He’s the shame of New York.
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is the Joe Paterno of the state capital. For decades, he has presided over the Albany cesspool, where uninvited touching, underage binge drinking — and alleged rape — are pastimes encouraged by bored legislators and cronies. Silver saw something.
He didn’t say something.
Instead, he has coddled and enabled filthy sex fiends who infest the state Legislature. He did it with a wink, a smile and hefty checks footed by you, the taxpayer — all in the name of protecting the dysfunctional brand he has spent his working life creating.
He’s got to go.
Even Paterno, the late Penn State coach who hid the serial sex crimes of assistant coach Jerry Sandusky, was eventually shown the door. It’s time to boot Sheldon Silver out of Albany.
Do it before the cesspool overflows.
Shelly Silver, as he’s affectionately known, is a rich lawyer who has served as a Manhattan assemblyman since the administration of President Gerald Ford. He rose to speaker — second in power only to the governor — during the Clinton years.
In that time, the state capital has devolved from a revered institution to a mosh pit. Lawmakers are paid, in part, for the indignity of spending three or four days a week in moldly Albany with the company of painfully young junior staffers. I saw it myself as a starving intern in the ’80s, when I was fired for rebuffing the advances of a married assemblyman. Trouble was, back then, the term “sexual harassment’’ had yet to hit the lexicon.
Things haven’t changed a bit since the days of short skirts and big hair.
Each year, fillies are scooped up under the well-known “Bear Mountain Compact.’’ It means that hookups with young things that occur north of the Bear Mountain Bridge are kept quiet. What happens in the sticks stays in the sticks.
Disgraced alleged groper Vito Lopez, the 71-year-old Brooklyn assemblyman, is just the latest to be accused of touching and harassing girls — four of whom have stepped up to accuse him — young enough to be his grandchildren.
In a now-infamous back-room deal in June, Silver paid two accusers a combined $103,000 in taxpayer money to make them shut up. Depressingly, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli approved the hush money.
Silver, for his part, says — too late — that he was “wrong’’ to protect Lopez.
I’ve now written about illicit sex and the state capital for 20 (!) years. And I was naïve enough to think Silver might have cleaned things up. But New York is suffering from a wicked case of déjà vu.
In 2001, Elizabeth Crothers accused Silver aide Michael Boxley of rape. But instead of complaining to cops, she was persuaded to go to the Assembly. There, she was treated with disdain and doubt by Silver. She finally accepted cash to make the claims go away — a decision Crothers regrets to this day.
Perhaps she could have saved another woman if she had stuck to her guns.
Two years after L’affair Boxley, a 22-year-old intern accused him of drugging and raping her. (Boxley was allowed to plead to a lesser charge of sexual misconduct, and spent not a day in jail.)
“Not going along with Silver has its consequences,’’ the victim, who has never gone public, told me in 2008.
“There is a clear message in Albany: ‘Keep your mouth shut.’ ”
Silver finally said he was “wrong’’ about Boxley. Where have I heard that said? Oh, right.
Sexual slights weren’t invented by Boxley. They won’t end with Lopez. Back in 1992, Charmian Neary testified about her victimization in a groundbreaking hearing of the Governor’s Task Force on Sexual Harassment. Nothing happened.
In 2004, a 19-year-old intern accused then-Assemblyman Adam Clayton Powell IV, 42, of plying her with Scotch and sexually assaulting her at a Howard Johnson motel. The allegations dissolved after the woman said any sex was consensual.
Yet the stink of spending motel time with a young intern, and allegedly supplying alcohol to one under the legal drinking age, taints the capital to this day.
Silver will cover up for his boys, provided they’re supposedly woman-loving Democrats.
Get lost, Shelly.
Take a hike, a’jad!
For the second straight year, Midtown’s Warwick hotel is set to provide aid, comfort and 1,000 thread-count sheets to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad when the Iranian tyrant, fierce anti-Semite and America-hater visits the UN this month. The group United Against Nuclear Iran has demanded that the hotel kick the moron to the curb, or face a boycott.
Ahmadinejad can talk ’til he’s blue to the UN’s terror enablers. But let him sleep on the floor of his UN mission, not in the lap of luxury, guarded around-the-clock by police and Secret Service at taxpayer expense. A’jad has to know he’s not welcome here. Ever.
It’s just ‘unfortunate’ ?
“It’s always unfortunate when you have a million-plus people here peacefully enjoying the parade and you have a small number who will do a violent act and that becomes the story’’ — State Sen. Eric Adams tees off in The Times after two people were stabbed to death and three shot following Brooklyn’s West Indian Day Parade
Two dead. Three hurt. That’s not unfortunate. It’s unacceptable.
NY Times muffin’ a Mitt story
In its bid to terminate the presidential aspirations of Mitt Romney, The New York Times has gone mental. In a loopy op-ed piece last weekend, the Times squandered precious real estate on Columbia writing prof Marie Myung-Ok Lee. Her argument: Mitt’s rumored habit of eating only the tops of muffins makes him unfit to lead.
A Mitt biographer once wrote that the former Massachusetts gov eschews muffin bottoms because he presumes butter trickles down. This may not constitute sound baking theory. But Lee snobbishly assumes that her late Korean-immigrant father, a Republican whom she slams for having consumed garbage during the Korean War and cat food in times of plenty, would be mortified by the waste.
The piece is second in weirdness to Times writer Cathy Horyn’s take-down of vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s baggy suits. Ryan, she wrote, is “a nerd suddenly out of his loafers and into the sex dreams of Republicans.’’
Of course, rail-thin Ryan likely doesn’t touch baked goods. The Times has to cook up something, I guess.
NYUers devour banned-wiches
Like chickens to a feeding trough, NYU students pounced on the city’s lone Chick-fil-A outlet as it opened this week. Undergrads ignored calls for a boycott from groups outraged by company President Dan Cathy’s opposition to gay marriage. They turned a deaf ear to Council Speaker Chris Quinn’s call to pluck the joint from the city.
Cathy’s right to free speech evidently trumped political correctness. Or maybe a breast slathered in Polynesian sauce was too yummy to pass up.