A career criminal with colorful tales tried to get the world to listen to his story as Barack Obama was running for his first term. But it didn’t quite work out the way he wanted it to.
Larry Sinclair, a serial criminal with a checkered past, tried alerting the Obama campaign and several national media outlets about his claims of a night of drugs and sexual acts with then-state Senator Barack Obama in 1999, according to Sinclair’s self-published book.
But the press told him to take a hike, and Obama’s campaign refused to listen.
Meeting Obama
In Nov. 1999, Sinclair attended a friend’s graduation from Great Lakes Navy Training Center in Chicago’s far northern suburbs, along Lake Michigan. He stayed at the Comfort Inn and Suites in Gurnee, Ill.
It was on that trip that Sinclair claims he met Barack Obama, then a 38 year-old State Senator two years into his first term, through his limo driver.
“Upon exiting the limo, I saw a thin built, big eared, light skinned black male dressed preppy standing next to (the driver),” he wrote. “(He) introduced me to this man as ‘my friend Barack Obama’.”
A night of partying
After a night of partying in Chicago, Sinclair said Obama visited him at the Comfort Inn in Gurnee.
Sinclair said that he did cocaine with Obama.
“Obama and I had a few drinks and talked for about an hour or so at the bar,” Sinclair wrote. “I mentioned to him that I could really use a few lines to wake up… Obama asked if I was referring to coke, and I stated I was. He then told me he could get it for me.”
“I handed Obama $250 to pay for an eight ball of cocaine. I took a CD case I had in the limo with me and put three lines of cocaine on it. While resting the CD case on Obama’s leg and taking a rolled up dollar bill, I snorted one line, “ Sinclair said.
They then engaged in a “sexual act,” Sinclair wrote.
“Correct your claims, Senator!”
Sinclair said that in fall 2007, while Obama was serving in the U.S. Senate, he contacted AKP, the consulting firm of David Axelrod, Obama’s campaign manager. He wanted to tell them his story and to ask that “Obama correct his claims that he has never sold drugs, and that he has ‘not’ used any drugs ‘since high school.’”
“Eventually both the Obama for America and AKP said that they would see that Obama was informed, and that I would hear back from them,” he wrote.
But they didn’t return his calls, so Sinclair decided to go to the media with his story.
The deaf ears of the media
“I decided it was time to go public. In the four months I gave him, he refused to be honest with America,” Sinclair wrote.
In late 2007, Sinclair says he contacted NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN’s Larry King and Anderson Cooper, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann and Chuck Todd, Fox News’ Shepherd Smith, the New York Times, the New York Post, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, offering his story.
Only the New York Post reporter Jeane MacIntosh responded, speaking to Sinclair several times but never writing a story.
Sinclair posted a three minute Youtube.com video on Jan 1, 2008 with his clams.
According to Sinclair, Chicago Tribune John Crewdson, a Pulitzer Prize winner, contacted him after his Youtube video was posted, pursuing the story and traveling to meet him at his then-home in Duluth, Minnesota.
“Mr. Crewdson and I met in person for some five days during the coldest damn week of the year in Duluth,” Sinclair wrote. “He questioned me about everything from my criminal past, childhood, family, the 1999 Chicago trip, my medical history and more.”
He said he and Crewdson had dinner at the Top of the Harbor restaurant in Duluth’s Radisson hotel.
Sinclair said that a New York Times reporter, Serge Kovaleski, heard about his conversations with Crewdson and urged him not to give the Chicago Tribune his story.
“You don’t want to talk to the Trib, nobody reads them,” Sinclair quoted Kovaleski as having said. “You want to let the New York Times do your story.”
Trolling the DNC
In May 2008, Sinclair traveled to Washington, D.C. to attempt to attend a Democratic National Committee (DNC) “Rules and By-Laws Committee” meeting, where he planned to tell members that “Barack Obama was a liar.”
He claims he was contacted by Susie Tompkins Buell, a major Democrat donor from San Francisco and the founder of the Esprit clothing company “often described as Hillary Clinton’s best friend.”
Buell put Sinclair in touch with a consultant who connected him with a Bloomberg News reporter. The three of them met at the Hamilton Plaza Hotel in D.C., he wrote.
Sinclair’s book, Barack Obama and Larry Sinclair: Cocaine, Sex, Lies and Murder, was self-published on Amazon on Jan. 1, 2010.