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| heldon Silver, a Democrat from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, has been the speaker of the State Assembly for more than two decades. Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times |
NY TIMES
Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the New York Assembly, exploited his position as one of the most powerful politicians in the state to obtain millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks, federal authorities said on Thursday as they announced his arrest on a sweeping series of corruption charges. [See below for graphic]
For years, Mr. Silver has earned a lucrative income outside government, asserting that he was a simple personal injury lawyer who represented ordinary people. But federal prosecutors said his purported law practice was a fiction, one he created to mask about $4 million in payoffs that he carefully and stealthily engineered for over a decade.
Mr. Silver, a Democrat from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, was accused of steering real estate developers to a law firm that paid him kickbacks. He was also accused of funneling state grants to a doctor who referred asbestos claims to a second law firm that employed Mr. Silver and paid him fees for referring clients.
“For many years, New Yorkers have asked the question: How could Speaker Silver, one of the most powerful men in all of New York, earn millions of dollars in outside income without deeply compromising his ability to honestly serve his constituents?” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, asked at a news conference with F.B.I. officials. “Today, we provide the answer: He didn’t.”
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The United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, Preet Bharara, announces the charges against Sheldon Silver, the longtime Assembly speaker, who was arrested Thursday morning.
Video by AP on January 22, 2015. Photo by Michael Appleton for The New York Times. |
His power unbending, his whims often unexplained, Sheldon Silver, in his two decades as speaker of the State Assembly, became a seemingly indestructible presence at the nucleus of the New York political world, a steady advocate for liberal causes and a master tactician in Albany’s closed and entrenched way of governance.
But Mr. Silver’s arrest on Thursday on corruption charges has thrown into question that arrangement, in which the governor and the leaders of the two chambers of the Legislature privately decide the most crucial policies of the state. It is a potentially seismic shift in power whose reverberations may be felt throughout the state, from the speaker’s home district on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to the grounds of the State Capitol.
Until now, Albany lawmakers accustomed to what prosecutors called a “show-me-the-money culture” have taken comfort in knowing that their most powerful figure was unassailable — untouched despite years of inquiries, suspicions and rumors of impropriety.
The events this week have shaken that sense of security and raised the possibility that Mr. Silver, the quintessential capital insider, could reveal his own colleagues’ misdeeds to federal prosecutors in exchange for leniency.
For the state’s orbit of lobbyists, advocates, elected officials and industry executives with a stake in the productivity and product of the Legislature, Mr. Silver’s potential diminution, if not exit, carries enormous consequences.
“It’s chaos,” said Richard L. Brodsky, a former Democratic assemblyman from Westchester County.
Labor unions and big industries like real estate depended on Mr. Silver to defend their interests in back-room negotiations, where he, governors and Senate leaders determined the fate of new legislation each year.
“Any interest group whose political strategy depends on the strength of the Assembly, they have to be concerned,” said Blair Horner, the legislative director for the New York Public Interest Research Group.
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| Recently, Mr. Silver has emerged as an important adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio.Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times |
Mr. Silver has long been the key representative of New York City in a legislative body that could be notoriously unfriendly to the city’s interests. Recently, he also emerged as an important adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio, who may now be forced to navigate Albany’s machinery without a like-minded friend in the negotiating room.
Questions were already being raised on Thursday about Mr. de Blasio’s legislative agenda, which includes immigration reform efforts backed by Mr. Silver. Mr. de Blasio spearheaded a campaign last year to unseat the Republican majority in the State Senate; that effort fell short, and Dean G. Skelos, a Long Island Republican who is the Senate majority leader, has signaled that he is disinclined to aid the mayor.
Mr. de Blasio, who had a win-a-few, lose-a-few legislative session last year, is also wary of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s efforts to expand charter schools and weaken teachers’ unions. Mr. Silver was a bulwark against those efforts, and a waning of his influence could hurt the mayor’s leverage.
Mr. Cuomo, for his part, may also need to recalculate rapidly. Before Mr. Silver was taken into custody, Mr. Cuomo, a fellow Democrat, unreeled an ambitious social justice agenda in his State of the State address, a headline-grabbing turn for a governor who prides himself on centrism.
It was a signal moment for Mr. Cuomo, who was embracing the start of a new four-year term and eager to put the troubles of last year, including a bumpy re-election campaign and a string of ethics concerns, behind him.
Instead, the speech was mostly forgotten by Thursday morning, with Mr. Silver’s arrest plunging the governor back into the ethical morass from which he had hoped to escape.
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| Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, shown on March 20, announced the demise of his ethics commission on Saturday with little fanfare. Mike Groll/Associated Press |
Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the New York Assembly and one of the most powerful politicians in Albany, did all he could to derail and undermine ananticorruption panel established by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
With his arrest on federal corruption charges on Thursday, there may now be an answer to the question of why.
Investigators from the panel, which was known as the Moreland Commission, were seeking records about Mr. Silver’s sources of income outside of his work as a lawmaker — the same sources of income that would form the basis of the case brought against Mr. Silver by the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York.
Even before Mr. Cuomo abruptly shut down the commission in March — and before it became clear that the governor himself had interfered with its investigations — Mr. Silver, who like the governor is a Democrat, attacked the work it was doing.
“The commission, we believe, has exceeded its mandate and has been engaged in a fishing expedition to intimidate legislators,” Mr. Silver told reporters in February.
N.Y. TIMES
Al Smith, the storied governor of New York in the 1920s who laid the groundwork for the New Deal, has been credited with making a famously cynical remark as he walked through a law school library. He spotted a student, bent over books and reading.
“There,” Smith supposedly said, “is a young man studying how to take a bribe and call it a fee.”
On Thursday, we learned that federal prosecutors believe that Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the New York State Assembly, collected $4 million in payments from two law firms for essentially no legal work.
The prosecutors have said that these were nothing but bribes, dolled up with feathers, wigs and lipstick to make them look like legal fees.
Prosecutors said a doctor at a university hospital in New York City began sending lung patients to a law firm associated with Mr. Silver for possible civil suits over asbestos exposure. Two months later, Mr. Silver invited the doctor to apply for state grants that he controlled. The doctor got $500,000 for a research center on lung disease. And Mr. Silver — who did no legal work whatsoever on the asbestos cases — got referral fees for the suits amounting to more than $3 million, according to a criminal complaint made public on Thursday.
In his official communications, Mr. Silver said the grant money would support research on Sept. 11 illnesses. He told the doctor not to tell a mutual friend that he was sending cases to Mr. Silver’s firm, the complaint said.
For years, Mr. Silver proclaimed himself a champion of disclosure. Somehow, the Assembly never got around to passing rules that would have revealed the relationships now laid bare. Asked by an investigating commission for “a description of the services you provide or have provided in exchange for compensation,” Mr. Silver did not answer the straightforward question. Instead, the Assembly hired a law firm to fight the subpoena. The panel, known as the Moreland Commission, “was engaged in a fishing expedition to intimidate legislators,” Mr. Silver said. It was disbanded by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
So the commission never found out that Mr. Silver had allegedly been secretly paid a total of $685,513.63 in “referral fees” by a two-person law firm that specialized in an arcane area of law. Nor did the commission learn, as the prosecutors say they did, that Mr. Silver got the referral money after he sent two big real estate developers to the little law firm — developers who needed legislative favors from Mr. Silver.
For years, there was mystery about what exactly Mr. Silver did to earn so much from his main source of income, the law firm Weitz & Luxenberg, which handled the asbestos cases. A grand jury subpoena asked.
“That request resulted in production of records related to a single property dispute in which Silver, along with other Weitz & Luxenberg attorneys, represented an individual,” according to the complaint.
