The Village Voice.
A Bush Covert Operative Takes Over Al Sharpton's Campaign
Sleeping With the GOP
by Wayne Barrett with special reporting by Adam Hutton and Christine Lagorio

Roger Stone, the longtime Republican dirty-tricks operative who led the mob 
that shut down the Miami-Dade County recount and helped make George W. Bush 
president in 2000, is financing, staffing, and orchestrating the presidential 
campaign of Reverend Al Sharpton. 

Though Stone and Sharpton have tried to reduce their alliance to a curiosity, 
suggesting that all they do is talk occasionally, a Voice investigation has 
documented an extraordinary array of connections. Stone played a pivotal role 
in putting together Sharpton's pending application for federal matching funds, 
getting dollars in critical states from family members and political allies at 
odds with everything Sharpton represents. He's also helped stack the campaign 
with a half-dozen incongruous top aides who've worked for him in prior 
campaigns. He's even boasted about engineering six-figure loans to Sharpton's 
National Action Network (NAN) and allowing Sharpton to use his credit card to cover 
thousands in NAN costs—neither of which he could legally do for the campaign. 
In a wide-ranging Voice interview Sunday, Stone confirmed his matching-fund 
and staffing roles, but refused to comment on the NAN subsidies. 

Sharpton denounced the Voice's inquiries as "phony liberal paternalism," 
insisting that he'd "talk to anyone I want" and likening his use of Stone to Bill 
Clinton's reliance on pollster Dick Morris, saying he was "sick of these 
racist double standards." He did not dispute that Stone had helped generate 
matching contributions and staff the campaign. Asked about the Stone loans, he 
conceded that he "asked him to help NAN," but attributed the financial aid to his 
and Stone's joint "fight against the Rockefeller drug laws," adding: "If he did 
let me use his credit card to cover NAN expenses, fine." The finances of NAN 
and the Sharpton campaign have so merged in recent months that they have shared 
everything from contractors to consultants to travel expenses, though 
Sharpton insists that these questionable maneuvers have been done in compliance with 
Federal Election Commission regulations. 

Stone's Miami-based Fairbanks Limited also set up an e-mail service called 
Sharpton-at-the-beach, which has issued dozens of releases highlighting campaign 
achievements before news of them was posted on the campaign website. His 
impact on strategy even included giving Sharpton the ax handle he wielded at the 
July NAACP convention, which Sharpton used as a symbol of former Georgia 
Democratic governor Lester Maddox, who became famous in the '60s by chasing blacks 
from his restaurant with one. Sharpton stirred the crowd, yelling from the 
podium: "Anytime we can give a party 92 percent of our vote and have to still beg 
some people to come talk to us, there is still an ax-handle mentality among 
some in the Democratic Party." Sharpton said he doesn't remember whether Stone 
gave him the ax handle. Stone declined to comment, but has boasted to friends 
that he came up with the theatrics. 

Recruited in 2000 by his friend James Baker, the former secretary of state, 
to spearhead the GOP street forces in Miami, Stone is apparently confident that 
he can use the Democrat-bashing preacher to damage the party's eventual 
nominee, just as Sharpton himself bragged he did in the New York mayoral campaign 
of 2001. In his 2002 book, Al on America, Sharpton wrote that he felt the 
city's Democratic Party "had to be taught a lesson" in 2001—insisting that Mark 
Green, who defeated the Sharpton-backed Fernando Ferrer in a bitter runoff, had 
disrespected him and minorities. Adding that the party "still has to be taught 
one nationally," he warned: "A lot of 2004 will be about what happened in New 
York in 2001. It's about dignity." In 2001, Sharpton engaged in a 
behind-the-scenes dialogue with campaign aides to Republican Mike Bloomberg while publicly 
disparaging Green. 

Sharpton recently rebuffed an appeal by DNC chair Terry McAuliffe to join a 
post-primary March 25 event to support the nominee, sending a letter saying he 
would attend but would also "continue to campaign vigorously until the last 
day of the convention." He has also repeatedly vowed that he would speak on 
prime-time TV during the July convention, saying party leaders would decide 
"whether that's inside the hall or out in the parking lot," threatening 
demonstrations unless granted exposure guaranteed to turn off many voters. Stone 
terminated a 45-minute Voice interview shortly after he was asked about any involvement 
he might have had with the letter to McAuliffe, saying he was "not 
characterizing my conversations with Sharpton," though he freely did in a recent Times 
interview. 

