Ohio's House Speaker Just Got Caught In A $60 Million Bribery Scam But His Backward District Is So Right Wing That He Would Win Again If He Could Run From Prison

One Ohio legislator told me that watching Householder shovel food into his maw was one of the most disgusting sights she had ever experienced

It's not nice to call anyone a putrid bag of shit. But Sheldon Silver is a putrid bag of shit. I couldn't cover up the stink if I tried. And we've never tried. We've been covering his political demise since January of 2015 when the powerful and incredibly corrupt Democratic Speaker-for-life of the New York state Assembly was arrested and forced to resign from the speakership and then his Assembly district. He was 71 back then and his lawyers argued-- unsuccessfully-- that he should not be found guilty because the southern District of New York (when it was still a law and order operation instead of a Trump Mob arm) was charging him with activity that state legislators routinely engage in and are not thought of as criminal, i.e., bribery. Now the Yeshiva boy is 76 and has still not served a day in prison. Presumably that will end in late August when he starts serving his six and a half year prison sentence, having been sentenced to that-- and a million dollar fine-- on Monday.

Having denied, denied, denied for years, Silver told the judge on Monday that "My use of my office for personal gain was improper, selfish and ethically indefensible... I'm sorry." The judge pointed out that he had been using his office for corrupt purposes for at least 15 years, taking money from real estate developers-- Glenwood Management and the Witkoff Group-- in return for favorable treatment and special legislation to help their businesses.

That was Monday. The next day, a very similar kind of action exploded in Ohio, where Republican putrid bag of shit/Speaker of the House, Larry Householder, was arrested. He had served as Speaker from 2001 to 2004 but had only been Speaker time time since January 2019. He represents the 72nd state House district east of Columbus-- Coshocton and Perry counties and part of Licking County. The district is 96% white and solidly Republican. Trump's 2016 vote in each of the counties should tell you all you need to know about the people who put Householder in office:

• Coshocton- 69.4%
• Licking- 62.1%
• Perry- 68.1%

And then came the big blue wave of 2018... and no one told the folks in this backward part of Ohio. Sherrod Brown, who won statewide, didn't do as well in the 3 Householder counties:

• Coshocton- 39.5%
• Licking- 43.0%
• Perry- 40.0%

During his first speakership, Householder, a notorious anti-LGBTQ bigot and hate-monger, was best known for passing the first legislation anywhere in America defunding Planned Parenthood-- and for passing a concealed-carry gun law, making it easier for Buckeyes to kill each other. He nearly went to prison in 2004-- for the same kind of monkey business he was arrested for yesterday-- money laundering and bribery. He was arrested by the Feds Tuesday morning at his farm and taken into custody as part of a $60 million bribery scheme that bailed out two nuclear power plants while gutting subsidies for renewable energy projects and increasing rate-holders power bills substantially.

Reporting for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Andrew Tobias wrote that federal prosecutors charged Householder with conspiracy to commit racketeering in connection to the nuclear bailout bill he shepherded through the state legislature last year right after he became speaker. He faces up to 20 years in prison and a quarter million dollar fine-- same as former Ohio Republican Party Chair-turned-lobbyist Matt Borges, prominent lobbyist Neil Clark, FirstEnergy Solutions lobbyist Juan Cespedes and Householder aide Jeff Longstreth.

Householder is one of Ohio’s most powerful politicians, and the investigation against him, news of which broke Tuesday morning, sent shockwaves through Ohio political circles.

...Prosecutors did not seek a monetary bond, although as a condition of their release, Bowman ordered them to surrender their firearms, to remain in the Southern District of Ohio, and to not have contact with other defendants or potential witnesses. This would mean Householder, one of the state’s most powerful politicians, could not travel the entire state or have contact with lobbyists or conceivably even other state lawmakers.

It's Not Just Sheldon Silver-- Routine Corruption Has Overwhelmed U.S. Politics On Every Level

Tuesday, in covering Sheldon Silver's guilty (on all counts) verdict, we mentioned that his attorneys had argued that in charging him, "Bharara had sought to criminalize the kinds of activity in which state legislators routinely engaged" (i.e., taking bribery and kickbacks). We sought to bolster the point by quoting Zephyr Teachout's assertion that  "The legal shades into the illegal [and] the structure of private campaign finance has essentially pre-corrupted our politicians, so that they can’t even recognize explicit bribery because it feels the same as what they do every day. When you spend a lifetime serving campaign donors, it may seem easy to serve them when they come with an outright bribe, because it doesn’t seem that different." Several Members of Congress contacted us to register complete agreement with that quote about how routine it makes outright corruption.

It is the bedrock on which the political careers of "leaders," not just like Silver, but like John Boehner, Chuck Schumer, Steve Israel, Steny Hoyer, Joe Crowley, Debbie Wasserman Schultz and other amoral congressional low-lifes thrive. It is interwoven through the entire American political system, both contemptible party establishments.

You may have noticed that Blue America has endorsed Eloise Gomez Reyes for state Assembly in California. She's running against a corrupt conservative incumbent, Cheryl Brown in San Bernardino County (Fontana, Colton, Rialto, western San Berdoo). An alum of Cal State, San Bernardino she was back at her alma mater recently, inspiring students. One asked her why she had abstained and voted against most important environmental legislation. Apparently it never dawned on her that "the utility companies give me so much money" is not an appropriate response. At least she didn't explicitly mention that one of her top campaign donors is Chevron, which is the case. In fact, the Sierra Club has called her out for taking $18,300 from Big Oil and then backing their toxic agenda. This year they assigned her a failing grade-- 67%, tied for 3rd worst in the legislature. Clean Water Action graded her a D, normally a grade Republicans get, not Democrats.

Cheryl Brown, Sheldon Silver... their contemptible behavior is exactly what elected officials do routinely engage in-- on both sides of the aisle-- without even dealing with the moral rot they have embraced. When Nebraska Republican Senate freshman Ben Sasse warned his colleagues on the Senate floor Tuesday that "the people despise us all," he wasn't even bringing up congressional corruption. In Congress, almost no one-- there are exceptions-- considers campaign contributions "bribery," although it certainly is. Back in September we shared a tape of Jim DeFede interviewing one of the more corrupt Members of Congress-- Chuck Schumer "rising star" Patrick Murphy-- in which DeFede asked a question Beltway reporters never do: "You sit on the House Financial Services Committee and you accepted a lot of money from banks on Wall Street. I could go through the list: CitiGroup, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, UBS, on down the line. You've accepted a lot of money from them. What are they expecting from you?" Murphy, taken aback, had a one word answer: "Nothing." Defied laughed in his face. "You think they expect nothing from you?" Murphy, a little panicked, started lying. "Nothing. I've never taken any pledge to not accept certain things. I don't tell people they're going to get anything but a hard-working Member of Congress... The vast majority of my support comes from low-dollar donations, people from across the state of Florida sending five, ten-dollar donations. You're not asking if I'm giving them any special commitments. That money adds up to significantly more than what these folks..."

But Murphy was lying. He didn't get the sobriquet "Wall Street's errand boy," because he doesn't deliver for Wall Street. And Wall Street delivers for him-- in the biggest of ways. In the history of Congress, the Finance Sector's top non-presidential recipient of routine bribes has been Murphy's mentor, New York crook Chuck Schumer ($23,538,638). That's an astronomical sum, almost identical to #2 and #3-- John Boehner and Mitch McConnell-- combined. But Schumer's been in Congress a very, very, very long time. Murphy is just starting out in the bribery business. Like most Members of the House Financial Services Committee, he's taking bribes from Wall Street. But in Murphy's case, he's taking the most bribes and he's the quintessential quid pro quo criminal. So far this year, Wall Street has shown Murphy its appreciation for services rendered by shouldering a very significant portion of the financing of his Senate campaign. Other than Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader McCarthy, both Republican slaves to the banksters, Murphy has taken the most of anyone in the House from the Finance Sector-- $787,750, almost $200,000 more than Jeb Hensarling, the Chairman of House Financial Services, who along with the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee (until he became Speaker, Paul Ryan), Wall Street's fate is determined by. Ryan scooped up $589,288, a lot but, again, just about $200,000 less than the deceitful Florida novice who claims they don't expect anything from him at all. This year's dozen most corrupt members of the House, each of whom would make a good roommate for Sheldon Silver in prison:

When Bernie Sanders and Zephyr Teachout talk about getting big money out of politics, they really are talking about the way bribery has been made routine and legalistic by a system run by instinctual criminals like John Boehner and Chuck Schumer. The 3 biggest political contributions so far this cycle are $15 million, $11 million and $10 million from avaricious and predatory billionaires each hoping to elect despicable Texas neo-fascist Ted Cruz. Voters themselves should decide that those kinds of contributions-- and multimillion dollar contributions from Wall Street banksters, whether to Democrats Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer or to Republicans John McCain, Mark Kirk and Rob Portman-- disqualify those candidates from holding elective office. Until we do that we will be subjected to politicians who serve the interests not of their constituents but of the Finance Sector and other special interests in conflict with those of ordinary American families. This year Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, and Chris Christie are all being financed by these people, not by people. That's who their policy agenda is designed to appeal to, instead of to the needs of the American people, which, in effect, is exactly what Senator Sasse was trying to say in his first Senate speech Tuesday. This factoid below is not a coincidence:

Sheldon Silver Is Going To Prison For Taking Bribes And Kickbacks-- Do You Think He's Any More Corrupt Than, Say, Chuck Schumer?

