There Are Three Men That Truly Run New York - One Is In FBI Custody
To understand how massive this is, you have to understand how Albany, the capital of New York, works. It's pretty simple. The Governor, the Speaker of the Assembly, and the head of the state Senate run the show.
Silver is the speaker of the New York Assembly, the lower house of the state. The district he represents includes New York City's Lower East Side, East Village and Brooklyn - parts of the city that have exchanged grit for hip during Silver's tenure in office.
And in the last twenty years, the other two men have changed. Governors have come and gone. The leadership in the New York State Senate has been a complicated ordeal, with Democrats and Republicans rotating the post after reaching a post-slugfest share agreement.
Silver, however, has remained in the room, until now completely un-phased by the scandals around him. These charges will throw Albany into disarray. There is no succession plan in Silver's tightly controlled Assembly. He is number one, two and three.
It's also important that a lot of critical measures for New York City - like anything having to do with the Metro Transit Authority - must be approved by the state legislature.
REUTERS/Adrees LatifNew York, New York
The Federal case against Silver has to do with payments he took from a law firm that specializes in lowering taxes for real estate firms. No one involved is talking about it.
What we do know is that Preet Bharara, the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, is the one who filed charges. This should not be a comfort to Silver. Bharara is feared on Wall Street for bringing insider trading cases. He has stumbled recently, but for the most part he shoots to kill.
The US Attorney's office started looking into Silver after Governor Cuomo shut down a powerful anticorruption commission - the Moreland Commission - last year. Cuomo had created the body in 2013 to root out the dirtiest elements of Albany's notoriously dirty mess.
And for good reason. Albany politicians who have been accused of a litany of transgressions continue to work in the Capitol session after session. This is the kind of stuff that gives notoriously corrupt Chicago a run for its money.
REUTERS/Mike Segar New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo (L) speaks to New York Assembly leader Sheldon Silver before Cuomo delivered his fourth State of the State address from the New York State Capitol in Albany, New York, January 8, 2014.
State Senator Malcolm Smith is still being investigated for trying to rig the election for NYC Mayor back in 2013 (officials are working on translating some wire taps that happen to be in Yiddish).
Former New York State Senator Pedro Espada is spending 5 years in jail for embezzlement. Former Assemblyman and New York State Comptroller Alan Hevesi got out of jail in 2012 after serving 20 months for his involvement in a pay to play scandal (he made friends with rapper Ja Rule and former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski while he was in there).
Not all of these scandals have been about money. Former City Councilman Hiram Monserate had only been elected to the State Senate for a month before he was accused of slashing his girlfriend across the face with broken glass.
Bharara will hold a press conference about the case at 1:00 pm.