A longtime Democratic leader who was convicted on federal corruption charges, Mr. Silver held sway in New York politics for decades.
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 Massachusetts, according to Judith Rapfogel, his former chief of staff. The cause and place of death were 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 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.
A full obituary will appear soon.
