Though the NBA’s players union asked Sacramento mayor and ex-Phoenix Suns star Kevin Johnson to act as its adviser in the Sterling controversy, Sharpton repeatedly tried to put himself center stage, threatening protests at the league’s Manhattan headquarters and the Clippers’ playoff game. Right up to NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s press conference banning Sterling for life, Sharpton kept using his NBC platform —ranging from his “Meet the Press” demands on Sunday to appearances on several MSNBC shows, including his own — to seek credit for Sterling’s eventual ouster, which everyone expected would be the dunk of the year, or maybe the epoch. (snip)

Sharpton recently got four New York tabloid covers in the New York Post and New York Daily News in two days, followed by dozens of other stories — all revolving around hard documentary evidence revealed by the Smoking Gun that he was so cozy with the mob in the ’80s that he taped 10 meetings with one gangster that lasted hours (ultimately becoming the basis for FBI wiretaps on the most powerful Mafia leaders in America). On Sean Hannity’s Fox News show, where Sharpton was once welcomed as a friend of the program, an ex-cop said he was known on the street as The Fat Rat. As hot as the fire around Sharpton was, he motored on, both a captive and champion of his personal history of scandal, a rogue for all seasons. (snip)

When Sharpton registered to vote at three different addresses in 1976 and was questioned about it in court, he testified that Brooklyn’s Democratic bosses couldn’t make up their minds which of three independent black leaders they wanted him to run against, so he registered in all of their districts. Then, in 1982, he allegedly joined his political mentor, State Sen. Vander Beatty, in the forging of thousands of voter registration cards in an effort to overturn a congressional election Beatty lost. Sharpton’s attitude about vote fraud hardly appears to have changed — he hugged an Ohio election official convicted on four counts of vote fraud at a rally two weeks before the NAN convention.