Hey, sometimes life is tough. But your government is here to help!
Let’s say you were busted while doing 120 mph on the Long Island Expressway with four underage Panamanian hookers and a Coleman cooler full of hashish.
Wouldn’t it be great if the cop who pulled you over wanted to make a deal?
Say, he’ll let you get off with confessing to doing 75 mph and agree that the Panamanian hookers were nuns on their way to a soup kitchen, while the Coleman cooler was full of Mountain Dew.
All you gotta do is write a check to the cops, and this misunderstanding goes away. The state saves on the cost of jailing you. Everybody wins!
Or let’s say, as you are a Post reader and no doubt an upstanding citizen, you have a more routine problem: You’d like the IRS to charge you a little less for the privilege of being an American. Maybe you could just call up the IRS commissioner and say, “Knock 10 grand off my bill, I’ll kick $2,500 back to you.”
That second scenario is essentially what prosecutors illustrated Thursday with a mind-blowing document presented to the jury considering corruption charges against former state Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Esq.
Michael Hoenig — the witness during whose testimony the document detonated in US District Court — is the chief finance officer for Glenwood Management, the real-estate firm at the center of the (second) set of dirty-dealings charges against Silver.
Prosecutor Andrew Goldstein casually showed the jury a document containing the phrase a “division of fees will be made between Jay Arthur Goldberg, P.C. and Sheldon Silver, Esq.”
For Team Silver, this wasn’t an “ouch” moment so much as it was the Hindenburg bursting into flames. When you’re defending an allegedly corrupt pol, the last thing you want to see is your client’s signature on a document showing him divvying up what ought to be public money with a megabucks lawyer.
Goldberg, Silver’s childhood friend, represents real-estate firms that beg the government to reduce the assessment values of their properties to diminish their property taxes.
Goldberg knocked millions of dollars off the official value of buildings for Glenwood after Silver referred their business to him. At a real-estate tax rate of over 12 percent, that meant millions of dollars of tax savings for Glenwood, the owner of the buildings.
Goldberg, the government showed, in turn gave 25 percent of that pot of cash to his pal, Shelly.
Hoenig, the finance guy for Glenwood, said he’d never seen the document before. He had no idea Silver was getting a cut.
Silver’s lawyers are not a shy bunch: “Objection!” has been their favorite word throughout this trial. But they sat in glum silence as the government made the Sheldonburg blow up in flames.
The best that Silver lawyer Justin Shur could do upon cross-examining Hoenig was sputter into stream-of-consciousness irrelevancies: “Just to be clear, you’ve never met Mr. Silver, right?” he asked Hoenig, as if that mattered. “Mr. Litwin [the owner of Glenwood] is 101 years old, correct?”
If Shur had asked Hoenig, “If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?” he could not have been any more useless to Silver.
But, hey, sometimes you represent a client who is as pure of heart as Kate Middleton hugging an orphan.
Other times, your defendant looks about as innocent as the Hamburglar dashing away from the Golden Arches with a sack of Quarter Pounders.