Motivated by greed, former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver devised schemes to collect millions of dollars in kickbacks in exchange for using his office to support a cancer researcher and real estate developers, a federal prosecutor said Monday at closing arguments in Silver’s corruption trial.

“Why did Sheldon Silver do it? He did it for the money,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Goldstein repeatedly told jurors in federal court in Manhattan.

Goldstein detailed one quid-pro-quo deal in which he said Dr. Robert Taub steered his patients with cancer caused by asbestos to Silver’s law firm, allowing the powerful Democrat and lawyer to secure more than $3 million in referral fees from lucrative personal injury claims. In exchange, Silver steered $500,000 in taxpayer funds to Taub’s research projects and helped his son and daughter get a job and an internship, the prosecutor said.

“The defendant got one hell of a quid from the asbestos scheme,” Goldstein said. “The defendant gave Dr. Taub all kinds of quo.”

The prosecutor also took aim at the defense’s accusation that overzealous prosecutors were trying to criminalize behavior that’s politics as usual in the Assembly.

“Let’s dispense with the nonsense … and let’s talk about the evidence, which Sheldon Silver tried desperately to keep secret for years,” Goldstein said.

Silver, 71, has pleaded not guilty to bribery and extortion charges in a case that increased scrutiny of politicians in Albany, where power has long been concentrated in the hands of the Assembly speaker, the Senate president and the governor.

Aside from the asbestos scheme, prosecutors have accused Silver of persuading some of New York’s biggest developers to hire a tiny law firm that secretly funneled $700,000 in fees to the ex-speaker. During the same period, Silver worked behind the scenes to deliver tax-abatement and rent-control legislation that favored developers — part of a pattern of corruption that netted the lawmaker $5 million in illicit income during his reign as speaker, prosecutors say.

The lawmaker quit his speaker post after his arrest but retained his Assembly seat. His lawyers were to give their closing later Monday.

(AP)