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.

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.

To stay afloat, the nonprofit became reliant on money that was supposed to go to payroll taxes, according to its financial statements. The amount National Action Network underpaid the federal government in taxes went from about $900,000 in 2003 to almost $1.9 million by 2006, records show. Mr. Sharpton, making more money from a new radio contract, tried to help by forgoing a salary from 2006 through 2008 and giving the organization a $200,000 no-interest loan.

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

In financial statements for 2007 and 2008, the group’s accountant noted that its “existence has been dependent upon” loans from Mr. Sharpton and “the nonpayment of payroll tax obligations.”