While Bush forces like the Club for Growth were buying ads in Iowa assailing 
then front-runner Howard Dean, Sharpton took center stage at a debate 
confronting Dean about the absence of blacks in his Vermont cabinet. Stone told the 
Times that he "helped set the tone and direction" of the Dean attacks, while 
Charles Halloran, the Sharpton campaign manager installed by Stone, supplied the 
research. While other Democratic opponents were also attacking Dean, none did 
it on the advice of a consultant who's worked in every GOP presidential 
campaign since his involvement in the Watergate scandals of 1972, including all of 
the Bush family campaigns. Asked if he'd ever been involved in a Democratic 
campaign before, Stone cited his 1981 support of Ed Koch, though he was quoted at 
the time as saying he only did it because Koch was also given the Republican 
ballot line. 

Just as Stone has a history of political skulduggery, Sharpton has a 
little-noticed history of Republican machinations inconsistent with his fiery 
rhetoric. He endorsed Al D'Amato in 1986, appeared with George Pataki two days before 
his 1994 race against Mario Cuomo, invited Ralph Nader to his headquarters on 
the eve of the 2000 vote, befriended Bill Powers when he was the state GOP 
chair, and debuted as a preacher in the church of a black minister who was also a 
Brooklyn Republican district leader. The current co-chair of his presidential 
campaign gave as much to Bush-Cheney as he did to Sharpton, and many of the 
black businessmen supporting this campaign or NAN have strong GOP ties. His 
conduit in the Bloomberg campaign, Harold Doley III, was the son of the first 
black with a seat on Wall Street. A major NAN backer over the years, Doley Jr. 
was appointed to positions in five Republican administrations, including Bush's. 


Stone, whose Miami mob even jostled a visiting Sharpton during the recount, 
said recently in The American Spectator that if Sharpton were to run "as an 
independent" in the 2006 Hillary Clinton race, she would be "sunk," implicitly 
suggesting that this operation may be a precursor to another Stone-Sharpton 
mission. In his book Too Close to Call, New Yorker columnist Jeffrey Toobin 
exposed Baker's tapping of Stone, as well as Stone and his Cuban wife Nydia's role 
in firing up Cuban protesters, with Stone calling the shots the day of the 
shutdown over a walkie-talkie in a building across the street from the canvassing 
board headquarters. The Stone mob was chanting Sharpton's slogan "No Justice, 
No Peace" when the board stopped the count, which was universally seen as the 
turning point in the battle that made Bush president. 

The Washington Post recently reported that the Bush campaign was planning a 
special advertising campaign targeting black voters, seeking as much as a 
quarter of the vote, and any Sharpton-connected outrage against the party could 
either lower black turnout in several key close states, or move votes to Bush. 
Both were widely reported as the consequences of Sharpton's anti-Green rhetoric 
in 2001, a result Sharpton celebrated both in his book and at a Bronx victory 
party on election night. 

A Mysterious Marriage 

The Stone involvement in the Sharpton campaign began in early March at a 
lunch at Gallagher's, a midtown steak house that Stone frequents. Stone and 
Sharpton do not disagree that two mutual friends, Democratic consultant Hank 
Sheinkopf and anti-Rockefeller-drug-law activist Randy Credico, helped to arrange it. 
Sheinkopf and Credico say Stone asked them to arrange the meeting, and 
Credico recalls "repeated pressure" from Stone to put it together. Stone says both 
are "mistaken" and that Sheinkopf suggested it to Sharpton and that Sharpton 
sought the meeting. Sharpton was scheduled at one point to fly to Miami for the 
get-together, says Credico, but canceled. Sheinkopf says it was "certainly 
Stone who initiated it," though he agreed that "Sharpton needed to talk to people 
who know how to do presidential campaigns." 

Sharpton, who brought lawyer Sanford Rubinstein and NAN director Marjorie 
Harris Smikle to the lunch, said everyone present—including Sheinkopf and Stone—
believed he needed to hire experienced staff. Stone discussed the daunting 
requirement of raising at least $5,000 in 20 states to obtain federal matching 
funds and outlined some of "the things he had to do," according to Sheinkopf, to 
achieve it. Credico recalls that Stone "mentioned Halloran's name," dumping 
on the inexperienced consultant, Roberto Ramirez, who Sharpton was then using. 
"They had a natural affinity," Sheinkopf said, "and agreed to continue 
talking." 

Credico said Stone explained his interest in working with Sharpton by saying 
that they had "a mutual obsession: We both hate the Democratic Party." Stone 
told Credico that he "would have some fun with Sharpton's campaign" and "bring 
Terry McAuliffe to his knees." Stone, Credico, and Sheinkopf walked to Stone's 
apartment after the lunch, and Stone was elated with the tenor of the 
meeting. 

