The evil that pols do
“The evil that men do lives after them/The good is oft interred with their bones,” Marc Antony says over the bloody corpse of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play. It’s a line that a few people mentioned to me following Monday’s news that former state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver had died at age 77 in a federal prison hospital in Massachusetts.
One person inadvertently switched the line around, offering the optimistic hope that it’s the good that men do that lives after them. To quote Hemingway and thus use up all my literary tickets for this column: Isn’t it pretty to think so?
It’s a little highfalutin to quote the Bard or Hemingway in reference to Silver, who was about as prosaic a figure as ever wielded a gavel at the Capitol. With his low growl, seemingly constant glare and overall turtle-like aspect, he was a rather minatory figure. He was definitely a wily opponent, whether you were Gov. George Pataki, Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno or Gov. Andrew Cuomo, or even a lesser combatant like Michael Bragman, the onetime Assembly majority leader who sought to depose Silver in a 2000 coup. When it failed, the Syracuse lawmaker was stripped of title, staff and budget and consigned to a miserable office “in the marble” — meaning the lower depths of the Legislative Office Building, where the clip-clop of high heels across the vaulted atrium echo like drumbeats in a funeral march. He resigned the following year.
Silver held on to power for more than two decades, under five governors, by understanding the direction in which his conference was leaning, and knowing when they needed to be nudged or shoved. He also understood that controversial issues could be milked for campaign contributions for years if the right conditions obtained — as seen in the endless debates in the Assembly over legalizing mixed martial arts pro bouts, a classic example of a quasicontentious issue with bales of money floating around it.
By the time I arrived at the Capitol in 2008, Joe Bruno had just resigned in the teeth of a federal investigation and Bragman was a character in a ghost story told to freshman Democrats to keep them in line.
Silver was still smarting from his shameless handling of two complaints brought by women against his longtime aide J. Michael Boxley, who ultimately pleaded guilty in 2003 to sexual misconduct. The Speaker learned the lessons of that episode so poorly that in subsequent years he tried to cover up serial harassment by Brooklyn Assemblyman Vito Lopez through the use of confidential legal settlements; when those payments were revealed, he and
his flunkies — including people who remain in positions of influence in state government — offered the laughable claim they had done it to protect the victims’ privacy. By keeping it under wraps, they helped maintain a pipeline of new victims into Lopez’s office.
Silver’s conference stuck with him, though, whether out of a belief that everyone makes mistakes (and some make the same mistakes repeatedly, I guess), or because Shelly kept the resources and favors coming, or maybe they just didn’t want to go out like Bragman. Or all three.
I covered Silver for seven years before his arrest in January 2015, when federal prosecutors — the only prosecutors who did anything about public corruption at the state level in those days — charged him with fattening his wallet through two schemes: directing real estate interests to a tax law firm he secretly had an interest in, and funneling mesothelioma patients to another law firm where he was of counsel.
After the criminal complaint was released, the dimmer members of the Democratic delegation talked about how he was innocent until proven guilty and should therefore remain as speaker; the principled ones read the allegations and were thoroughly disgusted.
After two trials, he was sentenced to more than six years. A case could be made that Silver succeeded in significantly reducing his prison sentence: His appeals delayed his arrival at Otisville Correctional Facility until August of 2020. He reportedly lost out on a last-minute commutation of his sentence from Donald Trump a year ago; a few months later, he was briefly furloughed back to his Lower Manhattan home for a few days — the federal Bureau of Prisons never explained the rationale for that decision — before being sent back to confinement.
Many of the Democratic lawmakers who served under Silver have fond memories of him — which is not surprising, because he was the boss when they were in positions of power. To hate him, even retrospectively, would be tantamount to acknowledging they had spent their time in partial thrall to a grifter.
There is an argument to be made that the newly dead deserve to have their evil left out of the conversation for a bit, at least while their family is in mourning — but such talk is for eulogists, not journalists. The counterargument holds that Silver’s death is the perfect time to talk about his abuses of power, as a reminder of what awaits people who betray the public trust and the power we invest in them as elected officials.
Silver left behind a number of victims — of his actions as well as his inaction — and we owe a greater debt to them.