Speaker of the Assembly Blames Dead Man with Same Name For Stopping Project
Silver Apparently Caught by NY Times in Stupid Lie

Speaker Sheldon Silver

The New York Times reported last week that NYS Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver tried to evade responsibility for blocking low-income housing on Manhattan's Lower East Side by blaming - get this - another guy named Sheldon Silver.

After the story broke, Silver's staff asked the Times for a correction, then dropped the request after the Times produced letters related to the matter written on Silver's official Assembly stationery.

Silver was caught in a bald-faced lie.

Back in the 1970s, Silver, who is Jewish, as a young assemblyman and lawyer, worked in concert with the United Jewish Council, to block a low-income housing project planned on a 20 acre vacant site on Delancey St. in the Lower East Side of Manhattan near a synagogue in his district.

After the Times article was published, Silver, a strong advocate of high welfare benefits of unlimited duration, said the man who fought to prevent the subsidized housing project was not he, but another man, a Sheldon E. Silver, a Minneapolis-born lawyer, who moved to Brooklyn in the early 1970s and died in 2001.

"I was forever confused with this guy," Silver complained at a breakfast he hosted on Thursday at the state Democratic Party convention.

Silver's spokesman, Michael Whyland, told the Times it was the dead Silver who "was a counsel to U.J.C. in the '70s and early '80s."

Sheldon E. Silver did work for a brief time as a lawyer for the Jewish group in the mid 70's.

Unfortunately for Silver, letters written on official stationery from the Assembly and minutes of the meetings with city officials identify Silver, the lawmaker, not the dead lawyer from Brooklyn.

One of the letters left little doubt which Silver it was. It read "I am also the assemblyman for the district in which the synagogue is located and have a keen interest in having the plaintiff congregants continue to use their synagogue in the future," he wrote.

The late Sheldon E. Silver was never an assemblyman. He built a small law practice, as a public defender and in smaller-scale commercial litigation, and rarely, if ever, worked outside Brooklyn, said his son Moshe K. Silver, now a lawyer himself.

The late Sheldon E. Silver

Throughout the late 1970s, United Jewish Council's stationery lists the counsel as Sheldon Silver, Esq. — exactly how Speaker Silver, who has no middle name, listed his name in his official registration with the state court.

The other Silver was registered as "Sheldon E. Silver."

It is emblematic of the welfare nanny state and its destructiveness that Silver would have to deny that he tried to prevent a project that would have destabilized a neighborhood he cared about which would have brought in hordes of people who cannot support themselves to his Jewish neighborhood while trying to spread the same kind of poverty-inflicting projects elsewhere in the state.

Maybe it was this Sheldon Silver.