The city agreed yesterday to pay $200,000 to Al Sharpton, who claimed cops failed to protect him at a 1991 Brooklyn rally where a drunken white man plunged a 5-inch kitchen knife into his chest.
The settlement, plus a $7,500 hospital bill, was reached in a courthouse hallway as jury selection was about to begin in the trial of a civil suit Sharpton filed, accusing the NYPD of being “careless, negligent and reckless.”
The civil-rights leader, who is running for president, was stabbed in January 1991 while holding the 20th rally to protest the sentences given to bat-wielding white youths convicted in the slaying of black teen Yusuf Hawkins in Bensonhurst.
Sharpton suffered a punctured lung and spent five days at Coney Island Hospital. He has a 1-inch scar on his chest and says he suffered lung damage that still disrupts his breathing.
He filed the suit a decade ago. In announcing the settlement, his lawyer, Sanford Rubenstein, said, “I’m pleased that Rev. Sharpton doesn’t have to relive the nightmare of the stabbing on the witness stand, but he was prepared to testify.”
Kate O’Brien Ahlers, a spokeswoman for the New York City Law Department, said the city “strongly believes” the NYPD acted appropriately.
“However, the city could not predict how a jury might rule and therefore believed that settlement was the best resolution for all parties involved,” she said.
Sharpton did not attend the news conference but said through Rubenstein that he decided to settle the suit because the city agreed to pay his hospital bill “and pay a fair amount of damages for the injures I suffered.”
The civil-rights leader was stabbed in a Bensonhurst schoolyard just blocks from where Hawkins was cornered, beaten and fatally shot by the white youths in August 1989.
Sharpton’s attacker, Michael Riccardi, approached him, plunged a knife into his chest and tried to flee. Riccardi was convicted of first-degree assault and sentenced to five to 15 years in jail.
Sharpton called the rally to protest sentences given the previous day to two youths involved in the killing. One was fined and ordered to perform community service.
Protesters had staged 19 previous demonstrations and residents shouted racial epithets at them, threw watermelons and told them to “go home.”
Rubenstein said then-Mayor David Dinkins had promised to protect Sharpton at the rallies but failed to do so on the day he was stabbed.
“Though there were over 200 policemen standing around, none of them made a move to grab him,” Sharpton said in his autobiography, “Go and Tell Pharaoh,” claiming his aides tackled Riccardi.