The gang's all here: Silver, Rangel, Clinton, Paterson, Schumer

If you read any of the pre-trial coverage of Sheldon Silver's corruption case, it will come as no surprise to you that spontaneous festivities broke out up and down the halls at DWT when he was found guilty of all seven of his charges yesterday. As the NY Times reported, "After a five-week trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan, the end came rather quickly and unceremoniously for Mr. Silver, 71, a Democrat who served more than two decades as Assembly speaker before he was forced to resign from the post after his arrest in January." He still hasn't resigned from his seat in the state legislature, but now he'll be automatically kicked out of it.

Preet Bharara, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, issued a statement that said, simply, "Today, Sheldon Silver got justice, and at long last, so did the people of New York." My favorite line in the Times report though-- one that tells the story of the culture of corruption endemic to our politics was:

Silver’s lawyers argued that in charging him, Mr. Bharara’s office had sought to criminalize the kinds of activity in which state legislators routinely engaged.

Routinely? Absolutely... just like DC. The Gothamist saw it the same way: "The prosecution centered on the question of whether nearly $4 million in payments Silver received for referring tax and asbestos illness cases to law firms were the fruit of quid pro quo arrangements he made with developers and a prominent cancer researcher for favors, or just run-of-the-mill greed-driven back-room dealing of the legal variety." Silver defended his $700,000 in kickbacks by arguing "It's virtually impossible for someone to serve in this citizen-legislator model and not have some form of conflict." That;'s exactly what his attorney said. And expected it to exonerate his client!

Silver is the most prominent in a parade of state lawmakers who have been convicted by prosecutors with Mr. Bharara’s office. At the time of Mr. Silver’s arrest, Mr. Bharara said the charges against him made it clear that “the show-me-the-money culture of Albany has been perpetuated and promoted at the very top of the political food chain.”

His conviction comes as Mr. Bharara’s office is trying his former counterpart, State Senator Dean G. Skelos, a Republican from Long Island who stepped down as majority leader after his arrest in May on federal corruption charges.

For portions of his tenure as speaker, Mr. Silver maintained a viselike grip on power, withstanding the rare challenge from a well-intentioned but unsupported Democratic colleague, and brushing off all criticism of his performance. He was faulted for his handling of two sexual harassment allegations; in 2013, a state ethics report criticized him for covering up accusations of sexual harassment against Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez.

Mr. Silver also loomed large in financial disclosure reports that were required under a new state ethics law, reporting hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in outside income from a law firm, Weitz & Luxenberg. That arrangement would become one of the focal points of the government’s prosecution.

At Mr. Silver’s trial, the government presented evidence that prosecutors said showed he had orchestrated two schemes through which he obtained nearly $4 million in illegal payments for taking official actions that benefited a prominent cancer researcher, Dr. Robert N. Taub, at Columbia University, and two New York real estate development firms.

Testimony and other evidence showed that Mr. Silver had arranged to have the State Health Department award two grants totaling $500,000 to Dr. Taub, whose research focused on mesothelioma, a deadly form of cancer related to asbestos exposure.

In return, Dr. Taub sent mesothelioma patients with potentially lucrative legal claims to Weitz & Luxenberg, which then shared a portion of its fees with Mr. Silver.

In the other scheme, prosecutors charged, Mr. Silver had the two developers, Glenwood Management and the Witkoff Group, move certain tax business to a law firm, Goldberg & Iryami, that secretly shared its fees with Mr. Silver.

In return, the speaker lent his support to critical rent legislation backed by Glenwood, in particular, and met with the company’s lobbyists.

A week after Silver was arrested, Zephyr Teachout, in an OpEd for the NY Times wrote that "fighting the kind of corruption that plagues not only New York State but the whole nation isn’t just about getting cuffs on the right guy. As with the recent conviction of the former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell for receiving improper gifts and loans, a fixation on plain graft misses the more pernicious poison that has entered our system... The legal shades into the illegal." It's why, here are DWT we regularly refer to the $23 million dollars Wall Street has given Chuck Schumer as "legalistic"-- or "legalized"-- bribery and why we just as regularly point out charts like this that show the Wall Street errand boys whose careers the banksters finance year after year after year all belong in prison, like this group of corrupt scumbahs, each one of whom is infinitely more criminal than Sheldon Silver; just not caught yet. These figures, by the way, are for this year alone, and just for the Finance Sector.

Please note how Wall St. bribes to Murphy and Ryan have skyrocketed since just last night!

Corruption exists when institutions and officials charged with serving the public serve their own ends. Under current law, campaign contributions are illegal if there is an explicit quid pro quo, and legal if there isn’t. But legal campaign contributions can be as bad as bribes in creating obligations. The corruption that hides in plain sight is the real threat to our democracy.

Think of campaign contributions as the gateway drug to bribes. In our private financing system, candidates are trained to respond to campaign cash and serve donors’ interests. Politicians are expected to spend half their time talking to funders and to keep them happy. Given this context, it’s not hard to see how a bribery charge can feel like a technical argument instead of a moral one.

...The structure of private campaign finance has essentially pre-corrupted our politicians, so that they can’t even recognize explicit bribery because it feels the same as what they do every day. When you spend a lifetime serving campaign donors, it may seem easy to serve them when they come with an outright bribe, because it doesn’t seem that different.

We should take this moment to pursue fundamental reform. We must reconstitute what it means to run for office and to serve in office. We need to ban outside income for elected officials. Transparency alone is not enough; it doesn’t solve the problem of creating outside dependencies. New York lawmakers can’t carry water for two masters when in office.

We should reject the private financing of campaigns as the only model. We need to provide enough public funding for campaigns so that anyone with a broad base of support can run for office, and respond effectively to attacks, without becoming dependent on private patrons. Running for office shouldn’t be a job defined by permanent begging at the feet of the wealthiest donors in the country.

Those two reforms would be transformational. We will never eradicate every shady deal, but we can make politics more about serving the public and less like legalized bribery.

There’s one last thing we should do: ban corporate spending and limit total campaign spending. Last week not only saw Mr. Silver in handcuffs, it also marked the fifth anniversary of the Citizens United ruling, in which the Supreme Court decided that outside corporate spending was in no way corrupting. We will have to revisit that decision, but we don’t need to wait for the court to act.

Corruption is about greed and private interests put ahead of the public good. Whether influence is bought through a bribe, outside spending, outside income or campaign contributions, the public suffers in the same way. Until we move past scandals toward structural change, our democracy will suffer, too.

The NY Post didn't go for any poetry this morning in describing this-- and included a well-deserved warning to another crook: Cuomo.

Sheldon Silver of the Lower East Side had stuffed his jeans with at least $4 million-- and that makes him distinctive by Albany standards: The capital city’s gutter-grubbers traditionally settle for chump change.

...Bharara’s brief against Skelos-- a sad man who allegedly indulged an arrogant, greedy, stupid son by strong-arming businessmen-- isn’t nearly as nuanced as was the case against Silver.

That is, jury deliberations in the Skelos case aren’t likely to last longer than the minute and 45 seconds that it took to convict Silver.

