So in the end, the longest-tenured of Albany’s three men in a room turned out to be just another thief.
Not a petty thief, not by any means. Sheldon Silver of the Lower East Side had stuffed his jeans with at least $4 million — and that makes him distinctive by Albany standards: The capital city’s gutter-grubbers traditionally settle for chump change.
But Monday afternoon, in federal district court, Shelly — the once-affable, supremely self-confident speaker of the New York Assembly — became simply Silver, a grim-faced felon soon to be delivered to the custody of the US Bureau of Prisons.
Pending appeal, that is.
Hurray and hallelujah. It was a long time coming.
Monday’s guilty-on-all-counts verdict was swiftly arrived at, and surely chilled the air in the nearby courtroom where US Attorney Preet Bharara has put another erstwhile Albany power broker, former Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, on trial for his future.
Not to rush things, but Bharara’s brief against Skelos — a sad man who allegedly indulged an arrogant, greedy, stupid son by strong-arming businessmen — isn’t nearly as nuanced as was the case against Silver.
That is, jury deliberations in the Skelos case aren’t likely to last longer than the minute and 45 seconds that it took to convict Silver.
And then there will be one man left standing — Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has been squarely in Bharara’s sights for months now. Not-guilty verdicts in Silver’s case would have let the steam out of whatever it is that the prosecutor is planning for Cuomo, and that didn’t happen.
Which has to weigh heavily on the governor. Though no one is suggesting that he ever put an untoward penny in his own pocket, he’s beefed up his campaign accounts with millions from people who figured prominently in both the Silver and Skelos cases.
If there’s something there, no matter how minuscule, Bharara will stretch it to its limits. If nothing else, he’s the hardest-charging New York prosecutor since Maurice Nadjari.
No, wait, make that former US Attorney Rudy Giuliani — not to project career ambitions or anything.
But that’s for the future.
Monday, Silver’s days in court came to an end, unhappily for him but — just maybe — hopefully for the people of New York state.
Again, the appeals process is just beginning, so justice is on hiatus for a bit. But if Monday’s verdicts don’t make a positive difference in how future business is conducted in Albany, then a lot of time, money and effort will have been wasted.
Alas, that may be the case. Certainly, the successors to Silver and Skelos — Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie and Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan — have been distressingly accommodating to a return to the legislative “member-item” pork that has been at the core of most of the lower-level corruption cases Bharara has prosecuted to date.
And Cuomo has been more than willing to play along — indeed, to encourage the old ways. Chalk that up to lessons not learned.
A fully sanitized political process, of course, is not possible — nor is it even desirable. Governments based on civic virtue have scarcely ever existed — because they simply don’t work. (Sorry about that, League of Women Voters.)
But at some point over the past few decades, legislative-lobby horse trading in Albany crossed a line.
Deals that once were more or less connected to the people’s business came solely to advance the personal and political interests of the deal-makers themselves.
Sheldon Silver, who brought intelligence and a gift for conciliation to the table, all of a sudden was working for . . . Sheldon Silver.
Well, that much is over.
Who’s next to fall? And who after that?
Pregnant questions.