Michael Goodwin

Michael Goodwin

US News

Sheldon Silver’s downfall exposes corruption in Albany

Except for the shouting, it’s all over for Sheldon Silver. But just as his arrest on charges of taking $4 million in kickbacks and bribes revealed his alleged scams, the aftermath of his fall is revealing the depths of Albany’s corrupt and cowardly political class.

Since prosecutors filed the charges against Silver, published reports are detailing how he manipulated the courts, the Legislature, not-for-profits and even an innocuous-sounding resolution to enrich himself. The portrait that emerges is that of a boss of a Mafia-like gang.

Think of it as La Cosa Nostra’s government family.

A capital veteran describes a telling dimension of Silver’s destructive stranglehold on government. The story begins in 2003, when Silver’s chief counsel was charged with rape and marched out of Assembly offices in handcuffs. Although District Attorney Paul Clyne was a fellow Democrat, Silver was furious at being embarrassed.

“He was fuming,” the Albany vet says, “and swore he would get a DA in there he could control and who would never embarrass him.”

Silver found his candidate for the 2004 election, little-known lawyer David Soares, and engineered the support of the upstart Working Families Party, a union front which went to work for Soares.

Against heavy odds, Soares upset Clyne in the primary and triumphed again in the general election. To this day, Soares remains the Albany DA, yet never finds anything amiss in the Legislature.

Like Sgt. Schultz in “Hogan’s Heroes,” Soares knows nothing.

Sadly, he has plenty of company. A line of federal prosecutors in the Northern District, which covers the capital, avoids political cases like the plague, as do the five DAs in the city.

Were it not for Preet Bharara, the Manhattan federal prosecutor, Silver could have kept his alleged scams going for another 20 years.

Consider that not a single lawmaker ever saw something that led him to say something. It is not humanly possible that none ever suspected that, as Bharara charged, Silver “monetized public office.”

After all, Silver disclosed most of the outside income at the heart of the charges and the lawmakers had to notice how the speaker doled out cash to favorite people and organizations.

If nobody suspected something amiss, Albany is the dumbest place in America. More likely, lawmakers of both parties were fine with the obvious corruption; as Bharara’s record proves, some elected crooks saw Silver as a role model and got on gravy trains of their own.

For the rest, those supposedly honest public officials, their leader’s lien on their morality continued after he was busted. Only several dared call for Silver to step aside as speaker, as the vast majority showed the courage of mice, hiding and waiting for him to signal his intentions.

The disgraceful silence held through the weekend. Even after Silver offered a cockamamie plan to hand his powers to a committee he would select, fewer than 20 Democrats, out of 105, challenged him.

The majority sat and waited for someone — anyone — to lead them to higher ground.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo wasn’t up to the challenge, saying only that the proposed committee system wouldn’t work. He neither offered substantive comment on the charges nor expressed any outrage.

Stranger yet, he insisted again that his Moreland Commission was a success, despite the fact that he disbanded it and would have let Silver off the hook.

The state’s other top Democrats, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, remain totally missing in action, rushing home to rearrange their sock drawers or something.

The chronology confirms Albany’s reputation. It is crooked to the bone, unwilling and incapable of fixing itself.

Now that Silver is gone, where do New Yorkers go for help?

In the short term, Bharara is the answer. He promises more cases to come, and bless him for that.

More important for the long run, his rip-roaring speech Friday amounted to a playbook for public action. He focused on the secretive, self-dealing culture that allows men like Silver to accumulate power and corrupt the government itself.

“The people of New York should be disappointed, but they should be more than disappointed,” the prosecutor said. “When so many of their leaders can be bought for a few thousand dollars, they should think about getting angry.

“When it is more likely for a New York state senator to be arrested by the authorities than to be defeated at the polls, maybe they should think about getting angry.”

In other words, We the People are the solution. Only when New Yorkers get mad as hell and refuse to take it anymore will the pols go straight.

Sign me up.

De Blasio: Clueless and flaky

The verdict is in. As one friend put it, “Mayor Putz can’t even get a blizzard right!”

As Bill de Blasio tried to wipe the egg off his face yesterday, it was clear he had overreacted to storm warnings. He defended the shutting of roads, schools and mass transit hours before the predicted blizzard, insisting that New Yorkers merely “got lucky” when the accumulation barely topped 6 inches.

Paul Martinka
“We had consistent reports talking about 2 feet of snow,” he said, adding, “You can’t be a Monday morning quarterback on something like weather.”

Of course you can, especially when the restrictions were so far from ordinary and so far from necessary. One large business owner complained to me that the unreasonable demand by the mayor for an early closing Monday through Tuesday cost him $3 million in lost work.

“From a business point of view, this just never made any sense,” the employer said, still steamed by de Blasio’s warning that owners not be “cheapskates.”

The storm also revealed the gulf between the mayor and the governor. Once described as longtime friends, they clearly don’t talk or even cooperate, as de Blasio suggested when he said he didn’t know the governor was going to close the subway system.

“We found out just as it was being announced,” the mayor told reporters, though he quickly defended the decision.

The worst is yet to come. With gazillions worth of city overtime racked up waiting for a blizzard that didn’t arrive, the cost to taxpayers will be the real snow job.

It’s yes, I know

Reader Bill Hlpsher writes, “You seem to know all there is to know about everything.” He didn’t mean it as a compliment, so allow me to prove him wrong.

I don’t know who is guilty in “Deflategate,” don’t know where Jimmy Hoffa is buried and don’t know if Lee Harvey Oswald had help in the JFK assassination.

However, I do know that Mayor de Blasio trusts Al Sharpton more than he trusts cops and that President Obama has a bug up his butt about Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu.

There.

Hill’s tough to Saskatch lately

A report says Hillary Clinton has made only two public appearances in the last six weeks, both in Canada.

Well, maybe she’s dodging Obama’s taxes.