And then there will be one man left standing-- Gov. Cuomo, who has been squarely in Bharara’s sights for months now; not-guilty verdicts in Silver’s case would have let the steam out of whatever it is that the prosecutor is planning for Cuomo, and that didn’t happen.

Which has to weigh heavily on the governor. Though no one is suggesting that he ever put an untoward penny in his own pocket, he’s beefed up his campaign accounts with millions from people who figured prominently in both the Silver and Skelos cases.

Earlier, an editorial at The Post hit the nail on the head: Shelly Silver’s conviction is an indictment of Albany’s entire political culture.

It’s a big win for New York.

Not just because he was such a disastrous lawmaker. But also because it means even powerful pols like Silver, who ruled the Assembly with an iron fist for years, can be held to account for their corrupt doings.

UPDATE: CUOMO!!!

Remember, the Lt. Governor, Kathy Hochul, is a less than worthless right-wing fake Dem. The Buffalo Chronicle just broke the story that Bharara will indict Cuomo on January 2.

Three sources are confirming that Bharara intends to indict Governor Andrew Cuomo on January 2nd-- along with a half dozen associates and former staffers-- on public corruption, racketeering, conspiracy, and honest services fraud.

The Chronicle is unable to confirm widespread rumors that the former staffers are Howard Glaser, Joe Percoco and Larry Schwartz.

The Stink Of Corruption In New York This Month Is Very Much Bipartisan

3 New York crooks-- 2 going on trial and the one in the middle on Hillary's Leadership Council

Sheldon Silver is from the Lower East Side; his Assembly district-- first won in 1976-- includes the world's worst cesspool of corruption, Wall Street. He became Assembly Speaker early in 1994 while Mario Cuomo was governor. He was Speaker during the terms of George Pataki, Eliot Spitzer, David Paterson and Andrew Cuomo and he was widely considered not just grotesquely corrupt but also a manipulative dictator. Last January he was arrested on federal corruption charges and a week later he resigned as speaker.

When federal prosecutors subpoenaed a law firm to learn what exactly Sheldon Silver, the powerful leader of the State Assembly, had done to earn the hundreds of thousands of dollars the firm paid him each year, prosecutors received just one file.

It was exceptional in two ways, they say.

First, Mr. Silver had performed a bit of lawyering on behalf of a client: He helped a legislative employee settle a private property dispute.

Second, Mr. Silver did not receive any payment for his efforts.

Other than that one instance, Mr. Silver “never did any actual legal work,” Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, said at a news conference Thursday. “He simply sat back and collected millions of dollars by cashing in on his public office and his political influence.”

The story that unfolded in the federal criminal complaint filed on Thursday reads like a political thriller, a lurid tale of abuse of power whose main character squeezed a tidy fortune out of the obscure but lucrative legal niches of asbestos lawsuits and property-tax reductions, while capitalizing on his position at the front gate in Albany where lobbyists and special interests seek passage through the legislative process.

Juggling more than half a dozen bank accounts, Mr. Silver-- who went before a judge to hear the charges and was released on a $200,000 personal recognizance bond-- steered public money to help those who would privately help him in return, the complaint alleges. He also meticulously covered up his scheming, it said, even meeting at his office in the State Capitol to draft side agreements that hid his actions.

When an anti-corruption panel appointed by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in July 2013 started asking questions about Mr. Silver’s income, the speaker fought the commission’s authority to do so-- deploying taxpayer-funded lawyers to do battle in court, and portraying the battle as a constitutional fight, not an effort at self-preservation.

Ultimately, Mr. Silver helped cut a deal with Mr. Cuomo to have the panel shut down entirely. But rather than ending the investigation into Mr. Silver, as the speaker had hoped, the panel’s disbanding inflamed Mr. Bharara, whose investigation culminated in the early morning arrest on Thursday.

Last April April 25, Silver was indicted on more charges-- making illegal investments, with money he had taken as kickbacks or bribes, through private vehicles, bringing him a profit of $750,000. He's still a member of the Assembly and his trial begins tomorrow This is going to be quite a month in New York politics, with a major politician from each party on trial. The Republican is Dean Skelos, former state Senate Majority Leader from southwest Nassau County, just east of JFK. The district includes the 5 Towns (Lawrence, Cedarhurst, Woodmere, Inwood, and Hewlett), Atlantic Beach, Long Beach, Lido Beach, Valley Stream (where I grew up), Malvern, Lynbrook, Oceanside, Rockville Centre, South Hempstead. He was arrested on his federal corruption charges, which include extortion and solicitation of bribes, last May. He was forced to step down as Majority Leader but, like Silver, he's still a member of the legislature.

Of course, the big media story in New York about the twin trials is that the fetid political culture in Albany is on trial.

Court papers in the two cases suggest that testimony in Federal District Court will expose in granular detail what watchdog groups say is a seamy world where big money and politics have long intersected with government.

There are accounts of kickbacks disguised as legitimate income; no-show jobs for a lawmaker’s son; and the use of state money to influence a doctor to refer clients to a favored law firm that, in turn, paid millions of dollars to a lawmaker.

The alleged acts are typical of a culture, according to the watchdog groups, that has made Albany practically synonymous with corruption and stubbornly resistant to reform, keeping citizens-- and even most lawmakers-- in the dark about much of the legislative work and spending done in their names.

For more than two decades, Mr. Silver and, for a lesser period, Mr. Skelos, have presided over the machinery comprising, along with the governor, the so-called three men in a room who have historically controlled much of the state’s policy, legislative and budgeting decisions.

The two trials-- Mr. Silver’s case is to begin on Monday with jury selection, and the case against Mr. Skelos, who is going on trial with his son, Adam, is scheduled to start on Nov. 16-- could run as long as six weeks each, so they will probably overlap for about a month. Never before have two lawmakers of their stature gone on trial at the same time in New York.

...The charges against the two men fall in line with generations of senior legislators in Albany, where corruption has endured for more than a century, with four previous Senate majority leaders and three speakers indicted. When Mr. Cuomo was elected governor in 2010, he vowed to restore integrity, a task that has eluded him so far.

The governor’s creation of the anti-corruption panel in 2013, known as the Moreland Commission, brought high hopes; it began to uncover what many of its members believed were the institutional problems forming the bedrock of Albany’s troubled culture.

Among them were two broad issues that are expected to figure prominently in both trials: ineffectual campaign finance laws that give moneyed interests-- especially large real estate developers-- outsize influence; and lax financial disclosure rules that allow corrupt lawmakers to list part-time jobs or consulting work to mask political payoffs. Often, this work is listed at law firms that represent clients with business before the state. These laws and rules, largely written by the lawmakers themselves, are seldom enforced.

Perhaps these trials will lead to some meaningful reform. Jesse McKinley writing last week for the Times suggested that "[w]ith corruption and the policing of government still pressing issues in New York’s capital, state ethics regulators have proposed that state elected officials be barred from accepting and asking for campaign contributions from any person or group under investigation by, or involved in legal action with, their offices. The proposal, made this week by the Joint Commission on Public Ethics, which investigates violations of state ethics and lobbying laws, would extend current conflict-of-interest policies that apply to state employees to also include the governor, the state comptroller, the attorney general, state legislators and their re-election campaigns."

USA Preet Bharara takes aim at his second target among NYS's legendary "Three Men in a Room"

Might as well be mugshots: Reuters photog Eduardo Munoz snapped this shot of Dean and Mini-Dean, aka NYS Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos and his boy Adam, approaching FBI HQ this morning, before they were indicted on assorted federal corruption charges.

"It's like [expletive] Preet Bharara is listening to every [expletive] phone call."

-- Adam Skelos, in a phone call with his father
(recorded by the feds, of course)

by Ken

Here I was, thinking of doing a follow-up to my Friday post "New Jersey USA kicks up the heat on Bridgegate Krispykronies, and we learn some nasty new stuff," based on Matthew Katz's report this morning for WNYC's "Christie Tracker" that "Yes, Chris Christie Is Still Planning To Run For President. Here's Why." (Some of the reasons: Bridgegate still hasn't been pinned on the governor, his billionaires still love him, and the Bridgegate story has been virtually shunned by certain key segments of the media, meaning Fox Noise.)

