Editoriali Intelligence Corso di perfezionamento Recensioni Summaries in English Scienze dell'Investigazione Bibliografia Forum Strumenti Cineteca Mappamondo Ultime notizie

Eliot Spitzer

…After scoring 1590 (out of a possible 1600) on the SAT, Spitzer attended Princeton University. He scored a perfect score on the LSAT …In the 1998 election, Spitzer defeated incumbent Republican Dennis Vacco by a slim margin to become New York State Attorney General. His campaign was financed largely in part by a controversial multi-million dollar loan from his father. As attorney general, Spitzer prosecuted cases relating to corporate white collar crime…He took office as New York's governor on the first day of 2007, with a record margin of victory and a profound sense of promise. He resigned on March 12, 2008, in a scandal over his involvement in a sex ring, bringing an abrupt close to a tenure marked by an almost unbroken string of stumbles and frustrations. …Mr. Spitzer's difficulties were a stark contrast to his long and steady rise. Over the previous eight years as attorney general, Mr. Spitzer, a Democrat, gained national recognition as the 'Sheriff of Wall Street' for his pursuit of corporate corruption and his self-styled role as the defender of the American investor.

New York Times

March 11, 2008

A Fall From White Knight to Client 9

<<...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 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.”

Then he ran for governor in 2006 and seized a vast electoral mandate. Reformers chortled at the thought of this young bull with a national reputation stomping about the calcified halls of Albany.

…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. …

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.”

…Time and again, Mr. Spitzer began as the hunter and finished as the hunted. >>

New York Times

September 28, 2008

Spitzer Is Contrite, Yes, but Sometimes Still Angry

<<...Six months have passed since Mr. Spitzer’s breathtakingly quick exodus from office after being implicated as a patron of a prostitution ring. One day, Eliot Laurence Spitzer was a national figure some saw destined for the White House; the next he was a target of ridicule. … “I told him that I think, in the end, this incident will be a footnote to a great life lived greatly, and that he still has the ability to make enormous contributions,” said Alan M. Dershowitz, the Harvard law professor, who once counted Mr. Spitzer as a student and now counts him as a friend. “One of his goals has to be to make this a footnote in his obituary, and not make it the lead.”Mr. Dershowitz added that the former governor was “working every day, he’s not goofing off, he’s not pitying himself.”.“He said to me he had the best job in the world and he did something stupid that made him give it up, but he’s not the kind of person that obsesses about the past,” he said”>>.