Sharpton was already negotiating a deal with Frank Watkins, who ran both of 
Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns, so he took no immediate action on 
Stone's suggestions. Halloran was busy anyway with another Stone- arranged 
assignment—running the parliamentary campaign for the United Bermuda Party, ironically 
the white-led party seeking to unseat the island's first black government. 
Halloran had also managed a Stone-run campaign in New York in 2002, spending 
nearly $65 million of billionaire Tom Golisano's money and getting the 
Independence Party candidate a mere 14 percent of the vote in the gubernatorial race. 
Stone, whose firm represented the prior Bermuda government, did initial work in 
the 2003 race there and left, recommending Halloran. Sharpton says that when 
the Bermuda job was over in September, he hired Halloran to work under Watkins, 
but that when he discovered that Jackson and Watkins were "sabotaging my 
campaign" and were really with Howard Dean, he replaced Watkins with Halloran. 

Halloran is a capable operative who claims he did advance work in the first 
Clinton campaign, and that he worked as a consultant in a statewide Democratic 
race in Georgia and as a volunteer for Al Gore during the recount battle. He 
has become so close to Stone over the last two years, however, that he stays at 
Stone's 40 Central Park South apartment when he's in New York working for 
Sharpton. Halloran and his wife celebrated Stone's 50th birthday with him and his 
wife last year, and the two operatives talk virtually every day. By his own 
account, Halloran made so much money in the Golisano and Bermuda campaigns, he 
has so far worked for Sharpton since September 4 without receiving a single 
cent in pay. 

Sharpton's latest FEC filing lists Stone as collecting nearly $5,000 in 
expense reimbursement. The campaign also owes him $50,000 in pay through December 
31. It's the only time he can recall running a campaign on trust. Since 
Sharpton 2004 now owes ($348,450) almost as much as it's raised ($382,766), and since 
the Rev has left a notorious trail of other liens in his wake, it's a 
peculiar level of trust. 

Angels for Al 

The same paucity of payments is true for a collection of other Stone-Halloran 
associates working in the campaign. Ernest Baynard, another Golisano campaign 
veteran who helped set up the Sharpton-at-the-beach e-mail address and does 
press and research for the campaign, hasn't been paid a cent and is listed as a 
$20,000 debtor. Ironically, while working for Sharpton, Baynard's Meridian 
Hill Strategies has been simultaneously retained by another campaign Stone 
helped launch, arch-conservative Larry Klayman's run for the U.S. Senate in 
Florida. Two other ex-Golisano consultants, Joe Ruffin and Andre Johnson, ran 
Sharpton's campaign in the Washington, D.C., primary last month, and unlike Halloran 
and Baynard, were actually paid for it, a total of $12,900. (Johnson is owed 
an additional $3,500.) 

The Archer Group, a San Francisco– based consulting company that reeled in 
$246,000 from Golisano, dispatched its two top executives, Michael Pitts and Ron 
Coleman, to New York back in September. In all this time, the company has 
only been paid $5,000 by the campaign for "logistics." The campaign filing lists 
the company as owed only another $5,000 for "rent"—on an office/ apartment at 
50 West 34th Street, where the company used to run its Sharpton operations. 
Pitts, whom Stone gratuitously described as "a 300-pound black Democratic 
operative," says they were recruited by Halloran "to do a national field operation 
plan." Admitting that it makes him "uneasy" that Stone is so involved in the 
Sharpton campaign, Pitts says he nonetheless participated in at least five 
strategy sessions with Stone to plan field operations, labeling him a "Mr. 
Know-It-All Kind of Guy." Calling Stone's involvement "sinister," Pitts simultaneously 
dismissed it, saying Stone "just wants to be disruptive" and "likes to be in 
the shit." 

All the other payments to Archer were made not by the campaign, but by NAN, 
which Stone has reportedly been quietly subsidizing. Pitts acknowledged that 
they signed a $20,000-a-month contract with Sharpton, but says the price was 
subsequently reduced. He says they were paid entirely by NAN until December, 
ostensibly to run a voter registration operation. But Pitts concedes that all they 
did was a registration plan, never any registration, and that they began "to 
focus more on scheduling" for the Rev, saying that many of the events they 
scheduled across the country were "shared events," part campaign and part NAN. 

"We knew some of these things were commingled," he said. "We heard from 
Charles that it had been ruled that our arrangements had gotten a bit too hazy." 
Was there, he asked, "a hazy thing" about being paid by NAN to do scheduling for 
the campaign? "Yeah, you get caught up in the middle of it." 

