It's Over: Silver to Be Replaced as Speaker of New York State Assembly

Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

N.Y. TIMES


Sheldon Silver, who faces federal corruption charges, is being replaced as speaker of the New York State Assembly next week, Democratic lawmakers said on Tuesday, paving the way for them to choose a new leader in an election to be held Feb. 10.

A Rochester-area assemblyman, Joseph D. Morelle, who is the majority leader and a top contender to succeed Mr. Silver, will become interim speaker on Monday, officials said.

Assemblyman Joseph D. Morelle, first elected in 1990, was named interim speaker.
Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times
Mr. Silver, amid a crush of reporters as he slowly left the Capitol later Tuesday evening, said he would not resign his Assembly seat because he had been duly elected by his constituents.

But he added, “I will not hinder a succession process.”

The developments appeared to give Mr. Morelle a running start in a contest that also features several downstate aspirants, and that could hold immense consequences for New York City.

An affable floor leader with an M.C.’s demeanor and a wrestler’s build, Mr. Morelle, 57, who was first elected to the Assembly in 1990, was for nearly a decade the party chairman in Monroe County, a Democratic enclave in a largely conservative part of upstate New York.

Among the Assembly members from the New York City area who may also join the race, Carl E. Heastie, 47, of the Bronx, is the most-talked-about candidate. If successful, he would become the first African-American to hold the position. Mr. Heastie, a onetime budget analyst in the city comptroller’s office who was first elected to the Assembly in 2000, has what could prove valuable experience in the trench warfare of New York politics: He was involved in a raucous takeover of the Bronx Democratic Party in 2008, leading an insurgent faction that overthrew the borough leader, Assemblyman José Rivera.

Assemblyman Carl E. Heastie of the Bronx is also a possible successor to Mr. Silver.CreditMike Groll/Associated Press

There were intimations of maneuvering by officials including Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, though both said they were not getting involved.

The Ides of January: Assembly Dems Call on Silver to Step Down as Speaker.His Plan Considered Unworkable.

Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

NY TIMES

Moving to exile one of New York’s most powerful and long-serving leaders, Democrats in the State Assembly agreed late on Monday to ask Sheldon Silver to step down as speaker in the wake of his arrest last week on federal corruption charges.

The Democrats reached the decision in a closed-door meeting that stretched for hours, rebuffing a bid by Mr. Silver to keep his post by relinquishing some of his responsibilities while he defended himself against the charges.

“He should understand that he’s lost the confidence of a majority of our conference,” Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh, a Manhattan Democrat, said after the meeting.

On Monday night, the Assembly majority leader, Joseph D. Morelle, a Democrat from the Rochester area, went into Mr. Silver’s office to tell the speaker of his colleagues’ feelings, other Democratic members of the Assembly said. They gave him until Tuesday to make a decision on whether to step down, or risk being ousted from his position.

Leaving the Capitol just before midnight, Mr. Silver told reporters that he had not told anyone that he was resigning, and that he would meet with his Democratic colleagues on Tuesday.

The move by the Democratic conference became clear after a five-hour private meeting in the Capitol, which ended around 10 p.m.

The meeting he left behind was somber, members said, and their eventual decision, after several hours, was that Mr. Silver’s ability to run the chamber had been irreparably compromised by his arrest.

Several members said Mr. Silver was being presented with the Democratic conference’s opinion that he could no longer serve as speaker,... One conceivable possibility, members said, was that Mr. Silver could return to his position as speaker if he were acquitted of the federal charges.

Earlier in the day, pressure had been building on Mr. Silver on a number of fronts. More than 20 Assembly Democrats called for Mr. Silver to step down or appeared poised to do so, and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, also a Democrat, said it would be a “good thing” if a replacement for Mr. Silver were to take charge in the Assembly.

(Credit: Charles Eckert)

Mr. Cuomo did not explicitly call for Mr. Silver to leave his post, but raised concerns about how his arrest could affect state government....In a setback to Mr. Silver, Mr. Cuomo criticized a plan that the speaker had formulated on Sunday in which he would retain his title, but temporarily relinquish some important duties to five other members, including the responsibility to negotiate the state budget, which must be finished by April 1. “Management by committee I’ve never been a fan of, and I’ve never seen it work well,” Mr. Cuomo said, adding, “From my own selfish point of view, I don’t understand how you negotiate with a committee.”

Many Assembly Democrats had similar concerns with the plan. Some voiced doubts that the power-sharing agreement would be efficient or effective in budget negotiations. Others said the structure itself was simply a way for Mr. Silver to retain power while appearing to step back from his duties.

The atmosphere at the Capitol was tense as lawmakers huddled to discuss the leadership crisis and considered what only days ago seemed unthinkable, the prospect of Mr. Silver’s ouster.

In a bid to save his job, Mr. Silver planned to present his power-sharing proposal to his fellow Democrats when they met behind closed doors. The meeting was delayed, and as the day went on, Mr. Silver’s proposal, and with it his speakership, appeared on the verge of collapse.

Sheldon Silver to Temporarily Relinquish Speaker Duties

Yana Paskova/Getty Images

NY TIMES

 Sheldon Silver, the longtime speaker of the New York State Assembly, agreed on Sunday to relinquish his duties on a temporary basis as he fights federal corruption charges.

His decision came amid mounting pressure from his fellow Democrats in the Assembly, who worried that the criminal charges would impair his ability to carry out the duties of one of the most powerful positions in the state’s government.

Under the plan, which the Assembly’s Democratic caucus is to consider in a closed-door meeting on Monday afternoon, Mr. Silver would “not specifically step down, but step back,” according to a person briefed on the situation, who insisted on anonymity because the plan had not yet been presented to the caucus.

