YOU ARE A SEXY GIRL

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was reported Monday to have told senior staff that he had been involved in a prostitution ring.

Spitzer, a father of three who built his career fighting corporate corruption as attorney general, issued only a brief statement after the reports broke, saying he had failed to live up to his own standards.

"I have acted in a way that violates my obligations to my family, that violates my or any sense of right and wrong," Spitzer told reporters, flanked by his wife of more than 20 years.

"I apologize first and most importantly to my family. I apologize to the public, whom I promised better," he said. "I must now dedicate some time to regain the trust of my family."

According to the New York Times, Spitzer was caught on a federal wiretap arranging to meet a high-end prostitute at a Washington hotel last month.




Spitzer was believed to have called an exclusive ring known as the "Emperor's Club VIP," the Times said that Spitzer learned last week that he had been implicated in the prostitution probe and informed his top aides Sunday night.

A New York Times report linked him to a $1,000-an-hour prostitute, saying he was caught on a federal wiretap at least six times on February 12 and 13 arranging to meet with her at a Washington hotel last month.

Prosecutors said last week the ring operated in cities across the United States and in London and Paris, employing more than 50 prostitutes who charged fees ranging from 1,000 dollars to more than 5,500 dollars per hour.

The club even offered clients the option of paying with cash, credit card, wire transfer or money order, selling the prostitutes' services through a website that ranked each of them on a system of one to seven diamonds.

His alleged involvement with the ring drew a swift call from the Republican Governors Association for Spitzer to step down. "The governor of New York should immediately resign from office and allow the people of New York to pursue honest leadership."

Spitzer, 48, became governor in January last year, pledging to bring ethics reform. At his inauguration, he used his address to say "we must transform our government so that it is as ethical and wise as all of New York."

His time in office, however, has been marked notably by a scandal involving the use of state police to keep tabs on Republican state senate majority leader Joseph Bruno.

It was during his time as attorney general that he earned a reputation for toughness and high ethical standards.

When he first took on the post, he locked horns with the Gambino Mafia family in a bid to break their hold on the New York and New Jersey waterfronts.

He later made a name for himself as one of the toughest corporate cops in the United States, with a crusade against Wall Street wrongdoers.

In May 2002, he led a spectacular victory over the Wall Street titan Merrill Lynch, which paid 100 million dollars to settle charges that it advised clients to buy stocks it secretly believed were "junk."

And in December of the same year, he helped wring 1.4 billion dollars out of top Wall Street banks and brokers for stock research abuses. His other targets ranged from the music industry to major insurance carriers.

During that period, he also prosecuted at least two prostitution rings, and according to the New York Times, in 2004 spoke with revulsion after announcing the arrest of 16 people for operating one high-end ring.

Spitzer is the individual identified as Client 9 in court papers that were filed last week when four people were charged with running a multimillion-dollar international prostitution ring, the Times reported, citing unidentified sources.

Client 9 arranged to meet with "Kristen," a prostitute who charged $1,000 an hour, on February 13 in room 871 of a Washington hotel and paid $4,300 for services rendered and as a down payment for future engagements, according to the court documents.

They describe six telephone calls between Client 9 and one of the defendants that were intercepted by wiretaps on February 12 and 13.

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer betray his family in a private matter and the public, and it is hard to see how he will recover from this mess and go on to lead the reformist agenda on which he was elected.

With his wife at his side, the governor apologized and said his behavior “violates my obligation to my family and violates my or any sense of right or wrong.” He was right about his violations, but he was, sadly, wrong when he asserted that politics is only about “big ideas” and not individuals.

His short, arrogant statement was not enough, not from the Sheriff of Wall Street, not from the self-appointed Mr. Clean who went to Albany promising a new and better day.

It is likely that every aspect of Mr. Spitzer’s other life as Client 9 for the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. every text message and other secretive communication will be made public. Any politician would have a full-time job just dealing with such revelations. There have been elected officials, over the years, who have survived scandals of this sort. But for Mr. Spitzer, who runs a large and complex state, the burden is especially heavy to show that he has not lost the credibility to push for change, a sound budget and good government, as he promised so confidently a year ago.

While few clients of prostitutes face criminal charges, law-enforcement affidavits raise at least the possibility of criminal charges based on transporting a woman across state lines for prostitution. Mr. Spitzer’s own record of prosecuting such cases gives him scant breathing room. As state attorney general, he prosecuted prostitution rings with enthusiasm — pointing out that they are often involved in human trafficking, drug trafficking and money laundering. In 2004 on Staten Island, Mr. Spitzer was vehement in his outrage over 16 people arrested in a high-end prostitution ring.


