A federal prosecutor had three choice words to describe former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver at the start of his influence-peddling trial Tuesday — “Power. Greed. Corruption.’’
Assistant US Attorney Carrie Cohen repeated the mantra at the beginning and end of her opening statements in Manhattan federal court, painting Silver as the quintessential money-grubbing, lawless power broker.
“This is a case about a powerful politician who betrayed those that he was supposed to serve in order to line his pockets,’’ Cohen said as her boss, Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara, looked on.
“He picked the people’s pocket to line his own,’’ she said.
“Year after year after year, Sheldon Silver was on the take [but] he did not meet his bribers in dark, shady alleys to take bags of cash. He was far too calculating for that,’’ the prosecutor said.
Instead, he schemed behind the scenes to grab nearly $4 million in kickbacks in a blatant “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’’ arrangement, Cohen said.
He “then netted himself nearly another million dollars through laundering his criminal proceeds, totaling about $5 million.
“This was not politics as usual. This was bribes and kickbacks, illegal criminal conduct,’’ Cohen said.
“At the end of this trial, the truth will come out. The truth about the defendant’s power. The truth about the defendant’s greed. The truth about the defendant’s corruption.”
The Democratic Manhattan assemblyman, 71, remained stone-faced as the prosecutor ripped into his legacy.
He faces up to 20 years behind bars on each of six of the seven counts against him. The raps include conspiracy, wire and mail fraud and extortion.
Silver — once one of the so-called “three men in a room,” along with the Senate majority leader and governor, who control the state’s budget and legislative action — is accused of steering taxpayer-funded grant money to a Columbia University oncologist in exchange for the doctor referring patients with asbestos-related illnesses to his law firm, Weitz & Luxenberg.
Cohen said the grant money came from a “secret pot’’ that Silver alone controlled.
Silver received millions of dollars in kickbacks from the firm, at which he remained “of counsel” while he served as Assembly leader, the feds say.
“That’s what a bribery scheme is, an illegal quid pro quo, this for that,’’ Cohen said.
The cancer doctor, Rober Taub, is expected to take the stand Wednesday as a star witness for the prosecution.
Silver also is accused of having dirty dealings with big real estate developers, allegedly getting them to bring their business to his firm in exchange for helping them on issues before the Legislature. Silver received hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result, the feds say.
“Same as with the asbestos scheme: same playbook, same game plan,’’ Cohen said.
But Silver’s lawyer, Steven Molo, scoffed that the allegations were simply much ado about nothing. He tried to paint Silver as a homegrown New Yorker to whom the jurors could relate.
“Mr. Silver is about as New York as New York gets. He grew up not far from here on the Lower East Side, where his father ran a hardware store,” Molo said in his opening statement.
The lawyer even described the assemblyman as having “represented the Statue of Liberty’’ — because it is located in his district.
“They don’t like the fact that friends might do favors for friends,’’ Molo said of prosecutors.
“They look at conduct which is normal and legal and they say, ‘This is illegal.’ ”
But “none of those things are a crime,” he insisted.
The more than $3 million in fees that Silver received for getting cancer patients referred to his firm is standard practice, the lawyer said.
As for the developers, “you’re going to hear they didn’t even think they were paying a bribe. Some bribe scheme,’’ Molo said.
“There are a lot of reasons why people might not like politicians,’’ he said. But “just because he’s a politician doesn’t mean that Mr. Silver is not entitled to the same presumption of innocence that all of us … enjoys.”
The government’s first witness, a Scarsdale assemblywoman, actually knocked a hole in their case when Molo forced her to admit similarities between Silver’s conduct and her own.
Assemblywoman Amy Paulin was expected to give jurors a primer on how the Assembly operates.
But she was exposed as having her own ethics conflicts when Molo pointed out that her husband owns $400,000 in stock in Con Ed and Merck, yet she still introduced legislation involving them.
It was one of the rare times in the proceeding that Silver looked pleased.
Perry Weitz, the law-firm founder, took the stand next, testifying that he brought Silver on board with the expectation that he “would help brand the firm … He knew everyone.’’
Weitz tried to smile Silver as he stepped off the stand, but his ex-employee didn’t acknowledge him by continuing to look straight ahead.
Additional reporting by Vinita Singla and Kate Sheehy