trying to help agents get other fugitives, especially
Mutulu Shakur, who was still on the run at that time. Mutulu Shakur, no
relation to Assata, was later apprehended and convicted in connection with the
Brink’s robbery and the escape of Assata Shakur.
( Mutulu Shakur )
prisonact-list@prisonactivist.org
( A project of the
Prison Activist Resource Center.)
SCRIPTURES
ZECHARIAH 11:4Thus saith
the LORD my God; Feed the flock of the slaughter; 5Whose possessors slay them,
and hold themselves not guilty: and they that sell them say, Blessed be the
LORD; for I am rich: and their own shepherds pity them not.
JUDE 1:11Woe unto them!
for they have gone in the way of Cain, and ran greedily after the error of
Balaam for reward, and perished in the gainsaying of Core. 12These are spots in
your feasts of charity, when they feast with you, feeding themselves without
fear: clouds they are without water, carried about of winds; trees whose fruit
withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; 13Raging waves
of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved
the blackness of darkness for ever.
EZEKIEL 34:1And the word
of the LORD came unto me, saying, 2Son of man, prophesy against the shepherds
of Israel, prophesy, and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD unto the
shepherds; Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should
not the shepherds feed the flocks? 3Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the
wool, ye kill them that are fed: but ye feed not the flock. 4The diseased have
ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have
ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was
driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and
with cruelty have ye ruled them. 5And they were scattered, because there is no
shepherd: and they became meat to all the beasts of the field, when they were
scattered. 6My sheep wandered through all the mountains, and upon every high
hill: yea, my flock was scattered upon all the face of the earth, and none did
search or seek after them.
7Therefore, ye
shepherds, hear the word of the LORD; 8As I live, saith the Lord GOD, surely
because my flock became a prey, and my flock became meat to every beast of the
field, because there was no shepherd, neither did my shepherds search for my
flock, but the shepherds fed themselves, and fed not my flock; 9Therefore, O ye
shepherds, hear the word of the LORD; 10Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I am
against the shepherds; and I will require my flock at their hand, and cause
them to cease from feeding the flock; neither shall the shepherds feed
themselves any more; for I will deliver my flock from their mouth, that they
may not be meat for them.
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