A further tragedy here, beyond the personal one of the Spitzer family and the damage he has done to the reform cause, is that Mr. Spitzer’s targets are now relishing their tormentor’s torment. Those on Wall Street who fumed at having to make their world fairer for ordinary shareholders can now chortle with satisfaction in their private enclaves. For New York Republicans, who have blocked some of the most important reforms in Albany, it is hard to imagine the private glee — especially at a moment when they are fighting desperately to hold their majority in the State Senate.

Sadly, this was not the first time that Mr. Spitzer has been caught up in his own arrogance. For all his promise as governor, Mr. Spitzer’s first year was unnecessarily rocky and full of the kinds of mistakes that come as much from hubris as from being new on the job. After succeeding with a few reforms, the governor’s ill-fated attempts to smear his Republican opponent lost him months of progress. Only recently had he seemed to be tempering his abrasive style.


Mr. Spitzer did not seem to understand on Monday what he owed the public, the longer he hesitates, it becomes a harder case to make. He has been too vague about his role in a high-class prostitution ring. He must step forward today to flatly disavow implications that he was involved in the illegal activity or resign.

Spitzer shocked New Yorkers and the nation in general when he told a crowded news conference Monday that he'd "acted in a way that violates my obligation to my family and violates my or any sense of right or wrong." He stopped short of admitting that he arranged to meet a prostitute at a Washington, D.C., hotel on Feb. 13.

Now is no time to play word games. As a former two-term state attorney general who used his aggressive crusade for high ethical standards on Wall Street to help catapult him to the governor's mansion, Spitzer owes it to New Yorkers to be honest and straightforward with them.




While he closed the news conference with a promise to "report back in short order," this alarming situation demands a clearer, unequivocal response, something he should have provided Monday.

Surely Spitzer, an Ivy League-trained lawyer, understands that he is embroiled in a scandal that's far more than the "private matter'' he described.

Too, unlike the Troopergate scandal, which involved charges that Spitzer used state troopers last year in an attempt to smear Republican Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno, the governor is suspected of criminal misconduct.




An affidavit reports that a federal wiretap captured a man believed to be Spitzer who confirmed plans to have a prostitute travel from New York to a Washington hotel room to meet him. The 1910 Mann Act makes it a federal offense to transport someone between states for the purpose of prostitution.

Wiretap evidence also indicated that Spitzer might have also had prior involvement with the prostitution ring, which booked upscale prostitutes by telephone or online at a rate of $1,000 to $5,500 an hour.

Based on what's already known about the scandal, today is likely to be another sad and dark day in New York history. Nevertheless, it can't be avoided. Spitzer must be more forthcoming, either with the facts as he knows them to be or with his resignation.

The ascent and descent of Eliot Spitzer’s career have been dizzying. He was the brainy kid who graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School and became an avenging state attorney general, hunting down Wall Street malefactors with a moralistic fervor that sounded pitch-perfect. Everywhere he found “betrayals of the public trust” that were “shocking” and “criminal.”

He stands close to ruin’s precipice, this tireless crusader and once-charmed politician reduced to a notation on a federal affidavit: Client 9.

The tawdry nature of his current troubles — to be caught on tape arranging a hotel-room liaison with a high-priced call girl, according to law enforcement officials — shocked even his harshest critics, though not all were surprised that he would risk so much. Mr. Spitzer’s path through public life has at times resembled a blindfolded dash along the political I-beam.

He was not the first politician to burn with a moral fervor; but he sometimes failed to recognize that his own footsteps could fall in ethically dodgy territory. In 1994, he denied — and later acknowledged — secretly borrowing millions of dollars from his father to finance an unsuccessful run in the Democratic primary for state attorney general. Mr. Spitzer the prosecutor might have pursued this sort of behavior as possibly illegal.



The Republicans complained, yet he sidestepped questions and won election to the office four years later.

As attorney general, his ambition, intelligence and energy were palpable. And his timing was impeccable. A gilded, stock-fed decade was winding down, and a torrent of too-easy cash had eroded the financial controls inside many investment banks, brokerages and insurance companies.

Mr. Spitzer cast himself as Wall Street’s new sheriff and took off at full gallop after his quarry. To his young lawyers, he offered his standard advice: “If you’ve got it, do it.” If they could turn old laws to new, even unintended purposes, so much the better.


