Remember being a kid and reading comic books and seeing all the evil villains that existed in those fictional worlds?
Welcome to the real world, where guys like Sheldon Silver make Lex Luthor and Dr Doom look like teddy bears. The real life bad guys aren’t plotting ways to conquer Latveria or hiding in underground lairs, they’re committing their crimes in plain sight and usually with little to no repercussions…
Sheldon Silver is one of the major opponents of legalizing MMA in New York, and it all comes back to a certain very influential union that have a massive beef with the owners of the UFC for keeping said union out of their Station Casinos, a move that has kept millions of dollars out of the union’s pockets.
Dana White doesn’t mince his words when speaking about the Las Vegas Culinary Union:
“Why hasn’t it happened? It’s a lot of political crap. The union out in Las Vegas is the reason it hasn’t happened as funny as that sounds. It has nothing to do with MMA or the UFC, it has to do with the union. My partners, the Fertitta brothers, own the fourth largest gaming company in the country and they’re non-union and the Las Vegas union has been doing some dirty stuff. They’re dirty guys. Gangsters! The culinary union in Las Vegas. The guys who run the culinary union in Las Vegas are dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty guys.” – Dana White, president of the UFC.
The political influence of the Las Vegas Culinary Union is very far-reaching and extends all the way to NY. The Wall Street Journal editorial board has gone as far as saying that the UFC “has more or less been told the price of getting into New York is to bow to the culinary union.”
If you know anything about Dana White, it’s that the only time he bows is to polish Conor McGregor’s shoes.
“The speaker does not personally approve of MMA,” said a spokesman for Silver in 2013.
Sheldon Silver was recently arrested on charges of corruption, and the prosecutor has revealed that he’s been abusing his post for a decade and has played puppet-master to multi-million dollar bribery schemes.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Goldstein said that Silver collected 4 million dollars in illegal kickbacks.
“The full picture of his corruption was exposed in this courthouse,” Goldstein went on to say.
Sheldon Silver’s shady deals included awarding a $500,000 grant to a cancer research who in turn would refer asbestos patients to Silver’s law firm, and he allegedly received $700,000 for referring real estate developers to another law firm and then softening up rent control in order to benefit them.
Silver’s lawyer said these acts are “politics as usual”, and the prosecutor is just trying to criminalize business as usual, stating that these claims are “a theory without evidence,”.
It’s worth noting that this year’s vote to legalize MMA in New York still didn’t pass, even after Silver had stepped down from his role, which shows that his influence still lingers – at least until the trial is over. Even though he’s no longer in power, people still don’t want to cross him – just in case.
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