Meanwhile, however, over on this side of the Hudson one of our U.S. attorneys, Preet Bharara (USA for the Southern District of NY), took prosecutorial aim at bigger game than NJ's USA, Paul Fishman, bagged Friday, with the indictment of NYS Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos and his boy Adam on federal corruption charges. This makes two of the famous "three men in a room," the men who run NYS government, USA Bharara has brought down -- first then-Assembly Speaker "Smelly Shelly" Silver and now th Senate's presiding officer. This leaves only Gov. Andrew Cuomo standing, and makes you wonder if he's looking over his shoulder.

(Let me stress that I haven't heard any reports to this effect. I'm just free-associating. Still, if no one has started the rumor yet, somebody has to. You remember how gung-ho for ethics Boy Andrew was back when it was state legislators' ethics that were at issue?)

After all, it was Boy Andrew who slammed shut the state ethics investigating commission which he himself had created as soon as it started doing, you know, actual investigating, meaning it started lapping up against friends of his. And who knows? Maybe eventually that lapping might have lapped up against his very best friend, his own self. And in a way, Boy Andrew also set the stage for the Silver and Skelos indictments, because it seems generally agreed that USA Bharara, who had been cooperating (and closely watching) the state ethics panel, felt obliged to take over at least some of its work when it was so unceremoniously shut down.

The Skelos indictments are an ugly blow for NYS Republicans, who haven't had an awful lot to cheer about in recent year and so were practically peeing in their pants with the excitement of the indictment of Smelly Shelly, who'd pretty much run the NYS Assembly for 21 years until he stepped down under pressure on February 2 following his indictment. Now, rather awkwardly, they're likely to be on the receiving end of advice from legislative Democrats similar to what they were offering back then -- like how dare Majority Leader Skelos not resign immediately? (It should be noted, for the record, that while Smelly Shelly resigned the speakership, he did not give up his Assembly seat. Even as we speak, he remains a member.)

Here's the report by the AP's Larry Neumeister and Tom Hays:

NEW YORK -- The leader of the New York Senate surrendered Monday to face charges including extortion and soliciting bribes after investigators looking into the awarding of a $12 million contract to a company that hired his son said they captured him on wiretaps boasting of his power.

Dean Skelos, 67, of Long Island and his 32-year-old son, Adam, surrendered at the FBI's offices in lower Manhattan as a criminal complaint was unsealed against them in federal court, where they were expected to appear later in the day.

At a news conference announcing the charges, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara alleged that Skelos's "support for certain infrastructure projects and legislation was often based, not on what was good for his constituents or good for New York, but rather on what was good for his son's bank account."

In a statement, Dean Skelos said he expected to be exonerated at trial.

"I am innocent of the charges leveled against me. I am not saying I am just not guilty, I am saying that I am innocent," he said. A lawyer for his son did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

Authorities said Dean Skelos - New York state's most powerful Republican official -has used his position as a carrot since at least 2010, taking official actions in return for payments to his son.

According to court papers, some evidence was obtained through court-authorized wiretaps on cellphones used by the father and son.

The complaint said Dean Skelos bragged to his son recently in one conversation after he was re-elected majority leader in January, a post he shared with another senator from 2011 to 2013: "I'm going to be president of the Senate. I'm going to be majority leader. I'm going to control everything."

The charges were unveiled four months after former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, D-Manhattan, was charged with accepting nearly $4 million in payoffs. Silver, maintaining his innocence, gave up his leadership post but is keeping his legislative seat as he fights the charges. Earlier this month, Silver's son-in-law was charged in a $7 million Ponzi scheme.

Bharara, who has called Albany a "cauldron of corruption," told a news conference that the case was further proof that "public corruption is a deep-seated problem in New York State. It is a problem in both chambers. It is a problem on both sides of the aisle."

But the prosecutor also appeared more cautious with his remarks in the wake of a ruling by a federal judge recently that criticized him for overdoing the publicity surrounding Silver's January arrest.

"Let me emphasize at the outset that these are only charges," he said. "The complaint contains allegations only, and both defendants are absolutely presumed innocent unless and until those allegations are proven beyond a reasonable doubt, which is what we intend to do."

The complaint said Dean Skelos used his position to extort money from others, including hundreds of thousands of dollars from a senior executive of a major real estate development firm who was cooperating with the government.

Dean Skelos promoted and voted for real estate legislation sought by the developer, including some pertaining to rent regulation and property tax abatements, the complaint said.

Skelos said last month he was cooperating fully and would not resign his leadership post. He's hired an attorney in response to the investigation, which focuses on whether Skelos influenced Nassau County's decision to award a 2013 contract to Arizona-based AbTech.

Adam Skelos worked for the company as a consultant. The complaint said AbTech, which was only identified as an "Environmental Technology Company," more than doubled its monthly payment to Adam Skelos after the $12 million contract was approved.

AbTech has said it is cooperating with authorities and is not considered a target in the probe.

"The process through which local authorities selected AbTech was comprehensive and diligent, involving several levels of Nassau County government," the company said. "AbTech is proud ... to have earned this contract after a thorough and fair review process conducted by Nassau County."

Dean Skelos has represented a portion of Nassau County on Long Island in the state Senate since he was elected in 1984. He was elected to the Assembly in 1980.

An attorney, Skelos is known as a shrewd negotiator and a frequent ally to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat. He is the seventh top lawmaker to face criminal charges in the past six years. Since 2000, 29 New York lawmakers have left office because of criminal or ethical issues.

Another top Senate leader, Sen. Thomas Libous, R-Binghamton, has pleaded not guilty to a federal charge that he lied to the FBI about using his clout to arrange a job for his son, who was convicted earlier this year of filing false income tax returns.

UPDATE: Daily News Says Skelos Must Go
-by Howie

To prison, I hope... with Adam. "Federal criminal charges lodged against state Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos," opined The News depict him as wringing hundreds of thousands of dollars out of Albany supplicants for his 32-year-old son (Adam). Skills believes, they reminded us, that "anything goes in Albany, no matter how much money changes hands or how vigorous the back-scratching."

[H]e must step down as majority leader and join the recently deposed Sheldon Silver in demonstrating that Bharara is imposing law and order on the Legislature’s standard operating procedures.

All too predictably, precious few members of Skelos’ Republican conference had the integrity to quickly call for his ouster-- with Long Island’s John Flanagan flatly declaring that Skelos “should stay on as leader, plain and simple.”

That’s how the Corruption Caucus in Silver’s Assembly behaved until the public revolted. Plainly, Skelos’ days are numbered. Flanagan’s should be, too.

Backed up by wiretaps, emails and cooperating witnesses, the facts show that Skelos put the arm on Glenwood Management, a major landlord, to hire his son during meetings in which the company lobbied him on rent regulation and tax breaks.

They show that Skelos guided $200,000 from Glenwood to Adam through a title insurance company and an engineering firm.

They show that Skelos reciprocated with legislation in Albany and by securing a $12 million contract from Nassau County. He even discussed the deal with Nassau Executive Ed Mangano at the wake for a slain NYPD officer.

As the Skeloses became worried about getting caught, Adam complained to his father: “You can’t talk normally because it’s like fucking Preet Bharara is listening to every fucking phone call.”

Revealed in a footnote was that the elder Skelos has garnered $2.6 million from a Long Island law firm without performing “any actual legal work”-- a whole scandal in itself.

Skelos is at least the 31st Albany pol accused of serious wrongdoing in the past 15 years-- including a governor, a controller, an Assembly speaker and five of the last six Senate leaders.

The place is corrupt to the core.

#

Maybe "Smelly Shelly" Silver is answerable to the laws we have after all: Part 2, Laws? What laws?

Just what connection do I see between Smelly Shelly and "Moneybags Mikey" Khodorkovsky?


Man with a microphone (but is anyone listening?): Ex-oligarch, ex-convict Mikhail Khodorkovsky "has grandly declared that he would guarantee Putin's safety if he left power peacefully."

by Ken

Last night, in Part 1 of this two-part "Maybe 'Smelly Shelly' Silver is answerable to the laws we have after all" series, I took note of the multi-count indictment handed down Thursday by a federal grand jury against former NYS Assembly Speaker "Smelly Shelly" Silver. The indictment covers nearly $4 million squirreled away by the Smellyman in a pair of schemes involving sums paid to him by law firms essentially in exchange for -- or so the feds allege -- using his position to either steer state funds in desired directions or to secure passage of desired legislation.

