Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver rolls in dough from controversial law-firm income
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver had to reveal his outside income and assets for the first time yesterday — and it turns out he’s worth millions.
The powerhouse law firm Weitz & Luxenberg paid Silver between $350,000 and $450,000 last year for his part-time “of counsel” services, according to newly released financial statements.
But that’s not the only lucrative financial relationship the speaker has with his law partners.
The Legislature’s most powerful Democrat also invested a hefty portion of his personal wealth in a separate lending business founded by Perry Weitz and Arthur Luxenberg.
Silver reported being owed between $500,000 and $750,000 in notes he issued to Counsel Financial, a company that issues loans to law firms. Weitz is chairman and Luxenberg is vice chairman of Counsel Financial.
Silver also reported receiving between $100,000 and $150,000 in principal interest from Counsel Financial last year.
The Post previously reported that the firm lent money at 18 percent interest to the law firm representing some 9,800 Ground Zero workers who filed toxic-illness suits against the city. Outraged, the federal judge prevented the firm from charging the 9/11 responders.
In total, Silver is worth millions.
He listed more than $2 million in stock assets, $1.5 million squirreled away in retirement funds and deferred compensation, and between $550,000 and $750,000 in total compensation and dividends — on top of his $121,000 salary as speaker.
As for his investments, Silver reported selling Ford stock valued at between $150,000 and $250,000.
He also owns stock in more than 70 firms including: Anheuser-Busch, Facebook, Coach, AOL, Cisco, Citigroup, Marathon Oil, Oracle, Time Warner, Bank of America, Alpha Orbit, Pfizer, General Electric, Texas Instruments, Verizon, DirectTV, Walt Disney Co., Hasbro, ExxonMobil, American Express and JPMorgan Chase.
He also invested in a venture-capital fund, Lerer Ventures, that financed the BuzzFeed news Web site.
Addressing his extensive stock portfolio, Silver spokesman Michael Whyland said, “The speaker invests in blue-chip stocks, as do millions of Americans.”
New ethics rules require lawmakers for the first time to disclose ranges of their outside sources of income.
The Joint Commission on Public Ethics posted the reports yesterday — on the eve of the Fourth of July weekend. The reports were delivered to the agency on June 30.
Critics have complained for years that Silver is the king of the trial-lawyers bar with a goal of blocking legislation to curb excessive lawsuits — and they argue it’s a conflict for him to be employed by W&L.
Earlier this week, The Post reported that Silver’s law firm was using its Web site to try to solicit sex-abuse victims as clients while the speaker fends off lawsuits accusing him of covering up sex-harassment claims against disgraced ex-Assemblyman Vito Lopez.
“It certainly raises the pressure on Silver to let the public know what he’s doing to earn this income,” said Bill Mahoney of the New York Public Interest Research Group.
Said GOP consultant Bill O’Reilly, “The public deserves to know exactly what Shelly Silver is doing for Weitz & Luxenberg, other than blocking every meaningful tort-reform bill in Albany. Are they paying him for actual work, or is he on the payroll to do the trial lawyers’ bidding in the state capital?”
In his financial statement, Silver described his work for W&L this way: “General practice of law with emphasis on representation of individual clients and personal injury actions and ‘of counsel’ to law firm.”
He didn’t list his clients — because he didn’t have to.
The ethics law approved in 2011 requires legislators to name only clients who have business before the state, or whom they represented after July 1, 2012. “They had time to clean things up,” an Albany insider said.
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Hearken to the words of Ferdinand Lundberg, from his 1968 best-seller The Rich and the Super-Rich:
"...it is a settled conclusion among seasoned observers that, Congress apart as a separate case, the lower legislatures -- state, county, and municipal -- are Augean stables of misfeasance, malfeasance, and nonfeasance from year to year and decade to decade, and that they are preponderantly staffed by riffraff, or what the police define as "undesirables," people who if they were not in influential positions would be unceremoniously told to "keep moving." Exceptions among them are minor. Many of them, including congressmen, refuse to go before the television cameras because it is then so plainly obvious to everybody what they are. Their whole demeanor arouses instant distrust in the intelligent. They are, all too painfully, type-cast for the race track, the sideshow carnival, the back alley, the peep show, the low tavern, the bordello, the dive. Evasiveness, dissimulation, insincerity shine through their false bonhomie like beacon lights....
"As to other legislatures, Senator Estes Kefauver found representatives of the vulpine Chicago Mafia ensconced in the Illinois legislature, which has been rocked by one scandal of the standard variety after the other off and on for seventy-five years. What he didn't bring out was that the Mafians were clearly superior types to many non-Mafians.
"Public attention, indeed, usually centers on only a few lower legislatures -- Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois -- and the impression is thereby fostered in the unduly trusting that the ones they don't hear about are on the level. But such an impression is false. The ones just mentioned come into more frequent view because their jurisdictions are extremely competitive and the pickings are richer. Fierce fights over the spoils generate telltale commotion. Most of the states are quieter under strict one-party quasi-Soviet Establishment dominance, with local newspapers cut in on the gravy. Public criticism and information are held to a minimum, grousers are thrown a bone, and not many in the local populace know or really care. Even so, scandalous goings-on explode into view from time to time in Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Missouri and elsewhere -- no state excepted. Any enterprising newspaper at any time could send an aggressive reporter into any one of them and come up with enough ordure to make the Founding Fathers collectively vomit up their very souls in their graves."
That's Albany, top to bottom -- and I don't omit the Governor's Mansion.
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