Update January 22, 2015 – Silver has now indeed been arrested and charged in an alleged corruption and bribery scheme. The full criminal complaint can be found here: Sheldon Silver Criminal Complaint
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As Yahoo Sports writer Kevin Iole speculated in 2013, Legal MMA in New York is not likely “until assembly speaker Sheldon Silver’s gone“.
In a surprising twist of events, the New York Times reports that Silver is expected to be arrested tomorrow on corruption charges. The Times reports as follows:
Federal authorities are expected to arrest Sheldon Silver, the powerful speaker of the New York State Assembly, on corruption charges on Thursday, people with knowledge of the matter said, in a case that is likely to throw Albany into disarray.
The investigation that led to the expected charges against Mr. Silver, a Democrat from the Lower East Side of Manhattan who has served as speaker for more than two decades, began after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in March abruptly shut down an anticorruption commission he had created in 2013.
Details of the specific charges to be brought against Mr. Silver were unclear on Wednesday night, but one of the people with knowledge of the matter said they stemmed from payments that Mr. Silver received from a small law firm that specializes in seeking reductions of New York City real estate taxes. Mr. Silver failed to list the payments from the firm, Goldberg & Iryami, on his annual financial disclosure filings, as required.
The total amount of the payments was unclear, but another person has said they were substantial and were made over several years.
This New York Daily News article from late 2014 may have insight into the potential background facts behind the rumoured arrest.
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