FORMER NY STATE ASSEMBLYMAN SHELDON SILVER GETS OUT OF JAIL!

By Chris Flash

On January 24, 2022, publicly-disgraced and twice-convicted former New York State Assemblyman Sheldon Silver died while serving a 6½ year jail sentence in a federal hospital. He was 77 years old.

        As reported in several issues of The SHADOW, after decades of corruption while in office, in 2015, Silver was finally charged by feds and tried for bribery and extortion involving almost five million dollars in “referral fees,” in reality kickbacks, paid to Silver by two separate law firms to which Silver steered clients in his capacity as Speaker of the New York State Assembly.

        Despite being convicted a second time in 2018 after a successful appeal of his first conviction in 2016, based on a judge allegedly failing to properly inform the jury, through late 2019, “Shelly” Silver, who lived in the Hillman Housing co-ops on Grand Street, could be seen casually strolling on the Lower East Side while his second conviction was being appealed, still collecting a $6,600 tax-payer-funded monthly pension.

        By the following year, Silver’s legal maneuvers to avoid serving jail time finally failed. On July 20, 2020, Silver was ordered to appear before federal Judge Valerie Caproni in order to hear his sentence in person.

        Though he was originally sentenced in May 2016 to 12 years in jail and ordered to pay more than $7 million in restitution, afer his first successful appeal, Silver got his sentence reduced in July 2018 to seven years. On July 20, 2020, after removing six months from the seven year sentence she originally imposed on him in 2018, Caproni also ordered Silver to pay only $1 million in fines. “This was corruption pure and simple,” Caproni said, adding that she hoped that the sentence was “long enough to send a message to Albany.”

        In citing only his corruption while in office, Caproni failed to note Silver’s more serious offenses committed against and irreversible damage caused to the people of the Lower East Side by his servicing of real estate vultures.

        Aside from his corruption conviction, Silver’s legacy is the loss of hundreds of thousands of rent-stabilized New York City apartments by his removal of rent protections, hyper-gentrification of the Lower East Side fueled and encouraged by his providing zoning variances and real estate tax abatements for real estate developers that resulted in construction of large “market rate” apartment buildings unaffected by rent regulations and his preventing construction of affordable housing for low-income residents on city-owned vacant land, including his sabotaging development of affordable housing in the former Seward Park Urban Renewal Area [SPURA], known today as “Essex Crossing,” on Delancey Street, which has become over-developed with out-of-scale market rate    apartment buildings.

        At his 2018 sentencing, in a hand-written letter to Judge Caproni, Silver said “I do not want to die in prison.” Silver reported to jail on August 26, 2020, to finally begin his 6½ year sentence. He died after serving only 17 months. Though he received what amounted to the proverbial “slap on the wrist,” in the end, Slimey Sheldon Silver weaseled his way out of serving his jail sentence after all.

[For the full story on Sheldon Silver, see SHADOWs #57 + #59 + #62 -- Ed.]