There had been, you'll recall, heavy speculation that Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, and his team were reluctant to press the grand jury for an indictment knowing how difficult it is to prove a quid pro quo in the movement of money into the pockets of a politician. We heard from a source, Susan Necheles, "a former prosecutor who has defended political corruption cases," who said that if you can't prove NYS legislators' quid pro quo, "even when the people they're earning money from also want political favors from them," then "that's not criminal, it's just politics."

And in fact, we're hearing blowback from Albany about how mean USA Preet is being to them, and showboating. Just last weekend a bunch of crybabies bent the ear of the New York Daily News's Kenneth Lovett for a moderately amusing piece, "Albany lawmakers cry foul over Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara's tactics," which came with a deck so long, there seemed hardly any need to read the actual piece:

While many are praising his willfulness to take on corruption in Albany, more than a dozen lawmakers and other insiders are upset over the means by which Bharara conducts his business, including his way of keeping the spotlight on him and his method of attacking the entire legislature as one.

Now the fact is that USA Preet never said, or in my hearing hinted, any such thing. If that's what these upstanding legislators are hearing, maybe they're hearing some other voices, possibly voices much closer to them. As for horning in on a state legislature, which shouldn't even fall under his jurisdiction, and the charge of showboating, I don't think it's my imagination that until the day Smelly Shelly was arrested, when understandably all hell broke loose, USA Preet kept about as low a profile as someone in his position finally could. And even on arrest day, it wasn't the Preetster who was out front, but his guys and the FBI guys who worked on the investigation.

For that matter, I don't see any reason to believe that USA Preet would have ever gotten involved in the Albany cesspool if the State Legislature had shown the slightest inclination to set and maintain any decent sort of ethical standards. But they haven't, and they don't, and unless they're forced, they won't.


SO WE ASK WHAT DO SMELLY SHELLY AND
"MONEYBAGS MIKEY" HAVE IN COMMON?"

Yes, finally we're getting to the point I've been threatening to make for ages now. When the shocking story of Smelly Shelly's arrest broke, I still had floating around my head pieces of Julia Ioffe's January 12 New Yorker profile of the bloodied-but-unbowed Russian ex-oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovksy, "Remote Control: Can an exiled oligarch persuade Russia that Putin must go?." Actually, I've already shared my "money" quote, and I don't think I can do much better than to share it again, with maybe a little boldfacing.

First I need to repeat the context I set when I presented the quote originally: "Before Khodorkovsky was brought down by Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, you'll recall, he had at a remarkably young age amassed a fortune that made even the fortunes amassed by the other rampaging oligarchs look ho-hum. And today, while he remains, as Ioffe puts it, 'unapologetic,' he's a little, um, defensive about what he did."

We might add just this additional bit of context for the breakout of the wealth grab that characterized Russia's economic transformation from SSR to post-Soviet entity:

Boris Yeltsin’s post-Soviet government implemented radical market reforms but instituted almost no legal structure to control them. Khodorkovsky was perfectly positioned to take advantage.

Now here's what Moneybags Mikey told Ioffe (as noted, with emphasis added):

When people say, ‘It was impossible to live back then without violating the law,’ I say, ‘Come on, don’t make me out for a fool,’ ” he said, with a sneer. “When there are so few laws and they’re so imperfect, you have to be a total idiot not to be able to find a way to do what you want without violating the existing laws.”

He had only taken colossal advantage of a nearly lawless landscape. “Back then, I didn’t grasp the fact that people of a slightly older generation than me simply couldn’t adequately assess the opportunities in front of them,” he said. “In this case, we are—or I was—also victims of the same problem. Because we got property but in a flawed way.”

He went on, “We weren’t the Rockefellers, but we weren’t modern Americans, either.”

Did you get that?

MONEYBAGS MIKEY: "When there are so few laws and they’re so imperfect, you have to be a total idiot not to be able to find a way to do what you want without violating the existing laws."

And JULIA IOFFE: "He had only taken colossal advantage of a nearly lawless landscape."

Now do you see why coverage of Smelly Shelly's day of shame set me thinking again about Moneybags Mikhail?


"SO FEW LAWS, AND SO IMPERFECT":
WELCOME TO NYS LEGISLATIVE ETHICS

One refrain you'll note throughout the coverage of Smelly Shelly's legal situation: NYS legislators are in fact allowed, almost without restriction, to rack up outside income," because our Legislature is presumed to be part-time. That's right, every once in a while our legislators entrust the care of the family farmstead over to the rest of the family and the farmheads and set out on the arduous trek to Albany, where they transact some official business and promtply set out on the return trek to the farm. It's citizen democracy at its best.

Yeah, right.

The fact remains that the way the Legislature was set up, it's practically assumed that legislators will do outside work, since they can hardly be expected to support their families on the pittance coughed up by the State of New York. Actually, it's far from what you or I would probably consider a pittance, especially when you add in all the extras, in either perks or outright cash, members earn for doing pretty much anything beyond showing up.

You're probably thinking, well, that's kind of iffy. After all, when your job is doing the state's business, it might seem awfully difficult to avoid conflicts of interest in performing outside work. Still, it's easy enough to see which sources of income might fail the smell test by looking at legislators' disclosure forms for their sources of outside income. Well, ha-ha and ha! Because the legislators don't have to disclose all their sources of outside income.

This is one of those utterly unaccountable oversights that somehow the Legislature has never gotten around to rectifying. Oh, I'm sure they've meant to, and somehow every time they have, well, something came up. Like they had to hurry home to chop some firewood or slop the pigs.

This was in fact one of the things our governor, "Boy Andrew" Cuomo, had in mind when he organized that commission that caused such a ruckus to look into ethical problems in state government. It was so important to him that as soon as the the "money guys" of some state legislators being poked at by commission investigators happened also to be "money guys" of Boy Andrew. Wham, end of investigation, end of commission!

Nevertheless, just this month Boy Andrew was back at it. As the head read on a post by Newsday's Michael Gormley, "Cuomo says he will force State Legislature to accept his ethics measures." As far as I know, the governor has made no mention of forcing himself to ponder gubernatorial ethics.

Still, the law is what the law is, and when you look at the rackets set up by, or at least on behalf of, Smelly Shelly, it's hard -- at least for me -- not to think of Moneybags Mikey declaring, "When there are so few laws and they’re so imperfect, you have to be a total idiot not to be able to find a way to do what you want without violating the existing laws."

Certainly that includes finding out just how far you can stretch those laws. When you dig into the details of the crimes alleged by the federal prosecutors, and see all the devices and strategies devised to hide what is alleged to have been going on, and the gaps even in following such laws as there are, you get a pretty good idea that everyone involved understood perfectly well how bad these things stunk. So it's kind of a relief that on the basis of the evidence the U.S. attorney's office presented to that grand jury, the jurors decided that yes, the charges deserve to be pursued to trial.


ONE LAST LESSON FROM THE SERIAL
PLUNDERING OF MONEYBAGS MIKEY

I would have liked to touch on a bunch more points that crop up in Julia Ioffe's profile of Khodorkovsky, which is definitely worth a read if you have newyorker.com access. As she notes, Mikey has freely reinvented himself ideologically a number of times, by coincidence all times when his reinvented self happened to suit his current financial self-interest. Forget presenting a "democratic" alternative to Russia's once and apparently for-all-time (at least until he loses control) strongman Vladimir Putin. None of those selves would seem well adapted to a principled "for love of Mother Russia" alternative.

For example, when Khodorkovsky started making his fortune through his sleazily won control of Yukos, the former state oil monopoly, Ioffe -- drawing on a 2002 Foreign Affairs article by Leo Wolosky, "at the time the deputy director of the Economic Task Force on Russia at the Council on Foreign Relations" -- notes:

Very little of this wealth was making it back to the parts of the country that were producing it. Instead of paying taxes, which could have been used to repair the decaying Soviet infrastructure, Khodorkovsky and his colleagues were depositing the funds in an offshore network.

"Whole regions of Russia are being impoverished," Wolosky said.

And we can hardly bypass Moneybags Mikey's anounced vision for the future:

Khodorkovsky is preparing for a revolution, convinced that Putin, despite his overwhelming popularity and his support inside the military and the security services, will soon fall from power. Khodorkovsky’s efforts may seem quixotic or irrelevant to almost everyone in Russia who bothers to pay attention, and yet he persists. He has people inside Russia organizing activists and preparing them for the 2016 parliamentary elections, even though he doesn’t believe that they will have an effect on real politics in the country. He has launched a Web site where Russian journalists write about the government’s many sins. One of his allies is busy working on a post-Putin constitution. Less than a year out of prison, Khodorkovsky has grandly declared that he would guarantee Putin’s safety if he left power peacefully.

