When Taki met Al Sharpton

 New York

This is a tale of two escape artists in one city. Let’s start with my old friend the Rev. Al Sharpton. I call him an old buddy because about 15 years ago, in a downtown restaurant, a boxer friend asked the strutting Sharpton if he wanted to meet yours truly. The reverend did not miss a beat: ‘Man, I got better things to do than meet Taki,’ he snorted. I burst into laughter, so he stopped and shook my hand and I pretended to count my fingers and then it was his turn to laugh. As some of you may remember, Al became famous 30 years ago by playing the race card non-stop and claiming that a young black girl had been kidnapped and raped by a white district attorney working for Rudy Giuliani. The case turned out to be a classic: full of baloney, as they used to say in Brooklyn in the good old days. Tawana Brawley, the so-called victim, turned out to have run away from home and to have made up the story to escape punishment. The tabloids went ballistic. An assistant DA kidnapping a 14-year-old black girl and raping her was a once-in-a-lifetime scandal. The DA resigned and spent the next ten years fighting the case. Which turned out to be as phoney as a three-dollar bill and then some. Once Tawana confessed, the DA sued the reverend for defamation and many other things. The DA won his case after numerous appeals by Sharpton but never collected a cent from the good reverend himself. Sharpton instead relied on his celebrity supporters to bail him out a few years later. Oh well, it’s water under the dam now, as they used to say in Alabama, where the reverend’s momma came from, and where people used to tell tall tales about the fish they caught and the women they slept with.