In early December, Pitts says they went on the campaign payroll. But by the 
end of December, the 34th Street office was vacated and Coleman was back in 
California. Pitts stayed with it, spending most of the last few weeks in South 
Carolina, and moving on this week to Michigan, where Sharpton plans a major 
effort. Elizebeth Burke, another Golisano aide, worked with Coleman and Pitts, 
first at Sharpton's campaign office at the hospital workers union, and then at 
the Archer apartment. She says the $5,000 payment to Archer is "laughable" 
compared to the amount of campaign work the company did. Burke was paid $1,000 a 
week, half by NAN and half by the campaign, and says she did "all the logistics" 
for him across the country, "working with debate organizers and creating 
campaign events." 

Burke says Pitts and Coleman told her that Stone made "at least two loans in 
six figures to NAN, totaling well over $200,000"—and that they were all 
"stunned to hear about it" because Stone, she said, "has to know that he'll never 
get it back." She also recounted how in December, Sharpton personally wrote a 
$10,000 check for Archer's services that bounced. "We found out the account 
didn't exist; it was a closed account." The campaign and NAN, which she calls "a 
shell," were in such disarray that "the only way we were staying afloat was 
through other sources that might not be legal, Republican sources." 

Credico, who's remained in close touch with Stone throughout the Sharpton 
adventure and who heard the Maddox story from him, says Stone told him he took a 
$270,000 promissory note from Sharpton. Stone also told Credico that Sharpton 
ran up $18,000 on his credit card last year, covering some of the costs of a 
California trip, including a fundraising dinner thrown by NAN. "I can't believe 
Roger's still involved with Sharpton," Credico said. "All he does is complain 
to me about Sharpton owing him all this money. Last time we had dinner, I 
told him, Why don't you just get out of it?" Credico has his own complaints about 
the campaign's finances, saying that Stone and Halloran promised to send him 
to Iowa but never did, setting him back the price of an airplane ticket from 
California when he rushed back to New York. 

Asked about the $270,000 and the $18,000 by the Voice, Stone replied: "Go 
badger somebody else." Sharpton said the Voice should get NAN's IRS filings for 
the payments, knowing that they do not detail revenue sources and don't have to 
be filed for months. "That was our annual event in California," he said, 
insisting only that any possible credit card purchases by Stone were NAN-related 
exclusively. "I asked a lot of people to help." He said the same thing about 
the loans: "I asked him in terms of the network." The NAN loans are a potential 
illegal end-run around FEC limits, as are his donated services, which are an 
in-kind contribution to the campaign from a professional consultant. 

The combination of the unpaid or underpaid services of Stone, Halloran, 
Baynard, Archer, et al., together with the NAN subsidies, paint a picture of a 
Sharpton operation that is utterly dependent on his new ally Stone, whose own 
sponsors are as unclear as ever. Stone is friendly with a number of Bush 
sidekicks, from Baker to powerhouse GOP Washington lobbyists like Wayne Berman and 
Scott Reed. Berman represents the Carlyle Group, the D.C.-based equity engine that 
includes Baker and former president Bush. Halloran's wife, Chris Trampf, 
works at Carlyle, though Halloran insists she is merely a back-office staffer. 

Blackface Bucks 

Stone acknowledged that he "helped Sharpton" in the campaign's desperate 
attempt in November and December to reach the $5,000 matching-fund threshold in 20 
states. "I collected checks," he said. "That's how matching funds is done. I 
like Al Sharpton. I was helping a friend." Sharpton was the last candidate to 
meet the December 31 deadline and is immediately seeking more than $150,000 in 
federal funding. If the FEC, which has been reviewing his application for a 
month, determines that he meets the threshold, Sharpton will be eligible for 
more. 

But he only submitted 21 states, and at least one, Illinois, is unlikely to 
be certified, since it came in at $5,100 and contains two $250 contributions 
from the same individual. Only single contributions of up to $250 can count 
toward the threshold. That means Sharpton's funding—against which he has already 
taken a $150,000 bank loan—is the lifeblood of the campaign. Stone and Halloran 
allies, including staffers Johnson and Ruffin, kicked in the last four $250 
contributions in D.C., all on December 30 and 31, that gave Sharpton a perilous 
$5,332 total. 