His mastery of this style of justice was evident. Employing aggressive tactics, threatening to crush his opponents, his office extracted vast civil settlements from defendants eager to avoid criminal indictment.

But his style wed toughness to what looked to some like bullying. He hurled curses at the targets of his investigations, and sometimes at colleagues perceived as too slow or too questioning of his tactics.

During an argument at a conference, he nearly came to blows with the California attorney general, according to a magazine article. And Wall Street rank left him largely unimpressed.




Few on Wall Street expressed much sorrow at Mr. Spitzer’s predicament on Monday. In particular, friends of Richard A. Grasso, the former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange and a favorite Spitzer piñata, recalled that Spitzer aides had circulated allegations, never substantiated, that Mr. Grasso had had an improper relationship with his secretary.

But in his own view, Mr. Spitzer was a warrior in wartime. He had come to symbolize public revulsion with Wall Street’s excesses, and most voters seemed willing to extend him the benefit of the doubt.

He also initiated popular attacks on subprime mortgage brokers and gun manufacturers, and issued a report concluding that the New York City police were twice as likely to stop blacks and Latinos as whites on suspicion of carrying weapons — a finding that enraged Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

And Mr. Spitzer was a careful custodian of his own image, cultivating editorial boards and magazine editors. He might be intense and sometimes profane, but he sold these traits as the necessary downside of his crusading style. So he became the “new Untouchable” or, in Time magazine, the “tireless crusader.”

So great was his public acclaim that his path to the governor’s mansion already seemed clear when he launched his campaign in Buffalo to the sounds of Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.” The symbolism was clear and his language was characteristically unyielding.

He promised a cleaning of the governmental stables, vowing to sweep out “unqualified cronies,” stamp out “pay-to-play politics” and impose leadership on a leaderless statehouse.

His assurance never faded, even as he walked up the steps of the Capitol to be inaugurated on a frigid January morning in 2007.

He relied — too often, said some — on his tough-talking crew from the attorney general’s office, and tended to speak loudly when he might better have listened.

Time and again, Mr. Spitzer began as the hunter and finished as the hunted. He would curse at legislators, who would in turn leak damaging word to reporters or hold up crucial legislation.

The Republican leader of the State Senate, Joseph L. Bruno, a wily, white-haired 78-year-old former Army boxer, tossed jab after jab at the 48-year-old governor. Mr. Spitzer, opined Mr. Bruno, is a “spoiled brat” prone to tantrums. And when it was revealed that just weeks into Mr. Spitzer’s term, the governor’s staff had used the state police to try to prove that Mr. Bruno misused a state helicopter for political trips, the Senate leader played the near-perfect victim.

“Straight talk,” Mr. Spitzer told a reporter last fall, “is perhaps something that comes too naturally to me.”

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's alleged involvement in a prostitution ring has sent some heads spinning. The possible acts of impropriety run counter to the politician's hard-line career commitment to fighting corruption. The obvious question on many minds: What was he thinking?

The short answer, researchers say: Power and corruption go together.

Psychologists suggest several reasons for Spitzer's seeming hypocrisy, including a feeling of invincibility and "no one can touch me" attitude. People in high positions have more opportunities to step out of line. Humans hold leaders to higher standards and elect those individuals whom they think can resist great temptations.

Spitzer, 48, allegedly paid $4,300 for a prostitute to commute from New York to Washington and meet him at a hotel there last month. News reports state Spitzer was tracked with court-ordered wiretaps. Spitzer was a repeat call-girl customer known as "Client 9," according to The New York Times.

In his prior position, as New York State's attorney general from 1998 to 2006, Spitzer garnered respect for his unrelenting pursuit to root out Wall Street corruption. He also prosecuted at least two prostitution rings during that time.

Power has been and will forever be entangled with corruption for various reasons. With more opportunities for lying-cheating-stealing behaviors, political leaders must be on their toes double-time.

Perhaps that's why power figures and sexual improprieties sometimes seem linked in the public mind. For instance, Sen. Larry Craig was arrested last year for lewd conduct in an airport men's room. Also in 2007, Sen. David Vitter was linked with prostitutes when his telephone number showed up on phone records of "D.C. Madam," an alleged prostitution service. This list goes on to include Rep. Barney Frank, who in 1989 admitted a relationship with a male prostitute, according to news reports.

If guilty, someone like Spitzer would likely be blown away that he or she was caught in an allegedly criminal act, because with so much professional success, failure is the furthest thing in his or her head, another expert says.