Posted on 11/30/2015 1:37:07 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Sheldon Silver has gone from one of Albany's famed "three men in a room" to one of 198,000 people in federal lockup.
A jury found the 71-year-old former Assembly Speaker guilty on all seven corruption charges Tuesday, sending a powerful message to politicians in New York's capital.
Judge Valerie Caproni will set the date of his surrender. He faces a maximum of 130 years behind bars, though he is expected to face a sentence more in the range of 20 years.
The verdict is a major victory for Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who slammed Albany as "a cauldron of corruption" when he announced charges against the Lower East Side democrat in January.
"Today, Sheldon Silver got justice, and at long last, so did the people of New York," the U.S. Attorney's office said in a statement after the verdict was revealed.
Over three weeks the government presented ample evidence of Silver's efforts to conceal twin corruption schemes that earned him $4 million.
Silver, the former state Assembly Speaker, was accused of two separate schemes. In the first, prosecutors said he secretly directed $500,000 in state money to Columbia University Dr. Robert Taub's mesothelioma research. The decorated doctor testified that he gave Silver leads on his patients who were suffering from the deadly effects of asbestos exposure. The Lower East Side democrat then directed those patients to the firm Weitz & Luxenberg, which paid Silver $3 million in referral fees.
(Excerpt) Read more at nydailynews.com ...
By the time the appeals process runs its course, Silver will be well into his 80’s. This man will never see a day of prison.
i HATED Silver, but who did he cross to be taken down like this?
i dont believe for a second that this was the desire for justice.
They didn’t come more powerful in NY, and I just dont see it.
Yep....I remember when I lived in Northeastern PA just how rotten things were and are still...many many stories....
Maybe, Silver is a member of “The rent is too d@nm High” party!???
Well, 14 years from now F Chuck Todd can claim
“No NY State democrat was guilty on seven counts of corruption in 2015, we can find no reporting”
Aw shucks. I was really hoping to see Silver losing an election, getting kicked out of office by the voters. But I guess this will have to do MUCH NICER!
There was no way Silver could ever lose his election. He brings in too much money to his constituents.
I always thought that a video of him murdering somebody in cold blood would come out and his die hard supporters would still claim that it was all manipulated.
This was the only way to get him out of office. I’m not very confident of his successor though.
RE: i dont believe for a second that this was the desire for justice.
They had the misfortune of encountering the dogged Indian-American prosecutor — Preet Bharara. This man’s main ambition is to be known and to go down in NY history as the man who took down the big guys — both in finance and in politics.
You can rest assured that he has his eye on the big one — Andrew Cuomo.
Nice of the urinalist who wrote the piece to put his political party affiliation right in the title, eh? Partisan Media Shills alert.
sucks to be him
would be sweet
bob_esb, what SaF said.
3 months house arrest?
Excellent news. Good job!
Who did he piss off?
US Attorneys are prosecutors for the US Department of Justice and Attorney General Loretta Lynch.
I’m good with all that
“I was surprised, concerned, upset,” lobbyist Richard Runes said...Liar. He IS a lobbyist.
Maybe for the federal govt as well. To adjust for the Senate, no Senator or Congressman more that 12 years service, total. POTUS stays at eight, total. Limits on relatives apply as well.For every Henry Clay there are a hundred Sheldon Silvers. Time to accept that.
For years while he was in office it was already known (if not in the courts at least on on the streets) that silver was notoriously corrupt. Yet his constituents kept on re-electing him over and over again. So I never want to hear them complain about corruption in politics. Clearly they dont care and arent in a position to talk.
There were so many corrupt Republicans being indicted that they had to even it out a little bit. A year ago Jonah Goldberg did an op-ed about the double standard in indicting corrupt politicians in Albany and shortly thereafter the Dems started going down.
Also, Shelly is hated by many in his own party because he challenged the petition signatures of people in his own party who were running against him in the primaries. He did what Obama did in Chicago—just pushed out any opposition, no matter how far-fetched their chance of winning.
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