On Thursday morning, Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, shocked the state's political class with the arrest of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver on corruption charges. On Friday morning, he cracked up a crowd of lawyers, former U.S. prosecutors, and politicians at breakfast.

Well before Bharara’s case against Silver, who allegedly took millions of dollars in a bribery scheme, went public, the prosecutor had been scheduled to speak at the breakfast at New York Law School. He opened with a suitably cocky joke.

“I see some public officials here, and, after yesterday, I have two theories as to why that might be,” he said. “One, you thought I would be taking attendance. And the other is that there are a lot of folks now looking for immunity.”

The icebreaker had an edge to it. Bharara’s office charged the State Assembly speaker with turning his office into a cash register through which millions in bribes and kickbacks flowed. At least some of these transfers allegedly translated into quid pro quo exchanges of funds for favors.

Silver is a longtime power broker, and, along with Governor Andrew Cuomo and Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, one of the three most powerful public officials in the state. In Albany, the trio is often referred to as the "three men in a room" who run New York. His arrest was shocking not just because the assembly speaker has held his position for 20 years, but also because he’s a Democrat. Bharara, nominated for his position by Barack Obama and previously employed as an aide to Democratic senator Chuck Schumer, is digging into his own team. BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith described the indictment as “a dramatic and unusual move, a step far across the invisible lines that often constrain appointed prosecutors.” (Smith labeled Bharara “the most dangerous man in American politics”; Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter has previously described him as “very much a hero of our times.”)

On Friday morning, Bharara spoke with the rhythm of a seasoned politician, as he used his public comments to explain the high-stakes prosecution of Silver. Aware of his moment in the spotlight, he gave the city’s metro desk columnists plenty of tough talk with which to work. At one point he even compared himself to Mark Wahlberg’s character in The Departed, who tells a criminal, “I’m the guy who does his job. You must be the other guy.”

“We are fundamentally fearless . . . and appropriately aggressive,” Bharara said of the Southern District.

“The people of New York should be disappointed, but they should be more than disappointed. They should be angry,” Bharara continued. “When so many of their leaders can be bought for a few thousand dollars, they should think about getting angry. When it is more likely for a New York State senator to be arrested by the authorities than to be defeated at the polls, maybe they should think about being angry.”

While many pundits positioned Thursday’s arrest of Silver as a watershed moment in New York politics, Bharara took pains to rattle off a list of other elected officials his office has convicted. “It seems, sometimes, that Albany really is a cauldron of corruption,” he said. “In some ways, [the Silver case] is different from other cases, because of the standing and stature of the person who was charged. But in many ways, it’s business as usual in our public-corruption unit.”

Bharara’s case against Silver is striking in its particulars, but symbolically important as well. On Friday, the U.S. attorney characterized the charges as endemic of a culture of malfeasance in the state capital, likening those engaged in wrongdoing to “barnacles on the bottom of a ship, of which there are many.” Bharara took particular aim at the “three men in a room” characterization, arguing that the “unduly” concentrated power in New York lends itself to bad governance. “I have a hard time getting my head around this concept,” which he compared to a sitcom.