Nobody Could Have Anticipated Corruption in New York State Government
A jury found Assemblyman Sheldon Silver — for years one of the most well-known and powerful legislators in Albany — guilty on all seven counts Monday afternoon. The 71-year-old Lower East Side Democrat was hit with federal corruption charges — including bribery, extortion, and money laundering — earlier this year after U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara accused him of obtaining “approximately $4 million in payments characterized as attorney referral fees solely through the corrupt use of his official position [as Speaker].”
Since state legislators work part-time in New York, Silver, who resigned from his position as Assembly Speaker after being arrested, had a side gig at the law firm Weitz & Luxenberg, where he was accused of accepting bribes involving a cancer researcher at Columbia. Prosecutors accused him of receiving money from another law firm, Goldberg & Iryami, after getting two major developers to use its services. During closing arguments, one prosecutor said that “Sheldon Silver was a master of every form of deception: lying, keeping secrets, even splitting hairs.”