By Terry Golway
(Terry Golway is author of Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics, due out in March. He is director of the Kean University Center for History, Politics and Policy. Any opinions expressed here are the author’s own.)
He was hardly a household name, and he owed his authority to the votes of a few thousand people on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. But for more than two decades, Sheldon Silver was one of the most powerful people in New York politics. He held up budgets, cut deals, blocked projects he didn’t like and doled out public dollars with little accountability. Governors came and went, but Silver seemingly was speaker of the New York State Assembly for life — beyond the reach of good-government critics, investigative journalists and ethics watchdogs. Until last week.
On January 22, Silver was arrested, handcuffed, fingerprinted and brought before a judge, accused of an array of corruption charges. (Silver did not have to enter a plea, but he has denied the accusations.)
Photographs of him being led away from a courtroom showed not an imperious power-broker, but a stooped, 70-year-old man with a road map of
