(MENAFN- Al-Anbaa) 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 Jan. 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 worry on his face. U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, whose office led the investigation, announced Silver's indictment with a blistering statement accusing him of amassing "a tremendous personal fortune through the abuse of [his] political power."
Silver's alleged crimes are hardly unique to New York City, Albany or, indeed, the United States. Political systems and cultures may vary widely from nation to nation, continent to continent, but corruption is universal. From Bejing to Kabul, Moscow to Mexico City, beleaguered citizens surely would recognize Silver, or former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, or former New York Representative Michael Grimm as variations on the familiar lament that power corrupts, and that absolute power corrupts absolutely.
But here's the difference between the United States and many truly lawless nations that happen to be strategically important to Washington at the moment: Corrupt U.S. politicians invariably get caught, sometimes because they overreach, sometimes because an ambitious prosecutor or an investigative reporter comes along to expose the scam.
Nobody in New York was more powerful that William Tweed, the infamous boss of the Tammany Hall political machine, in the years following the Civil War. He had allies in all the right places, particularly the comptroller's office, where the city's books were cooked until they were overdone. But when a political enemy brought evidence of Tweed's corruption to the New York Times in 1871, the powerful boss found himself alone and exposed. Tweed was arrested, convicted and sent to prison, where he died a broken man in 1878 at age 55.
Many a dubious private fortune was made during the Gilded Age; robber barons like Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie reaped vast riches. But Tweed, the face of public corruption, was the one notorious figure from the era to serve time in prison.
Corruption, from the venal to the vast, is so much a part of the American political landscape that comparisons occasionally are made to less developed nations where payoffs and graft are an accepted way of doing business. The huge enterprise that Silver is accused of running, one that prosecutors say netted him nearly $4 million in bribes disguised as legal fees, sounds like something many Americans would associate with, say, Afghanistan, Iraq or Pakistan - places where, not coincidentally, hundreds of billions of dollars have been funneled to power brokers, high and low, over the past 15 years.
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