“When the moment comes, the leftists will be organized, the neo-Nazis will be organized, and Putin will have the special services at his disposal,” an Open Russia activist told me. “And, when it’s go time, we want to have our hundred thousand people in the mix, too.”

But to get back to our subject, I did promise you a story I think relates, concerning the problematic relationship between Khodorkovsky and his future nemesis Putin. By the time the latter came to power, Ioffe tells us, Mikey had already performed his most recent self-reinvention, this one breaking out of oligarchitude. The time had come for him to stabilize his wealth, for which it was necessary to make Yukos a regular international-trading-and-investment-partner-grade company, and the stark reality was that "in order for our capitalization to grow, we needed a more transparent political system."

This was certainly not a traditional oligarchical position. Surely the last thing economic pillagers and plunderers want is political transparency. But Mikey's situation had changed. He wasn't trying to make a fortune; he'd already made it, and now he wanted to hold onto it.

Which seems, alas, to have somewhat clouded his perception of what was going on around him. Putin, we're reminded, came to power "promising to rein in the oligarchs." Does it really need saying that just about the last thing he had in mind was "a more transparent political system"? Yikes!

This situation was sketched for Ioffe by Natalia Gevorkyan, "who helped conduct the interviews with Putin that make up his autobiography, First Person." Ioffe writes (with, again, some highlighting from me):

After being elected to the Presidency, in 2000, Putin began to surround himself with K.G.B. alumni and friends from St. Petersburg, men who had fallen behind in the nineties. Now that they were in power, the imposition of legal structures and transparency was not in their interest; it would only prevent them from amassing the sort of wealth that Khodorkovsky had.

By 2002, Putin had driven two powerful oligarchs––Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky––out of the country and seized their media assets. According to [onetime Khdorkovsky business partner Leo] Nevzlin, Khodorkovsky didn’t understand the signals the Kremlin was sending: show fealty or leave. On February 20, 2003, at a business round-table with Putin, Khodorkovsky pointed to a questionable deal that had caught his attention as an oilman. He implied that Igor Sechin, an old friend of Putin’s who was also in the K.G.B., had enriched himself through the deal. When Khodorkovsky asked Putin to look into it, Putin snapped, “Yukos has excess reserves, and how did it get them?” The message was clear: you got yours, now stay out of the way as we get ours.

In the months that followed, Yukos’s offices were raided by the prosecutor general’s office. That summer, shortly after Khodorkovsky’s fortieth birthday, his lieutenant Platon Lebedev was arrested. Yukos employees fled the country, and Khodorkovsky’s friends and lawyers advised him to do the same. He refused.

The rest is history.


I'M NOT SAYING SMELLY SHELLY'S NYS
IS JUST LIKE MONEYBAGS MIKEY'S RUSSIA

Still, there is a certain angle from which the view looks kind of similar. Think of the way those NYS legislators bridle at outside interference in their little empire. (Say, is this not the Empire State?) Ethics-mongerers come and go, sometimes even in the governor's office, or a U.S. attorney's. But the principle that seems honored above all else in our State Legislature is: The people who came before us got theirs; now it's our turn to get ours.

I bet President Putin would understand.

#

Maybe "Smelly Shelly" Silver is answerable to the laws we have after all: Part 1, The indictment

He used to be such an important person, not just respected but feared. Now the feds are sitting on nearly $4 million of his moolah, he's facing real prison time, and he's got some Internet clown calling him "Smelly Shelly."

by Ken

So much for the hopes of former NYS Assembly Speaker "Smelly Shelly" Silver to wriggle out from under the heap of hurt piled on him last month by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara ("Say it ain't so, Shelly Silver -- and see whether anybody believes you") at the indictment stage. (I see that I myself referred erroneously to Smelly Shelly having been "arrested and indicted." No, he was arraigned upon arrest, but the indictment(s) remained to come.) In recent days observers have been pointing to this coming Monday as a turning point in his case -- the date by which the feds would have to either properly indict him or -- well, not. There was talk that USA Preet might have difficulty getting the grand jury to issue an indictment because of the difficulty of proving a quid pro quo for the roughly $4 million they say piled up in the Smellyman's coffers via corruption.

Just yesterday morning, for example, Bloomberg News's Patricia Hurtado filed a report that was headlined "Grand Jury Deadline For Sheldon Silver Tests Case's Strength." In her report, Patricia shared insight from a couple of insiders:

Susan Necheles, a former prosecutor who has defended political corruption cases, raised doubts about the charges and said they’ll fail without convincing proof of a quid pro quo.

“We have a part-time Legislature which is allowed to earn money on the side, even when the people they’re earning money from also want political favors from them,” she said.

“That’s not criminal,” she added. “It’s just politics.”

E. Stewart Jones Jr., a lawyer who last year won an acquittal for former New York Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno on corruption charges, said there’s nothing illegal about referral-fee arrangements that are disclosed to clients.

“These relationships have existed for decades,” he said in an interview. “The lawyers have done nothing but refer a case, and that’s been permissible and ethical.”

No doubt, proving a quid pro quo where political corruption is concerned is tough. You don't usually find a document along the lines of:

I, the undersigned [insert name here], acknowledge payment of $[insert amount here] from [insert name of political figure and office held] in exchange for his/her promise to [insert brief description of favor promised; please limit to 250 words, or attach extra sheets].

Signed, [sign document here]

Or audio or video tapes to the same effect.

Sure, there are dumb pols, but you like to think that a guy who -- speaking entirely hypothetically here -- has the smarts to engage in a couple of rackets that net him a minimum of $4 isn't apt to be that stupid. On the other hand, it isn't entirely unknown for a prosecutor to assemble a case with circumstantial elements that require a jury to connect some of the dots, based on the evidence.


SMELLY SHELLY IS INDICTED

Unfortuntately for Smelly Shelly, he's a step closer to having his fate decided by a jury, because yesterday the feds got their grand-jury thumbs-up. The NYT's William K. Rashbaum reports (links onsite):

A federal grand jury in Manhattan voted on Thursday to indict Sheldon Silver on the fraud and extortion charges that were the basis of his arrest last month, and led to his ouster as speaker of the State Assembly.

Mr. Silver was arrested on Jan. 22 on a five-count criminal complaint that detailed two alleged bribery and kickback schemes in a case that has upended Albany. The three-count indictment, handed up in the United States District Courthouse in Manhattan, charged him with mail fraud, wire fraud and extortion under the color of official right.

Two charges in the complaint — a mail fraud conspiracy count and an extortion conspiracy count — were not included in the indictment. A spokesman for the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan, which is prosecuting the case, declined to comment on why the counts had been dropped.

The indictment of Mr. Silver, 71, a Lower East Side Democrat who had served as the powerful speaker for two decades, suggests there is little prospect of plea discussions at this stage in the case, and moves the matter toward a possible trial. He remains a member of the Assembly.

Mr. Silver’s lawyers, Joel Cohen and Steven Molo, said in a statement that their client was not guilty. “We can now begin to fight for his total vindication,” the statement said. “We will do our fighting where it should be done: in court.”

Mr. Silver is scheduled to be arraigned at 3 p.m. on Tuesday before Judge Valerie E. Caproni of Federal District Court. She will preside over the case.

So at this point all that stands between Shelly and a jury of his peers is whatever plea agreement his legal team can hammer out with the prosecutors. If you wanted to look at the process cynically, you might say that the principal effect of today's development is to dramatically redefine the positions from which the two sides will now be negotiating.

No doubt, though, the prosecution team is going to be hearing that phrase "quid pro quo" a lot during the back-and-forth. Proving that Smelly Shelly -- and here, it shoujld be noted, we're no longer speaking hypothetically -- used his position to stockpile potential lawsuit referrals in exchange for the millions of dollars in referral fees he racked up, or that he used his control of Assembly purse strings to move public moneys into the hands of other parties in exchange for other payoffs -- this really and truly isn't a snap.

Don't get USA Preet mad!

