Sheldon Silver, Former N.Y. Assembly Speaker, Dies at 77

ALBANY, N.Y. — Sheldon Silver, the once-indomitable leader of the New York State Assembly whose career and reputation were undone by a 2015 corruption conviction, died on Monday. He was 77.

Mr. Silver had been incarcerated at Devens Federal Medical Center in Ayer, Mass., according to Judith Rapfogel, his former chief of staff. Kristie A. Breshears, a spokeswoman for the federal Bureau of Prisons, said in a statement that Mr. Silver had died at the nearby Nashoba Valley Medical Center.

The cause of death was not immediately clear.

A Lower East Side Democrat whose rise to power began with his election in 1976, Mr. Silver was known as a master of Albany’s often labyrinthian levers of power, controlling the Assembly — and its dominant Democrat majority — as its speaker for two decades, from 1994 to 2015.

Soft-spoken and sphinxian in his public statements and Capitol-corridor interviews, Mr. Silver nonetheless wielded outsize influence, capable of pushing liberal causes like raising the minimum wage and building affordable housing. At the same time, he was also capable of thwarting priorities of mayors and governors — he served alongside six, from Hugh Carey to Andrew M. Cuomo — when he cared to, including such flashy proposals as a stadium on the west side of Manhattan.

That dominance came tumbling down in early 2015 when Mr. Silver was accused of accepting nearly $4 million in illicit payments in exchange for taking official actions for a cancer researcher at Columbia University and two real estate developers.

Found guilty of federal corruption charges in late 2015, Mr. Silver managed to successfully challenge that conviction, resulting in its being overturned in 2017. A second trial — and a second conviction — followed in 2018. Still, Mr. Silver managed to avoid prison until 2020, when his legal machinations finally ground to a halt, leaving him to serve a six-and-a-half-year sentence.

Mr. Silver won a brief reprieve from prison life last spring when he was furloughed because of the coronavirus pandemic. After a public outcry, Mr. Silver was returned to prison two days later.

On Monday, longtime former colleagues of Mr. Silver sought to reconcile the circumstances of his downfall with what they see as his achievements during two decades as the leader of the Assembly.

Assemblyman Charles D. Lavine, a Democrat from Long Island, said Mr. Silver would be remembered for being a fierce defender of New York City’s priorities, including in the aftermath of 9/11, and for forcefully pursuing liberal policies around housing and education.

Mr. Lavine likened Mr. Silver to “a mythic, tragic hero who did some wonderful things for our state,” but, he added, “brought shame on our state and on his name.”

His downfall — and that of his Republican counterpart in the State Senate, Dean Skelos, who was also convicted of federal corruption charges in 2015 — presaged a shifting balance of power in Albany, where most deals were traditionally brokered by “three-men-in-a-room,” meaning the governor, speaker of the Assembly and Senate leader.

Indeed, Mr. Silver’s successor, Carl Heastie, a Bronx Democrat who is also the Assembly’s first Black speaker, has been considered more of a consensus seeker than the iron-fisted Mr. Silver. And the historical convention of “three men” making important decisions has also been shelved, at least temporarily, as the jobs of governor and leader of the State Senate are now filled by women.

William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting.