Shelly Silver’s other offenses
As former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver awaits sentencing for fraud, bribery and extortion, his friends, family and allies will no doubt send correspondence to the judge in the case, Valerie Caproni, pleading for mercy and describing various good deeds the longtime politician did for the public over the years. This is not one of those notes. Under federal guidelines, a sentencing judge is allowed to consider any relevant bad conduct by a defendant that never made it into the case. Caproni and all New Yorkers should remember that the former speaker’s misdeeds were not limited to the felonies for which two federal juries have convicted him.
Start with the elimination of the commuter tax in 1999. For more than 30 years, New York City charged a reasonable, minuscule income tax — 0.45% — on approximately 800,000 suburban workers who make daily use of our city’s roads, subways, police and other services.
Over the strenuous objections of thenmayor Rudy Giuliani, Silver strong-armed his own Democratic members and ended up making an alliance with Republican members to kill the tax — not for any rational reason, but simply to boost the political prospects of an obscure suburban Democrat who was trying to win a Senate seat in a special election.
Our city has been deprived of hundreds of millions in revenue every year since then — an estimated total of more than $11 billion that could have been used to pay for schools, public housing, our crumbling subway system and other vital needs.
The late Roy Goodman, a Manhattan state senator, called the commuter tax repeal “one of the most foolish pieces of fiscal folly ever perpetrated on the public.” And for that we can thank Sheldon Silver.
In his home district on the Lower East Side, there is abundant evidence that Silver kept his seat of power by blocking the creation of affordable housing in a 20-block area known as the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area.
For a stunning 47 years, according to an investigation by the New York Times, Silver and a close friend and ally, William Rapfogel (who was later jailed in an unrelated fraud) schemed, stalled, plotted and maneuvered to prevent the creation of affordable apartments.
Their goal was to preserve the influence of a shrinking Jewish community that made up Silver’s political base. New lowincome housing would have likely been occupied by Asian families from nearby Chinatown or by some of the 1,800 families, mostly Puerto Rican, who were moved out by the city in the 1960s to make way for development.
Silver indulged in myriad other smallscale hustles over the years. In 2005, a Las Vegas casino that was seeking an expansion into New York got fined $25,000 because the casino charged Silver $109 a night for a luxury suite that normally went for $1,500 a night — an obvious violation of the law limiting gifts to state officials to $75 or less.
And in 2008, the New York Sun reported that Silver regularly commuted to Albany — typically a two-and-a-half-hour drive — by taking connecting flights that extended his travel time to four hours or more, the better to rack up thousands of frequent-flyer miles at public expense.
Perhaps the most monstrous of Silver’s uncharged offenses involves his coddling of sexual predators in the state capital.
In 2003, shortly after Silver’s top aide, J. Michael Boxley, was charged with raping a young staffer and marched out of the capital in handcuffs, it came to light that another staffer named Elizabeth Crothers had told Silver’s office that Boxley abused her two years prior.
Boxley pleaded guilty to a lesser offense, got disbarred and was added to the state's sex-offender registry. (He has since returned to the capital as a lobbyist.)
Silver apologized for not protecting staffers from Boxley — but a decade later had to apologize again, this time for making a secret payment of $103,000 in public funds to two of the many staffers that Assemblyman Vito Lopez (now deceased) had groped and harassed for years.
Crothers, one of Silver’s unprotected staffers, publicly exposed his coverups. Her goal, she said, was “to unseat one of the worst leaders in the state and quite possibly in the nation.”
A jury of Silver’s peers has finally sent him away. Now it’s up to the rest of us to make sure we never again entrust untrammeled power to such a destructive, deceitful, unworthy man.