But the Smellyman's team has to know now that USA Preet isn't about to back down. His public statements have given strong indication that he's really peeved about the blatant corruption in Albany, not least because of the way our governor, Boy Andrew, summarily shut down the investigation he himself had set in motion -- peeved both by the rampant corruption and by the way he got snookered into cooperating into an investigation that turned out, as soon as investigators' inquiry into some of the legislators' money guys turned out to be looking at some of Boy Andrew's money guys, to be just a bit of political theater, a mere side show really, that could be shut down at the governor's convenience (or perhaps inconvenience).

Now if there's anything we learned from all those seasons of Law and Order, it's that prosecutors sometimes take the cases they prosecute personally. And while you don't want this to get out of hand -- law enforcement really shouldn't be a matter of a class of lawyers pursuing grudges -- it's certainly not entirely a bad thing. It might have been nice if USA Preet and other federal and state prosecutors had taken the massive malfeasances involved in the Great Economic Meltdown of 2008 more personally. Yes, yes, I know, a U.S. attorney can never get ahead of what he can prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt, and sometimes making cases that you lose is worse than not making any cases at all. Still . . .

Let's not pretend that Smelly Shelly is, even if everything the feds say about him is true, the most corrupt officeholder in the U.S. today. But what he's accused of is big-time, and the amount of trust invested in someone who occupied as powerful a position as he did has to make him accountable. It might be nice if some other prosecutors in other jurisdictions were inspired by USA Preet's present example.


TOMORROW: Once and for all, what do Smelly Shelly and "Moneybags Mikey" Khodorkovsky have in common?

#

Andrew Cuomo thinks pols are either talkers or doers -- guess which he thinks he is

The New Yorker caption for this picture is: "At close range, the Governor is a formidable presence. His speech comes in aggressive, self-confident bursts, especially when he's sizing up the state of political play, and he is relentless." I thought this was kind of funny, because just looking at the picture, I thought of some tacky horror-movie villain.

by Ken

It's about as old an argument as there is in the field of government: compromising to get stuff done vs. holding out for getting the right thing(s) done. Of course it's kind of a fake dichotomy. I think most people understand that at points in the political process, it's necessary to make compromises, and you can't just talk about "getting stuff done" without facing up to hard questions about what stuff needs to be done, and how much bad stuff you can allow to get done in order to get better stuff done.

Nevertheless, I think NYS Gov. Andrew Cuomo has made no secret of the fact that he's a "getting stuff done" kind of guy. And as much as he revered his late father, onetime three-term Gov. Mario Cuomo, and as intimately involved as he was in his father's political career, which after all blossomed pretty late for a pol, as an offshoot of his law practice and community involvement, Andrew's idea of being governor is by no means the same as his father's.

You see --


ANDREW'S MODEL FOR POLITICAL "DOING"
ISN'T HIS FATHER -- IT'S BILL CLINTON

Over the last several months, it turns out, The New Yorker's esteemed legal correspondent, Jeffrey Toobin, has been working on a profile of Andrew, which appears now in the February 16 issue, as "The Albany Chronicles: How Andrew Cuomo gets his way."

It is, as you would expect of a New Yorker profile, a very long piece. And I don't propose to get very far or deep into it. But at the start, we get some pretty sharp defining of political terms. And I thought it would be interesting just to isolate some of this.

Starting with Andrew's view of himself as a pol vs. his father.

Mario Cuomo defined his three terms as governor with oratory; Andrew Cuomo has sought to build his reputation in a different way. He made clear that his primary inspiration when it came to dealing with legislators was Bill Clinton, not his father. During Clinton’s second term, Cuomo served in his Cabinet, as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. “I was watching, and they were impeaching the guy, and he was still there every day, asking them how they were doing, trying to make deals,” Cuomo recalled, his voice bearing the hard consonants of Queens, where he grew up. “My job is to get to yes,” he said. “If I don’t make a deal, I get nothing done. If I get nothing done, I am a failure. If the objective is to make a nice speech, it means nothing.”

IN CASE YOU HAVEN'T GOTTEN THE POINT,
ANDREW BELIEVES IN DOING, NOT TALKING

Interestingly, Andrew thinks of Barack Obama as a talker, not a doer!

For better and for worse, Cuomo views his work as a series of transactions. He disdains rhetoric; he prizes results. He has had several accomplishments in his first four years. Against heavy odds, he pushed through a marriage-equality bill in the Legislature; he banned fracking; he tightened the state’s gun-control laws; he closed thirteen prisons; he started construction on the first major bridge in the state in fifty years, a replacement for the Tappan Zee, across the Hudson; and he passed four balanced budgets in a row, all on time. Deeds, not words—that might as well be the motto of Cuomo’s administration. In nearly every speech, and in many conversations, Cuomo dismisses the importance of political talk. As if adopting a typical voter’s view of President Obama, Cuomo told me, “Beautiful rhetoric, beautiful vision—I’m sold on the vision—and what happens? There was no product. There was no actualization of the vision. Now I’m more disillusioned than I was when we started. You brought me up with that beautiful language, and you got me excited and I thought it was possible and then it wasn’t.”

LET'S LOOK, FOR EXAMPLE, AT THE CORRUPTION
INQUIRY ANDREW STARTED, THEN SHUT DOWN

Jeffrey T provides us with background:

In the summer of 2013, Cuomo created what became known as the Moreland Commission, a bipartisan group of leading citizens, who were to spend up to eighteen months investigating public corruption in the state. The commission’s inquiries focussed in particular on whether the outside business activities of state legislators should be subject to tighter regulation. By early 2014, [Assembly Speaker Sheldon[ Silver and his colleagues had come to loathe the commission, and went to court to thwart its inquiries. Around the same time, Cuomo was seeking to pass his annual budget, and he hoped to do that on schedule. So, just nine months after Cuomo created the commission, he abruptly shut it down. Silver passed Cuomo’s budget; Cuomo rid Silver of the meddlesome commission.

ANDREW TELLS JEFFREY THAT HE
THINKS HE GOT THE THING JUST RIGHT

On the day after [Assembly Speaker Sheldon] Silver’s arrest, I met with Cuomo in his New York City office, on Third Avenue. I asked him about the widespread contention that the charges against Silver showed that Cuomo should have let the Moreland investigation run its course.

“They’re exactly wrong,” Cuomo said. “What happened on the Moreland Commission is they subpoenaed the outside info of the Senate and the Assembly, in a fairly aggressive way. The Senate and the Assembly join together, the Republicans and the Democrats, in a motion to quash the subpoenas. And they are successful in the lower court. And we’re stuck for, like, four months.”

Closing down Moreland, in Cuomo’s view, broke the logjam. After the shutdown, the Legislature passed modest ethics reform, which increased penalties for bribery and established a pilot program for public financing in the next state comptroller’s race. Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney in Manhattan, demanded the Moreland files and used them to make the case against Silver and, perhaps, others. “We get the legislation I wanted in the first place,” Cuomo told me. “Moreland takes the same cases and the same subpoenas and hands them to local D.A.s and to Preet.” Cuomo disclaims any responsibility for Silver’s possible misdeeds. “If Anthony Weiner shows his private parts, do you blame Obama? These are criminal acts of individual legislators. What would you have me do?”

AND YET ON THE OTHER HAND --

Each step in Cuomo’s analysis makes a kind of tactical sense. But he shut down the investigation even though the Legislature failed to make significant political reforms. Bharara and the other prosecutors obtained the commission’s files only because Bharara publicly expressed his outrage at Cuomo’s action. * Cuomo’s explanation ignored the symbolism: How could there ever be a legitimate reason, in a state long beset with corruption in its Legislature, for the governor to short-circuit his own marquee attempt to clean it up?

I DON'T MEAN TO COME TO ANY GRAND CONCLUSION

I just thought these very old issues of governance are framed pretty interestingly here.

#

While pondering the legal mess surrounding NYS Assembly Speaker "Smelly Shelly" Silver, Jeffrey Toobin offers us a "war story" from yesteryear (with update: Bye-bye, Shelly)

UPDATE: Smelly Shelly gets the heave-ho


It appears that Assembly Dems used the day off they scheduled for themselves yesterday -- free from GOP interference that might have occurred if the Assembly had been in session -- to reach agreement on the future of their embattled leader. Wednesday morning DNAinfo New York's Jeff Mays reports:

Sheldon Silver Out as Assembly Speaker

NEW YORK CITY — Sheldon Silver is out as speaker of the Assembly just days after his arrest on federal corruption charges in an alleged bribery and kickback scheme.

"On Monday, there will be a vacancy in the office of speaker," Assembly Majority Leader Joe Morelle said in Albany Tuesday while surrounded by most members of the Democratic conference.

The Assembly will elect a new speaker on Feb. 10. Morelle, a Rochester Democrat who is considered a top candidate for speaker, will serve as interim speaker until that election, after a special vote to change the rules to allow him to do so.

Silver, who has maintained that he is innocent and has said he will be vindicated, is aware of the decision, Morelle said.

"The speaker will not impede the transition. He knows about it. He has asked me to say that he will not impede the transition," Morelle said.

It is unclear if Silver, who has represented the Lower East Side and Downtown since 1977, will resign or whether the Assembly will force him out.

Asked what would happen if Silver refused to resign, Morelle said, "It means that on Monday there will be a vacancy in the office of speaker. The speaker knows that. The members know that. We are united in purpose and that's going to happen." . . .

•     •     •

by Ken

I still owe you a post on my imagined link between former Russian oil oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky and now-indicted NYS Assembly Speaker "Smelly Shelly" Silver, charged -- as The New Yorker's esteemed legal correspondent, Jeffrey Toobin, sums it up -- "with taking more than four million dollars in bribes disguised as legal fees." That post is still coming.

Meanwhile, a quick update. Once the immediate dust of Smelly Shelly's arrest and indictment settled, it began occurring to all concerned, even the Smellyman himself, despite his protestations of innocence and his plan for vinciation, that while the case moves through whatever process it will be moving through, the Assembly can't proceed as if nothing has happened. Naturally there were calls for Shelly to quit, calls that have gone unanswered, unless we count the implied "not on your life" as a reply.

A cynical observer might observe that if Shelly gives up his Assembly seat in general and the Assembly speakership in particular, he gives up his best, perhaps only, bargaining chip. After all, didn't that work out just great for indicted Staten Island Congressman "Mikey Suits" Grimm? It wasn't till after Mikey was reelected to Congress in November that it became clear just how important holding on to his House seat was for him. However much federal prosecutors might have liked to pursue the case, not just the already announced indictments but whatever additional charges were being investigated, their first priority had to be getting the slimeball out of Congress.

Possibly no such thing is on Smelly Shelly's mind, but it clearly has occurred to him that while his legal troubles are hanging over him, he can't simply continue to go about his, and the state's, business. He can't, for example, continue being one of those storied "three men in a room," watching over the state's business along with the governor and the state Senate majority leader. In fact, there's an awful lot of his job that can't very well be done by someone in the position he now finds himself in. And so he began talking about delegating powers to certain carefully selected (and apparently still to be selected) Assembly members. It's still not clear whether he's talking about all of his powers or only certain selected powers.

Meanwhile Assembly Democrats appear to be thinking more along the lines of "Shut the door behind you on your way the hell out, Shelly!" Again, this is a bit vague -- are they suggesting, for example, that Shelly merely step down from the speakership or quit his Assembly seat altogether? It's not clear. It's not clear, for that matter, how keen Shelly would be to continue hanging out in Albany as a back-bencher.

For what it's worth, no, there is no obvious candidate to take over the speakership, and by "obvious candidate" I mean "anyone who has the votes" to seal the deal, even if, as Assembly Democrats seem to be hoping, Smelly Shelly simply disappeared. It's said, though, that part of the thinking of the Assembly Democrats in calling off today's session in addition to yesterday's is that minimizes the opportunity for Assembly Republicans to share their thoughts on the subject in any official way.

ONCE UPON A TIME --

So the situation remains, shall we say, "fluid." At this moment the aforementioned Jeffrey Toobin has chosen to offer us a little legal comic diversion, diversion with perhaps a tinge of legal "moral," in the form of a newyorker.com blogpost called "Sheldon Silver and the Lawyers of New York." Noting that "much of the case against Silver rests on his relationship with Weitz and Luxenberg, the law firm where he was employed for many years," and that that firm was co-founded by "a very successful lawyer named Perry Weitz," Jeffrey asks us to permit him "a war story," concerning the law firm where Perry Weitz started his career, Morris Eisen, P.C., "an outfit so extravagantly corrupt, so hilariously dishonest, and so creatively malign as almost to defy belief." (Morris Eisen, Jeffrey informs us, was Perry Weitz's father-in-law.)

For the record, Jeffrey makes clear that "the young Perry Weitz was not implicated in the original investigation or in the criminal trial of the Eisen firm," and for that matter that "while the firm of Weitz and Luxenberg, which specializes in personal-injury cases involving asbestos, is mentioned more than twenty times in the criminal complaint against Silver, neither Weitz nor the firm has been charged with any crimes," and the firm claims to be cooperating fully with authorities. He allows that this blast from the past may be "just a big coincidence." Or maybe not, he seems to suggest.

JEFFREY TOOBIN'S "WAR STORY"

When I was a federal prosecutor in the early nineties, in Brooklyn, my favorite case involved the law firm known as Morris Eisen, P.C., an outfit so extravagantly corrupt, so hilariously dishonest, and so creatively malign as almost to defy belief. The firm dealt largely in personal-injury cases, often representing individuals against those thought to have deep pockets, especially the City of New York. (New York taxpayers, who were the actual defendants in these cases, may not have thought of themselves in that way.)

The business model for the Eisen firm was to fake evidence. Sometimes the lawyers embellished the facts of accidents, and sometimes it simply invented incidents altogether. Perry Weitz started his legal career at the Eisen firm, and Eisen himself was his father-in-law.

The Eisen team had great imaginations. Many of the firm’s cases involved accidents purportedly caused by potholes on New York City streets. One lawyer shrunk a twelve-inch ruler on a photocopier so that it was only about eight inches long. The shortened ruler would be placed by potholes and photographed, so that the potholes looked bigger than they actually were. (Sometimes, firm operatives just used pickaxes to make the potholes bigger.) An Eisen employee was injured at a firm softball game; after the game, the group went to find a suitable pothole at Aqueduct Raceway (deep pocket), where they could pretend the accident took place. The firm once won a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar settlement against the city because of an accident purportedly caused by a pothole on the Queensboro Bridge. A bystander named Arnold Lustig testified that he saw both the pothole and the accident. Six months later, the firm had another case involving a man killed on the Whitestone Expressway, in the Bronx. The eyewitness in that case? Arnold Lustig again! Alas, as my colleagues Jerome Roth and Faith Gay demonstrated, in what proved to be our office’s first Eisen trial, Lustig was actually in prison at the time he claimed to have seen the second accident.

As the Second Circuit Court of Appeals wrote, in affirming the convictions of seven Eisen firm attorneys, investigators, and office personnel (including Eisen himself), ‘‘The methods by which the frauds were accomplished included pressuring accident witnesses to testify falsely, paying individuals to testify falsely that they had witnessed accidents, paying unfavorable witnesses not to testify, and creating false photographs, documents, and physical evidence of accidents for use before and during trial.’’

Eisen was sentenced to fifty-seven months in prison, and served three years. He was disbarred in January, 1992. Reflecting the chutzpah that characterized the entire firm enterprise, Eisen commenced lawsuits, following his release, claiming that other firms had stolen legal fees that were legally due to the tragically disbanded Eisen firm.

The young Perry Weitz was not implicated in the original investigation or in the criminal trial of the Eisen firm. It is true, too, that, while the firm of Weitz and Luxenberg, which specializes in personal-injury cases involving asbestos, is mentioned more than twenty times in the criminal complaint against Silver, neither Weitz nor the firm has been charged with any crimes. A firm spokeswoman told the Wall Street Journal that the firm ‘‘fully coöperated’’ with the investigation and ‘‘wasn’t involved in any of the alleged wrongdoing.’’ In other words, according to the Weitz firm, its founder’s connection to one of the most notorious (proven) scams in New York legal history and one of the most notorious (alleged) scams is New York political history is just a big coincidence.

Perhaps it is. After all, in a parody-defying example of scandal convergence, Eisen himself had an appearance in yet another story, when, a dozen years after getting out of prison, he turned out to be one of the victims of Bernard Madoff’s own long con.

SCHEDULE NOTE: Next post at 3pm PT/6pm ET 

#