Immediately after Mr. Silver’s arrest on Thursday, Democrats in the Assembly rallied behind him. Mr. Silver, who has proved adept over the years at withstanding ethical and legal scrutiny, predicted he would be vindicated.

But in the past few days, as legislators conferred and newspaper editorials called for Mr. Silver’s resignation, some members of his caucus grew convinced that he could not continue to be effective in his post with the cloud of scandal hanging over him.

Assembly Democrats faced some urgency because negotiations on the state budget, which must be finished by April 1, are getting underway.

Under the tentative plan developed on Sunday, the Assembly majority leader, Joseph D. Morelle of the Rochester area, and the chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, Herman D. Farrell Jr., Democrat of Manhattan, would assume responsibility for budget negotiations.

Three other senior Democratic members — Carl E. Heastie of the Bronx, Catherine T. Nolan of Queens and Joseph R. Lentol of Brooklyn — will round out the leadership team.

Sheldon Silver, Dem New York Assembly Speaker, Took Millions in Graft, U.S. Says

heldon Silver, a Democrat from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, has been the speaker of the State Assembly for more than two decades. CreditNathaniel 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.”

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 Publish DateJanuary 22, 2015. Photo by Michael Appleton for The New York Times.

NY 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.

Recently, Mr. Silver has emerged as an important adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio.CreditNathaniel 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.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, shown on March 20, announced the demise of his ethics commission on Saturday with little fanfare. CreditMike Groll/Associated Press

N.Y. TIMES

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.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN NEW YORK; MORE SCANDALS,

N.Y. TIMES

One woman who worked for Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez [above]said she contracted pink eye after he pressured her to put drops in his eyes. Another woman described being repeatedly groped by him until he forced his hands up her legs. Several employees said Mr. Lopez told them to wear low-cut blouses and high heels, or stay in hotel rooms with him overnight. Two women were so repulsed that they began secretly taping their interactions with Mr. Lopez.

State ethics regulators on Wednesday released a report that offered a scathing assessment not just of Mr. Lopez but also of the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, a Manhattan Democrat, and his staff. The report said the Assembly’s leadership shielded Mr. Lopez, a Brooklyn Democrat who was one of the chamber’s most powerful members, from public scrutiny amid allegations against him by his staff of sexual harassment.

The report accuses Mr. Silver’s senior staff members of ignoring the Assembly’s own internal rules by failing to investigate and refer the initial harassment allegations to an Assembly ethics committee. Mr. Silver’s press office also appears to have made statements that were not candid, according to internal exchanges detailed in the report. And the staff went to lengths to keep the matter secret. “Money flow and our desire to keep this away from media scrutiny complicates the resolution of this matter,” Bill Collins, a senior Assembly lawyer, wrote in an e-mail.

[NY Times: Update: For Mr. Silver’s critics, the latest scandal reinforced a sense that ethics enforcement in Albany is a rigged game. The state ethics commission’s investigation into the alleged harassment by Mr. Lopez, who resigned on Monday, did not consider whether Mr. Silver or his staff violated state law in its handling of the complaints. Even with that limitation, one of Mr. Silver’s appointees to a separate legislative ethics body made a secret attempt to alter the state commission’s report, seeking unsuccessfully to excise references to Mr. Silver and his staff. ]
 

N.Y. TIMES



Accusations of wrongdoing have swirled around State Senator John L. Sampson [above] for years. But when he became concerned that his actions were under scrutiny by federal prosecutors, he allegedly took a step that stands out even in the growing annals of wrongdoing by New York lawmakers.

Mr. Sampson, prosecutors said, approached a friend in the office of the United States attorney for the Eastern District for help.

Turn over the names of all of the cooperating witnesses who could make a case against him, Mr. Sampson asked, so he could arrange to “take them out.”

That is among the crimes Mr. Sampson, a powerful Democrat, is accused of as he tried to thwart an intensifying federal inquiry centered on accusations that he had stolen more than $400,000 from the sale of foreclosed homes.

Prosecutors said Mr. Sampson used the money, which he had access to as a court-appointed referee for foreclosure proceedings in Brooklyn, to help finance his unsuccessful campaign for the Brooklyn district attorney’s office in 2005. The next year, prosecutors said, he persuaded a prominent real estate developer to give him nearly $200,000 help cover up the thefts. When the developer was arrested on unrelated charges, Mr. Sampson feared his crimes would be uncovered and turned to his friend in the United States attorney’s office.

The developer was not named in court documents, but law enforcement officials with knowledge of the matter identified him as Edul Ahmad, who pleaded guilty to mortgage fraud in 2012. The employee in the United States attorney’s office also was not named. Prosecutors said the person, identified by a law enforcement official as Sam Noel, had been fired after being found with a list of the witnesses’ names that Mr. Sampson had requested

The charges come after a procession of New York legislators, including several who have held top positions, have been charged with a variety of crimes. Speculation that Mr. Sampson would be next increased after the revelation last week that another legislator facing criminal charges, Shirley L. Huntley, a former Democratic state senator, had worked with prosecutors to secretly record conversations with Mr. Sampson. In one conversation, he helped arrange a meeting between Ms. Huntley and a businessman who intended to offer bribes in exchange for help securing lucrative contracts, according to court documents and law enforcement officials.

The United States attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Loretta E. Lynch, called the case “one of the most extreme examples of political hubris we have yet seen.”

Mr. Sampson, 47, surrendered to federal agents on Monday morning and was arraigned in Federal District Court in Brooklyn in the afternoon.

N.Y. TIMES

The Many Faces of State Political Scandals

Over the past seven years, 32 state officeholders have been convicted of a crime, censured or otherwise accused of wrongdoing, according to the New York Public Interest Research Group. The following [in the link above] are some of them: