ALBANY — There’s a little known anecdote about Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver that reveals a lot about why the state’s second-most powerful Democrat is facing five federal corruption charges that could put him in prison for the rest of his life.
For the better part of a decade during the 2000s, Silver told an associate, he would routinely send a $100 check each year to the campaign committee of former Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau.
“I knew he didn’t need the money,’’ Silver told the associate with a nervous laugh.
“But I wanted to see if he would cash my check. If he did, then I knew I wasn’t in any trouble because if he was investigating me, he wouldn’t have taken the money.’’
Unfortunately for the 70-year-old Silver, Southern District US Attorney Preet Bharara, unlike Morgenthau, doesn’t have a campaign committee that can accept — or reject — a politician’s cash.
Silver has been the most inscrutable power broker at the state Capitol for two decades, with just two or three of his most intimate associates, who often went back to his childhood on the Lower East Side, knowing really well what he was all about.
High-level officials used to believe that Silver was something of a politician’s politician, seeking from the game of politics as much as he could possibly get for his district and/or his fellow Democrats in the Assembly.
But in recent years, as Silver resisted growing calls for tighter ethics laws in the wake of a series of earlier pubic-corruption indictments, the suspicion grew that Silver’s hold on power was actually about extracting as many dollars as he could for himself from the legal business he was practicing on the side.
The reason, said a senior state official who has known Silver for years, is “he’s a grubber.’’
Rumors have circulated that bags of cash were being delivered to the speaker’s office on behalf of various special-interest pleaders, although that’s never been proven. But the existence of the rumors indicates the climate around Silver.
Silver didn’t knock down the suspicion that he was about making as much money as possible a few years ago when he began defending his bizarre practice of flying on the state’s dime from New York City to Albany via Washington, DC, or some other distant spot so he could pick up a few extra frequent flier miles for his personal use.
The senior official who has spoken admiringly of his political skills said this about the root cause of Silver’s problem:
“In the end, Shelly is about Shelly. He’s about grubbing for all he could get from state government, and his position as speaker has been a means to that end.”
That’s a description that could apply to many other of New York’s top politicians, a sure-to-be-unsettling reality since Bharara urged the public yesterday to “stay tuned’’ for more criminal charges to come.