In Florida, Stone's wife, Nydia; son Scott; daughter-in-law Laurie; 
mother-in-law Olga Bertran; executive assistant Dianne Thorne; Tim Suereth, who lives 
with Thorne; and Halloran's mother, Jane Stone (unrelated to Roger, he says), 
pushed Sharpton comfortably over the threshold, donating $250 apiece in 
December. Jeanmarie Ferrara, who works at a Miami public relations firm that joined 
Stone in the '90s fight on behalf of the sugar industry against a tax to 
resuscitate the Everglades, also gave $250, as did the wife of the firm's name 
partner, Ray Casas. Another lobbyist, Eli Feinberg, a Republican giver appointed to 
a top position by the Republican state insurance commissioner, did $250. 

Clive and Lenore Baldwin, entertainers known for their impersonations of Al 
Jolson and Sophie Tucker, came in at the matchable maximum as well. Stone 
adopted their act years ago, producing a Clive Baldwin recording, and putting him 
onstage at the 1996 Republican National Convention. In a Times tale of a recent 
Baldwin appearance in Long Island, he wound up being "shown the door" after a 
"confrontation" with angry black caterers. (Apparently Stone could not locate 
Amos & Andy for a contribution.) 

Two vendors for a current campaign assisted by Stone—the senate campaign of 
Larry Klayman—also donated in Florida, with public relations consultant Michael 
Caputo and Tasmania Productions owner Teddi Segal donating $250 (she says she 
doesn't know Stone). Caputo, ironically, was Stone's spokesman in 1996, when 
Stone was embroiled in the most embarrassing scandal of his career—the much 
ballyhooed revelation that he and his wife had advertised, with photos, for 
swinging partners in magazines and on the Internet. Caputo has, until recently, 
been handling press inquiries for Klayman, an evangelical who led the sex 
assault in Washington on Bill Clinton and is running a moral-majority, retake-Cuba 
campaign for senate. Stone volunteered behind the scenes for Klayman too, and 
several Stone-tied vendors, like Baynard and pollster Fabrizio, McLaughlin & 
Associates, have been retained. 

In fact, the treasurer of the Klayman campaign, Paul Jensen, a top Bush 
administration transportation official, joined his wife, Pamela, in making $250 
donations on December 30 to Sharpton, helping get him over the threshold in a 
third state. Jensen contributed to Sharpton, who favors a federal law certifying 
civil unions for homosexuals, even though the lawyer has filed suits in 16 
states seeking to defrock Presbyterian ministers who've "violated their vows" by 
ordaining gays. Stone has been in frequent touch with Jensen and Klayman in 
recent months and said that he might have "told Halloran to call him for a 
check" or asked himself, as he indicated he might have with many others on this 
list of anomalies. 

Though Sharpton conceded that he asked Stone to "help raise the matching 
funds," he said "everybody helped me qualify," adding that "it's ridiculous" to 
suggest that Stone's role, though he concedes it made a difference in some 
states, was of any overall significance. He insisted, accurately, that the bulk of 
his contributions were from black supporters across the country, attracted to 
his candidacy. But that does not make any less indispensable the critical, 
targeted fundraising Stone engineered. Halloran traveled through Georgia, 
Mississippi, and Alabama in a last-ditch December effort to nail down enough to meet 
the threshold. 

Sharpton and Stone are, in a sense, brothers under the skin, outlandish 
personalities too large to be bound by the constraints that govern the rest of us. 
Stone was the registered agent in America for Argentina's intelligence agency, 
sucking up spy novels; Sharpton was a confidential informant for the FBI, 
wiring up on black leaders for the feds. Stone is a fashion impersonator, 
dressing like a hip-hop dandy; Sharpton, having shed his gold medallion and jogger 
suits, now looks like a smooth banker. Stone was involved in Watergate at the 
age of 19; Sharpton was a boy-wonder preacher. Stone's mentor from the days of 
his youth was Roy Cohn; Sharpton's was James Brown. Sharpton is a minister 
without a church; Stone is almost as rootless, having left the powerhouse 
Washington firm he helped form years ago. Each reinvents himself daily, if not hourly, 
as if nothing in their past matters. 

For all his brilliance and personal charm, Sharpton's political bombast has 
always been more spectacle than belief. He is so determined to reach Jesse's 
heights he's sunk lower than ever, mining black America for Bush's secret agent. 
He recently ate dinner in a Manhattan restaurant with Stone and found himself 
sitting opposite former FBI agent Joe Spinelli, who flipped him after picking 
him up in a mob video sting. All the ironies of his life are coming home to 
roost, just as he stands in a brighter limelight than he's ever enjoyed. The 
Rev needs to get some religion. 

Additional research: Andrew Burtless, Cristi Hegranes, Brian O'Connor, 
Abigail Roberts, Catherine Shu, and Jennifer Suh 



    
    

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