NEW YORK — Sheldon Silver, a corrupt Manhattan politician who for most of his 21 years as state Assembly speaker took money from real estate developers and people sickened by a deadly disease, died Monday at age 77.
Silver died at federal prison medical facility in Ayer, Massachusetts, his former chief of staff Judy Rapfogel told the New York Daily News.
“I will say that Shelly Silver did a lot of good things,” Rapfogel said.
Taciturn in public, Silver was known in Albany as an able negotiator for Assembly Democrats on the state budget and numerous other issues.
Among his accomplishments was helping in 2005 to block Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s plans for a stadium on the west side of Manhattan on what is now the site of Hudson Yards. He also supported construction of the Fulton Center transit hub in his lower Manhattan district, and was known among constituents as a strong advocate of their neighborhoods.
But he’ll be most remembered for lining his own pockets. Silver reaped about $4 million from a pair of illicit schemes that saw him convicted in two Manhattan Federal Court trials that ultimately got him a seven-year prison sentence.
Silver was a rare breed — a Lower East Sider who lived almost his entire life in the same few blocks. He was born in 1944, the youngest of four children of Orthodox Jewish Russian immigrants.
A basketball standout at the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School, he graduated from Yeshiva University and Brooklyn Law School. After briefly practicing law, Silver in the early 1970s got a job as a law clerk to a Manhattan civil court judge.
He lost in his first run for office, a 1974 Democratic primary for a City Council seat. Silver was victorious in 1976, when he was elected to a state Assembly seat covering the Lower East Side and much of lower Manhattan. He held the seat until scandal forced him from office in 2015.
Early in his Assembly years, Silver’s colleagues included Chuck Schumer, who became the Democratic leader of the U.S. Senate, and Jerrold Nadler, who was elected to the U.S. House and helped lead the impeachment probe of former President Donald Trump.
Instead of pursuing higher state or federal office like some of his colleagues, Silver built his political career in Albany’s ornate state Capitol.
He sought stronger gun control laws and expanded drug treatment in state prisons. In 1981, he argued against construction of a homeless shelter in the East Village. “This community is already shouldering its responsibility ... Put them elsewhere,” he said.
When Assembly Speaker Mel Miller of Brooklyn left office in 1991 over a real estate fraud conviction in federal court (Miller later won his appeal), Silver aligned himself with the new speaker, Saul Weprin of Queens.
Ill health shortened Weprin’s speakership, and a stroke felled Weprin in January 1994; Silver maneuvered himself to be acting speaker. When Weprin died weeks later, Silver was firmly in place as leader of the Assembly’s lower chamber.
Some saw Silver as a strong advocate of legislative ethics.
When George Pataki, a Republican, was elected governor in 1994, the Democratic Party was $800,000 in debt. Silver — then state government’s top Democratic official — told a top party fundraiser he wanted a “firewall between government business and political business.”
But he soon began using his position to line his pockets.
In the late 1990s, Silver began lunching with Leonard Litwin, owner of Glenwood Management, one of the city’s biggest developers of luxury rental apartments and a big donor to Albany political campaigns.
During their meetings — usually at Ratner’s, a famed Kosher restaurant on the Lower East Side — Silver persuaded Litwin to give some of Glenwood’s property tax appeal work to lawyer Jay Goldberg, a friend of Silver since childhood.
Goldberg kept 25% of the fees Glenwood paid him, and gave 25% of the payments to Silver as a finder’s fee. Later Silver reached a similar arrangement with Goldberg and Steve Witkoff of The Witkoff Group, a developer with real estate interests in downtown Manhattan, which was part of Silver’s legislative district.
Litwin may have been unaware of the arrangement, and Witkoff said he knew nothing about it. There was no evidence anyone in the Assembly knew of this arrangement — but many of its members grumbled Silver was too close to Albany’s lobbyists.
The grumbling boiled over into rebellion in 2000, when an upstate Democratic legislator, Michael Bragman, tried to seize the speakership. “Silver’s style as speaker has been secretive and aloof,” Bragman argued to his colleagues.
After Silver prevailed in a dramatic 85-63 floor vote, he adjusted his style to be more approachable to other Democratic legislators. But the basics of how he maintained power changed little: Silver played an inside game.
Assembly Democrats trusted Silver in his role as one of Albany’s “three men in a room” — the Assembly speaker, the Senate Majority Leader, and the governor. Very little in Albany happened that was not negotiated by those three powerful figures.
His power in Albany helped Silver avoid consequences from several scandals — including an alleged sex assault by a top aide. Silver also got away with ignoring complaints of harassment by Brooklyn legislator and political boss.
It also helped him avoid disclosing his outside income.
The fees he took from Goldberg remained secret until they were unearthed by federal investigators. And while everyone knew Silver was employed by Weitz & Luxenberg, a law firm that specializes in representing victims of asbestos, no one knew how much he made.
Silver’s affiliation with Weitz & Luxenberg began in 2002, when its partners, Perry Weitz and Arthur Luxenberg, hired him to lend prestige to their firm. They didn’t expect Silver to do any work for his $120,000 salary.
His name on the firm’s letterhead caught the eye of Dr. Robert Taub of New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia Medical Center, an expert in mesothelioma, a deadly cancer caused by asbestos exposure. Taub wanted money for his mesothelioma research, and was irked that Weitz & Luxenberg made millions off the disease but did not support the search for its cure.
Taub approached Silver through a mutual friend to ask if he could persuade Weitz & Luxenberg to help. The word came back: “Shelly wants cases.”
Silver wanted Taub to send him the names of mesothelioma patients he could refer to Weitz & Luxenberg. In return, Taub got two grants of $250,000 — some $500,000 in all — from a pot of state money over which Silver had complete control.
Weitz & Luxenberg paid Silver one-third of the fees it earned from Taub’s patients. All Silver did to collect the money was to hand their names over to a Weitz & Luxenberg colleague.
No evidence emerged at his trials that he spoke to any of the mesothelioma sufferers Taub referred to him.
By the time both his schemes were uncovered by federal investigators, Silver had reaped about $3 million from Weitz & Luxenberg, and about $1 million from Goldberg’s law firm.
Silver’s conviction at his first trial in November 2015 resulted in a 12-year prison sentence. Silver won an appeal, and was tried and convicted a second time in May 2018. At his second sentencing in July 2018, Manhattan Federal Judge Valerie Caproni cut his prison term to seven years in prison, and imposed a $1.75 million fine.
Silver appealed again, and the charges related to his Weitz & Luxenberg earnings were thrown out. But the charges related to his earnings from Goldberg’s law firm and money laundering charges stood, and Caproni resentenced Silver to 6 1/2 years in prison.
Trump decided against giving Silver a pardon or sentencing commutation in 2021, and Silver later lost a further appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Had he lived, he would have been released from prison in March 2026.
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