Ex-NY Cop Bo Dietl: Informant Sharpton Known as 'Fat Rat'
Wednesday, 09 Apr 2014 01:36 PM
Host Sean Hannity showed a video, first aired by HBO in 1983, of the civil rights activist apparently attempting to buy kilos of the drug from an undercover FBI agent.
Sharpton admitted that he had cooperated with an FBI investigation into New York’s Genovese crime family, but he denied being paid to snitch on the mob. Dietl, however, said it was well known that Sharpton was helping the FBI.
"There was a lot of involvement with the music industry at that time that Al was involved in," Dietl said. "People I knew from East Harlem, everyone on the streets at that time, knew he was an informant. We used to call him the fat rat."
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Asked by Hannity what he thought of the video showing Sharpton’s alleged conversation involving a cocaine purchase, Dietl said, "The video stands for itself. He was talking about buying kilos of coke with an undercover [cop]. So who is he representing?"
Hannity then asked if Sharpton had been "flipped" by the FBI into turning informant because agents had probably threatened to indict him.
Dietl said, "The majority of the times when we develop informants is when you get them on a felony case, and then you flip them, and they become an informant. When he says he didn’t know he was an informant, that’s a lot of baloney. Al Sharpton knew what he was doing, he was cooperating with the FBI."
Dietl, who published his autobiography "One Tough Cop: The Bo Dietl Story" in 1998 and was portrayed by Stephen Baldwin in the film based on the book, said Sharpton continued working for the FBI into the 1990s.
On Monday, The Smoking Gun published documents relating to an FBI investigationinto Genovese mobsters. And although the documents did not name the informants, the website said Sharpton was an informer, leading to a blaring headline in the New York Post calling him "Rev. Rat."
Sharpton denied he was an informer known to agents as "CI-7." But he admitted that he had cooperated with the FBI in the 1980s to help record suspected mobsters repeat threats made against him over his campaign to help black concert promoters.
"They were threatening to kill me," he said, adding that he recorded the conversations over a two-year period. "I was not and am not a rat, because I wasn't with the rats. I am a cat. I chase rats."
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